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kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Non-Human POV

(I checked this square off my bingo card last time, but this new release arrived with perfect timing, so I'm doubling up.)

Ew, It's Beautiful is the newest collection of cartoonist Joshua Barkman's webcomic False Knees. It contains around 120 short comics, the majority of which were new to me, separated into sections for winter, spring, summer, and fall based on their setting.

The stars of False Knees are usually birds, but there are some cats, insects, and at least a couple of beavers in the mix here. Barkman's art is legitimately beautiful, with a naturalist's specificity and a knack for combining human expressions with realistic animal features, and his writing captures the universal experience of being a small creature in an unfathomably big world. It's full of absurd humour, occasional moments of awe, and recurring bits about the creative process, self-image, and the way friends or family can be on entirely different wavelengths. The comic is where I got my current default icon from, and it almost never fails to bring me a little joy or give me something to appreciate.

( 3 Comics )

glinda

June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.

It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too.

Current Music: Last Summer Effect - Leaves

delphi

Fandom 50 #22

Day by Day by

surprisepink
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Ship: Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands
Medium: Fic
Length: 1361 words
Rating: Teen
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, romance, humour, happy ending, established relationship, izzy lives, future, flirtation, compatibility, service
Summary: A typical raid for Captain Bonnet and his new first mate.

Excerpt:

“I’m getting the hang of this, if I do say so myself,” says Stede, cheerily.

“And you do.”

“What’s that, Izzy?’

“Say so yourself.” The man looks entirely unimpressed, but it does take a lot to impress Izzy. Stede has accepted it by this point, and knows not to take it personally. Knows, too, that if Izzy actually wasn’t at least a little happy with him, he could leave the ship just about anywhere and find another pirate crew to join. And yet, port after port, he doesn’t.

And all Stede had ever wanted was for people to stay.

This is everything I love about the idea of Stede and Izzy together on the Revenge, with Stede captaining and Izzy serving as his first mate. The way they rile each other up is perfect, tempered to just the right heat by a better understanding of each other. Izzy's ways of trying to serve Stede while keeping his ego in check are moving, and so is Stede's growing sense of what he's doing and what it means.

The story's funny, with a comedic moment early on that made me laugh out loud, and the sexual chemistry between Stede and Izzy absolutely crackles. This one really made my day.

delphi

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glinda

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Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: This Is The Kit - This is What You Did

vass

Books
Still reading A Power Unbound.

Comics
Caught up on Order of the Stick (I was at about #1319, and the most recent one was #1328.) Welp, that was a thing that happened.

Things are also Happening in Dumbing of Age. I am looking at the title text in June 24's strip and glowering distrustfully at Willis after what happened last big finale.

Games
Playing a lot of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Games on my phone.
Slay the Spire: have now unlocked Ascension 4 on all four characters. Surprisingly (to me?) the hardest run on Ascension 3 was with the Defect.

Links

The Bedbound Activity Masterlist: Part 1 (Also good for insomnia or for when it's too cold to be anywhere but under the covers, even if you're not bedbound.)

A New Ballet by Underrepresented Artists: "The Little Mermaid reimagined as a disabled, queer and brown coming-of-age story for 7 dancers." The link is to a fundraiser, but even if you're not up for donating there's a video there from rehearsals that might be of interest. (Disclaimer: I can't be objective about this show, one of my best friends is dancing in it.)

Crowdfunders for the UK's Trans+ Solidarity Alliance: Support Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and Maybe I'm Trans? (with badges). (hattip: rydra_wong)
Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed. As usual, HaveIBeenPwned, you know the drill.

Cats
Ash is down an incisor and a canine as of last Tuesday. He was good and brave at the vet and, after he got home, patient with Dorian's mistaking him for a stranger because he smelled Wrong.

Phenology
No new kangaroo visits. It's been very cold out.

delphi

Fandom 50 #21

Untitled Ouizzy Vampire AU by

derekstilinski
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Frenchie/Izzy Hands
Medium: Gifset
Length: 3 gifs
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: dark/horror, ambiguous ending, constructed reality, au: supernatural, infatuation, temptation, fear play, bloodplay (distantly implied)

Description:

In the first gif, Izzy steps uncertainly through the doorway of an abandoned church and stops in front of a flight of stairs. Frenchie jumps out at him theatrically onto the landing above, grinning in front of a full-length panel of stained glass. In the second, Frenchie's eyes glow and his lips part in the dark confines of a confessional. In the shadows on the other side, we glimpse Izzy's rapt and frightened eyes. In the third, Frenchie says something tensely and then flashes a persuasive fanged smile in the vestibule of the church, intercut with Izzy staring at him and swallowing hard, one hand pressed to the side of his face and neck.

This is my second rec for a constructed reality graphic from this same creator, and this one uses some absolutely brilliant editing to bring together what I'm pretty sure is Vengeance Is Mine and an episode of the TV show Bedlam (neither of which involve vampires) to create an AU where vampire!Frenchie and human!Izzy have a charged encounter in an abandoned church. The application of colour, the selection of eyelines, and the addition of other small edits all make this incredibly convincing, and the concept itself is very, very good to me.

I imagine this Izzy having some sort of protective interest in the church—a paid caretaker, a nosy neighbour, maybe a former vicar or member of the congregation who lost his faith after some tragic event. Whatever it is, he intends to roust out whoever's been squatting there, only to slide straight through "Oh no, he's hot" to "Oh fuck, that's a vampire" and into a dark and hot standoff between charmed predator and captivated prey.

Seriously, this is the gift of

derekstilinski's work. Three gifs and a fully formed universe full of potential stories pops into existence.

delphi

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Member Posts

What I'm Reading: Ew, It's Beautiful: A False Knees Comic Collection by Joshua Barkman

June Album Choice

REC: Day by Day by surprisepink (Our Flag Means Death, Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands)

Six Sentence Sunday

Dust if you must, but the world’s out there…

Things

REC: Untitled Ouizzy Vampire AU Gifset by by emilee (Our Flag Means Death, Frenchie/Izzy Hands)

Six Sentence Sunday

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October 2017

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