You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.
Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.
I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.
It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.
Title: Architect Author:kat_lair Fandom: Wheel of Time (books) Pairing: Rand al'Thor/Elayne Trakand, Rand al'Thor & Elayne Trakand Tags: Ficlet, Politics, Leadership, Teaching Rating: G Word count: 163
Summary: He’s still learning, is the thing. Author notes: A little ficlet to prompt 'architect' which immediately made me think of how Rand shaped the world. Set during Book 4. The Shadow Rising and Elayne's statecraft lessons in Tear.
I actually did read a very short book this week, Strange Houses by Uketsu.It was really hyped and I was so underwhelmed by it even though I wanted to like it. Very disappointed. People are saying his book Strange Pictures is even better, but at this point I don't know if I will try it since this wasn't to my taste.
Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.
Got him a new kicker toy a few months ago, it’s a hit:
Fiddlesticks busy shedding on a pile of just-washed-and-folded laundry:
Fiddlesticks plopping down in a corner of the vet’s office like she owns the place:
I asked last year for wet food recs that don’t generate such a mountain of trash. (Fiddlesticks expects some every morning, but she only finishes the gravy/puree stuff, which only seems to come in plastic sachets.) (Fluff isn’t interested at all. At first I gave him some wet food daily, but I’m guessing he didn’t like it much and only ate it out of food-insecurity, because at some point he just flat-out stopped.)
“Chicken puree baby food that comes in glass jars” came up. And it’s been a hit! For the sake of variety, I still give Fiddlesticks the cat puree about half the time, and baby food the other half.
…Then, at this vet visit, they said “She’s lost more weight than we’re happy with, possibly because she has this bad tooth, which likely makes it hurt to eat dry food. Also, please give her this course of antibiotics, which can be put in her food, as long as she takes it twice a day.”
So I started giving her twice as much wet food. Same serving size, but morning and evening. At this point, the antibiotics are long finished and she’s had the tooth out, but I assume it’s still good to keep her weight up. Plus, it would feel pretty rude to stop.
Soooo in spite of everyone’s best efforts, we’re back up to generating the same amount of plastic trash I started with!
Could be worse, could’ve been twice as much trash. But still. The irony.
☆paging doctor gorgeous☆ (southernmedicine) wrote2025-08-1311:01 pm
Things still aren't all put away and organized, as I'm still unpacking and sorting and re-arranging, but for the most part we're settled. We've been cooking meals together for dinner every night, going for walks with the dog, and watching episodes of Clone Wars every night before bed. It's... good. It's real good.
I was telling Blair the other day that I feel like my life has begun a new season: new set, some reoccurring characters, but mostly a new cast, and a new plot.
I was hoping to have begun working by now, but unfortunately the hiring manager at this clinic I want to work at has been dragging her feet and not returning my texts. I called the clinic direct the other day to try and talk to her, and she said they've just been really busy but that she would text me with information on when I could come in sometime this week. I said great, can't wait! Tomorrow is Thursday, and no text yet. Meanwhile my funds are dwindling fast, because moving across the country utterly devastated my bank account, and it took a lot for us to get started. Blair's mom gave us a couple hundred dollars for the basic necessities, but holy shit it went fast. Kitchen stuff in particular is dumb expensive, man!
But we've met some of the neighbors, and they seem... interesting.
We are hosting an in-person DnD session this weekend, so that should be nice.
Slowly getting back into watching this huge backlog of things in my open tabs. Begun the new season of Project Runway, and excited to watch Eddington. We went to the movies the other night for our first date in the new location, and saw Together, which was utterly bizarre (in a good way).
Would love to write again someday, ahahahaha. Yeah. Remember Fandom Trumps Hate? I do! Every day! I used to have plenty of time, but now, somehow, it's mid-August. Oh my god.
Just finished: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I went to art school semi-on-purpose. Which is to say I always loved art, loved drawing, but was it my passion? Who knows what a 13-year-old's passion is? I was nerdier about other things. But I was bullied in grade school and wanted only to get away from my tormentors when I finally graduated, and so I auditioned for the art school as an escape. I was good at drawing, good enough that they plucked me out of my boring town and away from everyone I hated. There I had teachers who truly were passionate about art, and art history, and I fell in love with not just the paintings and sculpture and architecture but the stories and personalities behind them. We scrimped and saved so that I could go on the school trip to Italy and there I got to see the art, and fall in love with Florence in particular, and walk in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and it was the most incredible thing to happen to me in my life thus far.
So anyway reading this book was like reliving that, only—as Ada Palmer says throughout the book—"Ever-So-Much-But-More-So." Because there is more history than I knew, or learned since, more stories, more people, about 100 pages of footnotes, and it's contested history, histories complicated by someone who loves this era even more than I do. Despite the book's heft, it's a very fast read. Also I cried a l'il. Fight me. But read it.
Currently reading: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a re-read of my favourite SM-G book For Reasons and my God, Meche is even worse than I remembered. I love her. Ahaha. What a nightmare child.
☆paging doctor gorgeous☆ (southernmedicine) wrote2025-08-1010:50 pm
Man. Yesterday and today were a long process of getting all of Blair's stuff here. The bad news is, it poured down rain halfway through transport, so everything she had in the back of her dad's truck got drenched. The good news is, it's all over now. We're completely moved, we have all our furniture set up the way we want it, and now we just. Settle in.
I didn't have time to mess with this before, but! Since our journey was the longest road trip I've ever been on, I decided I wanted to play the license plate game, and see how many states I could spot! Blair didn't want to play, but ended up excitedly pointing out states I hadn't spotted yet. It was so cute.
The final tally!
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
41/50 states! In one road trip. Not bad!
And bonus, Canadian provinces! Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec.
Two days left of my holiday and I've gone fully feral, just eating pizza and writing porn/fic in my underpants.
Anyway.
Is anyone bored enough to SPAG check any of these for me? 1. 2,4k Lost Boys, Michael/Sam, sequel to this 2. 1k MCR, Gerard/Frank, pure porn, very E rated 3. 3.6k The Witcher, Geralt/Jaskier, mostly fluffy feels
I've also been working on the SKZ BDMS!AU but that's currently for the co-author dreamersdare's eyes only, soz.
***
Here's another thing that is making me froth at the mouth:
Let us not even talk about the unveil tracks. For mental health reasons.
***
Anyway, TXT's latest album is also getting some repeat listens from me. I am, particularly in love with
Yeonjun's solo which is extremely catch. Also I spent most of the video trying to figure where in the UK it was filmed. I default to London but am not actually sure here.
Special mention to the absolutely stunning cinematography in Beomguy's solo though. The song, whilst pretty, didn't really hit with me, but the visuals inside the hot air balloon are amazing:
I am not like, a furry on the main, but let me tell you, the first movie made me ship this like the cross-Atlantic trade route. The fic from the first movie was, ahem, good. Well. Some of it. Probably not enough of it tbh, but still. And now there's this.
In the mountains of PA, where I live, the timber rattlesnakes mate in late summer, kind of mid-July through early September. Depends a bit on the weather and stuff, but basically late summer. 'Tis the season, as it were.
Also, no snakes were harmed in the making of this post. The snakes are fine.
Today's post is ICHH's "Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting." Gare and Mia take a deep dive into what is, superficially, a comparatively minor issue—that of conspiratorial thinking on the left. They take as their jumping off point a tweet from the Gestapo featuring John Gast's "American Progress." It's an overtly fascist tweet because the artwork itself celebrates the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the text reinforces that the poster thinks that this genocide is a good thing, and also because an overtly fascist organization that is currently carrying out a genocide tweeted it. If they'd tweeted a picture of kittens, it would still be a fascist tweet, because it is a fascist organization posting on a platform owned by fascists. Nevertheless, certain segments of the extremely online left and liberals have convinced themselves that there are also secret fascist messages in the tweet.
The basic thesis of the episode is, "no, you fools, they don't need to dogwhistle anymore because they are in power and doing fascism." But there's another, even more important point here, which is that we're all still basically stuck in 2016-7 and we need to be updating both our thinking and our strategies. I feel a certain way about this because for all that I mocked it back in the day, conspiratorial thinking worked very well for the right, and I sort of disagree with Gare and Mia that it won't reach a particular type of low-information voter who likes to feel privy to exciting secret knowledge. But also, it is counterproductive and has people who might otherwise be useful and productive chasing their tails playing numerology on X, the Everything App.
At any rate, it's an interesting psychological insight and as someone who is not immune from Extremely Online Thinking, it's a useful check-in.
Figured I should write a post about this movie before I go see the next one.
Short Preamble About The Box Office
…I’m so surprised this didn’t make more. It got much better reviews than Brave New World, but last I checked, it made about the same amount?
This more than anything has made me think these films are reaching a General MCU Audience. People aren’t thinking “does this individual film/premise/team/audience reaction sound good,” they’re thinking “am I the kind of person who goes to see every Marvel movie in theaters, or am I not?” And the pool of reliable-Marvel-moviegoers has only been shrinking over the past five years.
When The Marvels got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been any combination of racism, sexism, and the strike disrupting their usual promo tours. (The movie itself was excellent. None of the criticisms that people held up as Terrible Flaws ever made sense.) And when BNW got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been because the movie itself was Just Okay.
But Thunderbolts is another genuinely excellent movie! And it has multiple white guys in leading roles! So what gives?
I really wish this had come out years ago. Should’ve been the big team-up finale of Phase 4. Instead, in the meantime, the MCU burned a bunch of its regular viewers by making them sit through hot messes like Quantumania or MoM, and now even the real gems aren’t bringing them back.
Spoiler-Lite Actual Reaction
It’s good!
And specifically, it’s good in ways that cater to transformative media fandom, which you’d think would be a gift. The main characters are a Sad Blorbo Variety Pack. All of them are murderers with tragic backstories, mostly involving kidnapping and/or brainwashing. One has the extra burden of dealing with her overenthusiastic cringe dad, who is also a murderer with a tragic backstory. Everyone is trained in all kinds of cool deadly fighting styles, but completely incompetent at making friends. The premise is about forcing them to work together! The villains are “the embodiment of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss” and “a floppy-haired man with a stutter and sweater paws who just wants to be a hero.” Everyone has a traumatic childhood and everyone needs a hug. A critical plot point hinges on how desperately they all need a hug!
It’s one of those movies with a big cast, and almost all of them started as secondary characters in somebody else’s movie/TV show — but the writing does a great job of re-introducing them, giving you regular tidibts of exposition and recap, in ways that fit organically with the banter the characters would be doing anyway. Bucky is a bit of an outlier — he’s the most well-established character here, they expect you to basically know what his deal is, they only drop enough tidbits to jog your memory. Based on audience reaction, I think that was the right call.
(This is the movie where he’s in Congress. They don’t even try to explain how or why he ran for Congress. He’s just kinda…there. He’s not good at it, he’s visibly not enjoying it, but he sure is there! You just have to go “I Guess???” and roll with it.)
There was one character who, based on the previews, everyone figured was going to die early on. They do, in fact, die early on. If you were personally invested in that character, and excited to see them get more screen time, that sucks. But in general…I do think it was a good writing choice. It’s not a cheap shock-value death! It fits right in with the plot and the themes! It’s “these characters are career assassins, any one of them could’ve gone out that quickly if they had a bad day, is it any wonder they’re all depressed nihilists right now?”
A lot of the plot is about MCU version of Sentry, whose comics backstory is basically a version of what the MCU did with Spider-Man in No Way Home: “he used to be friends with a bunch of the Avengers and personally involved in a ton of world-changing events, but then, for the safety of the universe, his whole existence had to be erased from everyone’s memories.” I’d love to see the version of the movie where MCU Sentry had that backstory too. It could’ve been so fun to see “a montage of pivotal scenes from Phases 1 through 3, now with this random new guy photoshopped in.” And think of all the novel-length “Sentry’s adventures as a critical part of the last 20 movies” fic epics it would’ve inspired.
On the other hand, I get why they didn’t want to just rehash NWH. And I do really like what they came up with instead. The characterization is well-rounded and compelling, the designs for his different forms/powers are original and striking. A big part of his deal is that he’s Cartoonishly Unbeatably Strong, which makes it all the better that they shake up the Marvel “big CGI-heavy final battle” formula, so the win has nothing to do with “who can hit the hardest.”
Between all the different team members, my favorite dynamic is Yelena and Bucky. They never say out loud “so, how ’bout that life as the childhood friend of an OG Avenger, whose iconic heroism you could never possibly live up to even if you didn’t spend all that time as a brainwashed tool of the supervillains, huh?”, but they bring this low-key sense of mutual understanding to all their conversations. Yelena settles naturally into a team-leader role over the course of the movie, while Bucky has the most experience being on a team of Actual Superheroes, which he translates into “advising Yelena about management stuff” in this quietly-supportive way. It’s great.
I know Marvel has a really spotty record of having characters stay friends/partners/teammates from one installment to the next…but I really hope the Thunderbolts (or whatever name they manage to hang onto in the future) stick together for another one.
☆paging doctor gorgeous☆ (southernmedicine) wrote2025-08-0604:05 pm
The final day was not twelve hours. It was, in fact, fifteen, and it was very, very rough. Several gas station fill-ups, a few stops for food (rare in the middle of nowhere, rarer late at night), some wrong turns, and we arrived at Blair's parents' house around 5am yesterday.
We slept all of two hours, then had to get up and go sign all the paperwork for our apartment and get the keys. Then, the office manager gave us a tour of the whole place, and when we were alone, Blair and I cried and she hugged me tight and twirled me around and it was all very sweet.
The journey is over, we have our apartment, but it is currently FILLED with boxes and totes and the next several days will be all about unpacking and sorting and cleaning.
I love our apartment. It is brand new, literally finished getting built in April. Everything is fresh. Everything is new. Pristine. We have a club house, an exercise room, a mail room, a communal area where you can just chill and watch tv and cook, and we have assigned parking spaces inside a nice well-lit parking garage. The place is super secure, too, you need a fob to open ANY door.
I think we're going to be really happy. I still can't believe it.
I crashed for ten hours last night, I was so exhausted from being awake for nearly 48 hours.
Tonight I'm gonna sleep pretty well too, I imagine!
I'm sorry that I haven't been interacting. I've been on the road every single day, and I've been doing about 85% of the driving. We're either driving, doing activities or sleeping, so I haven't read my friends' list at all. I will try to catch up a little soon!
Just finished: Nothing, this book is 768 pages long.
Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. It's so good. The middle of the book tells the story of 15 Renaissance figures, both famous and obscure, on various sides of factional political fights, theology, and modernity. After a sympathetic look at Lucrezia Borgia (who did nothing wrong), I just finished the chapter on Michelangelo, which despite being one of the longer chapters (I am weirdly relieved whenever we hit someone I like who didn't die horribly and prematurely) and focusing on the political infighting of the time, didn't even cover his imprisonment. To be fair, he did a lot of stuff, and it covers his love life admirably, which is juicier. She uses it in part to talk about the degree to which art was wielded as a weapon of political influence, often at the expense of the artists and craftspeople themselves, and also the complex history of queerness in the era.
There's a particularly good exchange between Galeazzo Sanseverino (the lover of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who lived openly with him along with his wife Beatrice) and Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella d'Este. Sanseverino had challenged Gongzaga to a duel, to which Gonzaga replied, "Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture and a fig sign," and that when he had gay sex, "I do it at the door of others while you do it at your own." (I.e., he was a top.)
Anyway this book is great. I'm only highlighting this because it was the last thing I read before I passed out last night. It's all like this, though.
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sabotabby) wrote2025-08-18 09:56 pm
