I have up to this point avoided defining what this blog is for, and have kept all my interests in one place. But, I want to post more regularly about my art, and it's not really of interest to most people who follow this main blog. (Not that I necessarily post things of interest to anyone but me, and I'm not likely to change that!)
So, my main blog @fallowhearth will continue mostly as normal: books, comics, fandom meta, auspol, general political and social commentary.
My new side blog @fallowhearth-art will now be the place I post about my art. I may also post more about fashion there, since it's something I'm very interested in, but I know many of the people who follow my main are not. I'm mainly interested in traditional mediums so that's what you can expect in terms of original work and reblogs - watercolour, ink, oil, pastels, pencil, etc.
Hopefully I will see some of you over there! To everyone else, hope to continue discussing all the regular topics with you!
One of my app projects is for a wardrobe organiser, where I can catalogue all my clothes and save outfit combinations I've particularly liked. There are quite a few apps of this kind on the market, and I've even used a few, but none really had the feature I wanted which was to have the clothes represented by illustrations showing the structure of the garment (like the schematics on sewing patterns). Most of them are built around photographing your clothes then algorithmically removing the background. Which is fine... But not if you're curvy, like loose-fitting clothes, and wear mostly black. 90% of my favourite clothes look like amorphous black sacks on the hanger.
So anyway, these are some of the illustrations I've made for it using pen and paper. (And Adobe's free tool to convert images to svg)
One of my app projects is for a wardrobe organiser, where I can catalogue all my clothes and save outfit combinations I've particularly liked. There are quite a few apps of this kind on the market, and I've even used a few, but none really had the feature I wanted which was to have the clothes represented by illustrations showing the structure of the garment (like the schematics on sewing patterns). Most of them are built around photographing your clothes then algorithmically removing the background. Which is fine... But not if you're curvy, like loose-fitting clothes, and wear mostly black. 90% of my favourite clothes look like amorphous black sacks on the hanger.
So anyway, these are some of the illustrations I've made for it using pen and paper. (And Adobe's free tool to convert images to svg)
It's also probably a bad sign (for me as not the target audience of this book) that I found the interactions between Treila and the Loving Saint (I think it was that one) to have more chemistry and interest than anything between the female leads. He at least seems to be having fun being a kind of menacing, gender-bending, campy villain. Even if there was still some of the copy pasting (he 'cages her in' with his shoulders twice in three pages). Though from a quick skim of reviews, many others had this experience.
I took myself to a coffee shop this morning partly to see if I could get some uninterrupted reading time, but instead I spent that reading time writing a hater post on Tumblr 😔
I'm about halfway through The Starving Saints, so there's absolutely still time for it to turn it around, but I'm finding it a bit of a slog. Honestly, probably just a preference mismatch: I have a visceral dislike for the "man in authority position domestically abuses, chokes, terrifies woman he has power over, but it's fine because she's eventually into it" trope and it turns out that carries over when it's a butch lesbian cop. It doesn't help that all of these acts of violence are written in that cutesy, copy-pasted fanfiction/romance novel style.
It also doesn't help that the novel seems to be pulling punches on the horror elements (the cannibalism, mind control, etc). The author seems to be too squeamish to let her POV characters actually be drawn in, they have to reassure you they know something wrong is happening, break free of control unsatisfyingly quickly, etc. And then most of the cannibalism stuff happens offscreen involving apparently mindless drone NPCs who don't get the benefit of interiority.
As you've probably gleaned, I'm finding the romance elements to be more effective horror than the horror elements. Which would be fine! I like horror rooted in the cruelties people do to each other in the name of love and desire. But from what I've seen of over people's reviews, it does seem like it's meant to be read as more on the sexy than horrific end of the spectrum.
can you give some examples of the cozy colonialism trope from your previous post? i just feel like i haven’t encountered it anywhere but wondering if im missing it!
Tagging @mytly4 who also asked about this:
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of traditional SFF tropes—the invading orc hordes, the uninhabited exoplanet to settle, the adventurous archaeologist, the ancient aliens, the Lost World, the scary untamed wilderness—are rooted in colonialist adventure stories and attitudes from the 1800s and 1900s, and if you don’t really know what you’re doing with them it’s way too easy to accidentally just replicate their underlying colonialist and orientalist basis. Stargate is a famous example of this, but it’s missing the other half of the equation here: the desire to write something cozy, queer, uplifting, nice, and hopepunk.
When these two things crash together it can create some deeply unintended implications.
The problem with indie work in this space is that it has a tendency to be pretty conflict-averse, and it accomplishes this by presenting a protagonist or protag group who are nice as their primary defining characteristic. They’re nice, they’re good, they have correct and progressive beliefs, and narratively everything they do is framed as nice, good, and correct.
I wanted to contextualize what I’m talking about before I name specific works, to make it clear why I see this as a recurring issue. Links below go to more in-depth discussion of each example.
The exoplanet colonization audio drama This Planet Needs a Name is probably the purest distillation of this (from the title itself you can guess which direction this goes in). The short story “Dracanmōt Council of Human Study Report, Compiled by Usander Greystart” published in the queer SFF anthology Common Bonds was clearly TRYING to have a theme of “colonialism is bad” but what was actually presented was a replication of a shocking number of racist tropes about Native Americans, applied to marauding orcs.
Tradpub isn’t immune either, though. Becky Chambers’s novella A Prayer for the Crown-Shy contains no depictions of colonialism directly but draws unthinkingly from some deeply colonialist attitudes about nature, humans, wilderness, and religion, thereby presenting some bizarre and occasionally disturbing scenes that are supposed to be moving and gentle and sweet. I haven’t personally read The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune but I have heard the controversy about its origins; admitting that your cozy fantasy book where inhuman/monster children are taken away from their families and raised in a state-run foster home by a state agent who Understands them and Cares about them better than anyone else was inspired by the Canadian policy of taking Indigenous children away from their families to place them with white families who would raise them “better” sure is indicative of some underlying assumptions about how the world works.
My favorite example, though, is Season 1 of the audio drama Travelling Light, which had a theme of “artifact smuggling is a victimless crime and really it’s about the friends we made along the way.” The writing team brushed me off when I raised concerns about this, basically telling me “you are the only person who cares about this” (which was evidently true tbh) and then blocked me on tumblr, then apparently sat on this, considering it, writing a behind the scenes blog post explicitly using my term “cozy colonialism” without actually citing me because I was still blocked on Tumblr, then doing a complete 180 in season 2 where the main character learns that artifact smuggling is not a victimless crime actually. Also, I’m pretty sure they wrote me into the show as an antagonistic character who repeats all the points I made to the protagonist and the protagonist hates him for calling them out, but begrudgingly eventually agrees that he’s kind of right. SUCCESS. Also, the official tumblr unblocked me at about the same time, making me think that this is related.
So my partner is letting their org's enterprise GPT subscription expire ('cos it sucks), so they told me to go ham on the remaining usage, and I've been taking Sol for a test drive in Codex. And... It's fine. It's ok. It took my requirements and built a working prototype. Sure. But a few turns in and I have taken my git repository back over to Claude Code. At least for vibe coding, I prefer Opus to Sol. (Not even mentioning Fable, which I also prefer, which is at least in the same 'weight class'). Honestly I would even prefer Sonnet.
One of my goals for this year is to get an unassisted pullup; felt for ages that I was stalling. But it goes like that sometimes. And I just realised I've increased my assisted single rep max (19kg) to my three rep max! And my 4-8 rep training weight is about to move up to 26kg 🎉 I can do one set before having to drop back to 33kg. It's slow progress because I'm so heavy lol
Fun things to think about from the History of Japan episodes I've been listening to (on the post-war extreme right): you can technically be anti-capitalist by being pro-feudalist lol
It does annoy and baffle me that people seem to think that AI is the only thing that uses data centres, while everything else on the internet I guess happens in a magical realm separate from mundane physical reality.
This thought not actually sparked by online discourse or AI stuff, but by actual government customers who have a hard need for everything to be hosted and processed onshore, all their documents, their notes, their everything, lest they not meet their own policies... But then crying because we took away their ability to search the open web within the product. Like, what do you think happens when you search via Google? Your search string gets sent to a bunch of servers which might be anywhere in the world.
Small commission piece from DA - I definitely had too much fun doing it, and by the end all I wanted to do was climb on top of my desk and shout MAGE FREEDOM!
Book club book. In Annihilation, our unnamed narrator, the Biologist, embarks on a dangerous mission to map the mysteriously expanding Area X. But once inside the contamination zone, her small expedition quickly devolves into chaos, divided by their secretive government sponsors.
I've heard lots about Vandermeer, but I've never actually gotten around to reading his work until now. Annihilation is an odd little novella, featuring a limited cast of four people who are being picked off one by one. From the very first sentence, I was struck by how easily and immediately the Biologist falls under the sway of Area X. In other books, the fungal horrors usually take longer than the first page to conscript their prey, but not here. As the book continues, it becomes clear that perhaps the Biologist was always like this. Just as she kept her husband at emotional arm's length, she's entirely detached from the concept that her mind may no longer be her own. The biologist's cold indifference and unreliable narration dulls the horror a touch—Vandermeer is more inclined to subtle psychological effects than dripping fungal atrocities. Still, the Biologist's immediate and persistent insistence that the tunnel they encounter is the Tower, the sinister effect of the Psychologist's hypnosis program, and the endless train of doomed expeditions into Area X cast their own spell.
The overall effect is striking, but I don't feel any need to read the multiple sequels. Annihilation works best as a question—an attempt at the answers would dispel the effect.
"This feels kinda raunchy. How'd we end up like this?"
"The heck, dude? This was your idea!"
"I mean, you wanted to know what's inside me. Right?"
THE SUMMER HIKARU DIED / 光が死んだ夏
News for enjoyers of unhygienic woman detective geniuses and the sad wet bisexual boys who run their errands and (sometimes) (not often enough) bring them drugs! An Ana & Din short story entitled The Lion's Tusk will appear in the forthcoming Amazon-only fantasy anthology Magic & Mystery, due out on the 28th of July, 2026.
(No sign yet of an ebook of The Fallen Master. I asked Subterranean Press months ago and they told me they don't even HAVE the ebook rights. 💀 Does anyone know anything? I live in hope.)
Fallow Hearth @fallowhearth - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
