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Mar. 18th, 2026 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBecause Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!
The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.
Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.
Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!
It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.
Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler ( but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )
The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.
Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.
Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!
It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.
Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler ( but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )
Watching + listening roundup (Hoppers, Britcom rabbit hole) + fannish goals checkin
Mar. 15th, 2026 10:12 amhamsterwomanSo, L and I went to see Hoppers at the movies on Thursday. The premise sounded very stupid to me when I first heard about it, but L had showed me the “lizard lizard lizard lizard” teaser some months ago, and the lizard looked cute, and L wanted to see it by RH was not interested in seeing it with her, so I said I would. I watched Dan Murrell’s review of it with some trepidation, but he said it was a good, though “lesser” Pixar, with a good message but not too preachy, which seemed relatively reassuring. And both L and I ended up enjoying it more than we expected and laughing A LOT, which was nice.
We saw it in 4DX, which was my first experience of that at feature length – ( more on this part )
In fact, the only time the chair-jolting part became really unpleasant was during ( the previews )
The movie itself was fun! ( More, with marked spoilers )
It’s not a movie that will stay with me in some, you know, profound way, like an Encanto or an Inside Out or a Spider-Verse, but it was cute and a time well spent! I even don’t terribly resent it for costing us $33/person XD (though, seriously, that is insane).
*
I also watched a couple of comedy specials:
Pierre Novellie Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things special – about his autism diagnosis via heckler. I liked Novellie when he appeared on How Do You Cope, talking about his autism, and enjoyed him as a guest on Elis & John, in more free-form conversation, and thenscytale recommended this special, so I watched it (because I couldn’t get into Netflix for some reason, and B, whose email it’s linked to, was asleep in Normandy, so I couldn’t watch the James Acaster specials I was planning to watch with my solo dinner at home). ( I liked it (some joke spoilers) )
And then I was watching his other special on YouTube, Quiet Ones, and there is a bit he reads from a paper (because he finds it too boring to remember) about Moore’s Law XD I mean, what are the odds XD XD This show was from 2021, so a lot of it is about the lockdown, and I generally thought it was less strong (which makes sense, you would expect an artist to get better at his art as he practices it more), but I did appreciate the “quiet ones” bit, among the differences between men and women, after which the show is (justly) named.
*
Some more Taskmaster-adjacent content:
- CoC 4 portrait fanart -- what a gloriously mad bunch! :D (cartoon!Andy is my favorite)
- Another Taskmaster Podcast popped up for the second live event in NYC (the last night of the tour). There was some repetition of stuff I heard Greg say on other stops or other interviews, but still some fun gleanings. ( Assorted tidbits )
Long Alex & Greg interview during the US tour (YouTube): Fun and thoughtful, with some unusual questions and good rapport. ( Assorted tidbits )
*
I think it's also time for an Elis & John catch-up. It’s been a bit over a month since my last post, but really, because it took me about a month to get through the previous catch-ups, over 3 separate posts, I’ve actually got over two months worth of listening I’m catching up on – i.e. 2 months of new shows and about 7 months of Radio X backlog.
First, a visual bit: John and a giant teddy (from ~10 years ago?)
Second, John was on Chris and Rosie Ramsey’s “Shagged, Married, Annoyed” podcast earlier this year, where the schtick with the guest is he reads a listener-submitted story, which of course I don’t have much interest in, but he also talked about some personal stuff in more detail than I’ve heard elsewhere. (The recording was from about 6 months earlier than the podcast, so, mid-2025-ish, because How Do You Cope was actively putting out episodes and John said he’d been sober for 2.5 years, when he passed three years in November 2025.) ( Personal tidbits: giving up meat, spooky bum procedure )
Catching up on the current shows, ( Jan - Mar 2026 )
(I do also have ~8 months of Radio X shows to post about, but that's going to be a separate post -- hopefully it all fits in one, LOL.)
*
And oh hey, it's mid-March somehow, so this is probably a good time to check in on my ( fannish goals )
We saw it in 4DX, which was my first experience of that at feature length – ( more on this part )
In fact, the only time the chair-jolting part became really unpleasant was during ( the previews )
The movie itself was fun! ( More, with marked spoilers )
It’s not a movie that will stay with me in some, you know, profound way, like an Encanto or an Inside Out or a Spider-Verse, but it was cute and a time well spent! I even don’t terribly resent it for costing us $33/person XD (though, seriously, that is insane).
*
I also watched a couple of comedy specials:
Pierre Novellie Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things special – about his autism diagnosis via heckler. I liked Novellie when he appeared on How Do You Cope, talking about his autism, and enjoyed him as a guest on Elis & John, in more free-form conversation, and then
scytale recommended this special, so I watched it (because I couldn’t get into Netflix for some reason, and B, whose email it’s linked to, was asleep in Normandy, so I couldn’t watch the James Acaster specials I was planning to watch with my solo dinner at home). ( I liked it (some joke spoilers) )And then I was watching his other special on YouTube, Quiet Ones, and there is a bit he reads from a paper (because he finds it too boring to remember) about Moore’s Law XD I mean, what are the odds XD XD This show was from 2021, so a lot of it is about the lockdown, and I generally thought it was less strong (which makes sense, you would expect an artist to get better at his art as he practices it more), but I did appreciate the “quiet ones” bit, among the differences between men and women, after which the show is (justly) named.
*
Some more Taskmaster-adjacent content:
- CoC 4 portrait fanart -- what a gloriously mad bunch! :D (cartoon!Andy is my favorite)
- Another Taskmaster Podcast popped up for the second live event in NYC (the last night of the tour). There was some repetition of stuff I heard Greg say on other stops or other interviews, but still some fun gleanings. ( Assorted tidbits )
Long Alex & Greg interview during the US tour (YouTube): Fun and thoughtful, with some unusual questions and good rapport. ( Assorted tidbits )
*
I think it's also time for an Elis & John catch-up. It’s been a bit over a month since my last post, but really, because it took me about a month to get through the previous catch-ups, over 3 separate posts, I’ve actually got over two months worth of listening I’m catching up on – i.e. 2 months of new shows and about 7 months of Radio X backlog.
First, a visual bit: John and a giant teddy (from ~10 years ago?)
Second, John was on Chris and Rosie Ramsey’s “Shagged, Married, Annoyed” podcast earlier this year, where the schtick with the guest is he reads a listener-submitted story, which of course I don’t have much interest in, but he also talked about some personal stuff in more detail than I’ve heard elsewhere. (The recording was from about 6 months earlier than the podcast, so, mid-2025-ish, because How Do You Cope was actively putting out episodes and John said he’d been sober for 2.5 years, when he passed three years in November 2025.) ( Personal tidbits: giving up meat, spooky bum procedure )
Catching up on the current shows, ( Jan - Mar 2026 )
(I do also have ~8 months of Radio X shows to post about, but that's going to be a separate post -- hopefully it all fits in one, LOL.)
*
And oh hey, it's mid-March somehow, so this is probably a good time to check in on my ( fannish goals )
Performing some traffic maintenance today
Mar. 14th, 2026 01:04 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceHappy Saturday!
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
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Mar. 6th, 2026 07:26 amskygiantsSometimes you read a book at exactly the wrong time, and you're like 'god this stupid big fat fantasy novel. Why are you six hundred pages. Why is everybody Sexy. What's the point of you. I'm tired' and sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time and you're like 'thank god! actual worldbuilding!! somebody had a good time getting weird with this! please tell me more about how weird you're getting!!' and I think I could easily have gone either way on Tessa Gratton's The Mercy Makers depending on the four books I'd read just previous as well as the time of the moon. But as it happened, at the point I read it I was really hungering for something, ANYTHING that felt like it actually cared about depicting a unique and distinctive society with characters that felt like they actually belonged in that society, and The Mercy Makers gave me that in spades, so I ended up really high on it! I had a great time! Please understand that I mean it lovingly when I say that it felt like a visual novel high fantasy dating sim!
-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively throughalias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --
Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.
For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:
- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor
In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.
The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.
But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. ( the rest is spoilers )
-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively through
alias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.
For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:
- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor
In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.
The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.
But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. ( the rest is spoilers )