OOC CHATTER POST #14

[goosemods]

Welcome to the new home of the OOC chatter post, in our brand new community dedicated to all of your OOC shitposting needs! We're going to start off very rules and moderation lite and see how things go.

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Comments

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[spicecake]

what have you been enjoying lately ?
recs re: movies, books, music, etc

life's been a BUCKET of STRESS for me lately and i'm having a hard time focusing on almost anything but writing
so i'd love some new stuff to look at if there's something you've particularly been loving~

i just have a couple
film(s):

• The Endless (2017) + Resolution (2013) //
  lovecraftian sci fi kinda horror!! meta?! interesting relationships!
  i think Resolution definitely technically is the prequel but time does funky things in the story
  & i actually recommend watching it second :u
  ANYWAY something spooky is up in the woods and there's a cult hanging around and definitely a dimensional error of a monster and hmm
  i'm still thinking about these movies days after watching them.


• Miss Stevens (2016) //
  indie character study kinda film w timothee chalamet in it? it's on netflix. i enjoyed this way more than i thought i would
  & i kind of feel like some of you would too! a teacher takes some kids on a field trip to a drama competition. what is growing up?!?!?

+

book(s):
i can't get my brain to latch onto anything but YA stuff lately, so!!

• Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett --> "Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama." this book made me cry buckets but i LOVE elvis as a narrator. i can't recommend it enough if you find the synopsis even vaguely interesting.


• The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily by Laura Creedle --> "When Lily Michaels-Ryan ditches her ADHD meds and lands in detention with Abelard, who has Asperger’s, she’s intrigued—Abelard seems thirty seconds behind, while she feels thirty seconds ahead. It doesn't hurt that he’s brilliant and beautiful.
  When Abelard posts a quote from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise online, their mutual affinity for ancient love letters connects them. The two fall for each other. Hard. But is it enough to bridge their differences in person?" neurodivergent teen representation, cute story, abelard and heloise!!, etc. i really liked this. :c ♥ ♥
  

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[marno]

I started watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel lately and I love it?? It's an Amazon dramedy about a Jewish housewife in 1958 New York who becomes a stand-up comedian and basically everyone is perfect.

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[sunsoutgunsout]

that series is Very Good 👍

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[spicecake]

ohh yeah! i keep seeing ads for that & then forgetting it exists. :u it's... on a watch list of mine somewhere. maybe i'll actually check it out now???

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[kasnotkas]

let's see if i can remember anything?

• his dark materials by philip pullman (BOOK) - i decided to reread the golden compass recently and it holds up. i'm on the subtle knife now. fantasy theoretically for YA but it's so good for adults too. multiple worlds, conspiracies, atheist themes. i love it.


• queer eye (NETFLIX) - to cry and feel supported and loved and happy.

that's ... it. i'm just reclaiming my life and my love of reading fiction and not feeling guilty, and cleaning a whole lot. after HDM i'm going to revisit the series of witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski (BOOK). mostly i guess rn it's reading fiction that i love and want to re-remember.

i recently got an ereader and i love it so much i can't wait to read everything forever. :>

& re: cleaning, i've been listening to podcasts but nothing i think that would be super shareable? BBC world news, my video game ones. i caught the debaters (PODCAST) on the radio the other day and forgot how hilarious it was, so i've subbed to their podcast feed and deffo recommend it. comedy debates. stuff. words are hard.

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[lilwitchhazel]

Goooood His Dark Materials was such a big part of my childhood!!!! Good life choice to reread

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[spicecake]

i LOVE his dark materials (i think its actually my favorite book series of all time)!! i actually have a tattoo of a hare & hot air balloon to represent lee and hester. c: did you see that they released casting for the bbc series??? ...i'm due for a reread honestly.

ALSO i definitely had some emotions over queer eye a few weeks ago.
also also also ereaders are life-changing!! i got my first one.... last year i think? after dragging my feet forever. i still love having physical books around (obv) but it's so liberating to just like... check books out online. and carry a million of them at once. magic. :u

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[unironickylorenfan]

I am slowly working my way through both Stephen King's The Outsider, which is a new title for him but very old school Stephen King monster novel. Am enjoying it so far. And I'm re-reading It, which is...an old school Stephen King monster novel. Clearly I have a genre.

The last series I actually watched to completion was The Rain on Netflix, Danish post-apocalypse deal which started really strong but fell into predictable post-apocalypse tropes toward the end and set itself up for a second season rather than having a really satisfying ending to season 1. It was a decent binge, though.

When I'm bored I've been watching Defunctland on youtube, which is a series that goes over the history of closed down theme parks/rides/experiences. Mostly Disney, but I got into it because they did Son of the Beast and had a bunch of Busch Gardens Williamsburg episodes.

Music-wise, The Now Now by the Gorillaz is a decent summer album. The songs that got dropped before the album came out are all REALLY catchy. Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae has been out for a bit but is still just fucking excellent. Metric and Death Cab for Cutie have albums coming out soon and have released singles. The Metric songs that are out are really solid and kind of remind me of their older stuff (Combat Baby, Old World Underground, and stuff off of Fantasies). Neil Cicierega (the Potter Puppet Pals guy who does a lot of really solid mash ups) has an album coming out soon, too, I think. Oh and Young The Giant also has a new single out but no announced album afaik but I like the single a lot.

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[spicecake]

when did you first read It? i read through a bunch of stephen king books around the time the movie came out & was kind of surprised at all the ... stuff ... i totally forgot happened in that book. :u uh.

lol. the rain is... on my netflix watchlist, yeahh. sounds like something interesting but maybe not too demanding? which might be perfect for me rn honestly.

weirdly, i was JUST reading the wiki page for action park (which was... kind of funny in a seriously guilty what the fuck way). i'll have to check this out~~

&& i love the new metric stuff. :x ♥

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[helplyss]

EVERYONE HAS TO WATCH THE DIRTY COMPUTER EMOTION PICTURE THING it’s a law

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[gonnabefamous]

Hey this just made me realize I'm super boring. I've just been crocheting a lot. I bought $200 worth of yarn if I don't crochet Trent will murder me.

But I'm gonna think on this

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[spicecake]

i wish i could crochet ;-;

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[gwenniepop]

Ooooh, you got me all interested with books and tv recs MY FAVE

TV/Movies:

I am only a few episodes in with Ms. Maisel but highly recommend!

I love the new Tick series on Amazon, it cracks me up endlessly.

I'm still going through all the Marvel shows (I'm on Punisher right now), but I recently loved Altered Carbon (Netflix). I warn you, it's daaaark but mostly worth it. It does have (off-screen) child death, so trigger warning. But the premise is that instead of dying, your neural stack (this disk at the base of your brain) can get transferred into a new body, so no one really ever dies. The main character is this soldier/detective type from years before whose stack was put in suspension (you'll find out why) and someone pays a lot of money to bring him back to solve a murder. The world-building is very cool.

Books, I literally read so many that this is just from the last few weeks:

The Girl Who Loved Reindeer, Meredith Ann Pierce. And if you haven't read any of her books before, I highly highly recommend Birth of the Firebringer which is pure fantasy, first in a trilogy, about the war between unicorns and dragons (we are talking war unicorns!). This book was st in a world similar to ours, hunter-gatherer era, setting is very close to Inuit/North Pole/upper Norweigan area, but it does have magic. When the land that the main character (Caribou) lives in starts falling apart, with earthquakes and terrible storms, she has to teach the local villages how to build transports and escape across the Pole to the lands on the other side. Lots of fascinating mythology and magic.

Poison Princess, Kresley Cole. This is a post apoc series, young adult, with mythology built in. Basically, the main character discovers she is one of the Arcana, and whenever there is a major world upheaval like this, all the Arcana (think Empress, Death, Fool, etc) must battle til only one survives, in order for the world to continue on. It's got great survivalist themes, the magic (about their prior incarnations for one), and of course some romance. I'm on book three now.

I'm starting on The Map Thief which is actually a nonfiction account of this major map thief who used to cut them out of valuable ancient books and resell. Hoping it's good!

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[spicecake]

oook that's TWO for ms maisel so i def will now. :d ♥ i've also run across altered carbon a couple of times?? but it's another of those that i keep like... totally forgetting, lol.

the map thief sounds v relevant to my usual interests. :u that's goin on a list for suuure. i haven't been as into more recent YA fantasy stuff for some reason, but i LOVE stuff set in the far north for some reason? sooo i might have to check out the girl who loved reindeer too :u thanks!!

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[gonnabefamous]

Altered Carbon was good! Have you watched Luke Cage yet?

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[helplyss]

My tastes are abysmal and I won’t subject anyone to them but I’m looking for good podcasts so please help, world?

I used to rely a lot of true crime-y stuff but nothing kills listening to murder like WRITING about murder all day so anything you have been enjoying that is not crimey would be good to know???? I like good stories and ghosts and a lot of other things so I’d try lots.

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[spicecake]

hmm!!

the first things to pop to mind to recommend are maybe The Black Tapes or Tanis ? I haven't actually listened to either for... a while... so i'm not sure where the stories have gone, but both were fun and kinda spooky a year.5 ago!

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[heliocentrist]

TEXT THINGS:

• Kraken by China Mieville - My favorite book. A young scientist discovers that a giant squid specimen has been improbably stolen from the museum where he works. The event draws him into London's supernatural underworld, full of cults, horror, and the apocalypse.
  
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - Incredibly dark steampunk horror that's not for the faint of heart, but it's very interesting and rewarding. It includes killer months, women with insect heads, lots of body horror and a little revolution.
  
• Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey - A fascinating read about how racism, misogyny and cultural anxieties in America contributed to famous ghost stories and haunted places.
  
• From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty - A mortician travels the world and discusses different approaches to funerary rights and how cultures handle bodies. Very critical of the western funeral model.
  
• The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle - If you haven't read it yet, you definitely need to. Absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful. Sad, though.

PICTURE THINGS:

• Ask A Mortician - This is Caitlin Doughty, the author of one of the above books. She has series like Ask A Mortician and Iconic Corpse where she talks about historical oddities in the field of body preservation and burial!
  
• EM Carrol's comics are beautiful and poignantly scary. I especially love The Prince And The Sea and His Face All Red.
  
• Tomie, a manga by Junji Ito. More horror and gore guess what your girl's into!!! I like Junji Ito's stuff a lot because he does a lot of cool stuff with women in horror but it's surprisingly not sexually exploitative? Tomie is has a lot to do with beauty and vanity but more about how others consume beautiful girls and the rage it incites. There's a lot of Tomie stuff but this is the first one.
  
• Kitten Lady, for a drastic change of pace!!! This is just a channel owned by a professional neonatal kitten rescuer, showing off her kittens and talking about abandoned neonatal kitten issues.

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[gwenniepop]

Have you read Mary Roach's books, like Stiff? There's also Just here trying to save a few lives which is stories from the ER, by Dr. Pamela Grim.

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[spicecake]

oh gosh. i really like junji ito.
tomie is great -- it & uzumaki both made a huge impression on me when i was in high-school.

since you brought up caitlin doughty, have you also read her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes?
i had nooo idea it existed somehow until like last week. :d

i've also heard about china mieville a lot a lot, but never actually read anything! i just put perdido st on hold on my library site. ♥

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[lilwitchhazel]

Ahhhh Junji Ito ;o; Every few months I think about The Enigma of Amigara Fault and just sort of have to stare off into nothingness for a while

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[lilwitchhazel]

I'm very tired so I'm going to do a weak contribution BUT, Fickle Friends came out with their first full album and I love it! It's very... 80s synth-pop-y which is very me, sigh. But they have some good acoustic versions too!! I'll come with other things when I can brain.

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[spicecake]

music recs are alwayyys appreciated ♥ :d and uhh nothing wrong with a lil synthpop

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[empereurs]

I read two books recently by Seanan McGuire: Sparrow Hill Road and its sequel, The Girl in the Green Silk Dress. The protagonist is the Phantom Prom Date ghost story. The first book is more a collection of short stories that centers on this character, but it's one of my favourite books as it does a great job of establishing the characters and the world's mythology surrounding road ghosts. Very cool Americana folklore flavour.

The sequel is more of a straightforward linear narrative that's set pretty much immediately after the last story in the first novel. I liked the first one better but the sequel is still a solid read.

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[spicecake]

i'm sold on the folklore/mythology aspects!! i'll check these out. c: