Lucy versus her father was really interesting. Her old morals and her new willingness to use violence, his manipulation and disgusting idea of peace.

Max and Thad were so much fun together, I really would have loved getting more of that. I have high hopes for the new trio of Max, Thad and the Ghoul for the next episode.

( You know, the thing I-I can't figure out... is were you a monster back then? Or did you become one later? )

These are all taken with my phone, but some of them turned out okay, and I figure it's a good time for nature and bunnies?

( Ten pictures: Some nature, one cat, one rabbit, the northern lights )

Canada Reads 2026 short list is out. Thoughts? Feelings? I've only read one book and didn't like it. Very excited that Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a champion. I could stare at her face until I die.


Cinder House by Freya Marske
This was getting hyped up by someone at my bookclub, and I probably should've known better (not because they don't have great recs, just that I'm more miss than hit on fairytale retellings), but it was a novella, so I thought I'd give it a go. I indeed should've known better.

It's a cute idea: the step mother murders both Cinderella and her father on the first page, and the rest of the story is about Cinderella's ghost haunting the house. I appreciated a lot of the little twists on the story (which seemed pretty closely linked to the Disney version, but I also haven't read a tonne of other versions, so maybe not). There's some neat worldbuilding around how society treats magic, and the author did a good job incorporating the history and politics of the country without info dumping. I liked how the glass slippers worked.

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time connecting with it, and I'm trying to work out how to describe why. The story had a certain smugness to it, maybe? Like it was aware that it was telling the version of the story that would appeal to someone who thought a bisexual ghost polycule was the solution to every love triangle, where of course the other woman was a secret badass, because this is the kind of story that has Awesome Women who Subvert Tropes. Which is something that I ought to enjoy, and have enjoyed in other contexts, but not here. Maybe it was just that it should've been a novel with a few more subplots to hold it up, but either way the emotional beats never felt all that earned to me. What should've been crowning moments of awesome kept feeling like they were happening because this was the kind of story where they had to happen? It's all very clever, but never felt like it had any grounding in real emotion.

I thought this was a first outing, but it looks like Marske has written a bunch, so maybe she's just not my thing.


Leave Our Bones Where They Lay by Aviaq Johnston
Found this in a library display of books advertised as short reads to help you make your year-end goal, which made me laugh.

Short stories set inside a framing device: every season, an Inuit man travels into the wilderness to meet with a monster, and every season he must tell the monster a story. As he grows older, he struggles to find an heir to continue the tradition, but his immediate family is shattered, and won't go, so he ends up leaning on a young granddaughter. The stories are a mix of twists on traditional Inuit legends, and contemporary snippets of life in the high arctic, with or without supernatural elements.

The chapters are also interspersed with line art of traditional Inuit tools, and beautiful full page black and white photographs of lichen. It's physically a really beautiful book.

Both the frame and the stories examine how colonisation has affected Inuit society, and the ways families and individuals figure out how to recover their culture and even thrive. There's a mix of horror, humour, and quiet sadness. Johnson had originally published some of the short stories independently, so there isn't an explicit connection between the stories and the frame. However, they are arranged so that the stories fit with who's telling them, and match the tone of the frame story, so it never felt cludged together.

I loved the conclusion, and finding out who the monster was, and why we were telling it stories, and the tender relationships between all the characters. Really beautiful, hope Johnson keeps publishing.


Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by Kate Reading
Third time through this (maybe fourth?), and I still get new things out of it every reread.

Our heroine is middle-aged mother who has recently been freed from a curse, and now has to figure out if she's going to take another shot at having a life, or if she's just going to sink back into helplessness (which is a valid choice, considering how the rest of her life has gone!). She goes on pilgrimage, mostly to get out of the house, and then the gods get involved.

It's all about trying to figure out how to make choices, especially when your history with making them has been utterly catastrophic. It's also coming to understand that the narrative of your life has been told by other people, and maybe they didn't have your best interests at heart, even when they said they did. I also love how unrepentantly horny our heroine is. She hasn't gotten laid in a good twenty years, and is starting to think she should do something about that.

There are also a handful of beats about how women navigate in a patriarchal society, for good or ill, that largely avoid the way that a lot of books in these settings shame women for wanting power. Some characters we initial dismiss turn out to be capable of heroism, if someone thinks to ask it of them.

I just really love this duology.


Wounded Christmas Wolf by Lauren Esker
(Know the author disclaimer.)

A new series, with slightly different rules for the shapeshifters, which I enjoyed, and am interested in seeing how it builds out in future books.

I enjoyed how cheerfully over the top the set up was, with a family matriarch who was so into Christmas that the kids all have Christmas-themed names, and there's aggressively Christmas-themed cabins on the property, which is also a Christmas tree farm. And that the natural reaction to the relatively normal-person hero is, "Holy cow, this is all a lot." Which it was, and all the characters admitted it was, but we're just rolling with it now.

We have a classic Esker hero who's not sure where his place is in the world, or if he has one. He's got a whole traumatic backstory to heal from, and just falling in love isn't going to be enough to fix him. (I thought the fire theme could've used a little more set up). And a heroine who's also at loose ends and second guessing herself. The sparking romance built naturally around their foibles and hesitations, and was really sweet. I liked what we met of the rest of the family, especially the heroine's dad, and look forward to them getting their own books.

I'm happy to do more top 10s in this post, especially if they have to do with TTRPGs tbh, I forgot I love listing D&D things.


These past few days have been really stressful due to a combination of my sister hogging the washing machine, lack of money, PMS, and yet another delivery that was marked as received when it wasn't, which meant I had to call the store I ordered from yesterday to see if they can do something about that. I would have done it sooner but my brain was not cooperating in the slightest.

Today is -- extremely weird, to be honest, but I did get good news in the form of my mom's request for financial aid being approved and a date for when she'll get the first payment, which is a huge weight off my chest. We just need to survive until March 1, which is... fine? Probably? (Any help is extremely appreciated.)

But holy shit my brain is so confused, y'all. I do not get it. I don't get anything is how confused I am. Who am I. What do I do with my life. I have lists! I have Finch! I have a planner! I have a Trello with multiple possibilities of things to do! I have a page on my planner for stuff I want to watch/read/try! What is wrong with me. (It's my brain recalibrating, I assume. I've had to push down so much anxiety I've had nightmares every fucking day since last Monday. I don't not get it, logically. But feeling it is disconcerting.)

The Long Walk: This was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager. Thirty years on, as an adult, I find the story infinitely harder to stomach. It's incredibly brutal, and even more so when you watch it rather than read it.
But despite the brutality of the premise, it's also a really heartfelt movie about friendship that has enough moments of levity to be enjoyable. Ray's and Pete's relationship is the heart and soul of the movie. Both protagonists are more likable than their counterparts in the novel, and Cooper Hoffman (reminding me vaguely of the "Heartstopper" guy) and David Jonsson (hugely charismatic) were great. All the actors were brilliant, actually – I love how they brought the characters to life and fleshed them out, even those who only got a few scenes.
The book's ending with Ray being the last one standing but seeing an imaginary shadow walker in front of him he's trying to catch up to was so haunting that I vividly remember it decades later. Changing it made it somewhat less memorable, but also gave it more of an emotional impact because it centered the Ray/Pete friendship and was at once triumphant, tragic and ambiguous. ★★★★½

Thunderbolts*: I was fairly unimpressed with the first half hour or so because Valentina assembling a ragtag team of antiheroes, using them for shady missions and then trying to clean up the evidence felt like a knock-off Amanda Waller thing. But I liked how the team came together – grudgingly and with a lot of bickering – first to unite against her and then to save Bob (and save the world from Bob).
I enjoyed all the characters individually, though I felt like Walker turning from a rampant selfish asshole into a mostly okay guy was a bit odd. I didn't know Ava before, but I liked her. I liked Bucky's role in bringing the team together, and how gung-ho Alexei was about being a hero, and the movie's focus on Yelena really worked for me. I'm generally meh about Florence Pugh, but she's great here. Bob was at once such a likable character, and such a scary villain!
I was spoiled for the twist at the end, which is a shame, because I think it would have been hilarious to see it without knowing what was coming. Their dumbfounded looks are so great. The post-credit scene was fun too and actually makes me somewhat excited about "Doomsday", though given that there's not been a single big MCU team-up movie I actually enjoyed much, I'm trying to manage my expectations… ★★★★

The Rip: I thought the first ninety minutes of this were brilliant – I loved how it kept us in the dark who was perhaps a dirty cop the whole time, the mutual suspicion and the manipulation and the character dynamics. 10/10, instant favorite. And then it just… fell off. A predictable, boring car chase culminating in an even more predictable showdown, and a drawn-out ending sequence that looked like it might reveal a clever twist that never came. It was so incredibly frustrating! D:
Ben Affleck is very hot, though. And even though I'm not a big fan of Matt Damon, he and Affleck still have great chemistry. The antagonism between Affleck's character JD and his FBI agent brother (Scott Adkins) was fun as well. I also really enjoyed Kyle Chandler as JD's friend DEA Agent Matty, and Sasha Calle as the young woman sitting on 20 million dollars of cartel money. It was really a shame that the script didn't end up delivering what it promised. ★★★½

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025): The new screen adaptation seems to try to find some middle ground between the movie and the musical. I wish I'd known that beforehand, because going into it expecting a straightforward movie version of the musical got me off to a disappointing start. The main plot in the prison is stripped of all of its songs, so you really only get the musical when Molina (Tonatiuh) is telling Valentin (Diego Luna) the movie plot about Aurora. It's a decision that makes sense because it enhances the stark contrast between the dire, gloomy reality and the vidid beauty of Molina's imagination.
JLo does a really good job both as the embodiment of a Golden Age Hollywood diva and as the menacing mythical Spider Woman, but it's Tonatiuh's and Diego Luna's performances who make the movie so engaging. It's been a minute since I watched the 1985 movie, but from what I remember, I find the Molina/Valentin dynamic in the new film a lot more emotionally resonant. ★★★★

The Running Man (2025): The 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger was pretty formative for me when I was a teenager. I haven't watched it in years, I don't know if it would still hold up almost 40 (and let me tell you, writing this number made me die a little on the inside) years later or if I mentally built it up to remember it as better than it was, but the remake doesn't really cut it for me. It was slow to start, has a pretty good, fast-paced and really exciting middle part where Ben is trying to outrun the Hunters, and then it falls off really badly at the end with a resolution twist that stretches suspension of disbelief until it snaps. And Glen Powell just doesn't work for me as some kind of rugged, down-on-his-luck working class guy. ★★★

In the Heights: Watching this as a fan of the stage musical was a bit of a wild ride. The newly added opening sequence with Usnavi (Anthony Ramos, who's amazing!) telling the story to the group of kids threw me for a loop because it seemed to contradict the ending of the movie (and thus turn the entire point of the story on its head), but the ending twist was SO. GOOD. and made me incredibly emotional. So that was a change that really worked well for me.
On the other hand, they cut some of my favorite songs and with it entire chunks of background story and plot – I really missed Nina's (Leslie Grace, also brilliant) parents' songs, but cutting "Everything I Know" in particular feels unforgivable because it's such a pivotal song and arguably the emotional climax of the story.
And still, standing on its own, it's a good movie. The music is fantastic, the actors are great and their voices are wonderful, and LMM as the Piragua guy was a great little easter egg. ★★★★

Eden: It's a weird movie, and it's even weirder to think that this is actually a true story and not one that seems to be heavily dramatized for the screen either. It took me a while to get into it, mostly because most of the characters are deeply unsympathetic, and even when the story started gripping me, it's not a pleasant movie to watch, in the same way "Abwärts" or the Doctor Who episode "Midnight" are unpleasant to watch, because they all show how regular people when isolated and cornered bring out the worst in each other in a way that's frankly frightening. "Eden" has a lot of actors I like (excellently) playing characters I find deeply appalling (Ana de Armas, most of all, but also Jude Law and to a minor degree Daniel Brühl, though the Wittmers are the least unlikable of the bunch).
As the closing credits rolled (presumably over real life footage of the actual settlers?), I had come to feel mostly favorable and mildly impressed by the movie – it's a good movie and an absolutely wild story that it tells in a fairly engaging manner. Will I watch it again? Eh, probably not. ★★★½

Materialists: The plot is very straightforward: a matchmaker (Dakota Johnson, looking weirdly like Anne Hathaway in "The Devil Wears Prada") with a lot of success coupling up wealthy clients but a cynical outlook on love is charmed by the attention of a rich, attractive businessman (Pedro Pascal) who seems like a perfect match for her, but she's secretly hung up on her perpetually broke ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans, looking devastatingly handsome). It's a charming movie. All the main characters are more or less good, if flawed, people, and the movie never tries to create unnecessary drama or antagonism between them, which makes for a really pleasant change of pace compared to the usual romance plots. It's also fundamentally not about two guys competing for one woman but rather a woman trying to figure out her priorities in life.
The only thing is… I was rooting for John and Lucy all along, but absolutely nothing about this story convinced me that their relationship has any kind of future. Despite all the chemistry between them, they're a terrible match, and it's plain to see that their marriage is going to fail for the exact same reasons their first relationship failed. Which made the 'happy ending' feel very bittersweet in a way that I'm 90% sure isn't intentional. ★★★½

I also watched the first 15 minutes of "Sinners", which I know got rave reviews, but I couldn't get into it. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I might or might not give it another try at a later point.

I've been meaning to post all month, but Snowflake didn't appeal to me all that much, plus there's a lot of history there for me, even if I wasn't directly involved with the drama.

However, one thing I will be taking from Snowflake is the top 10 lists, outsourced. Ask me for any and I'll answer in the comments!

I am also going to make a little wishlist, much smaller than the one for Christmas. This is stuff that would make me happy:

1. Jigsaw puzzles
2. PS5 gift cards
3. Subscriptions to my ko-fi, which I'm planning to turn into a place to share all my TTRPG card, homebrew, merch and map designs
4. 4. Art of my PCs from the TTRPG campaigns I play in

-

It's been a pretty stressful month, money-wise. We've managed, but it is what it is. Doesn't help that it's cold and that I'm the only person in this house who's capable of not taking things out on other people. I've been doing jigsaw puzzles and deleting photos from my backlog and trying to figure out a permanent set-up for my day-a-page planner, which I keep meaning to post about to journalsandplanners. I took pics and everything.

One upside that's been keeping me sane is the soft light my friend Nate got me, which I use to get selfies even when it's too dark because winter. It helps my self-esteem a lot, even if I'm more aware of the way my skin keeps breaking out. I figure most of that is coming from the same place as the daily nightmares.

Good luck everyone!

Works are due at 11:59pm EST, Saturday 24 January | see countdown.

That's soon.

Additionally, AO3 is going down for 15 hours on January 21st. So you won't be able to upload a draft or check your assignment on AO3 during that time.

Good news! You can always check the details of a prompt at the app.

This is a great time to check your recipient's Do-Not-Wants - because if your story or comic overlaps with an unwanted topic, you still have time to change it, check with a beta, send your recipient a question through me, or default.

Good luck again to everyone currently working!

Fashion/outfits
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Fashion art
Yoga
Vampire Diaries cast



rest HERE @ yellowrosess

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Honestly, trope doesn't entirely resonate. I can remember years ago, seeing something about tropes and just not relating to any of all that forced to share a bed/enemies to lovers/coffee shop AU stuff. But I do have a theme, which is alternate timelines. What if So and so never died? What if the villain made the obvious choice that the original writers seem to have somehow totally missed? What if Character X was the one to move from his cancelled spinoff to the main show? I have done them all.

The first series I ever saw to completion was Once Upon a Time, where Jafar was the one to move across from the Wonderland spinoff to the main show (imagine his lamp ending up in Gold's shop and Zelena accidentally letting him out). Another one was The Flash, where Eobard manipulated Nora into giving Barry the metahuman cure and the finale showed a dystopian 2049 that resulted from this (at the time I started that, I was convinced that was the route canon was going to take; to this day, I still don't get why the writers wasted time on Cicada rather than pursuing this route and just letting Eobard be the bad guy). I've saved Sun, Jin and Sayid on Lost several times over (and after a prompt in last year's three sentence ficathon, I was even tempted to expand on my attempt at Smokey McSmokeFace going back to the classical Roman era to get off the island while he was still human).

And yes, I have a few ongoing such works which I'm determined to finish. The School Spirits one where Mr Martin chooses to possess Emilio instead and the impact this has on Charley and Yuri is barely started (the upcoming new season may help with that), and I am determined I will push past my mental block on a) the Lost series where Sun joined the others in 1977 (I lost heart after the decision in canon to kill her off, which I still strongly disagree with 15 years on) and b) the Dark series where Ulrich successfully rescues Mikkel from 1986 (at this rate, I think I'm actually going to end up going down the Choose Your Own Adventure route, one where Ulrich and Mikkel get their happy ending and the minimum of characters are erased from existence, and one where Claudia gets hers.)

Just found out that Spry Fox is going independent again.

!!!!

So maybe (maybe?) Cozy Grove 2 for the Nintendo Switch?

Pretty, please with a Spririt Bear on top?

Mostly posting these without commentary.

Uncategorised Stuff:
CCF: Anger is beautiful. Anger is generative. Anger is ancestral. By Chantelle Ohrling, a justifiably angry defender of Turtle Island.

dolorosa_12: Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure: suggestions for concrete actions.

Technology and Media Criticism: ( L.L.M. slop, gender-based violence, transphobia. )

Canadian News That's Pissing Me Off ( Various human rights violations. )

The United States Immigration Stuff: ( No images of violence, but cutting for folks already burned out. )

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.


This is actually something that I've been wondering if I need to improve on, especially when it comes to writing series. Specifically, how much of a series I should have planned out before I start posting it, although admittedly there have been a few times where I've intended something as a one-shot and then realised that actually I can't really leave the story where it is.

Also, this is a process specifically to Dark more than any of my other fandoms, but I realised I should probably make sure I have a full understanding of the original timeline before I try to change it. A moment of sheer frustration at Ulrich getting stuck in 1953 and being unable to rescue Mikkel from 1986 led me to write a scene where Ulrich did get to 1986, and it became clear I couldn't just leave it there. But at that point in season 1, I didn't have the whole context of how that whole family tree/timeline worked, or the reasons why the character Claudia just would not let the timeline deviate that way. So I now find myself with an ending I know has to happen, but that I was trying to avoid and that's just blocking me finishing the final chapter. Anyone remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books as kids? I'm seriously thinking about those now as I'm tempted to write the one ending where Claudia fixes the timeline her way or trying to work out if there's any way of incorporating the alternate universe characters into the timeline so the minimum of people actually get erased from existence and Ulrich and Mikkel get their happy ending.

Something I have often done is been determined to get a fic finished before the next episode of a show aired and canon could contradict it. This tends to be easier with one shots than series, although I've only ever had one dickhead trying to "correct" me over not incorporating context that hadn't aired at the time that chapter was posted. But since that was a known troll, they could shove their corrections where the sun didn't shine. If that does come up, I don't rewrite.

Sometimes it involves going back and watching old episodes, or even just checking facts on fandom wikis, to make sure I have my details correct. (Even if I sometimes wonder why I bother - for example, I was trying to find out whether Fringe's Peter Bishop's specific date of birth was ever confirmed, to see if it was feasible for a time travelling Daniel from Lost to have met Walter before Peter was born to give him the name. In the process, I managed to establish that Walter's father's date of death in 1944 doesn't make sense for Walter's birth in 1946, so decided that if the writers weren't going to worry about that, I'd roll with my idea whatever!)

As far as requests go, if I'm not doing it as part of an exchange, I'll only consider if we've interacted. Just my way of making sure I don't end up granting a request for aforementioned known troll, whose MO was to ask for requests then spam anyone who didn't take their (very specific) requests with insults.

But anyway, what I'm wondering if I need to do is try and do more planning in advance of any story likely to become a series before I start posting it. I have one now I'm trying to work out (School Spirits, a rewrite of season 2 where Mr Martin possesses someone other than who he actually does possess in canon) so I'm going to start with that.

(I've got so many links right now I'm splitting it up. The depressing shit one to follow in the next few days.)

magnavox_23: The One With All The Icons From All The Fandoms...
These are gorgeous! All the fandoms being: Good Omens, Our Flag Means Death, Doctor Who, Xena: Warrior Princess, Reservation Dogs, Star Trek TOS, Heated Rivalry, Hazbin Hotel, Hellava Boss & What We Do In The Shadows...

With the Dawn by SweetSorcery
Fandom: Kidnapped! (Davie/Alan)
Word Count: 1,300
Rating: General
Summary: Alan's own safety is worth very little to him, if it means leaving David behind ill and defenseless.
Notes: I've missed so much fic in this fandom, and was really happy to read this one from last year. The sweetest lil h/c missing scene from the book. Great voices for both of them, and very tender.

The Worst Part of Waking Up by Sanguinity
Fandom: Hornblower (William/Horatio)
Word Count: 6,600
Rating: Teen
Summary: At the end of "Loyalty," Bush is too late to save Hornblower. With his dying breath, Hornblower requests a kiss from Bush… …only to wake up a week later and discover he's going to live after all. Damnit.
Notes: More very excellent h/c featuring Horatio Hornblower being Olympic levels of Bad at Feelings. Also extremely sweet, once he gets his shit together. I love the tag: "When He Made This Bed He Wasn't Expecting to Wake Up In It"!

ThatDisasterAuthor: Put the light out. | Turn the light on.
Gorgeous Lighthouse | Fire Tower art!

Tractor Beam: The Valley in Thaw by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall and Xiang Yata.
Beautiful graphic short story about a soil remediation robot and a band of humans who survived the apocalypse. More like this, please.

Humble Bundle: Fierce Women of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror.
Great selection, open for another couple weeks. You get epubs, not the weird kobo link thing.

CBC Books: The Canada Reads 2026 longlist is here.
I really wish they'd announce this earlier so you could take a proper shot at the long list before they drop the shortlist. I'm like half way through one of these. Lots of hockey books this year. Hmmmm.

University of Pennsylvania (for some reason?): "Introducing Myself", 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Extremely funny and extremely gender.

Fantastic Mr. Fox on Bluesky: A Recipe for Disaster.
This meme is such a whole entire mood.