^ So yeah, I hadn't put this in Pitches, Fixes, and Rewrites yet because we were gonna wait until the whole trilogy was finished, but yep, Nate and I are rewriting the entirety of the prequels as fanfic-novels, because we're masochistic people. We're gonna be doing a huge second-draft pass on the trilogy once it's finished because we rushed Episode II and are unhappy with how it turned out, but we're hugely excited to write Episode III (in the middle of outlining right now), and we're pretty proud of Episode I too! It'll have some fixes made in the rewrite pass too, but this draft is still something we put a lot of time into, and when Teague asked to narrate it we were INCREDIBLY excited. So happy for this to be the way it drops on the forum. If you care to read in text form, it is on AO3 and FFN.

Nevada - Session Four!

God DAMN, Alice. God DAMN. So fuckin' pretty.

To go with the apocalyptic theme, coupla oldies y'all know quite well:

The Internet Song/The No More Internet Song
Literally

And another Sondheim:

The Ballad of Czolgosz

Nevada - Session Three

(I say session four in the recording, I am not smart.)

Btw, if anyone wants to follow along in text form, here's a link to PDF/ebook files! All free under Creative Commons.

Well, folks, I am not an ideal narrator and do not have a perfect mic, but nonetheless: here's the first chunk of Imogen Binnie's Nevada! One of my favorite books, about a trans woman slowly unraveling in NYC. There's some background gonks in my opening greeting but they go away once the reading starts. Apologies in advance for any points where enunciation goes out the window, I stumble over a sentence here and there, and/or I mush letters together.

Anyway, without further ado, here it is! More to follow.

But of course!

Will come back with some movie recs, but for now . . .

HANNIBAL HANNIBAL HANNIBAL

Streaming on Prime. For those here who haven't seen or need persuading, it stayed a standard killer-of-the-week procedural with higher-than-usual gore quotient just long enough for everyone to stop watching, at which point (midway through the first season) it transformed into a homoerotic Gothic arthouse project and never looked back. It's utterly astounding that this got away with airing on a network for three seasons—it's the most deliriously, self-indulgently Aesthetic show I've ever watched besides Twin Peaks: The Return, and some of the artful violence they slip through the TV-14 rating is unbelievable. Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen give the two best lead performances I've seen on television, and Laurence Fishburne and Gillian Anderson more than match them. Season Two finale is my favorite episode of anything ever, and while they weren't planning on the show getting canceled, the series finale is still incredibly fitting as a cap.

Had a conversation with Teague tonight in which he told me he hadn't realized Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of Against Me!, is a trans woman. So, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, one of the best rock albums of recent memory!

This is the most soothing thing I've found in . . . years, maybe?

So this isn't a "showing off current new shit" thing so much as "showing off shit I intend to get in future" thing, but it's cool and I wanted to share it to the forum.

My main avenue for listening to music is still either my iTunes library when I'm wired or my iPod when I'm on the go. Alas, today, after nine long years of faithful service, my 160GB iPod classic is finally down to a mere 75MB in space. FORTUNATELY, I just discovered this Etsy store. They're selling jailbroken 160GB iPods with upgraded batteries and hard drives to support anywhere from the base 160GB to a full 2TB of storage space. (Anything above a TB is for uncompressed audio specifically, as the iPod's internal database maxes out at around 30,000 songs from what I've heard.)

A terabyte is probably excessive considering 160GB has lasted me for almost a decade, but I am definitely gonna spring for 512GB as soon as I've got the disposable money to do so. Very much a worthwhile investment for me, especially since I only do streaming for music if I have no other resort. One nice bonus will be the ability to have every DiF episode on my iPod again for the first time in several years.

There are a lot of Hong Kong action movies that are impossible to get decent home media of in America, either because it has no HD release, because it has an "HD" release that's a poor transfer, or because an American distributor *coughWEINSTEINScough* butchered the movie with cuts/poor subtitles or dubbing/etc. Welp, turns out that if you don't care about obtaining discs through legitimate means, there's an awesome solution.

Enter Hong Kong Rescue, a collection of bootleggers dedicated to smuggling HD transfers out of Asian markets and preserving them on region-free discs, along with retranslating subtitles, adding a shitload of extras, and in some cases doing their own restoration work. If you're looking for some great Jackie Chan or John Woo movies that are either unavailable in the States or have terrible releases, this is the place to go—their Police Story release is moot as Criterion have now put that out, but as far as I know this is the only way to get a proper Region A disc of all the other films in the collection.

(This post inspired by my hunt for a proper Blu-Ray of Hard Boiled after seeing it for the first time on a big screen this week. Whatta picture.)

I've been getting a little bored with the standard brass/bass/piano/drums hard bop lineup lately, so anything that deviates from it is very welcome. Cue my discovery of Allison Miller, whose lineup includes violin and clarinet.

Re-reading Ubik for the first time in a good few years. Nobody writes late capitalism like PKD.