jsparc

1. There's a new round of AO3 statistics discourse, this time with some commentary on fic injections. Reddit post. Apparently the latest hobby among The Youth is to spam a ship tag in order to artificially inflate its numbers to prove... something. That their ship is the best? That they are the most dedicated fan? Reminds me of kpop stan culture.

2. I watched all of Murderbot, and it was delightful! I have a week left on my Apple TV subscription and tried a few other shows that looked intriguing--Dickinson and The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin. They're both entertaining, but I don't feel a desperate desire to watch the whole thing.

3. Speaking of desperate desires, I've been reading more romance novels: A Fashionable Indulgence by KJ Charles was excellent, and I'm currently waiting to borrow the sequel. I then started A Delicate Deception by Cat Sebastian, which seemed fine for a bedtime read, but now I'm also reading Frankenstein and Mansfield Park, and modern popular fiction set in vaguely nineteenth century suffers in comparison. I'd tried to read Mansfield Park once before in my youth, but never finished it; so far it's engaging me this time as an audiobook (Jane Austen is a good writer, did you know??). In rereading Frankenstein I was struck by how often characters' education or lack thereof was mentioned; you could say the novel is a treatise on the importance of a liberal arts education and the dangers of too much emphasis on STEM. I'm only a third of the way through though.

I was reading The God of the Woods for a Goodreads challenge, and it was ok, but also I had the feeling that there was just a serial killer in the woods and not a god and I didn't care about everyone's very 1970s personal problems so I dememed it and fail_fandomanon spoiled it for me. A hold for The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands came in, so I'll be trying that one instead.

1. One alarming thing I heard recently: Endless Thread podcast: consensual doxing. Makes me want to delete everything I ever posted online. /o\

2. I know antishippers still exist because sometimes I search for recent mentions of Fanlore on social media and find people using it to argue over the definition of proshipper.

3. I finished reading Band Sinister by KJ Charles the other day. It was fine. I liked Amanda more than her brother. The more Regency-era romances I read, the more it feels like Regency England (1811-1820) is a fantasy setting overrun with dukes and rakes where everyone is forever recovering from the war with Napoleon, rather than a very short period of time in the real world that everyone lived through and then moved on. (To be clear, Band Sinister is atypical, but having a large number of characters with modern sensibilities running around highlights how fantastical the setting is. Here is a more enthusiastic blog post about the book.)

4. I started poking around AO3 for KJ Charles fic and found a podficcer called jennisaisquoi. I also found an exchange. Most popular ship: Will Darling/Kim Secretan.