snickfic

Starting the year off strong with two winners! (And several DNFs, but they were left over from the last year, so I say they don't count.)

The Sisters of the Vast Black (2019) by Lina Rather. Several decades after a brutal civil war between Earth and the diaspora, a living spaceship full of nuns minister to the world amidst progressively more challenging circumstances.

This novella has:
- canon f/f
- an atheist nun
- a mother superior with a dark past and the beginning stages of dementia
- a theological dilemma involving a living ship's reproductive cycle
- a rising tide of authoritarianism
- daring heroics and a growing political resistance

The first half of the book is enjoyable enough, but the plot really turns on the jets in the second half and comes to a thrilling conclusion that I was all in on. Atheist rationlist Sister Faustina is my favorite, and I kind of ship her with kindhearted idealist Sister Lucia, especially by the end of the book.

This is Rather's longest work to date. I'm really looking forward to whatever she decides to write next.

--

Knock Knock Open Wide by Neil Sharpson. In 1979, Etain disappears, is held at a farmhouse in the Irish countryside, and escapes with no memory of what happened.

Boy, this book goes PLACES. It's about Irish mythology and fraught mother/daughter relationships; it's also about a bunch of other things that I would rather let you discover for yourself. It's about Ashling, a drama student at University College Dublin in 1999 whose mother hates her, who might be gay, and who is at any rate dating a woman that she's convinced can't possibly really love her. It's about various factions jockeying just beneath the surface of the world, to the point that sometimes it feels like an espionage novel only masquerading as mythological horror. There's even a spunky journalist turned old-school battleaxe who's never gotten around to losing her Barbie-pink suit.

It's nonlinear as hell, which Sharpson juggles with remarkable dexterity, so that even when we're switching between timelines mid-chapter--and there are a LOT of timelines--I was never in any doubt about where we were. I found the integration of mythology and plot generally worked well, even though I sometimes had trouble keeping track of it all and frankly think there was enough there to support a sequel or two rather than cramming it all into this one. The characters are great and messy and complex and almost all female, which I also really enjoyed. Playing out over such a long timespan, this novel really lets you feel the tragedy the follows the horror. And this novel is VERY Irish, which I especially enjoyed having been to Ireland a couple of times. They keep mentioning the Liffey, and I'm like yes, I know that river! :D And I could hear the accents sometimes in the dialogue!

Overall, a fantastic time and a wild ride. If you've read it or do in the future, I would love to compare notes! I looked it up in some of my usual discussion spots and it seems like it kind of slipped under the radar. I see Sharpson released another horror novel last year, which I'm now anxious to check out.

One of my favorite aspects of Yuletide has become making a list of stuff from the tagset that I'm interested in checking out and then orienting my fall reading/watching around it. I'm generally bad at reading on a theme, but it turns out "maybe I can write this for Yuletide" is a theme that does work.

I thought this year I'd record for posterity what all I tried:

The hits:
Moby Dick reread
Red Rooms (2023)
The Shadow of the Leviathan
The Secret of Chimneys
Short films My Sister and the Prince, Corvidae, Serpentine, Possibly in Michigan, and The Vampire Gastelbrau

The misses:
Strangers on a Train - did not enjoy this! DNFed with 60 pages to go!
Pern reread - wooof the misogyny
Crooked House (2017) - a deeply mediocre Christie adaptation
Battle Royale (2000) - idk man, it was fine?
The Starving Saints
The Incandescent
Rotherweird
The Ascent of Rum Doodle - this was Too Silly

The... other?
Crash (1996) - I can't tell if I liked it, but I wrote a fic for it, so!

It's been a minute!

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. IDK how you make a book full of starving, soon-to-be-cannibal lesbian nuns beseiged in a castle anything less than completely my jam, but man, I just wasn't feelng it.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. The superintendent of a private school for magic... sorry, I got at least fifty pages in and I can't even tell you what the premise was.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. I tried this book about the mysterious deaths of a bunch of Russian hikers during my mountaineering disasters phase, but I just couldn't get over this American doc producer rocking up to Russia without speaking a word of Russian OR knowing anything about mountain hiking and deciding he was going to solve this decades old mystery. Half the chapters were about him bumbling around Russia hoping people would take pity on him and tell him things while privately complaining that they didn't tell him fast enough. God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis. Trans woman narrates her gender journey through music. I'm interested in stories about rock music and people's relationship to it, but I struggled with Stratis's writing. I don't even know why.

Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby. A driver who's successfully escaped the life gets pulled in to do one last heist. I feel like this is the Cosby everyone recommends, but I couldn't get over how predictable the plot was. Maybe it had some surprises later, but I didn't get that far. Worse, I was supposed to be reading this with a friend and totally failed out, which I still feel guilty about!

Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop. Magic and gemstones and stuff, who can say. Guys, I'm sorry, I really wanted this to be trashy good fun, what I've osmosed about the series sounds so bonkers and great, but the writing was so bad. I couldn't do it.

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott. There's a town forbidden to learn history, and some new folks arrive. This sounds like the kind of bananas culty cloistered culture I'm into (eg Anathem), but in practice everything felt both artificial and not nearly weird enough. I felt like I was reading a toned-down Lemony Snicket novel for adults.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Two men fall in together on a train, and one proposes they each perform a useful murder for the other. I loved The Price of Salt, but this is a meaner novel, about two characters hopelessly, miserably, self-indulgently mired in their own perspectives. I didn't like how one-sided the whole thing was, with the one guy basically blackmailing the other into doing a reciprocal murder, and somehow once he's done it, you're only drowning even more in his self-centered misery. The weird thing is I kept being reminded of The Secret History and the aftermath of its central murder, but somehow I loved that book and found this one continually repellent. I stopped sixty pages from the end, and I should have stopped way sooner.

Penhallow by Georgette Heyer. The terrible family patriarch is murdered, or so the back cover promised, but I was halfway into this 500+ page novel and he hadn't even died yet. I gather from discussions that this is more of a literary novel than a murder mystery as such and that it gets really dark. I was enjoying it okay when I was reading it, but I took a break for Yuletide, and a month later I just don't care to continue. I still want to try one of her frothier detective novels, though.

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!

We all know about Connections and Wordle, but here are some browser games that last longer and are great for keeping from going insane during Zoom meetings:

2048 Cupcakes. I still play 2048 in times of need, but it's so much more fun with colorful cupcakes.

Squares. If you like word games, here you go. Find all the words in the four by four grid. The dictionary this game uses is highly idiosyncratic, which can be frustrating; how is THIS a word that counts but THAT is only a bonus word?? But it does add to the challenge!

Clearing out the last of my movies watched last year.

We Bury the Dead (2026). After an American experimental weapons accident kills every human and animal on Madascar, an American woman (Daisy Ridley) comes to help identify bodies and search for her husband who was on a work retreat there. Also sometimes the dead don't stay dead.

As someone who is pretty over zombie movies, I liked this one quite a bit. First of all, it's Australian, and boy can you feel it. This is not your Hollywood zombie blockbuster or even your Danny Boyle zombie blockbuster. For starters, we spend relatively little time running from or fighting zombies. In fact, these are the most ambiguously threatening zombies I can remember seeing in a long long time, and I liked how much that complicated the story. It's also beautifully shot with great atmosphere and a score that really adds to the mood of the whole thing. And I really appreciated how our understanding of the central couple's married relationship gets more complicated as the film goes on.

That said, ( spoilers )

This movie feels like it invites comparison to 28 Years Later, if only by accident, given the timing. I know 28 Years Later has a lot of fans, and I didn't hate it, but overall I liked this a lot better for the indie feel, the focus on a female character, and honestly because I liked the cinematography better.

Anyway, it's out in theaters now. If it sounds fun, I recommend it!

--

Red Rooms (2023). A French-Canadian film about two female true crime fans following the trial of a man accused of raping and murdering underage teen girls. This movie is beautifully made, and with really visible care and precision. The director knew what he wanted to make, and he went for it. The result is moody and fucked up without ever feeling exploitative (to me); this is very much about the groupies, not about the man on trial, and we never seen the horrifying footage at the center of the trial.

It's also shippy as hell. Our main gal Kelly-Anne is a wealthy model and computer hacker who professes herself to be "not bad with numbers," who's obsessed with the trial for reasons that are to some extent left to the viewer, while Clementine is a less well-heeled diehard apologist for the man at the center of the trial and is convinced he's innocent. Somehow out of these two, it's Clementine who feels like the more well-adjusted person; it's questionable whether Kelly-Anne has any friends at all, and yet maybe Clementine becomes one. As a friend of mine described it, "Clementine’s more open neediness draws out a reciprocal vulnerability from Kelly-Anne."

High rec from me. If any of this sounds appealing to you, definitely check it out.

* I'm really delighted that there were fantastic Yuletide fics about Stebbins from The Long Walk for both the novel AND the show. I love Garraty and McVries, obviously, but Stebbins always intrigued me in the novel, and I think he might actually be my favorite from a fanworks perspective? I don't know why it's never occurred to me before to look for fic about him.

* threesentenceficathon prompts open Jan 17. I am so excited. I've started each of the past two years with tiny fics, and I'm ready for a third year.

* I wrote 200 more words yesterday on some self-indulgent Gallaghercest. When things suck, the OTP is here for me.

* from denise: If you have an old #LiveJournal account, and it has things you still care about in it, download it or import it to Dreamwidth SOON. 🧵 On her ffa thread, she added: Please spread this far and wide so as many people see it as possible, because I really don't see English-language LJ continuing in its present form for much longer, and I know some people may still have things they care about there. It doesn't matter how you get it backed up, but it's absolutely crunch time for getting it backed up.

My year in summary
I posted 88k words this year across 31 fics and wrote more than 103k new words total. I posted 8 Oasis fics (including several very short ones), 5 original works, 2 Re-Animator fics, and 16 singleton fics for other fandoms.

Fandoms of my heart this year
Oasis, obviously. What a time to be alive.

I also rekindled some Re-Animator feelings earlier this year, between fic I was writing and getting to see the movie in the theater. On film, even!

Other fandoms I felt at least a little fannish about this year, whether writing, daydreaming, or what have you:
- The Iskryne books by Bear and Monette
- On Swift Horses, the 2024 movie
- Dune movies

( my year in fandom, in much greater detail, with a meme )

( other fannish things )

I had a fantastic Yuletide this year. I got two great gifts. I managed to write FOUR things for the main collection, a personal best! (The closest I've come previously is three in the main collection and one in Madness, and that was back in 2013.) I got really nice comments on them, even the one for a fandom I didn't think anyone would know. <3 And then I had so much fun browsing the collection this year, and I found some really wonderful fic. Perfect experience, no notes, can't wait to do it again next year.

Interestingly, everything I wrote this year was for fandoms I watched or reviewed specifically for Yuletide. Like, the two movies are two I pulled out of the Yuletide tagset and put on my to-watch list. I always enjoy making those lists from the tagset, but I don't think they've ever borne so much fruit directly before. (Then again, most of my old standbys that I don't need to review, like Oasis and Re-Animator and Scream, are now too big for Yuletide. That's probably a factor.)

First, my assignment:
stave my soul, Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, 2.7k. A ghost story. Last year I really wanted to reread Moby Dick and write Yuletide treats, I got about a third of the way in, and then I bogged down and didn't finish. This year, I wanted the same but even more, to the point that I not only offered it instead of planning to just treat, but I got very brave and culled my offers until nearly all my matches were Moby Dick.

I got assigned to whalebone (yes, really) and wrote this in a few days. The idea came to me pretty much fully-formed, and it should have been relatively easy to write once I got a handle on the narrative voice, but it was one of those times where I was finding writing very hard and was really mad at my past self for putting me in the situation, to the point that I wished I'd defaulted before the default deadline.

But! I did manage to write the fic more or less exactly as I'd planned. And this was by far my most popular fic this Yuletide, with more comments than I've gotten in a week on anything since 2020.

--

fires of love, Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, 2.2k, omegaverse. Then I turned around and wrote a treat, and it was Moby Dick omegaverse. In fact, qkind's prompt for this last year was the number one reason I wanted to reread the book, and I was very happy that they prompted it again this year.

The big appeal here was describing an omegaverse scenario in Ishmael's inimatable prose, and I had a great time trying. In fact the first writing I did for Yuletide was some paragraphs of this that I got in the shower. Ishmael discoursing about omegaverse gender stuff was a hoot to write. This might be my favorite Yuletide fic I wrote this year.

I don't know if I'll write more Moby Dick; I feel like I've gotten those two high-concept fics out of my system, and I don't have any other burning ideas. I really have to get in the right frame of mind to tackle Ishmael's voice, and it's like I'm holding my breath the whole time and have to eventually come up for air. On the other hand, I definitely think there's room for more Moby Dick horror in the world, if nothing else.

--

a restaurant called karma, Red Rooms (2023), Clementine/Kelly-Anne, 5.6k. This is an independent French-Canadian film about two serial killer groupies attending the trial of a man accused of raping and murdering several teen girls. I'd been meaning to watch this for a while, but seeing a Yuletide request was what finally got me to do it, and then I wrote this post-canon getting-together fic in like a week. This is the first fic in the tag, so I wasn't expecting much of a response, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how many people know it and have commented on the fic. <3

It was actually almost 2k longer at one point; the day before reveals I wrote 2k of porn, then woke up Christmas Eve morning and decided the porn took the fic way off track, and I took basically all of it out and made the fic fade to black, all before 1pm. I don't know if I've ever done that before. It was not my favorite time-crunch editing session ever! However, I ship the hell out of these two now and I hope more people write them.

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wreck, Crash (1996), James/Catherine, 1.1k. James gets in a new, more serious accident, and he and Catherine enjoy the aftermath. This was a quick little PWP of them being fucking weird together. I don't know if I really hit the "if he likes cuckolding, he'll LOVE being rendered impotent by a car crash" button as hard as I wanted, but hey, it's 1k, it's fine. And it turns out I and one other person in Yuletide inaugurated the James/Catherine tag on AO3 because it didn't exist before, which blows my mind.

So many delicious goodies. :') I hope to make at least one more recs post before writer reveals.

Two, Seven, Eight, Possibly in Michigan, 1.8k. The Beachwood Place Mall is not a great work environment. The canon is a bizarre 1983 short film about weird men in masks following women in shopping malls, possibly with the intention of eating them, which you can watch here; this fic is a series of incident reports and answering machine messages to and from a concerned perfume counter employee. IDK if it's possible to fully capture the fever dream quality of the film, but this takes a good stab.

an island made from fate, The Secret History, Camilla & Charles, 1.6k. Early on at Hampden, Camilla escapes a tedious house party and finds Charles. This is a great, elegantly written little character study of Camilla, who never got quite enough time in the book IMO, and really shows the fault lines of her relationship with Charles. Great stuff.

k2, p2, yo, k2tog, The Raven Tower, The Strength and Patience of the Hill and The Myriad, 1.2k. The Strength and Patience tells a story about a sheep, and The Myriad has quibbles. The story about the sheep is fun and feels very in keeping with the universe of the novel, and the reveal about why the Strength and Patience has chosen to tell this particular story is delightful.

la femme comme il (en) faut, Impromptu (1991), George Sand, 3.2k. George gets invited to a salon and attends despite her better instincts. I'm not familiar with the movie and found this via the historical RPF tag, but I really enjoyed this vivid portrait of the Parisian artistic community at this time period, and the last scene really elevates it, IMO, and ties the whole thing together. I love the subtle emotional arc of this, and now I kind of want to go find the George Sand biography the author mentionds in the notes.

More A Comment Than A Question, The Dispossessed, Laia Asieo Odo & Sadik, 2.3k. Every so often, Laia goes a little mad and hears a voice claiming to be from the future. It's been a long time since I read about these characters, but I enjoyed this so much. The device of visiting Laia at these various points in her life was very cool, and there's something so peaceful about this whole fic, too, the same sense of peace and simplicity I got from reading the novel years ago.

There's No Discharge in the War, The Long Walk - Stephen King, Stebbins, 12k. Stebbins walks, dies, walks again. Stebbins has always been a sneaky favorite of mine, and I love seeing him get a fic all his own here that fleshes him out and gives him his own unique horrific trauma! The author uses the time loop device to fantastic and creative effect, and it all adds up to a conclusion that I like more and more the longer I think about it. Absolutely spectacular work. One of my favorites this year.

Hyacinth Girl, Waking the Moon, Oliver Crawford, 7.6k. Oliver, before the Divine. The author tags this as "Tragic Backstory" and they are correct!! I read this book last year and yet feel as though I'm missing things in this fic; I can't quite tell how many of these elements were present in the novel and which the author invents here, but the result is gorgeous and heartbreaking. You've got fairy tale stuff, dysfunctional family, the Benandanti always menacing in the background, more literay quotes than you can shake a stick at, absolutely gorgeous imagery.

Knife, Rope (1948), Brandon/Phillip, 4.9k. Brandon and Phillip's class go on a camping trip, and Brandon discovers that Phillip is not just more wallpaper. This is obviously backstory to the movie but feels like a beautiful, self-contained little psychopathic romance on its own. Two weirdos falling in love via discussing murder scenarios!! I was compelled from start to finish.

I will probably see a couple more movies before the end of the year, and I’ll update the numbers accordingly, but I think otherwise my answers will pretty much stay the same.

NB I have reviews for most of the movies in my movies tag.

What TV shows did you watch a season of this year?
Creepshow, which wasn’t even good! It just had good guest stars! My trend of one full season of TV a year continues apace.

What TV shows did you DNF this year?
Severance. I got it out of the library, and I still didn’t want to finish it.
Legion. I watched one episode and then got distracted, but I’d like to try again. I do love Dan Stevens.

How many movies did you watch this year? Any trends in genre/viewing format/etc?
I had a Regal subscription for over half the year, so I had a HUGE uptick in new releases watched. Movie stats overall this year (not counting rewatches except where noted):

2025 movies: 30 (plus one that’s technically 2026)
Older movies: 34

Movies seen in the theater (new and old): 33
Movies seen otherwise: 32

I also rewatched two 2025 movies in the theater, three older movies in the theater, and seven older movie at home, for a total of 38 total visits to the theater this year. That is definitely the most I have ever been to the theater in a year in my life, and I had a great time. I cancelled my Regal subscription because I thought I was burned out, but it’s been expired for five days and I already miss it, so I will probably resubscribe. I got way more use out of it than I did my Huly subscription last year and probably my Hulu and Netflix subscriptions combined (both of which I have since cancelled).

What were your movie trends for the year?
Most-watched actor: Jeffrey Combs once again, mostly due to rewatches at this point, but Doctor Mordrid, Dark House, and Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls were all new.

Most-watched genre: Horror by a mile, thriller a very distant second.

Most-watched country of origin: USA, but Australia was second with three, so that’s neat.

What are your top movies you watched this year?
In terms of the sheer amount of joy and delight I derived from it, it’s probably Red Sonja. This is by no means the best movie I saw this year, but apparently it was the movie I needed.

Some other fave first-time watches, from this year unless noted:
- Cuckoo (2024). Weird weird xenobio shit, casually queer, Dan Stevens chewing the scenery. What’s not to love.
- Companion. Smart, fun comedy/thriller(?). Just so tightly written, and everyone was great, most of all Sophie Thatcher.
- Clown in a Cornfield. Another movie way smarter than it had to be, and with so much heart.
- Sinners. Gorgeous.
- On Swift Horses. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying Jacord Elordi was very pretty and sad and gay.
- The Long Walk. I didn't love it as much as the book, but it understood the assignment, and I respect that.
- Hell House LLC: Carmichael Manor (2023). For pure horror, this is the scariest movie I saw this year.
- Wake Up Dead Man. Despite the heavy themes, this was ultimately a good entertaining time, just like the previous ones. I want ten more. 🙏
- Silent Night Deadly Night. A late-year surprise. I went in knowing basically nothing, and I had such a good time. I NEED a sequel.
- Red Rooms (2023). French-Canadian movie about women obsessed with serial killers. Stylish, femslashy as hell, an extremely precise and careful movie.

Other movies you saw this year that deserve more love
- Strange Harvest, a microbudget cosmic horror true crime mockumentary. Yes.
- Him, which absolutely did not deserve to get panned so universally. It had style and ambition, which is way more than I can say for lots of movies I saw this year.
- Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, a cheesy low-budget fantasy/horror movie with a lot more heart than it has any right to given how broad the comedy is.

Biggest disappointments
- Death of a Unicorn. >:( What a soulless, half-assed attempt at a horror comedy.
- The Conjuring 4. Even Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga couldn’t save this piece of dreck. Worse than 3, and that’s saying something.

Movies you finally got around to seeing for the first time
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Omg Chelsea of Dead Meat wasn’t being ironic; Leatherface IS baby. ;__;
- The Shining (1980). Fuck off, Jack Nicholson.
- Candyman (1992). Maybe trying to do too many things at once, but I was pleasantly surprised by how central the question of race was, and the romance/corruption arc was good stuff.
- Crash (1996). We definitely emphasized a different word in the phrase “erotic thriller” than I expected going in.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005). I respect it for what it was and meant at the time, but I did not love it. Heath Ledger was incredible though.
- The Mist (2007). It was fine.

Movies that you had the most fun talking about, whether they were good or bad
Probably either The Ugly Stepsister or The Long Walk, both because they have clear themes about (gross generalization here) characters doing their best in crapsack dystopias and showing how messy that gets emotionally for the characters. Lots to chew on in both of them, although I would say The Ugly Stepsister goes harder (which is impressive considering the other movie is the one where people get brutally shot in the head on screen every few minutes). The logistics of filming The Long Walk were also super interesting.

Did you rewatch any old faves? If so, which one was you favourite?
I got to see Re-Animator in the theater. <3 On film, with a recorded video message from Jeffrey Combs beforehand which someone played on their phone and held up for the audience to see. <333

What's the oldest movie you watched?
A Bucket of Blood, a 1959 thriller/satire.

What's the newest movie you watched?
LOL technically We Bury the Dead, which doesn’t hit wide release until the beginning of January. I saw it at a mystery movie screening.

Did you watch any movies outside of your usual preferred genre(s)?
Red Sonja is sword and sorcery, which I don't really watch, but that's partly because it doesn’t really exist as a movie genre these days. That may explain why it only got one day of theatrical release and zero marketing, which is a crying shame.

I watched indie drama Die My Love for Jennifer Lawrence and regretted it. I watched indie feminist/fable 100 Nights of Hero and… didn’t regret it, I guess, but I did think it sucked a lot on multiple axes. Every time I venture out of my horror niche, I end up thinking I should just watch more horror. :\

Any movies you're excited to watch in 2025?
I am aware of and excited about a surprising number of movies coming out next year!
Scream 7
Ready or Not 2
Dune 3
Wuthering Heights
The Bride
Iron Lung

This is the year-end category where I'm least likely to want to change my answers in the next week and a half, lol, so here we go.

Favorite new songs/albums of the year
- Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 by Lord Huron. Great vibes, a great progression, only one skip (“Digging Up the Past”). Dreamy and sad, suffused with existential horror, just weird enough both lyrically and musically. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from the new album, but this was exactly it. “Who Laughs Last” is probably my song of the year.

- Mayhem by Lady Gaga. When you're sixteen years into your career and can make a banger album like that this fits right in with your classics!!! The first six or seven songs in particular are an amazing run. “Perfect Celebrity” is probably my favorite, but it’s hard to choose.

- All the live tracks from the Oasis tour. I think this is the first officially released live version of Bring It On Down ever, and Wonderwall is the best live version since… idk, the one from Knebworth 1996 maybe? Or maybe ever? And this live version of Slide Away has finally brought me around on that song. Incredible stuff. (Full live tour album when???)

- "Van Horn" by Saint Motel. One of those songs I didn't really appreciate until I heard it live. Great fun. Also a couple of songs off their new album from the spring (as opposed to their new album for the fall).

- New Candys, which I stumbled across on Bandcamp. I got hooked on their single "Regicide", and the accompanying album The Uncanny Extravaganza is ideal "drowning out external noise" work music.

- All That We Imagine Is the Light, the new Garbage album. Some of the writing is a little dodgy, honestly, but the vibe is great. No Gods No Masters is still my favorite, though.

Disappointments
- I wish I liked Miley's new album more than I do. The tracks I like best are mostly her doing Lady Gaga, and that's not really what I go to Miley for.

- I discovered Dorothy Martin of the band Dorothy has gone full born-again Christian and is now giving interviews about spiritual warfare and the like. Bummer. We'll always have ROCKISDEAD, I guess.

Favorite new-to-me songs/albums
- This year I got really into the Monnow Valley and Sawmills versions of Definitely Maybe, which were released for the 30th anniversary last year. In some ways I like them better than the official album, or at least they've made me appreciate the official album more. Sad Song with young Liam on vocals is incredible, and I’m sad the official version left out that great electric guitar (bass?) hook.

- At the beginning of the year I had a month or so of listening almost exclusively to Doechii (mostly Alligator Bites Never Heal) and GloRilla (mostly Glorious and Anyways, Life's Great). Good times. TGIF is an all-timer.

Stuff I was really into for a hot minute and/or that I want to explore further
- Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo through their collab album In the Earth Again. I love the contrast of the menacing electric guitars and Pedigo's contemplative, melancholy acoustic.

- Ethel Cain, maybe? Or maybe I just like “Tempest” a lot.

- The singles from Charli XCX’s upcoming Wuthering Heights-themed album. Brat didn’t do anything for me, but these are very much my jam. I love when a pop artist goes weird, like she does on “House.” My most anticipated release of 2026.

- That new Rosalia album. I think I need to spend more time with it to fully appreciate it. “Berghain” is a hell of a track, though.

- Jonah Kagen, mostly that single “God Needs the Devil,” which is exactly the kind of rootsy bitterness I like sometimes. However, his full album later in the year gave me bad politics vibes, always a hazard with Americana and country artists, so I don’t know that I’ll explore him further.

Some other favorite tracks from this year
“Problems” by Yonaka. That last bit leading into the chorus for the first time!! Gives me shivers.
“The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift. This song is NONSENSE but it’s so catchy.
“Lucky” by Renee Rapp from the Now You See Me 3 soundtrack. A classic bop. Apparently it didn’t even chart, which surprises me, but the charts were wacky this year.
“Song for Henry” by Loren Kramer from the soundtrack for On Swift Horses. You know, the angsty heartbreaker song playing over Julius and Henry’s first sex scene.

Old Favorites - stuff I already loved and continued to listen to a bunch in 2025.
Kendrick Lamar! His Super Bowl show reignited all my enthusiasm. I watched that thing so many times. This coincided with my Doechii/Glorilla phase at the beginning of th eyear.

Miley Cyrus's older stuff, especially her 2023 album Endless Summer Vacation. I’d have said Plastic Hearts was the one I really loved, and yet at this point I think I’ve actually listened to ESV more times. I guess maybe it’s the right mood for more situations than Plastic Hearts. It kind of wears down towards the end, and I find the last two songs unlistenable, but until that point it’s a basically flawless execution of the thing it’s choosing to be.

Oasis, lol. They were my top artist of the year yet again. Mostly the Definitely Maybe anniversary release and the live tracks, as mentioned above, but also according to Tidal I listened to the Knebworth 1996 live album a lot. I don’t even remember this.

Best lines - New or old, on their own or combined with the music:
- I got a burning feeling deep inside of me / And don’t know where to put it (“Who Laughs Last” by Lord Huron)

- You said you really don’t dream anymore (“Life is Strange” by Lord Huron)

…I probably just need to do a whole post about this album, huh. Does anyone else here listen to them?

[ART] Night of the Red Sands, The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett. A gorgeous, dramatic painting as described in the novel. Can be appreciated canon-blind!

You're Gonna Need A Softer World, Jaws, A Softer World remixes. Every one of these is hilarious and absolutely spot-on.

Do Automatons Dream of Albino Eels?, Sunless Sea/Citizen Sleeper, gen, 6k. A zee-captain finds a mechanical stowaway and must decide what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the Citizen Sleeper, but the crossover character fits really naturally into the Fallen London universe. Great atmosphere all the way through, so many deliciously horrible little bits of worldbuilding flavor, and a satisfying arc of the stowaway automaton and the crew learning to care for one another.

fix it (how can you fix it?), BtVS, Spike/Buffy, 3k. Buffy's soulmark signifies that her soulmate died before she was even born. I really enjoyed the extra details of soulmate worldbuilding this added, and if Spike and Buffy were soulmates, I could definitely see it going exactly like this. <3

The Beat Goes On, At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie, 6.6k, gen. The scandal at Bertram's Hotel is a major news story—apparently too major for Beatrice to be trusted with it according to her editors, even though she's always been the one to cover stories about Lady Sedgewick. A very cool timestamp featuring an OC I loved immediately, a female reporter trying to make it in a man's world, and doing whatever she needs to to get the story, including going back home to visit little old Miss Marple. IMO you don't need to remember the novel to enjoy this (because I did not remember it, lol).

Dust Bunny (2025). A little girl hires a hit man (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives across the hall to kill a monster under her bed. Or, Roald Dahl meets John Wick.

This is listed as a "horror thriller," which I guess is true in the same sense that the Barbie movie is a "political drama." I would be more inclined to call this a dark fantasy/action movie. It's also rated R, and I legitimately do not know why; this is like a mid-tier PG-13. I kept waiting for things to get gory and justify the rating, and they never did, so I recommend managing your expectations on that front.

The aesthetic here goes extremely hard. Their apartment building is an absolutely incredible art nouveau confection. We visit other locales with similarly heightened decor, but honestly nothing is nearly as visually stunning, which I think is fine, because the apartment building is the heart of the movie.

The acting here is all extremely good. In addition to Mikkelsen and the child actress, who is fantastic, we also have Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and someone I didn't know named Sheila Atim who is delightful.

This is fun ride and great time. I spent most of the movie having absolutely no idea where it would go next. If any of this piques your interest, I definitely recommend it.

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Wicked: For Good (2025). First, props, the subtitling is clever. Anyway, this is the second half of the story of a good witch and a bad witch fighting/collaborating with the machine while pining for each other and also some guy who's just kind of there.

Honestly, "just kind of there" describes a lot of this movie. It doesn't really expand on any of the political motivation from the first movie, so I had trouble remembering exactly WHY the wizard and his henchwoman have decided to demonize the animals and by extension their defender Elphaba. Fiyero the awkward third wheel, whom I actually found quite charming in the first movie, got almost nothing to do here. No animal character got any kind of significant development; the closest we got was one of the flying monkeys, who didn't even get any lines for plot reasons. There's a subplot involving Elphaba's disabled sister becoming increasingly more unhinged and embittered by her romantic disappointment and probably ableist society at large, but then, you know, she dies from a house falling on her, so that's the end of that. There's a Big Reveal about Elphaba's parentage that literally everyone saw coming, but which Elphaba herself doesn't even get to find out about or react to. There are barely even any big musical set pieces and basically no dance choreography at all. The only song that made a real impression on me was Elphaba's big heel turn song No Good Deed, and I hear from the theater folks that it was kind of weaksauce compared to the live musical version.

All that said, this is the Elphaba and Glinda show, and they're great, honestly. Ariana Grande's comic timing is impeccable. The pining truly is spectacular; there's an amazing scene towards the end that must be seen to be believed. The shippers feasted.

ficinabox reveals have happened, and after being a post-deadline pinch hit (and then a post-post-deadline pinch hit...) and being a little nervous about it, I got some great things. :3 More recs to come once I get a chance to explore the rest of the collection.

i said farewell (i meant don't go), Red Sonja (2025), Sonja/Petra, 7k. Petra survives the arena, goes traveling with Sonja after the end of the movie, and absolute does not pine or have any feelings about it (and then gets abducted by an eldritch cult, oh no). Jaded traumatized warrior women/young earnest warrior woman, what an excellent ship. :') The writing here is gorgeous, and the fic hits that good tropey goodness in a way that can be hard to find in femslash.

Probably readable canon-blind? If this sounds like your jam at all, I definitely recommend. This fandom is SO SMALL that the tag is unwrangled on AO3, and I worry that no one but me is going to find this fic and read it.

The Lonely Ones, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Alexis Rigby pre-slash, 5k. One misterable stormy night, Alexis appears on Booth's doorstep, to their mutual surprise. This is the first fic for this ship longer than a drabble, and I am so delighted it exists. The writing is really delicate and lovely, and very careful, as it needs to be when writing Booth making new personal connections (whether he wants or not).

Reflections, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 3k. Despite his best intentions, Ratcliffe loses touch with Booth and then starts to form some suspicions about why that might be. I love this premise of Booth being a kind of liminal being as well, which fits right in with some of the ways Monette treats time and setting in canon. A nice shippy little ghost(?) story.

Wake Up Dead Man (2025). A young priest accused of murder in a small parish in upstate NY pleads his case to famous detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).

This is the third movie in the Benoit Blanc franchise, and I enjoyed it a lot. The cast is great, as always, and Josh O'Connor in particular as the young priest is fantastic and is the heart of the movie. The writing is solid and often very funny, with some great laugh lines, even if this wasn't trying quite as hard as Glass Onion did. These movies are just fun, even when they don't make all that much sense.

I will say it felt too long; I thought it might be my favorite of the series, and then it went on for another 45 minutes. 💀 It needed at least one less twist and one less dramatic monologue. I also wish one of the secondary antagonists (Cy, the mixed-race would-be Republican politician) had gotten more development or at least a hint of how he'd become who he'd become, not least because he was one of the funniest characters and stole almost every scene he was in. I have some quibbles about the narrative treatment of one of the female characters as well; I think the movie's heart was in the right place, but the execution didn't quite get there.

This one also tackled some heavier themes than either of the others. The charismatic, abusive, ego-driven church leader making his own little cult felt very familiar, especially after that podcast I listened to about Mars Hill.

Overall: just fun. Solidly entertaining in an era when it feels like mainstream movies really struggle to be that. I hope Rian Johnson makes ten more of these.

And this was the last one on his Netflix contract, so maybe the next one will get a real theater release instead of this bizarre indie-and-tiny-chain-only bullshit. OTOH, because the release has been so limited, I saw it in a completely sold-out theater that laughed throughout and then clapped at the end, and that was pretty fun. Silver linings!

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Hell House LLC: Carmichael Manor (2023). A ghosthunter and her girlfriend investigate a supposedly haunted house near the site of the former Abaddon hotel and soon wish they hadn't.

This is the fourth entry in the Hell House LLC franchise, and for my money it is the scariest. There's not even a close second IMO. It took me almost a year to watch this in fits and starts, because I kept getting too tense. I only finally managed it because an online friend was going to watch it and we had a watch party. Found footage is the scariest horror there is, in my opinion; the fiction of watching raw footage removes a last crucial layer of distance between me and the events. This franchise's greatest strength is that it has a fucking scary clown and it knows how to use it, but there are a number of scenes here without even a threat of clown that are genuinely unnerving and use the found footage mechanic in creatively terrifying ways.

As a movie, this is also far and away the best one since the first. The characters are well-developed and don't get bogged down in the history of the previous movies, unlike movies two and three. I do think the last twenty minutes or so, when it tries to tie the story to the broader lore, is by the far the weakest part of the movie, but so it goes.

Also, I've been pining for more found footage horror focused on women, and it's just a bonus that these are an f/f couple to boot, which goes completely unremarked. Yay, more of this please.

If you're looking for a good scarefest with minimal gore next Halloween, you absolutely should check this out.

Meme nabbed from sushiflop, who also has the coded text if you want to do the meme yourself.

Go to your Works page on AO3, look at the tags, and see what the answers to these questions are. (Or any other site that has tags)

1. What rating do you write most fics under? Teen and up. Basically anything with a "fuck" gets marked at least teen, whatever else is in it.

2. What are your top 3 fandoms?
What's listed are Buffy, Hockey RPF, and SPN, but if I go to the MCU page, which includes all my fics that are in MCU subfandoms, that has the most works of any of my fandoms at 95.

3. What is your top character you write about?
Sidney Crosby with 33 fics. Still, all these years later!

4. What are the 3 top pairings?
Sid/Geno (hockey, 24 fics), Liam/Noel (Oasis, 23), and Spike/Buffy (BtVS, 14). Yes indeed, those are my OTPs. <3 Fourth is Dan/Herbert from Re-Animator, which feels right as well.

Despite writing a shit ton of MCU fic, I was too much of a multishipper for any of my ships to threaten the top here. My highest was Carol/Yon-Rogg, and I only wrote 8 for them.

5. What are the top 3 additional tags?
Drabble (64), mpreg (50 jfc), and hurt/comfort (29). Zero percent surprised by the first two, but I'm a little surprised by the h/c count. I don't tend to think of myself as a h/c writer. However, I do like writing things that contain h/c, and I guess I'm good at tagging it when it applies...

6. Did any of this surprise you? e.g. what turned out to be your top tag.
I only need to write two more Gallaghercest fics for that to be my top ship! To be fair a bunch of the existing ones are less than 1k long, so Sid/Geno probably still wins by wordcount, but OTOH one of those Gallaghercest fics was 40k, so maybe not.

I have a big of a rec backlog now and am trying to work through it, so: here are a bunch of art recs from last year! (One of these days the little AO3 symbol will return from the war.)

Batman: Rainy Knight by Reused, Batman, SFW. Incredible black-and-white digital piece. The composition!!

Wednesday Addams: Lazy Wednesday Afternoon by Reused, Wednesday/Enid, very cute.

Cult of the Lamb: Two Bishops by fayharley, SFW. Two very cool eldritch monsters on traditional media!!

Dredge: No one has ever asked by araydre, Collector/Fisherman, SFW. Gorgeous colors and shadows in this.

Dredge: Sunset scene by armadillomania, gorgeous impressionist scene of the fisherman by the lighthouse.

Stardew Valley: late night conversation by Anonymous, Krobus, SFW. Very cute pixel art of Krobus, some junimoes, and a fish.

Original work: anglerfish by bittercape, NSFW. MERMAID ANGLERFISH. And it's in WATERCOLOR.

stripysock, in response to the photo below: This must surely be the most satisfying fandom you've ever been in, for real time live content

me: Yes. I will never have it this good again.



This is from their official socials, by the way.

In late 2019, I:
- Watched Todd in the Shadows's video on Be Here Now
- Fell in love with "D'You Know What I Mean," opening track of Be Here Now, and listened to it about fifty times via the Youtube music video (you know the one, with the actualfax helicopters)
- Found Cerberusia's Yuletide prompt for Oasis omegaverse
- Listened to their first two albums. I liked the second album a little better, and on the second or third loop of it playing on Youtube in the background (because I hadn't even subscribed to Tidal yet), I went hey, this song's neat, I wonder what it's called? Friends, it was Wonderwall.
- Watched Supersonic, their two-hour documentary/extremely high-end marketing film.
- Watched a bunch of archive interviews on Youtube, read a bunch more. Fell alllllll the way down the rabbit hole. Collected all the links in a giant word doc that I maintain to this day and which formed the basis of the primer I posted a few months later.
- Wrote 5k of Oasis omegaverse porn. (Got an approving comment on it from one of the OG omegaverse writers!!)

Six years!! I can't believe all that's happened since. 2019 was the absolute nadir of their relationship, and now they hug on stage every night while grinning at each other like soppy adoring idiots. (You see what I mean.) I've written almost 120k of fic and stuck around more or less continuously for longer than I've been in any other fandom. I've seen Liam solo three times, Noel once, and Oasis twice. These gigs have taken me to London, Manchester, and Dublin (twice), after only having been to Europe once before, and have led me to meeting up with a bunch of friends while overseas, some for the first time IRL. After first seeing Liam in 2022, I also started going to see other live music, and some special favorites have been Garbage, Lord Huron, and Saint Motel.

Meanwhile the world in general and I personally have gone through a lot of shit that continues unabated. It's been a very long six years.

The weather here has turned wet and cold, just as it was when I first listened to What's the Story Morning Glory on repeat in 2019. I put the album on in car this weekend, and the big wailing guitars and Liam's voice, helped along by the same grim autumn weather in which I first heard these songs, took me straight back to that original thrill of discovery.

We take our joy where we find it. I have found a lot of mine the past few years in this band and especially these two guys.

The Secret of Chimneys (1925) by Agatha Christie. An adventurous fellow arrives in England set on delivering a manuscript and a batch of illicit love letters and ends up in a wild plot involving a murder, a stolen jewel, and a Ruritanian country in Eastern Europe.

This is one of Christie's light-hearted romps. I definitely read this at some point 25+ years ago but had forgotten basically everything, including how much fun Christie is when she's in this mode. (Aside from the ambiant xenophobia, classism, antisemitism, and some unexpectedly central pro-monarchial sentiments.) I had a great time.

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Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer. A collection of essays spanning a wide range of topics at least tangentially related to climbing. As the title suggests, not many women in this book. Overall a mixed bag, as an essay collection is liable to be, and sometimes Krakauer's voice wears a bit thin, especially when he's trying to be funny. OTOH, in the midst of "Tentbound," an otherwise tediously humorous essay on being stuck in your tent for days at a time, we get this passage, the end of which delights me more than I can even articulate:

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious, peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington Post: "Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound . . . Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredome, lest his tail grow scaly.

My favorites out of the bunch are probably "Valdez Ice," about climbing frozen waterfalls; "Club Denali," about people attempting to climb Denali; and "Devil's Thumb," about him randomly deciding at the age of 23 to go to Alaska and solo climb a particular peak. You will notice all of these are about difficult, hazardous climbing in very cold temperatures, aka sort of similar to his Everest book.

In addition, usually Krakauer gives kind of mixed messages about his own climbing, on one hand saying it's an addiction and the only thing he's good at, and on the other hand only talking about how uncomfortable it is and how much he would rather be doing something else, So Devil's Thumb in particular was nice for a story of him actually doing some major climbing and only making a little bit of fun of himself over it.