i don't need a reason to bleed until we're even

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

Word for today: swarf

HI YES ABSOLUTELY

Okay first and foremost The Murderbot Diaries. 10/10 hilarious future sci-fi romp featuring the world’s most introverted and deadly part-human-part-bot-falls-in-a-very-gray-area-when-it-comes-to-humanity-but-it-just-wants-to-be-left-alone character ever. Love Murderbot, love the universe Martha Wells built, love all of the very human humans and augmented humans and very inhuman bots and machine intelligences and especially that one particular sassy machine intelligence that has way too much access to knowledge and also guns she populated it with, and ESPECIALLY love Kevin R. Free’s audio book narration. I think my favorite individual novellas were Exit Strategy and Fugitive Telemetry but all of them are great.

I recently powered my way through House of Leaves! Weird, strange, ineffable, uncomfortable and freaky in a good horror way (I think) (?) (as experienced by someone who can’t handle horror worth shit) (I didn’t not like the feeling, but it was certifiably uncomfortable), an insane show of one person’s ability to just commit to writing a book in which a guy finds another guy’s writings about a film that may or may not exist about a house bigger on the inside than the outside which was edited in-universe by a bunch of other guys, replete with appendices and letters from disturbed mothers and incredible typography layouts and poems that are supposedly about pelicans. I don’t know if I’d recommend it, but it is undoubtedly a work of art and also very influential.

Next: the Wheel of Time series! A thirteen-book chonker and clear descendant of both George R. R. Martin and Tolkien that I’ve now read through three times. It’s a really good saga of approximately fifteen million different characters running around a world with limited magic, a big bad evil guy/god trying to free himself from his imperfect prison, a whole lot of political drama and several different nations and peoples rising and falling and rising again, so many relationships (romantic, familial, platonic, geopolitical, fate-ordained, and time-crossing, to name less than half) you’d need a tree the size of Yggdrasil to map them all, and some of the greatest worldbuilding I’ve personally seen. Do be warned: the individual books only get longer as the series goes on (the original author’s widow recruited Brandon ‘I write thousand-page novels on the reg’ Sanderson to finish it when her husband passed) and there’s so much shit going on that they need to be read in relatively quick succession (at least for me) or else you’ll just get bogged down in all the… everything.

DISCWORLD DISCWORLD DISCWORLD— Ahem, more specifically, the little trilogy of books regarding one Moist von Lipwig, the most unfortunately successful conman in all of Ankh-Morpork: Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam. I don’t think I need to tell you to read Pratchett, but these three are specifically great for watching one man succeed into more and more responsibility than he could ever dream of.

On a similar note (by which, I mean, regarding characters putting their very specific talents to work in increasingly specific and politically-complex situations that they really couldn’t care very much about except when it comes to their personal safety and comfort), the Apothecary Diaries is a rightly lauded series of light novels turned beautiful anime that follows a young woman named Maomao who is thrust into the chaos of not-quite-Imperial-China’s inner palace, where she must use her abilities as an apothecary, her detective talents that rival those of Mr. Holmes, and her unfortunate (from a certain point of view) connections to very politically important people to survive the cutthroat world of concubines, government officials, and political intrigue. It’s a little bit of a romance, but mostly a very complex court drama with a vast cast of characters and a very lived-in feeling world.

And on another similar note (by which, I mean, regarding well-researched period dramas that deviate just enough from actual history to be alternatively dramatic and hilarious), a little manga by the name of Golden Kamuy has all but grabbed me by the throat. It basically takes the format of a classic American Western (war veteran goes to the frontier and does shenanigans) and sets it in Hokkaido just after the Russo-Japanese War, where a motley cast of veteran soldiers, escaped convicts, political radicals from Moscow and Tokyo alike, and indigenous Ainu run around the northern islands seeking to assemble a map to a hidden cache of river gold from the tattooed skins of various criminals and use it for their various ends. There are more plot twists than stripes on a Siberian tiger and at least two times as many well-researched moments showcasing the unique culture and history of the Ainu. It is a violent, tragic, realistic, dramatic, absolutely hilarious, and completely batshit insane story full of characters you can’t help but love.

(Also, because it’s you, July, I have it on good authority that the mangaka of Golden Kamuy has also written an absolutely insane hockey manga about a former figure skater joining a hockey team and doing tricks and jumps over the other players’ heads called Dogsred. Allegedly, it is very fun, hilarious, and surprisingly well-researched, just like Golden Kamuy.)

first off: oughhhh the murderbot diaries,,,, i love that series so damn much. they're so good and funny and murderbot is so incredibly relatable, it's marvelous. i haven't reread them in a While so maybe the next time I'll listen to the audiobook versions! also if you have not read it already, i recently read Martha Wells' fantasy novel Witch King :) It wasn't nearly as good as Murderbot but I enjoyed it nonetheless

house of leaves!!! i've also read this one and i think your description of it is one of the most accurate that i've seen. that book is so damn hard to describe but it had SUCH an impact on me. I read it all in a feverish unsleeping haze over the course of Thanksgiving break a few years ago and now I always associate November with inscrutable unnerving genre-bending horror fiction lol

wheel of time is one of those series that i've gotten recommended a lot but have always been scared off by the sheer length of it. however i do love a good political drama-infused fantasy world (i'm currently in the middle of A Strange and Stubborn Endurance courtesy of @rootbeerrex , which i would also recommend to you!) so maybe I'll get over my misgivings and read them this summer!

*chanting* discworld discwoRLD DISCWORLD!! :DDD

i actually haven't read going postal which is a damn shame. but my excuse is that literally every single time i visit the library all the Terry Pratchett books are checked out (and i can't place holds bc my library account is perpetually on hold bc I keep on forgetting to return books whoops). however i have obtained some knowledge of it by osmosis and i must say that Moist von Lipwig seems like the scrungliest blorbo to ever exist lmao

I'd heard of The Apothecary Diaries as an anime but I had no idea it was a book series first! As previously stated I am a sucker for political intrigue and Imperial China is one of the best settings for it in my opinion. (Side note: have you heard of the video game Road to Empress? It's a very similar premise i think - trying to stay alive in the drama-filled world of Imperial China, but based off of real-life historical figure Wu Zetian (of Iron Widow fame - another book I'd recommend if you haven't read it already!) Also, it's entirely FMV, which is awesome. Anyways tangent over, back to books.)

I have a shameful confession to make: I've never read any manga. It's one of my many flaws 😔 I just struggle to concentrate on comic books/graphic novels/manga nearly as well as I can with written text. But I have to admit that your description of both Golden Kamuy and Dogsred has me intrigued! I'll have to figure out where to obtain manga, though, since I don't think my local library branch has any.

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.