#adreadfulidea

[unwhithered]

Hey, I just wanted to say I've been really loving your Witcher soulmate AU (and all your Witcher fic in general). You came up with a unique and totally heartrending concept for it and I'm excited to see where that goes!

Thank you! Sorry I took a few days to reply - school and the kitten keeping me awake and also an unhealthy addiction to the Witcher 3 have been keeping me offline. I’ve been falling down on the job of writing it, partially because I just have all of these random bits and I’m struggling to get a coherent timeline knocked out. But I’m really hoping to have an actual chapter done and postable by the end of the long weekend.

[calamity-bean]

@adreadfulidea replied to your post “The extra special thing about Hunt having at least 109 books — and...”

hunt is the my family is starving dril tweet but books instead of candles

i don’t mind admitting that your reply made me laugh WAY too hard

[meyerlansky]

I was reading your post about the history of mafia investment in gay bars in New York and also the circumstances around the D'Amato murder -- really interesting stuff. Do you think it's possible that the difference in the reaction to queer members might have been a little location based? NYC has been such a gay hub for such a long time, before the modern movement for sure. I imagine even NYC based gangsters could have their attitudes impacted by that.

it’s definitely a possibility! d’amato was the acting head of the decavalcantes, which is based in north jersey, so it’s not completely out of nyc’s sphere of influence, but it’s certainly not an epicenter of queer activity the way nyc historically has been. my gut impulse is that location was slightly less deterministic of response than time period—partially because the given reason for d’amato’s murder was “we can’t have a queer guy representing us in front of the new york family heads, we won’t be taken seriously,” plus there was no punishment from the new york families meted out to the decavalcantes for unilaterally murdering an acting boss without bringing it up for a vote, which is supposedly what anyone wanting a boss killed were SUPPOSED to do, which makes me think there was at least implied rejection of queerness even from the new york bosses in the d’amato case—but obviously queer acceptance in new york in the 20s was higher than queer acceptance in almost anywhere else in the country at the same time, and considering that the village is right next to the lower east side/little italy and was already established as a queer enclave by the 20s, it’s pretty likely the proximity influenced gangsters who considered that their home base, especially the ones that emigrated before their teens and grew up in manhattan

[isagrimorie]

@adreadfulidea: it sure is a pattern... i don't suppose they make any effort to go to the inboxes of people who ship Sam/Dean or Cesare/Lucrezia in the height of Borgia fandom, which are *actual* incest. (sorry am on mobile rn)

[timelordthirteen]

My Tumblr Crushes:

emospritelet

rufeepeach

thatravenclawbitch

perfectlyrose

adreadfulidea

nottheopera

richard-grayson

rose-tylers

swnews

How do I *heart eyes emoji* in real life?

[titleleaf]

I'm going to ask for Cornelius Hickey's Starbucks order, because the idea amuses me so much.

My knee-jerk association with Cornelius Hickey and Starbucks is a truly terrible one that I will not share with you all out of decorum and kindness but I feel like it’s plausible that he prefers coffee to tea. (Truly a man ahead of his time.) Street-sellers of coffee were definitely a thing by the 1840s and meant a lot to people on their way to work at odd hours, whether workmen out and about in the early morning or “night walkers” and “fast gentlemen” out late at night -- Hickey’s probably slammed a cup of black coffee at 2 AM on his way to do something dubes. 

Anachronistic Starbucks-orders-wise... this is so hard for me because I don’t drink coffee, so I only know Starbucks’ teas.  Hickey shows up with a trenta cup of cold brew with cream but no sugar, then runs around on the glaciers and the shale fields and things shouting about his own divinity. 

[titleleaf]

Going to be predictable and say The Locust for the meme, I've mentioned to you before how much I love that one.

“The Locust” @ AO3 (And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side - James Tiptree Jr., Original Male Jesuit/Original Male Alien)

I’m really glad that my most accessible work involves stabby bug-dicks. 

I can’t remember if I wrote this fic before or after I actually watched a hedgehog anoint itself, but it is profoundly weird that that’s what ended up in this fic as a sort of combination goodwill gesture/grooming gesture/come-on from the main character’s lover. My friend’s hedgehog Fritz used to lick off my perfume and then rub his spitty mixture on his own quills for mysterious hedgehog reasons. It was not very erotic but it was very sweet. 

This fic almost didn’t get posted, both due to a deadline crunch and some basic insecurity about its premise. 

This fic was pretty much entirely dictated by A. Lynn Martin’s book Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century, both in its epistolary format as a riff on the journalistic framing of the original short story and in some of the specifics like the quarantine measures and the narrator’s reflexive religious hedgings. Martin’s book is a better Early Modern science fiction horror story than anything I could write, though. 

[titleleaf]

You wanted someone to ask you about the Servant, so I am!

Glad you asked! I love The Servant (1963) because it's really tremendously weird and I'm surprised I don't encounter it more often when people are talking about weird psychological thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s and/or midcentury gay shit. It's a super pent-up, off-kilter drama about a beautiful, wealthy twerp (Tony, played by James Fox looking beautiful and twerpish like a luminously lovely Bertie Wooster) who moves into a run-down but expensive Georgian townhouse and decides the first thing he needs to spruce the place up is a dutiful manservant. The perfect specimen materializes, a man who's effortlessly discreet and accommodating and tasteful -- Hugo Barrett, played by Dirk Bogarde looking haunted and quietly surly. 

Shit gets massively psychosexually weird in short order, first with the rivalry between Barrett and Tony's equally-snobby/twerpish fiancée, Susan, and then with a darker triangulation incorporating Barrett's sister/mistress Vera. The presence of the outside world starts to fade away and the power structure within the house grows more and more tenuous and topsy-turvy and fucked-up. It’s a really pretty-looking movie with a deeply weird sense of place and a lot of unsubtle symbolism, and if you dig a sense of interpersonal corruption and slow much-deserved class warfare it’s good shit. The movie is claustrophobic and quietly kinky and at times pretty shocking even by 2019 standards and I want people to watch it so I can talk about it with them. 

(i hope you like that mirror bc it gets a lot of action)

(also vera’s legs and hair, there are some peak early-60s looks in this film)

Basically it's really fun if you like your weird angry midcentury gay shit with a lot of stuff about class and power in it, or if you like your gloomy meditation on class and power to be full of fraught weird sexuality going every which way. It reminds me a lot of plays adapted to the screen like Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (1982) but as far as I know it was adapted right from novella to film, and it has a really cockeyed sense of humor that gives it a low-key Hitchcock vibe almost. I’m so mad the fantasized Criterion Collection edition the folks at Make Mine Criterion! came up with doesn’t actually exist. It’s not on streaming anywhere from what I can tell, but I hope some place will pick it up.