No Place I'd Rather Be
How was your Memorial Day weekend, all? If you’re not in the states, how was your totally normal weekend? Did you get to lounge around or did you stand outside at a town festival talking to human beings for nearly 20 hours over two days? Have you accepted that this might be where your career as a supervillain begins?
It’s alright. Happens to the best of us.
Notable Breakfast
Apple chicken sausage with leftover Blueberry Boy Bait (which is a very Southern name for what amounts to blueberry cake). The sausage makes having cake for breakfast slightly more acceptable, right?
Dog Thing
“I guess I’m trapped downstairs forever now.”
Mixed Media
I was going to say that this is oddest thing I have become obsessed with, but that is very likely not true. Nevertheless I am obsessed with it. Colorful Gradients is a tumblr which posts computer generated color gradients. It does this automatically 48 times a day. Each gradient is numbered, though I don’t know how the number is determined for each.
What it comes down to is 48 times a day I get a little block of color on my tumblr dash. I love it. I’m a person who suffers from a lot of anxiety, and I have a mental bag of tricks which help me stumble through the average day. This blog has been added to that bag of tricks.
It isn’t true of all 48, but at least 5 a day will come along just when I need them, distracting and calming me. I like blues, purples, oranges, and anything which makes me think of fog.
I just really like fog. Colorful Gradients is a Will Burn project, and yeah, while probably not my oddest obsession yet, it just might be the gentlest.
Also: Summer Camp‘s new album Bad Love was good (single here), and so was The Vaccines‘ (single here). I saw Mad Max Fury Road a 2nd time, and have listened to the score a whole lot. You also really, really need to watch this video.
I Read Comics for a Living
Effigy #5 continues to unroll a mystery which I find fascinating. Effigy is about Chondra Jackson, a woman who was a child star on a Power Rangers-esque kids sci-fi show, and now she’s a beat cop in her hometown. All she really wants is to live a normal life, but she’s not sure how to do it, and it doesn’t help when a murder occurs which ties back to the show and she’s pulled into the investigation. There’s so much happening in this comic, and one of the things I love best about it is that one of the main characters is a transwoman, a fact they deal with frankly, and they do not skirt away from what the reality of her life is like.
Also good:
All-New Hawkeye #3 Is it weird that All-New Hawkeye is happening when the previous series, just called Hawkeye, has yet to publish its final issue? A little, yeah. All-New Hawkeye isn’t trying to be its predecessor, though it is plainly trying to be a good successor, and doing admirably. It’s leaning hard on the relationship between Clint and Kate (both of our titular Hawkeyes), which is pretty much all I want from a Hawkeye comic–as much Kate Bishop as I can get.
Infinity Gauntlet #1 This is one of Marvel’s many, many Secret Wars tie-in books, and was my favourite this week. Full disclosure: this is going to be a book about Thanos. I do not care about Thanos. I did, however, come to care deeply about the entirely new family introduced in this issue, living in a wrecked city, constantly on the run from giant bugs. I want to know more about these people, and I want to see them win.
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad #3 continues to be my fun Western candy, and I love it. In the previous issue, they introduced a main character who is American Indian, and in this issue they went a little into her background, in a way I really enjoyed.
Anxiety Pyjamas
Eberjey Manuela Lace Sleeve Teddy
I splurged on Eberjey pyjamas once, and I long to someday do so again. They are so soft.
Note: I was asked for an explanation about anxiety pyjamas last week, so I thought I’d put it here: sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I browse for pjs and it makes me feel better. I will never own even a fraction of the ones I find, so why not share? I feel like I’ve got solid taste in pyjamas.
Fics I Shouted About (many)
Untitled by thepsychicclam Teen Wolf, Sterek, human AU. Stiles spends a summer interning at his dad’s station for college credit, and gets stuck with Deputy Hale (you see where this is going). Very sweet, this.
At All Costs by InTheArmsofaThief Teen Wolf, Sterek, time-travel AU. Stiles is an agent sent back in time to save Derek’s life. This had a great deal of what I love about Play It Again (possibly my very favourite TW fic), but minus some of the heartbreak. This is still mildly heart-wrenching, though.
Best Laid Plans by Euphorion Check Please!, Jack/Bitty, Lardo/Shitty. When I recommended this to a friend who had just gotten into Check Please!, she yelled at me for starting her on what is clearly the best fic, because now everything else will have to measure up to it, and probably fail. She definitely had a point. This is about Shitty’s plan to get Jack to realize how he feels about Bitty, and the series of events that sets in motion. Just really, really great character work in this.
Things Holster Likes by Euphorion Check Please!, Ransom/Holster. The companion piece to Best Laid Plans, filling in the rest of the stuff happening in the Haus. Equally great.
Untamed by rosepetals42 Teen Wolf, Sterek, Hogwarts AU. Stiles is an American transfer student at Hogwarts, a thing no one even knew they did there. This takes place 15 years after the events in the Harry Potter books, and is a fantastic analysis on house prejudices and politics in the post-Voldemort world. It’s also just a great sterek fic.
Lastly
Thus ends this week’s collection of weird gentle things I find calming.
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