runpunkrun | recent entries

Hi, I'm Punk. I'm a fandom old she/they, and my journal is a mix of fannish and non-fannish content.

You can expect non-fannish stuff like podcast, TV, and book reviews, also poetry, recipes, and personal essays (??). I'm also teaching myself Japanese because I read too much haiku and my brain went a little funny.

Fannish content might include recs, meta, and possibly even some fanfiction (???).

I do write fanfic, it just takes a while to see the light of day. In the meantime, all of my work is on the AO3, and I also have a personal website, The Underground. If you're interested, you can check out my content notes policy. I have a transformative works policy, too, but in short: Go for it.

These days I'm into Star Trek (Original and Alternate Series), Star Trek RPF (Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto, aka Pinto), and Stargate Atlantis. Older fandoms include: Smallville, due South, Sports Night, The West Wing, and The X-Files, my first fandom. Shout out to atxf.

I welcome comments and try my best to reply. If all you want to say is a heart emoji or a +1, that's cool with me. If you want to add me to your reading list, go right ahead, there's no need to ask, and if you want to remove me from your list, that's also cool.

Most of my entries are public. Access locked entries are about family or being chronically ill, my least favorite fandom. If you spot me out there being chronically ill, please don't offer advice unless I've asked for it.

I run

gluten_free and

fancake, and here are some other places you can find me:

'Unreliable Narrator, at Fancake' added to a collage made from the ripped up page of a book, the strips imperfectly pieced back together.

fancake's theme for July is Unreliable Narrator! This round is dedicated to all the cats out there claiming they haven't been fed. It's a good story, but we know the truth.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

How else to rate a greatest hits album but that it contains all your favorite hits? Of course Ask Me, my favorite Stafford poem, is here. (The icon on this post takes its keywords from it: "hold the stillness exactly before us.") As is At the Bomb Testing Site, because I am a simple person, and I cannot resist the image of that lizard, its elbows tense, as it waits on the desert sands, and, yes, also the anti-war message.

Stafford's anti-war sentiments pop up frequently in his poetry, at times making him sound almost naive, but as a conscientious objector he spent four years in the Civilian Public Service during World War II, fighting forest fires, building and maintaining trails and roads, halting soil erosion, and still getting up early every morning so he could write. There is nothing naive about him.

Stafford's voice is consistent, steady, warm. Family, nature, the homestead, all of these things repeatedly show up in his work, and his poetry often feels haunted, by loss and injustice, but in such a delicate way that these things are often only hinted at in oblique melancholy—a son a lost kite, the father left holding the empty string in Father and Son—and many of these I finished reading and felt compelled to go right back to the beginning and read them again. I am curious about the poems that seem to be from a Native American perspective, and those that seem to belong to the pioneers; there's something to get into there, but mainly I'm drawn to his more transparent work, and the way he can lay the natural world on top of the human world and make a statement about both. Here's a poem about a mole:

Starting with Little Things

Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands—

But spades, but pink and loving: they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch:
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.

Some others I enjoyed from this collection: These Mornings; Ceremony; The Fish Counter at Bonneville; Malheur before Dawn (ed: yes, that Malheur); Climbing Along the River; Any Morning.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )

Second book in The Captive's War trilogy. Still feels like an Adrian Tchaikovsky knock off, and the characters are nowhere near as memorable or engaging as those in the authors' own Expanse series, but for a follow up to a long, dense book that came out two years ago that I barely remember, this was surprisingly readable. As long as you're reading for world building and plot. It does have that middle book problem where it's mainly just moving people around on the board to get them into place for the third book, but at least it doesn't drag it out.

Contains: genocide, violence, gore; a crop of babies grown in artificial incubators from stolen genetic material; two unwanted surprise erections under almost identical circumstances (being spooned by the erectioneer).

The one with the racetracks, and the titular parade.

It took me way too long to get into this because I was too busy going Tran? Bautista?? Florin??? Brittany???? every time a supporting character popped up without an adequate reminder of who they were (like, here I am picturing Florin with the head of a crocodile and nothing the book said either proved or disproved it; imagine reading anything else like that, like, yeah, iirc, Hamlet is a hammerhead shark with robotic legs)(ilu Jamal) but once I stopped caring about that, I had a lot of fun. Just as propulsive as the other books. With a couple of those sneaky big feels that occasionally ambush Carl. And a clever resolution to the eleventh floor.

Contains some actual animal harm, like to actual animals. Plus the usual gore, violence, and conspicuous adherence to a gender binary, including, at one point, the phrase "female boots," like wtf, Dinniman, fucking slap that phrase into Google and put your eyeballs on some ladies footwear and fucking describe it. But even worse is that I think they were probably motorcycle boots and did not need to be gendered at all. Which could be said of a lot of things in this series.

Photograph of a mix tape. Just Like Canon, A Fancake Mix 2026 is written on the cassette's label alongside some heart doodles.

fancake's theme for June is Just Like Canon! These fanworks are so close to canon even their progenitors can't tell the difference. This includes works that are strongly rooted in canon, feel like they could be new canon, or are even meant to be a replacement for canon, like virtual seasons or fanmade supercuts.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

It's like Martha Wells heard me when I said the thing I like the least about this series is all the descriptions of walking and was like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. This book is almost entirely one long walk. Even Murderbot was complaining about it.

A return to form, where, much like the first four books in the series, that form is a novella where Murderbot is in a situation and must get itself and its assigned humans out of it. This time the situation is an escort mission, only, unlike a video game, the people Murderbot is escorting can think for themselves and won't walk off a cliff if left alone for a second. They're interesting characters and, unlike many of the other humans Murderbot adopts, I had no trouble keeping them straight, but they're not Murderbot's main people, so despite Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of its emotional state, this book lacks a lot of the deep feels that, say, Exit Strategy or Network Effect provoke. Instead, I mainly found it interesting for the worldbuilding and the exploration of the different ways people live in the Corporate Rim.

I loved seeing Three again, but, of course, I wanted more Three, and really I missed Murderbot's interactions with the humans, augmented humans, and "bot pilot" who know it best. Because the thing I like the most about this series, and I said this too, is Murderbot and the way it's learning how to be a person and building relationships despite not knowing how to do either of those things.

Contains: child harm, the usual violence and swearing (though not as much as usual!), character using a mobility device.

Amazon gave me a month of free Prime a while back and so I loaded up the app and saw what there was to see and discovered that Deadloch's second season was out, despite hearing literally nothing about it on the social medias. I started it and it had even more shouting than the first season somehow, but it also read the room and noticed that ACAB, actually, and really leans into it.

The mystery felt a little messy, but I'm there for Eddie and Dulcie (and Cath)(in that order) and it delivered on that, and on its commitment to queerness, introducing Leo, a stealth them (they are stealthy, the them part is explicit), and having Eddie explore their identity in the loudest she/they way possible.

I think the Kates did a reasonable job of spreading the ACAB around, showing how being a cop was eroding Dulcie's humanity, that Eddie's disdain for protocol isn't just a fun quirk of her personality but a real problem, and how Abby isn't able to do her job properly due to all the incompetence—some of it her own—and then just going the extra mile and making every cop in the show flat out lazy, racist, and/or corrupt. They did not do it with any subtlety either, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on your level of media literacy.

But I had to suffer through advertisements in the middle of my prestige streaming, and even for free that made me angry because no way am I paying to watch Amazon's programming and then also paying through watching ads. Also the closed captioning on Amazon's Roku app is just for shit. Tiny white letters with no background or outline and no way to change it. I missed a lot because I often couldn't even see the text. At one point, I'm pretty sure the closed captioning had Leo saying, "Slow down. I'm wearing flatforms." Which had me googling to see if there was a type of shoe I'd never heard of out there. There was not.

Cal has come to think of Ardnakelty as his home and thinks he finally sees it for what it is—all the tangled connections between the people who have lived on the land for decades, whose families have worked it for centuries, and the ways those connections influence what justice looks like, how it's meted out, and by whom—but being accepted by the locals as more than a blow-in means Cal's finally seeing the real depths of the machinations, and who's behind them.

These books are deep and chewy because as Cal learns about the village and the people who live in it, the layers of Ardnakelty are slowly peeled away, one by one, and there's always some intensely troubling shit between those layers. This book, like the others, was super tense and I was constantly bracing myself for what was going to happen next. But unlike the others, it took me two weeks to read. For some reason I felt like it didn't have quite the same sense of urgency as the others. This is more of a slow motion disaster, but I was still worried about the characters. Lena, in particular.

I highly recommend the series, but you have to read the first two books before picking this one up. Out of all three, The Hunter, the second, is still my favorite—this one did not have enough Trey—but like for good, normal teenaged reasons. She's not part of the problem this time.

Contains: Discussions of suicide and depression, fear of animal harm.

I was flipping through an old notebook looking for notes on the Pinto fic I'm revising, and found, on the front of a page with Pinto notes on the back, the following:

Had a dream I was stuck in a burning elevator with Zachary Quinto and I had to save us all by myself because he had just come out of therapy and was useless.

hashtag relatable
but jesus zachary help a girl out
those mob guys who blew up the elevator
probably weren't after me

I'm guessing that last part was due to reading too many Pinto fics where Zach's in the mob.

Then there's some css. This notebook is truly an adventure.

Photograph of things you might take with you, or pick up, on a trip, with added text: Journey & Travel, at Fancake. Items are neatly arranged on a rustic wooden table or door and photographed from above: hat, knapsack, barn coat, worn boots, folding knife, sunglasses, bottle, magnifying glass, as well as various maps, notebooks, pine cones, cameras, lenses, and rolls of 35mm film.

fancake's theme for May is Journey & Travel! This theme is for fanworks that focus on the journey/travel of it all. That could mean a work that focuses more on the journey than the destination, one where the travel destination is a big part of the work, or, as always, a secret third thing!

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

And Even, Even if They Take Away the Stove
My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!

They took it away
What remains is
a grey
naked
hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.

( HOLE )

In recent years, I've been on a mission where I pick a worthy WIP out of many volunteers and finish it. So far I've completed:

A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin, SGA | July 2021
stop. motion., SGA RPF | September 2024
New Year Market, Star Trek Reboot | September 2024
Condition Zebra, SGA | May 2025
Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor), Star Trek Reboot | January 2026
The Feast of St. Olaf, SGA | April 2026

That covers my entire output of the last five years, with only one absolutely new fic posted during that time, the 15 sentence fake fake dating Star Trek fic Strange New Worlds, Etc. that I wrote for OTW's 15 year anniversary in 2022.

All of these WIPs were abandoned in various stages of doneness. I do this. Not on purpose, but I start a fic and get thousands of words into it and then either get anxious about it (writing can be a trigger for me, though it's gotten better through careful practice) or life gets in the way and I have to stop working on it and then get scared (anxious) to pick it back up again. But past!me's problems are a boon for present me who doesn't have to come up with ideas and has a bunch of notes for all these stories that can either be used or discarded. And because they've sat for a while, undisturbed, I'm able to work on them almost as if it's someone else's writing that I'm improving. I can kill the darlings that need killing and get on with it.

A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin was probably more like two stories when I opened it after a long period away from it. The opening part and the rest of it. I had to stitch the two together, and the opening section was just murdering me before I finally, after a lot of work, figured out which parts were important.

stop. motion. was done and betaed, but Joe Flanigan had gotten a divorce (sorry, Joe) while it was sitting on my hard drive and I wanted to work that in, which changed the tone—and purpose—of the story significantly.

New Year Market was done and had even been through two betas. I had some sentences that were annoying me, so I fixed them, and I am as shocked as you are that it took me less than a month to do that.

Condition Zebra was a complete draft, but I'd finished it in 2013 and never looked at it again. (I wrote it and then Emily died, and these two things were not related, but also were.) It needed a lot of polishing, and I had made Rodney too emotionally mature. So I made Rodney a little messy and John, in a move that surprised me, responded by becoming more emotionally mature. It seemed he'd grown up, too, in the twelve years since I'd written it.

Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor) was not as done as I thought it was. Instead of being nearly complete, it was only a couple of paragraphs in the file and then several pages of handwritten story. I transfered the handwritten part to the screen, editing all the while, and then did a bunch of writing to finish it and then lots and lots of revising to get Jim's voice right. This was him after the first movie, still a selfish frat bro, but with the capacity to learn from his mistakes, and I didn't want to quash his worst instincts, but it was hard for me to just let him be the (almost) worst version of himself. I had to keep removing the guardrails I built around him. And his literal voice needed to be way more casual. I got there in the end, though, and in the process learned that this Jim didn't like hedging language, no "just" or "almost" or "kind of"; everything's flat out with him, no room for doubt. This was the newest of my WIPs, started in July 2020.

The Feast of St. Olaf (my 60th SGA fanwork!!) was basically a complete story when I opened it up in February. It had all the important parts—a title and a last line; there was just some empty space between a joke (which I did not...get? despite having written it??) and the last sentence. So I erased the joke and just started writing from there. I began this fic for the "blades" square on my kink_bingo card in 2011, but as I wrote toward the last sentence I had, using it as a guide, the focus of the story changed. It was no longer just about Ronon being good with knives; it became about loss and memory, a much deeper story. So I reworked the rest of it to match, and in the process the knives were no longer what the Kink Bingo mods refer to as the erotic focus of the story, and I didn't feel like I could add this fic to the Kink Bingo collection. (Sadly, because I adore posting G-rated kinkfic to the chat.)

Many of these WIPs went through similar changes as I finished them. Maybe He's Born With It came from a much lighter idea, less loss, more eye shadow. And stop. motion. lacked an emotional core before I worked Joe's divorce into it. So having these stories sit for a bit between their initial drafting and being completed benefited us both, in many ways. Though I'd honestly prefer if I could finish a story in less than ten years, it also lets me see how much I've grown as a writer, even in the last few years.

Next up is my Star Trek RPF from 2016, an extended version of my little Saturday Morning ficlet. As I recall it's completely finished, though the last scene needs some tweaking as I've never been happy with it. It has a title, but I've never been happy with that, either, and I've got a new one that should work. And of course, anything I haven't seen in ten years is going to need a polish as my writing sensibilities have changed somewhat in those years. I've been putting this one off because it's RPF from 2016, set in 2016, and stuff has changed! And I'm worried about it!! But it's not going to get any younger, and as I keep repeating to myself, it was the canon we had at the time. It's not like I could write it any differently today. Though I guess we'll have a chance to see.

Photograph of a pomegranate (here standing in for an alien fruit) and a paring knife against a black background. Text: The Feast of St. Olaf, by Punk.

Author: Punk
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Team Sheppard
Rating: G
Content notes: No standard notes apply.

Size: 3,800 words

Summary: The hunting knife is twice the size of the fruit in his hand, but Ronon handles it with ease.

Read it on the AO3 or here »

( The Feast of St. Olaf )

Reblog on Tumblr
Email | The Underground | AO3

The lyrics to 365 songs written by John "The Mountain Goats" Darnielle, including some that are unreleased, accompanied by musings on their poetics, musicality, and personal meaning. Darnielle is a thoughtful, funny, devout man who has lived a lot of different lives, and while he resists making this a memoir, it is, though you just as often see him decline to explain the personal significance of a song. I respect his honesty, and his self-reflection, and even his coyness. If he were a character in a book, I'd say he had interiority, which isn't something you can say about everyone who's written a memoir.

I really enjoyed this, even as it's basically just really, really thick liner notes. The book gave me a new appreciation for my favorite songs and even introduced me to some new ones. I bought "Horseradish Road" after reading the lyrics and listening to it on YouTube; I learned he had an album that came out in 2022 that I'd never heard of—probably because we had some other stuff going on at the time—and which I will be buying soon, and in the four months it took me to read this, I've been listening to the albums I already knew I enjoyed (Transcendental Youth, All Eternals Deck, We Shall All Be Healed) and those I never quite clicked with (Beat the Champ, Get Lonely). I did not listen to Goths, Jenny From Thebes, Dark in Here, Getting Into Knives, In League With Dragons, All Hail West Texas, or Ghana, but there's still time. And I don't need an excuse to listen to Tallahassee, The Sunset Tree, The Life of the World to Come, or Heretic Pride, as they are my absolute favorites and I'm listening to them all the time anyway. Also do not sleep on the Babylon Springs EP. (Though this book does.)

If you're a The Mountain Goats fan, or a fan of Darnielle's social media presence, and/or a poet, songwriter, or storyteller, there's plenty to think about here. Darnielle shares what he finds interesting as an artist, the phases and trends he's gone through in his career, and the echoes he finds in his work. He recommends reading one entry a day, thus the format, but I had to read several a day because this was a library book, and huge, but it definitely benefits from being read in small bites, like poetry, so you can sit with it a while.

Contains (in part): references to child abuse, drug use, addiction, overdose, suicide. The ebook duplicates the print book's index, but does not bother to link any of the song titles to their entries, which is bullshit.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )

Two gold rings photographed on top of a dictionary opened to the definition of marriage. Text: Arranged Marriage, at Fancake.

Can I just tell you how many times I looked at the word "marriage" while making this banner and posting theme announcements and just being deeply unsure that's really how it's spelled? Like I'm still not sure. What is that "i" even doing there? What are we doing here?

Anyway,

fancake's theme for April is arranged marriage, spelled some kind of way, and since this is a Flashback Round where we revisit a classic theme from the early years of the comm we've already got 41 recs in the archives in 31 fandoms if you want to browse through the tag.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

LOVED the art. Fun, colorful, cartoony, and expressive. Brings to mind Matt Groening and John Allison.

LOVED that there's more trans and genderqueer characters than you can shake a stick at.

LOVED the framing device with the kids in the museum.

LIKED the first half of the book with the Spiritual Association of Peers, a secretive community/cult that lives in the lawless exurbs outside the New York City Administrative and Security Territory and refuses to talk to the researcher sent to research them.

LIKED our hapless trans man Lucius Pasternak, researcher, who's just trying to do his job.

NOT KEEN on the second half of the book with the visions and the monster(s) as a metaphor for, idk, self-loathing or capitalism or whatever. It's not a trope I have a natural affinity for and this didn't sell me on it. I want real monsters or I want self-loathing, but don't outsource the problem. The romance also felt whatever. There was chemistry between them, but little else.

UNSATISFIED by the ending, which seems to be resolved in passing by two randos, but also raises a lot of big questions that go unanswered and left me skeptical.

IN SHORT, the first half is kind of a mystery where you're getting to know the players and the setting, and the second half is a kind of gory fairy tale where it's about types of people and social movements, big picture stuff, and I felt like it didn't really match up with the first half.

BUT I'm always glad to read something from Lubchansky and this was a fun way to spend some time.

CONTAINS: some misgendering, including from the robotic health care system; nudity; sex; animal harm (scraggly and aggressive wild bear); violence; cartoon blood and guts; cartoon cops and their cartoon blood and guts.

Sequel to Spin State, and, yes, you have to read that one first. Really solid hard science-fiction where the science is artificial intelligence (real AI, not fucking Claude), cloning, ecological collapse, complex adaptive systems and complexity theory, and I took the last two straight out of the "Further Reading" section at the end (yes there's homework) because hell if I know, even though Moriarty definitely expected me to know and says as much. The closest I can get to guessing what that field is about (without Further Reading) is E.O. Wilson and his ants, which are also here.

The fiction is set far in the future in a universe where the Earth is suffering from global climate catastrophe and the vast majority of people live in orbital stations or on terraformed planets. This includes huge hives of genetically engineered corporate clones, who are no longer considered human, and transhumans who have been technologically advanced to the point where they're not considered entirely human either. The only humans allowed to live on Earth are natural ones with hereditary exceptions, which, practically, seems to mainly mean indigenous groups, whatever's left of the United States after it broke with the U.N., and people with religious wars to fight. Half of the action is set in the middle of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

So you can see how this book might be a bit too real at this stage of the horrors.

Unfortunately for both of us, due to my state of mind—and the state of the world—I couldn't concentrate on any of it. I could only read it sporadically and had trouble remembering all the spy intrigue (of which there's a lot) and who was on what side, but I'm sure it was great and tense and full of unexpected betrayals (iguess.jpg). However, I can say that even after days away from it, I could pick it up and just start reading because it's very well written and the (main) characters are all memorable and interesting.

If any of this sounds like your jam, read the first book (that one is about mining, Bose–Einstein condensates, corporate espionage, and AI), pick up this one, and then probably read the third in the trilogy, Ghost Spin. I'll pick it up one day, but probably not today, and probably not tomorrow, on account of my poor brains.

Contains: global climate disaster; Israel/Palestine; torture and interrogation; widespread infertility; unplanned pregnancy; amputation; slaughter of chickens for food; and an extended shoutout to Ender's Game.

Poetry of Chiyo-ni: The Life and Art of Japan's Most Celebrated Woman Haiku Master, edited and translated by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi:

An important book as it was the first—and perhaps still the only—of its kind in English, a translation dedicated to a female haiku master. The introductory material provides valuable context for the time in which Chiyo-ni lived, the forms she worked in, and the influence of Zen Buddhism on her art, but it can be repetitive, covering the same ground multiple times, and I wish the biography had stuck closer to things that could be verified and wasn't so gossipy. We know very little about Chiyo-ni's personal life, not even if she was married, and Donegan apparently felt the need to pad her bio with unnecessary—and often melodramatic—speculation.

Chiyo-ni's haiku has, you'll never guess it, a more feminine approach than those of the old male masters, and for this her poetry has been criticized—by men—as not being "as good." But here's yet another example of men needing to shut up and let women work. Chiyo-ni's poetry is different because it's hers, just as Issa's work is different from Bashō's. Chiyo-ni's haiku is often more personal than that of the old male masters, with more people, particularly women, present in them:

woman's desire
deeply rooted–
the wild violets

Bashō would never. Issa might, but he'd add fleas. (Not in a gross way, he just loved bugs!)

Chiyo-ni's haiku is perhaps also more deeply rooted in Zen Buddhism—she was a nun after all—and as a result I found many of them inaccessible to me, as they're mainly interested in expressing Zen principles and feel kind of canned as she repeatedly returns to the same images and phrases. "Cool clear water" is nice once or twice. It is not as nice the fortieth time. It didn't help that the editors were constantly in the footnotes explaining how this was a poem about impermanence or non-duality and praising the deepness of her understanding of such things. It started to make the poetry feel performative, like Chiyo-ni was trying to win some kind of contest, and it didn't offer much to this non-enlightened reader. Like they didn't even bother to explain what non-duality was. But I still found several pieces that were meaningful even without Being The Best At Zen, like this, one of her best-known poems:

a hundred gourds
from the heart
of one vine

And her most famous haiku:

morning glory–
the well-bucket entangled
I ask for water

And this, one of her best known Buddhist haiku, which is supposedly expressing the peace of detachment, but I just love how dismissively breezy it is:

anyway
leave it to the wind—
dry pampas grass

I, too, wish I could leave it all to the wind.

Recommended because it's important to keep Chiyo-ni's name out there, mentioned in the same breath as Bashō, Buson, and Issa, but there's also good poetry in here. Like this haiku, which I absolutely love because the structure suggests that the horsetails were there first and the ruins came later.

つくつくしここらに寺の跡もあり
tsukutsukushi / kokora ni tera no / ato mo ari

among a field
of horsetail weeds–
temple ruins

Or this classic:

falling down laughing
at others falling down—
snow viewing

The poems are presented one per page, with the transliteration first, which is a weird choice, then the English translation, and the Japanese (with furigana) in three staggered vertical columns, read right to left. (Personally, I think either the translation or the actual Japanese should have been offered first, as the transliteration is the least attractive on the page and not particularly meaningful if you don't know Japanese. If you do know Japanese, it's still of limited use.) Footnotes identify the kigo (seasonal word), and many include translation notes, further background, or another poem on a similar subject.

Now for the bad news: I read this in ebook because that was the only way my library had it, and it was not a pleasurable experience. It's listed as an epub in the catalogue, but it sure did act like a PDF. It was an image of the book rather than a text that would flow to fit your screen, and you could only zoom in, not increase the font wholesale. You couldn't highlight text (or search) with any accuracy, and you couldn't highlight at all if you were zoomed in. None of the many end notes were linked. I was pretty mad at this book, not going to lie, and it made my time with Chiyo-ni's poetry kind of frustrating. Definitely get it in print if you're able.

Photograph of two adorable Vietnamese toddlers in identical denim overalls and dinosaur sweaters, text: Siblings, at Fancake.

fancake's theme for March is Siblings! Assigned, chosen, other, it doesn't matter what kind of siblings they are as long as they're wearing matching dinosaur sweaters. jk

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

The lightbulb in my lamp just burnt out, but the cat is lying on me, so I'm literally sitting in the dark right now because those are the rules.

First I bring you two recs I shared on fancake, then notes on my recent rewatch, a complaint about taxonomy, some observations about the 1980s, three more recs, and finally a call for ~~papers~~ more recs.

We Better Make a Start (11087 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, Robin Buckley
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Himbo Steve Harrington, First Time, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Are Best Friends, Podfic Available

Summary: As soon as Eddie gets to the counter, Steve turns to him and says, "Back me up here. Kissing is no big deal, right?"

Steve Harrington is talking about kissing. Eddie's brain shorts out. "Uh," he says.

Bookmarker's Notes: Steve accompanies Robin to a gay bar where he discovers his skills with the ladies are transferable to guys. Robin and Eddie both have a crisis over it, though for different reasons. Very fun and very hot, with Steve at his himbo best.

Like a Virgin (26183 words) by mistresscurvy
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Will Byers/Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Characters: Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, Steve Harrington, Jonathan Byers, Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley, Argyle (Stranger Things), Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers
Additional Tags: Loss of Virginity, First Kiss, First Time, 80s teen sex comedy, will and mike are both 17 in this fic, Discussions of sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Coming Out

Summary: "Did it ever occur to any of you that I might not want to have my only sexual experiences be with someone who isn't actually interested in me?" Will asked.

He was met by three identical looks of confusion. "I mean, it would still be sex," Dustin said finally.

Bookmarker's Notes: Set after a season four where, yes, a lot of people died. But the kids are seventeen now, and Mike and Will are both virgins, which Mike is very concerned about: Cue the 80s teen sex comedy. Unlike much of that genre, though, this isn't gross or embarrassing, and everybody's having a good time. I adored Will here, kind of baffled by what Mike's gotten them into, yet excited about it too, and it's wonderful to see him stand up for himself, confident enough to be honest about who he is and what he wants. Plus it includes the entire crew, even Argyle.

So, in November, I started rewatching the first four seasons of Stranger Things in preparation for the fifth season. The first season is still so good; tightly plotted, every group working in their own genre until all three storylines converge. Second season: Not my favorite, for a number of reasons, but it does give us Max and for that I will forgive it. The third season is a mall-shaped masterpiece of nostalgia, even if a bunch of goofy kids infiltrating a secret Russian facility is harder to buy than the Upside Down. Fourth, all over the damn place, literally, and full of infodumps thrown together in order to explain the new retroactive continuity, but the Hawkins crew is absolutely solid.

And the fifth season? The first half felt like a different show than the second half, and the second half wasn't exactly made up of my favorite things. I loved the quarantine aspect—huge fan of a bottle episode—and I was proud of Will (and glad that he finally got something to do), and Robin and Steve running the radio station was perfect, but I wanted MORE TEAM FEELS. There was NOT ENOUGH FRIENDSHIP for me. And would it have killed the Duffers to make Will and El BFFs? Apparently so. It got real sloppy toward the end, too, losing interest in characters in peril (Erica! Mr. Clarke!) and not checking back in with them AT ALL. And that final boss battle was boring. Like Joyce wasn't even a little bit dirty at the end. But I still love the characters and the finale didn't destroy my love for the show, and in this era of television, that's not nothing. Watching all five seasons at once was a great decision and kept me happy for a month.

But when I finished the first part of S5, I desperately wanted more, immediately, and felt all out of sorts for like, a day, until I remembered fanfic. So I went to the Stranger Things tag on AO3, filtered by gen, and sorted by kudos, and I am only going to say this once but the people tagging their Steve/Eddie and Steve/Billy fics gen need to open a fucking window. Though not either of the authors I just recced, because, as you'll see, they didn't tag their explicit relationship fics "gen," and also those came from my bookmarks.

I read, or started to read, several of the things I found on the first few pages of hits, but kept getting that sinking feeling you get when you realize the fic you're reading was written by someone who doesn't remember the 80s—probably because they hadn't been born yet.

A selection of slides from my imaginary PowerPoint presentation on the 1980s:

If you're making a joking reference to popular benzodiazepines, it's Valium, not Xanax.
Private homes were more likely to have answering machines than voicemail, but even those wouldn't be common until the late 80s and early 90s.
The telephone was the phone. No one called them landlines because there was just the one kind.
VCRs were still new and very expensive ($500 to $1,000 or more)—so if you were worried about paying the bills you probably didn't have one—but if you did have one, you'd be more likely to rent movies from an independent (and often janky) shop than buy them, as movies on VHS were very very expensive (around $100) when they first hit the market.
The only way you're renting a video from Blockbuster in 1985 is if you lived in Dallas, Texas.

I will permit Eddie saying, "My bad," however, because it's funny.

Bonus 1990s slide:

If you were playing Mario Kart in 1996 it would have been on the Super Nintendo; there was no Mario Kart on the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

I know it's crass to complain about free entertainment, but the cognitive dissonance is real. Many of these things could have been solved with the slightest bit of research, but, on the other hand, you don't know what you don't know, like working class people weren't routinely drinking bottled water in the 1980s, magic eye stereograms became ubiquitous in the 90s, not a decade before, and if you were at the hospital, that thermometer wasn't going in your ear.

And so I trudged on through my disappointing search results. I didn't want to exclude relationships (except for Steve/Billy which can get lost) because some of them are canon and, thus, could be considered gen, so there I was, wading through pages and pages of fic labeled gen that was decidedly not gen, when, in the midst of that relationshippy soup of search results, I found it. The fic I had been looking for. A fic that was just like the show, with a new big bad and EVERYBODY (from S2) in it, where the romantic relationships fit into the story without overwhelming it. Excellent voices. Very well written. And looooooooooong.

In A Strange Land (180411 words) by MrsEvadneCake
Chapters: 12/12
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Jonathan Byers & Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Past-Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler
Characters: Steve Harrington, Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Will Byers, Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper, Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers, Scott Clarke, Sam Owens (Stranger Things), Billy Hargrove, The gang's all here.
Additional Tags: Action/Adventure, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, POV Multiple, Period-Typical Homophobia, 80's Music, Eldritch Abomination, Horror, Steve Harrington-centric, Pre-Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, So many horror references, Honestly Pretty Mediocre Babysitter Steve Harrington

Summary: Doom comes to Hawkins, Indiana. Population est. 30,000.

It's cold, that's all, and the breeze is kicking up. That's why Steve feels the chill go up his spine like someone dropped an ice-cube down his back.

"Why wouldn't I be real, El?"

"The Aboleth got you."

Highly recommended. With the small caveat that it seems to think winter break happens in February?

That fic was so satisfying I stopped digging through the gen tag and moved on to the relationship soup, but lord it's a jungle out there. I did manage to find these three excellent Mike/Will fics all by myself:

( Three post-canon Mike/Will fics )

But I saw some shit out there that I can't unsee. Some of the kids just aren't all right. So it's time to get out of the tags and ask for recs: If you have favorite plotty or tropey fics that focus on a pairing—that preferably still involve Hawkins and most of the cast and don't include the redemption of Billy Hargrove, but I'll read anything if it's good—I'd love to hear about it. And of course if there's excellent plotty genfic I've missed, I need to know about that immediately.

I posted my first fanfic* TWENTY NINE YEARS AGO TODAY. My most recent fanfic† was posted less than a month ago. And today I am finishing up a fanfic‡ I started in 2011.

* The X-Files
† Star Trek
‡ Stargate Atlantis

Had a dream I was in a drugstore and Bad Bunny was sitting up in the balcony and he threw a bottle of aspirin at me and I ran across the store and scaled the wall to get up in his face about it.

Photograph of two kingfishers perched on a branch. One is surrounded by a cloud of pink love hearts and the other has a single question mark over its head. Text: Inept in Love, at Fancake.

Just in time for Valentine's Day,

fancake's theme for February is Inept in Love! This round is for all those dingdongs who just do not know what they're doing when it comes to romance or even expressing their feelings for a best friend or family member.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

So I posted my Star Trek fic: Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor)!!

Going by file dates I started that one in 2020, so compared to all my other wips, it was relatively new. It took a lot of writing to finish because when I started it was really just a couple of paragraphs and then five handwritten pages. I quickly had a first draft, but it needed a lot of editing to connect the themes and refine Jim's voice. It's at the very start of his career as a captain and he's still a hot bro-y mess, and even though I found myself resisting his self-centeredness, I needed his actions to reflect that selfishness, and I think I hit a good balance of bro and personal growth. He can be taught! Spock, of course, is perfect. No notes.

Next up in my endless list of neglected WIPs: It should be my Pinto fic—which, as I recall, is all but done except for the last lines, fuck you, last lines—but instead, it's the G-rated Stargate Atlantis

kink_bingo non-sexual knifeplay fic about an extinct Satedan fruit. I gotta be me.

Looks like I last opened this in 2011 and it's basically complete. Let's gooooo.

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