teach me the art of war

Fandom

May the Fourth Exchange revealed on - well, May the fourth. (I never claimed to be a good source for breaking news.) I got two absolutely fantastic gifts, both Din/Bo-Katan:

[art] Got Your Back by Irusu - Hand in hand, guarding your back. This is the Way. Extremely pretty and badass art. Also completely safe for work, so go look now! :)

[fic] Stillness and the Sight of You by ambiguously - Din and Grogu come back to Mandalore. There's plenty of work to do when they arrive. The exact perfect post-s3 fic I was craving, basically. ~4.5k and very worth reading if you ship Din/Bo even slightly (or if you're just here for Baby Yoda being cute).

On the writing side, I wasn't organised enough to treat, but I enjoyed the hell out of my assignment: Trust Fall, Ben & Poe with background Reylo, ~6k. You know when you get an assignment that just happens to line up neatly with an idea you'd already been turning over in your head? This scenario - Ben and Poe falling off a cliff together - started its life as an extremely self-indulgent (and not very coherent) h/c daydream with injured!Ben, but some much needed guidance from the recip's great prompts and a shift to Rey as the injured party turned it into a fic I'm actually quite proud of.

Books

Provenance by Ann Leckie - I listened to this as an audiobook, which is usually a format I save for rereads (I'm really bad at listening properly when there's no visual or actual-real-life-person element to hold my attention), but Adjoa Andoh is a fantastic narrator and I guess knowing the overall Radch universe quite well made it easier even if I didn't already know this specific story. It was a fun, solidly plotted murder mystery in space, full of aliens and fancy tech and Leckie's trademark thoughtful treatment of gender. I don't think I'd have found it all that gripping as a standalone, but as part of a beloved preexisting fictional world it was great! 

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson is about the US Army's attempts, post-Vietnam, to harness New Age spiritualism and the supernatural in service of national security. Serious attempts were made by people in positions of significant institutional power to walk through walls, to train special forces in the art of psychic assassination, and to achieve mind control through the use of subliminal sounds. The project revolved around a proposed new army of supersoldiers called the First Earth Battalion, and Ronson traces its influences forward to the War on Terror and the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

I have a bit of a weakness for books about the hyper-paranoid world of US intelligence, and I think I'd have enjoyed this one more if I weren't already familiar with so much of the material. Ronson's ability to wring black-humoured entertainment out of heavy subjects is a strength I've admired in his other works, but all the "fun" here comes from shock value, and I've read too much about the War on Terror and projects like MK-ULTRA to be shocked by the First Earth Battalion's exploits or particularly inclined to find them funny. I'm not anti-reccing it - it's well written, well paced, and would probably make a very satisfying first dip into the general topic of US intelligence and military agencies being equal parts evil and batshit. It just wasn't exactly what I wanted, I guess.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis - osprey_archer got me on a reread, and it's so nice as a relaxing pre-bedtime project. I enjoyed The Magician's Nephew and The Horse and His Boy immensely, though I'm afraid The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian lost a little of their childhood lustre by virtue of my having been so fannish about the Disney adaptations. Big live-action movies are just a completely different vibe from vintage Christian children's novels. They were absolutely charming, but I couldn't help slightly missing the action scenes.

TV

Alone Australia is an extreme survival reality show: each contestant is sent out on their own into the Tasmanian wilderness on the cusp of winter, with a strict limit of ten survival items (things like fish hooks, ferro rods, sleeping bags etc, chosen from an allowable shortlist) and camera gear to film their own experience. They have no food except what they can catch for themselves, no shelter except what they can build, and no contact with any other humans except for a satellite phone they can use to withdraw from the competition when it gets too much. The winner is the last person standing. 

My youngest sister told me about it, and I confess I only started watching to boggle at the insanity of anyone who'd accept a challenge like that. Instead the contestants have won allll my respect, and despite (or I guess maybe because of?) the high stakes, I'm really enjoying the uplifting mood compared to most reality telly I'm used to. There are no villains, and although I can't help having favourites and least favourites, at the end of the day it's impossible to really dislike any of these people or hope to see them lose. Like, you can't cross your fingers to see a real person injured or hungry or freezing, you just can't. You end up cheering for everyone to succeed at once, but then when they tap out and "lose" the contest you're still cheering for them anyway because they've been through enough and deserve the relief of going home. It's good vibes.

...I would not last five minutes, though, holy shit. One woman fasted for twenty days while out in the freezing cold with nothing but the hard labour of shelter-building to distract her from her hunger. I can't skip breakfast without it being a total crisis.