teach me the art of war

Some media about women being intense and gloriously weird

Wed, 13 May 2026 03:07:02 GMT

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, trans. Polly Barton: osprey_archer wrote in glowing terms about this book, and then just recently, a copy jumped out at me from a library shelf - so really, what was I supposed to do? It's about a journalist, Rika Machida, who gets in over her head while covering a sensational story about convicted female serial killer Manako Kajii, who is claimed to have lured in her victims through marriage-oriented dating apps, seduced them with her cooking skills, milked them to fund her luxury lifestyle and then callously disposed of them. The most controversial thing about the case, far more viscerally appalling to the public than the lives lost and ruined, is the fact that Kajii is fat. The idea that a fat woman could convince multiple men to want her so badly that they'd shower her in money and finery has people bemused at the absolute best and frothing with hateful rage at the worst.

Did Kajii really commit the murders? This novel doesn't give a fuck! The true-crime-journalism angle is mere set dressing for what is actually a passionate story about female hunger in a society where misogyny, rampant body shaming and a general pressure to conform make it taboo for women to actually want almost anything at all. It is fluffy and heartwarming in places, horribly dark in others, and slathered all over with vivid, sensuous descriptions of food. Everything revolves around Rika's dangerous growing closeness to Kajii, and the corresponding distance opening up between her and her best friend, Reiko; both relationships are characterised by obsessiveness, insecurity and unexpressed yearning, with strong homoerotic undercurrents. (These are not just wishful thinking on my part; I know Japanese homosocial norms are different from Western, but Yuzuki herself is explicit, if inconclusive, about the fact that lines are being at the very least toed right up to.) I am a fairly fast reader - partly because suspense is not my friend (I need to know what happens, damn it!) and partly because I so enjoy the dopamine hit of successfully crossing a task off my mental to-do list - and this is the first time in ages that a first-time read has had me regretting this about myself, because I really would have liked to luxuriate for longer in the deliciousness and complex psychological honesty of these pages.

( On the other hand... [cut for candid and personal weight/fatphobia talk] )

Above disclaimer (tldr; big trigger warning for ED sufferers) notwithstanding, this might be my favourite thing I've read this year so far.

Deadloch season 2: This was good telly, but compared to the flawless first season, I feel disappointed. Detectives Eddie and Dulcie, along with Dulcie's civilian wife Cath, have gone caravanning up to the Northern Territory to investigate the possible murder of Eddie's previous detective partner. Instead, they get embroiled in a completely different murder case, involving the deceased owner of one of the town's two competing crocodile tour companies whose body has started washing up in pieces along the river. The formula is the same as last season: it's crime/black comedy with a sharp eye for misogyny and a major subplot focusing on queer relationships. The ongoing workings-out of Cath and Dulcie's marital issues were my very favourite thing this season, followed closely by Eddie's exploration of her/their newly discovered queerness, conducted in the most maximally brash, eccentric, Eddie-ish way possible. Fantastic stuff. Unfortunately, the main plot largely did not work for me this time.

Part of my annoyance is with the cultural depiction of Australia. Last season took a very nuanced and diverse view of small-town Tasmanian society, which rang true even (maybe especially) at its most satirical; this season, the supporting cast was dominated by exhaustingly loud Top End bogans whose portrayal imo tipped a bit over the caricature line. The Kates are southeasterners (and to be fair, so am I) so I guess it makes sense that they have less of a wealth of experience to draw on for their portrayal of the NT, but...idk, I'm not even saying those kinds of people don't exist, I'm just saying they're not ALL that exists up there, and I would have really liked a bit less screentime chewed up by making fun of them. Not least because they are exhaustingly loud. Eddie's antics were funny when Eddie was the clown to everyone else's straight man; once the other clowns all trooped in, and it was just a big crowd of clowns trying to out-clown each other, it stopped being enjoyable to watch.

The other annoying part was the murder mystery itself, which lacked all the sharp, twisty urgency of the previous one. I spent so much of last season compulsively trying to guess who the culprit was, feeling tantalisingly close to putting the pieces together, only to have all my conclusions thoroughly (and pleasurably) swept away by the finale. This time it took me the whole first half of the season to even start caring whodunnit, and by the time I did start caring, the rough shape of the answer was obvious; the twists thrown in at the end to try and make it more of a surprise felt cheap and tacked on. And CONVOLUTED. Holy fuck, the finale was convoluted. Too many threads tied in too loose a knot, with most of them completely unnecessary to the actual structure of the rope.

So I'm not sorry for the time I spent watching it, and I'm very happy with how things worked out for the main characters, but I'm also not sorry it ended in a way that seems to preclude any further sequels. I would like to keep my memories of the absolute pristine perfection that was season one as untainted by later missteps as possible, so here is definitely the place to stop.

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Recipes I will be making again

Thu, 07 May 2026 11:19:11 GMT

A million years ago, fiachairecht blogged about having made gochujang cookies and I declared that I HAD to follow suit immediately!!! And then I...um, didn't, first because I was tired, then because I had no gochujang and the Asian grocer is such an inconvenient extra trip from my usual supermarket run, then finally because I figured the kids probably wouldn't like them and baking just isn't as fun when you can't share the goodies with your loved ones. But yesterday evening in a fit of sweet-toothed greed I at long last whipped up a batch just for myself, and you guys omg these are delicious! The texture is divinely crisp-chewy and the flavour of gochujang works better as a sweet than I would ever have predicted! I think I'll omit the cinnamon next time, or at least halve the quantity, because even in such a small amount it was more assertive than I wanted it to be. But that is a minor complaint which the perfectly balanced salt-sweet-spiciness more than makes up for.

On a very different note, this evening I left my dinner planning unreasonably late and ended up trying this stovetop mac and cheese recipe out of sheer desperation to get something on the table. RecipeTin Eats has never let me down in all the years I've been going there for recipes, and while it didn't come out quite as good as the baked version I usually make, it did take quite literally only a third of the time and generate a lot less washing up, and was still perfectly cromulent mac and cheese.

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Brows, high and low: a whiplashy reading post

Tue, 05 May 2026 23:54:52 GMT

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai: Florian Herscht, a young German man with no family and an ambiguous learning disability, has become convinced that he - and perhaps he alone - can see the end of the universe coming, due to his misunderstanding of an adult education class in particle physics. What is to be done about this? Why, he needs to inform Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel will know just what to do. In his free time Florian writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel; the rest of the time he works for the Boss, who runs both a cleaning company (Florian's business) and a unit of militant neo-Nazis marshalled in their fading, impoverished former industrial village (not Florian's business, despite the Boss's ongoing efforts to indoctrinate him).

The cover of this novel is emblazoned very prominently with its author's prestigious awards (he is last year's Nobel laureate in Literature and has also received an International Booker) but that's not why I read it. I read it because my sister's boyfriend pressed his unwanted copy on me with the irresistibly flattering remark that he absolutely hated it but that I, a more serious reader than him, would surely be equal to its challenge. This worked on me a little too well and I devoured the book over two and a bit days, despite the fact that it is, in fact, quite difficult.

Specifically, it is difficult because the whole thing is written in a single sentence. At least in its English translation (by Ottilie Mulzet; the original is in Hungarian) this obviously involves some abuses of grammar, and with no chapter, paragraph or even sentence breaks, you don't really feel like you can stop. I spent the first fifty pages or so involuntarily trying to dismantle the prose into more traditional units in my head before I finally got into the flow of it; after that it was a dreamlike, slightly bewildering reading experience, where I gave up trying to keep strict track of the chronology (it jumps around all over the place, back and forth in time as well as freely between characters' heads) and just let the story wash over me. Set shortly before and during the COVID pandemic, it is perhaps around 70% supremely petty goings-on between a community of ageing smalltown Germans and their beloved village idiot, and then 30% appalling Nazi violence; the result is darkly funny, depressing, infuriating, and quietly apocalyptic in its portrayal of a way of life that is in irreversible global decline. I'm not exactly hoping the prose style catches on more broadly, but I did very much enjoy myself.

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig: This has been marketed all wrong! It's neither romantasy nor fantasy proper, and if you try to read it as either, you get major structural and stylistic problems. What it actually is - and what it does a really good job of being, imo - is a fairytale. An original, longform, gothic fairytale updated to millennial/gen z sensibilities. If you've ever read one of those "feminist fairytale retellings" that have been so prominent on bookstore shelves in recent years, that's going to give you the closest sense of what reading this book is like.

Our heroine, Sybil, was taken into Aisling Cathedral as a child and has no memories of her life before being inducted as one of her faith's six Diviners. These girls - always girls - have the power to foretell the future through their dreams as they are drowned to unconsciousness in a magical spring. But as the Diviners' ten year period of service nears its close, and the now adult young women look forward to their freedom in the wider kingdom, they start vanishing one by one. Sybil flees the cathedral and sets out on a quest to discover what has happened to her sisters, helped along the way by an adorably eccentric gargoyle and a devilishly handsome, abrasive knight named Rodrick Myndacious.

(Yes, his name is actually Myndacious.)

The worldbuilding in this story is a lot of fun but not at all to be taken seriously. The characters all read like ordinary modern people who have agreed to live under a feudal system for the #aesthetic but see no actual reason why that other guy over there (the king of the realm) should think he's any better than them! Get over yourself, Your Majesty! The Diviners are Vestal Virgins who smoke fantasy marijuana, have casual sex to their hearts' content, and affectionately call each other "shrews" instead of "bitches". The kingdom's economy is in the silliest state since the king from Sleeping Beauty ordered all his land's fibrecraft to a halt: there are only five hamlets, each of which is entirely devoted to (respectively) the crafts of Scribe, Forester, Fisherman, Merchant or Weaver; the earth just tills itself, I guess. The author also spoon-feeds every moral message and plot development with such fondly infantilising care that I had accurately guessed the entire book's trajectory by the time we were done with the set-up. But this is kind of why I'm harping on genre: nobody reads fairytales because they're in serious suspense as to whether Sleeping Beauty will really wake up, or whether Cinderella will really get her prince. I would have liked it even better if I'd been allowed to feed myself, but at the end of the day, the stuff on the spoon tasted really damn good.

This book is only the first in a series called The Stonewater Kingdom; the next instalment is due this September, and I'm going to have to read it, because the ending of the first is too dark to be left alone. I mean, I can pretty much already guess how it's all going to resolve, but I won't feel satisfied until I see it happen. The final book of The Hurricane Wars trilogy is also due out shortly after, in October, so I guess the back end of this year is going to be heavy on enemies(ish)-to-lovers popcorn reads with endearingly silly worldbuilding for me.

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Reading post

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:41:51 GMT

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie: On a routine trip to the dentist, legendary private detective Monsieur Poirot becomes embroiled in a case of apparent suicide that looks increasingly suspicious as the bodies of other patients from that day's appointments start to pile up. This is a clever, twisty, wryly funny mystery on par with everything you'd expect from Christie; my Poirot reading has been sporadic and out of order, but he's such a vivid character that it only took a few pages before he felt like the very best of fictional acquaintances. I find it impressive in general how much Christie manages to do with so few words. Her prose is very neat and precise, with minimal but to-the-point descriptions and long passages of untagged dialogue that are nonetheless easy as anything to track. She lures you through the story at a brisk walking place - pleasant, exhilarating, but not exhausting - and then ends it all with a solution to the puzzle that you could never have guessed (well, I couldn't, anyway) but feel like you should have guessed for how well it brings together all the clues.

Carefully avoiding any spoilers, I will just say that I really liked the pairing of crime-thriller-worthy events with the utterly prosaic setting of a dentist's office, and then also, paired with that, Poirot's nobly naive insistence on the value of ordinary human life in the face of grand ideologies. IDK, it was all just so nice, for a story with so many corpses in it. Our girl Agatha was perfecting the cosy mystery long before the genre was a twinkle in the zeitgeist's eye.

H. P. Lovecraft: I have never attempted Lovecraft before, but I came in abundantly forewarned of his 1) breathtaking racism and 2) rather unlovely prose. The latter I mitigated somewhat by listening to this first handful of stories in audio format, with a good narrator to make up for the lifelessness; the latter can't be helped. I enjoyed myself, anyway!

( Three novellas/short stories )

Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin: And now for something completely different! I've been plugging away at this all month, and it has been an experience. Augustine (St. Augustine in the saint-having traditions) is a 4th century church father, theologian, philosopher and priest from Roman Africa. He was from a mixed-faith family and his mother attempted to raise him Christian, but in his twenties he fell in with the Manichaeans (a dualist religion incorporating elements of Christianity as well as other faiths). Augustine was fiercely intelligent, passionately interested in philosophy and rhetoric, and never fully satisfied by the Manichaean doctrines; it took him a decade of uncertainty and questioning, but eventually, at age 32, he embraced Christianity wholeheartedly after being taught an allegorical approach to reading scripture that resolved all his objections to the faith.

( Cut for length )

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Gorgeous women who are not having a very good time

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:22:27 GMT

I've slowed my horror movie roll a bit, mainly because the work I'm doing on my fanbinding project lends itself to the same headspace and timeslot as movie-watching. But I have not lost interest! Today's unintentional mini-theme is toxic female friendship, yay.

Jennifer's Body (2009): A struggling indie band turns to Satan to give them their big break, but the girl they chose for their virgin sacrifice was unfortunately not a virgin. Instead of dying, the ritual causes Jennifer to become possessed by a demon, and leaves her devoted best friend Anita ("Needy") struggling to come to terms with a Jennifer who is mostly the same cool, hot, vacuous, slightly mean teenage girl she's always been, only now she feeds off the flesh of her male classmates.

I'm boggling that I never saw this in cinemas when it came out, because it was fucking laser-targeted at my demographic (emo kids who were coming of age in the late 2000s), but I can't recall any of my friends even talking about it. I recognised almost every band on the soundtrack. I recognised a lot of faces too: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, that guy from The O.C. Anyway, it was a great time! If I hadn't been out and rug-munching for several years by the time it was released, that Jennifer/Needy makeout scene would have given me the mother of all sexual awakenings too, lol. Those heady teenage hormones were off the charts.

Fall (2022): A year after her husband's death in a rock climbing accident, Becky allows her best friend Hunter (a youtuber who has built her brand on daredevil stunts) to goad her into climbing a decommissioned TV tower together. The tower is 2000ft/610m high, rusted through, and due to be demolished soon. They tell no one what they're doing and pack no food or survival gear. The ladder gives way beneath them, and the two end up trapped on a tiny open platform right at the top.

I fucking loved this, okay? Looking at reviews after I'd finished watching made me feel kind of dumb, because everyone else was all "too much suspension of disbelief" and "saw the twist coming a mile off" and "leads are so dumb they deserve it" while I was just there like 🤯🤯🤯. Hot women with a dangerous physical hobby! Extreme heights! Confined to a single location with literally no room to maneuver, and somehow still heart-stoppingly tense and exciting the whole way through! Yes the leads are a bit dumb and yes the filmmakers are less than 100% married to realism the whole way through. (There's no point me defending the twist, because I am a very naive viewer; most twists catch me off guard, whether they're well executed or not.) But all I really wanted was attractive, dysfunctional women and vertigo-inducing aerial shots and to spend a decent portion of the runtime yelling "no no no don't do that!" through my fingers, and you couldn't get a purer, more intense experience of those things than this film if you injected them intravenously.

In Fall-adjacent news, I am greatly amused by the existence of this Getting Stuck in Terrible Places Cinematic Universe list on letterboxd. Some of these films I have already seen over the years; some are on my watch list; others I have never even heard of. But a person who can put Saw, The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer and The Blair Witch Project all together on a themed list and have it make perfect, intuitive sense is a person I can respect.

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Book review: The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:48:37 GMT

This book is classic children's literature that has shaped every generation of Australian horse girls since it was published in the 1950s. I'm revisiting it now for the first time since I turned double digits old, but it all feels almost as fresh in my memory as if I last read it a week ago. It's one of those stories that really, truly sticks with you if you read it at the right age!

Thowra is a brumby (feral horse) living in the Snowy Mountains; he is passionate, wild and deeply in love with his bushland home, but attracts attention wherever he goes due to his unusually pale palomino colouring. He is beset on one side by rival stallions vying for his mares and territory, and on the other side by human trackers and stockmen eager to capture and tame him. But Thowra is extremely cunning, with an intimate knowledge of bush survival imparted since birth by his similarly attention-grabbing mother Bel Bel, so he is able to outwit all his enemies and retain his precious freedom.

The brumbies and other animals are semi-anthropomorphised: they talk among themselves, understand human speech and think in humanlike, analytical ways, but their behaviour, instincts and social structures are as authentically horsey as Mitchell could make them. I am not a brumby expert and can't vouch for the book's actual scientific accuracy, but Mitchell has clearly observed horses closely and tried to stay true to her observations, even when they are sharply at odds with human morality (mature offspring maintaining no relationship with their parents; murderous fights between stallions being accepted as the natural way of things; etc). She wants us to empathise fully with her equine characters while recognising them as fundamentally unlike us, and largely resists the temptation to project familiar human family values onto them as a cheap way of getting us emotionally invested. I'm not saying The Silver Brumby does a better job at teaching children the basic principles of cultural relativism than any Very Special Episode I've ever watched, but I'm also not not saying that.

The landscape of the Snowy Mountains is vividly described to the point of feeling almost like a character in its own right. Everything is snow gums and snow grass, rocky crags and howling winds and icy rivers flowing down from the mountains. As a child I once camped in the region during winter; I remember the cold being so intense that it became like a substance, a physical thing trying to shove me back when I climbed out of the tent. It hurt and it made me feel so, so alive. The whole book crackles with that energy.

I know I must have read every book in this series, but by some unhappy chance I only seem to own copies of the first and last; perhaps I took the others out of the library, or perhaps the rest of my collection fell victim to my mum's legendary garage sales of the early oughts. Tracking down the rest shouldn't be hard, but if possible I'd really like editions to match my battered, lightly foxed sexagenarian hardbacks with their torn or missing dust jackets. Nostalgia is at stake here! Clearly I'll have to do some secondhand bookshop scouting.

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There is nothing I can do to wrangle my current media consumption into a coherent post

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:50:53 GMT

I'm just. I'm ALL OVER THE PLACE. And have drunk rather a lot of gin this evening, meaning you guys get to hear the unfiltered reactions while I'm too compromised to try and make myself sound smart about any of it.

Reading: Saint Augustine's Confessions (blowing my mind, this guy can really Theology) and Elyne Mitchell's The Silver Brumby (haven't read since I was like eight, but remembering everything literally beat for beat as I read, this is honestly such amazing children's literature and I can't wait to post about it in more detail when I'm done).

Watching: The Autopsy of Jane Doe (scared the everloving shit out of me), Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (didn't scare me even a tiny bit, I literally set up a VPN just so I could access this, everyone was saying it's so scary but it isn't), and Inside the World's Toughest Prisons (are you guys going to think I'm a complete fucking weirdo if I admit that this is a semi-regular comfort watch for me).

Listening: Iron Maiden. So much Iron Maiden. I've been trying to do deep dives into a bunch of different albums, but right now I'm so in love with A Matter of Life and Death that I don't want to move on to a different album, and it's rather hampering my progress.

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Another horror movie post

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:46:21 GMT

The Dark and the Wicked (2020): The grown children of Texas farmers come home to support their dying father in his last days, but a demonic presence is hanging over the house, filling the family's heads with terrifying hallucinations and the urge to commit brutal acts of self-mutilation. This film is style over substance, but the style was genuinely extremely good, so...I liked it, I think? The plot is paper thin and the veneer of "elevated" horror is hardly worth analysing. It's a haunted house story. Terrible forces do terrible things to ordinary people and there's no way to stop them. But the focus is on slow, building dread over action; the atmosphere is stark and lonely, full of sweeping shots of the farmstead that are sometimes so underlit you have to squint and other times so overexposed it sears your eyes, all clearly done intentionally; the soundtrack doesn't miss a single trick to get your heart beating faster. Everything is beautiful and horribly off-kilter.

Do I see myself wanting to rewatch this? No, probably not. The fucky lighting made my eyes hurt and there's nothing about any of the characters that makes me crave more time with them. But the movie gave me exactly what I wanted: to feel so scared it was a genuine struggle not to close my eyes and cower away from the screen. Only one other movie has so far given me such an intense, lizard-brain fright, and that was The Tunnel. We all have our specific fears; I guess "inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily, inexorably out of the darkness" must be mine.

It Follows (2014): Hahaha, and then after that realisation I decided to watch a film where an inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily and inexorably for like ninety minutes straight. Three guesses what kind of emotional state I was in after this one. 😅

It was great, though! It's about a murderous horror that is sexually transmitted; once it has latched onto you, the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else. Until then, it follows you. Everywhere. At a slow and steady walking pace. It can take on any human form, it knows where you are at all times, and it never stops. You can buy yourself time by getting far away, but sooner or later it will catch back up; if it gets its hands on you, it will kill you. So, obviously, our college-age protagonist Jay catches It after sleeping with a guy she's been dating, who it turns out seduced her under a false identity out of desperation to save his own life. Her sister and a handful of childhood friends rally around her, and together they try to find a solution to the curse while staying ahead of the pursuit. It's a really interesting, self-aware but not satirical twist on the "sex = death" slasher trope, and also REALLY FUCKING SCARY. (I mean, we've established that slow pursuit scares me shitless; others' mileage may vary, idk.)

On the other hand, the main girl looked so much like Hilary Duff that it kept throwing me out of the story, and the time period was jarringly out of whack. Everyone drove vintage cars, had 80s wall phones and 90s TV sets on which they watched 1950s horror movies, the internet didn't seem to exist but one character had this bizarre, kitschy little clamshell e-reader on which she was reading Dostoevsky...apparently it was supposed to feel "timeless" and "dreamlike" but I just found it distracting. Not enough to negate how much I liked the actual storyline, but it was an irritating little niggle, and in general I found a lot of the aesthetic choices in this movie odd and unappealing. Horror movies can be scary, thematically interesting AND pretty! This one only scored two out of three, and that just felt like an unfortunate waste.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023): A true crime vlogger takes her real estate agent girlfriend and her schizophrenic brother to stay several nights at a remote manor that was the site of a grisly domestic homicide, and that also (she learns, to her very great misfortune) turns out to be connected to the infamous Abaddon Hotel tragedy. snickfic promised me 1) a lesbian main couple and 2) even scarier clowns than the ones in the original movie, and has proved faithful on both counts. These were some seriously NASTY clowns, and I really liked the main couple with their Mulder and Scully-Against-Her-Will dynamic. I thought the true crime fan angle was a very good justification for the whole investigation setup, even as it set my teeth on edge (in a fuck-you way, not a scary horror way - I have some strong views on the true crime genre and the fannish community around it, but we are not going to get into that here, because life is short and outrage is cheap and I should be in bed right now instead of blogging about horror movies in the first place).

Anyway, yeah, really enjoyed this! Don't have much to say about it, but really enjoyed it.

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Fandom 5K 2026

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:09:48 GMT

( Letter under the cut )

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Bite-Sized Fandoms Exchange 2026

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:08:57 GMT

( Letter under the cut )

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Some 1940s movies: comedy, horror and film noir

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:09:50 GMT

I'm bouncing around the media landscape like a pinball at the moment. No idea why but I'm having a great time! Icon in honour of Bela Lugosi, who is forever and always a vampire in my heart if not in this specific film selection.

His Girl Friday (1940): This is a really fun screwball comedy about a slick, dodgy newspaper editor trying to win back his journalist ex-wife by manipulating her into covering one last story for him. Hildy is a brilliant reporter who excels at her aggressive, fast-paced job and is very much "one of the guys" among her colleagues - including her ex-husband Walter, hence the divorce. Walter's life revolves around the newspaper; he even cancelled their honeymoon so they could both rush to the site of a breaking story. Hildy pines for a more traditional feminine life in which she is romanced and protected, free to maintain a peaceful home and raise children while her husband works a steady, predictable job to provide for them. To that end, she has left Walter and become engaged to insurance salesman Bruce. The meat of the movie is a chaotic farce in which Walter deploys a wild barrage of sneaky, often criminal tactics to lure Hildy away from Bruce and reawaken her love for her career (and, by assumed extension, for him).

The gender dynamics in this were fascinating. Hildy's professional competence is about the only thing the film takes seriously; through all the wacky hijinks she is universally respected as a good reporter, with no trace of any "for a woman" caveat. (Nearly every other woman who appears onscreen is a secretary or telephone operator, and in brief interactions Hildy is as collegial with them as she is with her more "esteemed" fellow reporters, but they don't really feature much one way or another.) Of course Hildy's whole inner conflict revolves around the unchallenged premise that women, as a class, belong in the domestic sphere; but Hildy herself is the only character who seems to view the issue along gendered lines. For everyone else, it's about journalists vs non-journalists; people who can be satisfied with staid domestic life (of whom Hildy's classically masculine new fiancé is the prime example) versus people who crave the thrill and challenge of the fast-paced media world. The other career reporters all shake their heads and predict a swift end to the whole Hildy/Bruce business. No way will anyone as thoroughly like them as Hildy be able to stand the tedium of the American picket-fence dream for more than six months. I'm not saying it was some kind of feminist statement in the modern sense; I just enjoyed the nuance of how Hildy's femininity was handled. She was a great character.

The Devil Bat (1940): Bela Lugosi stars as a mad scientist with a vendetta against his employers, the owners of a cosmetics firm who have gotten rich off his designs while paying him only a tiny fraction of the profits. His genius plan for revenge is twofold: firstly he has engineered himself a giant bat large and strong enough to kill a man, and secondly he has trained the bat to become enraged at the scent of a specific chemical, which he has put into a specially formulated aftershave. Target applies aftershave to neck. Bat swoops in to tear out jugular. Bam! Greedy capitalist gets what he deserves.

This was every bit as ridiculous as I hoped it would be. It's billed as straightforward horror, but it's really more of a bat-themed, lightly murderous comedy. A lot of the action is driven by a pair of madcap journalists investigating the story, whose antics include things like using taxidermy to produce fake photos of the devil bat, doctoring out the wires that made it fly but forgetting to remove a label from the wing that says "Made in Japan". I was honestly cheering for the doctor, partly because his evil plan is so delightfully (ahem) batshit, and partly just because, you know. Bela Lugosi. Unlike the other two films in this post, this one is very much not a must-watch of 40s cinema, but it's certainly a why-the-hell-not, especially since its runtime is barely over an hour. I had fun.

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Hardboiled private detective Sam Spade gets hired under false pretences for a job that leads to the death of his business partner and ends up embroiling him in a violent, competitive criminal scheme to gain possession of an unthinkably valuable historical artefact known as the Maltese Falcon. This is, of course, one of the films noir and has all the elements you'd expect: a cynical, street-smart protagonist, a beautiful femme fatale for him to have dangerous chemistry with, a supporting cast of gangsters who are forever double-crossing each other.

I'm kind of drawing a blank on what to say about this one, but I honestly really loved it and it has whet my appetite for more film noir. The pacing is much slower than today's modern crime thrillers and that really worked for me; the latter tend to stress me out so much that I have to be in just the right mood to watch them. This was tense and exciting without forcing me to lie down afterwards. The whole chiaroscuro aesthetic was absolutely gorgeous. My favourite moment was when the femme fatale slaps a gangster, who goes to hit her back, only for Sam to leap in and bellow in the man's face, 'When you're slapped, you'll take it and you'll like it!' Iconic, honestly. Sam Spade is a true ally to femdom fans everywhere. More men should learn from his example.

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Nausea by Sartre & The Stranger by Camus

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:25:00 GMT

Disclaimer: I am trying to meet these books on their own terms, but it's hard. Intellectually I accept that Sartre and Camus were brilliant philosophers who contributed valuable things to modern thought; the trouble is that in the decades since their breakthroughs, existentialism has been so widely and enthusiastically embraced by teenage edgelords that engaging with it makes me feel like it's the early 2000s and I'm in the off-topic chatroom of a Marilyn Manson fan forum ranting about how my stupid sheeple parents keep making me clean my room even though objectively nothing matters. It's a cultural baggage that I just can't shake, sorry.

But anyway, troisoiseaux posted about reading The Stranger a while ago, and it reminded me of the time I read both Nausea and The Stranger for a high school lit studies class and ended up at war with the teacher over which was the better novel. I thought Roquentin was a visionary and had no patience for Mersault's bullshit; my teacher scoffed and implied very strongly (I don't remember his exact words, just my own indignation) that I was a silly little girl who had been falsely taken in by Sartre and lacked the maturity to appreciate Camus. troisoiseaux's review brought all that petty adolescent resentment flooding back as if it were yesterday, but I realised that for all the heat of my grudge I couldn't actually remember any of the details of either book. So I decided to reread them both and see how my teenage opinions hold up to a more mature review. Conclusion: The Stranger is still dumb as shit! Fuck you and your smug Camus fanboying, Adrian!

Okay, actually, no. My opinion is more nuanced than that. (Maybe not much more nuanced, since, as I already mentioned, I really do not vibe with the existentialist worldview.) Both Nausea and The Stranger are short, stream-of-consciousness first person French novels about a dysfunctional man coming to understand that life is meaningless, written within a few years of each other during the interwar/WW2 period.

( More thoughts )

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I Spit On Your Grave (cw: sexual violence)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:12:49 GMT

Help, I started watching these notorious, near universally panned exploitation films because I was in a bad mood and wanted something to be angry about, except I accidentally ended up thinking they were KIND OF FUCKING GREAT, ACTUALLY, and now I am forced to declare myself a card-carrying member of the Dead Rapists Cinematic Universe fanclub. I swear with hand on heart that I'm not trying to be iconoclastic here. I just. I thought these were good films. I enjoyed them. I can see where the critical consensus is coming from and I don't think it's Wrong, per se, but I also really just completely disagree, which I guess means that I am either a bad feminist or (I'd prefer to think) just vibrating on a different frequency than the mainstream in this case.

Anyway, backing up a bit: I Spit On Your Grave is an extremely controversial rape-revenge horror movie franchise. It's about...well, I guess the genre label is pretty self-explanatory. A rape survivor exacts murderous revenge on her rapists. The original film was released in 1978, and widely banned or censored around the world for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. (A brutal gang rape scene takes up 30 full minutes of runtime.) A remake came out in 2010, followed by a couple of sequels; in 2019, the original director and lead actress returned with a sequel to the 1978 version. So far I have only watched the 2010 remake and its 2015 direct sequel. I plan to watch the 1978 as well but will probably skip the 2019 sequel (which apparently kills my first movie Final Girl blorbo) and am undecided on the 2013 middle movie of the remake trilogy (unrelated plot with all-new characters).

I'm going to put the entire rest of this post under a cut for obvious reasons. But tl;dr, if you can stomach the sexual violence, these movies absolutely have a place in the feminist conversation imo and are very impactful, successful horror in their own right.

( Potentially triggering discussion of potentially triggering films under the cut )

Has anyone else here watched any of these movies? Or want to use my "objectively" bad taste new obsession as a jumping-off point to gush about your own favourite exploitation media? Just tell me I'm not alone here in actually really, really liking something I'm by all accounts supposed to hate.

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Book post: crime and romance

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:35:44 GMT

Fire and Bones by Kathy Reichs: This is a Temperance Brennan novel, also of Bones TV show fame, chosen with no regard for series order but simply because it's the one my library happened to have available for immediate ebook download when I wanted it. This didn't seem to matter, as it usually doesn't in this kind of long-running crime series. There was some stuff about a relationship in the background that was clearly part of a longer-running arc, but it was pretty self-explanatory and neither took up much page space nor made any difference to the main mystery plot. That said, it was a very odd reading experience, in ways I don't think are accounted for just by not knowing Temperance's full backstory.

( No spoilers, just thoughts )

Naked in Death by JD Robb (AKA Nora Roberts): JD Robb is the penname Nora Roberts uses for her near-future, lightly sci-fi tinged crime/romance genre mashup novels. I did start this series in the correct order, at the strict urging of my mother, who has been dying to have someone to enthuse with about these books for ages and who pounced the moment I mentioned being in the mood for something quick, formulaic and exciting. This certainly fit the bill, although it also went to some dark places that I had definitely not osmosed to expect from Nora Roberts.

The protagonist Eve Dallas is a police lieutenant working in New York in the late 2050s. Guns have been outlawed; sex work has been legalised and heavily regulated for safety; despite these facts, sex workers are getting killed with guns in a string of clearly related homicides. Eve is assigned to the case as primary investigator, but her professionalism soon comes under threat from two directions: the nature of the case dredges up old wounds related to her own childhood trauma, while the romantic overtures of a mysterious, handsome, absurdly wealthy entrepreneur named Roarke start to win her over despite her best efforts to stay distant.

( More thoughts )

Deliver Me by Ashley Hawthorne: My adventures in pull-to-pub Reylo fic continue, and...oh, man. How do I even begin to review this one? I haven't had such warring feelings about a book since The Hurricane Wars. I think there's a common theme here where I have so much fannish goodwill towards these books that I give them leeway on flaws that would otherwise be an instant DNF, and then I end up enjoying them so much that I'm glad I gave them that leeway, but the flaws are still very much there and ARGH...

Let me start by saying that I unreservedly adore what this book is trying to be. It's about Mia, a Texan college student and devout (but very socially progressive) Christian who joins her Bible study's prison pen pal initiative and gets paired with Gabriel, who at 28 years old has been incarcerated since his mid-teens for the murder of his father. Mia soon comes to understand that Gabriel did not get a fair trial: abandoned by his remaining family, too young and traumatised to self-advocate, he was left to the mercy of an overworked, disinterested public defender and a media circus that the courts took no measures whatsoever to manage. His history of harrowing abuse and the desperate circumstances surrounding the altercation with his father were all excluded from evidence, and he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole when his mitigating circumstances should have reduced the conviction to second degree. He and Mia fall in love and begin a relationship through their correspondence; Mia becomes passionate about the brokenness of the Texas justice system and changes her major with the goal of becoming a lawyer; she also convinces a nihilistically resigned Gabriel to appeal his conviction in the hopes of a fairer retrial.

( Thoughts, technically with spoilers, though nothing you wouldn't guess from the first few chapters )

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Drive-by horror fanvid rec: Bloody Creature Poster Girl

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:38:06 GMT

[VID] Bloody Creature Poster Girl by satanicnightjar: A tribute to monster/demon/slasher/psycho girls in film. Content warnings for blood, gore, violence, and general R-rated content.

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Scary zombies, romantic zombies, and a romance novella with no zombies at all

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:42:13 GMT

[REC] (2007): This is Spanish found footage horror about a zombie virus outbreak in an apartment complex, filmed by a TV reporting duo who get trapped in there while accompanying first responders for a workplace documentary feature. On the whole I thought it was well executed. The lead reporter went off the deep end and into "We have to film every second of this!!! We have to show them what's really happening!!!!!" territory faster than I thought was entirely convincing, but I was happy to write it off in-universe as her way of coping so that I could kick back and enjoy the grisly terror that ensued.

There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with ( spoilers ) had me breathless.

Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.

This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.

I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.

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Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 04:23:19 GMT

So, just about everyone I know irl has been talking about this new Louis Theroux documentary in which he interviews manosphere influencers and tries to figure out what makes them tick.

I found it a worthwhile but frustrating watch. Frustrating not because of anything Theroux does - he is courteous and perceptive throughout, and imo strikes a very good balance between his moral obligation to challenge toxic rhetoric and his pragmatic need to be non-threatening so his subjects will keep talking - but frustrating because the whole topic is just so wretched, and because, as with all far right movements, there really is no mutual good-faith conversation to be had. The men who are profiting off the manosphere aren't interested in good faith. As this documentary exposes, they're barely even interested in their own professed ideology. The only thing they care about is making money, and they've learnt through experience that saying vile shit gets them attention they can cash in on. So it doesn't matter how much blatant bullshit you catch them out on. Bullshit is controversy, and controversy is attention, and attention is profit. Heads they win, tails you lose.

What I will say is that their "victory" is one of the most hollow things I've ever witnessed in my life. These influencers are spending their whole lives pumping iron, prowling the streets for "content", and making the shallowest possible small talk with parasocially overinvested strangers. Young men whose lives supposedly revolve around all the hot sex they're getting (that YOU could get too, if only you stopped making excuses for yourself and invested all the savings from your after-school McDonalds job in this crypto scam they're flogging!) are hosting pool parties for crowds of OnlyFans models just to sit in a corner glued to their phones, too busy keeping up with the tepid memes being spammed by teenage boys in their livestream chats to notice all the near-naked women flaunting tits and ass right in their faces. They brag about the freedom of not having to attend a nine-to-five job, but instead of answering to a traditional boss, they're instead beholden to fickle social media algorithms and the whims of attention-span-challenged audiences who require ever more extreme behaviour to keep them engaged. Like, fuck. I'd take a regular human manager any day of the week.

I will also say that the contrast between all these puffed-up, roided-out, hypermasculine peacocks and the polite, scrawny, middle-aged British man interviewing them was really something to behold. It was fragile overcompensation vs authentic self-confidence blown up to an almost cartoonish degree. I particularly enjoyed the little tongue-in-cheek sting at the end where Theroux, having been good-naturedly "humiliated" on the boxing arcade machine earlier in the documentary, got in one last make-up swing on his own that earned a far more impressive score. It was a very sly way of saying "See, I could hold my own in you guys' macho dick-waving contests if I wanted to! I just don't want to, because why the fuck would I?" and I love him for it.

I also love him for the compassion he was able to maintain towards the men he talked to, even and especially when they wanted to make it all into some him-vs-them fight for survival. Manosphere influencers are some of social media's lowest-hanging fruit in terms of hateability. Looking at the bright-eyed little boys they used to be and reflecting, with an open heart, on what went wrong in their lives to make a life of vapid and viciously competitive materialism look like something to aspire to is much less emotionally satisfying than fuming over their outrageous behaviour. But at some point I guess we just have to reflect anyway, because a whole new generation of bright-eyed little boys are being drawn in by this content before they've developed the critical thinking skills to resist it. Seeing that part - seeing crowds of boys whose voices had barely dropped yet flock to these jerks on the street - was more upsetting by far than anything the jerks themselves have ever said. Theroux didn't offer a solution and I sure as shit don't have one either, but at least making the effort to step outside the cycle of outrage seems as good a place as any to start.

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Just shovelling horror movies into my mouth like popcorn at this point

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:48:58 GMT

Me when I catch my kids' cold: 🙁🤧
Me when my husband doesn't catch our kids' cold, meaning I get to spend like half the weekend watching horror movies in bed while he takes over the heavy-duty parenting: 😈😈😈😈😈

Get Out (2017): HOLY SHIT WOW OKAY. WOW. I confess to being surprised back in 2017 when the whole world suddenly started saying that Jordan Peele, who I knew only as one of the two guys who made silly skits about hats, was actually a huge horror genius. I get it now. This was absolutely terrifying, but in a way that feels very different from any of the other horror I've been binging over this last couple of months. It has all the cleverness and humour you'd expect from a career comedian turned wunderkind of elevated horror, coupled with villains who are straight-up bloodcurdling in their fetishistic admiration of Blackness and cold disregard for real Black lives.

Chris is a young Black photographer on a trip out of town to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. They present as stereotypical white Liberals: wealthy but self-effacing, welcoming but awkward, proud of their self-avowed colourblindness but incapable of meeting an actual Black person without being deeply weird about race. And of course, all those smiles and good intentions turn out to be a deliberate front: the Armitage family has a secret, incredibly sinister plot to acquire and exploit Black bodies, and Chris finds himself ensnared in it before he has time to realise his unease is a gut response to something much darker than a few fumbling microaggressions. This film blew my mind. It was scary, it was funny, it was FUN, and underneath all that it was an extremely clear-sighted callout of a kind of covert racism that almost a full decade later still often seems to get a pass.

The Conjuring (2013): I loved this! It's a straightforward haunted house/demonic possession type story - family moves into creaky old country house, bad supernatural things happen, demonologists come to the rescue with a terrifying climactic exorcism scene - but every part of it is executed to spooky perfection. It's aesthetically beautiful (of the several posters/covers, this one best captures the ~vibe imo), has a cast of likeable characters I was cheering for the whole time, and manages to sustain an immaculate atmosphere of paranormal suspense livened up with just a small handful of well-timed jumpscares. No complaints. Prime material for a semi-regular Halloween rewatch.

I've always found stories involving professional exorcists, paranormal investigators etc. oddly comforting, no matter how scary they try to be. I know I should be alarmed by the idea that the supernatural not only exists but is sufficiently widespread to have spawned a viable career path, but it's just so nice to think that if you're ever in a situation where traditional law enforcement fails you, there's some stake-wielding hero or beautiful clairvoyant or quietly powerful magic shop owner out there who will put their own life on the line to help you. It's even nicer in stories where the rules of Christian folklore apply, and you can cling to a crucifix or a bottle of holy water for protection during your hero's brief but unavoidable offscreen time. The Christians do very much have to be Catholic, though. This is theologically disappointing but aesthetically essential. Imagine if you were in one of these movies, cowering in some dark, haunted corner as you wait for your exorcist to arrive, and then in walks some Protestant fresh from his drab conference-hall worship centre wearing his clerical collar with jeans. Dude doesn't even know Latin, probably. He and the demon are going to have to communicate through Google Translate.

Paranormal Activity (2007): Katie has been experiencing terrors in the dead of night since she was eight years old. Her shitty boyfriend Micah, finding out about them after they move in together, decides to "help" her by treating the whole thing as a sleuthing game and antagonising the demon attached to her while filming the whole thing. This is some seriously stripped back horror: something like half the runtime is just footage of the couple sleeping, while the other half is an increasingly weary Katie begging Micah not to film her, all happening inside the same few rooms of a neat, modern, unremarkable suburban American house. And it is SCARY. It had me on tenterhooks the whole time, heart leaping into my throat with every footstep noise or flicker of shadow. The final shot almost had me out of my seat.

Unlike The Conjuring, there are no comforting demonologists to save the day here; they exist, but they're, like, super busy and can't help you. I think that part might actually have been even scarier than the demon.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A group of teens start having vivid nightmares about the same disfigured man with knives on his fingers; if he kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. Now, this one I definitely did watch back in high school! Almost none of it actually jogged my memory, though, besides the Freddy costume itself and the scene where he slits his abdomen to reveal all those maggots. Man, though, what a fun slasher. I'd forgotten how funny Freddy is, the way he does his murders like they're playful capers - and then how scary it is at the end, when he loses his temper at being bested by Nancy and that playfulness turns to unbridled rage.

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My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:12:08 GMT

(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)

Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.

This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.

So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.

( Major spoilers under the cut )

On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.

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Madame Bovary

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:12:57 GMT

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Emma, a farmer's daughter from a tiny rural French village, consents to marry Charles Bovary, a cheerfully mediocre country doctor who fell in love with her while treating her father's broken leg. Emma has grown up an avid reader of romances and sentimental poetry; her head is full of passionate, idyllic expectations to which the humble realities of her life as Madame Bovary fail utterly to measure up. She sinks into a deep depression, spends profligately to assuage her existential boredom, and embarks on a series of adulterous affairs as she nurses an ever-deepening contempt for her adoring but unexciting husband.

I enormously enjoyed almost all of this book. I say "almost" because the ending was not enjoyable at all, but I admire and respect and agree with the way everything concluded even if it didn't exactly spark joy. Honestly, if there is such a thing as a perfect novel, this one might just be that; every part of it is executed smoothly, effectively and with magnificent literary flare.

I cannot overstate the loveliness of Flaubert's prose. I read it in English (the 1886 Eleanor Marx-Aveling version, specifically) but even in translation it was impossible not to appreciate how clean and finely tuned the use of language is. There's a cinematic quality to everything, a vivid precision, that fills each scene to bursting with evocative imagery but never once tips over into excess. The writing is also unflaggingly witty and wry, but in an understated way, not harsh or cynical; Madame Bovary receives no quarter for her terrible decisions but I also never felt like Flaubert lacked compassion for her.

On the contrary, her downfall arises from the most painfully human emotional state: she takes for granted what she has, and exaggerates the value of what she doesn't. The life Emma Bovary was born to was one of comfortable ordinariness: she is secure but not wealthy, clever but not brilliant, loved warmly and unconditionally but without passion. But her peaceful life is worthless to her, and the idea of happiness being derived from within never even seems to occur to her. She craves drama, romance, specialness, and feels hard done by when life fails to deliver it to her. She attributes her feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction to some inadequacy of her life circumstances: if she only possessed XYZ trappings of wealth, or if only a suitably passionate lover arrived to sweep her off her feet, all her misery would evaporate and she'd finally experience true happiness. And when the expensive goods and the torrid affairs fail to make her happy, instead of realising the fundamental flaw in her philosophy, she doubles down harder and keeps chasing that next, bigger, stronger hit that will surely satisfy her hunger at last.

Flaubert is extremely funny about the disconnect between Madame Bovary's pretensions and her material life circumstances. I want to quote the whole several pages in which a lover's impassioned declarations to her are interwoven with the proceedings of a local agricultural fair going on outside the window of their love-nest, but I'll satisfy myself with this short excerpt:

'Thus we,' he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other.'
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
'For good farming generally!' cried the president.
'Just now, for example, when I went to your house-'
'To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix-'
'Did I know I should accompany you?'
'Seventy francs.'
'A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you - I remained.'
'Manures!'
'And I shall remain tonight, tomorrow, all other days, all my life!'
'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!'

The whole book is in this tone, more or less. It's utterly delightful.

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New Contrapoints video about the Saw franchise :D

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:07:29 GMT

Contrapoints has released a new video essay! It's about Saw! Much shorter than her usual, but filled with all the same tongue-in-cheek cleverness and philosophising and wild tangents and running jokes. And, of course, costume porn. For this video she has messed up her hair and makeup and wrapped herself in barbed wire, and guys, it is doing things to me. I knew I admired Contrapoints but I didn't know I was hot for Contrapoints. Turns out I very much am hot for Contrapoints, at least when she does herself up like she's just escaped a Saw trap. Damn.

Anyway, watching this was a kind of DIY exposure therapy for me, lol. The Saw franchise is pretty much the reason I spent all these years thinking of myself as Not A Horror Person. I'd been really enjoying my forays into the genre in my mid/late teens, until my then-gf and I decided to host an overnight Saw marathon for all our other edgelord friends. I think I actually quite liked the first one. But we kept going (this was the late 2000s, there were already five or six of them by this point), and we were tipping into the early hours of the morning when I'm prone to feeling queasy anyway, and I was very tired and probably a bit drunk, and I remember falling into this awful half-doze where I could still hear all the screams and gory squelches coming from the TV set. At one point I came fully awake to a conveyor belt full of rotting pig carcasses getting splattered all over everything for some reason? It was the exact kind of gross that I like least in the world, and my sleep-soggy brain was not equipped to handle it. But of course I was a teenage edgelord surrounded by all her edgelord friends, so I still did not stop watching. But from then on, when I thought of horror movies, I thought of that night, and the association made the whole genre feel nauseating.

(I want to be strictly fair to Saw here: my mental health deck was also stacked against it. Around the same time period, for unrelated reasons, my needle phobia really kicked into overdrive and my vasovagal response was expanding to trigger on all sorts of other unpredictable forms of gore; since it was so hard to guess which sights of blood would be harmless and which would set off a fainting spell, I became really avoidant of violent movies in general.)

I'm definitely not at a point in my horror (re)discovery journey yet where I want to rewatch Saw. Maybe someday I'll be desensitised enough, or maybe I will always be a bit too squeamish. But watching a gorgeous woman draped in elaborate barbed wire jewellery talk about Saw is much more in my wheelhouse. Also she has made me want to watch a bunch of Quentin Tarantino movies, which is not specifically what I expected from a video titled "Saw", but this is Contrapoints so there's always some kind of massive tangent you could never have guessed from the title that ends up swallowing half the runtime. And that's why we love her.

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Movies. Guess what genre.

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:48:19 GMT

The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Okay, so, this an actual masterpiece and I can 100% see why it's on all those "best films of all time" lists. I loved it, but it's so good that saying I loved it feels kind of superfluous; as a work of art it is just so far above the liking or disliking of one barely film-literate nerd with a Dreamwidth blog. But I'm going to review it anyway because there's a good chance it's going to end up being my favourite piece of media I've consumed this year and maybe even one of my favourite pieces of all time. GUYS. THIS FILM.

The heroine is Clarice Starling, a bright and ambitious FBI trainee who becomes involved in the hunt for Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a genius psychiatrist and convicted serial killer whom the FBI believe may be able to help them identify Buffalo Bill. I love that in a film where the whole plot revolves around catching and stopping a guy who is on the loose literally skinning people, the most terrifying character is one who spends most of his screentime locked safely in a prison cell. Lecter had the most chilling presence of any villain I've ever seen. He also had this intense, darkly playful, weirdly chivalrous interest in Clarice that appealed to me in ways I'm not sure I'm willing to examine too closely. ~~(Known villainfucker horny for new villain, news at 11.)~~ The acting was absolutely brilliant all around; the cinematography was beautiful in this grim, grounded way; the score was haunting; the climactic scene almost stopped my heart.

It was also - this is going to sound like very weak praise in comparison to all my gushing, but I'll say it anyway - a lot less transphobic than I thought it might be, given the whole concept of "crazed man denied gender reassignment surgery goes on a murder rampage so that he can wear the skin of his female victims". I know there's been criticism and controversy around this film (and I'm speaking as a cis viewer, so grain of salt and all that) but the filmmakers were very explicit, in the language of their time, that Buffalo Bill was a profoundly disturbed individual whose pathology had nothing to do with an LGBT identity. I also on a more personal level really appreciated the handling of (cis) gender issues, which I know has also been controversial: there was no "teachable" feminist moment, it's true, but the misogyny and pervasive sexual menace Clarice experienced as a female law enforcement officer was vividly present on screen in a way that was impossible to mistake for endorsement, and Clarice herself is an amazingly well-rounded character, competent and fallible and brave and scared and utterly human. I loved how the film demanded we identify with her and forced us to sit with her in those uncomfortable moments, for which, as in real life, there was no clear-cut or simple redress.

Re-Animator (1985): A brilliant but antisocial medical student has developed a serum that can reanimate the dead, and ropes his normie roommate into his batshit experiments, with fatal consequences for their reputations and also, potentially, their actual lives. This one was just straight-up fun! It features a zombie doctor carrying his own severed head around in a surgical tray full of donor blood to keep it alive, and from that one detail I think anyone should be able to make up their minds whether or not the film will be to their taste. I thought it was hilarious, and some really great homoerotic tension between the weird serum inventor and the normie roommate. I had hoped to be able to join snickfic in her fannish enthusiasm for them, but sadly didn't quite get there (neither of them has the overlong hair or angstbucket backstory that my fannish motor primarily runs on). But I really enjoyed the film and can see myself watching it again on a night when I just want to have a good time.

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You guys will be shocked but I've been watching some more horror

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:44:23 GMT

Since my sudden mania for film shows no signs of slowing, I've created a Letterboxd account. I don't really plan to use it for much besides tracking what I've watched and what I plan to watch, but add me if you're a user and I'll heart your reviews when I see them. :)

Anyway it has been A Week and I've been too tired by the end of each day to do ANYTHING other than vegetate in front of the TV, and specifically to vegetate in front of something scary and tense enough to prevent my otherwise inevitable zoning-out. The upside of which is yay, more horror movies!

Hell House LLC (2015): A documentary crew investigates a haunted house attraction that went gruesomely wrong on its opening night, leading to more than a dozen fatalities under baffling circumstances which the authorities have hushed up. When snickfic recced this movie to me, I said I would not watch it because clowns gross me out. But the haunted house + found footage conceit was calling to me enough that I decided I could probably handle the clowns - and hey, I was right! This is not especially clowny clown horror by my highly arbitrary personal standards that mostly boil down to "there are no gross clown smiles" and "there are no even grosser clown laughs". Maybe this is a gateway for me? Maybe someday I'll be sufficiently desensitised to clowns that I can catch up to the rest of the world and watch It? Whatever the case, I had fun with this movie. I admired the filmmakers' decision to leave so many questions unanswered and I think that uncertainty is scarier than any explicit answers they could have devised. (For that reason, I'm going to go right on ahead and ignore the fact that there are sequels. Not EVERYTHING has to be a franchise, damn. The movie stands alone just fine.)

On a minor note, I REALLY liked the piano-and-violin piece in the soundtrack. Beautifully simple, beautifully discordant.

Carrie (1976): I am once again standing in awe of the incredibly broad palate of flavours that get lumped together under the "horror" label. This movie is not a scare so much as an anguished distillation of the cruelties of high school. Carrie suffers horrific religious abuse at home and extreme bullying at school; after falling victim to a very public and sadistic "prank" during senior prom, she unleashes her budding telekinetic powers on the watching crowd with murderous results. But her rampage is - well, not an afterthought per se, but it happens right at the end of the film in a dizzying blitz; the vast majority of the screentime (and the most visceral source of horror, for me at least) is the long, slow lead-up to the prank, as tension mounts between the glow-up narrative Carrie thinks she's living and the humiliation we know she's about to suffer.

I am not enough of a Film Buff(TM) to comment on the weird split-screen thing they were doing during the climax, or whatever the fuck was happening at the start with that borderline pornographic locker room shower scene. Both of them threw me out a bit but neither was enough of a hiccup to spoil what was otherwise a really gripping story.

The Old Dark House (1932): I watched this because it stars Boris Karloff, and while it may not be one of his most iconic roles, it was the one my library happened to have on offer at the moment I found myself thinking, 'Hey, I should watch some Boris Karloff!' So on those qualifications, I bring you this old-school spooky cult classic about two small groups of travellers who are forced by a violent storm to go begging for shelter at an isolated old house in the Welsh countryside, whose eccentric inhabitants turn out to be harbouring a deadly family secret. Karloff's physical acting is impressive: his character, Morgan the butler, is completely mute but has an immense screen presence (literally as well as metaphorically) despite the lack of dialogue. He's a hulking mass of danger whose sullen subservience turns to violent, lust-addled malice when he drinks, as of course he does on the stormy night in question. There's also a romance between a feckless WWI vet and a chorus girl who is only technically not the sugar baby of one of the other houseguests, which aside from being endearing in its own right was a lot more risqué than I expected of a movie from the 30s. Evidently the "pre-Code" label is more than just a historical technicality!

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Starting my 2025 music catch-up

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:19:40 GMT

Here's a life hack for time-poor music fans. If you ignore all new releases within your chosen genre for an entire calendar year, then you get to read a whole bunch of Album of the Year lists at your convenience and listen to ONLY the best stuff.

Which is to say: I have a couple more music recs that aren't, like, hrr grr arrgh blargh Satan! Recs that have maybe a passing chance of appealing to the majority of you who aren't into extreme metal! I also have some recs that probably only Zook and Liriaen and Kimara should even bother glancing at, let alone listening to if they haven't already, but I'll stick those at the bottom of the post. Because it seems like a lot of the best "metal" of 2025 was actually quite mild and accessible, or even just straight up crossover stuff that wasn't really metal at all but appealed to a lot of metalheads for its dark ambiance and experimentality.

Album recs, normal person edition

The Spin by Messa: Smoky, jazzy female vocals over a goth-tinged canvas of reverb-heavy guitar and driving beats. I don't think I've found a single AotY list in my whole search that did not include this album in the top couple of spots. Technically it's doom metal but I really don't think you need to be a doom metal fan, or a metal fan in general, to appreciate this; it's just gorgeous.

Here, have a music video! It's more aesthetic than riveting, but it does feature the extremely attractive singer on a motorbike and is a good representative sample of the album. If you bounce off this song, there's nothing here for you; if you like it, oh boy do you have a treat coming with the rest of the album. <3

Camgirl by Crippling Alcoholism: I honestly have no idea what to call this. It's not metal, though metalheads have been loving it; it's too heavy to be post-punk or goth rock or synthwave, but it has elements of all of them. It's dark and dreamy and wonderful and I have listened to it so many times in the last few days. (Disclaimer: this is a concept album about a sex worker, and I can only make out about half of the lyrics. Quite possibly it's sympathetic and thoughtful? I'm choosing to hear it as sympathetic and thoughtful. But I can't rule out the presence of bigoted shit in the less intelligible parts, and I haven't bothered to listen to any band interviews about the inspiration behind the album, so I cannot in good faith vouch for them as anything other than auditorily enjoyable.)

There might be more coming; in particular, there are new albums by Ainsoph and Calva Louise that come highly recommended and based on their first couple of tracks have a lot of promise, but I haven't found time to give them a full listen yet. But I honestly just want to spend a while listening to The Spin and Camgirl on repeat before I delve into anything else. They're SO GOOD.

Album recs, hrr grr argh Satan edition

Scapulimancy by Hedonist: This is fantastically fun, catchy, filthy death metal with brutal vocals and chugging Bolt Thrower-esque riffs. It's not an album that prompts any sophisticated or nuanced response in me whatsoever; it's an album that scoops the thoughts out of my brain and replaces them with nothing but primitive satisfaction. I don't headbang but this band makes me want to. Just. FUCK yes.

Heritage by Structure: Bear with me. You're all alone in the middle of a black night ocean that is maybe a real body of water or maybe a metaphor for your filthy conscience, being dragged down into the unfathomable depths by an anchor tied to your feet. Looking up as you sink, you see the cosmic sparkle of millions of stars refracting through the water's surface from far above. This is death/doom at its best and I am thoroughly smitten.

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Some nineties horror and the new Knives Out

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:09:06 GMT

My movie-watching roll has slowed a little, but I've still watched a few things over the last couple of weeks. One I hated so much that I'm not even going to mention it here because I want to let the memory fade (probably nothing anyone else will have deep feelings about, just this Scandinavian horror flick my library streaming app happened to be promoting that hit some squicks I didn't know I had). The other three are below!

The Craft (1996): Well, we can add this to the list of things I'm glad I didn't get into back in high school. It would have been my whole personality for, like, a semester at least. I would have been even more insufferable than I was during my Buffy phase. New girl Sarah falls in with a clique of three witchy misfits who, empowered by her natural gift for the occult, start using magic to solve their problems in increasingly dangerous ways. This film is an utter delight. Extremely nineties, extremely teen angst (but in a fond, earnest way), too campy to be truly scary but with a really fun and satisfying horror aesthetic. I have so many feelings about those poor downtrodden, miserable girls who tasted power for the first time and went mad with it. There was also some very tempting hateshippy tension between Sarah and Nancy, the coven's leader. I had a feeling if I looked this up on AO3 it would prove to be one of those comparatively rare fandoms where F/F dominates, and I was right; there is nearly as much F/F as all other categories combined. (On the other hand, there are only 125 fics total, which feels very unfair. Filing it away in my mind as a Yuletide option for later this year.)

Ringu (1998): Ring fan mutuals, I'm so sorry, I have failed you. :( I think probably this one was just too similar to its remake for me to enjoy watching them this close together. There were parts I liked better in this older version - especially the close-ups on the dead faces instead of those annoying barely-visible flashes the 2002 version does, and the fact that the little boy seems happier and better-adjusted in this one - but the suspense wasn't there and the production was less glossy, and I ended up getting interrupted in the middle of the well-digging-out scene and haven't bothered to go back. I might try again in a few years once my memories have faded?

Wake Up Dead Man (2025): When cultish Catholic priest/culture warrior Monsignor Wicks is murdered, suspicion naturally falls on Father Jud, the recently assigned assistant priest who has made no secret of his opposition to Wicks' vicious preaching style. The brainwashed congregation all turn on him, but Detective Benoit Blanc is convinced of Father Jud's innocence and enlists his help to expose the true murderer.

I think this might be my favourite Benoit Blanc movie to date. It's not as clever as Knives Out or as funny as Glass Onion, but it has so much heart and soul and kindness to it, even and especially when its tongue is planted firmly in its cheek. It is neither pro- nor anti-Catholicism; Wicks is a vile character who embodies the bigoted, exploitative, self-aggrandising side of the Church, while Jud embodies the earnest love, faith and self-forgetfulness of the Church as it should be. Not to be weird about an imaginary Catholic priest but Jud is also kind of hot, in a vaguely Adam Driver-ish way that's mostly ears and angles. I enjoyed his screen presence a lot.

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