I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Yes, IWTV is great! While waiting for the next season, might you consider Evil? The show follows a hot Catholic priest-in-training, the hot atheist shrink to whom he is desperately attracted, and their hot lapsed Muslim tech guy as they investigate and try to prove/disprove demonic possessions. It is incredibly, delightfully unhinged. Part of it is that the show started on network TV, then moved to streaming in its second season, leading to the absolute best evolution where characters who were reasonably well-behaved start spouting "fuck" at the drop of a hat in S2, including a delightful nearly silent episode that was actually filmed while they still thought they'd be on network, so after filming they replaced the "thought dialogue" onscreen that the actor thought he was filming with a stream of "fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck," to hilarious effect. There's body horror, Catholic guilt, an amazingly toxic mother (Christine Lahti, having the time of her life), four kids who have clearly been instructed to just yammer every time they are on screen together--making them more realistic than 80% of TV kids from the get-go--examination of misogyny and anti-Blackness, critiques of modern internet culture, and the occasional Wallace Shawn. Also, the tech guy is Aasif Mandvi and the hot priest is Mike Colter (Jessica Jones/Luke Cage). And the bad guy is Michael Emerson (Harold Finch), chewing scenery like he only gets paid by how much debris is left when he’s done.

Shorter rec: What if Hannibal and The X-Files had a deeply online baby? My one caveat is that this is a cynical show, which feels a little like watching Cabaret: It's a sick culture and the show is not interested in fixing it, only in displaying it pinned open on a table so we can poke at the nastiest parts.

Chuck Tingle, Bury Your Gays: ( queer joy/horror )
R. A. Sinn, A Second Chance for Yesterday: ( time travel romance )
Joy Demorra, Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites: Fluff and Fangs Edition: ( werewolf/vampire romance )
Stephen King, You Like It Darker: Stories: ( because they can )
Austin Grossman, Fight Me: ( cynical former supervillains )

Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Oracle: ( horror and spycraft )

The Orville is going so much harder at doing what TOS did than SNW is. The Orville is, with all its 2020s workplace dramedy sensibility, posing much harder and more salient political and ethical questions, albeit solving them in TV ways (like TOS). SNW is having fun, no question, and I frankly would prefer to like it more than I like The Orville, but I guess I like my nostalgia with a bit of a cutting edge.

A Partial List of Things They Changed in the Movie (2626 words) by rivkat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Speed (1994)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Annie Porter/Jack Traven
Characters: Annie Porter, Jack Traven, Harry Temple
Summary:

Harry lives. Other parts of life go on too. Note: I ignored Speed 2 because I never saw it. It does not exist in this universe.

I've been bingewatching Legends of Tomorrow and ...( theater of the absurd )
( More Merchant Princes )

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ogres: ( novella about genetics and oppression )
Rebecca Roanhorse, Fevered Star:( return of the gods )
Aliya Whiteley, Skyward Inn: ( DNF )
Daniel Abraham, Age of Ash:( epic fantasy )
Kate Elliott, Unconquerable Sun: ( spaaaace opera )

Beforeigners is an HBO show set in Norway, 7 years after people from earlier time periods started appearing in numbers. Meret turned me on to it and it is amazing. Not only are there a ton of witty details about what life would be like, it also has a charismatic lead and some interesting things to say both about (1) immigration/anti-immigrant sentiment and (2) how people get inured to previously unbelievable and you-would-have-thought-intolerable situations, which has obvious relevance to the current situation. People are arriving from a thousand years ago! Ugh, is that still happening? The female lead was a Viking (but we don't use that term any more) shieldmaiden, and warriors aren't supposed to become police officers, so she just told them she was a farmwife, and they had no idea how to evaluate that claim so they believed her. Does have police work, but not US police work, so I hope it's tolerable?

My daughter and I also powered through the new She-Ra, which was great (though I think I still like Steven Universe better). Next up: new season of Lucifer, then probably Legend of Korra.


Veronica Roth, The Chosen Ones: ( after the victory )
K.M. Szpara, Docile: ( slavefic )
T. Kingfisher, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking: ( weaponized dough )
Stephen King, If It Bleeds: ( story collection/more Holly Gibney )
The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2019, ed. Jonathan Strahan. ( Good stuff )
Tasha Suri, Empire of Sand: ( desert magic )
Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow: ( prolific editor )
Best of British Fantasy 2019: ( horror creeps into fantasy )
K.B. Wagers, A Pale Light in the Black: ( space adventure with games )
K.B. Wagers, After the Crown:( gunrunner turned Empress )
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft:( mysterious keys )

The Society:( Under the Dome, teen edition )
Lucifer: ( they still have chemistry )
Elana K. Arnold, Damsel:( a dragon and a girl )
Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars: ( back to Ravka )
Rae Carson, The Girl of Fire and Thorns: ( princess comes of age )
Audrey Coulthurst, Of Fire and Stars: ( different princess comes differently of age )
Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere: ( Southwestern Lovecraft gothic )
Emma Newman, Atlas Alone: ( kind of a dark side )
The Final Frontier, ed. Neil Clarke.  ( spaaaaaace )
Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside: ( fantasy with worldbuilding )

I found myself unexpectedly charmed.

( spoilers )Now I want an OA vid to 5 out of 6.

Hi there! I am still lurking fannishly, with no great loves but many enjoyments. Including Black Lightning, which is currently my favorite Marvel/DC show in significant part because Jefferson and Anissa are routinely so over others' nonsense, including each others'. Also The 100, which I finally caught up with, and I have one thing to say: ( 6-month-old spoilers )
If you're of a mind to share your current enjoyments, please do so!

I'm enjoying the hell out of Black Lightning. Anybody else?

Also, random bleg: anyone speak Polish willing to contact a store for me and ask if they ship to the US? I've sent a message in via their site but it might well have been treated as spam, inasmuch as I relied on Google Translate.

Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book: ( can you hear me now? )
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: ( Space race )
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: ( he brought a knife )
James Meese, Authors, Users, and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity: ( hi, theory )
Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: ( waterworld )
Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea: ( doomed to repeat it )
Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: ( be very afraid )

William Langweische, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson: ( a hero fad )Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder: ( my innocence has just been sold )
Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: ( War is hell )
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present: ( modernism and its discontents )

1. Lucifer is very satisfying to me right now. Maze and Chloe as roommates is exactly the fanservice I desired.

2. I love gothy covers of Sarah McLachlan’s Possession, but it occurs to me that they are a bit mansplainy. She did, after all, know that she was writing about a stalker.

3. Words cannot really describe how much I want a Farscape vid to Murdering Stravinsky.  Dining on each other! Dressing up as fascists! Killing off the past to make the future last!  Dancing on the coals!

( Elliott Kay, Seanan McGuire, Sarah J. Maas )