Another journal

Oh, and also I just picked up Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles on playstation because for some random-ass reason they were TWO DOLLARS (/paperboy-from-better-off-dead-voice) for a couple of days, which is ludicrous. Those are the two most recent games by Qute (who made Eschatos and Judgment Silversword); they're very cool, and I was planning to eventually just pay full price for em.

I haven't fired up Natsuki yet (though I previously watched some footage), but Ginga Force is so wild and inspiring. The core of it is a story mode where you attack the levels one-by-one and accumulate a bunch of alternate loadout options, which is very anti-arcade design. (JSS and Eschatos both might as well have been arcade games.) The levels themselves are entirely designed around their bosses, which I find exhilarating — you're constantly interacting with (and shit-talking at) the boss throughout the stage, and can occasionally take a chip off em in between dealing with all the popcorn enemies and obstacles they're throwing at you. Structuring the level as a multi-stage chase scene makes for an incredibly grounded sense of place and context, which is exactly the kind of evolution I should have expected after Eschatos.

That's not really the first place I've seen some of those ideas; in Blue Revolver Val and Dee come to fuck with you mid-stage a couple times (and according to lore each level boss is directly remote-controlling their entire fleet), and a bunch of Touhou bosses fill in as their own midboss. But taking boss-based levels this far gives another effect entirely, and I absolutely love it.

Well, it's arriving at a good time for thinking about this stuff: I'm getting closer to a point where I need to buckle down on level and boss design for Ultra Badger Coyote (working title), so questions of how to build narrative and direction via action and space in a shmup have been on my mind. I think the best examples I've seen prior to this have been ZeroRanger, Eschatos, Radiant Silvergun, and oddly enough Ketsui.

• Most Cave games are just structured as "here's a cool new space you ended up in somehow, here's some enemies that might be in that place, here's a boss" — it works fine, but it's not narrative drive! Ketsui, on the other hand, makes it very clear that you're wading inch-by-inch through the nation-scale defenses in front of a single bastardly target with a known fixed location, and the difference is palpable.
• In ZeroRanger, of course, you're carving through the invasion fleet to get to Green Orange — over the city, through the excavation, up the space elevator, across the solar system, into the battlestation. It all serves the directional momentum (well, the excavation detour is weird if you sit and think too long, but w/e, it works), and the environments are all extremely structured, with memorable landmarks and wholly unique enemy formations.
• Eschatos is almost the same as ZeroRanger (which makes sense, they say it was their biggest direct influence) — over the city, over the country, through the atmosphere, TO THE MOON. It's not split up into levels in the conventional "take a break and show the score summary" way, so it all feels like a continuous and spatially-grounded journey. (Actually, Ketsui benefits from that too because of the transition areas they keep displaying during the stage breaks! Hmm.)
• Silvergun is too complicated to get into, but your objectives and destinations keep changing as guided by the narrative, and the big bad keeps showing up to fuck with you, so you're staying connected to your motivation to knock over the final boss.

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsActII

Jumble and clink the keys in his hand, falling to chime on the pile of them in that wide-mouthed jar, seventy-five cents the price on the tag about it. Past the bins of loose handles and knobs, dulled nickel and pitted brass, wood smoothly turned to satiny finishes, white enamel cleanly bright but chipped, cracked, he stoops, there at the end of the aisle, over a low bucket filled with tiny dice like chips of ruby, sapphire, diamond, emerald.

“Anvil?”

He straightens, shoulders shifting in a blue-sheened coat a trifle tight. “Mason,” he says. In one hand a worn brown leather satchel.

Back through an angled corridor more doorways than walls, out one of them into a courtyard crowded with birdbaths leaned companionably one against another, cold fire pits set before a line of chimineas, great earthen pots and planters and mirror-bright gazing globes, a clustered flock of spindly orreries and armillary spheres flanked by blocky concrete sundials poured from the same mold, and in the middle of it all a dry and empty fountain, the heavy-lipped basin surmounted by reticent angels. A low doorway opens on a steep flight of stairs to a cramped hall, lumpily carpeted and no angle entirely square. Luys knocks once sharply at a door, then opens it wide.

The office within surprisingly spacious, tall dimly shaded windows, spotless dark-stained floorboards, a brusquely modern desk in a corner, and behind it Bruno in a moleskin vest. “You weren’t kept long?” he says.

“I did pass the time,” says Pyrocles. “You’ve a great many distracting articles below.”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsActII

Unrelatedly, I'm starting to close in on a Maniac 1cc of Mushihimesama (using S-type shot) which is probably going to be my first clear of a Cave game. It's gonna be a bit, still; I'm missing some answers for the stage 4 boss, the stage 5 boss, and the section around 3/4 through stage 5 where it just goes absolutely apeshit on you.

I checked out Kiwi's survival strats video, but I can't use his approaches directly because he's using the supershot exploit, and I've committed to avoiding that for this 1cc. (Short story: there's a programming oversight that lets you do way more damage and counter-gain by setting autofire up in a particular way. Most players consider it legitimate in score play, but I want to see if I can clear the game the way the developers thought they were balancing it. Kiwi's video shows that there are several boss patterns you can just not deal with because the supershot damage lets you skip to the next phase too quick, so I'm definitely causing problems for myself on purpose here.)

qntm — Fine Structure

Feb 4

This novel covers some of the same ground as Ra, but I didn't like it as much — it didn't feel as coherent and directed, which drained some of the impact of the big gonzo ideas. Anyway, read Ra! I can't yet speak to There Is No Antimemetics Division, but I'll probably get to it at some point. (Actually, that's what I meant to read this time, but the hold line at the library was pretty saturated, so I diverted.)

John Scalzi — When the Moon Hits Your Eye

May 15

Kind of high-concept — the setup is that, in a miraculous occurrence that cannot be explained or comprehended, the moon turns to an equivalent mass of cheese, and then we spend 28 chapters flitting from character to character (only rarely making repeat visits to someone) to show a world Staying Entirely On Its Bullshit Despite It All.

Well-written and fun, but I think it ultimately felt a bit slight? Well... hmm. It's possible the ending will stick with me.

I found the end annoying — everything goes back to the way it was, as randomly as it began, and then a hundred years later it's fully accepted that it was all a globally-coordinated "megahoax." Kind of the whole thesis of the book is "what we do in the face of the senseless," and I feel like that ending is an especially grim final answer that I don't really have a response for.

Andrea K Höst — the Touchstone series (re-reads)

Jan 26, Jan 26, Jan 27, Jan 29

I was just in a mood to re-read some junkfood.

Andrea K Höst — In Arcadia

Feb 3

Oh yeah, so I noticed a couple years back that Höst had done another sequel to the Touchstone series, and this one was a romance novel about Cass's mom. Okay! Sure!

I liked this. Yeah, okay, it's very hetero, as is the original series, and I could name some ways to improve that. But it's doing some interesting and satisfying stuff against the standard grain of the portal fantasy format, which was also something I liked about the other, prior epilogue — it's really committing to exploring the consequences of deciding to stay in the portal world, whereas usually the decision to stay (or return) is the end of the story.

At the end of said prior epilogue, a significant chunk of Cass's old life decided to pick up stakes and hop through the gate the next time its rotation came around, including her mom, her brother, one of her aunts, two of her friends, and a friend's dying sibling. But then what? Laura's suddenly a dependent of her adult child, her other kid is on the struggle bus, and everyone's finding it a bit oppressive to be under global tabloid scrutiny every time they stick their nose outside their guarded compound. She's trying to restart her art career from scratch and there's still feelings from her divorce that she never finished unpacking. It's messy! I liked that.

Graydon Saunders — A Succession of Bad Days, Safely You Deliver, Under One Banner (re-reads)

Mar 19 – Mar 26, or thereabouts

Yep.

Martha Wells — Platform Decay (Murderbot... 7?)

May 25

It's Murderbot, I liked it.

I'm looking forward to some more exploration of Murderbot's burgeoning artistic/documentarian career, but this isn't that; it's a real fucked up extraction mission in a much bigger and more chaotic environment than our protagonist is used to dealing with. Also, it has started reluctantly going to therapy, and seems to be benefiting from that a bit.

There was something I mentioned in an old review of one of the other novellas in the series: something where the answer to an ongoing mystery turned out to be much less complicated than it looked, but then also paradoxically more complicated because of the way it didn't weave into the rest of the backstory in a tidy and contained way. A deliberately ragged edge that smudges the boundary between the small and comprehensible plot and the big incomprehensible world that surrounds it.

Anyway, this has that going on.

This impressively weird dark fantasy/timeslip novel has three storylines. One follows Lee, a white American college student in the modern day. He too is impressively weird. He can tell when people are lying, he can hear other people's heartbeats, he sees bloodstains that no one else does, and he's addicted to over the counter sedatives like Benadryl to muffle his perceptions which are normally painfully acute. He's also very emo and obsessed with death. For a while I was convinced that he was a vampire.

When we meet Lee, he's fled to Kagoshima, Japan, where his father is living with his latest Japanese girlfriend in a historic samurai house. (Lee's mother disappeared in Cambodia under mysterious circumstances long enough ago to be legally dead; the official story is that she was taken by human traffickers.) The reason Lee fled is that he murdered his college roommate for reasons he can't recall, and also can't recall where he hid the body!

The second main storyline follows Sen, a girl Lee's age from a samurai family a hundred years ago, after the samurai were essentially outlawed. Her father took part in a failed rebellion in which everyone else was killed, and has fled with his family to the same house Lee is living in now. Her father, a traumatized abusive asshole, is plotting another rebellion, and so has very reluctantly agreed to let her study the sword as her brothers are too young. Sen is extremely devoted to the idea of dying nobly to impress her father.

The third storyline, which only gets a couple of interspersed chapters, is a retelling of the legend of Urashima Taro, a Japanese fairytale about a fisherman who rescues a turtle who is actually a princess, and visits her castle under the sea.

Sen and Lee both begin to see each other, initially believing the other is a ghost. The book really picks up once they start talking to each other. Lee thinks that since Sen is dead in his time, maybe she can help put him in touch with his dead mother. Sen is reluctantly willing to oblige once she repeatedly fails to kill the creepy foreign ghost, mostly because he's someone her own age who will talk to her. Their relationship is intensely romantic but not sexual, or possibly extremely intensely platonic. But the more Lee presses Sen to try to contact his mother, and the more involved Lee gets with the idea of saving Sen from her rapidly approaching glorious death in battle, the more weird and surreal things get.

Japanese Gothic was a working title that stuck, and the book is indeed extremely gothic. I enjoyed how unabashedly overheated, strange, and surreal it was. It feels like Baker had a great time writing it. There's a number of mysteries and I figured out some in advance, but I never, not in a million years, would have figured out how they all fit together. In fact, almost everything does fit together quite neatly by the end. That aspect and others reminded me a bit of Catriona Ward.

I really enjoyed this book. It's Baker's second novel. Her first is Bat-Eater and Other Names for Cora Zhang, which I am excited to read.

Content notes: Gore. Inventive methods of child abuse (very reminiscent of Catriona Ward). Cruelty to animals (wild hares) (ditto).

Would a Von's in southern California have sold basic toiletries like hair gel in, like, 2006?

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsActI

Trinkets and fallalery, bangles and geegaws, furbelows, the occasional bagatelle all racked and scattered, sorted, spread over shelves in the glass case before her, sunglasses in silver, or tortoiseshells of blue, amber, green, or plainly classic black, candy-colored charm bracelets, a bowl of mismatched cufflinks, copper mule mugs and glittering shot glasses set before a couple of silvery cocktail shakers. She looks up, about the store, windowed walls that narrow to a point where glass doors propped open on a not especially sunny day. Deco to Disco, says the sandwich board on the sidewalk, 1960, the numerals painted in reverse on the clear glass lintel. Over in an odd back corner behind another glass case a clerk sits on a stool, reading a paperback. Poor People, says the cover. She coughs demurely. He doesn’t look up.

Past a couple-three mannequins draped and posed in polyester finery to a small high table clouded over with filmy scarves printed with maps, cartoons, faux-embroidery and trompe-l’œil batik, twisted in infinite loops. She selects one spangled with toy rockets and flying saucers, slips it over her head, lifting out of the way her wild hair the color of clotted cream. She winds it twice about her throat, smooths it over the nubbled collar of her sheepskin coat, issues another, louder cough. The clerk turns a page, shoulder shifting in his pinstripe vest. His beard thinly patched.

Back to the glass case filled with baubles. Cocking her head to one side, the other, shaking out her hands, she plants her feet. Holds her right arm out, fingers wiggling. Something slips from the sleeve of her coat, a length of wood, finely turned and polished, improbably lengthening until those fingers close about the tapered handle of it, a baseball bat she twirls once and lifts above her head. One last glance for the clerk, who turns another page.

Splash of glass she drives the bat through the case, shatter and crash she twists it about, knocking loose the jagged shards so she might reach in to pluck a pair of sunglasses, thin wire frames, aviator gold.

“Hey!” the clerk’s shouting, “Whoa! Hey!” Flinching as she rounds on him, sunglasses on her face, scarf about her throat, bat choked high. “The Shrieve,” she snarls.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsActI

After 40 years together, Don and Rodney face the end of the world from a black hole that will swallow the Earth in exactly one month. So they embark on a road trip to keep a promise they made to their son.

Klune sells very well at my shop. He is good at doing what he does, and what he does is gay, twee, and glurgy. I did not enjoy The House on the Cerulean Sea and I did not enjoy this either. Both of them made my eyes glaze over. I started both of them, disliked them both, started skimming, still was bored and irritated, then skipped to the end to see how it all came out. Then I learned some information that made me revise my opinion of the book even lower. In the case of The House in the Cerulean Sea, it was an interview where he mentioned that his sappy, trivializing book was inspired by the Sixties Scoop. In the case of We Burned So Bright, it was his afterword.

Spoilery. ( Read more... )

Klune's books are very deeply meaningful for a lot of my customers, but UGH. The best thing I can say about it is that I quite like the covers.

There’s a Greatures tournament arc on right now and it’s ludicrous.

When you pick up an old children's book because it says it's about a tiny glass mermaid coming to life, you probably don't expect most of the story to involve the main character going to another world where she has to face an evil pirate witch who wants to nonconsensually adopt her. Admittedly this all happens while they're lugging around the now full-sized mermaid so she can be the best friend of the other world's sole mermaid, but if they miss the deadline she'll turn back to glass, while the witch pirate throws spells at them, but... Did I mention that all of this takes place inside a Christmas tree?

This is a pretty fun book but like many older children's books, recounting the plot is like describing a half-remembered dream.

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsOpening

“And it all depends,” says the radio, “on the nature of the day. Was it good?” A man’s voice, unpolished, but not unpleasant. “Then it’s all good, for one more day. Kick back. Relax. You’ve earned it. But if it was a bad day?” Groans from an unseen audience. Up behind the radio the wall’s been tiled with old album jackets, color photos of men with horns, or keyboards, muted duotones of women crooning into elaborately caged microphones. “One bad day,” the radio says. “Enough to take everything you’ve taken years to gather, and to build, to take it all and pull it down around you.”

Out in the middle of the room a big round table covered in green felt, surrounded by a motley herd of armchairs and recliners, one of them laid flat. Curled apparently asleep atop it an old man in a brown suit much too big. “Our prosperity,” the radio’s saying. “Our security. The walls around us, the roofs over our heads, the floors beneath the very shoes on our feet, how secure are they? When all it takes is one bad day to lock it all away from us. How real are they, if one bad day’s enough to make them disappear?”

One wall’s mostly free of albums, taken up instead by an overhead garage door, a smaller door beside it creaking open on sullen afternoon. Christian squeezes through, sagging brown jeans, soft green hoodie, tugging the door shut as an afterthought. “In this,” says the radio, “the richest country in the history of the world that ever was.” He stoops, snagging empty cans from the floor, dropping them a-rattle into a blue tub. “Like many of you,” says the radio, “I had my bad day,” and murmurs swell, a general air of affirmation, “oh, indeed I did. I used to be an up-and-coming architect, what they call a starchitect, if you can believe it,” and a pause for almost laughter. “But I can’t show you any buildings I built, because I never built a one. Not while I was an architect. I told other people how to build them. And they’re all garbage.”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/AndThirstyWildsOpening

My Extremely Square ass is writing a scene where a character does LSD, and they (AMAB NB) hallucinate seeing and fusing with a female version of themself- for the rest of the trip, their proprioception/body map is altered so that they feel as though they have a more "female" body shape (eg, breasts, wider hips).

My question is in the title- is fucking with the body's proprioception/body map/sense of touch in this way something LSD can do? Also, the contents of the trip are kind of plot-relevant, so if LSD can't actually do this, are there any hallucinogens that can (and that people take recreationally/Actually Enjoy Tripping On)?

Thanks!

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongClosing

“What time is it?” she says, sat up abruptly in pastel sheets. “Is that?” Rubbing her eyes. “Are you, is that, bacon?”

“Good afternoon,” says Big Jim Turk, there by the credenza, stirring something about on the little electric griddle. “You’ll note I didn’t say good morning. It’s late enough I thought I’d try an olfactory cue, as kisses and sweet nothings hadn’t seemed to do the trick.”

“Me and Anna were,” she says, rubbing her forehead, “talking, you were already asleep when I, isn’t that, like, a violation? Or something?” Complex calligraphy across the front of her T-shirt says The Mandarin Miranda. “The meat.”

“If there’s any sin,” he says, pushing and turning, “these spatters of hot grease should prove penance, ow! enough.” Thumbing the lop of his belly. His buttocks pale and hairless, flat, almost concave beneath the heft of his thickset torso. “Smell alone’s enough to remind the likes of, tst! me, what I’m missing, but also,” scooping slices onto a chipped blue plate, “enough to tell me, were I to take a bite,” tap tap, and he shuts the griddle off, “what knots would twist my gut.” Turning to hold out the plate, but she’s already off the bed before him, taking it from his hand, setting it back on the credenza, wrapping him in a sudden hug. His hands up, startled, settle gently, awkwardly on her shoulders. He kisses the jet-black top of her head. “It’s only what a Chatelaine deserves.”

She shoves out of his arms, away, hard enough to rock him back a step. “Don’t you start.” Wheeling off toward the window.

“Gloria,” says Jim.

Her back to him, both hands on the sill of it. The glass has been cleaned but painted over with blossoms, a nodding columbine in red and yellow, a suncup, an orange blanketflower. Out beyond those colors, a rainy day.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongClosing

A very loose take on "Little Red Riding Hood," set in modern times post-apocalypse!

Cordelia, nicknamed Red because she hates her given name and always wears a red hoodie, is the sole survivor of her family. She's traveling the post-pandemic wilderness to get to her grandmother's house in the woods, armed only with an axe. She's used a prosthetic leg since losing one in a car crash when she was a child, so people underestimate her. They shouldn't.

The story alternates between her post-pandemic journey and the events leading up to it, when Red lived with her mom (a Black college professor), her dad (white, I forget his job) and her older brother Adam. Red is about 20, Adam is about 22; they're both college students. Red is extremely into horror movies and preparing for danger, so she sees the urgency of the pandemic well before most people. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save her parents and brother.

I was absolutely glued to this book, staying up past midnight to finish it, despite its many flaws. If you, like me, enjoy a small scale apocalypse story with a focus on the logistics of survival, this is a must-read. The logistics of survival bits are GREAT.

It's repetitive (HOW many times do we need to be told that Red can't run fast because she has a prosthetic leg?), everything is over-explained, Red is somehow able to use a small axe to kill multiple men armed with guns (all at once in addition to sequentially!) despite having no training, and the ending is incredibly abrupt and has more loose ends than a half-finished sweater. I cannot believe the author's chutzpah in setting up all sorts of fascinating mysteries only to have Red conclude that she's not the main character (what?) and so no longer cares that she'll never know the answer to any of them. Okay, but I care!

And yet, I enjoyed the hell out of it, right up to the non-ending. I am just a sucker for people searching for beef jerky in looted supermarkets and rescuing kids.

Spoilery details.

( Read more... )

Halfway through this book, I was looking up all of Henry's other books, which are horror or thrillers, many dark fairytale retellings, so I could read them all. When I got the end, I looked up their reviews. Many mention "abrupt" endings and none of the rest are post-apocalyptic, which was by far the best part of the book, so I will probably leave my reading of her books right here.

Just discovered this new webcomic. I love this dumb lil strip about trading card smell.

A beautifully written, atmospheric riff on Pet Sematary, among other things, in which the women of a Korean-American family living in a small, mostly white town have the power to resurrect the dead. They only use it on small animals, primarily to resurrect their beloved pet rat Milkis every time he dies of old age, which is about every three years. (If the author hasn’t kept pet rats, I will eat my hat.) Theoretically they could resurrect humans, but family lore says it’s a very, very bad idea. Despite extreme temptation, the two teenage sisters do not try to resurrect their mom when she dies in a car crash. But when the older sister, Mirae, drowns in the river, her younger sister Soojin can’t resist…

This isn’t the kind of story that’s built around surprises – we know from the beginning that sometimes dead is better, and the whole idea of forbidden resurrection is about refusing to accept the fact of death, so that also must come into play—but rather about the journey. The book has a water-drenched, hothouse atmosphere, all claustrophobic relationships and emotions too intense to bear. It’s a bit spooky but mostly an exploration of grief and love via creepy magic. I thought it was great, but rat lovers should heed the note below. (Which is too bad because the pet rat character is great.)

Content notes: The same pet rat repeatedly dies of old age and is resurrected, a process which involves some physical mutilation of the corpse. This part didn’t bother me but the rat does also die one painful and violent death, which did. There is also a flashback story to earlier generations involving a chicken that gets repeatedly killed in a cruel way. Lots of body horror. The story is centrally about grief.

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongActIV

The light is changing. She peers up beneath a shading hand as she steps off a number fifteen bus at the corner, there. The sun, having past its zenith, begins its inexorable descent toward a monstrous wall of rain-heavy cloud already stretched across one whole side of the sky, bulwarks that swell from stoney blues and greys up and up through warming browns to hazy, shredded palisades and parapets of ivory, and already the towers of downtown have been overwhelmed. The bus unkneels with sigh behind her, pulls away with a snort, on up the hill.

Across the street and down, a couple of similar brick buildings shoulder up three or four storeys together, the one at this corner higher than the one at the next as the street slopes before them. Above her, the skeletal frame of what had once been a grand awning to cover the sidewalk, though the wide windows of the storefront are newly, clearly clean. Inside, wide sheets of graffiti’d plywood neatly stacked to one side of the space, lengths of cyclone fencing laid upright against the other wall, and plastic signs lapped one atop another that say Wilson Properties, Sutherlin Bank, Anaphenics. Tools neatly racked against a bar back there, shovels, bolt-cutters, pry bars, and a fading mural on the back wall, of a leaning, red-roofed tower over sketches of olive trees. Lido, the letters cursive above. The next and lower storefront, windows similarly sparkling, and the letters on them freshly painted, red that’s lined and edged with black, Monte Carlo, they say. Pizza. Steaks.

“Two Italian restaurants,” says Ellen Oh.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongActIV

Erica Skyberg is a 35-year-old teacher in a small town in South Dakota who’s just realized that she’s a trans woman. Or rather, the knowledge that she’s a trans woman has finally become impossible to suppress. Unfortunately, she’s deep in the closet and the only other trans person she knows is Abigail, who is 17 and the only openly trans student at her high school. Erica is in the stage of identity where she can’t think about anything else; Abigail is fine with carrying the banner of being out but would really like her life to not be just about Being Trans.

Erica comes out to Abigail, who is equal parts annoyed and fascinated by the chance to take on the role of being a mentor to an adult. Their relationship is definitionally inappropriate, but not predatory or harmful. Abigail can be a lot and Erica has enormous issues with self-esteem and boundaries, but they’re both essentially kind and well-meaning people trying to just live their lives in a world that has cast them as Public Enemy # 1.

This novel is also essentially kind. It’s a very warm and often pretty funny look at two people who have one somewhat random thing in common and create a relationship based on that one thing, which becomes a relationship based on more than that, and how the repercussions of that relationship spiral outward and affect others: Erica’s ex-wife, Abigail’s boyfriend, Abigail’s boyfriend’s mother, a lonely student who wants to be friends with Abigail, the woman running against an anti-trans political candidate who is guaranteed to win, and many more.

Content note: Obviously transphobia and internalized self-hatred are central to the overall story, but it’s not the kind of book where people are constantly getting slurs screamed at them.

I will mention, since it’s a mistake that I made, that Emily St. James is not Emily St. John Mandel who wrote Station Eleven.

Recommended by Naomi Kritzer. Thanks!

Heya ! God it's been a WHILE since I've posted here LOL ! But I've been thinking on something I haven't gotten a straight answer for :

I have an OC , and a part of their backstory involves pretty much being locked inside their house for 4 years at 17 by their dad at an attempt to keep them away from publicity after their mother killed someone .

To be more specific on their conditions :

- They're not allowed outside unless it's absolutely necessary (example , to see a doctor)

- They have one specific friend who is allowed to come over at any time , and they do message on social media via an anonymous account.

- They do home schooling , to explain education stuff .

They finally move out and go outside more when they're 22 , aka 5 years later .

I know that a (likely permanent) damaged immune system would be one of the negative effects due to lack of vitamin D and exercise , but what else could be a side effect , physically , socially AND mentally ? And how could it be for them when actually going outside for the first time again ? I haven't gotten lots of resources for it ..

Edit : Ok so I learned I'm likely wrong on the immune system , but theres lots of traits I considered that I never considered could've been caused by this trauma ..

Also ! It's worth noting that the character would overall lack motivation to do . Anything for that matter , so exercising is kinda off the table and they lack a lot of basic self-care .

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongActIII

It’s not one table, but six, each of a length and a width, pushed together in two close lines of three tables each, and the tops of them of differing colors of formica, gleaming sunny yellow and dark red a-glitter with silver and black, lavender spun with threads of violet, a sturdy brown, pale institutional green flecked with more and darker greens, or blues, or greys, a buffed matte white, and Iemanya moves methodically about it, polishing the table-tops with a damp rag. The room about is dusty yet, littered with scraps of lath, ivory dollops of dried plaster and brighter scraggles of spackle along the drop cloth where Jim Turk’s knelt, filling and smoothing cracks beneath the line of mullioned windows. There across the room Fildhine with a pair of needle-nosed pliers and Cherrycoke with a screwdriver confer about an exposed junction box. A line of them through half-opened double doors then, Teacup Tall and Charlichhold, Herwydh, Lustucru and Powys, deftly unfolding tray tables, setting down broad trays crowded with bite-sized snacks, and Powys hovering over them, prodding tartelettes back into place, resettling a mound of chips. “Wsht!” a hiss from Herwydh, as Big Jim gets to his feet, as Iemanya drops her rag into the bucket at her feet. The Helm Linesse has stepped through the doors, slender in a sleeveless tunic of gleaming grey, striding toward the trays, where Powys is still fussing. She plucks up a bit of golden crust twisted about a roasted fig, but doesn’t take a bite.

“Chairs,” hisses Teacup, and gesturing leads a number of them bustling from the room. Cherrycoke screws a cover onto the junction box. Jim sets to cleaning his trowel.

Next through the doors, Wu Song, soft white shirt buttoned up to his throat, tattoos at his temples blurred by stubble. A rumble rises behind him and he steps to one side, out of the way of Lustucru and Teacup and Herwydh and Fildhine, guiding a dozen or more wheeled chairs into the room, spinning and turning and pushing the thunderous ballet into place about the table.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/SoPowerfullyStrongActIII