lirazel | Reading

Continued my short story kick with a new collection by Louise Erdrich, Python's Kiss; I particularly liked her unexpected* foray into sci-fi with a pair of stories set in a San Junipero-like digital afterlife, one about a woman plotting vengeance on her father (also dead, in the same afterlife) and the other about a woman whose version of heaven includes raising a construct of her daughter through (but not past) childhood, over and over, until the current version – the "8037th Caroline" – refuses to fade away and takes over her mother's (after)life instead. Two of the other stories I liked best also shared a thematic link, of women surviving abusive marriages: contemporary fiction played straight in "Wedding Dresses" – the titular dresses a story framework for a woman telling her niece about her four prior marriages – and with a magical-realism twist in "Borsalino," in which the main character's encounter with a ghostly thief in Venice decades before helps her leave her abusive husband. Snakes are another recurring theme. Cool black-and-white illustrations by Erdrich's daughter at the beginning of each story, frequently blurring line between drawing and comic strip.

* It came as a surprise to me, anyway— I'd forgotten about/haven't read her dystopian speculative fiction novel Future Home of the Living God.

pauraque

This puzzle game by Scottish studio DMA Design takes as its inspiration the myth that lemmings (arctic rodents) mindlessly fling themselves off cliffs. In the game, lemmings (pixelly humanoids with green hair and blue leotards) fall from a trap door and begin marching mindlessly to the right, oblivious to cliffs, fire, lakes of acid, and other deadly hazards. When they hit a wall, they turn 180 and march the other way. It's your job to guide as many of them as possible safely to the exit.

lemmings fall from above and walk to the right, away from the exit that is immediately to the left. one has just exploded in a shower of pixels

lemmings fall from above and walk to the right, away from the exit that is immediately to the left. one has just exploded in a shower of pixels

To accomplish this, you can assign individual lemmings one of eight skills: Climber (climbs vertical walls), Floater (uses an umbrella to survive falls), Bomber (explodes after 5 seconds, leaving a crater), Blocker (stands in place and won't let other lemmings past), Builder (builds a staircase), Basher (digs a horizontal tunnel), Miner (digs a diagonal tunnel), and Digger (digs a vertical tunnel). Each level offers a limited number of skill assignments, so you have to use them strategically to create a path for the others.

Lemmings was wildly popular in the '90s, spawning multiple expansion packs, sequels, and spinoffs. As a child I don't know if I was really aware of what a global phenomenon it was, but it was certainly a phenomenon in my house, considering the countless hours my brother and I spent trying (and usually failing) to stop the cute little dummies from marching to their doom.

( cut for length )

The original Lemmings is unfortunately not commercially available. If you've misplaced your floppies/cartridge, various releases are available as abandonware. I was playing the DOS release on DOSBox, which runs fine but you may need to edit some files to defeat the copy protection. If that doesn't sit well or sounds like too much trouble, there are also several fan-made freeware clones that are supposed to run on modern systems, though I have not personally vetted any of them.

firecat

But people always say he’s such a good writer, so lately I’ve been thinking maybe I should…

…but I don’t feel like it any more.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stephen-king-defends-graham-platner/

After Politico reported an allegation in July 2026 that Maine's former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner had raped a woman, author Stephen King said, "Tell you what — if you knew the whole truth about everyone in the Senate and House of Reps, those chambers would be dead empty. Jesus said, 'Let him without sin cast the first stone.'"

The fact that there are already sexual abusers in Congress doesn’t mean it’s good to elect another one.

Calling for someone to drop out of a political race isn’t the same as participating in executing them.

There are translations of John 8:7 that don’t use a gendered pronoun.

I don’t judge people who still support Platner, but if they defend their support publicly, I hope they explain it better than this.

osprey_archer

John W. Crowley’s The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William Dean Howells is not so much focused on Howells’ later fiction as on how the literary public elevated him to the rank of Dean of American Letters (partly because the pun was irresistible, but he did wield a great deal of influence through his column at Harper’s), which ended up tanking his reputation during the post-Great War shredding of all things Victorian.

Although in his younger days Howells had been considered something of a troublemaker, his elevation to Dean marked him as not merely a member of, but the embodiment of the Establishment. So when the Establishment fell, it was open season on Howells. Younger writers derided his work as stuffy and sissified, often without having ever read his novels. They certainly had no awareness that he had championed shocking authors like Ibsen and Zola. (I don’t know if Ibsen is still shocking, but Zola will probably be shocking as long as there are novels.)

He also wrote his own “J’accuse” defending the Haymarket anarchists. They were sentenced to death on the grounds that their anarchist beliefs had incited the Haymarket bombing, even though none of them had actually been involved with the bombing. At the time, the Haymarket anarchists were so widely loathed that no one else in America was willing to go on record saying "we are hanging these men for their BELIEFS and that's FUCKED UP."

Aside from writers in translation like Ibsen and Zola (and Turgenev, and Tolstoy…), Howells also helped launch the careers of many American authors: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others. But obviously not even Howells could read or appreciate every single deserving author, and some of them clearly held a grudge, notably Theodore Dreiser, who probably gotten off on the wrong foot by faking (!) an interview with Howells in the late 1890s. So beyond the basic generational conflict, there were some writers with personal axes to grind.

(Howells may have never read Dreiser, although Dreiser later claimed that he once ran into Howells in the offices at Harper’s, where Howells told him, “You know, I don’t like Sister Carrie,” and walked on. Brutal. Absolutely ice cold. Dreiser very much admired Howells, so you can see how an encounter like that would turn his love to hate, assuming of course that it actually happened.

I have never read Dreiser but nonetheless have a strongly negative opinion of his work: an American Thomas Hardy, writing grim boring slogs that no one reads except when it’s assigned in class. I’ve also escaped the misfortune of reading Thomas Hardy. It is actually quite fun to lambast authors whose work you haven’t read.)

A bit of a downer, but full of interesting tidbits about the publishing market in the years around 1900. For instance, serialization in a magazine prior to publication in book form was seen as a sign of quality, so Howells knew he was on the way down when no one would serialize The Kentons.

To end on a lighter note: I laughed at this gripe from an aspiring writer, who wrote to the Century magazine, “If you do not take some of my contributions, I shall have to resort to the humiliation of being discovered by William Dean Howells.”

muccamukk

The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by Marguerite Gavin
Concluding my reread of the original Five Gods books with the first book I read in that series. Yes, I know that's not the correct order, and in retrospect, I wouldn't recommend it. ("You're reading the third one!?" demanded an exasperated friend who'd spent years trying to talk me into reading The Curse of Chalion.)

Compared to the duology set in Chalion, which I've reread multiple times, I remembered relatively little about this one. Honestly, memory was the scene at the inn with the pregnant sorceress, the polar bear at the funeral, the ending in the sacred forest being confusing, and that I'd been reading it because someone had recommended it as an example of a fic trope when I was trying to get a handle on writing that trope myself. I didn't remember which fic trope, but it turns out it was soul bonding.

I think it benefits from reading them in order because this one somewhat expects you to know how the Five Gods worldbuilding works, and is doing its most interesting stuff by tinkering with it, so I think I was a bit overwhelmed going in cold. It might be a bit of a let down if you just want more of Caz, Ista and the gang, as they're in another country and also not born yet.

Anyway! I really liked it! The hero is a solid Bujold entry in stoic man who believes he's damaged beyond repair but feels the pull to act with honour despite not much of his experience with the world suggesting that's going to work out for him. The heroine would like things to be less stupid, and also not to get raped or murdered, and plans to persist until conditions improve. I felt like her character could've gotten fleshed out and given a bit more to do, but I did like her. There are a lot of vivid side characters who feel like they have their entire own stories while they're not on page, without taking over the narrative. The baddie was somewhat foreseeable (if it walks like a fascist, and talks like a fascist, it's prooooooobably...) but well constructed and convincing.

I did make sense of the big dramatic scene at the end this time, though it didn't quite have the kick of the ending of the first two books. Overall, this one was good, and if you liked the Caz and Ista books, you'll probably like this, but I would read them in order.

Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen
Grabbed this second hand as I've been meaning to read more of Yolen. I now feel a bit bad writing this not that long after the woman passed away, because it really shouldn't be held up to represent her writing. I think if you publish 500 books, they can't all be bangers?

I started out really enjoying it, and being pleased at how much SF/F in the 1970s and '80s could just be really fricking weird. It's presented as a series of anthropologists reports of first contact with a new planet, recordings of conversations, and trial transcripts, leading to overlapping, out of sequence, and sometimes contradictory versions of events. Which is usually my favourite thing! All the male characters also seemed to be casually bisexual (though not a lot of concern about consent to be found). I don't remember much sex happening between women, but it was still cool to see in a book that came out in 1984.

( This got long, so I'm putting the rest and the negativity behind a cut )

So yeah. That sure was a book I read. I'm glad it wasn't the first Yolen I encountered, and I will try again, but wow.

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco
Grabbed this off the library shelf for non-fiction graphic novels while I was looking for something else.

Graphic novel about the author investigating the causes, events and aftermath of a religious riot in rural India. If that's the kind of thing that interests you, this will probably be interesting. I think the author did a good job of trying to pick apart the different strands of events and conflicting narratives to lay out not exactly what happened, then the tensions that lead to it happening, and how the cover up rolled out. Sacco has an eye for how people justify bad actions, and while it's not without judgement, it's certainly with an attempt at empathy. It does feel like that kind of openness and honesty is maybe what will lead to solutions in similar situations, but I also didn't leave with an impression that was happening at all.

landofnowhere

World Without End, Amber Reeves, 1912. Early 20th century feminist and socialist Amber Reeves may at this point be most known as one of H. G. Wells's many girlfriends and inspiration for his book Ann Veronica (see my comparative book review where it gets the worse end of the comparison); I heard of her first as mathematician Dusa McDuff's grandmother (that link will be interesting to feminists as well as mathematicians). I read her novel A Lady and Her Husband a while back after reading Ann Veronica.

Anyway, I mentioned Reeves to

kurowasan who is always looking for more women authors to get into Project Gutenberg (though she can't project manage Amber Reeves's books herself as they are still in copyright in Canada) and ended up lookig up what else she had written. This is Reeves's first novel, published as The Reward of Virtue in the UK, which is in some ways a more fitting, if sarcastic, title for the book than its US title World Without End. But the experience of reading a book titled World Without End and not knowing it's going to end was interestingly open-ended. Like Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill, it's a cautionary tale about an unprepared young woman marrying too young, with a badass liberated woman or two in the background, but the two protagonists could not be more different. Evelyn Baker is wealthy, lively, self-centered, and the book does a good job of showing her as a rounded character with more depth than her better-educated peers see in her. The story starts with her birth, and does the child point of view very well. As Evelyn matures, the story turns into a marriage plot, and there is excellent social commentary and criticism of purity culture throughout. When I was getting near the end I wasn't sure how the story would wrap up in the pages left, though the ending more or less worked. ( ending spoilers ).

Terre des Autres, Sylvie Bérard. Francophone SFF book club is a thing now, and has moved on past Élisabeth Vonarburg! It turns out that wanting stuff that is easily available in English translation is more of a constraint that we'd realized, especially for Quebeçois authors, but we were able to find this book, which you will now be getting weekly updates on. We're on a desert planet with reptile aliens and human settlers who are at war with each other, and the book has made it clear that it's in conversation with the Western genre. The part I read include a bit that worked well as a self-contained short story but I'm wondering where things will do next.

kaiosea

Since writing the last update on my haino/cyhaino fic (https://kaiosea.dreamwidth.org/115618.html) I wrote about 11,529 in the first 5 days of July. This is kind of crazy for me but I feel crazy about this fic. Also added around 1000-1400 from my scraps pile back in, since I had written some of the ending at the beginning of the drafting process (which began... oh god... in Sept 2024. I took a lot of really long breaks because I didn't know what to do). Then I skimmed the whole thing and noted where I had actually missing parts and started filling those in. Once I am done then I will say yes; I have an actual first draft.

Ch 1 - 5568
Ch 2 - 6548
Ch 3 - 6609
Ch 4 - 5986
Ch 5 - 8121
Ch 6 - 4592
Ch 7 - 3939
Ch8 - 5237

Because this is longer than anything I have ever written I need a different editing strategy because I know my usual one won't work. I tried looking around fic and not-fic spaces to find tips and didn't really come up with anything useful, so I'm thinking:

Finish filling in the few missing parts (actually I only have one glaring missing part right now). Then the first draft is done
Very light edit over the whole thing just for readability - typos, wrong names, etc., only enough so that I can...
Read entire thing and make notes in a separate doc - DO NOT EDIT, DO NOT LINE EDIT - Only note big things e.g. completely dropped plot line, missing character
Track arcs / check arcs. I have 11 things I want to check so use spreadsheet I think. Look chapter by chapter because arc by arc would take forever. Probably will take a long time, but my current spreadsheet is already formatted like this so it helps. Then, start making broad fixes. "Arc" is probably not the proper term but it is what I call it in my head.
Characterization check - each important character - maybe in conjunction with next step (dialogue check). Not sure if better to do scene by scene or character by character (in short fic i always do this character by character, but i usually have like… 2-3 mains. Not like this fic with 9+ significant characters + others who still have canon personalities no matter how one-note they are in canon)
Dialogue check
Themes check
Line editing, which might actually take as long as all previous steps put together
Repeat any/all previous steps as many times as needed
Beta if I can find one... might need to start looking soon

Anyway feel free to give thoughts/feedback, I'm on step 1 lol, this might look insane. I thought about doing themes check earlier than 6 but I think it'll be easier like this; I'll see, will probably adjust things as I go.

Current Mood: groggy

flareonfury posting in

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The below icons were made for

itsabattlefield Supernatural battle. Entry count was only 20, but... I'm me, and I have a bunch of extras... What can I say? I love me some werewolves, vampires & witches ;D

[20] Being Human (US & UK)
[03] She-Wolf of London
[02] Sabrina the Teenage Witch
[07] Grimm
[01] Moonlight
[02] Buffy the Vampire Slayer

PREVIEW

werewolves, witches, and vampires....

contingencycon posting in

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forestofglory

It hasn’t been that long since the last media roundup and I haven't read that much but I had lots of thoughts that I wanted to share, so have a post:

Hirayasumi, vol 3+4 by Keigo Shinzō— This continues to be very charming. I’m loving all the little details.The cityscapes here feel so warm and lived in! I'm not sure if it's a slice of life manga thing, a manga thing or just an artifact of my limited selection but I've been really enjoying the land/cityscapes in the slice of life manga I've been reading recently
Content note: fatphobia/diet culture

Silver Spoon, vol 14-15 by Hiromu Arakawa— I’m working on a rec list of slice of life manga and I was reminded that I’ve never read the last two volumes of this series. I'd always meant to reread the rest of the series but that felt like too much of a project. So I ended up just reading these last two volumes – it wasn’t that hard to pick up, there’s helpful story summary in the front of each volume.

This is a charming story about a city kid who goes to an ag high school to get away from everything. I love all the details and about farming, food equipment and rural life. I thought it wrapped up nicely!

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, Vol. 1 by C.R.C. Payne, StarBite, et al— I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time, and it was mentioned in the comments of my superhero comics rec list, so I finally got around to it. I ended up getting it on paper because the endless scroll webtoon format isn’t great for my hands.

It’s like a cute slice of life comic about the batfam. It’s got a very fic vibe, things are chill and everyone more or less gets along. Which sounds like exactly what I want in a batfam comic but for this first volume at least, felt a little flat actually. I wanted a bit more conflict or angst or something. I’m generally pretty happy with low conflict personal stakes stuff, but I guess these versions of the character feel a little shallow. Each story is so short, like five pages, its just hard to get much depth in that length.

(I’ll probably read some more of this because it is cute and free online. Maybe if I space out the episodes more it will not only not bother my hands as much but feel less bland.

X-men: The Animated Series season 1— Since I'm more open to Superhero media these days, R suggested we watch this animated series from the 90’s. It’s fun! I like that it's got a big team, though it does mean most characters don’t get much screentime. I also like that they are pretty much just fighting for mutant civil rights. There’s a lot less for me to suspend my moral disbelief about here than in most superhero stories I’ve encountered recently.

genarti

I keep forgetting* to post about this, and now Readercon is starting uhhh tonight, but I'll be at Readercon this year! And on some panels! On Friday and Saturday morning, after which I will be spending most of the weekend looking at the tall ships parading majestically around Boston, but I'm going to cram as much con fun as I can into that time.

*"Forgetting" is mostly "being too busy to have bandwidth for things" really, but who's counting?

Here are my panels (ETA: now with 100% less messed-up html!):

Faux-Victorian Scientists in Fantasyland (Friday 1pm)

In a review of A Letter From the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall, Abigail Nussbaum notes that it is part of a "recent trend for tales about cod-Victorian scientists in fantasyland (a group that includes Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and Malka Older’s Mossa and Pleiti novellas)." What's behind this trend and how does it approach the complicated legacy of the Victorian Era?

Secretly Brilliant Strategists (Friday 2pm)

Ivan Vorpatril of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is handsome and vacuous: a himbo. And yet, despite his seemingly unimpressive mental faculties, Ivan repeatedly makes good strategic choices—even when they don't initially appear to be. What do we love (or hate!) about characters whose intelligence is camouflaged? What do they do for their narratives that more obviously clever characters can't?

SFF Spanning Cycles of History (Saturday 11am)

There was a time when SFF narratives spanning whole historical cycles, such as Foundation, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the Dragonriders of Pern, allowed readers to follow whole civilizations as characters, watching as situations go from current and urgent to historicized and mythologized and become the cultural context for new urgent problems and events. Has this style of storytelling become less popular, and if so, why? What challenges and opportunities do such longitudinal narratives offer?

annapeace

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osprey_archer

A few weeks ago, scrolling through Tumblr, I was arrested by a quote:

“I can’t think what it’s like to be certain. I’m afraid that it’s impossible for me. There isn’t a place for me.”

His voice was tense, excited, full of passion. As he went on, it became louder, louder than the voice I was used to, but still very clear.

“Listen, Lewis. I could believe in all the rest. I could believe in the catholic church. I could believe in miracles. I could believe in the inquisition. I could believe in eternal damnation. If only I could believe in God.”

“But you can’t, I said, with his cry still in my ears.

“I can’t begin to,” he said, his tone quiet once more. “I can’t get as far as ‘help Thou mine unbelief.’”

We left the ridge of the Roman road, and began to cross the shining fields.

“The nearest I’ve got is this,” he said. “It has happened twice. It’s completely clear – and terrible. Each time has been on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had the absolute conviction – it’s much more real than anything one can see or touch – that God and His world exist. And everyone can enter and find their rest. Except me. I’m infinitely far away for ever. I am alone and apart and infinitesimally small – and I can’t come near.”

This comes from C. P. Snow’s The Light and the Dark, and of course I had to read it at once.

Now unfortunately this turns out to be one of those rare times when my book instincts have led me astray. The above excerpt electrified me, but the rest of the book was… it’s fine. It’s well-written. Our narrator (Lewis) is telling us the story of his friend Roy (the speaker in the above extract) and his struggles with recurring melancholia.

Roy hopes that if he can come to believe in God, that will cure his bouts of despair. When that doesn’t work, he decides to try the next best thing, “a feeble simulacrum of his search for God,” by attempting to embrace the Third Reich.

Given the kind of God Roy was looking for, based on his passionate declamation that “I could believe in the inquisition…in eternal damnation,” it strikes me the move from God to Hitler actually makes perfect sense. God the Fuhrer seems like just the sort of deity who would delight in damning people for the hell of it, too.

You might imagine that Roy’s flirtation with Nazism put me off the book, but in fact I had gotten annoyed with Roy much earlier, simply because I felt that the author was continually leaning over my shoulder breathing “Isn’t he dreamy?” Young, handsome, deeply and romantically sad; slender yet strong, intellectually brilliant, showered in honors to which he is indifferent; a notorious womanizer who had a brief gay love affair in his youth –

I did entertain the possibility that Snow may have meant us to read Roy as gay, adding an extra subtext to his despairing “There isn’t a place for me.” But upon reflection I think this briefly-alluded-to affair is simply meant to add to Roy’s aura of irresistible dreaminess. Women want him, men want to be him; but men also just want him. Don’t you, dear reader, also want…

“NO,” I said, heaping rejection like coals of fire on poor Roy’s head, like an angry god myself.

So in a way it was a bit of a relief when Roy started flirting with Nazism, as I felt released from any obligation to like this beautiful sad boy. Look how sad he is. How could you dislike anyone so sad and so beautiful at the same time? He does perhaps allow his sadness to lead him into excesses, but it’s just because he’s so darn SAD, don’t you understand? Well, look, I think we can all agree that “fanboy for the Third Reich” is simply an excess too far.

Unfortunately, now that I’d decided I was allowed to hate him, I began to find him far less annoying. It helps that when the war starts, he signs up to fly for the RAF, mostly because he knows the death rates for pilots is high, but at least he’s fighting for the right side even if he is also sighing re: the Nazis “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last best hope.” Last best hope for WHAT, Roy? This is genuinely unclear to me, because he recoils whenever he has to interface with a specific example of Nazi doctrine, like their policies toward the Jews or their desire to conquer Europe, when considered as a concrete fact rather than in the abstract. (In the abstract he thinks unification is a good idea and, after all, it will never be accomplished peacefully.)

So he’s still fumbling about in basic political incoherence, but he nonetheless achieves a certain pathos in this section. Despite myself, I felt some of the tragedy of this beautiful sad full-grown man who is clearly always going to be spiritually a beloved boy in C. P. Snow’s heart.

Snow is actually quite a good writer, I think, but would have been even better if he could have gotten out of his own way. There’s no need to constantly point out Roy’s dreaminess. He’s put enough of it on the page that readers could notice it on their own, if they were only left alone.

nowhere posting in

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220 icons @ insomniatic.

elisi

A little explainer for people overseas who are wondering wtf is happening in UK politics at the moment. The video freezes a little way in, but the sound is fine which is the main thing. ETA: OK IT WORKS PROPERLY NOW.

Watch on YouTube

And here is a little interview with Count Binface himself. 🗑🏆

Watch on YouTube

ETA: OK, I couldn't help myself...

MPs make fun of Farage resigning

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: silly

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. What would you do right now, if money were not an issue?

2. What would you do for the next three years, if money were not an issue?

3. What is bringing you the most joy right now that requires little or no money?

4. What types of things do you find enjoyable that require no money?

5. Is there anything you've been meaning to do for a long time, but put off because of money?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on

booknook.

Promoted

vocab_drabbles.

snickfic

Leviticus (2026). Two queer teen boys in a homophobic Australian backwater are stalked by a demon that appears to each one as the other, driving them apart.

This stars Joe Bird, the little brother in Talk to Me. He was great then and he's great here, and his and co-star Stacy Clausen's chemistry is fantastic. This movie only works because they're so good together as two fumbling kids who don't really understand themselves or each other, who can't trust each other because the other guy might be a demon, but who, it turns out, can't trust anyone else in their lives either. Betrayal is the big theme here: by trusted adults, religion, the person you're into, and yourself.

The conversion therapy metaphor is very obvious, which isn't necessarily bad, but I did feel that the movie wasn't sure what to do with it once it had introduced it. Like yes, now you (or the appearance of you) are dangerous to each other, so now what? I wanted it to give me more. The movie feels like it plateaus in the last act, neither deepening the themes nor escalating the tension but just hitting a lot of the same beats until things finally resolve.

However, the actual character work is good, IMO. Both kids are complicated and make realistically bad choices, but they also both keep trying with one another. There's a really great scene where love interest Ryan uses the word dickhead about five times, and it's honestly really sweet in context. The cinematography was also good; I really felt the kind of down-and-out exhaustion of the industrial small town.

Overall, even though it didn't fire on all cylinders for me, it's definitely a worthwhile watch if teen boys in love in a horror setting sound like your jam.

--

Rose of Nevada (2026). Directed by Mark Jenkin, who also made Enys Men, this is about two guys in an impoverished Cornish fishing town who take a job aboard a lost and resurfaced fishing boat, which takes them back in time. The guy who's been sleeping rough suddenly finds he has a wife and kid; the guy who took the job to support his family no longer has one, because they're back in the present day.

This movie is largely an Experience (tm) rather than a story as such. It seems like there is some actual plot/lore underpinning, but Jenkin is not that interested in explaining what it is. We spend a LOT of time on a fishing boat. The captain might be fae, or the boat might stuck in a time loop, or... who can say.

Mostly what Jenkin is interested in is making a movie that feels old, full of fuzziness and tactile impressions of things. I'm told the camera can only store about twelve seconds of footage at a time, so everything is a quick cut, and for whatever reason he didn't mic any of it, so all the sound happened in post and all the spoken dialogue was dubbed in, like an old giallo film or something.

I got out of this and was like well that was an experience I guess, but with time I feel like I might want to watch it again. Maybe I can make sense of more things this time.