snickfic

In one place that's easy for me to find.

• via elasticella: If you'd like to filter by multiple tags, add them via comma with ?mode=all at the end. For example, all my recs posts also tagged with Oasis: https://snickfic.dreamwidth.org/tag/fandom:+oasis,entry:+recs?mode=all
  
  
• If you're a paid user, DW allows you to filter out specific tags by other users (for example, my "topic: politics" tag). It's just not easy to find. First you need to make an access filter and put the person on that filter, and then once they are in the filter, click on their name and all their tags will pop up.
  
  
  One suggestion would be to make a filter with your entire circle in it, and then just take out the tags you don't want. Then that could be your default view of your circle.

Themes of the month
1. Comfort music, by which I mean mostly the Gallaghers. This felt like a rough month, and I listened to my big Noel playlist a lot, as well as my 2025 and “most listened” playlists. About every six months I listen to the latter and discover it has a lot of great songs on it. Who could have guessed!

2. Also in the comfort music vein, a lot of Lord Huron, mostly the new album, which has earned the extremely rare distinction of skipping the seasonal playlist phase and going straight into my year-round rotation.

3. Wuthering Heights by Charli XCX. Neeeew album! Short, and with some filler of the kind you get in an album for a movie, but still a few new songs I was into. I appreciate how she used the melodramatic vibes of the movie as an excuse to go OTT.

4. Lana del Rey. Inspired by her new single, I went back and listened to Norman Fucking Rockwell again, which I haven't listened all the way through since 2020.

My top artists (by # of streams)
1. Oasis
2. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
3. Lord Huron
4. Liam Gallagher

...I told you. 🙈

Favorite songs:
1. White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter by Lana Del Rey. Weird Lana is back!! Some of this is kind of bad tbh and is definitely her operating in the vein of Taylor's "But Daddy I Love Him," ie pissed at her fans for having opinions about her love life, but also: it's so delightfully weird. I'm into it.

2. Dying For You by Charlie XCX, my favorite of the new tracks on her WH album. Again: really took the theme of OTT melodrama to heart. <3

I would like to bulk up my store of recipes that travel and reheat well and are good for taking to other people, the "casserole for someone who's ill/grieving/up all night with a newborn" kind of thing. Casseroles and hearty soups are welcome, but also other kinds of one-dish meals that don't require much fiddling other than reheating.

In return, I can offer one of my own that fits this description:
White chicken chili

A week before the CH deadline, I thought I might have to default on my assignment. I had literally no words and no energy to try to make some. But at the last minute I got a nice, easy, short idea and wrote it in two days, and I was really happy with it. And then somehow in the three days before reveals I wrote two more things! Huh! And also a separate thing for Bulletproof!

for the man who has everything, Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel, 1400 words. 5 times Liam flirted with Noel during the reunion tour, and one time he didn't have to. I WAS NOT going to sign up for CH this year, but a request turned up for Liam/Noel at the very last minute, and I could not possibly refuse. (I've decided that I'm allowed to break my no-signups rule for Oasis requests. It's not like there are lots of them!)

This feels like a spiritual sibling to my vignettes fic from last year, although not in the same continuity. That fic was about their slow relationship rebuild leading up to tour, while this is about rebuilding during the tour, but in both cases it's a lot of short scenes that string together into a bigger whole, relatively sparsely written. This one leans a lot harder on specific canon events, partly because the period during the tour gave us all way more to work with than the period before (which is mostly a total mystery to this day!).

I didn't think I had another of those in me, but once I had the idea the day before the deadline, it all flowed really smoothly. I wrote the last scene and was like "this is way too soppy and cheesy, I'll need to rewrite it," but then I came later to edit and decided it had exactly the right amount of cheese, actually! FEELINGS.

--

14 Capra, Drowning by Numbers (1988), Cissie/Cissie/Cissie/Madgett, 800 words. It happened like this: on a Saturday afternoon, Cissie, Cissie, and Cissie agreed it was time for an experiment.

This movie had been on my radar for a while, I think because I'd seen a Yuletide promo for it? I was motivated to finally watch it when a CH request came up for pinch hit. It's a deeply weird, surrealist meditation on death featuring three women named Cissie and also starring Bernard Hill, and after I finished I was like, "I definitely cannot write fic for this." Then I went to take a shower, had not even gotten into the shower yet when the first line came to me, and I put my clothes back on, sat down, and wrote the whole thing in half an hour.

The fic is partly a "for want of a nail" fix-it of canon, and partly simply a fill for the prompt of the Cissies taking turns with Madgett. I think of all the fic I've written, it's probably one of the least comprehensible for reading canon-blind. I had fun, though, and christened the fandom tag, which is always nice. And the recipient seemed to really like it, which is the most gratifying part of writing something super niche. <3

--

full-service, The Housemaid, Millie/Nina, 2100 words. The obligatory post-canon cunnilingus fic, as you do.

This movie ended with such interesting possibilities for these two, and I knew my friend lioness was requesting them for CH, but what really got me to write this was that there were two entire fics in the fandom tag and neither for this ship. ;___; I wrote it all in a rush over two days, and I think it kind of shows, but I had fun, and maybe people will see the vision and write more of them. I would definitely read more about Millie's post-canon exploits and how her relationship with Nina evolves.

--

tea in the moonlight, The Endless, Aaron/Justin, 1700 words. The red flower knocks Aaron up, with Justin's assistance, and they have to decide what to do about it.

I had about 200 words of this for the Bulletproof tag "complicated but ultimately positive feelings about incestuous mpregnancy," one of maybe half a dozen Bulletproof false starts this year. I didn't think it was going to go anywhere, but after I finished the Housemaid fic, it turned out I still had energy left over, and I wrote the rest of it and posted it that same day.

I didn't end up gifting it to anyone, so as one of exactly twelve fics in the fandom tag, it hasn't gotten much attention. Now I'm kind of second-guessing posting it at all, or at least posting so soon without letting it sit for a while and giving it another editing pass. It's not remotely on the same level as my other Endless fic. OTOH I do really like the weird incesty mpreg feelings in it. IDK.

Wuthering Heights (2026). Young woman is torn between her love for the best friend she grew up with and her wealthy new-money neighbor.

I enjoyed this a lot. Emerald Fennell's visual spectacle is always on point, and in particular the costumes and sets are fantastic. There are a bunch of amazing set pieces, and the artificiality of Linton's mansion and the wardrobe he gives Cathy vs the organic squalor of her home and childhood were really effective IMO in contrasting several different binaries at once. I loved every single ridiculous dress. I was also really into Cathy and Heathcliff's starcrossed love. Heathcliff is so gone on her, and even when he's trying to be manipulative, he mostly comes across as desperate. (When he approaches Linton's ward Isabela in hopes of making Cathy jealous, he is the most gentlemanly ravisher you have ever met.) And Cathy is clearly equally gone on him, even if she gets in her own way sometimes.

I think the script could have used some work. For one thing, several secondary characters' motivations were left as exercises to the viewer (Cathy's father and especially her companion Nelly); like yes, I can form theories about why they did what they did, but maybe a little less subtlety here is in order. Also, just to make Cathy and Heathcliff feel a bit more complex as characters and/or to just make their relationship more toxic or at least complicated. Honestly, my main criticism here is that Fennell, against all expectations and especially considering her work on Saltburn, doesn't go nearly as weird and batshit as the story could support. The visuals yes, the character dynamics no.

Overall, though, a good time. I ship it and immediately went looking for fic. (There were 15 fics in the tag, half from before the movie even came out, and half the new ones were crossovers. RIP.)

--

The Tunnel (2011). An Australian mockumentary about a news crew that goes into abandoned subway tunnels underneath Sydney looking for a story.

I'm always interested in mockumentary horror, as opposed to your standard found footage, so I was excited to check this out. Unfortunately, the longer I sit with it, the less I like it. First of all, the whole point of the mockumentary aspect is to add depth, context, and contrast to the found footage, but IMO the interview clips here were almost extraneous. There were one or two nice moments, like when they have the anchor listen for the first time to what another crew member in the tunnels had heard through his head phones, but there was very little else that we couldn't have gotten from the found footage itself. The news investigation framing all felt a little off as well; the supposed pretext for going into the tunnels feels a little overheated. "Politicians fail to give updates on big proposal" does not feel like the red flag for a huge scandal, and various other aspects that were treated as potentially newsworthy just weren't, IMO. Also, surely the most terrifying part of underground horror is the threat of getting lost? I was astounded by how little a concern this was in the movie, even when they were running around without any care whatsoever for where they were.

What really killed this for me, though, was the gender politics. As with so many found footage type movies, there's one female character, the news anchor, and everyone else is male. (Why is this????) There are repeated assertions from the guys both in the found footage and the interview segments that the anchor doesn't know what she's doing, doesn't deserve her position, and probably is fucking the station director. And what do you know, they're right, several people die because of her ambition and poor judgment, not to mention how she goes into crying hysterics several times. In 2011!! Just brutal.

There's a behind the scenes doc about the movie that I managed to watch five minutes of, and before I turned it off, it was entirely about what genius fundraisers the creators were, and how they "disrupted" the Australian film funding model by "inventing NFTs before they were big." (They raised funds by ~selling frames of the movie to donors.) So... yeah.

The movie isn't entirely without merit; there's some great found footage moments. If you just want to watch people stumble around underground being chased by unknown monsters, you could do worse. But a very qualified rec.

--

Prince of Darkness (1987). Per Shudder, this John Carpenter movie "follows a group of quantum physics students in Los Angeles who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan."

NGL, I watched this because I really really wanted to see a movie about the liquid embodiment of Satan, and now I have, I guess. This was just bad. There are some memorable moments; I loved the dripping fluid floating upwards and that the canister (OF FLUID) was locked to "only open from the inside." The dream transmissions for the future were honestly rad. The bugs and creepy-crawlies everwhere were really effective sometimes. There's also a fun sense of claustrophobia as the night goes on and things close in around the characters. Also, frankly, the devil and Jesus as extraterrestials who came to take over and warn Earth, respectively, was neat! I wish the movie had gone harder on that!

OTOH, the eventual romance began with the guy being such a creeper that I was sure he was being set up as a villain, and then he's a big old sexist to her right before he asks her out, and I hated that. The demon instapregnancy was so predictable and tedious. One of the guys repeatedly has homophobic comments made to and by him, and also he's weirdly racist to one of the girls, and this is all for no apparent reason except as a characterization note. And overall the movie was just slow and lacking in charm. I would love to see this exact premise from someone who was actually good at writing characters.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they were interested in specific elements of the plot or if they're a John Carpenter completionist.

(This and the writing post were all going to be one post, but then I had so many Oasis things to say...)

+ LOL Noel won Songwriter of the Year at the Brit Awards for 2025, the first year in probably twenty or so when he did not release a single song. The Brit Awards also happen to be in Manchester this year. Did they give Noel the award to get him to Manchester? Did they put the awards in Manchester because they already planned to give him the award (since it clearly didn't depend on any work he actually produced last year)?

And most importantly: Is Liam going? His answer has varied, but the most recent one seems to be yes. In any case he definitely approves.

+ And they're definitely still talking. :') Here's Noel calling into his favorite sports show.

Noel: Our…our…our kid thinks we’re still.. Our kid thinks we’re gonna win the quad.

Andy: Honestly hand on heart, he does?

Noel: Well, that’s what he was telling me last night.

(And he says he's in the studio!!!!!)

+ Speaking of Noel in the studio, here's what Liam had to say about that. Don't tease us Liam!!

+ One last Liam tweet to send you off. ;____;

The Housemaid (2025). A recently released felon (Sidney Sweeney), takes a job as a housemaid in hopes of stabilizing her life, but lady of the house Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is abusive and unstable, and things escalate.

This is once again Paul Feig directing a dumb enjoyable trashy thriller about woman, following the Simple Favor movies with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. Glad you found your niche, dude! Keep it up! I think parts of this might be even dumber than A Simple Favor, and it didn't matter at all. The plotholes are gaping, and we do not care, because we are here for women who Survive and ultimately Fuck Shit Up, and that is what we get.

Also like A Simple Favor, there's a husband, although at least here he's plot-relevant.

( spoilers for that )

In addition to being dumb as fuck (affectionate?), I will say this movie would have been better if maybe 20 mins of it had been cut. The middle kind of dragged.

Interestingly, this was a slow burn success at the box office; I think it's up to about $335M worldwide, which is huge for a little thriller like this. I foresee a sequel in our future, and honestly I'm here for it.

--

Iron Lung (2026). An adaptation of an indie video game, this is about a convict sent below an ocean of blood in a tiny submarine to look for... stuff.

This movie was self-funded, directed, and edited by Youtuber Markiplier, who stars. For all that, it's a pretty credible first effort. There's a lot of great atmosphere, and things go full Sam Raimi in the end in a way I enjoyed.

OTOH, I felt it really struggled with pacing and flow of information. Sometimes I had to infer key facts (like "what is his objective through the entire middle of the film") from stuff said way after the fact. Even worse, nearly all the exposition is delivered via distorted radio, and it was very frustrating to have the sense there was important stuff that I wanted to know that I straight up couldn't hear properly. There's also just too much plot and backstory and lore here for a movie with this little dialogue. The video game is barely an hour and has no characters; we don't need most of this!

Fellow youtuber hbomberguy (of the James Somerton plagiarism video fame) posted quite a long letterboxd review and made some points I appreciated, especially that Markiplier probably feels a certain personal connection to the idea of sitting in a small room trying to do an ill-defined job while unsure of one's purpose. Overall, though, my feelings align more closely with my charts guy Dan Murrell's take.

Anyway, I hope this movie is a gateway to more people discovering indie horror films. There's so much stuff out there, and a lot of it's good and weird and trying new things, like this is.

--

Whistle (2026). Some teens, including newcomer Chris (Dafne Keene) and future doctor Ellie (Sophie Nelisse) blow an ancient death whistle that causes their fated deaths to happen early, one by one.

That description does not make it sound like a good movie, and in fact it isn't, but it was trying harder than these kinds of dumb supernatural slashers often are. The cast is all very charming; I have a huge crush on Nelisse, it was great to see Keene again, now all grown up (she was Laura Kinney in Logan), and honestly all the main teens are likable, even the obligatory asshole jock. Nick Frost and Michelle Fairley are also here! Frost in particular is very fun and I wanted more of him.

There are various notes (Chris's past drug use, cousin Rel's nerdy comics obsession) that clearly were trying to add up to something. With several more rounds of script edits, this could have been this year's Clown in a Cornfield: a surprisingly charming teen slasher, greater than the sum of its parts, and with a sweet queer romance. For the first forty minutes or so, I had real hope! The setup was good!

Unfortunately this movie didn't get those edits, so it sort of tries to say something about dying and living, but also people's "deaths" are disfigured versions of themselves gleefully chasing them to ground like cats playing with their food. The cousin feels like three different characters in a trench coat. There's a time paradox thing going on with Chris's future death that just confuses the issue. It does have a queer romance, and you could argue that seeing Keene and Nelisse finally kiss is worth the price of admission, but I found it underbaked. There's also a drug dealing youth pastor with a switch blade for some reason.

Unlikely as it is with a premise this dumb, this could and should have been better.

Some recs from the threesentenceficathon. Prompting and filling still open!

Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, belowdecks by platinum_firebird

Dune, Paul/Feyd-Rautha, if you need to be mean, be mean to me / i can take it and put it inside of me by surrenderer

Riddle-Master, Deth/Morgon, solace by hafnia

Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel, the first makeup sex by whynot

Gattaca, Jerome & Eugene, min/maxing your baby by sholio

Finally managed to write some fills for the threesentenceficathon!

1. MCU, Valkyrie
https://threesentenceficathon.dreamwidth.org/6398.html?thread=14482686#cmt14482686
any, any, “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”

( Valkyrie )


2. Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel
https://threesentenceficathon.dreamwidth.org/6398.html?thread=12601086#cmt12601086
Any, any, soft underbelly

( Gallaghercest )


3. The Long Walk - Stephen King, Stebbins
https://threesentenceficathon.dreamwidth.org/6398.html?thread=14502654#cmt14502654
The Long Walk (book), Stebbins, ghosts

( The Long Walk )

Impromptu (1991). Writer George Sand (Judy Davis) strives to avoid past lovers, romance the man of her dreams (Chopin, played by Hugh Grant), and find peace and quiet to write novels.

The movie's strongest point is its cast. I'd not seen Judy Davis before but absolutely fell in love with her here, and Bernadette Peters as the scheming one-time BFF is wonderful, at first charming and later pitiable. Emma Thompson has a smaller, purely comedic part as a duchess desperate to become a patron of the arts, and she's also delightful. There are also some male actors, and they were fine. (I know everyone loves Julian Sands, and he's very nice to look at, but I'm unpersuaded by his acting chops.)

Wikipedia calls this movie a "historical film," which conveniently saves anyone from having to identify the tone. Is it a comedy? A romance? A drama? Possibly all of the above? I enjoyed it for the actors and the discussion of the arts, and I'm interested to learn more about George Sand, but it felt like a movie that wasn't entirely sure what it wanted to be.

I was inspired to watch this because of sophiahelix's excellent Yuletide fic for it, which I enjoyed even more rereading after seeing the movie.

--

The Secret Agent (2025). A research scientist in 1970s Brazil is targeted by a corrupt capitalist and hides out under a false name while trying to get the documents for him and his son to flee the country.

My understanding of this movie going in was that it was a 70s-esque thriller, but a very slow burn. I guess that's not untrue, exactly, but "slow burn" is a bit optimistic tbh. I can appreciate the artistic craftsmanship on display here, and as a portrait of people going about their daily lives amidst pervasive corruption, it was very good. I also enjoyed the occasional cuts to the present day of two women transcribing cassette tapes recorded during the main action of the movie, and how that juxtaposition worked of tension in the past vs reconstructing the events fifty years later. OTOH, I found the left turn in narrative structure towards the end pretty unsatisfying.

Overall, I get what the movie was doing, and I think it did it well; I just wasn't into it.

--

The Testament of Ann Lee (2026). The Shakers were an off-shoot of the Quakers who, per the movie, were given to physical motion ("shaking") as a form of worship leading to religious ecstasy and who eventually adopted a doctrine of total abstinence. Amanda Seyfried stars as Ann Lee, the English prophet of the Shaker sect who leads them to America in the mid-1700s. Also it's kind of a musical?

I've seen people say that Robert Eggers's movie The Witch is a horror story from within a Puritan worldview, and I've never quite been able to wrap my head around that framing, but Testament of Ann Lee is 1000% a story about a fringe religious sect from the sect's POV. If you've ever wanted folk horror without the horror part, this movie is it. The script is heavily inspired by contemporary accounts of Lee by her followers, and the movie is entirely committed to that version of events, complete with visions and apparent miracles.

The movie is gorgeous, and so much of it is given over to the religious music and dance that in places it feels more like an experience than a narrative. It's more interested in conveying the emotional life of these characters than in strict realism, so some of it feels heightened in a way that I really liked, without trying to be deliberately distracting. So for example, at one point in one of the climactic musical sequences, an electric guitar comes in. That heightened approach makes the extensive musical worship sequences feel organic and necessary, which is why I hesitate to call the movie a musical in the conventional sense; the music and dancing is almost entirely diagetic, even if choreographed to a degree unlikely in real life.

If it's not apparent by now, I loved this. Beautifully shot, incredible integration of the worship sequences, Seyfried was incredible. It was great to see a movie where the weird prophet was a woman and yet the movie still treats her with utter seriousness. There were moments where I could have done with a bit more on-screen illustration of events that get relegated to voiceover, but it's a small quibble.

I found a quote from director Mona Fastvold that she initially struggled to find support for the project due to "zero interest" form the industry, to which I can only say, no shit. I honestly have no idea how this got made, but I'm so glad it did. I have never had a movie experience like this before.

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been a minute!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearing out the last of my movies watched last year.

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

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

That said, ( spoilers )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( other fannish things )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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