some kind of gay boat festival

( A List of All the Things )

Previous Years: 2024 + 2025

AKA, my Very Serious Holiday Break Reading List.

Flamer by Mike Curato
One of my professors (who's also a librarian) mentioned that they'd just gotten this for the library's graphic novel collection because it was on the banned book list yet again. So I picked it up, then left it on the mantel until school ended for the year.

Centred on a teenager in boy scout camp, the summer before high school starts, the story covers about a week of intense emotional turmoil. The Scouts had banned homosexuality, but were filled with homo-erotically charged jokes and behaviour from the boys, as well as overt homophobia, fatphobia and racism. Like the author, the protagonist is mixed race, chubby and gay, and none of those seem to him like they're going to lead anywhere good. He's looking forward to leaving the Catholic school system, where he got religious guilt on top of bullying, but afraid of the big public high school and future bullying. He's desperately in love/lust with his tent-mate, and terrified what might happen if anyone finds out he's gay.

The art is simple grey scale with occasional red and orange, and showcases the juvenile over-exuberance of the characters, and how every emotion is the most emotion anyone has ever felt. Not a whole lot actually happens in this story, but it does a wonderful job of showing how world-endingly monumental the mundane can be at that age, when everything you feel is going to be all you feel for the rest of your life. The specific experiences aren't something I dealt with at that age, but the intensity felt very familiar.

It's a well done story that I think would be very useful to teens and tweens going through similar situations, which I assume is why it's widely banned.


The Claiming of the Shrew by Lauren Esker
(Usual disclaimer about knowing the author.)

The reservation system worked! For those not following the Fated Mountain Lodge series, the previous novels have all depended on reservation system mishaps putting people in odd situations, but this time it worked! We're in business, baby! The hero does end up in the Honeymoon Suite because it's the only available room, but that's no one's fault but his.

This is probably tied with its sister novel, Joy to the Squirrel, as my favourite in the series so far, with the fully charged shrew (as in she can turn into a shrew) heroine ready to go out there and solve some crime! Even if she has no experience in solving crime. She's paired with the honeymoon-suit inhabiting trash panda private detective, who does know how to solve crime, but is definitely getting off to a slower start. And there also a theatre troop living in the woods. And a dragon. It's just really, really sweet and fun, with charming characters to root for, and largely pretty low stakes. I really appreciated having a disabled heroine, and how she worked with her disability as a shapeshifter. Absolutely this series at its best.


The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by James Lloyd
(sanguinity just read this, which made me want to read it again (third or fourth time through), so I did.)

I think Sanguinity does a better job of summing up what's great about this book, but to be brief: Caz, our hero, who has had the worst time of it, is my platonic ideal of an iron woobie. He's just trying to get through the day so he can catch a damn break in some hoped-for future, but unfortunately a variety of gods have other plans for him. Does he set out to save the kingdom? No! He sets out to have a nap, but the nap turns out to be on the other side of some serious political shenanigans, so off he goes. Like it or not. And he very much does not like it.

The book is an exercise in slowly ratcheting up the stakes, until the kingdom's fate rests on the fall of some beads, and just doesn't feel like it's going to work out. I really appreciate Bujold's ability to put the reader through it along with the characters. I also like how though there are heroes and villains (and some convincingly loathsome characters), no one's a panto baddie, who's just evil for the sake of the plot. The story is about corrupting influences, and power turning people into their worst selves, and how to fight back against that, which I appreciated.

I have some thoughts about the theology and world building, which will probably get their own post some day.


The Gifts of the Magpie by Lauren Esker
(Know the author, etc.)

The most recent Fated Mountain Lodge book, and the reservation system is... working! But several characters still accidentally get booked into the honeymoon suite, because why not? There were also some fun winter adventures on snowmobiles, and I really liked the set up for the next book's main character.

Unfortunately, that's about all that worked for me. ( slight negativity )

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page: Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

I do (semi) regular link lists, and thought about dumping one here, but then I saw this video, and wanted to talk about it.

lostrekkie / jessiegenderafterdark5287: Starfleet Academy Is The Best Live-Action Star Trek We've Gotten In Years (Spoiler-Free Review) (Video: 43 minutes).
I braced for CW-core melodrama in space and instead got a Star Trek show that actually understands Star Trek.

Context on where I am with modern TV Star Trek, the TL;DR being: "Too old and tired to deal with this shit."

I remember watching the first two episodes of Star Trek: Picard, and deciding, "I don't have the energy to be angry at Star Trek." Which was similar to how I felt about pretty much everything in January of 2020, to be fair. But the feeling specific to Star Trek has stuck, and I haven't kept up with any of the modern shows. We did watch part of the first season of Discovery, and I enjoyed later episodes more than my first impression of the pilot (which I loathed). But then I just never cared enough to go back to it.

I probably should've watched Prodigy, which was more my speed (it sounds like, being a Voyager girl growing up). Then I bounced off Lower Decks, both tonally and in animation style. And I felt the same sort of continuity exhaustion towards Strange New Worlds as I do towards all of Star Wars and most of the MCU at this point.

(For the reboot movies: Enjoyed the first one, have forgotten every single thing about the second one, adored the third one, but then Anton died, and they never made any more. Tentatively interested in whatever the reboot of the reboot will be.)

This looks like something I might enjoy! I hope it doesn't rely too much on continuity from season three of Discovery, but otherwise I like the cast, I'm willing to put up with overly-hormonal youth, and I'd just... it'd be nice not to be angry at Star Trek for a change.

A few quibbles with the video:

• Not personal to me, but if you're loving the current era of Trek... Jessie very much is not, and may harsh your mellow.


• It's probably not as spoiler free as some people use with that term, but it didn't really give away any plot details.


• I basically listened to it as a podcast, because while I very much enjoy Jessie's face, there's a lot of b-roll that's just the trailers over and over? Which I guess is a youtube thing.

But overall I liked her video! I will be tuning in to the new show.

AND THEN I SAW THIS VIDEO, so you get some Raye, too.


Challenge #5: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.
I'm not really active in transformative works fandom right now (brain full, no room), but here's a couple broad wishes for rainbow chasers.

1. Copying a bunch of people asking for help with fandomtrees. There's lots of great trees that need a few more decorations <3

2. Tell me your favourite album last year. Not song, full album you can listen to end to end. The album doesn't have to have come out in 2025; it can be from another year, and it was just your favourite to listen to in 2025.

3. Tell me your favourite tiny detail about your blorbo, and why you like it. Don't worry if I know/like your canon. I just want to roll around in some fandom positivity. Alternately, a small joke or funny moment from your blorbo's show (or novel, or whatever).

E.g.: this is more of a canon beat, but the thing in "Mr. Rowl" where everyone keeps mistaking the heroine's dad for the Duke of Wellington cracks me up every time I think of it.

ETA: 4. If you use Discord, please go fill out this survey and tell them to put AI integration where the Sun will never see it: We're exploring how people feel about AI—tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot—and what they'd want (or not want) from AI in Discord.

ETA 2: Survey appears to be down. Not sure if it got overloaded. Or if Discord decided they don't want user input after all. Or what. Let me know if it comes back on.

(Which is def not me procrastinating on homework on the second day of a new term.)

If you use a rich text editor to post to DW so that it does all the coding for you, and you don't have to worry about it, it has the potential to make your posts very difficult to read without clicking through to see the journal in your style. A lot of the rich text editors override the page layouts and styles selected by the user (ie, in this case, me, who is not very tech savvy, so apologies if the terminology is wrong, please correct me in comments!).

To show you what it looks like... ( please click through, rather than expanding the cut tag )

It could also be an issue if you force your font to a particular typeface or size, which overrides people who set their journal style with a typeface/size that they need for accessibility reasons (e.g. low vision or dyslexia).

I'm not trying to call anyone out! (The styles are made up examples.) I don't want to discourage using rich text editors, which make posting so easy for people. I just think that everyone is maybe not aware that this is how their posts look on people's reading page.

I've never used a rich text editor, so I have no idea how to tell it just to post text without modifying the colour/size/typeface, but maybe someone in comments can let me know?

There's probably also a way to make my browser strip out people's customisations, though times I've tried that it's ended up with some pretty odd results, so I gave up on it.

PSA: LiveJournal may be about to geolock to Russia. If you have shit there that you like, and want to see again without visiting Russia, now's a good time to save it. (ETA: Not sure if the terminology is entirely correct, but the sentiment is.) Here's a long bluesky thread about it by denise, which includes ways to export LJ to DW and/or to your drive. IDK how people are saving LJ scrapbook.

I'd say pass it along, but I think it's pretty widely broadcast by now. Pass it along to spaces where one can find LJ people are who aren't on DW?

Anyway, on with the show.



Challenge #1: The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Hi! I'm Muccamukk or Mucca. You may know me from Age of Sail, Stargate, Babylon 5, Marvel Comics, Band of Brothers or Top Gun fandoms, plus an extremely random selection of others across twenty plus years in online fandom spaces. I used to write fic and comment quite a bit, though I've been less active the last few years.

My pinned post and profile seem to be in good order, and I do still post link lists, book reviews and music from time to time.

I helped mod Snowflake for a few years there, and am taking this year off (mostly), so I'm looking forward to slightly lower-stakes participation, and maybe digging up some old memories/meeting new friends.

If you want to play an ice breaker game, check out my 2025 Media Tracker and ask me for a hot take on any albums, movies or shows on there (I think I've reviewed all the books up to December, which I'll cover in the next few weeks, but other media not as much).


Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom: Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

Somehow, the only pet I can now think of is Darwin from seaQuest: DSV, who isn't strictly speaking a pet. The talking robot dolphin was a lot of fun, though.

Instead: here's a list of fic I've written that include significant pets (canonical or otherwise), because writing pets is really fun, given they're often (very cute) chaos goblins designed to throw plans awry. (Presented in order written):

Unstinting
Fandom: Marvel 616 (Captain America)
Summary: Sam Wilson, downtime.
Pet Content: Sam Wilson's canonical cat, Figaro.
Read on DW | Read on AO3

Found Sleeping
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Summary: After Replacements, Bill and Johnny look for Bull.
Pet Content: Original mama cat and kitten characters.
Read on DW | Read on AO3

To Say Nothing of the Tiger
Fandom: Hornblower (TV)
Summary: Admiral Pellew wants a favour. Horatio wants to do anything to help. William just wants to spend time with Horatio.
Pet Content: Admiral Pellew's [historically] canonical tiger.
Read on DW | Read on AO3

A Dog's Eye View
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Summary: How Trigger sees the events of "Crossroads."
Pet Content: The dog that Tab probably stole found in Holland.
Read on DW | Read on AO3

Also, here's a picture of my cat, who is a fandom pet insofar as she's named after Kaylee from Firefly.( Read more... )


Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I have a vague memory of a History of Psychology class some twenty years ago, where the professor was talking about the uncertainty of knowing if the world you perceived with your sense and senses was even remotely similar to the world anyone else perceived. He described philosophy (which is more or less what psychology was for most of history) as being like creating an image of the world, and holding it cupped in your hands, then opening your hands to show it to other people, and inquiring if that matched their image of the world, a process which bagged a number of questions for future philosophers to attempt to unpack. (Some of all of these details may be incorrectly recalled, with apologies to Professor C.)

This is how I feel about art in general, and fandom specifically: that need to articulate how one understands the world, and see if anyone else feels the same. And, yes, that does often involve a lot of pornography, but the point of transformative works as a form of philosophical communication remains.

I see a story out in the wide world, and it sparks something in me: resonates with a life experience, and emotion, something I want and don't have, an aspirational or cautionary way of moving through life, a new idea, something that just really pisses me off. The story speaks to me about how I perceive the world, and I wonder if that's true for anyone else, too.

So I take that story, and say to a friend and peer, "Hey, did you see that? Did it inspire/intrigue/inflame you too?" And someone else comes back and says, "Yes, but also..." or "Yes, and this too..." or "No, because..."

(or they don't, ask me about being in a fandom of one...)

And that communication can take the form of edits, or discord conversations, or meta posts, or pic spams, or setting the story to music, or rewriting it into a new story, or making a picture, or... or... or.... (In some ways, those reaction fic, that just retell a scene in a show or movie from the PoV of the author's blorbo, are the most immediate form of this.)

As a form of philosophy, it's imperfect, and often shallow, and inherently biased, but holding my fannish heart between two cupped hands and showing it to others has gone a long way to formulating how I interact with the world, and often made me feel less alone.

And for that, I'm grateful.

I needed a novel to round out my holiday reading, so I picked up "Mr. Rowl" by D.K. Broster (who wrote part of the Gay Jacobite Extended Universe). I'd read a couple reviews, but they were long enough ago that I remembered the following:

1. There are no gay Jacobites.
2. Because it's set during the Napoleonic War.
3. One of the characters (Raoul des Sablière) is a French officer who is a prisoner of war in England.
4. Everyone is very worried about their honour.
5. Readers of my acquaintance ship the French prisoner with an English dude.
6. The ladies are cool.

So I go into the book and immediately meet Raoul, and start looking for whoever I'm supposed to ship him with.

I meet Sir Francis, who is a handsome English Lord who Does Not Like Raoul. This seems like it's probably who I'm supposed to ship.

Except! Sir Francis is immediately a controlling dick to his fiancée. I have pretty generous shipping goggles, when need be, but I don't think anyone could read Sir Francis as being a controlling dick because he wants to be with Raoul. He's just a dick. He is very worried about his honour, though, so it did seem somewhat likely that he might still be the one.

No, one character being a dick has not slowed fandom down before. But isn't usually 100% my thing. So then I was feeling a little sad that I wasn't going to be into the pairing my friends like.

However, as I got farther into the book, and Sir Francis became even more of a dick, I was like, "This is going to be one hell of a redemption arc!" But also doubt.jpg. Also, also, wow, it's funny to have mostly aligned ships with someone, then have them be ride or die for something that's rapidly turning into a NOTP for me.

Finally, I broke and looked at AO3, and figured out I'm supposed to ship Raoul with some guy who has not yet showed up, as of 20% of the novel.

Which is a relief. Because I quite like Raoul, even if he has the Broster characteristic of being slightly silly about his honour, and he deserves better than Sir Francis, who is a dick.

( A List of All the Things )

Previous Years: 2024

Fully sat for this album. I'm really loving her last three singles.

Still working through old reviews, this one is mostly stuff I read for school, plus one tile for queer book club.


Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
This being the book club one. A trans woman in contemporary London feels trapped by mediocrity and inertia. She has a job she doesn't like but pays well enough. She has friends she more or less gets along with, but aren't great people. She writes poetry that does okay, but never really goes anywhere. She has tense meetings with her family, who love her but are bound by an inability to actually communicate. Meeting a new guy seems like it might nudge her into something better, but her overwhelmingly low standards and lack of ambition might sink that too. There are also flashback from the boyfriend's point of view, about a youthful trip to South East Asia, which ends in violence.

This book was a lot of people being mildly terrible, and everyone feeling like they ought to do something about improvement, then... not doing that. It was often quite funny, and Dinan has some great one-liners that cut through to the core of people's motivations. Though it's mostly about the failure mode of... pretty much everything, there were glimmers of the protagonist at least trying to work on the people around her, and maybe even herself. None of that was really enough to lift the book out of its mire of dreariness, though. It was a lot of time to spend with the grindingly unpleasant.


Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee
I read this when it came out, and remember not being deeply impressed. I think I expected there to be more of a story, or perhaps more of a resolution. Rereading it some years later, I liked it a lot better. (Though several of my classmates had my initial "Is that all there is?" reaction.)

Vivek starts getting oddly poetic transphobic death threats via email, and becomes obsessed with the sender, paranoid it could be someone she knows, afraid it could be a stranger on the subway. She collaborates with artist Ness Lee (always shown drawn in her distinctive black and white line art, while everyone else is in colour) to make the novel we're reading, while still being haunted and possibly hunted by the letter writer.

This benefits from close reading, as the images are symbolically very rich, and the colourists do a lot of work with motifs and character themes. Literary graphic novels can be redundant, at times, with the pictures just showing you what the text is already saying, and a general feeling that this could've been an e-mail, but the art here is telling its own story, running alongside, underneath and through the text. It's very well done, and I'm sad that Shraya switches genres with every project, as I'd like to see more of this from her. Though she does great work in all the other genres, too.


Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
I hadn't managed to read this before, and it's a lot. Bechdel tells the story of her relationship with her father, including discovering he was gay, and his ambiguous death. She's based the story on her teenage diaries, found documents such as family photographs, newspaper clippings, dictionary entries, and maps, and a reading list she shared with her father. Each section takes on themes of one of the works mentioned (including In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, The Importance of Being Earnest), going over and back over the events of her youth and her father's death. The whole thing sits inside a frame of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, though it's not clear which character is meant to be whom.

The text is dense and recursive, as if Bechdel is still unable to face what happened full on, and keeps sliding up to it sideways, keeps feeling the emotions vicariously through other stories. At one point, she talks about how in a childhood bout of OCD, she kept writing symbols over top of the names of important people and things in her diary, as a kind of ward against the evil eye. To some extent, the whole novel feels like that: as if she's writing over and over the events of her childhood to take a curse off them. It probably rewards rereading, but it's also a lot.


Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Second time through this, and it's still great. It's difficult to imagine the impact of this in the early 1980s, when queer lit was very much a thing, but also more siloed and less diverse. I should look up contemporary reviews, and see if this was indeed like a bomb going off, or was taken in stride. Incredible depth, incredible emotion, wonderful literary voice. I don't have a lot to say otherwise: It's great and you should read it!

It was interesting what I remembered from reading it a few years ago: the abortion, the execution of the Rosenbergs, working in the factory, not fitting in with the butch/femme lesbian bar scene, Kitty. I was surprised at how late in the book we meet Kitty, and how abrupt the ending was.

Fandom and Art Stuff
elasticella: sapphic stocking stuffers.
Lots of great prompts! Open for fills until 31 December, or they're all full, whichever happens last.

Street Art Utopia: The Giant Kitten.
By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain

Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack.
I read this, and was like "hmmmmmmm." Because it seemed plausible that there were bots or whatever, but also a lot of people I'd seen critiquing the album were definitely humans that I knew. But also human conversation can be driven by bots without the humans realising it. And also, I don't care enough about TS to look into the whole mess. Then I saw the following.

MedusoneDeluxe: Rolling Stone embarrasses itself to defend Taylor Swift. Again. (Video: 41 Minutes).
I love it when people actually read the research. So probably not a significant number of bots, but also the science is so sloppy it's impossible to tell.


Trans Rights Are Human Rights
The Walrus: Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.
Lovely, thoughtful look at how we see gender, and maybe kids have this more figured out than a lot of adults to. Older piece, but I enjoyed reading it again.

The Guardian: The WI and Girlguiding have been pressured to exclude trans women – yet the law is clear as mud by Jess O'Thompson.
The Guardian published something non-terrible about trans people in the U.K.! Do the Dance of Joy!

CTV News: Skate Canada to stop hosting events in Alberta due to sports gender law.
Solidarity! From a national sporting organisation! A MIRACLE!


Canadian Politics Stuff
The Tyee: Human Rights Tribunal on RCMP Methods Delays Decision Nearly a Year.
This is some fucking bullshit. The elders are dying of old age before they're seeing any kind of justice. I am enjoying how Amanda Follett Hosgood is so out of fucks to give on the publication ban that she's basically putting up a bright red arrow pointing to A.B.'s name, even if she can't actually say it. Which is John Furlong, incidentally. And seriously, fuck that guy.

The Globe and Mail: Leilani Muir made history suing Alberta over forced sterilization.
This is an older obit, but I dug it up for a school project, and thought it was worth sharing. Not enough people know about Canada's eugenics policies.

Times Colonist: Residential school survivor says he will protest OneBC at other campuses.
We shouldn't need our elders to be superheroes, but nonetheless many of them are.

Times Colonist: Water-contaminated fuel caused crash of Port Hardy-bound plane: TSB.
This is neither here nor there, really, but I find Transportation Safety Board investigations really interesting. Even if they take a really long time (i.e. I found this while looking for information about a more recent crash, but will probably have to wait a couple years to find out what happened to that guy).


Slightly Dated U.S.A. Politics Stuff
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American: December 6, 2025.
Beautifully ties in the events of Pearl Harbor with the politics of today.

Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Parks's Historic Protest.

The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into, as the site says, new patterns, new connections, new relationships. Solidarity is always about connection across difference, about the way you stand with someone you have something crucial in common with but who may be different in other ways. It is a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole. It is e pluribus unum.