all among the nodding trees

Like a lot of people trying to find a new home base after the Muskification of Twitter, I'm going to try and post more on here, but I can't promise anything especially riveting, at least until I get my lube meta wrapped up. November and December are peak fic exchange season for me so I'm hard at work there, but I'm trying to pace myself and focus on the pleasure of writing rather than the metrics of my output. It's easy for me to get lost in the mindset of Producing Content(tm) and treating stories like measurable deliverables -- as if writing erotic fanfiction is my job, which it certainly is not -- so I'm trying to focus on the mentality of writing for myself and following my id and whatnot even if it's hard. The past few years have been hard for obvious reasons but those conditions have at times been really good for fic output so it's weird to reconcile being at a really cushy place in my life (certainly relative to like, spring of 2017, or fall of 2020) and suddenly having that derangement-fueled productivity drop off. My new apartment is slowly getting sorted out, and so far it's really suiting my needs, but even after trimming down my library for packing I need two or three more bookshelves to get these paperbacks wrangled.

Most of my reading right now is either fic research or crime-related, predictably -- I'm making my way through Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, his magnum opus of prickly Kennedy assassination conspiracy-debunking later adapted into the 2013 film Parkland, and while I'm probably not his target audience as a person already inclined to support the conclusions of the Warren Commission (conspiracists are so salty about how dismissive he is toward their theories, but I would be too if I'd spent as much time on the matter as he has) it's still engrossing and makes a weirdly moving capsule study of gun violence. I've also begun Ann Burgess' A Killer By Design, which is pretty clearly her own answer to all the Ressler/Douglas/Hazelwood-type he-man crime writing around the development of FBI criminal profiling -- it's not bad in the least but I'm a lot more interested in her work around rape trauma and nursing than the kind of macho military track the average male Fed of the era (and basically all of her male colleagues) came in on so it's not entirely satisfying either. I've also got Adam Cohen's Imbeciles, dealing with early 20th century American eugenics, so nothing on the docket is particularly cheerful. (There's been a bug up my ass about eugenics and popular conceptions of heredity/inbreeding/degeneration since I caught Barbarian on Netflix --spoilers, I did not like it, lmao.)

It's been hard to scrape together even a single brain cell for reading fiction -- I think the last novel I completed was one of the Stranger Things tie-ins -- but it feels like everyone around me is reading something life-changing and it might be necessary to lighten some things up around here bc jfc.

Podcast-wise, I've been listening to Lions Led By Donkeys, a military history podcast with one of the hosts from Well There's Your Problem (a leftist engineering disaster podcast which I also love) -- it's a lot of fun even if the subject matter is not infrequently heavy (the main host is a historian of genocide) and it's good to get a chance to dig in on military history in general when that's very much not my forte. I've also been milking my We Hate Movies patreon subscription for all it's worth, and getting a big kick out of their Star Trek rewatch episodes.

Onscreen... yeah, I've gotten fuck and all done other than trashy horror movies and an Age Of Innocence rewatch. Unless you count sporadically watching Ryan Murphy's 9-1-1, which I guess I could?

Otherwise, the bulk of what I've been doing has been a) working and b) shopping. So much shopping. I should do a perfume round-up of my most recent acquisitions one of these days but I can strongly rec Arquiste's Peau. It's love meme season over on gdgdbaby's DW if you like to party that way: ✨ holiday love meme 2022 ✨
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