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.

1) You can post and comment here with any journal you own, i.e. CDJs, character journals from any game, etc. You don't need to join the comm in order to comment, but you can if you want.

2) We will do our best to continue putting up new chatter posts here whenever the old ones get close to filling up.

3) If for whatever reason, you'd like to make a new post in campers, you can!

And also: Please put a subject line in your comments to help people sort through conversations!

Comments

Re: media corner

[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.

Re: media corner

[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.

Re: media corner

[heliocentrist]

I'VE HEARD ABOUT STIFF A LOT, I need to try it out. My family is Very Irish* so my dad and I talk a lot about traditional wakes and home funerals, and now I'm very fascinated by how things changed over the years. And I'll look into the other one too!

* One time I teased my family about us being just some white mutt American family who claimed Irishness for trendiness, and I got Such A Lecture from my dad and grandma.

Re: media corner

[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. ♥

Re: media corner

[heliocentrist]

Uzumaki is also amazing and so impressively uncomfortable? If you like that, I bet you'll love Perdido Street Station. (Also I meant killer moths not months oops! Scary bugs all around!!! But definitely try it if you love something really beautiful and rough.) China Mieville has a really interesting overly descriptive writing style that seems kind of love it or hate it, and I think Perdido exemplifies his stuff. Even then, I've hated some of his books, while other books of his are just goooorgeous? My other recs from him are The City & The City (urban fantasy noire murder about two cities whose dimensions overlap, but aren't allowed to acknowledge one another) and Embassytown (sci-fi, a woman with a failing marriage is one of the few humans physically capable of speaking an alien language) buuuuut I haven't finished them admittedly.

I own Smoke Gets In Your Eyes but I haven't read it yet!!! I guess I need to.

Re: media corner

[spicecake]

absolutely!! hm. some of what you're saying about china sounds a bit like how i feel about jeff vandermeer sometimes. :|a if you haven't read Shriek: An Afterword, you might like that based on these recs? it's -- strange and occasionally a bit Much, but i remember it as v lyrical and with a lot of interesting world-building going on (plus the relationship between the sibling main characters is also complex and well-done). also there's sentient mushroom people. i think there's another novel within the same setting but i've never actually read it.

i like it!! i've been... reading it really slow so am not too far in, but i enjoy her voice so much.

Re: media corner

[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

Re: media corner

[heliocentrist]

UHHHHH THAT COMIC HAUNTED ME FOR MONTHS which is a testament to his skill