snickfic: Margot Robbie as Barbie, black and white (Barbie)
snickfic ([personal profile] snickfic) wrote2025-12-17 10:29 am

Movies: Silent Night Deadly Night, 100 Nights of Hero

Movies: the nocturnal edition, I guess!

Silent Night Deadly Night (2025). A nice young man who sometimes puts on a Santa suit and murders naughty people as directed by the voice in his head meets a nice young woman who sometimes really loses her temper.

This was a delight. I had the BEST time. It's a remake of a 1980s slasher I haven't seen, but the premise of that one sounds like it's played straight as a "guy in a santa suit goes on a psychotic killing spree" kind of thing, and this one is a lot more complicated/enjoyably weird in its execution. The lore of this movie is absolutely bananas, just total nonsense, but is never overexplained, which it seems like is where so many of these kinds of bonkers movies fall down. The script is surprisingly smart overall, I felt, with a lot of care and affection for its characters. It doesn't hurt that I adore Ruby Modine, who previously had smaller parts in Happy Death Day (the roommate) and Satanic Panic (the daughter). And the ending is *chef's kiss*. I would watch the hell out of a sequel that follows what happens next.

On a personal note, as someone who loves Christmastime but has had less opportunity/excuse to indulge in it as I've gotten older, I really enjoyed the over the top Christmas theming of this.

It does have a couple of awkward lines about gender(tm), which maybe are trying to do a thing, but do not succeed in my opinion. There's also an incident with a white supremecist which would have felt more successful if we'd seen, like, a single non-white person by that point in the movie. The movie also does not look great; it's kind of all sludge. Oh well, we can't have everything.

I think this movie is already almost out of theaters. If it sounds fun to you at all, I would absolutely recommend chasing it down for some Christmas-flavored horror cheese.

--

100 Nights of Hero (2025). In a misogynistic dystopia, a young married woman (Maika Monroe) whose inattentive husband is away on business must cope with a would-be suitor (Nicholas Galitzine) with the help of her maid and best friend (Emma Corrin).

I checked this out because the descriptions I saw were sending gay signals, and indeed, this is very gay! Monroe and Corrin's respectively repressed and hidden gay longing is great. It also, unlike the movie above, is beautiful and stylish, even though they were clearly working with a fairly small budget. The aesthetics are top-notch. And Galitzine (of Red, White, and Royal Blue, among other things) does a great job playing a hot himbo whose sense of menace is undercut by how dumb he is.

Unfortunately, the actual story a) is not my kind of thing and b) IMO sucks pretty hard on its own merits. If I had realized quite how much of a satirical fable it was, I would not have gone to see it. This takes place in a universe where women are killed for such sins as literacy, extramarital sex, and not getting pregnant within nine months or so of getting married. This last one is the key for our sad wife Cherry, whose husband and the villain of the piece simply declines to have sex with her, even when the local Puritan-flavored but fictionally religious order says she'll be executed if she doesn't hurry up and get pregnant.

I do get that we're trying to critique men's control of women's bodies, but like... this is not a scenario that has widespread analogue in the real world. Men refusing to have sex with women, even when the women's lives are at stake, is not a thing! RL misogyny is bad enough, you don't have to make shit up! The fact that it's suggested (but not confirmed) that the husband is either gay or ace makes it worse, as he's the only possibly queer man in the movie, and it makes it much much much worse that he's also played by the only actor of Middle Eastern descent that I noticed. In fact I think he's also the only character of color still alive at the end of the movie; all the various women of color have died. (Including Charli XCX's character, who along with her two sisters is executed for knowing how to read.)

This movie makes the Barbie movie look subtle. I would say I don't know who it's for, but apparently it's for the other five or so people on bluesky who've seen it, all of whom gave it gushing reviews. IDK man.
settiai: (Words Flow -- gnomeofsol)
Lynn | Settiai ([personal profile] settiai) wrote2025-12-17 12:02 am
Entry tags:

Once more with Yuletide...

Okay, we're right at 16 hours to the deadline, so now I'm starting to feel a bit of pressure as I try to get things finished up.

I had a headache this morning and took off work to stay curled up in bed until close to lunchtime, so my sleep schedule is completely messed up again. Which, in this case, is probably a good thing, as I honestly tend to do better writing at night than during the day. My plan is to stay up until at least 2-3am working on finishing up my fic(s) or, at least, getting them to a point where they'd be considered a properly finished work if I were to get hit by a bus before I could get back to them to make additions.

I'm sure that I'll end up spending some more time tweaking things over the next week, cleaning things up and maybe adding some extra scenes depending on just how much my muse decides to cooperate tonight. Still, the important thing is getting everything finished.

So... I guess we'll see how it goes?
torachan: brandon flowers of the killers with the text "some beautiful boy to save you" (some beautiful boy to save you)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-12-16 08:39 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Carla needed the car for an appointment today so since we've still only got the one, I worked from home. I didn't have anything that required being in the office anyway, so it worked out.

2. Speaking of the car, they finally found the leak, yay! It should be fixed tomorrow or Thursday. The not so yay part is that apparently it was not a malfunction but was caused by a rock or something getting kicked up into the engine, so we will have to pay for it. We have the money, so it's not a problem in that regard. I'd just rather spend my money on nicer things than car repairs. :p

3. Molly's getting cozy.

melagan: (snowglobe)
melagan ([personal profile] melagan) wrote2025-12-16 11:11 am

something to go with the socks

red gloves

I've made gloves for family, but this is the first time I've made some for me!

I'm recovering from a 24-hour (nasty- sooo nasty) stomach bug and all I want right now is a cozy Christmas-y McShep fic to make me feel better.


Yes, that's blatant begging. Aided by Chkc's wonderful Chibi art.
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-12-15 07:44 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Today I finished another big part of the project we're working on at work. It was a lot of double checking stuff and data cleanup, which was tedious but now we have workable data to upload, woohoo!

2. I had a couple things to mail today and managed to get to the post office a few minutes before they opened so there were only like four people in front of me and I was out of there in like twenty minutes. I was braced for worse since it's the holiday season.

3. Cutie Chloe.

snickfic: Spuffy Smashed kissing (Spuffy)
snickfic ([personal profile] snickfic) wrote2025-12-15 04:31 pm

more FIAB recs

[ART] Night of the Red Sands, The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett. A gorgeous, dramatic painting as described in the novel. Can be appreciated canon-blind!

You're Gonna Need A Softer World, Jaws, A Softer World remixes. Every one of these is hilarious and absolutely spot-on.

Do Automatons Dream of Albino Eels?, Sunless Sea/Citizen Sleeper, gen, 6k. A zee-captain finds a mechanical stowaway and must decide what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the Citizen Sleeper, but the crossover character fits really naturally into the Fallen London universe. Great atmosphere all the way through, so many deliciously horrible little bits of worldbuilding flavor, and a satisfying arc of the stowaway automaton and the crew learning to care for one another.

fix it (how can you fix it?), BtVS, Spike/Buffy, 3k. Buffy's soulmark signifies that her soulmate died before she was even born. I really enjoyed the extra details of soulmate worldbuilding this added, and if Spike and Buffy were soulmates, I could definitely see it going exactly like this. <3

The Beat Goes On, At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie, 6.6k, gen. The scandal at Bertram's Hotel is a major news story—apparently too major for Beatrice to be trusted with it according to her editors, even though she's always been the one to cover stories about Lady Sedgewick. A very cool timestamp featuring an OC I loved immediately, a female reporter trying to make it in a man's world, and doing whatever she needs to to get the story, including going back home to visit little old Miss Marple. IMO you don't need to remember the novel to enjoy this (because I did not remember it, lol).
settiai: (Yuletide -- liviapenn)
Lynn | Settiai ([personal profile] settiai) wrote2025-12-15 06:08 pm
Entry tags:

Yuletide

The deadline is officially in less than 48 hours at this point. I'm not quite at the point where I'm properly worried yet, but that may be coming by this time tomorrow depending on how much fic writing I'm able to get done between phone calls at work tomorrow.

Still, I try to save the proper panic for the minus 12 hours and counting point, so I still have plenty of time before that arrives. It's fine. Compared to some previous years, I'm doing significantly better already.
schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)
schneefink ([personal profile] schneefink) wrote2025-12-15 08:06 pm
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Books read recently: Camp Damascus, The Incandescent, Queen Demon

I have an e-book-reader with many many unread books on it. But when I'm e.g. on the underground, taking out and turning on my e-reader would be an extra step, and it's easier to read things on my phone. Which used to be fic, but now I also have the library app on my phone so I can read books I'm currently borrowing from the library. Convenient, but a side-effect is that which books I read next is more often determined by which books I finally got from my wait lists. And sometimes it is almost stressful when I get several at the same time ^^

Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
Camp Damascus )

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh
The Incandescent )

Queen Demon, by Martha Wells
Queen Demon )
turps: (Christmas owls)
turps ([personal profile] turps) wrote2025-12-15 02:30 pm

(no subject)

The knife saga is over, sadly, not with help by Amazon. In the end, yesterday, we just drove to the outlet mall again and bought the equivalent quality knives from the kitchen shop there. It did cost a little more than the Amazon prices, but both knives also come guaranteed for 25 years and at least they're bought as it was getting a little close to Christmas for comfort.

We did our usual thing of going an hour early, planning to go for a Costa while waiting for the shops to open at 10. Only to find out the Sunday hours are different, and you couldn't even get to any of the shops, including the food ones, as the gates to the actual mall were all shut. But, you could go into the McDonalds at the end, so I had a McMuffin and coffee and watched the craft and food stalls set up.

There were so many tempting stalls, including one selling bath stuff. I'm a sucker for soap, whipped soaps etc, so after checking out the smells I gave James a big hint such stuff would be nice to receive, and he sent me on my way as he made a surprise purchase. Which he then left next to the Christmas tree at home in an open paper bag.

We may also have come home with some cakes, which were enjoyed last night, with more left for tea later.

Saturday it was the delivery day for the pieces James has been working on. Thankfully, the man who'd commissioned the pieces loved them. James had also created a freebie for him, a raccoon on a live piece of wood. I think that's the technical term anyway, it's wood which still has bark attached at the sides. The man sat stroking that piece -- the other two are a bit big to hold onto -- and it was obvious he was genuinely happy with everything, which was such a relief.

After delivering those, we drove up to Seahouses, taking the coastal route and stopping off in some small villages to have a mooch and hot coffees. It was so nice to do that, normally those places are packed in the summer, but in winter it was easy to look around and actually see stuff, including a red phone box that had been turned into a Christmas decorated tiny library.

In Seahouses itself, we got to pose with a giant plastic polar bear, and a lovely lady offered to take a photo of both of us together You can also see photos of the pieces James delivered if you're interested, just click the arrows to see all the photos. No photo of the raccoon piece, though, I had to take a screengrab from a video from that, so that's behind the cut. With bonus standing in front of our Christmas tree too, as I know [personal profile] turlough likes to laugh at it every year *g* behind here )
settiai: (Konzen -- xskadi)
Lynn | Settiai ([personal profile] settiai) wrote2025-12-14 11:04 pm
Entry tags:

RIP Rob Reiner

The news broke a little while ago that Rob Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home.

Based on several articles, it looks like it's being investigated as a possible (or maybe probable would be the better word if the rumors some sites are reporting are true?) homicide.
torachan: (Default)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-12-14 05:25 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. I have recently ordered multiple things off Amazon that are not at all urgent, and they're offering good rewards for getting them delivered after Christmas rather than before (most have been 7% cash back but the most recent one was a $2 ebook credit). So now I have a ton of stuff arriving on the 27th. D:

2. I finally got all of Alex's books repacked into nice boxes and stacked on the new shelves I put in the shed. It's looking so much more organized. I ordered two more sets of shelves (one of the above-mentioned purchases) so then there will be three sets on each wall, which will mean plenty of space for long-term storage as well as things like toilet paper and paper towels, which we buy from Costco and they come in huge packages that are too big to store the whole thing in the house.

3. I love getting these shots of Gemma looking out the window.

settiai: (Dragon Age -- offensive)
Lynn | Settiai ([personal profile] settiai) wrote2025-12-14 04:14 pm

The Joining Exchange

The Joining Exchange, a Dragon Age exchange focusing on Grey Wardens that just started this year, went live a little while ago. I got not one, not two, but three lovely gifts this year!

First up is Something Out Of The Ordinary, set during Dragon Age: Inquisition and featuring Alistair/Cullen Rutherford/Female Surana. 23,267 words.

Next is L’Hymne à L’Amour, set prior to Dragon Age: The Veilguard and featuring Antoine/Evka Ivo. 3,142 words.

And then there's in on it, set after Dragon Age: The Veilguard and featuring Antoine/Ashur | The Viper/Evka Ivo/Tarquin. 1,539 words.
theladyscribe: Evgeni Malkin pulling back for a shot (booty toughness)
a subtle sort of brilliance ([personal profile] theladyscribe) wrote2025-12-14 10:16 am
Entry tags:

Heated Rivalry

Wow, so I read Heated Rivalry in anticipation of the tv show, and tbh I did not really like the book! But I am head-over-heels for the show, oh my god. It's hitting all of my feelings. I saw someone on meme say that it has disrupted their Seasonal Affective Disorder, and honestly same? Wow.

I think the serial nature of its release is contributing here - I had not realized just how much I missed the weekly anticipation of a new episode! More streaming shows should be like this, tbh.

Anyway, I have fallen hard enough that I am writing a soulmates (TiMER) AU on bluesky in between trying to wrap up my Yuletide assignment. I am furiously refreshing the What Chaos youtube channel in breathless anticipation of their next episode reaction (already 2 days late!! get on this, guys!!). I am buying every song on bandcamp (because the music is STELLAR, like for real, haven't seen music cues this great since my SPN days). I am eating up every rec and little detail and gifset that crosses my path. I've watched all of the current episodes at least twice and will almost definitely rewatch Friday's episode again today.

I'm going to be home for the holidays visiting family when the final episode airs, and I am already trying to decide if I will get up early to watch it or if I will have to wait until after everyone else goes to bed that night to finish it.

If you are watching this, please come yell with me about it!
torachan: maru the cat sitting in a bucket (maru)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-12-13 08:15 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. The weather today was very nice. It looks like it's supposed to be in the low 70s for a few days coming up, but I hope it actually stays at those temps and doesn't end up warmer than predicted as it often has recently.

2. I've been waiting for the right size box to ship some stuff out and today I finally got one! Amusingly enough, what I want to ship out is puzzles and the perfect box had some new puzzles I ordered recently in it. (The actual size of the puzzles I'm sending is different from the ones that just came, but the box fits both and came with lots of packing paper.)

3. Tuxie is fattening up for the winter.

torachan: my glitch character (glitch)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-12-13 05:58 pm
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2025 Disneyland Trip #77 (12/13/25)

I thought today would be less crowded than Monday because all three lower level passholders are blocked out, but it was super crowded. D: Still not as bad as Monday (especially because Monday was unfortunately timed with the parade, which makes things cloggier), but not great.

Read more... )