#charmingpplincardigans

[halfdeadfriedrice]

@charmingpplincardigans is it okay if I bring this out of the notes so I can have easier access to be unhinged about it

[halfdeadfriedrice]

Hello hi I just was reading Mister Impossible from the dreamer trilogy and thought of your Blue and her monsters ficlets. I just wanted you to know that that story has lived vaguely in the back of my head since I first read it however many years ago, and I would think of it time to time. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of your words!

!!!!

Genuinely thank you so much <3 <3 <3 I'm always pleased when I get like, a kudos notification for The Length and Width of Summer, (which is the more accessible and more popularly niche ot5 porn), but I am very tender for the the Blue and her monsters ficlets, which have less than 60 notes all put together and are an experiment in trying to write things above my skill level that are kind of weird, with like, gestures towards plot and character relationships. It really means a lot that it resonated for you across all this time. (the essence of the beauty of fandom? for me? <3)

(and I hope you're enjoying mr. impossible, which is so wild and magical. carmen farooq-lane, my beloved.)

and ofc it was really really fun to play in a sandbox with @charmingpplincardigans whose beautiful grasp on character relations and usefully succinct/accurate/spare dialogue and use of details always impresses me and inspired me to want to do writerly things and without whom the victorian monsters would not have existed in any forms

[bronanlynch]

7, 8, 31?

7. do you prefer poems or love letters? poems. love letters are cool in theory but they seem too direct for my personal taste and I would prefer to hide my feelings behind some metaphors

8. favorite fanfic trope? homoerotic sparring. urban fantasy AUs. street racing/fast & the furious AUs. political marriage. friends to mutual pining to enemies to reluctant allies to friends to lovers

31. guitar or piano? piano. like, don’t get me wrong I enjoy guitars but I am a classical music person at heart and pianos are such a versatile instrument (side note it’s been years since I’ve been able to play with piano accompaniment and I miss it. someday the pandemic will end and I’ll try to get into the local ~community orchestra scene and find someone who will play piano for me) (I mean. first I’ll have to find a place where I can practice because I’ve barely played my flute since the pandemic started because I have so many roommates and someone else is always trying to sleep and our walls are very thin)

[z-bot]

It's your birthday? Happy Birthday!! I hope the day was kind. You're rad and I want nothing but happiness for you. 🎉🎉🎉

I didn’t mention it the day of, but my birthday is actually December 25th! Which is mostly kind of ugh, but I feel better when I remember that I share it with somebody very special...

Anyway, thank you! I think you are very rad as well, KL, and I’m happy that @anachronistique introduced us to each other on this virtual tumblr-scape, and also I just sent you an email so have fun looking at my art-related word vomit. <3

[halfdeadfriedrice]

2 and 17?

Hi KL! Thanks for asking! <3 

This is for the End-of-Year Book Ask

 (that is actually 2) Did you reread anything? What? This was the Year of Rereads, more than anything else! I just went back to divide my goodreads into ‘new reads’ and ‘rereads,’ and was honestly shocked that I managed 68 new books (out of a total of 96 so far), which makes 28 rereads. Honestly way better than I thought. I read Gideon the Ninth four times (and Harrow I read twice, and will probably round out a third time by the end of the year) I reread Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief series in anticipation of “Return of the Thief,” the closing chapter of her 25 year long series.  Reread Ann Leckie’s oeuvre just for fun, because it’s nice when justice is real, and read A.K. Larkwood’s “The Unspoken Name” twice, because sometimes two girl-child sacrifices to wild gods can grow up and make other choices.

(that is actually 17) Did any books surprise you with how good they were? Another thing I went to count, when I was tallying up new reads, was how many new authors I tried! That was 28; a lot of them from various recommendations across the internet and a lot of Tor debut authors. There were a lot of new books I read that were amazing but I wasn’t Surprised By how amazing they were - Martha Well’s “Fugitive Telemetry” blew my socks off but so has the rest of the murderbot series - so I’ll pick two from my branching outs! I really liked “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory,” by Caitlin Doughty; it has the dubious honor of being one of the only nonfiction things I read, but it’s this amazing memoir of working in the death industry, and a woman’s goal to demystify it for Americans. I learned SO MUCH about the funeral industry and also about cremation and ALSO how natural burial is still a thing you can demand and while it’s a bit morbid and has some difficult emotional moments I really liked it. I did try to read it over lunch and would not.. would not recommend that approach. Strictly an afternoon read. I also really liked, and perhaps this one benefits from being finished yesterday and thus still fresh on the brain, “The Merciful Crow,” by Margaret Owens. This story opens with our heroine, one of a troup of plague body collectors (the Crow Caste), on a mission to pick up some royal bodies; and when they are insulted with a lack of payment, her rage and quick wits lead her to take charge in a negotiation standoff (a “Money Dance”) that plays out absolutely beautifully. And then, of course, when they go to burn the bodies, it turns out the prince and his bodyguard aren’t dead - they want escorts to a new location to lead a coup or stop a coup or something. It’s a classic kind of road story, but the writing is so snappy and the main character is so sharp, it’s a real delight to read.

[babzgordon]

15! 33! 7!

15. “Holy Water” by Sakima. (Oh this is on my mix for the jtbq epilogue thing ive been writing. if this song had come out in like 2016 .... the edits would have been fire .. i guess the joenicky fandom can have it now )

33. “Let Me Know (I wonder why)” by Juice Wrld (extremely personal coping mechanism haha next question!) 

7. “Cross You Out” by Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira (this song just always punches you in the face. yeah..) 

[alwaysalreadyangry]

35, 72

35. The Way Young Lovers Do - Van Morrison

more astral weeks!! honestly it’s just a great album. 

72. For Myrtle - Louise Bichan

this is from a wonderful album that came out in 2016, here’s a description of the project from Boston Irish:

Such is the case for Brighton resident Louise Bichan, a fiddler from Scotland’s Orkney Islands studying at the Berklee College of Music who four years ago embarked on an effort to retrace the epic journey taken by her grandmother, Margaret S. Tait, across Canada more than six decades ago. Now, Bichan’s Margaret S. Tait Project has yielded the album “Out of My Own Light,” a suite of instrumental pieces composed by Bichan, plus restored archival recordings of Tait’s performance of Scottish songs on Canadian radio during her trip. Bichan draws on the Orkney fiddle tradition (she began playing at age 7) for her compositions while incorporating other influences and styles – chamber-folk, jazz, experimental – assisted by a quintet of musicians on fiddle, double bass, cello, piano, tenor guitar and percussion.

[z-bot]

maple? harvest?

maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did?

Name a hobby and the answer is probably “yes”, but! BUT! Top among those has always been playing an instrument, in particular either the guitar or violin. And I have finally looked into doing so. And for the first time in my life, it is absolutely within my budget.

So now I have a short list of violin teachers to contact after the election (because I’ll be working the polls the week of, and even if I weren’t I’d be in no fit state to start lessons yet), because the best time to start doing something I’ve wanted to do my entire life is ASAP.

harvest - what fictional character do you most identify with? Why?

This was a hard question! I identify somewhat with a lot of characters, but also I think one of the reasons I created so many OCs when I was younger was because there was a distinct lack of characters that I really identified with in my favorite stories.

But I guess if we’re just going by Venn diagram overlap, it would actually be... Bruce Banner? Even though I was more into DC as a kid, Bruce was always nearest to my heart. Coming from a childhood of abuse and domestic violence, I had serious anger issues as a teen and a young adult, plus a lot of anxiety, and great difficulty forming close emotional bonds. PLUS I adore the mad scientist trope, but Bruce is more of a morose scientist and boy do I Feel That. You know, just. Augh.

[ask meeeeeeeeeeeeeme]