a post on tumblr made me think about what my favorite albums might be and THAT led to me relistening to some albums i love a lot yesterday and today. music good. also holy shit i love florence welch's voice so much. cosmic love still hits so hard.

i was going back and forth about lungs vs ceremonials but i think i gotta go with lungs as my florence album. it's just SO striking and left such an impression on me when i first heard it.

apparently this is a topic i'm S L O W L Y acquiring a stash of knowledge about, so we'll call this a work in progress bibliography

Episode 122 of Set Lusting Bruce: Bella and Bruce's Gayest Songs, an episode of a podfic where the host talks with someone about bruce springsteen. the Good Gay Shit only really starts about halfway in, but i found the rest of the episode relatively enjoyable anyway

Beyond blood brothers: queer Bruce Springsteen by Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel. Unfortunately, this is an academic article, so you need a way to access it (or come talk to me). shout out to frecklebombfic for sending this to me a while ago

Because The Boss Belongs to Us: Queer Femmes on Bruce Springsteen, a zine i found on tumblr ages ago that i really should save somewhere i can find it again.

My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen by Natalie Adler. an essay about reading Springsteen's performance as queer.

Playlist and Roundtable: We’re Here and We’re Queering Bruce Springsteen, from Autostraddle. pretty much exactly what it looks like - a playlist of Springsteen songs with a little blurb about each one

“Terry was a dude”: A dialogue on “Backstreets” and “Governor Chris Christie’s Fort Lee New Jersey Traffic Jam”. two people talking about how great Backstreets is and how it's queer (i don't totally agree with their conclusions, but i think they have some great arguments).

if you know of anything else like this, send it my way! or just come talk to me about it

hi i'm back several years later with NEW MATERIAL!

Things That Can Only Be Found in the Darkness on the Edge of Town, by Naomi Gordon-Loebl. an article about why springsteen's music might resonate with queer fans in particular.

Because the Boss Belongs to Us. a podcast by two queer people investigating whether Springsteen can be considered a queer icon. I haven't listened yet but i intend to very soon.

one of the hosts of the above podcast has a few zines about bruce, including this one, "Me and Bruce #4: Queers on the Edge of Town," which i am seriously considering buying rn.

i also have to shout out this iconic tumblr post quoting the My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen article in combination with an article about Dolly Parton's performance of gender/femininity

hi it's me back again with this wild clip from a jimmy fallon interview: "previously we played to a lot of young men, due to the homosexual undercurrents of my music—" so uh, thanks for that bruce. what do i do with the rest of my day now.

it turns out that i have kept very poor track of what i've watched in previous years, so i'm gonna try and post here more often about things! i finished rewatching stranger things season 2 today.

and man... what a horribly uneven show!!! the writing is frequently bad on a plot/coherency/pacing level, they love to do things that make me go 'wait sorry i'm supposed to think WHAT about WHO doing WHAT NOW????', and i feel like it's one of the most thematically messy shows i've ever seen. AND ALSO i'm obsessed with all the characters, there are so many fascinating and fun and real feeling character interactions, and it is a show that knows how to give a climactic and EXTREMELY EMOTIONAL moment on cue at the BEST times.

what a mess <3

tbh i'm very excited to get to s3. i know it is Critically Disliked but i love it. if it gave me nothing else i would still love it for max and el.

i'm also still thinking about how i watched s4 and was like, man the metallica moment is so objectively Nonsense and yet also bc it is in this context it WORKS SO FUCKING WELL. thats what i mean about a climactic moment.

tron legacy is so aggressively a mediocre movie except: aesthetics, which are in every way unparalleled. that the relationship between kevin and sam is like... not horrible but also certainly not good. and the extremely sexy move to do All Of That with rinzler.

unsurprisingly the female character situation is DIRE and there's absolutely no people of color in significant roles at ALL and i would love to be like 'ah a product of its time' but that time was... 2010. so. fuck that.

reading reactions to Critical Role Downfall on tumblr is giving me so much fucking psychic damage, i need to take a long rest

first of all the number of people referring to aeor and also the prime deities as two singular collective entities... WILD!!! we just watched hours of their absolutely being differences and changing opinions and conflict within both groups! second of all the number of people who think there's a Right Answer to the situation in aeor baffles me.

but like, i kind of... put this on matt if i'm honest... not the reactions i'm seeing specifically but that i've been kind of uncomfortable this whole campaign with how deeply it's diving into questions of morality of religion and belief when i don't actually think that's, in some ways, a story CR is well-suited to explore and when the world it's taking place in is so informed by a very specific worldview.

idk dude. downfall is cool as hell as a story and yet. it's very hard for something to be a singular story and also a philosophical experiement/debate about morality and also also about a concept that is unavoidably colored by everyone's personal feelings about religion, a famously divisive topic.

This is to accompany the playlist I made of the songs that i've titled fics from. if you want a link to that playlist, just leave a comment or ask me directly!

so as i've been telling basically anyone who's asked what i've been up to lately, i finally watched season 4 of stranger things (i finished it a week ish ago). it's funny, because i was feeling so obligated to watch it when it came out and when everyone started talking about it that i put it off for ages, and was surprised to remember that oh yeah i actually like this show. (i was also surprised to find it had been over a year and a half that i'd put it off, rather than the nine-ish months i was SURE it had been since s4 came out, but here we are lol.) so this is half my reactions to s4 and to the fandom (not entirely positive), and half like... just generally poking at what i do like about the show and why i enjoy it, because i was doing a lot of mulling that over as i got back into it.

we will NOT be talking about how many words of stranger things fic i've read in the last two-three weeks because i'm not tracking my fic reading this year so i can pretend to remain in blissful ignorance. thank you ever so much in advance.

anyway, i have no conclusions to draw here but please come talk to me about this if you have thoughts or feelings about ST s4 or if you just want to react to anything i said! i keep tripping over the fact that this is a brand new season of canon for me and like fucking two years old for everyone else lmao.

Dear Author Letter

hello! this is my fourth year doing yuletide (holy shit?? i feel like i JUST did it for the first time so recently!) and i’m so excited to do it again. if you’re writing any of these fandoms for me, i’m already guaranteed to love you and whatever you write, but i also know that personally, i love getting a ton of info to work from in exchanges, so i’ve written a bunch here! feel free to look through it for ideas, but also please please don’t feel beholden to it.

treats policy: go for it!

insert pleading emoji and hands pointing at each other bc im too lazy to figure out if i can insert that here easily

i would love to use DW more often because i think i like the idea of this style of interaction a lot and i've never really participated in a space/platform/community like that! however due to [see above] i actually have no idea how to like.... do that..... i feel like to me, i think of it as kind of like ao3? you post stuff and maybe people respond. but like. how do you find new people? how much chatting and interacting is encouraged and/or desired on posts? what kind of stuff is reasonable for me to post? i realize that these are all subjective and no one will have coherent answers but i'm feeling very adrift for not having expectations here haha