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Leviticus (2026). Two queer teen boys in a homophobic Australian backwater are stalked by a demon that appears to each one as the other, driving them apart.

This stars Joe Bird, the little brother in Talk to Me. He was great then and he's great here, and his and co-star Stacy Clausen's chemistry is fantastic. This movie only works because they're so good together as two fumbling kids who don't really understand themselves or each other, who can't trust each other because the other guy might be a demon, but who, it turns out, can't trust anyone else in their lives either. Betrayal is the big theme here: by trusted adults, religion, the person you're into, and yourself.

The conversion therapy metaphor is very obvious, which isn't necessarily bad, but I did feel that the movie wasn't sure what to do with it once it had introduced it. Like yes, now you (or the appearance of you) are dangerous to each other, so now what? I wanted it to give me more. The movie feels like it plateaus in the last act, neither deepening the themes nor escalating the tension but just hitting a lot of the same beats until things finally resolve.

However, the actual character work is good, IMO. Both kids are complicated and make realistically bad choices, but they also both keep trying with one another. There's a really great scene where love interest Ryan uses the word dickhead about five times, and it's honestly really sweet in context. The cinematography was also good; I really felt the kind of down-and-out exhaustion of the industrial small town.

Overall, even though it didn't fire on all cylinders for me, it's definitely a worthwhile watch if teen boys in love in a horror setting sound like your jam.

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Rose of Nevada (2026). Directed by Mark Jenkin, who also made Enys Men, this is about two guys in an impoverished Cornish fishing town who take a job aboard a lost and resurfaced fishing boat, which takes them back in time. The guy who's been sleeping rough suddenly finds he has a wife and kid; the guy who took the job to support his family no longer has one, because they're back in the present day.

This movie is largely an Experience (tm) rather than a story as such. It seems like there is some actual plot/lore underpinning, but Jenkin is not that interested in explaining what it is. We spend a LOT of time on a fishing boat. The captain might be fae, or the boat might stuck in a time loop, or... who can say.

Mostly what Jenkin is interested in is making a movie that feels old, full of fuzziness and tactile impressions of things. I'm told the camera can only store about twelve seconds of footage at a time, so everything is a quick cut, and for whatever reason he didn't mic any of it, so all the sound happened in post and all the spoken dialogue was dubbed in, like an old giallo film or something.

I got out of this and was like well that was an experience I guess, but with time I feel like I might want to watch it again. Maybe I can make sense of more things this time.

David Lowery Tackling Adaptation of Horror Novel ‘The Fisherman’ for Focus (Hollywood Reporter). You guys!! Lowery directed Mother Mary, which I didn't love but which had style for days, and The Fisherman feels like exactly the kind of surrealist psych/cosmic horror blend that he could really sink his teeth into. Here for it.

Also in movie news, Park Chan-Wook is making another English-language film, and it's a western! Starring Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal. Put it in my eyeballsssss.

"Couch to 5k for Reading", an 8-week event for building up a reading habit. There are three tracks, depending on your goals. I am tentatively doing track 2 but with harder reading material (classics or nonfiction). Bummer it's on Substack though. :/

Okay so did everyone but me know that Ty Olsson and DJ Qualls (Benny and Garth on SPN) got married?!?! Turns out there WAS a gay romance on the show. Just, you know, not any of the ones people shipped.

Also learned this week that there was a Supernatural "Valentine's Day Special" comic book complete with T&A cover. Published this year, 2026!! These things are never good, and yet I'm so tempted.

The Oasis reunion doc teaser trailer is out. Guys, they titled the doc Don't Look Back in Anger. Here are some gifs from the trailer. My demise is imminent omfg.

There Is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM. It's hard to research stuff that resists being remembered. Who knows what it might be getting up to that you've forgotten?

This is the pro-published version of what was originally an SCP serial story published online. I could definitely feel the SCP influence, but I didn't mind it, although it's still wild to me that SCP has narrative now. Back in my day it was only the wiki! *shakes cane*

Anyway, this is a series of chapters that build on each other but connect a little more loosely than a conventional novel. Many chapters are about the UK branch of a worldwide organization researching all sorts of Weird Shit (tm) and specifically the woman in charge of the division on stuff that resists remembering, ie the Antimemetics Division. Some chapters are about her husband. Some are about other random people in the organization. The first chapter is one of those and is a great introduction to the universe and the whole concept; if you're on the fence about the novel as a whole, give that first chapter a try. That segment would make a fantastic standalone short film.

Due to the Weird Memory Shit (tm), many of the characters are totally ignorant of the events from one chapter to the next, even if they were involved in all of them, which makes for some great dramatic irony, especially as we get deeper into the novel and the true threat becomes more apparent. ( spoilers )

Overwall, a quick read and a good time. I look forward to rereading it more slowly now that I know what's coming.

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Harvest Home (1973) by Thomas Tryon. A man and his family escape soul-crushing NYC to an idyllic New England hamlet that still keeps to the old ways--which are, it turns out, not so idyllic after all.

Yes, this is folk horror. In fact it might be the folk horror novel. All the basic stuff you think of is here: outsider fleeing the evil city for the wholesome countryside, idealized rural setting, quaint but then toxic cultural traditions, eventual murder. This is not a case where a genre grew and expanded on the kernel of an idea, or if it did, this is the expansion and not the kernel. The classic tropes and themes of the genre are all fully realized here, described in exhaustive detail. The setting is Connecticut, but the traditions are originally Greek by way of Cornwall, so you do get the British element of folk horror. There's also a developmentally disabled child who acts as oracle, and now I wonder if that aspect of Midsommar was referencing this novel specifically, or if it became a thing in folk horror, and I just haven't encountered it in other things yet.

It's fascinating to me that this came out the same year as The Wicker Man and has some of the same themes, and I wonder what was in the water that led to their parallel evolution. It's also really interesting to me that The Wicker Man was very difficult to access for decades and gained cult classic status via illegal copies, but is now acknowledged as an all-time classic, while Harvest Home was a bestseller but has now, I think, sunk into relative obscurity.

(There's an amazing quote from Stephen King on wikipedia from a 1976 review he wrote for the NYT:

It isn't a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel ... Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn't exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of Harvest Home".

Now he's a household name who will blurb pretty much any horror novel under the sun, and meanwhile the only copies of this novel in my library system were ebooks.)

Anyway, I enjoyed this quite a bit. As implied by the King review, this is a leisurely book that takes its sweet time introducing us to the entire village and all its quaint ways, most importantly its seasonal festivals that culminate in Harvest Home, which involves the Harvest Lord (elected every seven years) and the Corn Maiden whom he selects. Along the way we spend time with important figures such as the homespun yet venerable Widow Fortune and Worthy Pettinger, a youth with big ideas about modernizing the local agriculture.

We see all this from the first person perspective of family man and aspiring artist Ned Constantine, who has moved his impressionable wife and severely asthmatic daughter to the village. Ned is the kind of guy who meets his wife by overhearing her talking to her friend in the Louvre and butting in to correct her pronuciation. Beth is, I guess, the kind of woman who falls in love with the kind of guy who does that. The book opens with Ned lustfully appreciating how his wife looks in her nightgown, which is exactly as awkward and offputting as you would expect from a male author writing a male character in the 70s. Ned also continually declines to share any of his growing concerns about the village with Beth out of concern that her delicate sensibilities can't handle them. His and the book's attitude towards women gets even worse when he starts inching towards unfaithfulness with the village ~hussy. Basically Ned is kind of the worst, especially as the book goes on. I frankly can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much while growing to loath the main character this much, apparently against the intent of the author.

Ned is also dumb as a bag of hammers. His driving motive through most of the book is to discover what happened thirteen years earlier to unfortunate young suicide Grace Everdeen, and yet he is hilariously incurious about anything else happening in the village that he doesn't see as directly tied to this. Furthermore, confusingly, this mystery is not really part of the main plot except as the reader's way into the village's darker underbelly, and the final reveal of what happened to her is frankly baffling as a narrative choice. (It turns out she ( Read more... )

Anyway, ( big spoilers )

Overall a fascinating piece of horror history that I genuinely enjoyed. Now I want to read more early folk horror.

It's becoming harder and harder to find vids that suit my oldschool tastes. "Edits" full of spoken dialogue just don't hit the same. 😔 But here are some great ones I've come across in the past while.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by

AP, Dune 2021. The song that launched a thousand vids, but here's another one, and it's perfect here. On theme, and Lorde's slow, ominous beat and rising tension perfectly suits all Villeneuve's long, solemn, glorious shots.

i'm so sorry by

heywinchesterr, Stoker 2013. Song is I'm So Sorry by Imagine Dragons. ngl as soon as I saw the SPN username I knew I was in good hands. I love a cheeky off-genre song choice, and the vidder here does a lot of fun things with the beat. Great editing, really fun use of slow-mo, and this movie is basically a feature-length series of viddable imagery, so really it's hard to go wrong, although it does end a little abruptly. (I'm still working on a Youtube deep dive for vids for this movie; if you have recs, please link me!)

Now for some vids that mash up a lot of sources. (What are those called?)
Is It My Body by

Tafadhali, 70s reproductive/domestic horror. Song by Emilie Autumn. Unsettling in all the right ways. Horror movies have been telling stories about female bodily autonomy for a long long time.

80s horror summer by

legallybrunette1997. Song is Cruel Summer by Bananarama. Some 70s horror in there too. If you want to get in the mood for some sweaty retro horror, this is the vid for you. Just sheer fun.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC by

legallybrunette1997. Song is The Taste of Blood by Sqürl. This is almost six minutes over a totally instrumental song, which is a very hard sell for me, but I was totally enthralled the entire time. What a gorgeous ode to southern gothic horror. I recognized a few of the sources (including brand new Is God Is), but I clearly need to watch a LOT more in this genre. CW for animal butchering from about 2:21 to 2:36.

Themes of the last two months
1. In May, I listened to Kacey Musgraves's new album a lot. Middle of Nowhere is legit my favorite album of hers since her debut. Golden Hour was just okay (I know I'm alone in this), Star-Crossed was so confessional that it felt like an invasion of privacy to listen to and also wasn't any fun, and Deeper Well was just... stale? Also not any fun? Mostly songs of mixed feelings about relationships that I didn't care about?

But Middle of Nowhere takes Musgraves back to her storytelling, classic country roots, and importantly is her first album in years with a sense of humor and irony. Dry Spell I've talked about before and is both clever and very funny. Back on the Wagon is about a woman who's sure that this time her man will stay sober. (I saw a reviewer say that the song is ambiguous on whether this will work out, and no. No it isn't.) Horses and Divorces featuring Miranda Lambert is about old enemies finding common ground over beer (and then fucking about it, IMO). For the moody downbeat vibes, I especially liked Abilene, about a girl getting out town the first chance she gets, and Coyote, about a guy wandering through life lost and missing something he can't identify.

The album lags a bit in the back half, and the first six or so songs are the strongest run of the album, but it's all a good time, and I've already listened to it way more than any of her other recent albums.

2. A lot of Oasis. The thing about Oasis is between the band and the solo projects, there's so much music that I can just switch to a different album or era when I need a change. It's comfort music at this point. This time around it was mostly the Sawmills/Monnow Valley recordings of Definitely Maybe as well as the live tracks from the reunion tour. (Live album when!!!)

3. Lord Huron, mostly Cosmic Selector Vol. 1.

My top artists (by # of streams)
May
1. Oasis
2. Kacey Musgraves
3. Lord Huron

June
1. Oasis
2. Lord Huron

Favorite songs:
1. Becomes the Color by Emily Wells, the end credits music for Stoker (2013), currently my movie of the year. This song is such a great combination of dark and fun and perfectly suits the movie. All of Wells' other stuff that I've tried has been much slower and less lyric-dense. If anyone has recs for other things I should try like this song, ideally with female vocals, I am all ears.

2. The Chain, cover by The Highwomen (live at The Gorge). Perfect song, great performance by some of the greatest artists in country music. Infinitely listenable.

3. Abilene, Coyote, and Horses and Divorces by Kacey Musgraves, linked above.

elasticella is running Filthy Femslash Fantasies Ficathon, an old-school commentfic meme with an emphasis on the filthy details. I love that the prompts get into the delicious nitty gritty, but there aren't many fandoms I know so far. Maybe go drop some prompts? 🙏

Stoker (2013). Isolated, standoffish teenager India Stoker's life is disrupted first when her father dies in a freak car accident and then when her charming uncle that she didn't know existed comes to town.

This movie has so much interesting background. It was written by gay actor Wentworth Miller, who I guess starred in his own show but whom I know as That Guy From That One Buffy Episode, and directed by Park Chan-Wook as his only English-language film. It stars Mia Wasikowska, whom I've loved ever since I first saw her in... I think Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, of all things? And very importantly, it has nothing to do with Bram Stoker or vampires.

Anyway, I loved it. People have told me it's meant to be Southern Gothic, which I didn't catch on to because no one has a southern accent, but I'm fascinated by the timeless feel of the setting and the Stoker house. I spent quite a while trying to guess the time period and had tentatively settled on the 1960s and then it turns out it's set in the present day (of 2013). Regardless, it's gorgeous. The score is great, the vibes are immaculate.

I LOVE the dynamics between India and her mother and Uncle Charlie. I knew vaguely that people shipped the incest, but I did not realize the extent to which the movie ships the incest. Uncle Charlie is eyefucking India from basically the first scene. And overall the movie feels gothic in the way Thoroughbreds feels noir, and I enjoyed it for a lot of the same reasons.

I will say the one big reveal about two thirds of the way through felt pretty cliched. On the other hand, the ending and how it loops back around to the beginning of the movie was brilliant and made me want to rewatch immediately now that I better understand India's whole deal.

I've been watching a fair bit of female-centered fucked up shit lately, but none of them quite understood the assignment like this one. Overall a fantastic time. A++.

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The Furious (2026). "Somewhere in southeast Asia" mute handyman Wang Wei's daughter is kidnapped by child traffickers, and he will go through anyone who stands in the way of getting her back.

This is a Hong Kong action movie, which is to say basically everyone is amazing at martial arts (but our handyman even better than everyone else). I went to see it on the strength of incredible word of mouth; I think the Rotten Tomatoes score was at 99%. I saw someone say on social media that it was dubbed, but no, it's just mostly in English, with occasional subtitled Chinese.

And indeed, I had a great time. The action scenes are the heart of the film, and they're spectacular. I also really enjoyed the alliance between our main guy and Navin, whose journalist wife went missing several months ago investigating the child trafficking ring. I liked them a lot ~~and kind of shipped them~~. After the constant quippiness of most American action movies these days, there was something really relaxing about half the main duo not speaking at all. This is not a quippy movie.

Also, ( spoilers )

I do wonder how many of the things I found refreshing or surprising feel like old hat to an audience familiar with this genre. And is it weird for a Chinese movie to be set "somewhere in southeast Asia"? I feel like a British movie set "somewhere in eastern Europe" would feel pretty weird. However, I don't know nearly enough about regional dynamics and movie tropes to know how this plays to its intended audience.

I will say the big climactic fight was about three times too long; in particular I feel like we did not need the one wildcard character to show up and make everything longer. I also felt like it made a lot less use of the space and the props than a big American fight scene would. Again, I don't know if that's standard for this kind of movie?

My real complaint, though, is that in literally the first scene, the daughter complains about having to practice kung fu with her father, and then they never do kung fu together. I waited all movie!! OTOH I really enjoyed how ( spoilers )

If you're into action movies and especially hand-to-hand fight scenes, you absolutely should see this.

Gonna just catch up all in one post.

I Love Boosters (2026). Three professional shoplifters develop a grand plan to take down fashion maven and general asshole Christie Smith (Demi Moore).

This is Boots Riley’s sophomore outing. If you’ve seen his first film Sorry to Bother You, you know that you’re in for a colorful, satirical, absolutely bonkers time. If you haven’t, the closest other analogue I can think of is Everything Everywhere All At Once, except this is less about interpersonal relationships and more about the power of collective organizing.

It’s hard for me to talk about this film beyond the sum of its parts, so let’s talk about its parts. Riley LOVES color. There’s so much color. For a while Corvette (Kiki Palmer) and co are working in one of Smith’s own upscale fashion stores, which sell exactly one color at a time. The lighting is very colorful. The costuming is amazing and also colorful.

The score is incredible and may be my favorite part. You NEED to listen to the opening credits; it tells you basically everything you need to know about this movie.

The movie has a bit of a slow start, but it really kicks into gear when a brand new plot element arrives at about the halfway point, and by the end I honestly felt a little weepy, because how many movies are there about collective action???? Much less ones that are bonkers and fun and amazing?

Also Lakeith Stanfield is there. He's a [spoiler]. So you have that to look forward to. :')

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Is God Is (2026). Twin sisters go on a mission to murder their father, who set their mother on fire and left the sisters with burn scars.

First-time film director Aleshea Harris adapted her own play in this movie, and I will definitely be watching out for what she does next, because this is stylish and full of flair and ambition. The whole film has a sort of mythic feeling about it that reminds me a bit of O Brother Where Art Thou. The people we meet along along the way are each a necessary component of the sisters' journey, and each one feels a little bit uncanny. I love the use of text on the screen

The relationship between twins Racine and Anaia is the heart of the movie, and it's great. Anaia is more heavily burned, and Racine is her fierce and sometimes unwanted defender, a hot-tempered woman yearning for meaning who finds it when they're summoned by their dying mother, whom they had thought was already long-dead. "We're on a mission from God," Racine says at one point, calling out another great road trip classic. When Anaia protests, Racine says, "Our mama is like God, right? She made us."

The movie also has stuff about misogyny and domestic violence specifically among Black families, which I'm not qualified to comment on, but it too is wrapped up in heightened storytelling that I really enjoyed. Sterling K. Robinson is extremely menacing as their abusive father.

I will say that I was disappointed by the ending, both from a thematic and character perspective. But the ride up until then was great. One of my favorite movies of 2026.

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Carolina Caroline (2026). Caroline, a girl in smalltown Texas, falls in with a traveling con man, and they go on a road trip to find her estranged mother and do some crime along the way.

I watched this for my girl Samara Weaving, who stars as Caroline. However, in terms of movies about Kyle Gallner driving around committing crimes, I kept wishing I were watching The Passenger instead, which had a way more interesting relationship between its leads. I kept waiting for more meat to Caroline and her relationship with Oliver, and we just never get it. She's starry-eyed and a little naive, and she has abandonment issues. Somehow this leads to bank robbing. IDK man.

I wanted the movie to have more ambition. There are no surprises at any point, except maybe the decision to move from small-time cons at the beginning to suddenly robbing banks at gunpoint, a big tonal shift that goes unremarked by the movie. These aren't even bank heists, just regular armed robbery.

If you're hankering for a Bonnie and Clyde style thing, you could do worse, but maybe wait for streaming.

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Buffet Infinity (2025). Sometime circa the 90s, a sinkhole opens in the parking lot of an upstart new buffet, and in perhaps unrelated events, people start disappearing.

The most important thing about this cosmic horror movie is not the plot as such, but the fact that it is told (almost) entirely through TV commercials. This is a heck of a gimmick for a 90-minute feature film, and I will be honest, the movie did not quite pull it off. Towards the end it starts cheating, both with filmed segments that it's hard to imagine would ever actually go on TV (why not just film another take?) and a handful of scenes that didn't appear to be in-universe footage of any kind.

However, cheating aside, the movie managed to keep my attention through the entire runtime through however many, many 30-second to 2-minute clips. There are a few recurring characters, local businessfolk whose ads become progressively more unhinged and suggest more and more about the events, and I definitely had my favorites. (I ADORE Ahmed's terrible pawn shop raps.) The ads from the buffet also get more and more uncanny and over the top, but I think a big strength of the movie is playing on how so many real life ads already feel uncanny and fake; it just doesn't take much to tip that over into outright horror.

I can't say the ultimate reveals involving the L Ron Hubbard expy really worked for me. If anything, I think the movie should have had less plot and explained less. (See: Backrooms.) However, I kind of want to rewatch it from the beginning now that I know where all the plot threads are going, so I can better appreciate what it's doing.

Honestly, with a premise this unique, I don't think it matters if the movie is entirely successful. If "cosmic horror movie told through fictional ads" sounds like your jam, this is still absolutely worth your time.

- Gutted by the death of Anthony Stewart Head.

- I've been watching so many movies lately. Many other life tasks and ambitions have been iffy, but an A+ in movie watching. Yesterday I saw Backrooms again. Still good a second time! Cosmic horror and impossible spaces are exactly my jam, but also it turns out the A24 vibe really works for it. I've spent a lot of time scrolling social media about it. Tomorrow I might go see Obsession again.

- The thing about the backrooms is their basic concept and visuals are very easy to replicate, so no doubt we're all going to be totally sick of them within two months, but in the meantime, this backrooms riff on the official McDonald's channel is a lot of fun. I can't say it makes me want to go eat a burger, but as an elder millennial some of the imagery definitely got me.

- As someone who likes both numbers and horror movies, it's been a hell of a time to be watching the box office. Obsession INCREASED its receipts for the second AND the third weekend, which is absolutely absurd outside of the Christmas holidays (when releases and days off shift a lot of patterns around). "Little horror wins big" obviously calls The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity to mind, but in terms of percentage increases the most recent comp is probably freaking E.T.. Incredible.

Meanwhile Backrooms obliterated all A24's previous records in the first weekend and is now, in week 2, their biggest movie ever.

- Speaking of Youtubers making good: The Future Of Horror Filmmaking Is YouTube ... If You're A Dude. Yeah. :/

- The Dog Stars doesn't look good, but Jacob Elordi looks good in it, so I'll probably still see it. ;__; And Margaret Qualley, too!

- The Dead Meat Horror Awards have released their list of movies, although not the categories yet. I did such a good job watching horror movies last year that there are only 2-3 here that I haven't seen and might want to. (Dangerous Animals, The Toxic Avenger, maybe Black Phone 2. Maybe Ick??)

PLEASE NOTE: several of my keyboard keys are going out intermittently, so I’m going to suck at responding to comments for a while. 😩😩😩

Backrooms (2026). A furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an entrance in the store basement to a seemingly endless series of uncanny office rooms.

The second huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Although maybe not a sleeper to those paying attention, because this movie is adapted from a wildly popular series of CGI Youtube shorts by teenager Kane Parsons, who also directed this movie at the age of 20. The last I saw was that its opening weekend receipts might beat The Mandalorian and Grogu’s from last weekend, which is just incredible. (LOL Disney.) The word is that this is getting huge number of middle and high schoolers into the theater. I know my local theater has been nearly sold out, and I saw it in a nearly full theater. It’s wild, honestly; I’m not used to going to movies that other people want to see, too!

Anyway, this movie is maybe the purest expression of Vibes™ that I’ve encountered in a horror movie in a long time. The horror here is: what if empty rooms? What if the 90s? (This is also a period movie, by which I mean it’s set in 1990.) But most importantly: what if empty rooms that are apparently infinite and don’t make any sense? The comparison used in the film is “What if you described a dog to someone who’d never seen a dog, and then you asked them to draw it?” Stairways go nowhere and carpeted ramps lead to tiny, Alice in Wonderland scale doors with three doorknobs. Furniture is stuck in walls and floors. And everything is very bright and very yellow.

What this movie does not do is clutter up all those vibes with, say… a plot. That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve seen too many horror movies that feel the need to pull some bullshit plot out at the last minute to justify their existence, and Backrooms is confident enough to eschew all of that. It does have a narrative structure as we follow first furniture vendor Clark and later his therapist around the treacherous backrooms, learning things about them (or at least making conjectures which are never confirmed or denied by the film itself). Some people die, because of course you can’t have a labyrinth without a monster or two. There aren’t even many jump scares, though the whole atmosphere of wrongness is so intense that I spent the whole movie clutching my blanket very tightly.

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Saccharine (2026). A med student (Hana, played by Midori Francis) starts taking a weight loss pill made from human ashes and becomes haunted by the ghost of the person she's consuming.

Francis is absolutely the star of the show here and does a great job portraying Hana's insecurities. I also really enjoyed Danielle Macdonald as her friend and fellow med student Josie. The movie also has a clear cinematic vision for how it tells its story.

As for the themes, I don’t feel fully qualified to make a judgement one way or the other, but here are some thoughts.

( spoilers and a BUNCH of stuff about weight loss and fatphobia )

I have watched what feels like an absurd number of movies recently and am trying to work through the backlog. Can I just say I've seen a whole string of movies recently that were just... good? (With one exception.) None I loved with my whole heart, but all of them ambitious with style and a clear vision. Feels like we're in some kind of golden age rn. Obsession, Saccharine, Backrooms, I Love Boosters, Is God Is all came out within the past three weeks.

Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not making original movies anymore.

Obsession (2026). An awkward young man wishes his crush would love him more than anyone in the world, gets his wish, and wishes he hadn’t.

AKA the (first?) huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Even if you’re not that into horror, you might’ve heard that Obsession’s box office in its second weekend was 30% higher than its first weekend, which basically does not happen outside the Christmas holidays when release dates are weird. It cost less than $1M to make, and it’s going to clear easily $100M in ticket sales; as I’m typing this, just two weeks in, it’s at over $95M, and its domestic daily receipts are ahead of the Mandalorian and Grogu movie that’s only been out for a week (although tbf I think that’s probably as much a commentary on that movie as on Obsession).

Anyway! Having gotten that out of the way: the movie. I was actually not that excited to see it, despite the hype, because the premise seemed so familiar. Yeah, yeah, monkey’s paw, love wish/potion/whatever, we know this story. Buffy the Vampire Story had an episode on this in, what, 1998? But the key is in the execution. This is one of those movies where everything feels so thought out and deliberate, and all the writing is so tight. In so many ways, both in execution and themes, it feels like a different iteration of last year’s Companion, which I loved.

I’ve heard a lot about how scary Obsession is, and I guess my scareometer is broken, because I didn’t think it was. However, it’s very tense, especially starting about a half hour in, and things get progressively more fucked up as we go. It’s also not all that gory overall, but the one scene where it is, oh shit it goes hard.

The movie hinges almost entirely on Michael Johnstone as dweeby Bear and Inde Navarette as cool girl Nikki, and they are both fantastic. Navarette in particular plays arguably three different characters, and between the two actors they do such a good job of making every scene SO uncomfortable.

( spoilers )

And it’s funny! Director and writer Curry Barker does sketch comedy on Youtube, and he layers in just the right amount of funny-awkward and funny-horrible moments. I laughe a lot in the theater, even though this is by no means a comedy.

I walked out of the theater not sure whether I’d enjoyed the experience, but the more I’ve thought about it and discussed it with other people, the more it’s grown on me. I might even go see it again while it’s in theaters.

--

Corporate Retreat (2026). The young execs of a tech company go on a corporate retreat, which turns out to be an exercise in vengeful sadism by the founder they pushed out of the company.

So this is the exception to that string of wins I mentioned above. It’s worst movie I've seen so far this year, old or new, and it's not close. Alan Ruck plays the founder, and he is entertaining as the sadistic yet pompous self-styled guru of enlightenment. Unfortunately, he feels like he's been airlifted in from some other movie that has a sense of humor, because nothing else in this movie is funny or even apparently trying to be. I think the execs are supposedly to be hateable, but they're such nonentities that I can't even tell them apart, much less muster a feeling about them. I was dismayed when the shady HR gal died fairly early on, because she was the only one who seemed to have attained two whole dimensions, and I genuinely couldn't imagine who the rest of the movie was going to be about. It took probably another half an hour for me to identify the final girl, which is wild in a movie like this. (In fairness, I did miss the first five minutes, so maybe that would have made it clear up front.)

Also, like. Why is everyone currently in this tech company under the age of 35, if the founder was in his 60s? How does that even happen?

Meanwhile the horror parts, where Ruck's character goads the characters to ever greater feats of self-mutilation on threat of death, is just kind of tedious? At one point we spend ten solid minutes watching a series of characters dig one of their eyeballs out with a spoon. One of them failed to do so, but that still leaves four separate eyeballs being removed in the same way! Ten minutes! And the effects were just lol. At one point, a bunch of characters were giving each other injections of a poison antidote, and the injections looked so fake I laughed out loud in the theater.

The one bright spot was the founder’s two henchwomen, who stalk around in nice skirt suits with automatic rifles. I’d forgotten Ruck was going to be in the movie, so I was bummed when he showed up, because honestly I’d rather the movie have been some scheme of theirs.

Thank you for creating something for me! I love horror. 😊 I am good with all kinds of endings for horror stories, from everyone safe and whole, to grim but hopeful, to the bleakest of the bleak. For the horror subgenres, feel free to take them as suggestions, but don’t worry about whether your work fits exactly into one of them. The prompts are also just suggestions; feel free to go in another direction that fits the tags if you think I would like it.

I would be happy for both fic and art treats for any request, including requests where I only request one medium.

( Likes and Dislikes )

( Horror/dark likes and prompts )

( Re-Animator - Fic )

( Original Work - Fic )

( Ready or Not - Fic )

( Knives Out (Movies) - Fic )

( Moby Dick - Fic )

( Cult of the Lamb - Art )

+ Liam and Noel have been going to football matches together, along with various combinations of Liam's kids Gene and Lennon and Noel's kids Anais, Sonny, and Donovan. Liam and Noel's first time hanging out in public since like 2008?? Some great photos and short clips, but this one from last weekend has got to be the best. The full belly laugh, head thrown back! Noel trying ever more insistently to get his attention again because he wasn't finished yet!!

Bonus: Anais thinks her uncle is funny. ;__;

+ Speaking of the kids, here's how the comeback is going from their perspective:
( cut for image )

+ The reunion tour documentary has an official release date! And it's going to have JOINT INTERVIEWS, YOU GUYS. Liam and Noel in the same room, answering questions. Can you even fucking imagine. They haven't done one of those since 2005. Noel is going to laugh at all Liam's jokes and Liam is going to be SO SMUG about it. I'm going to see this IN A THEATER and I am going to dieeeeee.

+ Of course twitter asked Liam about this, and his response was:

People asking me what the documentary's like it's a ROMANTIC COMEDY with a bit of ROCK N ROLL

He later said that the romance would be between "us and the fans," but we know the truth. :')

+ And finally, have this old clip I found of Liam at a gig singing I waited for a thousand years for you to come / and take me from behind.

- There are FOUR movies coming out this weekend that I am at last mildly interested in seeing, two probably only in theaters for a week. We'll see how many I manage to hit. The one I'd most like to support is Saccharine, a horror movie directed by an Australian woman, but it's also the one least convenient for me in terms of location/showtime. There are two other horror movies, Passenger and Corporate Retreat, and the new Boots Riley movie.

-

summerofhorrorexchange noms close tomorrow. My co-mod apologized that I've had to do most of the nom approvals this round, but honestly I'd felt like I was hogging them because I've so badly needed a fannish distraction. Anyway lots of good things in the tagset! Many new items on my read/watch lists! I can't wait to see what people request.

- So many nice Oasis tidbits from the last month and a half. I hope to compile them into a post here soon.

- I haven't written anything since I posted that Oasis fic a month and a half ago. I'm really hoping SoH gets my creative juices going again. I miss writing.

- Yesterday at Goodwill I found a whole stack of things, ranging from a DVD boxset of schlocky mid/late 00s horror to a SIGNED British hardcover edition of The Scar by China Mieville. For $4. Okay!!

In the Forests of Serre (2003) by Patricia McKillip. A tyrannical king of a magical forest engages his recently widowed son to the princess of a neighboring kingdom, whether either of those parties want it. The grieving widower son gets cursed by a Baba Yaga-esque witch. The princess tries her best to protect her kingdom, which happens to include a wizard recovering from a debilitating fight to the death with an ancient monster, which he got involved with because of the thoughtlessness a younger wizard whose aid he came to and who he sends off to protect the princess in her travels. The wizard is being tended by a scribe borrowed from the nearby monastary, who finds himself somewhat unwillingly devoted to the wizard, in all his foibles.

Maybe one of the reasons McKillip's books are famously kind of hard to remember is because there's so much going on in them, character-wise, and yet often relatively little plotwise. That is a lot of characters to pack into 300 pages, especially when the pace of the book is fairly slow and meditative. The actual events of this book are thin on the ground and mostly involve characters traveling or having conversations. Every so often we return to the kingdom of Dacre, where our scribe makes sure the enfeebled wizard is sleeping properly and getting enough to eat.

I've described McKillip's ouvre as what I wanted fairy tales to be like when I was a kid: beautiful, gossamer fantasies, with characters that felt like people. This one really nails that for me. We have some elements lifted directly from folk tails, like the witch Brum and the various quests the prince finds himself going on for talking animals he meets. We have the spectre of the monster, who even in death is casting a pall over those it touched in life. We have characters concerned for each others' health and well-being. We even have a very late, very casual reveal that complicates one of our villains in a way I didn't expect at all, even though maybe I should've.

Overall, a delightful time. Glad I finally got to this one in my McKillip reading.

--

Furnace (2016) by Livia Llewellyn. A collection of short stories, mostly horror or dark fantasy, some erotic, many with a surrealist bent.

I've been meaning to read more of Llewellyn's work after really liking her story "Omphalos" in a collection I read a few years ago, and since I've been on a roll reading short fiction lately, now is when I got around to it. In that review, I wrote, I'm not 100% sure what happens in it, but I don't care. The first half of that continued to be true through most of this collection, but unfortunately after a while I did start to care. I also found that her prose started to bother me after a while; I found a lot of it overheated and overwritten, using too much description to diminishing returns. Her occasional efforts in experimentation, such as the story entirely in lower case or the several stories in second person, also mostly did not work for me.

Llewellyn is definitely saying things around bodily agency, female sexuality, patriarchy, and also some things about toxic female familial relations, often mother-daughter ones. I can't say much of it resonated with me, unfortunately, but I do appreciate the centrality of the female perspective here.

I also really enjoy is that Llewellyn clearly has a relationship with the Pacific Northwest, and most of the stories with an identifiable real-world location are set there. I've never read a horror(?) story set in a Tacoma mall before or in the worker housing at the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. The sense of regional specificity is really neat.

I did like a few stories okay out of the bunch:
"Cinereous." A woman with a menial job at an institute doing horrible human experiments is determined to show them she is worthy of greater involvement in the horrible experiments. A satisfyingly nasty little story with a suitably horrible ending.

"It Feels Better Biting Down." One of the most surrealist of the bunch, a story about codependent twin sisters who get everything they want, more or less. I just enjoyed the incestuousness vibes tbh. Also the body horror.

"Allocthon," the aforementioned story set in Bonneville construction housing, which is also a cosmic-flavored time loop story about a housewife whose prosaic dreams of a tropical vacation morph into an increasing desperation to see something on a mountainside that the time reset prevents her from seeing.

"The Last, Clean, Bright Summer." One of the most straightforward from a narrative perspective, a folk horror piece in the form of diary entries of a fourteen-year-old girl who finally gets to participate in the family reunion. I'm not sure what it says about me or Llewellyn that I often like her best when she's writing about underage rape, although unlike in "Omphalos," the rape here is very weird. I enjoyed the cosmic horror stuff, the weird biology, and the theme of alienation from one's parents (who in this case, it turns out, are literally not even her parents). Would pair really well with Attila Veres' story "The Black Maybe."

Heated Rivalry
i know where to draw the line by

magneticwave
Shane/Ilya, 62k. After a rough few years with San Francisco, Ilya signs with Hollander's Metros as a restricted free agent. A fun canon divergence AU, very funny, many lines so funny I had to DM to the friend who recced them to me. A few thousand words in I was like I have to find out who this author is, and of course it's magneticwave, who wrote some great Sid/Geno fic way back when. An all-round delight of a fic.

Formula 1 RPF
For about a week last year I was reading F1 RPF, and friends, it was like I'd been directly transported to hockey fandom circa 2015. Crunchy character dynamics, lots of porn written by adults, cracked out porn premises treated totally seriously. Somehow F1 is like twice as big as hockey RPF on AO3 now, despite having only really existed for about four years? Anyway here are my two favorites.

crash landers by

crescenteluce
Oscar Piastri/Carlos Sainz Jr, 58k. Carlos is so obviously an alpha that Oscar has never considered anything else until Carlos goes into heat. Classic omegaverse combined with classic pining of the kind where everywhere is just fundamentally unable to see past their own messy issues... until they finally do, and it's so satisfying. I cried a bunch of times reading this.

like milk from a baby by

higgsbosonblues
Lando Norris/Oscar Piastri, 5k. Sometimes Lando needs to lay eggs, and this time he's asked Oscar for help. YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN about 2015 hockey fandom!! If you too reminisce about weird xenobio kinkfic, this is for you.

I've had these saved for two years. 🙈 They're good ones though, I promise!

Welcome Home by

tuesday, Anaconda (Movies), Terri & Sarone, 1.5k. In the aftermath of their escape, Terri is haunted by dreams. I love the slow creep of weird shit getting weirder and weirder, starting with the dreams of Sarone and the friendly snakes. There's this kind of delicious ambiguity around what exactly is happening to her, but I really like that, that it's this complex tangle of effects that can't be broken down into nice simple strands.

Rabbit Heart by

tangentti, The Descent, Sarah & Juno, 5k. Instead of going caving, the group goes hiking in a Norwegian forest, or, a Ritual AU. I had never noticed how similar the setups are, but Sarah and Juno and the crew fit right in where the guys were in The Ritual. Both groups even fight a monster!The uncanny forest with its Loki and its ancient worshippers is ultimately just as hostile as the cave system, even if somewhat less claustrophobic.

remote by the sea by

fullborn, Apostle (2018), Malcolm & Thomas, 900 words. The Prophet witnesses his God. The island grows. I love these two very different perspectives on what Thomas has become. It feels like Malcolm hasn't changed in the least, hasn't learned anything, is just projecting all his spiritual need onto a new object now. And then that POV flip to Thomas is SO good.

How Does Your Garden Grow by

scioscribe, Miss Marple - Agatha Christie, Jane Marple, 3k. Miss Marple knew all about gardens. The art of growing things—all manner of things—was ancient. Often it was peculiar, as well. An eldritch body horror murder mystery, what a delicious combination of things. I had no idea Jane Marple folk horror was something I needed in my life, but I so did, and the horror plot is so creepy and great.

The Ship of Theseus Has Run Aground by

psychomachia, The Thing, 3k. MacReady survives the events of Outpost 31. At least, he thinks he did. What a great coda to the film. The central worry in the movie is, who ELSE is a shapeshifting alien, but this really gets to the heart of things: am I a shapeshifting alien? I really like how spare the writing is, stripped down to the essentials of each scene, and how that kind of accentuates the unease and paranoia. Great stuff.

Trad Wife (2026) by Saratoga Schaefer. A would-be tradwife influencer wants a baby for both personal and professional reasons, but her husband won't have sex with her (because he's clearly cheating on her), so instead she has sex with the shadow creature in the well on edge of the property. This plan obviously has no flaws whatsoever. AKA: the trad wife novel that ISN'T about time travel.

This was fun and a quick read. It leaned harder on the monsterfucker element than I expected, and where I was expecting mostly psychological horror with elements of the supernatural, no, the supernatural stuff was front and center. I appreciated how our tradwife has depths that she is progessively less able to keep hidden, and I was just as mad at the past and present men in her life as the book wanted me to be. Her husband is just the woooooorst.

That said, ( spoilers )

I also felt that the degree to which she's consciously, actively deceiving herself about what's happening with her pregnancy was just kind of silly. I would have liked subtler writing there.

--

Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky Brothers. A man makes a living sneaking into the "Zone," a restricted area full of dangers and treasure left by a one-time visit by aliens.

I completely coincidentally got interested in this and the adaptation Stalker almost simultaneously, without realizing they were related. In both cases I went in with, it turned out, unfounded (but different!) expectations of what I was going to get. Stalker isn't really a cosmic horror movie, alas, although the bones of one are there, and meanwhile this isn't very interested in the Zone at all, at least not as a setting, which if nothing else is a big contrast from the movie! I can see why people say it's a very loose adaptation.

This novel is actually about the daily life of a guy trying to steal forbidden alien artifacts and sell them to the black market, his dealings with various shady characters, and how hard this all is on his family. There are a lot of themes of hopelessness and corruption. It feels very 70s in its mundane focus with Big SF Ideas relegated to the background.

Unfortunately I was super uninterested in most of this. The grimy details of social corruption as seen through our lead's gross sexist lens: not what I came for! I came here for the weird horror shit, the "hell slime" that disintegrates your bones and turns your limbs into rubber, the gravity traps that crush you flat, and the various other hazards of the Zone, which we get only at the very beginning and very end.

I can definitely see why it's a classic: it generally accomplishes what it's trying to do, and it treats its characters and their reality with total unironic seriousness. But it was not what I wanted, alas.

Writing meme! Give me a number and I'll share my thoughts.

1. Favorite genre(s) to write
2. Preferred tense & POV
3. Tag you’ve used most
4. What inspires you to write
5. 1 line from a current WIP
6. Trope you want to write
7. Favorite character to write
8. How you choose your titles
9. Describe your writing style
10. A comment you treasure
11. Favorite scene you’ve written
12. Fic that best represents you
13. A fun fact about a fic you wrote
14. How you handle writer’s block
15. Hardest thing for you to write
16. Dialogue you loved writing
17. Your planning process
18. Your editing process
19. Your favorite writing tip
20. Your current writing goals

* I finished that Gallaghercest fic at the beginning of April, wrote 100 words for my drabble assignment, and otherwise wrote nothing all month. I keep getting the vague urge to write but without any concrete inspiration.

* Probably doesn't help that I started a new Stardew farm. A week and a half later, I'm most of the way through fall of Year 1, so clearly that's where my time and brain have gone. Oops.

* OTOH I'm so impatient for

summerofhorrorexchange, which doesn't even open noms for almost two weeks, that I might start my letter tonight. Current plans include Ready or Not, maybe The Housemaid, maybe Re-Animator.

* The other day I moved over 100 drables and ficlets to a separate AO3 account. The idea was to make me feel a little less overwhelmed by the number of works on my main, but I'm not sure how well that's going to work, given there are still over 300. But in case you're like "where did Snick put all her drabbles?!?" they're here.

* I've been dealing with the existential horrors by buying books. There are worst vices. In the past month or so I've bought more books, mostly used, than in the last year combined. Specifically:

Frisson - museum art exhibition book
A God in the Shed - JF Dubeau
In the Forest of Serre - Patricia McKillip (have now read)
The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington
My Death - Lisa Tuttle (had already read)
Black Light - Elizabeth Hand
The Black Maybe - Attila Veres (already read)
This'll Make Things a Little Easier - Attila Veres
Silk - Caitlin Kiernan
Anathem - Neal Stephenson (already read)
Flyaway - Katherine Jennings (already read)
Knock Knock Open Wide - Neil Sharpson (already read)

At some point I was like, shoot, I need to start reading again to justify all these new books. And then I did... and so far it's been nearly all library reading. LOL oh well, that still beats not reading.

Drabbles are revealed! I had hoped that this would kickstart my writing again after a month off and that I would write lots of treats, but in fact I only wrote my assignment, alas.

However, I got SIX incredible gifts, and I highly recommend them all. They are not getting enough love yet in my opinion. ;__; 100 words unless otherwise noted.

pickled, Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel. So cute in that specific Gallagher way.

Five Hauntings of John Pelham Ratcliffe, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Ratcliffe. 500 words. Five drabbles about Ratcliffe before, during, and after "Drowning Palmer," and every one of them is perfect. What a great mix of tones, with some amazing lines.

Gilding, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth & Claudia Coburn. A creepy/sweet/funny drabble.

Counterproposal, Ready or Not, Grace & Ursula meet before Grace marries Alex. The possibilities!! 👀

Field of Play, Ready or Not, Ursula & the Lawyer. I can SEE Elijah Wood's smarmy little lawyer smirk in the last line of this.

Down to My Last Cigarette, Ready or Not, Ursula/Grace. Another possible divergence, and full of hot little details. 👀👀👀

I've been to the theater a bunch recently!

(BTW, the reason I see so much in the theater these days is because I have a monthly subscription to one of the big theater chains, which means I get to see basically any movie I want for free. This works out to be worth the cost if I see at least two non-matinee movies a month, which is pretty easy when there's a new horror movie pretty much every weekend.

And between my local chain theater, which has an outsized number of screens for its location and therefore shows a lot of weird indie stuff just to fill space, and the slightly further away indie theater that also by definition shows a lot of weird indie stuff, it turns out I'm able to see just about anything with a 100+ US theater release.)

Over Your Dead Body (2026). Samara Weaving and Jason Segel star as a married couple who go for a weekend at their secluded cabin, each with the intention of killing the other, and are interrupted by the some escaped convicts (including Timothy Olyphant) and their equally unhinged former prison guard (Juliette Lewis).

This particular brand of "people hate each other, comedically" is not really my thing, but a friend wanted to go because the director was involved with Lonely Island, and in fact I had a good time. Samara Weaving is always delightful, and it was fun here to have her using more or less her natural Aussie accent. There were a lot of funny bits, both lines and slapstick. Things get quite gory at the end, in a fun way if you're into that sort of thing. The movie also did some things with nonlinear storytelling that were fun without feeling overly clever.

I will say I could really have done without the extended comedic scene of one of the convicts attempting to rape Segel's character. I also was both unpersuaded by the couple's motivations for wanting to kill each other and not entirely sold how things ended between them.

Still, it wasn't hard to just ride along with where the movie wanted to take me. If you're in the mood for a frothy, kind of mean-spirited comedy with occasional attempts at being heartwarming, you could do worse.

--

Hokum (2026). Writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a writer haunted by his mother's death who takes his parents' ashes to the inn in Ireland where they honeymooned, which might be haunted.

This was directed by Damien McCarthy, whose previous movie Oddity I thought was just okay, mostly because I found it overly linear with no surprises. This, on the other hand, has enough moving pieces that it sometimes felt to me like it didn't leave itself enough room to be scary. There are for sure some jump scares and creepy bits, but overall my main interest was in how various plot obstacles would be solved, which, combined with the writer main character, made it all feel a bit Stephen Kingian.

I will say ( spoilers )

Overall I had a good time. The plot is engaging, Scott is great, and McCarthy does a good job of spooling out his plot at just the right pace. I just didn't ever feel a strong emotional connection to it.

--

Mother Mary (2026). Troubled pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to her bitter former collaborator and fashion designer Sam (Michaela Coel) for a dress for her first performance in years.

On one level, this movie is absolutely magnetic. Sam is chockful of vitriol, and Coel acts her ass off. Even when other characters are present (all of which are women; I don't think there's a single man with lines), it feels like Sam and Mary are the only characters in the scene. Everything is filmed tight and close and claustrophobic, with dim lighting and lots of shadows. The psychological tension basically doesen't let up for the whole two hours.

All of which is good, because on another level, very little happens in this movie, lol. If you're game for toxic psychological drama between two women, this is For You. If you're not, boy are you going to be bored. The A24 experience!

The movie also has a lot of visual interest. We get to see a ton of Mother Mary's pseudo-religious costumes, some only for a shot or two. There are clips of her concert performances and an extended a capella modern dance sequence. As the movie goes in, the line between flashback and present, between reality and dream, gets thinner and thinner, and the imagery gets ever more surrealistic and dramatic.

On paper, all of this should be my jam. I think the main problem I have with the film is that Sam is borderline unhinged in her fury and resentment, and meanwhile Mary feels so defeated the whole movie, a bedraggled, exhausted person struggling for purpose. The huge difference in their energy makes the whole movie feel unbalanced. This isn't helped by how the source of Sam's all-consuming resentment is basically that Mary stopped answering her texts, or by how despite Mary's dramatic iconography, her actual music that we hear is the most basic, generic, nearly hookless pop music imaginable. (Also I thought it was super funny that when someone quotes the attendance figures at one of Mary's concerts, it turns out she's just playing arenas, not the stadiums one would expect from her supposed stature an artist.)

I think in writing this review, I've talked myself around to liking it more. I'm definitely not mad I watched it, and I really respect the director's ambition, even if it didn't all quite land.

Themes of the last two months
1. In March especially I listened to a ton of Gallaghers as mood music for an Oasis fic I was writing. (As opposed to, you know, all the other reasons that I listen to them.) In particular I listened to Liam's most recent solo project a lot, C'mon You Know, which came out four years ago.

2. My cold early spring albums, specifically the first Mumford and Sons album and an old favorite, New Reveille, which is kind of country-adjacent but with fiddle, banjo, and cello. I love the strings, the vocals, and the angsty/dark vibe. For example, Hounds or Conway Shore. Does anyone have recs for more stuff like them? They released one album eight years ago, and it doesn't look like they exist anymore as a group.

3. Female-led country/Americana artists in general. Kacey Musgraves, Molly Tuttle, a little bit of Ashley Monroe and Kathleen Edwards.

4. Lord Huron, mostly Cosmic Selector Vol 1 in March and Strange Trails in April, as the weather has warmed up.

My top artists (by # of streams)
March:
1. Liam Gallagher
2. Oasis
3. New Candys
4. Lord Huron

April
1. Oasis
2. New Reveille
3. Molly Tuttle
4. Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

Favorite songs:
1. Still White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter by Lana Del Rey. It's just so weird and has like five layers of irony. The more I hear it the more I love it. Nobody does it like Lana.

2. Dry Spell by Kacey Musgraves, a serious-sounding but goofy-hearted song about how she hasn't had sex in almost a year and is SUFFERING. The music video is a hoot. This is the first single for her album that comes out tomorrow, which I'm super stoked about.

3. Suit and Tie by Soda Blonde. This reminds me a bit of London Grammar, although this gal's voice is very different. I love the moody vibe and the synths.

4. Everything Burns by Molly Tuttle. More banjo, some political rage, and a great driving sound. Between this and New Reveille (and I guess Mumford and Sons too), it's really clear that I love high-energy, moody rock songs with banjo. More of that, please!

A collection of short stories translated from Hungarian. I picked this up from the library because I'd seen references to the author writing cosmic horror, which is apparently one way to get me to read a short fiction collection I otherwise know nothing about.

Veres has a direct, unsentimental style that reminds me a bit of Lisa Tuttle, although with less interest in women. Like Tuttle, one gets the impression he doesn't like people all that much. I enjoyed the eastern European perspective, adding extra flavor to ideas I've seen American or British versions of before. Veres also is really good at spooling out the key information, so that apparently unremarkable scenarios get weirder and weirder as we learn more detail.

And indeed, there is some straight up Lovecraftiana in here as well as two different body horror twists on the idyllic rural past, all of which are squarely my kind of thing.

Favorites:
Well, both the Lovecraft ones. "Multiplied by Zero" is a travel report from a man who's gone on a guided tour of a Lovecraftian horrorscape. I enjoyed the contrast between subject matter and tone all the way along, and then it really stuck the landing.

Meanwhile, "Walks Among Us" is an inside view of a Lovecraftian cult, aka exactly my jam, seen from the perspectives of two people raised in the faith and struggling with it and one who's married in. I'm amazed by how deftly Veres weaves all the backstories together with the present day timeline. This is extremely nonlinear and yet I never had any trouble following the action. One could argue the discussion of the cult as a religious minority is not great, given that this minority really is into murder and slavery and all that, but I enjoyed the Watsonian view of the world too much to quibble about the Doylist implications.

The two farming horror ones are honestly quite similar in subject matter, if not theme, to the point of feeling a little repetitive. "Return to the Midnight Soil" has the more interesting and imaginative body horror, but I think the title story "The Black Maybe," about a family from the city doing farming tourism, wins by a hair because it's more horrific, rather than tragic like the first one, and because I cared a lot more about the daughter in it than about either of the boys in the other story.

And "The Time Remaining" is the slashy entry, a story about a man whose life keeps getting worse and the devil whose life's purpose is to convince him to lead the armiese of hell. VERY shippy.

Least favorites:
"To Bite a Dog," about a woman who discovers the psychic power of dominating other creatures by biting them and her boyfriend who can't decide how he feels about it. The most Tuttle-feeling story of the collection because of how damn bleak it is. Also I just don't like animals being upset or in pain. It's rough being a horror fan sometimes.

"Fogtown," an epistolary story composed of an unfinished manuscript about someone else's unfinished book about an incredibly popular underground band that seemingly no one ever actually heard. I love this kind of thing normally, but the nested epistolary layers (complete with editor's notes!) were hard to keep track of, and the underlying story just didn't have any meat to it. I've read this story before with less effort and at least as much reward.

Those were the first two of the collection, so I'm really glad I pushed through to the ones I enjoyed! In fact, I ended up liking the collection enough that I bought his new one rather than waiting for it to show up at the library.

(I guess I'm letting out all my bottled-up words today...)

A collection of essays on feminist topics. I've been meaning to read some Solnit ever since everyone was reading her book Hope in the Dark during the first Trump administration. I randomly was in need of an ebook to read, and this was the book of Solnit's available through my library, so here we are.

On one hand, I did not find this a challenging read. Most of what Solnit had to say, I've encountered in some form or another before, and most of these essays are surface-level examinations of their topics. OTOH, there's something to be said for having thoughts laid out in a coherent essay format when one has previously only encountered them via social media, haphazardly and in fragments. And even though the collection had a strong feminism 101 feeling for me, I did highlight a bunch of quotes, which I am putting below under a cut, mostly for my own use. So, clearly I got some value out of the book!

IMO, by far the strongest essay is the one where she gets into specifics, and that's the final essay, "Giantess," about a 1950s film called Giant starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. I feel like I might vaguely have heard of this movie, and although it doesn't sound like my usual jam genre-wise, the politics sound progressive even today, so I'm tempted just from a point of historical interest.

( quotes )

Assorted items:
+

seasonsofdrabbles spring round signups close today!

+ Having posted the fic below, I seem to have gotten all my Oasis feelings out for the moment, or maybe just all my writing feelings. I spent the last couple of weekends going to art museums, and I've also finally found the brain space and desire to read again. It feels really good. I've finished two books in the past week! Amazing!

+ Currently actively reading:
- In the Forests of Serre by Patricia McKillip
- It's Not a Cult by Joey Batey (thanks to

troisoiseaux, who passed their copy on to me <3)
- The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

I wrote a fic! Not even for an exchange!

doughnut hips (6511 words) by Snickfic
Fandom: Oasis (Band)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Liam Gallagher/Noel Gallagher
Additional Tags: Chubby Kink, sensory play, Light CBT, Light BDSM, Anal Sex, Porn with Feelings, Oasis Reunion (Band), Sibling Incest, Crying, Weight Gain, Kissing
Summary:
Liam settled his hands on Noel’s hips and then wondered if he shouldn’t, but there weren’t a lot of places for him to touch Noel that weren’t softer than they’d been sixteen years ago.
Noel cleared his throat. “I didn’t think you’d care if—you know. If I put on a few pounds.”

This was supposed to be a quick kink-focused one-shot, but it almost immediately grew a bunch of reunion feelings and became a lot more emotionally dense than I planned, and it ended up taking me about five months to write (across 19 days of writing). It was really satisfying to finish, and I feel like I did all the things I set out to do.

On the theme of "every kink applies to Gallaghercest," this has my first ever CBT and sensory deprivation. I've never had even the faintest inclination to write those before, did not go in planning to write them here, and yet: here they are.

I'm calling this a fill for

crackthewip, which makes it the first fic I've finished for that event, despite having run it for three years (and then passed it on to

chacusha). Yay.

This fic really filled a niche, apparently, because I got the most feedback on this that I've ever gotten in the first week of posting an Oasis fic (not counting the one last year that I was posting in daily installments). It's so gratifying to write things that people want to read. ;______;

Exit 8 (2026). A man who has just found out his ex-girlfriend is pregnant gets lost in a seemingly infinite subway tunnel.

This is a Japanese movie based on a Japanese video game that was apparently a huge hit a few years ago. It's also the second movie this year based on an essentially non-narrative video game with long stretches of "yup, this sure feels like I'm watching someone play a video game." Like Iron Lung, they really have to work here to stretch their premise to a 90-minute runtime with an actual story. Things get pretty repetitive after a while, since the tunnel acts essentially as a spacial time loop (as elegantly depicted by the movie poster).

That said, I mostly enjoyed the experience, in large part because of the lead actor Kazunari Ninomiya, who is great. I've learned he was a beloved Jpop idol 20+ years ago, and I believe it, because he has loads of charisma while acting basically alone for the first 2/3 of the film. I would absolutely watch him in more things.

The movie is also occasionally really stylish. The opening scenes are IMO the best part of the film from a filmmaking perspective, starting with our guy on a crowded train listening to Bolero to the camera-eye POV first loop through the subway tunnel (as a nod to the game being a walking simulator).

However, I think my favorite part of the movie is the interlude where we see the backstory for the other recurring character in the subway tunnel, a man walking robotically with a briefcase. That's easily the best horror material in the film.

--

Forbidden Fruits (2026). Three women named after fruits who work in a mall fashion boutique tentatively welcome a new member into their girl-power coven.

This movie is kind of all over the place. It leans a bit too hard into satire, which loses me sometimes, while also not seeming to have a clear idea what it's trying to say about female relationships. In my opinion Lili Reinhart as the coven leader is one of the weak links, although I've seen a lot of people say the opposite. On the other hand, Victoria Pedretti as the airhead recovering alcoholic stole the show for me. I didn't even recognize her at first because Cherry is so different from the Mike Flanagan characters I've seen her play, but she's hilarious and heartbreaking.

The movie is also very stylish, and the fashion is incredible, like truly impossible to describe, you have to experience it for yourself. Each of the four gets their own consistent look: glam seductress, gothy femme, girl next door, sexy baby.

The movie also, after an hour and fifteen minutes of campy satire, suddenly goes extremely hard. It gets gnarly, you guys. It fucking commits. It must have been a real challenge to market this film, because if you're watching it as a horror movie, it takes over an hour to get there, but if you're not into horror, you are in for a nasty surprise at the end.

Put this on the list of "wasn't quite for me, not mad I saw it, happy it exists." It had style and ambition, and that goes a long way with me. (Typing that out, I realize it has a ton in common with last movie's football horror movie Him, with a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses. So if you were into that, try this.)

Omegas are the glue that holds us all together, providing the essential social lubricant needed for our society to function—and yet they are often maligned and treated as lesser-than. This April, we are changing part of our logo to highlight omegas as part of our commitment to the inclusion and wellbeing of our omega volunteers and users.

Full post on Organization for Transformative Works website, here.

;)

movies
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A bunch of characters from classic literature get together to save the world. Not only does it not pass the Bechdel test, but I think there's only one female character that even had lines by the time I quit, and Quatermain had already been outrageously sexist to her on three separate occasions. Also it was boring. I'd osmosed that this was unfairly maligned but uhhhh I don't think it was.

Titane. A psychopathic woman does a bunch of apparently disconnected, increasingly violent stuff. I thought this was going to exactly my kind of freaky shit, but alas it was a different kind of freaky shit. Once she got done getting fucked/knocked up by the car, it was all downhill from there.

Heart Eyes. Slasher romcom starring Mason Gooding from the new Scream movies, among other things. The slasher half of the story is by the book, although there's one impressively gnarly kill. The real problem was I didn't buy the romcom half at all. These people have no chemistry, and I don't care about either of them.

The Void. The local lawman brings an injured, raving guy to a hospital where he knows literally everyone by their first name, which is then immediately hemmed in first by creepy Klan/cult types and then by two angry rednecks with guns. Also people start turning into flesh monsters. A bottle story like this lives or dies by the dynamic between its characters, and this one has got nothing going on at all in that department. Also they'd already been grudgingly teaming up with the rednecks for twenty minutes and still no one had asked the rednecks WHY they were trying to kill the injured raving guy, which was just too stupid for me to handle.

books
Like in Love With You by Emma R. Alban. Regency romance where two young woman trying to marry the same man fall in love with each other instead. I could pretty much roll with the modern-sounding dialogue, but then they professed their feelings and had sex and there was still a third of the book left, and I couldn't muster any interest in continuing.

Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Young woman raised on an isolated estate in the north of England discovers big family secrets. I picked this up because the premise sounded like it had great Gothic vibes, but I was not prepared for it to be 700 pages, and I found the prose to be labored in that "trying to be old-timey" way. I lasted like 20 pages.

In which I review two movies with main characters named Grace.

Ready or Not 2 (2026). Immediately after the events of the first movie, Grace is kidnapped, handcuffed to her estranged sister, and put into a new hide and seek game against the heads of all her in-laws' fellow rich devil worshippers.

This was a great time. It's not as tightly written as the first, and I have some quibbles, but Samara Weaving is once again and absolute delight, and the cast of rich assholes was a lot of fun, even if they couldn't bounce off each other quite as well as in the first movie because they're not all related to her. I adored Sarah Michelle Geller as Ursula, one of a pair of twins who take the field together, and one of my biggest regrets is that we didn't get more of her and Grace interacting directly. Even with the little we have, I ship it really hard.

I also enjoyed how the movie managed to take multiple key themes and plot points from the first movie and put new spins on them, and I enjoyed the expansion of the lore.

I wasn't totally sold on the sister relationship. I didn't have a problem with the estrangement part or how that got used to retcon in a family member for Grace, but I wanted their history to be a lot messier. "I didn't take you with me when I moved out at age 18 because I didn't think I could take care of you" vs "You abandoned me" just isn't that interesting a conflict to me, you know? Nor does it offer much room for interesting resolution. I've seen people say they found the movie very shippy for sistercest, but I'm not really into it, unfortunately, because they just weren't fucked up enough for me.

Also, this movie was straight to a distracting degree. ( spoilers )

So: overall not quite as charming as the first, but still very fun.

--

Project Hail Mary (2026). Ryan Gosling stars as xeniobiologist turned middle school science teacher Ryland Grace, who gets recruited for an interstellar mission to try to save the sun from getting eaten by space microbes.

Gosling is the only human being on screen for about 80% of the movie, and he carries the movie so effortlessly that I was genuinely surprised to realize that this movie is by far his most financially successful leading role. He's been getting lead roles for 20+ years, so it feels like oh yeah, of course he's an A-lister, but actually I think this is the movie that is going to cement that for him. And good for him!

The other main character is the rock alien, who is primarily a puppet augmented with animatronics and CG. I wish I'd realized going in that he was mostly practical, because I'd have paid more attention. The sets are also fully practical, and I read somewhere that there is zero green screen work; when Grace is doing his spacewalks and so in, Gosling was being filmed against matt paintings that were touched up later. And you can feel it! This is a megabudget SFF movie that was nonetheless made with love.

There are some other characters in the flashbacks, but the only one I cared about was the administrator of the mission played by Sandra Huller, whom I absolutely loved. She brings such gravitas that it felt like she was in some other movie entirely. I looked her up, and it turns out she starred in that movie Anatomy of a Fall from a few years ago, which I definitely need to see now.

The story itself is really linear, even taking into account the flashbacks in the early part of the movie. There aren't really any surprises here; you'll get the movie you saw in the trailer. I enjoyed all the montages of Grace Doing Science, which I gather is the novel author Andy Weir's big strength. The ending stutters a bit, in the sense that there were about three in a row and it wasn't clear which one was the actual end, and I have some worldbuilding/plot questions about how things shook out, which I assume Weir answered them at length in the novel.

It didn't blow my mind like it seems to have blown a lot people's, but I had a good time. If you're in the mood for a space adventure, especially one with a lot of practical filmmaking, you should check it out.

The Revenant (2015). A wilderness guide (Leonardo Dicaprio) left for dead after being mauled by a bear goes on a revenge quest against the trapper (Tom Hardy) who killed his son.

As suggested by that summary, this extremely whumpy, if you're into that, to a point well beyond realism. Somehow our guy Glass struggles through total wilderness for tens of miles with myriad open wounds and a broken leg, and rather than dying of deprivation, exposure, or infection, he actually gets better. By the end of the movie he's barely even hobbling anymore. Also, the people in this movie spend so much time tromping through and even immersed in barely-melted icewater that I expected them to either die of hypothermia or lose some toes to frostbite in the first twenty minutes.

This is also an incredibly linear movie. There are no surprises here, no unexpected decisions or developments. No depths of character are revealed. It's also incredibly male-centric. The only female character with lines is Glass's wife, who's dead before the movie even starts, and the only other woman on screen is a Native woman-shaped Macguffin who gets raped on screen, then rescued, but never gets to speak. Even worse than that, to me, is that we get nothing of Glass's relationship with his half-Pawnee son at all. Other than simmering resentment over unjust treatment, we don't have any sense of the kid's personality or Glass's dynamic with him, which makes for a weaker movie and also makes it hard to believe in the movie's pretensions of giving a shit about the effect of European colonization on Native peoples.

I watched this for the scenery, and I will say it was great on that front. Lots of snowy crags, excellent! I also really enjoyed Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson, who round out the cast.

Cannot believe this beat Mad Max: Fury Road for best picture.

--

Stalker (1979). Wikipedia summary: a man called a stalker guides two clients through a hazardous wasteland to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where there supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires.

This is a Soviet movie by director Andrei Tarkovsky, who also did Solaris. If I'd realized that, I could have better set my expectations for this movie. I watched it because the premise gave me cosmic horror vibes and specifically because it felt like a precursor to a bunch of more recent cosmic horror that I've loved or at least loved concepts from, including Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy and movies like A Dark Song, Malefique, YellowBrickRoad, and Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made. (If you're not familiar, this a hilariously idiosyncratic list of widely varying quality, lol. There's a reason you probably haven't heard of most of those.) Maybe, I said, this is the original source of these other things I love!

Unfortunately, while this does promise many horrors, it delivers none of them. Very possibly it was an inspiration for those other things, but in the sense that other people watched this and were like, "okay but what if this were actually a horror movie."

The first hour or so is my favorite; I was genuinely shocked when the sepia filters of the real world give way to full color in the Zone, and there's some great tension as our stalker navigates the Zone using methods that hint at incomprehensible dangers. However, the longer we go without encountering any of those dangers, the harder it is to believe in them. By the time we finally arrive at the possibly magical room, I was more than half convinced that the dangers were all imagined, and the glimpse of two decaying skeletons came too late to change my mind. And then! We DON'T EVEN GO INTO THE ROOM. NO ONE GOES INTO THE ROOM. *flips over table*

Tarkovsky was not trying to make the movie I wanted to watch; he was much more interested in big philosophical questions and really long takes, and I gather this is considered an all-time classic for those reasons.

This was apparently an adaptation-in-name-only of the Strugatsky Brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, which I happen to have already have on hold at the library for unrelated reasons. I'm interested to see how it compares.

- For fic reasons, I've been watching the first night of Knebworth 1996, and gosh, the footage is gorgeous. Incredible that they sat on it for almost thirty years. Here's an example:

Watch on YouTube

- Speaking of Oasis, did you know the mangaka of Chainsaw Man also wrote a one-shot about two young female mangakas? And more importantly that the title Look Back is a direct reference to the Oasis song Don't Look Back in Anger? Yes.

- Have a silly video about the Oxford comma, among other punctuation. Really takes it up a notch in the second half.

- Trailer for Dune Part 3!! My perspective of the Villeneuve Dune movies is that the visual spectacle is incredible, but they're a little too self-serious and not weird enough. The books also take themselves very seriously, but make up for it via frequent batshittery. However, I'm definitely interested to see how Villenueve finishes things up, especially since he'd started going off the map by the end of part 2, and part 3 appears to all be taking place in the gap between the end of the first novel and beginning of the second. Here's hoping for lots of Jessica. 🙏🙏🙏

- They cast Jason Momoa's son as Paul and Chani's kid. Let the Paul/Duncan mpreg headcanons begin.

- You can now filter your AO3 bookmarks by wordcount!!

- IDK how it never occurred to me before that the bugging scene in The Matrix would spawn a whole new kink, but it absolutely did, and I stumbled across that corner of deviantart earlier this week. Bless.

- I'm not going to do a whole Oscars postmortem, but horror movies got EIGHT awards, which has got to be an all-time best, including two of the four acting awards. I'm especially happy for Michael B Jordan and Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw.

- Tough week for Buffy fans. I'm relieved that the reboot appears to be DOA; I was going to watch it, but I wasn't hopeful. Meanwhile, sucks about Nicholas Brendon. Losing him and Michelle Tractenberg a year apart, when they were both so young, is fucking rough.

Oscar-nominated movies I've watched: Frankenstein, Sinners, Weapons, The Ugly Stepsister(!!!!), The Secret Agent, Marty Supreme.

After the nominations came out, I was like "Wow, I've seen so many of these!" Friends, I literally had only seen the four(!!) horror movies, but between Frankenstein and Sinners they were nominated for so many things that it felt like I knew more movies than I really did.

Snubs: I didn't see it until after the nominees were announced (and neither did anyone else, apparently), but man, Testament of Ann Lee should have been up for Best Score and Best Actress at the very least. Best Picture too tbh.

Who I'm rooting for: I want Sinners to pick up a bunch of hardware, most of all Best Picture, but also Delroy Lindo for Best Supporting Actor, Wunmi Mosaku for Best Supporting Actress, Best Score, and Best Original Screenplay. My second choice in any category where they're going head to head would be Marty Supreme, and Chalamet is probably my pick for Best Actor.

My favorite story of these awards: The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian-language horror film, getting nominated for Best Hair and Makeup. There's no way it's going to win, but how did it even get nominated?! I hope the nomination got some more eyes on it, especially since it pairs so well with The Substance, which was nominated last year.

Rotten tomatoes: Frankenstein just wasn't all that. It was long, obvious, and self-important, and I hated the design of the Creature, which was basically just body paint and bad hair. I wouldn't mind it winning for something like Production Design or Costuming, and but that's about it. Props to Elordi for snagging an acting nom, though.

And take this one with a grain of salt, because I haven't watched it, but every Black person whose review I've come across haaaaaaated One Battle After Another. I think FD Signifier has put out three different videos or streams at this point about how much he hated the treatment of Black women in it. I was already primed to skip it because I disliked the trailer; in particular, the father/daughter bickering about pronouns for her nonbinary friend really hit me the wrong way. So I personally am rooting for any movie but that one in every category (esp against Sean Penn for Best Supporting Actor, because fuck that dude).

Marty Supreme (2025). A sleezy little punk in the 50s exploits everyone he knows or can finagle a meeting with in order to pursue his dream of becoming the world's best ping pong player.

I reeeeeally went back and forth on whether I wanted to see this, because everyone was like "Did you like Uncut Gems, the two-hour anxiety attack? It's like Uncut Gems." In general, I would not describe entertainment that makes me anxious to be a big draw! (I'm not talking about horror, that's TOTALLY DIFFERENT lol.) This is why I will never watch The Bear or The Pitt! But I finally got myself to go to a pre-Oscar showing of this because I enjoy Timothee Chalamet a lot, and I had a good time.

This movie is a RIDE. I have a pretty severe embarassment squick, but weirdly this rarely hit it. I only had to hide under my blanket in the theater maybe twice. Marty is just the worst but in a trainwreck way, so there's this sense that it doesn't really matter what he does or what happens to him, because it'll be engaging, not least because Chalamet is phenomenal. One of the low-key funniest lines is mid-movie when his uncle who owns a shoe story tells him that he's a fantastic shoe salesman. No shit, of course he is! It also helps that this is more of a black comedy than a ~drama, and while sometimes plot developments are the natural consequences of Marty's actions, other times they're utterly batshit that no reasonable person could have predicted.

CW for an ongoing stressful situation with a dog, but as far as I understand its last appearance, the dog is fine, unlike pretty much everyone else Marty so much as speaks to in this entire movie.

In conclusion, this is very much not a movie for everyone, but I had fun.

Drowning by Numbers (1988). A woman, her daught, and her niece are all named Cissie, drown their husbands, and depend on the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) to cover up their crimes.

This is a surrealist late-80s comedy meditating on death and also games and numbers of various kinds, which is to say it feels very much of a piece with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, except for having no Shakespeare and being more focused on female characters. It's all nonsense; nobody is really a real person here, and that's fine. It's also pretty horny in various ways, and in fact Madgett proposes to each of the Cissies in turn. You kind of want him to succeed with one or possibly all of them.

If you want a sense of what you're in for with this movie, Madgett's introduction gives you a pretty good one.

--

The Bride! (2026). Maggie Gyllenhaal directs this riff on the Frankenstein mythos, this time a sometime-musical Bonnie and Clyde story about Frankenstein's creature Frank (Christian Bale), still alive in the 1930s, and the bride (Jessie Buckley) that he talks a mad scientist into "reinvigorating" for him. The dead woman thus invigorated was a mobster's call girl, but she doesn't remember any of that anymore. Sometimes Mary Shelley talks to her for some reason.

If you get the sense from this description that this movie has a lot going on, you are correct. I would say this movie is less than the sum of its parts, but I really enjoy several of those parts. Buckley is fantastic, and Annette Bening as Doctor Euphronius is delightful. The big dance number is fun. The movie has a lot of style and is sometimes cheekily anachronistic.

The various pieces don't ever really cohere; there are too many of them. And some of the pieces I enjoyed less, like the Overboard-style plot where our revived gal thinks she's still alive and was already married to Frank before her "accident." The subplot of her being occasionally literally possessed by Mary Shelley was just baffling to me. I get that it was supposed to be thematic, but: why. But, the movie tackles all its various tones and themes with a lot of energy and verve, and overall I found a lot to enjoy.

--

Send Help (2026). A frumpy woman who dreams of competing on Survivor crashlands on an island with her horrible boss.

This is a psychological thriller by Sam Raimi, and it took me a long time to go see it because ~suspense movies about people chasing each other around trying to kill each other aren't usually my thing. (See also: every home invasion movie except You're Next.) But! We don't really get that until the end, and in the meantime, Rachel McAdams is delightful as Linda Little, who's competent and helpful to a fault until she's finally pushed too far. I love how much of a glow-up Linda gets the longer they stay on the island. There were also some late developments that I really liked.

It's not breaking any new ground, but it's fun and well-executed. If you support women's wrongs(tm), I think you'll enjoy this.

In one place that's easy for me to find.

via elasticella: If you'd like to filter by multiple tags, add them via comma with ?mode=all at the end. For example, all my recs posts also tagged with Oasis: https://snickfic.dreamwidth.org/tag/fandom:+oasis,entry:+recs?mode=all
If you're a paid user, DW allows you to filter out specific tags by other users (for example, my "topic: politics" tag). It's just not easy to find. First you need to make an access filter and put the person on that filter, and then once they are in the filter, click on their name and all their tags will pop up.

One suggestion would be to make a filter with your entire circle in it, and then just take out the tags you don't want. Then that could be your default view of your circle.

I went hunting for fic of these two a while back. Here are my two favorites.

Acts of Faith by

quietly_obsessed, 4k. "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in you". Jud and Blanc fall in love during the year after Wicks' murder. A bittersweet but lovely fic in which they find some healing in each other.

fair with her firstborn on bethlehem down by

hauntinghouses, 9k. Benoit Blanc comes back to Chimney Rock just in time for Christmas. In which Blanc sets out to seduce a priest and/or not have a miserable Christmas, and ends up talking a lot more theology than he wants (but no more than he ought to have reasonably expected). If you're like the religious debates in the movie were great but what if they had them while fucking, this is the fic for you.

Themes of the month
1. Comfort music, by which I mean mostly the Gallaghers. This felt like a rough month, and I listened to my big Noel playlist a lot, as well as my 2025 and “most listened” playlists. About every six months I listen to the latter and discover it has a lot of great songs on it. Who could have guessed!

2. Also in the comfort music vein, a lot of Lord Huron, mostly the new album, which has earned the extremely rare distinction of skipping the seasonal playlist phase and going straight into my year-round rotation.

3. Wuthering Heights by Charli XCX. Neeeew album! Short, and with some filler of the kind you get in an album for a movie, but still a few new songs I was into. I appreciate how she used the melodramatic vibes of the movie as an excuse to go OTT.

4. Lana del Rey. Inspired by her new single, I went back and listened to Norman Fucking Rockwell again, which I haven't listened all the way through since 2020.

My top artists (by # of streams)
1. Oasis
2. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
3. Lord Huron
4. Liam Gallagher

...I told you. 🙈

Favorite songs:
1. White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter by Lana Del Rey. Weird Lana is back!! Some of this is kind of bad tbh and is definitely her operating in the vein of Taylor's "But Daddy I Love Him," ie pissed at her fans for having opinions about her love life, but also: it's so delightfully weird. I'm into it.

2. Dying For You by Charlie XCX, my favorite of the new tracks on her WH album. Again: really took the theme of OTT melodrama to heart. <3

Here are a couple of my favorite winter soup recipes. They're from cookbooks, so no handy online version to link to. So this is for you and also for me, so I can access these away from my cookbooks.

( Pork and hominy soup )

( Sausage, White Bean, and Kale Soup With Besar )

I would like to bulk up my store of recipes that travel and reheat well and are good for taking to other people, the "casserole for someone who's ill/grieving/up all night with a newborn" kind of thing. Casseroles and hearty soups are welcome, but also other kinds of one-dish meals that don't require much fiddling other than reheating.

In return, I can offer one of my own that fits this description:
White chicken chili

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