fleetsparrow ◾ ◾ Network

2026-06-17 11:42 am

Stoker (2013). Isolated, standoffish teenager India Stoker's life is disrupted first when her father dies in a freak car accident and then when her charming uncle that she didn't know existed comes to town.

This movie has so much interesting background. It was written by gay actor Wentworth Miller, who I guess starred in his own show but whom I know as That Guy From That One Buffy Episode, and directed by Park Chan-Wook as his only English-language film. It stars Mia Wasikowska, whom I've loved ever since I first saw her in... I think Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, of all things? And very importantly, it has nothing to do with Bram Stoker or vampires.

Anyway, I loved it. People have told me it's meant to be Southern Gothic, which I didn't catch on to because no one has a southern accent, but I'm fascinated by the timeless feel of the setting and the Stoker house. I spent quite a while trying to guess the time period and had tentatively settled on the 1960s and then it turns out it's set in the present day (of 2013). Regardless, it's gorgeous. The score is great, the vibes are immaculate.

I LOVE the dynamics between India and her mother and Uncle Charlie. I knew vaguely that people shipped the incest, but I did not realize the extent to which the movie ships the incest. Uncle Charlie is eyefucking India from basically the first scene. And overall the movie feels gothic in the way Thoroughbreds feels noir, and I enjoyed it for a lot of the same reasons.

I will say the one big reveal about two thirds of the way through felt pretty cliched. On the other hand, the ending and how it loops back around to the beginning of the movie was brilliant and made me want to rewatch immediately now that I better understand India's whole deal.

I've been watching a fair bit of female-centered fucked up shit lately, but none of them quite understood the assignment like this one. Overall a fantastic time. A++.

--

The Furious (2026). "Somewhere in southeast Asia" mute handyman Wang Wei's daughter is kidnapped by child traffickers, and he will go through anyone who stands in the way of getting her back.

This is a Hong Kong action movie, which is to say basically everyone is amazing at martial arts (but our handyman even better than everyone else). I went to see it on the strength of incredible word of mouth; I think the Rotten Tomatoes score was at 99%. I saw someone say on social media that it was dubbed, but no, it's just mostly in English, with occasional subtitled Chinese.

And indeed, I had a great time. The action scenes are the heart of the film, and they're spectacular. I also really enjoyed the alliance between our main guy and Navin, whose journalist wife went missing several months ago investigating the child trafficking ring. I liked them a lot ~~and kind of shipped them~~. After the constant quippiness of most American action movies these days, there was something really relaxing about half the main duo not speaking at all. This is not a quippy movie.

Also, ( spoilers )

I do wonder how many of the things I found refreshing or surprising feel like old hat to an audience familiar with this genre. And is it weird for a Chinese movie to be set "somewhere in southeast Asia"? I feel like a British movie set "somewhere in eastern Europe" would feel pretty weird. However, I don't know nearly enough about regional dynamics and movie tropes to know how this plays to its intended audience.

I will say the big climactic fight was about three times too long; in particular I feel like we did not need the one wildcard character to show up and make everything longer. I also felt like it made a lot less use of the space and the props than a big American fight scene would. Again, I don't know if that's standard for this kind of movie?

My real complaint, though, is that in literally the first scene, the daughter complains about having to practice kung fu with her father, and then they never do kung fu together. I waited all movie!! OTOH I really enjoyed how ( spoilers )

If you're into action movies and especially hand-to-hand fight scenes, you absolutely should see this.

◾ Tags:

topic: movies

2026-06-17 04:00 am

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3260/

Commentators agree that this will probably be the last World Cup in which Messi faces serious competition.

https://xkcd.com/3260/

2026-06-17 03:34 pm

annapods in

podfic_calendar

Title: Open prompting for Taggle
Link: Dreamwidth, Ao3, Discord invite linked on DW

Schedule/Timeline
Prompts: now until the end of the game, likely end of June
Reveals: likely beginning of July

Additional Info
Would you be open to receiving some somewhat random podfic (or fic or art) gifts?
The Taggle challenge starts today and we need volunteers. You just need to add some requests to the prompt collection so we can gift you stuff. Here is an unofficial explanatory post.

◾ Tags:

2026-06-17 03:22 pm

annapods in

podfic_calendar

Title: Bricolage Bigbang
Link: Carrd, Discord, Tumblr

Schedule/Timeline
Podficcer sign-up date/s: now to 01 October
Writing deadline: 25 January
Podfic deadline: 01 March

Podficcer Requirements
Minimum/maximum: all of the fic if <10k, over that is flexible.
For reference, the minimum for fic is 3k (lower tier) or 8k (higher tier).

Additional Info
This is a big bang for small(er) Korean webnovel and webcomic fandoms. Podfic isn't mentioned in the rules, but I discussed adding it with the mods in the server. You can find the discussion in this thread. In general, they are flexible and open to suggestions.
There are currently more artists than writers signed up/who expressed interest, so it's likely that several artists will be matched with the same writer.

◾ Tags:

2026-06-17 07:15 am

shmaylor in

pod_together

We're at the halfway point of icebreaker week!

If you're finding that you're not able to answer the whole set of questions within a day but think they'd be valuable to go through, please feel free to spread the five days of icebreaker questions out across more than 5 days to fit your schedule.

This next set of questions is geared towards helping partners get more familiar with each other's work and creative process.

Why do you create fanworks? What does it mean to you?

Share a piece of a fanwork you're particularly proud of (a page or so of a written work, a few minutes of an audio work) and explain why you're proud of it.

Read/listen to your partner's shared fanwork, and give feedback about what works for you about it.

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 09:15 pm

muccamukk

(I think this is the only icon I have with a baby.)

(This probably should be a fic, but I don't have the brain space to write fic right now.)

Preamble

Firstly, this isn't vague-blogging or subtweeting or whatever, and I'm not intending to tell any specific person they're wrong on the Internet. It's something that I've been thinking about since I saw FF:FS last year.

I'm further not telling anyone they should like the film if they didn't, or that they're bad for not wanting to watch a Disney movie prominently featuring pregnancy and parenthood. I'm sympathetic to having had enough of that genre and/or have been burned by it too many times. Totally fair! If you don't like plots with babies, you won't like this movie. There is definitely a baby!

I do, however, intend this to be something of a rebuttal to the "I don't like that the only female character was just a mom" line of criticism, which I've run into since the trailer. I also want to explain why I think that framing Sue's role as primarily a mother is reductive, and ignores some of the more interesting things the film was doing with her character.

( This will be long, and will spoil the entire movie )

◾ Tags:

fandom: marvel

2026-06-16 09:05 pm

slacktivist_feed

Posted by Fred Clark

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2026/06/16/that-was-the-river-this-is-the-sea/

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/?p=74609

A bunch of recent links that didn't really have any sort of common thread until I imposed one on them.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2026/06/16/that-was-the-river-this-is-the-sea/

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/?p=74609

2026-06-16 05:48 pm

senmut

So, while I do LIKE dogs, I long ago recognized I am not a dog-energy person. Hilariously, I was usually the first one allowed by the bitches into the kennels to count pups, and also the one that nursed at least one litter through a bad disease, keeping all four alive. I was around dogs a lot:

Cricket, Lady Bit, Romeo, Juliet, Napoleon, Josephine, Champ - uncle's
Pepe, FiFi, Nina-Dog - Granny's
Rocky, Maggie, Goldie - Aunt's
Other assorted pooches I didn't interact with as much at other relatives.

Momma said we had a dog when we first moved to Keesler, but I don't remember it at all. As an adult, I have been personally responsible for these:

Kelly, my beloved Bull Terrier/Black Lab mix, went through a very delayed puppy phase once she realized she was SAFE with us and we figured out first owner was military as a uniform was the only thing that ever riled her to temper.
Cocoa, my beloved Cocker Spaniel/Irish Setter mix, who literally died the same week we lost my late partner.
Kara (LoIsLana), the fighting chihuahua (called that as they are the largest of the breed) we got for K as a gift, and the only pedigreed dog I personally paid for.
Sasha (bear), the very mixed Chow-something that I never really fully bonded with.

How about y'all?

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 01:33 pm

delphi

(Also plugged this over at

ourflagmeansgay.)

The 2026 OFMD Big Bang is underway!

The OFMD Big Bang is an annual writing challenge for the Our Flag Means Death fandom.

Authors will complete stories of 10,000 words or more over the course of four months, and these stories are claimed by artists who create works to go along with the story.

Final stories and their accompanying artwork will be posted over the course of several weeks (depending on the number of works). At the end of the bang, all story links will be compiled into a masterpost.

The OFMD Big Bang event is about collaboration and shared delight - taking joy in our shared love of Our Flag Means Death and its celebration of the value of loving, kind community and found family! We welcome you whether you are an author, an artist, or simply a lover of beauty who fancies fine fics and art.

Author sign-ups are open until June 30th, artist sign-ups are open until August 22nd, and beta sign-ups will remain open throughout the challenge. More information is available on the challenge's FAQ and schedule.

I am writing a thing for this, which I can't talk about publicly (because it has to be anonymous when artists are choosing stories to create something for), but I am having a lot of fun with it so far. I really struggle with longer works, by which I mean anything above 500 words, but I am full of ideas and determination. I hope anyone else interested considers joining in.

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 03:44 pm

malymin in

little_details

Not sure how to word this...

I'm looking for information on castles? In particular the keep, which was a residence for the nobility as well as a last line of defense.

Some questions include:

Wikipedia only talks about English, French, Italian, and Spanish castles having keeps. Did castles in northern, central, and eastern Europe not have keeps, or is this just a matter of fewer English-language sources on, for example, German, Danish, and Polish castles?
If you know of any good diagrams or floor plans with labels of castle keeps - both the kind of "generic" cross-section illustrations you see in children's educational books (the larger and more visually detailed the better!) and of specific real-world castles. Preferably castles that actually served as fortifications in addition to residences, rather than castle-esque palaces like Neuschwanstein Castle. It's difficult for me to reconstruct spatial information with text, so visual aids are helpful. It's very hard to find good educational pictures with an image search these days, there's too much AI-generated inaccurate bloat in the results.
Relatedly, photos or illustrations of the castle's interior.
Who (if anyone) resided in the castle, aside from the noble that owned it and their family, and the servants? Also, more information on the duties and types of servants who would have been present in the castle.

I, um, am sorry if this is too broad. ^_^;

2026-06-16 03:53 pm

lucy_roman in

fan_flashworks

Title: There's No Place Like Home
Author:

lucy_roman
Rating: Teen and up
Summary: John is in London but he misses George. Pre-slash. Set after the episode Gently Through the Mill.
Word Count: 667

( There's No Place Like Home )

2026-06-16 03:56 pm

selenak

If you've read the author's previous A Fatal Thing happened on the Way to the Forum and remember all the passages therein dealing with slavery and enslaved people, you have a pretty good idea of what this book is like. Servus: How Slavery made the Roman Empire is still written in Emma Southon's characteristic breezy, casual tone (while being very well researched and annotated), but despite previous books incluidng a whole lot of murder (one even devoted to it), this is definitely the darkest one by far, and she doesn't let the chatty tone interfere with it. Slavery in Ancient Rome: did not depend on race, was no less gruesome, brutal and dehumanizing for it. On every level. This said, Southon does use her trademark humor to great effect when telling the stories of individuals who did not perish, like this gem about Cicero's librarian: Prepare for a lengthy quote, because the passage illustrates what her writing style is like very well, and it's one of the few with a happy ending:

One name we do know is that of a librarian named Dionysius. He was ineslaved by Cicero and, in 46 CE, his name appeared in several of Cicero's letters because he had fled from his slavery. Dionysius first appears in a letter aaddressed to the governor of Illyricium, which was the area we now call the Balkans (...). In 46 CE, Cicero was one of the most prominent and famous men in the empire but had largely retired from politics in order to marry a teenager who had once been his ward. Thus, his letter was mostly general chit chat, and it ended with a request for a favour: Dionysius, Cicero's librarian, had disappeared. Somehow (Palpatine returned. No, not that), it had been revealed that Dionysius had stolen a large number of books. Whether he did this to sell for profit or for his own library we don't know but, like many enslaved people, he saw someone with a surfeit and skimmed some off the top, and got caught.
Realising a punishment was coming and it might be appalling, Dionysius decided to get out of certian danger. He travelled from either Rome or Tusculum to a port and managed to talk himself onto a boat out of Italy. He crossed the Adriatic Sea and, upon arriving in Narona (in modern-day Croatia), bumped straight into one of Cicero's friends, Marcus Bolanus. Recognising Dionysius, Bolanus got chatting to him. Dionysius held his nerve with extraordinary presence of mind, convinced Bolanus that Cicero had freed him and onctinued on his way. When Cicero found out from Bolanus about the sighting, he immediately wrote the surviving letter to the governor of the province asking him to send soldiers to search for Dionysius and return him to Rome for punishment. Nine months later Cicero was still writing to everyone he knew in Illyricum demanding that they use imperial and military resources to "sourch by land and sea" through the Balkans for his missing librarian. When Caesar sent an army to the province to crush some locals in 45 CE, Cicero added "the affair of Dionysius" onto their mission, offering to allow the commander to lead the librarian in his Triumph as a prisoner of war.
It seems that Dionysius was smarter than Cicero and had got as far away from Illyricum as he could the seocnd he saw Bolanus because he was never caught. I hope he lived a happy life somewhere beyond the reach of Rome.

There is a source problem if you want to focus on slaves in the ancient world, i.e. 99% of the surviving literary texts hail from the rich senatorial class who usually only bother to mention slaves when they have a complaint, and while many graffiti and also enscriptions on tomb stones by freedmen - and freedwomen ensure we also have direct testimony by the enslaved, it still isn't nearly as much compared to the 1%. So you have to be grateful for mentions in someone else's biography (like, say, Caenis the freedwoman in Vespasian's, or Asiaticus in that of Vtellius), while still aware that mammunited slaves successful enough for Roman historians to complain about their influence are very much not the rule of how the majority of enslaved people ended up. Given my recent reading of The Four Emperors quadrology, i.e. four novels which despite the title do not focus on the Emperors themselves in the Year of the Four Emperors but on the staff on the Palatine who kept the Empire running in the year between Nero's death and Vespasian's final victory, I nodded along to the emphasis about how most of the the work in practically every branch, but especially bureaucratic administration, ended up being done by slaves or freedmen, and flinched whenever the book got to the sexual exploitation of slavery (which started at an incredibly early age). On a lighter note, I was amused but not surprised to discover Emma Southon did like Spartacus: Blood and Sand ("That show contains bizarre, over the top aesthetics, but is one of the few Roman-themed TV shows to take the dynamics of slavery seriously.")

As with "A Fatal Thing happened on the way to the Forum", some of the most touching passages do hail from tombstone enscriptions by grieving parents commemorating their children (and thus illustrating, if it needs to be done, that living in an era of high chlid mortality and in an incredibly brutal system does not stop you from loving your child and wanting people to know about its sweetness or cheerful ways). And the constant snark about every Roman celebrity ever never gets old, either. In conclusion: a very dark book, but worth reading. Dionysius the escaped librarian needs his own novel!

◾ Current Mood: contemplative
◾ Current Location: Munich

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 01:01 pm

flo_nelja

13 juin : Un coming-out glorieux
Little Witch Academia, Croix(/Chariot), PG
Un coup de tonnerre sur AO3

14 juin : Émission queer
Miraculous Ladybug, Alec, G
Vir privée sur AO3

15 juin : Himbo et coming-out
The Dragon Prince, Terry/Claudia, T
Une révélation sur AO3

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 05:55 am

shmaylor in

pod_together

Day 2's icebreaker questions are related to group work!

What strengths will you bring to the group?

What things do you struggle with when it comes to group work? (And, if you want, how can your partner help you with these things?)

What are you hoping for from this collaboration experience? What would your dream version of Pod-Together collaboration look like?

What's one thing your partner(s) could say or do that would feel really good to you? (For example, compliment your fanwork, offer to help with organization/beta/cheerleading, reach out to you to say hi every few days, etc.)

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 11:39 am

selenak

Darth Real Life continues to cut down on my internet time, but it does exist. Thus:

Star City 1.04: In which the show keeps surprising me by the rapid pace it puts its intrigues under. ( Spoilers now also include a female Indian scientist among their cast. )

◾ Current Mood: pensive
◾ Current Location: Munich

◾ Tags:

episode review

2026-06-16 10:03 am

oursin

Off today to talk about CONDOMS in Warwick.

This involves a rather tiresome journey -

Any journey which starts from Marylebone Station, which is not well-connected to the London transport network, is tiresome from the outset.

And am not madly prepossessed with the prospect of Chiltern Railways' stopping trains but at least there is no change.

I am a bit taken aback to discover, rather late in the day, that the venue in which I am speaking also holds Haunted House Tours.

Am now envisaging the story that MR James, Montague Summers, AC Benson, Algernon Blackwood, etc could not bring themselves to record: 'The Case of the Possessed Baudruche'.

◾ Tags:

2026-06-16 09:42 am

oursin

Happy birthday,

quoththeravyn and

rahael!

2026-06-15 08:28 pm

senmut

In honor of Boots' 2nd gotcha day, what are the names of some cats you have had?

Thom(as), (Missy) Uno, Simon, Snowball who became Sammy, Pooh Bear, Pollux, I-Chaya who became Gizmo, (Chester) Bu(bastis), (Alexandria) Chi(cago), Memphis (Jones), (Thumbsy) Thebes, (Cairo-)Glyph, Turtle, Mischa, Denali, Evie, Boots.

I think that is all the named cats I have had the pleasure of sharing part of my life with. Renames were rehomes.

◾ Tags: