Dobes Zone

 Author's note: I haven't touched any creative writing project in years but I feel like the writing bug is back and has its mandibles sunk thoroughly into my brain. Here's the first of a few short stories. If there's enough interest and enjoyment I may release a short story collection on my itch site with accompanying illustrations.     Working from Home with Tippy by Dobes Crusher Life was quiet and cozy for Tippy the cat and her person, the human woman named Sarah. They lived together in a small house in the suburbs, a sleepy place with little noise and a fenced in yard that Tippy had access to through her cat door. The fence was a tall wooden one which Tippy knew she could scale easily, but on one side there were human children who Tippy didn’t really feel like meeting, and on the other was a dog that smelled like trouble. There wasn’t really any need to wander far when there were bushes to crawl under, bugs to catch, and warm patches of grass where she could sp

       Octavia E Butler really is one of those authors whose work is impossible to put down once you pick it up. I read Fledgling as part of my book club (a special benefit for those supporting the excellent Girls Guts Giallo Patreon ) and it was almost impossible to not zoom through the book in a couple evenings. World building and exposition in sci fi and fantasy stories can really be make or break with how they're handled, and even quite skilled authors can lose me a little when they get lost in the reeds dumping a ton of info about the politics, culture, etc about a fictional world or people. A lot of the brilliance of Fledgling is how effortlessly Butler leads us into the world of vampires and making things like their customs, their biology (and even court proceedings) unfold in a way that's natural and riveting for the reader. Her style is sharp, precise and highly digestible while dealing with difficult concepts that have multiple interconnecting layers.   Fledgling is

       My choice to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner started with my desire to re-read The Fall of the Kings, a book that I happened to pick up randomly at a book outlet when I was maybe 12 or 13. At this same outlet I'd also picked up Katie Waitman's The Merro Tree as well as The Essential Bordertown: A Traveler's Guide to the Edge of Faerie- a collection of short stories about the human world and the elfin world connecting. At this age I was totally rabid for anything SF/F and often brought home huge hauls of books from library book sales, where you could fill a bag for a couple dollars on the final days of the sale. It should probably surprise no one that a lot of my experiences with these books were formative and were some of my earliest experiences with queerness. Generally I was reading books that were only aimed at adults for the most part since I didn't really *do* YA except when I was quite little- barring some obvious furry bait choices like Redwall. The Fall

       I should start this review by mentioning that I would never even have heard of Andrei Codrescu's Blood Countess if not for the Girls Guts Giallo book club. If you support the podcast on patreon , you get access to curated weekly movie screenings, a fun discord server, and a book club! I've never been a part of a book club before and having one hosted by and joined by smart, funny, insightful queer folks has been an invaluable experience. If you like subversive film, kink and queer horror you'll love Annie's podcast and the inclusive community she's building. I've learned so much about weird and beautiful works and a lot about theory from listening and participating in her spaces. I'm not being paid to promote this, it's just something that's been meaningful and a source of joy for me, especially when the broader online conversation about art tends to be really reductive, skittish about sex and taboo, and moralistic to a degree that creators ge

     Mild spoilers ahead. More focused on themes than plot beats or infodumps about the characters though.        It's been too long since I've written a book review and I wanted to get in depth about an interesting book from a contemporary author. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a book that takes on the tired trope of "what if only women survived an apocalyptic event" and revitalizes it with a transgender perspective. Considering that there were recent attempts to make a TV series out of Y The Last Man , a story which trots out this premise about "biological" sex that's been fucking tired since the 70s, it feels very necessary to have a trans take on the subject. I find too with a lot of SF/F (which is often adjacent or overlapping with horror) that a lot has absolutely regressed in the contemporary despite claiming some very by-the-numbers elements of progressiveness.      And I should note, regarding the 70's, James Tiptree Jr's (aka A

 In January, I discovered I had a bunch of isopods (aka pillbugs, rolypolies, woodlice, carpenters, etc) living in a Rubbermaid tub of soil that I was over-wintering. The soil had come from my little balcony garden, where some of my plants didn't survive the colder months. I was quite surprised to see them in there since I didn't expect these tiny moisture loving bugs to make the journey up to my second story balcony. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them.      After some thinking I opted to dispose of the soil and use the tub for storage, but I wanted to see if I could save some of the isopods and keep them in a small terrarium. I started with a large squared glass jar from Michael's, a couple scoops of soil from the tub, plenty of isopods, and a couple spider plant babies from my garden plants. Many people are now keeping different isopod species as pets and I thought it looked neat enough to try myself.  I added in some leaf litter from my balcony plants as wel

      Without intending to, I had a tweet about physical media collecting and file collecting go a bit viral (sigh) and I've decided to make a little introductory post on how to start collecting both physical media and digital media- including making back-ups, digitizing things in your collection, and organizing. It won't be fully comprehensive and some aspects of collecting requires spending some money and having space for things- do what's reasonable for you and your goals . I definitely don't expect everyone to be able to spend money, but if you can pay for several streaming services per month you can probably afford to cut back on those and instead invest in some real media or some digital downloads. Someone's gotta own these movies, might as well be me.      This post will be focusing mostly on movies/TV and music, since those are the things we rely on streaming the most for. I'm also working on the assumption that you have a computer- a desktop or a lapto