I Swear To God I'm Getting Fucking Ads On My Keyboard

Ides of January Reading Update

The Cloisters got DNF'ed. I don't like to do that, but I had to. It was so fucking boring. The stuff about tarot was interesting, but it would only be focused on for like two paragraphs and then utterly forgotten so the protag could whine some more about not being cool enough. It was also all tell, no show. At one point, it's said that the MC has been having trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality and might be having full-blown hallucinations. And....that's it. We never get to see it at all. If it weren't for that line, there'd be no way to know that was happening. And it's like that with everything. Awful book.

Babel is good, but it's taking me forever to get through it. I like it, it's just slow going.

So This Is Ever After is the only romance I've ever enjoyed reading. It's funny, sweet as hell, and Queer af. I don't even know why I decided to read it because I don't really like the romance genre, but I'm so glad I did.

Maus made me cry and that's all I'm ready to say about that.

Iron Widow is one of the best books I've ever read. Wu Zetian is an absolute gold medal badass and I love everything about her. I don't know if I want to be her friend, her girlfriend, or just be her; I'll even accept being her enemy if I have to. I'm just obsessed and want her in my life somehow. It's fucking brilliant and I cannot wait for Heavenly Tyrant.

The Weight of Blood is very good so far. It's a Carrie retelling set in a 2014 Georgia high school about to host its first integrated prom. I'm only about a third of the way through it right now, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

Weird peeve time. Calling lab grown gemstones “fake” is stupid because it’s the same shit just not formed naturally. An artificially grown diamond is the same shit as a natural diamond it is the exact same material bro it’s all fuckign carbon

Middle school bully Bakugo and Midoriya but it’s a darr man video

okay i wanna do one of these. PLEASE interact: fraternal twins, people who were blonde as children, geminis, scorpios, roleplayers (ttrpg or larp version), roleplayers (tumblr blog or discord or omegle edition), gif makers who are terrified of the death of tumblr bc they will have nowhere to post, people with septum rings, non supernatural fans who nonetheless have opinions on the characters by osmosis, ace attorney investigations enjoyers, people with old laptops, people who do not own airpods, flautists, people with ocd who are very messy, collectors of weird objects, drinkers of iced coffee only, and winter haters

Saw your post and who am I to deny an opportunity to rant about terrible terrible twilight knock offs?

Okay so ever since twilight came out in 2005, there's been a load of knock offs inspired by the "vampire=hot and sexy/mysterious" and while some of them are, this author P.C cast and Kristen Cast saw the idea and cranked it up more than was necessary because what the hell.

The book is called House of Night and there are lots of books. And the idea of being a vampire was that you had to be marked/chosen in order to undergo it's transformation which. If you were chosen, you had to be with a fully fledged vampire until you were fully fledged yourself which is a long process (around four years) and what is a better place than being with a bunch of fully grown vampires than a academy with other chosen with the fledglings as the teachers?

I'm not gonna lie, it's a great concept but it's terrible what the authors done with it. Transformations don't always work and the chosen sometimes die, but in order to prevent this- you had to be pretty and not fat. Shockingly this isn't the worst thing on the list of how many messed up things this book had done

Then the authors worsen the book more by having the characters be problematic. (They sl#t shame a lot and this doesn't make sense since it's common knowledge that drinking human blood /blood in general is sexual in the story)

Examples include saying the r word, fetishizing queer characters, making a white character "twins" with a black character because they're just so alike like using aave as an example (and the black character she's twinning with is terribly written as well so it just ends up more terrible)

And absolutely terribly horrendous relationships!!

The main character is the "not like other girls tm" and so she gets the bad boy, some sort of thousand year old grandpa boyfriend, a TEACHER boyfriend, and a human boyfriend 😭 (for the amount of shaming this book has, the main character is getting busy with every boy she meets)

AND WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK MORE WORSE is that they thought it was cool to use Indigenous culture but strip everything about said culture so they can fit use what they thought was cool to use in the story. Im happy for any type of indigenous reputation as an indigenous person myself but WHY

They just made the main character (who was named Zoey redbird btw, cool last name tbh but absolutely shitty character) have op powers and call her a "Cherokee princess" with no respectful mention of Cherokee culture at all. They just made their own thing and slapped the word Cherokee on it and shipped it as representation.

For a character that's supposed to be non-white, she was acting the opposite despite being close with her grandma who was Indigenous (+ being stereotypical) and inheriting op powers that were meant to be from her "culture"

PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH

I don't even know how I saw past the red flags as a kid reading this book but now that I have, I'm just so angry just thinking about it 😭

I hope this rant of mine was entertaining

I was just on the right side of too old to hear about this series back when it came out. So let me tell you, it was an absolute trip to see what was in these books when my friends started raving about them a few years later.

Like, this? This is what they were so hyped about? I'd rather them tell me how much they love 50 Shades - well, okay, that's a little too far, but still.

I truly don't understand how any woman survived the absolute peak of fatphobia that we hit in the 2000s. And I'm including myself in that. No idea how I lived through it. These were the days when people were calling Britney Spears fat for being a size 4 instead of a 0. How did women not just collectively die off? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that we made it through, but holy hell it was by the skin of our teeth.

So someone really needs to tell me what the actual hell was going on in the 2000s that made every piece of teen media present teacher/student relationships like a totally cool and not abusive and traumatizing thing. Remember how grossed out everyone was by the Archie/Grundy relationship in Riverdale? In the 2000s, no one would have batted an eye at that. It would have fit right in with every other teen show at the time. I can't watch hardly any of my favorite high school shows anymore because of that. Ugh, so gross.

And holy shit I forgot she was indigenous! Well, in heavy quotes at least. That Cherokee Princess nonsense is such a White People move and I just can't. I don't know what's worse regarding indigenous rep, House of Night or Twilight. My man Charles de Lint isn't perfect and he's fucked it up a few times, but at least he actually tries and shows respect (um, hey, if he's actually far worse than I think, please let me know).

But, hey, in maybe possibly good news, apparently the writers are trying to convince the publishers to let them rewrite the series so they can do something about all the problematic stuff. That at least has the potential of growth for them

Good News!

I'm feeling much better now and will be able to stream tonight!

I hope you join me as I battle my way across Montana in a rather strange quest to bang a cult leader. I'm talking, of course, about Far Cry 5.

Live at 11:30 EST

Here’s my book rant for you. Boneyard by Seanan McGuire.

It’s set in the Deadlands setting, so basically Wild West but with monsters and some magic.

The book is about a traveling circus and the woman who has to tend to the monster exhibits while raising her mute daughter and running from her crazy narcissistic and abusive husband.

Overall, I’d say the book is really good, but there one thing that really sticks a thorn in my side.

So the circus has a collection of various monsters. There’s these red pirhanna things with teeth so sharp they bite themselves constantly, sending them into a feeding frenzy. They’ve got crazy poisonous spiders with skull patterns on their backs, they’ve got wasps the size of your forearm, an ENORMOUS catfish, a corn stalker which is this this pumpkin headed plant person.

Then, there’s the bloodwire.

What is a bloodwire you might ask?

I can’t tell you because apparently the author can’t either.

Throughout the ENTIRE BOOK they are constantly alluding to the bloodwire as a creature they have, but never once is it described or shown in action.

At one point the book even goes “and she told the little girl about the bloodwire” but NEVER ONCE DO WE AS THE READERS GET TO KNOW WHAT IT IS.

It seemed like for the entire book, the author was building up mystery around the bloodwire, deliberately concealing it so she could reveal it at the end as the circus’ most dangerous monster, maybe it would come in handy in the book’s final confrontation.

Literally all of the other circus monsters are used, except the bloodwire. I’m half convinced the author forgot about it halfway through.

That’s my book rant

I feel like a curse has been passed onto me because now I desperately want to know wtf a bloodwire is but I know that there is no answer. It is a curiosity that cannot be satisfied

all the “weird” content on tiktok feels so fabricated and performative. whereas on tumblr you’ll meet someone who will casually admit they eat paint

Teen Wolf has the best fucking soundtrack since One Tree Hill. And OTH had a banging soundtrack

I got this book, "The Girl Who Drank The Moon" by Kelly Smith. It made me SO mad. It's super well written, the plot makes sense. It has poetry and the poetry is nice too. You root for the characters. But it randomly switches perspectives between the two storylines endlessly and discombobulates you so bad you lose all momentum. Now all of sudden you can't read. In the end I had to just skim the fight sequences cause my brain stopped brain-ing thanks to the sheer amount of perspective shifts suddenly colliding into one.

10/10 would recommend.

It's always disappointing when there are multiple perspectives, but only one of them is actually interesting. Especially when they're very disconnected from each other