eirenical | Network

It's a zombie apocalypse, only instead of zombies, there's cats.

In a future in which 90% of the population owned a cat, a strange virus spreads. If you cuddle a cat, or a cat nuzzles you, you turn into a cat! It's a catastrophe! A catlamity! A nyandemic!

Not only are cats everywhere, but the cats are either instinctively trying to turn humans into cats, or they just want to be petted. Cue every zombie movie scene ever, but with cats. Cats scratch at the doors! Cats peer through the windows! Groups of cats ambush you in tunnels!

The characters are all very upset by this, because they love cats! And now there's cats everywhere, just begging to be skritched! And they can't skritch them! "We can't even squish their little toe beans!" The horror!

Needless to say, they would never ever harm a cat. In fact they feel bad when they're forced to spray cats with water to shoo them away.

I'm not sure how this can possibly be sustained for seven volumes, but on the other hand I could happily read seven volumes of it. The cat art is really fun and adorable. I would definitely do better in a zombie apocalypse than a cat apocalypse, because I would never be able to resist those cats.

Content notes: None, the cats are fine.

stardust_rifle posting in

snowflake_challenge

Introduction Post * Meet The Mods Post * Challenge #1

Remember that there is no official deadline, so feel free to join in at any time, or go back and do challenges you've missed.

On many of the fannish websites we use, our history is easily compileable into "pages". When we look back through those pages, sometimes we stumble upon things that we think are rather cool.

Challenge #4: Rec Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

And please do check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge and visit their journals/challenge responses to comment on their posts and cheer them on.

And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.

Current Mood: apologizing for my lateness

tinny

Heated Rivalry dominated December:

TV finished

Heated Rivalry! It was so good! It's on HBO Max and Crave. I really liked the first two episodes, there was a ton of sex, and other people much more eloquently explained why that's not a bad thing: the sex is the plot!
I hated ep three, depriving me of the main pairing I love, but I see how it's necessary as context for later episodes. Since I knew that going in, I waited until I was ready for it and just treated it like a different show. That worked for me. I loved the last three episodes again, there was a ton of romance. *A lot* of thought went into the show, and it's all intentional, and that's such a change from the things I usually watch where I rant at the writing all the time. Here, there's almost nothing to rant at. Plus, it's pretty much exactly what I'm most looking for in a tv show: m/m sex and m/m romance. \o/ I will probably read some of the books this year, and likely write up a review for the show if I find the time.

For now, let me direct you to

* my friend

machinistm's heated rivalry tag
* the heated rivalry comm

gamechangerhr
* the hockey podcast "What Chaos!" reacting to every single episode with genuine enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us7Pok5nDRc

TV new (ongoing)

Love on the Turquoise Land (17/32) - a modern fantasy/horror cdrama with Dilraba Dilmurat as a mystical sword fighter. I started watching for her, and by now probably would still be watching even if she wasn't on it. It's ... not good, exactly, but I love it anyway? I got over halfway through it in a few weeks. The horror aspect is not my thing at all, but it was only strong in the first episodes, and after that it started focusing more on vampire rituals and a general good vs evil fight and the horror took a backseat. I'm happy with that! I am very much enjoying Dilraba's actual voice (yay! she doesn't usually get to dub herself! This is cool!) and seeing her fight monsters. I am ranting at how illogical all the vampire lore is (they're called Earth Fiends but everything screams vampire to me), but fwiw once you disengage your science brain, it's fine. Giving the vastly overpowered FL a damsel-in-distress moment made me grit my teeth, but it did lead to the ML taking care of her for three eps straight, and I am not complaining about that at all. The character interactions are really good! I love the fighting, bantering, h/c, and budding romance between the ML and FL. The central mystery sounds interesting, and even though I don't trust the book author (who also wrote Parallel World) to plot herself out of a wet paper bag, the plot seems to hold together so far. Since Heated Rivalry has finished, this is the show I'm most motivated to watch right now. It's on viki.

our times

Our Times (03/38), a 90s retro "IT students go professional" cdrama with Wu Lei and Hou Minghao. The costumes are amazing (bell bottom jeans and corduroy jackets galore), and I really am enjoying the retroness of it all, especially the way the cut scenes are interspersed with actual old footage from Chinese cities, e.g. the construction of the tower in Shanghai. I immediately imprinted on Wu Lei's character (who is a bit of an arrogant asshole but gets beaten up twice in the first episode woah, see another cap). I only watched three eps so far, but liked those a lot. The only downside is that the show triggers my embarrassment squick (they are so incompetent as computer salesmen omg!), so I have to go through it slowly with many breaks. We'll see. It's on wetv and youtube.

TV continued

Still The Long Ballad (43/48), I don't want it to end. omg why do I love this show so much? I haven't loved a historical cdrama this much since Lost You Forever. Whenever Ashile Sun is on screen I go awwwwww. I'll enjoy the rest of the drama at a slow pace, while it continues to give me life. <3

I haven't dropped A Moment But Forever yet, but also haven't watched a whole ep this month.

TV (dropped)

I got halfway through Love at Night, and once the leads got together, which always makes me happy and is the main reason I watch anything, I immediately lost my motivation to continue, lol. I guess it just wasn't otherwise good enough. I might pick it up again, once I'm done with Turquoise Land? Maybe? I'm not holding my breath, though.

I realized that To My Shore is airing now, a Chinese BL (one of those sneaky international China-Thailand co-productions), and I watched half an ep, but I think it's too dark for me. For whatever reason, they keep picking the non-con ones to produce. *sigh* I prefer my romance consensual.

Extraordinary, a shorty cdrama with 20 15-min episodes about a computer nerd who transmigrates into a playboy in the past and basically transforms his family into the richest family around using his modern knowledge of business and weaponry. There's a cross-dressing FL (who he immediately sees through, lol), but otherwise it's mostly comedy of the type I'm not too fond of, and I dropped it again after a few eps.

Rewatches/Watchalongs

The HPI watchalong finished season 5. Unfortunately, there are no subs (yet) except French ones. We tried auto-translated English ones *once* and then decided that French will have to do. We enjoyed it very much but now it's over. *sob*

We started Nothing But You after that. Now on episode 6 already, we're going through it fast because we don't want to spend a year on it. So far looking good in the *show everyone how good this cdrama is* department. \o/

Still watchalong-ing When A Snail Falls in Love with my other friend, and will move on to Nothing But You after that as well.

philomytha

The Spies of Hartlake Hall, RL Graham
This was a Christmas present that looked very promising, being a WW1 espionage murder mystery with a female sleuth, and therefore with all sorts of interests of mine all lined up. Unfortunately it was only a middling book: the authors never really seemed to know what they were doing, both the mystery aspect and the espionage aspect were a mess, and the period details were a bit of a mixed bag. It started really strongly: an unknown dead body, inside a closet locked from the inside in the heart of naval intelligence, clutching the un-decoded Zimmerman telegram, found by a secretary who is not what she seems - but it was all downhill from there on. Still: spies, WW1, murder mystery, female sleuth (though one of many disappointments with the book is that our female sleuth was instantly sidelined for the real hero who is of course a male counterespionage guy who has a fridged love interest and an unpleasant mother, he has Angst About Women and a Tragic Past instead of any actual characterisation) - I read the whole thing. But it felt like it was the ropy first draft of a much better book.

( fuller review with some spoilers )

maggie33

This is Juhno’s new drama on Netflix. It’s short, just eight episodes. And my elbow still hurts and it took me two days to write this post, but I really wanted to tell you about this drama. Because it was amazing and I loved it. 😍

Junho is Kang Sang Ung, a public servant who gains a power of super strength based on the amount of cash he’s carrying. But that cash disappears after he used his power. Since he’s just an ordinary guy it becomes a big problem for him to maintain enough money to use his abilities to help people. But he has a wonderful girlfriend, Kim Min Suk, who is practical and efficient, and who always supports him. He also meets two other people with supernatural abilities - Byeon Ho In, a lawyer with the ability to pass through solid matter with the help of alcohol, and Bang Eun Mi, a telekinetic powered by calories. They start working together to protect their normal lives, and lives of ordinary citizens from villains who seek to destabilize the world.

This drama feels like subversion of superhero genre to me. Or maybe deconstruction would be a better term? Every superpower comes with a price, and often a steep price. And it has a limit you can’t cross, because you might lose your superpower. But it’s absolutely not dark and gloomy, as it might seems from that description. On the contrary, it’s optimistic, touching and uplifting. It made me smile a lot. And it made me cry twice. Once during the 6th episode and once during the finale.

Spoilers for the ending, if you want to know if it’s happy or not.

It’s the happy ending. All the villains get punished, all the good guys live.

One small minus is that the villains were rather annoying to me. Hot, yes, because Kang Ha Na and Lee Chae Min are both very hot, but so annoying that I wish that they had a bit less screentime.

But Juhno is fantastic. And Kim Hye Joon as his girlfriend is wonderful. And Kim Byung Chul as a superpowered lawyer is wonderful, too.

And yes, this drama is not perfect, and the script could be better. But I was so invested in an emotional side of things that a few logistic plot holes didn’t bother me at all.

A few things that I really liked, with major spoilers.

I was very impressed that Sang Ung told his girlfriend about his newly-acquired power. Despite his father telling him sternly “Keep it a secret and don’t tell anyone”. And Sang Ung nods, but later is all ‘nah, me and Min Suk don’t keep secrets from each other’. And he tells her instantly.

And I loved the friendship that developed between Sang Ung and Ho In and Eun Mi. So heartwarming.

And when the final fight between the one of the main villains and Kang Sang Ung started to drag on, I was sitting there rolling my eyes a little over predictability of this all. And then there was that moment when the villain had the upper hand and he asked “Who’s going to help you now?”, since Sang Ung used all the cash he had with him. And then all those ordinary people Sang Ung was saving started to throw money at Sang Ung through their windows, and cheering him on. And I lost it. I cried and cried. I don’t care that it was cheaply sentimental and OTT. It worked for me, it was beautiful and I loved it.

tinny

I was unfortunately not very consistent about writing down things in December. Once I realized on December 6 that I'd already forgotten three things again that I'd failed to note down, my motivation dropped considerably for the next two weeks. Which is why there are now only

( 8 (+2 related) things I learned in December )

oursin

Happy birthday,

beeswing,

ciiriianan and

queen_ypolita!

jadelennox

finally watching season 2 of the live action Ronia the Robber's Daughter from 2024 and my kingdom for someone who will talk about the cinematography with me the way people are breaking down the Heated Rivalry longing gazes.

Also Ronia singing the wolf song and me being surprised about pronunciation of "Du varg, du varg" and then me realizing it's the exact same way anglos always mispronounce Greta Thunberg's name.

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
心 part 10
总, general/always; 怼, to flame; 恋, love ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=61

词汇
长途, long-distance; 延长, extend ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
什么东西总会有变化的, everything always changes
他是不是失恋啊, do you think he has a broken heart?
[no 长途 or 延长]

Me:
谈恋爱并不简单。
如果没有时间写作业，到下次延长也可以。

tinny

I had expected the first Snowflake Challenge to be "update your intro", so I did that. :D It wasn't quite that, though. The first part of the challenge was "introduce yourself", so I guess close enough. :D Snapshot of my current dw profile page:

tinny profile 2026

I only updated the icon comms and changed a few icons in the color bars. Nothing much new, really.

The second part was "why do you do the challenge and what you you hope to gain from it"? Idk? I'll just see which challenges speak to me and then I do them. I did this in previous years as well, and it suits me fine. I usually just pick a few challenges that I like, no more than five, usually, and then I do those.

Here's my post from 2025: challenges 2-6 challenges 14+ and my own

Here's my post from 2024: only challenge 5, the icon scavenger hunt

Here's my post from 2023: challenges 5-10, 12 and 13

Lets see what this year brings, shall we? :D

What I'll also do this year is try and think about my creative process, and there's a new comm for that:

cultivativity

I'm looking forward to this, too!

shadaras

Over the last ~week,

hafnia and I went "sooooo what if we ran a multifandom remix event" and now it is up and ready for signups! We're hoping it'll be a fun time, and we'd love to have you join us. <3

Remix Through the Seasons is a quarterly, trope-based multifandom event hosted on ao3.

Participants will write one new story (between 1-5k) and then be assigned another story written for the event to remix. These stories can be in any fandom (including Original Work). Matching will be based on the stories' tropes (and creator DNWs) rather than pairings/fandoms. Remixing works from one fandom into another is allowed (even expected).

Schedule:
Signups open: Now!
Signups close: January 24
Assignments sent: January 31
Original works revealed: January 31
Remix works due: March 14
Remix works reveals: March 21
All author reveals: March 28
All due dates etc are at 11:59pm GMT on the listed date

DW Comm:

seasonalremix
Ao3 Collection

(getting everything finalised involved spending a couple hours on a discord call editing the gdoc full of rules and only occasionally getting distracted talking about other things, which tbh is pretty good for how many moving parts there can be for stuff like this and how easy it can be to get sidetracked talking to your bestie. we think the rules are clear! ask questions [preferably on the comm] if they aren't! <3)

trobadora

Third headache day in a row; this sucks. (Today is a bit better than yesterday, but I want it to go away! *kicks it*)

Today's writing

Just a little

fandomtrees work, but I'm really losing momentum here. :(

(I did finish my

candyheartsex letter last night, at least. Now I just have to hope someone requests something I can write ... Sign-ups are still open until tomorrow, btw!)

Tally

Day 1:

alightbuthappypen,

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

philomytha,

sanguinity,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 2:

alightbuthappypen,

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 3:

alightbuthappypen,

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 4:

alightbuthappypen,

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 5:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 6:

china_shop,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed anyone! And remember you can drop in or out at any time. :)

rachelmanija

Once upon a time, the moon Panga was industrial and capitalist and miserable. Then robots suddenly and inexplicably gained self-awareness. They chose to stop working, leave human habitation, and go into the wilderness. The humans not only didn't try to stop them, but this event somehow precipitated a huge political change. Half of Panga was left to the wilderness, and humans developed a kinder, ecologically friendly, sustainable way of life. But the robots were never seen again.

That's all backstory. When the book opens, Sibling Dex, a nonbinary monk, is dissatisfied with their life for reasons unclear to themself. They leave the monastery to become a traveling tea monk, which is a sort of counselor: you tell the monk your troubles, and the monk listens and fixes you a cup of tea. Dex's first day on the job is hilariously disastrous, but they get better and better, until they're very good at it... but still inexplicably dissatisfied. So they venture out into the wilderness, where they meet a robot, Mosscap - the first human-robot meeting in hundreds of years.

I had previously failed to get very far into The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this novella. It's cozy in a good way, with plenty of atmosphere, a world that isn't quite perfect but is definitely one I'd like to live in, and some interesting philosophical exploration. My favorite part was actually Dex's life as a tea monk before they meet Mosscap - it's very relatable if you've ever been a counselor or therapist, from the horrible first day to the pleasure of familiar clients later on. I would absolutely go to a tea monk.

I would have liked Mosscap to be a bit more flawed - it's very lovable and has a lot of interesting things to say, but is pretty much always right. Mosscap is surprised and delighted by humanity, but I'm not sure Dex ever shakes up its worldview in a way it finds true but uncomfortable, which Mosscap repeatedly does to Dex. Maybe in the second novella, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.

And while I'm on things which are implausibly neat/perfect, this is a puzzling backstory:

1) Robots gain self-awareness and leave.

2) ????

3) ~~PROFIT!~~ Society goes from capitalist hellscape to environmentalist paradise.

Maybe we'll learn more about the ???? later.

But overall, I did quite like the novella. The parts where Dex is a tea monk, with the interactions with their clients and their life in their caravan, are very successfully cozy - an instant comfort read. And I liked the robot society and the religious orders, as well as a lot of the Mosscap/Dex relationship. I'll definitely read the sequel.

prisca posting in

fic_promptly

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33966

AO3 Logo with the words AO3 Update

In 2020, we gave you some insight into our traffic numbers, focusing on the impact that global lockdowns had on our user base. Five years later, we have not only sustained that rise in users but also continued to grow steadily, so we thought we’d show you an update!

Comments in 2025

A line graph showing monthly comments on AO3 in 2020 and 2025 with the line for 2025 consistently one to two million higher than 2020.

Image 1: Line graph of monthly comments on AO3 in 2020 versus 2025. Both line graphs share small dips in February, June, and September; and peaks in July, August, and October; before sharply trending upward in December. 2020 sees an additional sharp increase in April, while 2025 shows a more typical slow rise throughout the year.

In our previous post, we observed a common pattern of slight dips in user activity in June and September. This pattern still holds true: Our users left 84,278 fewer comments in June than in May, before coming back en masse in July and August. We see a significant drop in September before cresting a suspiciously Kinktober-shaped peak in October. November sees the bustle die down one more time, before we reach record highs—crossing 5 million comments for the first time—by way of our typical end-of-year holiday increase in December.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Comments 2020/2025 (Google Sheets).

Daily page views

A line graph of daily page views from April 17th to December 31st 2025 generally trending upwards with many peaks and troughs.

Image 2: Line graph showing AO3’s daily page views (in millions) starting in mid-April and ending on December 31st. Smaller spikes show higher activity on weekends than weekdays. There is one big spike to 141 million on June 1st, and two big dips to 73.7 and 72 million respectively on July 3rd and September 29th. The trend line rises slowly but steadily, crossing 110 million daily page views in mid-October.

Site traffic tends to slowly increase throughout the year with a noticeable jump in December, and we then carry that forward into the new year. Our first anomaly happens around June 1st, with several days of incredibly high page views. After consulting with our Systems volunteers, we marked this off as likely being due to a large influx of bot traffic.

On July 3rd and 4th, we ran out of rows in the database table that stores bookmarks, so we had to move them to a larger table that can hold them all! This made it so you can once again add your own bookmarks to the 647 million we already had before then. The recovery after this outage is a little higher than normal, possibly due to an influx of users downloading works to tide themselves over any future outages.

On September 29th, we had to take some planned downtime to implement an update to collections—Collection owners can now use up to ten tags of any type to describe their collection, making it easier to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views 2025 (Google Sheets).

Site traffic throughout a typical week

A line graph showing daily page views in August 2025

Image 3: Line graph of daily page views. A subsection of the above graph, more clearly showing the ebb and flow of traffic on the archive throughout the calendar week. There are five clear peaks on every weekend with the apex on Sunday. Thursday and Friday are where traffic dips to its lowest.

If we zoom in a little, we can clearly see that weekends are most of our users’ favourite time to engage with fanworks. Some may wonder about the peaks seeming to run over into Monday—our systems run in UTC and much of our traffic comes from later timezones. More North and South Americans reading late at night on Saturday and Sunday equals peaks on Sunday and Monday!

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views August 2025 (Google Sheets).

New Year’s Eve by the minute

A line graph of server requests on New Year’s Eve across the globe

Image 4: Line graph of requests received by our servers between 9:00 UTC on December 31st 2025 and 9:00 UTC on January 1st 2026. Requests start to rise from ~550K at 12:00 UTC, peaking at nearly 800K at 17:30 UTC before slowly decreasing back down to ~650K. Sharp, sudden drops are noticeable at 16:00 UTC, 23:00 UTC, and 5:00 UTC, with smaller drops at 0:00 UTC and 6:00 UTC.

The delayed effect described in the previous section is especially noticeable on New Year’s Eve. We receive sudden, hourly drops in requests to our servers as users in different timezones pause their reading to ring in the new year. At 16:00 UTC, 47 thousand users in UTC+8 promptly went offline before coming back in force half an hour later, giving us our first noticeable drop. The yearline swept across the globe with minor dips on each hour, before UTC+1 dropped us by a whole 50 thousand requests and UTC followed with just 43 thousand requests. By far the most severe dip occurs when UTC-5 entered 2026, with over 80 thousand fewer requests—compared to UTC-8, which only dropped us by 30 thousand requests.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: New Year’s Eve by the minute (Google Sheets).

Site traffic over the years

A bar chart showing the past 13 years of weekly traffic on AO3

Image 5: Bar chart showing weekly traffic during the last week of November on AO3 from 2012 to 2025. Large jumps are noticeable between 2019 and 2020, 2022 and 2023, and 2024 and 2025.

To round things off, let’s have a look back through time!

We had a big jump in users this year—November 2025 saw over 146.6 million weekly page views more than the previous November. At first glance this is significantly higher than the 129 million increase we experienced from 2019 to 2020, but this is only 22% growth over the previous year as opposed to 52% because our baseline looks completely different.

We are excited to see where 2026 takes us, and it looks like we're already starting off strong! In the first week of the year we amassed a record high of 879 million page views, a significant jump up from 816 million the week before and averaging out to ~125 million page views a day. We look forward to breaking more records with you.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Weekly Traffic 2012-2025 (Google Sheets).

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33966

oursin

Though by now it's mostly dispersed - still lying in parts.

***

Yesterday had that exasperating thing of asking what I thought was a question for very specific thing (not even for myself, for someone who didn't have access to this particular knowledge-resource) and got, okay, one really good response that was right on point, and several which demonstrated that actual humans are quite capable all by themselves of hallucinating what the question actually was and providing answers entirely tangential and Point Thahr Misst.

***

I have had to do with this campaigner: ‘Women have to fight for what they want’: UK campaigner’s 60-year unfinished battle for abortion rights over archives of campaigns she was involved in (I even, as I recollect, suggested an appropriate riposte - a bouquet of parsley - to some weird hostile message sent to her by the notorious Victoria Gillick.)

Pretty much her contemporary, I don't think I ever met the recently-deceased Molly Parkin, but I certainly read various of her writings, including most of her various 'bonk-busters' - I'm not sure they entirely fit that category - which seem to have fallen out of print, at least, they do not seem to have enjoyed e-revival.

sovay

Doubtful as it may be under present conditions to find encouragement in anything of military origin unless it's the USS Princeton in 1844, about twenty-seven seconds into the two minutes' patriotism of Warship Week Appeal (1942) I cracked up.

Two hundred feet exactly of no-credits 35 mm, the object in question is a trailer produced for the Ministry of Information, essentially the same concept as the film tags of WWI: a micro-dose of propaganda appended to a newsreel as part of a larger campaign, in this case a sort of public information skit in which it is supposed that Noël Coward on the Denham sets of In Which We Serve (1942) is approached by Leslie Howard, slouching characteristically on with his hands in his pockets and his scarf twisted carelessly label-out, anxious to discuss a problem of National Savings. "How do you think we can make an appeal so it won't quite seem like an appeal?" With limited screen time to realize their meta conceit, the two actor-directors get briskly down to explaining the mechanics of the scheme to the British public with the shot-reverse-shot patter of a double act on the halls, but the trailer has already dropped its most memorable moment ahead of all its instructions and slogans, even the brief time it rhymes. Diffident as one end of his spectrum of nerd heroes, Howard apologizes for the interruption, excuses it with its relevance to naval business, and trails off with the usual form of words, "I'm sure you won't mind—" to which Coward responds smoothly, "I'm delighted to see you. And I know perfectly well—as we rehearsed it so carefully—that you've come to interview me about Warships Week." He doesn't even bother to hold for a laugh as Leslie snorts around his unlit cigarette. It doesn't all feel like a bit. The interjection may or may not have been scripted, but Coward's delivery is lethally demure and his scene partner's reaction looks genuine; for one, it's much less well-timed or dignified than the smile he uses to support a later, slightly obligatory joke about the income tax, which makes it that much more endearing. It's funny to me for a slant, secondhand reason, too, that has nothing to do with the long friendship between the two men or further proof of Noël's deadpan for the ages: a dancer with whom my mother once worked had been part of the company of Howard's 1936 Hamlet and like all the other small parts, whenever her back was to the audience and the Hollywood star was stuck facing the footlights, she tried to corpse him. One night she finally succeeded. Consequently and disproportionately, watching him need the length of a cigarette-lighting to get his face back, I thought of her story which I hadn't in years and may have laughed harder than Leslie Howard deserved. If it's any consolation to him, the way his eyes close right up like a cat's is beautiful, middle-aged and underslept. It promotes the illusion that a real person might say a phrase like "in these grim days when we've got our backs to the wall" outside of an address to the nation.

Not much consolation to the MOI, Warship Week Appeal accomplishes its goal in that while it doesn't mention for posterity that a community would adopt the ship it funded, the general idea of the dearth of "ships—more ships and still more ships" and the communal need to pay down for them as efficiently as possible comes through emphatically. It's so much more straightforward, in fact, than I associate with either of its differently masked actors, I'd love to know who wrote it, but the only other information immediately available is that the "Ronnie" whom Coward is conferring with when Howard courteously butts in is Ronald Neame. Given the production dates of their respective pictures, it's not difficult to pretend that Howard just popped over from the next sound stage where he was still shooting The First of the Few (1942), although he is clearly in star rather than director mode because even if he's in working clothes, he is conspicuously minus his glasses. What can I tell you? I got it from the Imperial War Museum and for two minutes and thirteen seconds it cheered me up. Lots of things to look at these days could do much, much worse. This interview brought to you by my appealing backers at Patreon.

Current Music: The Advisory Circle, "Inner Activity"

troisoiseaux

Read Lovesick Falls by Julia Drake, a modern, queer YA retelling/remix of As You Like It in which best friends Celia, Ros, and Touchstone spend the summer working at an outdoor theater festival, navigating crushes and friendship drama. This one was slightly less my cup of tea than her first novel (The Last True Poets of the Sea, a modern YA take on Twelfth Night), mostly because of one major plotline in which main character Celia meets/befriends/briefly goes out with her celebrity crush Oliver, an actor on the endearingly bad TV show she and her friends are obsessed with, a trope I find so viscerally embarrassing it's fully a squick. (Like, people actually want to meet their celebrity crushes/idols/blorbos?! Can't relate.) Overall, I liked it a lot, though— more than I'd initially expected to when it seemed like it was taking more of a cutesy best summer ever! YA romance angle, because it was ultimately a bittersweet coming-of-age: ( ... ) As a retelling of As You Like It, specifically, Drake works in some fun nods to the original play, including a very grumpy cat named for the melancholy Jaques.

sovay

After a full week without water in the kitchen, the plumber cameth on half an hour's notice from the property manager and was horrified to hear about it, but he was swift and competent and we have a new and working faucet, which was all the problem turned out to be. Hestia made herself invisible in the bedroom throughout the proceedings. I washed a fork without first boiling water and it felt like a big deal.

I just finished reading David Hare's A Map of the World (1983), whose device of examining an interpersonal-political knot through the successive filters of the roman à clef, the screen version, and the memories of the participants reminded me obviously of similar exercises in metafiction and retrospect by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, double-cast for an effect at the end approaching timeslip such as works almost strictly on stage. I did not expect to find some fragments preserved in an episode of The South Bank Show, but there were some of the scenes with Roshan Seth, John Matshikiza, Bill Nighy, Diana Quick. I wish I thought it meant there were a complete broadcast I could watch, but I'm not even finding it got the BBC Radio 3 treatment. More immediately, it reminded me of how many of the stories I read early were about stories, their propagation and mutation, their conventions, their shifting distances from the facts. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

The problem with the denaturing of language is that when I say to

spatch that the political situation is insane, I don't mean it's a little far-fetched, I mean it is driven by wants and processes that are not rational and it is exhausting to be trapped inside someone else's illness.