astrogirl: (Napstablook)
astrogirl ([personal profile] astrogirl) wrote2025-06-05 03:41 pm
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Time For An Installment of What Astro's Watching-- I Mean Listening To

Or, rather, what Astro's just finished listening to, not counting a couple of long Q&A wrap-up episodes, because I literally just finished it a few minutes ago, and I do not know when I will recover.

So, TMA fans, horror aficionados, podcast peeps, you've... you've all already listened to The Silt Verses, right? I mean, surely, right? Because I can't really remember anyone talking about it, except maybe very briefly in passing, but I know it finished up a year ago and maybe I just wasn't paying attention before I very belatedly started listening to it. It still seems sort of astonishing to me, though, because my main reaction to the whole thing is pretty much, "OMG, why isn't the title of this thing on everyone's lips? Why haven't they made up entirely new awards just to give them all to this show?!!!"

Because, geez, you've got top-notch, deeply affecting horror. You've got fantastic characters, complex and flawed and evolving. You've got exceptional worldbuilding, with possibly the best take on the idea that gods are created by humans and need worship and sacrifice to survive that I've ever seen, and, yes, I am not even excluding Sir Terry Pratchett there. You've got incredibly good voice acting. Well, all, right, there's a place or two where you listen to some of the minor characters and think, whelp, those were some acting choices, for sure. But the main cast are incredible, especially Méabh de Brún, who really should just get handed All the Awards Ever. You've got fantastic writing and fantastic production values that work hand in hand, and a format that really, really works for me, blending internal narrative, dialog, and soundscaping a in a way that artfully and artistically conveys to the listener everything we need to know. Which is incredibly important for me as someone whose suspension of disbelief goes SPROING the instant a character starts narrating their own movements out loud or describing things everyone with them can see perfectly well.

And it's incredibly meaty, with themes involving faith, corruption, war, politics, death and how we meet it, ambition, the legacies we leave behind, the difference between reality and the stories we tell about it afterward, capitalism, exploitation, love, defiance, hope, betrayal, cruelty, kindness, the near-impossibility of changing systems when you're bound up inside them, and undoubtedly a whole bunch of other things.

Oh, and if I'm making this post a pitch for those who haven't listened to it yet, I'll first add content warnings for darkness and horror and lots of disturbing stuff. But I'll then add, because I know there are a lot you out there for whom it's likely to be a serious selling point, that this thing has two canonically trans main characters (whose stories are incredibly complex and deep and have nothing whatsoever to do with their gender), that a significant percentage of the people we encounter casually, use they/them pronouns, and that while (rather refreshingly) the show entirely avoids romance tropes when exploring the ways in which the characters love each other, there are certainly queer relationships to be found in the background.

So, yeah. Fantastic stuff. My eyes are still kind of bothering me from how much the final episode made me cry, not gonna lie. I also find that I can't stop thinking about how, to put it without spoilers, the two-part finale here had a surprising number of elements in common with last week's Doctor Who season finale, despite being a very different kinds of storytelling, and, boy, does it say something that one of those two things left me going, "Ugh, OK, whatever, I guess?" at the end, and the other made me cry a lot and then write a rambling Dreamwidth post about it.

I do find, though, that this seems to be one of those things were I don't want fic and fannish stuff for it, because it's super satisfying to me as it is, and I don't want to mess with it at all. Hey, maybe that's the reason, actually, that it doesn't get the kind of attention TMA does, who knows?
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-06-05 09:22 am
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2025/085: One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth — Mark Cocker

2025/085: One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth — Mark Cocker
What faces a young swift is a metamorphosis no less than if it were a larval insect bursting from the chrysalis as a winged imago. What hatched as a toad-mouthed lizard has already morphed to a light-wreathed angel, but now it must go from a condition of complete reliance upon parents to independence, instantly and without alternative. It must launch itself from a dusty, dark roof and fly out to the Sun. There are no second chances. It is a one-shot deal. It must fly, but fly perfectly, having never done so. It must simultaneously learn to feed and do so immediately... [loc. 2361]

Mark Cocker frames his narrative as a single summer day, from dawn to dusk. He draws on history, physics and anecdote to support his hypothesis that 'it takes a whole universe to make just one small black bird', and his account is nature writing at its best -- discursive, poetic, emotional, scientific, full of anecdotes and unexpected facts. Read more... )

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sᴏᴜᴛʜ ᴏғ ([personal profile] nowhere) wrote in [community profile] fandom_icons2025-06-05 03:03 am

(no subject)

150 | wicked: for good ( TRAILER SPOILERS )


150 icons @ [community profile] insomniatic.
inkcharm: (Default)
inkcharm ([personal profile] inkcharm) wrote in [community profile] fandom_icons2025-06-05 12:37 am

gustave. clair obscure: expedition 33.

CANON: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
CHARACTERS: Gustave.
ADDITIONAL INFO: 60 Icons, Act 1.
CREDIT TO: [community profile] inkonic


HERE @ [community profile] inkonic
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-06-04 10:21 am
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2025/084: Copper Script — K J Charles

2025/084: Copper Script — K J Charles
You couldn’t get hot for handwriting. And yet he had ... [loc. 1329]

Set in London in 1924. Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler, of the Metropolitan Police, is approached by his slimy cousin Paul to sort out a graphologist who's wrecked Paul's engagement by accurately reporting, to his fiancee, his infidelity. Fowler drops in on the graphologist, one Joel Wildsmith, expecting to find a con artist of some variety: but he's disturbed, and impressed, by the accuracy of Joel's analyses. (And by Joel himself: but Aaron never acts on his desires, times being what they are.) He devises a scientific test, presenting Joel with a set of handwriting samples -- and Joel's gift reveals a sociopath.

Read more... )
myrmidon: ([tv;] hashtag clout.)
❜méfiez-vous des grecs portant des cadeaux.❛ ([personal profile] myrmidon) wrote in [community profile] fandom_icons2025-06-03 10:42 pm
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Smoke, Season 1 [2025]

Smoke, Season 1 (301-306)
[ taron egerton ]


[ here @ [community profile] axisandallies ]
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-06-03 08:31 am
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2025/083: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories — Diarmuid Hester

2025/083: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories — Diarmuid Hester
... this new queer writing was all about using language to weave connections: to a place (San Francisco’s Bay Area) and between people (real or imagined). All in the service of queer community politics. In the late 1970s, [Bruce] Boone and [Robert] Glück thought about calling it something. ‘How about New Narrative?’ Boone suggested as a joke. [p. 287]

Hester starts off at Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness, with the vague notion of 'a larger project I had in mind, which would examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture' [p.7].Read more... )

marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote in [community profile] book_love2025-06-02 10:55 pm

Catburglar of the Constellations

Catburglar of the Constellations by John C. Wright

Starquest book 3. Spoilers for the earlier books ahead.

Read more... )
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-06-02 08:53 am
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2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault

2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault
The fire leaped high; it shone down the long stone-lined cutting into the mound, showing the painted doorposts of the burial vault, the new bronze hasps of the open doors, and the Erechthid snake upon the lintel. But it did not pierce the dark beyond; sometimes when my back was turned I could feel him standing in the shadows beyond the doorway to watch his rites, as they show dead men in the funeral pictures. [loc. 336]

Sequel to The King Must Die: I think as a teenager I read this first, an old paperback from the jumble sale. Narrated again by Theseus, it's the story of everything that happens after his return from Crete: his father's funeral, becoming king, his friendship with Pirithoos the Lapith (a Bad Influence, to be honest), his relationship with the Amazon Hippolyta, their son Hippolytus and Theseus' frustration with his chosen life... There are curiously primitive Kentaurs, an encounter with Oedipus, and a foreshadowing of Paris's Judgment: also a fleeting encounter with a young Achilles. And through it all, warp and weft, Theseus's sense of the gods: his religious and spiritual practices. 

Read more... )
magnavox_23: Jodie Whittaker is jumping in the air with the tardis in the background (DW_Jodie_jumping)
'Adíshní Mags ([personal profile] magnavox_23) wrote in [community profile] fandom_icons2025-06-02 12:20 pm
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The Reality War - Doctor Who Icons

Under a cut for *spoilers*

cut cut cut... )

Check out the rest here. <3 
astrogirl: (What?!)
astrogirl ([personal profile] astrogirl) wrote2025-05-31 09:55 pm
inkcharm: (Default)
inkcharm ([personal profile] inkcharm) wrote in [community profile] fandom_icons2025-06-01 04:26 am
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sam young. black doves.

CANON: Black Doves.
CHARACTERS: Sam Young (Ben Whishaw).
ADDITIONAL INFO: 107 Icons, Season 1.
CREDIT TO: [community profile] inkonic


HERE @ [community profile] inkonic
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote in [community profile] book_love2025-05-31 11:30 am

A Nervous Splendor

A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 by Frederic Morton

A discussion of Vienna before, around, and after the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf.

Discusses all sorts of people. Some famous, some to be famous, others never to be more than footnotes. Creates a mood piece, possibly shaded. Discusses politics and arts. How the Hapsburgs set about modernizing Vienna by tearing down its walls, and more.