Archives

Multifandom fic recs (Enterprise, Madoka Magica, Jeeves & Wooster, Discworld, original)

Sep8
  • Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Homura/Madoka | G | A Red Umbrella
    Homura has been looping time for the past year, and she’s exhausted. She’s so exhausted she hasn’t even noticed that Madoka is in love with her and being really obvious about it.
    series:puella magi madoka magica,fic:chaptered,pairing:homura_madoka,yuri,trope:timetravel
  • Monstrous Regiment | Maladict/Polly | T | The Yunk and the Restless
    Polly spends the night in a nest of vampires. It involves questionable accents, even more questionable nightclothes, and a certain amount of confusion over quite how she ended up classified as Maladicta’s ‘yunk lady’.
    pairing:polly_mal,series:discworld,yuri,fic:one-shot,trope:vampires
  • original | T | Unknown Number
    – Ok you’re saying that you’re me
    – From another timeline
    – contacting me by fucking TEXT MESSAGE
    fic:socialmedia,genfic,original,trope:genderplay

Catching up (Hellsing, Black Butler, Magia Record)

Aug16

Celebrated Free Comic Book Day by…dropping a huge pile of cash on the deluxe hardcover Hellsing omnibus.

They’re so big! So crisp! So hefty! The third one has color art plates in the back! Nothing a dedicated fan hasn’t seen before (and I kinda wish they’d done something fancier for the covers), but still, very classy.

Bookshelf with Hellsing volumes

And, plot twist: the local comic shop had a raffle that night, and the more you spent the more entries you got. So I walked away with 2 free books after all. (Got my tickets called twice in a row, took the only 2 titles on the table I was interested in, figured that was my cue to call it a night.)

Black Butler promo art

Library traffic has been slow for a bit, so I took the opportunity to raid the manga shelves and catch up on Black Butler.

And wow, what a great showcase of “come up with a core premise/main cast, use it as the basis to write literally whatever you feel like.” This arc: cooking contest comedy. Next: zombie horror at sea! Next: castle with a fairytale curse. Next: school sports drama!

…that wasn’t exactly the order they came in, but you get the picture.

And it definitely went directly from “this arc plot is an excuse to draw progressive stages of injury from exposure to chemical weapons” to “this arc plot is an excuse to draw multiple full-page spreads of 4-bishounen boy bands.”

Followed in turn by “hmm, it’s been too long since I drew a small cute boy getting tormented…what if I did a whole volume about two small cute boys getting tormented.”

This creator is out here living her best art life and I’m loving it.

I’m also keeping up with the new season of Magia Record — or rather, it gets early releases on premium sites and I’m waiting for the free viewing on Crunchyroll, so I’m keeping a week behind with the new season of Magia Record.

As usual, there’s a heap of plot and too many characters and I’m definitely not tracking it all. If you liked the original series for the tight writing and flawless pacing, this is skippable.

But the animation is gorgeous, it’s fun to get more appearances from our long-missed Main Girls (even knowing this is an early timeline), and I can enjoy the emotional beats in the moment while reading recaps later on to figure out “ohhh, that’s who was doing what to who because why.”

MagiReco Homura-Madoka-Sayaka battle screencap

*meets an f/f/f triad* so which of you has the strategic power, which of you has the overwhelming firepower, and which of you has the NYOOM

Literary links roundup

Aug1

A Pterry note:

There’s a thing I regularly hear people say about Terry Pratchett, even across wildly different contexts…

“Was he always perfectly sensitive about my identity? No. Would he even really understand my life and experiences? Probably not. But if I got to sit down and talk with him, it feels like he would genuinely listen. And take what I said to heart. And support my right to live an authentic and fulfilling way, whether he got it or not.”

Life goals, seriously. I can only hope readers in 50+ years will be saying the same about me.

Kickstarter is crushing it:

November 2020: “Although 2020 isn’t over yet, Kickstarter is reporting the crowdfunded comics on their platform have already amassed $22 million in pledges. That is over 30% up from 2019’s $16.9 million, with two months still to go in 2020.”

July 2021: “…it almost beats Kickstarter comics’ entire 2019 ($16.9m), and is well ahead of its revenue for the first six months of 2020. If this trend continues, it would break the $25.7m record set in 2020 – possibly even getting at or above an even $30m.”

So these are a bummer:

N.K. Jemisen, 2013: “All mythological creatures have a real-world root. Dryads are trees + humans + magic. Mermaids are fish + humans + magic, or maybe porpoises + magic. Unicorns are deer or horses + magic, maybe with a bit of narwhal glued on. Dragons are reptiles + magic, or maybe dinosaur bones + magic – paleontology. So again: what are orcs supposed to be?”

2020: “Before we get into the results of the data analysis, let’s play a game to see how well you recognize gendered descriptions. Here are several character descriptions from actual books. For each one, select whether you think it describes a man or a woman. Don’t think too hard about it—just react!”

2021: “[What happened to Isabel Fall] has been held up as an example of progressives eating their own, of the dangers of online anonymity, of the need for sensitivity readers or content warnings. But what this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way. ”

But this is fun:

A Lois McMaster Bujold quote I’m constantly coming back to: “The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.”

“Well now, thanks to Nicholas Love’s neat cover generator, you can create both Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics covers for any book (or movie, or concept) your heart desires, avian gatekeepers be damned!”

Tamsyn Muir is doing a whole extra Locked Tomb novel. We’re getting a 4-part trilogy, folks. Can’t think of another ongoing series I’d be happier to hear it for.

Aaaaand spoke too soon

Jul31

Made a post last night about how I think the computer is okay, came home from work this afternoon to find it did this again. I know, I know, I jinxed it.

Dell Diagnostics hardware scan

No issues found! You didn’t find any issues the last four times, either! Why do you keep doing this.

Gaaaah. Should I even try to do a full reinstall? Contact Dell customer service and sit through however many hours of troubleshooting they’d want to do? Or just give up and live like this?

…and, in a completely unrelated bonus vent:

Chris Chan, long-time Webcomic Person and generally infamous Internet Personality, has been trending on Twitter for a bit. For entirely horrible reasons. If you don’t want to read about elder abuse and mental illness, don’t go digging.

But given that she has like a 20-year history of being egged/goaded/manipulated by trolls into doing awful things for their entertainment…my first thought on hearing bad news about her is “wonder which sociopath talked her into thinking this was ok.”

(For anyone who wants receipts, there’s a comprehensive documentary series on YouTube that goes through the trolling in detail. And by “comprehensive” I mean “59 parts so far, each about 40 minutes long, and it’s only caught up through 2017.” The creator just put it on hiatus, because they don’t want to seem like they’re taking advantage of a terrible situation for hits — which is a principled move, good for them — but here I am linking to the back catalog anyway.)

Seriously, in a better healthcare system Chris would’ve been taken into some kind of professional care at least a decade ago, for her own safety. Let alone anyone else’s.

And I hate how sure I am that the instigators are never gonna see any consequences ever.

Erin Watches the egg disaster

Jul29

It is verrrry rare these days that I start watching an anime while the season is still airing, but I did it with Wonder Egg Priority.

The internet was saying s many good things after the first few episodes! It sounded so complicated, and so interesting, that I wanted to keep up with the discussion in realtime! Didn’t want to put off the episodes for later, and risk being spoiled for who-knows-how-much by the time I got to them.

…without spoiling anything too specific — whoo boy, this show went so downhill so badly.

And now I’m just gonna link all three Anime Slushie recaps, because they do such a satisfyingly thorough job of picking it apart.

Including highlights for all the times when it was like “they almost have something here, they’re brushing up against what could be a really profound and meaningful commentary, here’s what we could’ve had in a better show that was going there on purpose.”

(I know they’re long, but if you’ve got time to listen to the whole set, it’s worth it.)

(…definitely a better use of your time than actually watching Wonder Egg.)