rip my beloved subaru, march 2021-august 2026. saying it succumbed to rust makes me feel like a bad car owner but nobody in texas really understands that northeast road salt eats cars alive no matter how careful you are. can't believe i don't have a better picture of this thing.
listening: cherry lips (go baby go!) by garbage
reading (article): obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay by kate wagner
reading (book): the everlasting by alix harrow. a review i read was like "what if brienne of tarth and milo disneyslegendofatlantis got together?" and yeah
watching: Devil Girl From Mars (1954, dir. MacDonald). so strange. wish i liked it. plus a long digression about cowboyfic.
playing:...fallout 3
making: car shopping :(
listening
how did i find this? background music for an equestrian on instagram who does very funny reviews of horse books but most of her content is about riding actual horses. her mare is named ahsoka like the star wars character.
really grungy alt pop. rarely do i fall in love with a song so hard and fast.
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reading (article)
it didn't change my life
from my favorite architecture critic and mcmansionfromhell darling kate wagner. there are so many quotes i want to pull i would essentially be putting the entire article on here.
Beyond this weird attitude towards reading and one’s other preoccupations, many of the depictions of phone life made by phone detox content are just straight up kind of ridiculous. Paragraphs upon paragraphs are spent detailing the hard and brutal struggle to put the phone down in a way reminiscent of the gonzo addiction memoirs that were popular in the mid-2000s. When the task is framed as, for lack of a better term, fentanyl-esque, would you, personally, want to attempt it? It doesn’t take a cognitive scientist to realize that when we expect something to be extremely difficult, surprise, our brains tend to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
being on my dang phone at work is something i really struggle with. i feel like most of the time i am just killing time here until i get enough time to get my student loans forgiven and get my pension fully vested. this job is a good movie financially but not so much for like. upward career mobility. i see a lot of the very worst of people at this job. i am trying to counteract that with more volunteering but there is a lot of inertia. both in me and my community.
back to the phone, where activism and community building mostly do not happen. i can and will lose literal hours to instagram, which is not good for my blood pressure and is much much much harder to curate and train than any other social media's algorithm i'm on. mostly it wants to sell me supplies for cat fostering, quack cures for mcas, eds, and """""""neurospicy""""""" hacks and supplements. this does not make me feel great. my rss feeds make me feel slightly better (depending on the feed) but i am perpetually caught up on my rss feeds. tumblr is much a more curated and fun place, but i can only go so far down my dash before the app crashes and very few mutuals are active when i am at work.
shocker, i do feel better and more settled when i am actively doing something (chewing through my physical tbr, knitting and listening to podcast or audiobook, working on citizen archive stuff, writing postcards, etc). and then i have stuff to actually talk about for the tuesdayposts, which is the whole point of the tuesdayposts, bc i feel better when i am poking around in a bunch of different formats of things every week. i need a lot of variety in my input and i need a lot of passive social interaction, neither of which i have been giving myself lately. i am a terrible zookeeper.
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reading (book)
the everlasting by alix harrow.
From Alix E. Harrow, the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, comes a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part–even if it breaks his heart.
Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.
Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.
But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend—if they want to tell a different story--they’ll have to rewrite history itself.
my bestie really twisted my arm about this bc i do Not like time travel or time loops. this is a book where everything is fine the whole time :) this is a book that will not hurt you :) come closer :)
BIG gruff canonically bisexual lady knight and her pathetic little. bard? historian? follower? her guy. deal with colonialism, fealty, loyalty, and PTSD together. not a straight book. not a hetslop book. sort of hetero plus. it has been so so long since i have read a good queer book written recently. this is partially bc queerness is not the focus of the book. it didn't save anything but it sure fucking was there.
one of THE most fascinating villains i have ever read. i do support womens' wrongs i want to read more about them.
@dying-suffering-french-stalkers there is a sort of weary closing a restaurant, putting the chairs up, and turning the lights out behind you vibe i think you would really love. a dogged determination to witness the very end of something.
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watching
Devil Girl From Mars (1954, dir. MacDonald). not good. not good! i must agree with 12-year-old octavia butler who said to herself "i can write something better".
REMARKABLY horny for a fifties british movie made for about five pounds. the titular devil girl from mars, in pvc and silk stockings and high boots (i wish she had a crop, but she does have a large and weird robot control device, as well as a raygun) is on earth to capture men as breeding stock. bc the matriarchal population of mars isn't doing too good. they are several centuries post-overthrowing their old society so they managed for quite some time! occupies such a weird niche in film and feminist history.
a youtube channel i follow restores the wackiest selection of older movies and this one was one of their recent projects, which means you can watch the entire thing right on youtube.
i think this movie would be a big hit in a very far-off part of one of my fics. i don't know when i'll ever return to writing about fallout: new vegas. i think i would have to completely rewrite it. i think (i hope) i have become much better at identifying story elements and writing techniques that work for me, and i don't know that this fic really serves me or what i wanted to get across any more.
but my loose plan for the first half of "blow a kiss, fire a gun" was courier six not contending with the fact she can't do shotgun diplomacy any more, responding VERY poorly to separate NCR and legion remnant plots, stalking down the strip with a missile launcher and causing a lot of damage. therefore, the "you're a hero but you have to leave" sequence, taking the boys up to salt lake city to see about solving the salt shortage in a more permanent way and establishing a better trading route (skirting around zion). goofs and hijinks and falling into rivers and such. i had such a plan in my head for salt lake city, including a very old legion diplomat and a very old NCR diplomat across the street coexisting with each other, but it would end with the denver dome sending an airship to pick her up for negotiations (is there a fight on top of the airship? yes of COURSE). i think the denver dome is a matriarchal society full of lesbians who don't quite keep slaves, but men are definitely a severely curtailed underclass. aesthetically they are much more art deco and much more engineering as a representative profession for social improvement through technological progress. i think it would be neat for six to reckon with the fact that she's been sort of blowing off old world problems as problems caused by boys, and seeing that a matriarchal society is doing just as bad would make her think. i also think slamming her against second-wave feminism would be interesting and funny.
anyway, they'd be very impressed with her TWO wives and TWO subservient men. if she gets back to vegas alive she's going to have a lot to talk about with arcade.
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playing
playing fo3 is making me want to play fo4, which (to me) is a very elaborate settlement sim and a bunch of space on the way to maine and nuka cola world. todd how did you fuck up so bad. the bones of an interesting thing are here but it's so fucking empty. every time i talk to an NPC i get nothing funny or useful or interesting. WHY IS IT ALL SLAVERY, TODD??? how come the biggest quest is paradise falls??? how come i can't do anything about charon??????
however, it is so good minute-to-minute at making me want to keep playing it!!! infuriating!!! it's been so long since i played and so much of it Looks like fnv with regards to interior textures, i am so convinced that the next metal box i open will have something good, or the next mostly-destroyed building will have a terminal with some interesting entries. i would settle for a funny little tableaux that does not involve a gnome or a toy or a toilet. the most interesting thing i have seen so far is sometimes a dead raider in the metro will have scattered stimpaks around, like they were trying to heal before succumbing to mirelurk.
again. fallout would be so good if it was good. what if there were more ghouls. everything with underworld is so much more interesting than megaton or rivet city and they feel so much more like real people than almost anywhere else. the brotherhood in this one might as well be little cardboard shadow puppets.
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making
shopping for a car is second only to moving for "most wretched drawn out expensive and fuck-up-able" activity known to man
hey hey we're back for Tuesday Again No Problem. yes, it's wednesday again. this time it's because I've only just gotten back into cell service territory! I was at the dunes with my best girl (pictured) and my in-laws (elsewhere):
She hates the water but she looooves frolicking in the sand 🥹 (also how wild is that sand mountain in the background??)
Reading: Just finished Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Batshit crazy.
Listening: the disco snails song is on loop in my head, send help.
Watching: Andor, which is just as good the third time
Making: a crochet shirt with bamboo yarn that now smells like campfire smoke. no regrets
Plotting: when I can go stand-up paddleboarding again
Enjoying: vacation time + being home again + air conditioning
Struggling with: going back to work tomorrow >:(
Looking forward to: honestly idk because I'm dreading my next trip (flying to see family). making more stuff, ig
The little things: sea lions going RRRUUUUUUUUUUURR and molasses-flavored salt water taffy, my beloved
I won't spoil anything for Yesteryear, but it wasn't what I expected. I heard "tradwife is sent back in time to the real era she's cosplaying" and I thought oh, we're going to get a rather smug view of her realizing with horror that she's been duped by the American Dream and her domineering patriarch of a husband. I was wrong. I didn't feel completely satisfied with the ending, but I did read it in 48 hours, so, clearly something was working for me.
My spouse and I are rewatching Andor since our roommate hasn't seen it and god damn, the narrative design and acting and costuming and scoring. I love this fucking show and it's a crime that more people haven't seen it. We're watching the end of the Narkina-5 arc tonight and I'm going to be very normal about my boy Kino Loy.
Have some sea lions from the US's largest sea cave!
I tried to upload a video so you could hear them, but apparently tumblr wasn't having any of that. But look at all those chickens!!
