hi! i'm leigh, i use any pronouns, and i've been around on this lovely little hellsite since 2016!
i don't post a lot about myself because it's not something that comes naturally to me, but i really appreciate all the communities i've lurked in over the years. if you're one of my few mutuals, i see and appreciate you!
aside from my occasional complaints, this blog is just really a big old scrapbook that i use to gather everything that interests me, and i hope you enjoy it too!
things i like include fashion (especially historical fashion), knitting, (literally any kind of textile craft will draw my attention), cool drawings (anything woodcut or linoprint i love love love), ttrpgs and occasionally critical role (mighty nein mostly), my chemical romance and many adjacent punk and emo bands, the list is long but you get the gist
my ask box is open, and i hope you enjoy my curation of things!
Remember in 2010 when Taio Cruz said "I throw my hands up in the air sometimes"? I appreciated his restraint. You can't just throw your hands up in the air whenever. There's a time and a place, and that time was 2010, and the place was the club.
no worse feeling that going on some subculture fashion clothing website and seeing the size chart runs from extra small to petite to pequeño to microscopique. yeah here at DeathKillFuckShadow Fantastique Cloth Imaginations i think you’ll find that we see the world a bit difference… we have bleak brutal imaginations… what if blood and fangs were COOL… but we cannot in our most tortured imaginations picture a woman who has a stouter frame than the fucking Insulindian Phasmid
"Dervish Leading a Bear", Folio from the Shah Jahan Album. Painting by Govardhan. Recto: early 19th century; verso: later copy of 16th century original. Attributed to India.
Southern Reach series (10th Anniversary Editions) by Jeff VanderMeer
Cover art by Pablo Delcan
MacMillan, 2014-2024
Annihilation (2014)
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything
Authority (2014)
After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.
John Rodríguez (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.
In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.
Acceptance (2014)
It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it—the Southern Reach—has collapsed on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.
Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X—what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X—and who may have been corrupted by it?
In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.
Absolution (2024)
When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time
"hephaistion made this" in a beautiful trompe-l'oeil piece of paper half unstuck by the wind still some of the rawest stuff ever put in a mosaic (2nd century bc, pergamon)
what a beautiful time of year everyone is growing veegtables for me spacifically, one problem though you need to make fences shorter im sure its a mistake but i cant reach some of them
