netgirl_y2k

I, like a lesbian, am 5'4 and furious about it. So the other day I was in Lidl and a lady (who was the same height as me!) went 'Hey, you're taller than me, can you get me a pint of milk from the top shelf of the fridge.' The first couple of rows were gone, so the milk was quite far back, and I had to stand on my tippy, tippy, tippy toes, and kind of use my fingertips to nudge the carton closer. I hand the lady her milk, she says thank you, and a tall guy, like, 6'0, who was standing behind me, goes, 'I would have done it, but you seemed really happy to be asked.'

Reader, I was!

So I, ill-advisedly, I think, joined a D&D game. I have this buddy who DMs, and I generally don't play in his games, because we have very different ideas of what makes for a good time. He's very much a in-it-to-win, the DM vs. the players, min-maxing for min-maxings sake type DM, and I am...not. Like, we're good mates, but we can't do anything remotely competitive together because he takes it too seriously, and I don't take it seriously enough. But he was trying to talk me into joining his most recent game, it was mostly newbies, he said, pretty low-key, and he thought I'd fit right in.

So I spin up a war cleric, we have a session zero, and it's all going well. Maybe he's chilled, maybe I'm not dicking about. Then we get to the first game with the other guys, who all seem delightful, by the way. They're really trying to include me, one of them tried to invent a spell called 'Find War Priest.'

When my character was introduced, I immediately got ambushed by six vampire spawn, grappled to the ground by three of them (so I can never get up), and trapped in a cone of silence (so I can't use any of my spells.) What followed was a five hour combat encounter where I got to do exactly *nothing* apart from fail all my death saves.

And, look, I have spent an entire evening watching other people play D&D before, it's just that when I do there's usually better production values.

By the time I failed my last death save I was actually kind of relieved, this could by a funny story. Like, remember that time I guest-starred in your campaign as 'murder-victim.' Then one of the other players 'remembered' that he had an ability that would let me add two to a failed death save. I got the feeling that I could have missed by nine and he would have bullshat an ability that would get me to ten. And, like, that was really nice of him, but also now I have to go back at least once or twice, before discovering I'm no longer free on Thursdays, otherwise it looks like the only chick at the table is sulking and can't take it.

It having finally dropped below the surface temperature of the sun I ventured to the park with the dog, where we met a really cute blue staffy and I ask the owner the dog's name, as is my wont.

Looking really rather embarrassed the owner says that the dog's called Elektra.

Cool name, says I, suits her.

She is then quick to add that she didn't name the dog, she had no idea that Elektra was some kind of hit-woman from the Marvel comics, she really should have changed it, but Elektra was named by an autistic six year old and she didn't have the heart to change it.

I'm like...sure, I am also an adult with a job who definitely did not have that information immediately to hand.

So later I'm telling a couple of my mates this story because I think it's funny and self-deprecating and whatnot, and immediately after I start listing all the dogs I know with comic book names (Loki x2, Rogue x2, Bane x1)

And then I realise that no one else has been able to get a word in edgeways because I have segued directly from a detailed issue by issue recap of one of my favourite comic books to just listing cool dogs I've met. Apparently despite being forty-three years old and just having had to buy my first pair of orthopedic trainers for the arch support I have the special interests of a six year old!

In my defence, the comic thing was not entirely irrelevant, I was talking about Woman of Tomorrow because I'd just seen Supergirl.

Supergirl - This was like if James Gunn's Superman, The Fifth Element, a bunch of abandoned Star Wars concept art, and Mad Max: Fury Road had a baby together, and that baby was played by Milly Alcock.

I understand that the internet's least normal men are mad about this, because they have noticed that Alcock is a woman, and they have forgotten what joy feels like, but fuck 'em, this was a hoot!

Milly Alcock is a great Kara, Krypto is fab. I was a bit worried about Lobo, because Lobo is a dogshit character, and Momoa can be a bit much, so I was worried he would overwhelm the movie, but all the Lobo stuff in the trailers? That's kind of it. The movie would actually play out the same if he wasn't in it, but what's here is fine, it's for flavour. Most of the fight scenes are great, I feel like the stunt team had a lot of fun with Kara's varying power level depending on what colour sun she was under. The last big fight, where she's fully powered up, suffers a little bit in comparison, whether because the movie is struggling with how to film to Kara's Kryptonian 'press triangle to win' powers in an interesting way, or because WB had been beating the visual effects team for ten months and morale had not improved.

I loved seeing Corenswet's Superman again, and I though the movie differentiated Kara and Clarke in an interesting way (kindness first/(reluctant)goodness first). It's all a bit frantic and it doesn't always come together. The brides, in particular, felt like a holdover from an earlier version of the script. Like, if you're going to include kidnapped child brides in your movie, that kind of has to be the thrust of the movie, yes? Not your main character's distant third motivating factor. Like, Fury Road* is a movie that already exists, you're not going to do that storyline better.

But, honestly, I think if you liked Birds of Prey you'll get a kick out of this.

*I rewatched Fury Road recently, and Goddamn, that's a movie. I always thought the reason I didn't much care for Furiosa is that I thought that Anya Taylor Joy was miscast, but on a rewatch, no, it's because, like, The Green Place, The Bullet Farmer, Guzzoline Town, The Vuvalini, those names are the perfect amount of information, tell me exactly nothing more about any of those concepts, you'll ruin it...oh no, you've ruined it.

The Sheep Detectives - I love the sheep detectives! They are my friends!

Weapons - I was a brave little toaster. Brave. Little. Toaster.

One Battle After Another - About half an hour too long.

Pretty Lethal - You are a troupe of American ballerinas. You are lost in the Generic Eastern European Countryside. You stumble across a sinister ballet themed inn. Run by ballet themed mobsters. Uma Thurman is there, doing an accent best described as 'A Dracula.' It is the best type of batshit.

Apex - Taron Egerton and Charlize Theron play The Most Dangerous Game in the Australian outback while narrating everything their characters do out loud, multiple times, because Netflix assumes that you are on your phone while watching this, which you should be, texting every ridiculous plot turn of the movie Apex to whichever one of your friends you most feel like bothering.

So a lot of these are movies I saw ages ago, and some of them I watched when I was really ill, so my reviews will be both brief and ill-informed.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps - Best looking MCU movie in a while, I think the stylised 1950s world made it look like a deliberate choice and not just like it had been filmed in a cupboard (hi, everything since Quantumania.) A+ casting of the F4!

Predator: Badlands - Okay, I apparently did need Lone Wolf and Cub (Dek is the cub, obvs) in the Predator universe. Kind of love that Predator is this, and also Prey, and also Killer of Killers. Just a franchise firing on all cylinders, I think.

Ballerina - I enjoyed a lot of this, then the movie takes this weird diversion about how much cooler and more competent John Wick is than Ana de Armas' character (like, we know, this is a spin off movie) and take the final boss out for her. And this is why sometimes you should disregard test audiences/studio dipshits. I know that this is mostly not possible *blows raspberry*

Good Boy - Sometimes my friends trick me into watching a horror movie by telling me there's a very good dog in it. 'Trick' is a loaded term, the actual suggestion was Hey, we should watch this movie together and you can tell us about dog body language and training and how you think the stuff with the dog was done, and I'm only human and like to grandstand about one of the three (3) subjects on which I think I'm genuinely knowledgable. Also, the dog in this seems to be a very good dog indeed.

The Monkey - And sometimes they're just like a horrifying toy monkey does some funny/gory murders. I have been a very brave little toaster, is the point.

M3GAN 2.0 - The first movie was a horror/comedy, this one is more of a straight down the line action movie. I think if they do a third it should be a straight up Gemma/M3gan rom-com. I mean they got pretty close with 2.0

Wake Up Dead Man - These movies continue to be great; this one did feel a little bit like Rian Johnson got two thirds of the way through a Josh O'Connor vehicle and went, 'Oh, shit, this is contractually meant to be a Knives Out, someone call Daniel Craig!'

Honey Don't! - Yes, I liked the movie where Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley bang. You're shocked, I know.

Blue Beetle - Super cute, I hope it gets folded in to the James Gunn DCU somehow.

Sisu 2 - Not as good as the first movie. Killing the red army in the snow is just not as satisfying as killing Nazis in the snow*

*may vary by geography, obvs.

Small Things Like These - Emily Watson steals this movie (from Cillian Murphy, no less) for one scene as a deeply fucking sinister nun. I do kind of love that the main thrust of this movie is that you are but one person and probably can't do anything about huge, harmful systems embedded into the state, but you should still help people where you can. Feels like a good message for our trying times.

2025 was kind of a bum year for reading with far more misses than hits, but last year was kinda a bummer on a lot of fronts. The thing to remember about 2026, though, is that we're not trapped in here with it, it's trapped in here with us.

What’s the best book you read last year?

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and it's not even close. Horrifying alien planets and why you should endeavour not to get stuck on them.

What’s the worst book you read last year?

Perhaps not objectively the worst, but Julia Armfield's Private Rites was such a fucking slog. What if it wouldn't stop raining and we were all sad and gay? Idk, and what if this meeting had been an e-mail.

The book that disappointed you the most?

This wasn't really the fault of Emily Tesh, because my expectations were out of whack because of how much I had loved Some Desperate Glory but fuck The Incandescent was a let down. It also did that thing, vis a vis the love interest being a cop, where you can almost feel the author trying to write ahead of bad faith goodreads reviews and making their own book worse.

The hardest book you read last year (topic or writing style)?

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica was just so fucking unpleasant. A short novel set a cloister in a post-apocalyptic world. Mutilation, sexual violence, and animal death told in a relentlessly grim monotone.

Read The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling instead, it's bloody in places, but at least it won't make you want to fucking die.

The funniest book you read last year?

The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur. Bedazzled with lesbians and as much fun as that sounds.

The saddest book you read last year?

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is an extremely good read, and also in many ways a bummer.

A book that touched you?

If you've ever wanted to have a bunch of feelings about Anne de Bourgh then The Heiress by Molly Greeley is excellent.

A(nother) book you read this year you want to recommend (maybe one that you haven’t mentioned yet?)

So this post isn't wholly a downer, some good things that were good:

The Vengeance by Emma Newman (pirates, and vampires, and werewolves, and lesbians, oh my!)
The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older (don't walk, run, to read the entire Mossa and Pleti series)
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab (toxic lesbian vampires, etc.)
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I said what I said)
Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman (the whole Absolute line up is solid, honestly, I'm just not so much of a Batman person)

Were you part of a reading challenge? Did you meet it?

I wasn't, which is probably for the best, I don't think this would have been my year.

Which authors featured most prominently for you in 2025?

My only doubles were Adrian Tchaikovsky (loved Shroud, didn't care for Service Model) and Robert Jackson Bennett because I started reading his Shadow of the Leviathan series.

The book series you read the most volumes of last year?

If there had been more than two volumes of Shadow of Leviathan I would definitely have read them too. Like, it's not super original, it's Sherlock Holmes by way of Attack on Titan by way of Poison Ivy, but all the elements of it are done so well and it goes down so easily.

The last book you finished last year?

I got The Unworthy in just under the wire because I just wanted to be done with it, but man, it was such a genuinely unpleasant note to finish out the year on.

The first book you will finish in the new year?

I don't know yet. I do have some Christmas book tokens if any of you guys have recommendations for a palate cleanser?

The genre you read the most this year?

I read an unlikely amount of horror, which was a surprise as I'm not a horror person; I didn't care for most of it, not a surprise as I'm not a horror person.

Which books are you most looking forward to reading in 2026?

Apparently there's going to be a new Children of Time book. Spiders, woot!

And finally, make a New Year’s Resolution: How many books do you think you will read in the new year?

Let's shoot for fifty-two again.

I recently had to do a bit of wardrobe update as I realised mine contained entirely too many pairs of ripped jeans and sleeveless t-shirts to survive another Glaswegian winter; nothing dramatic, a couple of smart jumpers, good boots, new Big Coat, jeans that aren't ripped to fuck. I was round my parents after and my dad goes: "You look very smart. That's different."

And I, affronted, go: "What do I normally look like?"

"You usually look-" and here there is an extremely long pause as a seventy-two year old Scottish man tries to think of a synonym for gay that isn't gay "-practical."

A day or so later, still affronted, I'm relaying this story to my buddy Cameron in the pub and he just looks at me deadpan and goes: "You're wearing a flannel shirt under a denim shirt."

It was November. I'd walked there. It was chilly. I think that's a fine style choice.

Anyway.


Books

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - I don't read much in the way of horror because I am, and this is the technical term, a big jessie, but this one kind of blew me away. It's set in the early days of Montana being a state and features a native american vampire recounting his very long life story to a pastor who has a sinister connection to a massacre half a century earlier. It's a revenge story, except it can't be, because how, even as an immortal monster, can you ever get revenge for a crime as large as genocide, you have to pick a crime within the crime. It also has this really unique take where vampires become what they eat, so that when the protagonist tries to feed on only white hunters he can't without losing himself, and the only way to defeat a vampire is to trap it and feed it only harmless small animals until that's what it becomes. It is super interesting in about twelve different directions.

The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett - Ah, I wanted my love for the Shadow of the Leviathan series to be uncomplicated and pure. In a fantasy empire beset by leviathans from the sea a Holmes and Watson analogue investigate high crimes and corruption aided by the superhuman abilities the empire grants its servants by way of distilled leviathan blood, in their case a photographic memory and prodigious deduction skills respectively. And all of that's so awesome! None of the elements are super original, but they are all done so well that it doesn't really matter. But there's one thing that's niggling at me... So, in the first book, our pov character Din, the assistant investigator, has a little romance with another dude, it's pretty chaste, mostly happens off page, and doesn't really effect the plot. But it's a cool little detail to have, our main character is a gay guy. Anyway, when we pick up with Din in book two he's in a bar trying to pick someone up and he thinks something about how he mostly likes men but none of the guys in this bar appeal to him so he picks up a woman. And, like, okay, a preference for the same sex but with exceptions is a very real sexuality. This relationship also doesn't really impact the plot, the love interest isn't really much of character either, the only difference is they bang on page, like, a lot. I'm not entirely sure why I feel a bit ick about this, except that it feels like a Decision Was Made. I am planning to read book three, though, so it's obviously not a dealbreaker.

Lady Like by Mackenzi Lee - I did, er, not enjoy Mackenzi Lee's YA historical romances. Less to do with the books, I'd guess, than that I have long since reached the age where the doings of young people are simply none of my business, especially as this one, which in not YA, I really liked. Two women are pursuing the same Duke, one is an actress, a rake, and illegitimate daughter of the crown prince who wants to marry the only man she thinks will allow her to both keep her inheritance and keep banging her way through her sapphist theatre company, the other is a proper country miss who needs a titled husband to convince her parents to let her out of her betrothal to a man she suspects of killing his first wife...and they were romantic rivals, oh my god, they were romantic rivals.

The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur - A pastry chef is heartbroken when her vapid influencer girlfriend rejects her marriage proposal, so heartbroken that a demon (a hot blonde demon, to boot!) offers her six wishes to get her ex back in exchange for her soul. It's deep as a puddle, but in the best possible way. It's adorable, cannot recommend it highly enough!


Comics

Peacemaker Tries Hard! - There's a dog in this! A tuxedo french bulldog called Bruce Wayne because he's a little fancy man! On the off chance you don't decide whether or not to read something based on whether or not there's a dog in it (the only correct method!) this is charming and fun. It's less canon compliant post S2 but still worth it, I'd say.

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth - Diana wakes up on a post apocalyptic Earth only to discover that the world ended following a war between humans and Themyscira. This was really good, and I was wondering why I hadn't heard of it until my buddy's wife insisted that he get rid of any trade paperbacks he also had digitally - it was more than 1000 trades. I have a had a comics windfall, my friends - until I saw it came out in March of 2020, when it's fair to say that I had other things on my mind.


Movies

Frankenstein - I'm really surprised this didn't get more of a cinematic release. Like, I feel like Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, put out the week before Halloween, would have been a hit, especially with how awesome it feels like it would have looked on a bigger screen. The costuming especially was gorgeous, I thought. It held my attention all the way through, which is not something that can be said of extruded Netflix product of late. And while it became obvious in the last third of the movie that del Toro was much more interested in Victor than the monster, I still think it is well worth a watch if you haven't yet.

Hedda - Speaking of gorgeous costumes, I really enjoyed Hedda, although if you've any issues around social cringe, especially in relation to alcohol, you should have a cushion ready to hide behind, or an excuse ready for why you have to leave the room. I am one of ten(s) of people who enjoyed The Marvels but I'm glad Nia DaCosta's career doesn't appear to be suffering from Disney having sent that one out to die.


Telly

Peacemaker S2 - First thing, the opening dance number is not as good as S1, which should have been my first clue. Like, it's good, but it felt like two seasons jammed awkwardly together, the madcap hijinks of Nazi world, which was fun and all, but not enough to fill a season which is why every episode was about half an hour long, and the character focused, sobriety metaphor first and last episodes. Also did he finale feel a lot like late in the day edits/reshoots to anyone else? Like, there was clearly meant to be a Rick Flag snr. twist that just didn't happen.

Currently really enjoying Plur1bus, and obviously shipping Carol with the avatar of the hivemind because I'm me, and kinda sorta enjoying The Mighty Nein even though Molly's accent feels like even more of a hate crime than it did in the campaign.

I have had a circular journey with the movie The Mandalorian and Grogu. At first I thought 'That's not a real movie', then I thought 'Well, maybe the movie is real but that's obviously a joke name the internet has given it,' and then I wondered 'Did Disney forget to swap out the working title?' And now, having seen the trailer I have come all of the way back around to 'This movie isn't real.'

Speaking of movies that aren't real, The Thursday Murder Club is less an actual movie than it is an extremely pricey episode of Midsomer Murders

Telly is real, though.

I frickin' adored Alien: Earth even though, had you been in the room with me while I was watching it, all you would have heard was a near constant litany of 'OH, NO. EW, GROSS. AGHH! THAT'S SO UNPLEASANT. PUT THAT BACK WHERE YOU FOUND IT OR SO HELP ME!

Some things I particularly enjoyed: Boy Kavalier being the sort of SBF/Altman/Musk amalgamation so icky that you want to join the Xenomorph war on he side of the Xenomorphs. Weyland Yutani's continued insistence on sending people so underpaid/underequipped/unqualified that they don't know about shatterproof glass to collect the universe's most dangerous biological specimens. The unsubtle, tonally jarring, but completely epic mic drops at the end of each episode. The adult actors playing children in grown up bodies by moving like they didn't know what a back spasm was. That they didn't try to hide what the Xenomorph looked like as though we didn't all know.

One thing that I did not like: The horrifying eyeball monster/evil sheep combo. Kill it with fire. And rocks. And rocks which are on fire.

'This is not a good television show,' I say to myself at three o'clock in the morning as I hit 'next episode' on The Hunting Wives. I guess I will once again reiterate that 'good' and 'great' are not the same thing.

My two favourite bits of this show were i) the flashback to how the main character met her husband and it's just that he happened to be the first man who ambled into her field of view when she was having a moment of gay panic, ii) when one of the secondary characters keeps saying to the woman she's in love with that they can't be together openly, and, like, obviously not, because she's a horrible murderer who is only pretending to take you back so she can find out if your sheriff husband (also gay) suspects her, but I do not think that is what you meant.

A lot of the Marvel telly stuff of late has had a whiff of 'What's the point?' about it, having obviously been put in motion before Marvel pivoted and now being sent out to die, which is a bummer in the case of the two most recent animated shows which were pretty solid.

Eyes of Wakanda had an awesome art style, expanded the world of Wakanda without getting tangled in the weeds of Boseman's passing, and gave us an Iron Fist that didn't suck.

I don't think anyone had particularly high expectations of a spin-off from a 2021 episode of a show that has since fizzled out, but Marvel Zombies went so much harder than it had to. It was neat to see Kamala, Shang-Chi, Kate and other characters that I don't think are coming back in live action in any meaningful way get room to play.

It did seem to be angling for a second season at the end there, but, like...come on, bro, be realistic.

I talk a good game about giving up on books you're not enjoying, and I am pretty good at DNF-ing books at, like, 10-15%, but I find it very difficult to give upon a book after I've gotten much past that.

Which is probably why I have spent weeks now trying to convince myself that I really am going to go back to Awakened by A.E. Osworth (put down at 40% sometime in mid August). I so wanted to like it - the summary is a coven of trans witches fight an evil AI. Cool, eh? I never got to that bit, I bounced off it for, actually, the same reason I can't get on with the Gideon the Ninth books; the narrator has the same too online, wryly twee, queer elder millennial voice. And I know that the reason I find that voice oh so grating is that I talk like that. During one of the hotter days this summer I was in a pub beer garden with a mate and I described our environs as 'a bit fire hazard-y.'

Moving on, what should I read instead? Read anything good recently?

Comics wise I did read Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon which I loved almost as much as Absolute Superman. The AU is that Diana was raised in Hell by Circe the witch. So like, she's still Wonder Woman, still extending her hand in friendship, but she is riding a skeletal pegasus, and performing dark magic, and constantly covered in blood. She's got a magic prosthetic arm because she sacrificed her real arm as part of, like, a blood spell. It's badass...and Steve Trevor is still kind of a lame love interest.

I only got as far as the first issue of Absolute Batman, but I am generally a harder sell on Bruce in general. I do want to give some of the other absolute runs a shot before they get folded into the wider DC universe or some sort of giant, ridiculous crossover event and I completely lose interest.

And I did read the first issue of G. Willow Wilson's Black Cat, which seems like it's going to be a lot of fun, although I will be bummed if it turns out Felicia wasn't actually flirting with Night Nurse.

Speaking of comics, I think I got my friend Al in trouble with his wife. So Al has no fewer than one thousand (1000) trade paperbacks stacked up in his garage, and the reason that he has been giving for why he hasn't gotten rid of them yet is that I was going to come round to go through them and take anything I wanted. So the other week I'd been round watching a movie with the wife and she said "Hey, while you're here do you want to have a look at those comics in the garage?" and I said "Huh?" while clearly wearing the facial expression of someone who was just learning this information for the first time.

Oops.

So someday soon I have to clear a morning so I can go round and stand in Al's garage going through a literal ton of comics.

Hey! A wild meme that I can distract myself with while I pretend that I'm not worried as I wait for the vet to call me to pick Freya up. She's in getting two teeth pulled because her life long endeavour of 'everything is food if you try hard and believe in yourself' has finally caught up with her. It's not major surgery, but is under anaesthetic, and she's an older pup now...

Anyway.

( What parts of the MCU have I watched )

The funny thing is, everyone I've seen post this has had roughly the same arc of having been super into the early MCU and then gradually falling off. Whereas my arc is more like aggressive disinterest in the early movies shading into outright dislike of the OG Avengers, a brief period of, like, Ragnarok, Black Panther, Captain Marvel that I actually really dug, that eventually turned into 'It's free on Disney+' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Having spent far too long slogging through Private Rites by Julia Armfield grouchily going 'this should have been a novella' I decided to start off June with a couple of actual novellas.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite - Olivia Waite is someone I had previously encountered through her series of f/f historical romances, so when I heard that her next book was going to be a cozy mystery set in space I was intrigued. A Miss Marple type detective is taking a well earned sabbatical in the ship's memory core before being decanted into a new body, when she wakes in a young body that isn't hers. It's cute, but it is very...slight. But I do increasingly think that it's an admirable skill to know and accept when a one hundred page idea is a one hundred page idea and not dragging it out to novel length.

Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard - This was a little bit longer at one sixty odd pages, and there was a lot going on - navigators are people who can navigate unreality with the help of some sort of magical/sci-fi power called shadows, a monster escapes from unreality, there's a murder mystery, four expandable junior navigators all with their own traumas and neurodivergences have to learn to work together, there's an odd couple romance - and it's very interesting and all, but none of it gets enough room to breathe, so it doesn't really land.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older - I absolutely adore this series about awkward lesbians solving fairly low stakes myteries in a future where humanity has fled a dying earth to a system of interlinked platforms around the rings of Jupiter. They actually remind me a little bit of Murderbot, not so much content wise, but, like, vibes, and the way they go down so easy. If you haven't read them, there are three of them now, and you're in for a treat!

Cover Story by Celia Laskey - You know that feeling where you're reading something at a clip and having a great time, and then you get to the end and are like, I don't actually think that was that good? Yeah, it was one of those. So that the set-up is that it's 2005, the beginning of the smartphone and blogging era, and a neurotic publicist falls in love with the up and coming actress she's charged with keeping in the closet. It was pacey and frothy and I read it over a couple of days, and then I got to the end and the one (1) thing about it that had stuck with me was there's this line in one of the sex scenes "her vagina gulped for air", and, I'm sorry, but whoever let that line stay in the final draft hates you and wants your endeavours to fail.

The Heiress by Molly Greeley - Modern takes on Austen can be of, uh, variable quality, but this one, where Anne de Bourgh fights her way out of her laudanum induced haze to take control of Roslings, her destiny, her queerness, her desire not to be a mother is probably the best one I have ever read. Highly recommended!

I'm trying to post here more. Sorry about that.

So I finished the second season of The Last of Us, a season of television that was...fine. There wasn't a single outright bad episode; there also wasn't an out and out banger like the Bill and Frank episode from S1, where it felt like they'd remembered that this was a television show and not a video game and took advantage of that. If anything, I thought it hewed too close to the game. And I say this as someone who liked the game - and by 'liked' I mean I played it to credits, broadly enjoyed the experience, and didn't go immediately insane and spend the next five years screaming into a front facing iPhone camera like a total weirdo.

And there were a few things that I thought the show did better than the game. The first was the attack on Jackson, which I though was pretty epic set piece. The second was Eugene's fate, in the game he's just an old guy who likes weed and has died of a stroke, here he serves as a neat bit of unflattering characterisation for both how cold Joel can be and how selfish Ellie can be, and marks the real beginning of their relationship breakdown. The third was Jesse, who is the very definition of an npc in the game, he has no strong feelings about his girlfriend dumping him for Ellie, about becoming a father, or being trapped in a war zone right up until he gets shot in the face, something he would presumably also be nonplussed about. I appreciated that the show let him be furious at Ellie the entire time he was in Seattle, and I thought it was kind of a cop out to have them make up immediately before the aforementioned face shooting.

But the main thing I thought the show did better than the game was the Ellie/Dina relationship. I really wanted to like it, too - it was a big triple A game with central f/f relationship - but the pregnancy plot twist was one of the spoilers that got leaked, and I was immediately so cross that I forgot to care that Joel died. I hate the 'unknowingly pregnant when they get together' storyline that was for a while endemic in f/f stories so much; I think I would hate it a lot less if even 5% of the time it ended in 'Look, I like you, but this relationship is a minute and a half old, and I don't want to be a parent' but, nope, it was always insta family.

I feel like I should clarify, because when I was talking about Andor I was kvetching about the Bix pregnancy storyline too, and, like, I like kids, I enjoy spending time around them - even right now, when my friend's kids are exclusively communicating in lines from the Minecraft movie - but, by God, I am a hard sell for stories about pregnancy.

Anyway, I liked the Ellie/Dina relationship a lot more on the show. The actress who played Dina was probably the MVP of the season, the actors had great chemistry, and I really liked the change where it was Dina who was with Joel when he ran into Abby's crew, it gave her a reason to go with Ellie to Seattle other than just because she's the love interest. Changing the speed at which Ellie and Dina's relationship developed so that they didn't properly get together until after they both knew Dina was pregnant changed that story from one I hated to one I merely disliked. I actually kinda liked Ellie's 'I'm gonna be a dad' line, both because I thought it was a cool line, and for Bella Ramsey's delivery, but it didn't solve the underlying problem for me, that show!Ellie, even more than Ellie from the games, does not seem like someone who wants to be a parent at nineteen or would be in any way good at it.

I badly wanted to be proved wrong, but I still think Kaitlyn Deaver has been horribly miscast. And, like, I don't want to slight her, she's been excellent in pretty much everything else i've seen her in, but her casting as Abby only makes sense to me if I assume she was slotted in as Abby after ageing out of playing Ellie (presumably without auditioning anyone else for Abby.)

The pacing was also weird as balls. Seven is an odd number of episodes, and if you're determined to keep the main character switch, why not just do one season of 12/14 episodes? You could even have a hiatus over the summer if you wanted to differentiate them.

The switch to Abby's perspective on the same three days, something that barely worked in the game, if that, given how divisive it was, is not something that is going to work when the show comes back in 18-24 months. And it feels like at least someone involved knew that, which is why the big emotional beats of the back half of the game (why Abby killed Joel/that Joel and Ellie were trying to patch things up) got moved up, because who's going to remember and/or care in two years?

What else? Let's see.

The converse of it all. I understand that Ellie, not unlike myself, is trapped in the terrible fashion choices of 2003, but trainers with no grip, no ankle support, and which rot if you get them wet are a terrible choice of footwear if your day job is fighting zombies in the snow.

Also, the amount of abuse that got thrown Ramsey's way, and HBO's lack of any kind of a response does not bode well for what, if any, safeguarding measures are being taken to protect the kids in the misbegotten HP reboot. God, that show is so fucked...