sometimesalways

First I bring you two recs I shared on fancake, then notes on my recent rewatch, a complaint about taxonomy, some observations about the 1980s, three more recs, and finally a call for ~~papers~~ more recs.

We Better Make a Start (11087 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, Robin Buckley
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Himbo Steve Harrington, First Time, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Are Best Friends, Podfic Available

Summary: As soon as Eddie gets to the counter, Steve turns to him and says, "Back me up here. Kissing is no big deal, right?"

Steve Harrington is talking about kissing. Eddie's brain shorts out. "Uh," he says.

Bookmarker's Notes: Steve accompanies Robin to a gay bar where he discovers his skills with the ladies are transferable to guys. Robin and Eddie both have a crisis over it, though for different reasons. Very fun and very hot, with Steve at his himbo best.

Like a Virgin (26183 words) by mistresscurvy
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Will Byers/Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Characters: Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, Steve Harrington, Jonathan Byers, Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley, Argyle (Stranger Things), Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers
Additional Tags: Loss of Virginity, First Kiss, First Time, 80s teen sex comedy, will and mike are both 17 in this fic, Discussions of sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Coming Out

Summary: "Did it ever occur to any of you that I might not want to have my only sexual experiences be with someone who isn't actually interested in me?" Will asked.

He was met by three identical looks of confusion. "I mean, it would still be sex," Dustin said finally.

Bookmarker's Notes: Set after a season four where, yes, a lot of people died. But the kids are seventeen now, and Mike and Will are both virgins, which Mike is very concerned about: Cue the 80s teen sex comedy. Unlike much of that genre, though, this isn't gross or embarrassing, and everybody's having a good time. I adored Will here, kind of baffled by what Mike's gotten them into, yet excited about it too, and it's wonderful to see him stand up for himself, confident enough to be honest about who he is and what he wants. Plus it includes the entire crew, even Argyle.

So, in November, I started rewatching the first four seasons of Stranger Things in preparation for the fifth season. The first season is still so good; tightly plotted, every group working in their own genre until all three storylines converge. Second season: Not my favorite, for a number of reasons, but it does give us Max and for that I will forgive it. The third season is a mall-shaped masterpiece of nostalgia, even if a bunch of goofy kids infiltrating a secret Russian facility is harder to buy than the Upside Down. Fourth, all over the damn place, literally, and full of infodumps thrown together in order to explain the new retroactive continuity, but the Hawkins crew is absolutely solid.

And the fifth season? The first half felt like a different show than the second half, and the second half wasn't exactly made up of my favorite things. I loved the quarantine aspect—huge fan of a bottle episode—and I was proud of Will (and glad that he finally got something to do), and Robin and Steve running the radio station was perfect, but I wanted MORE TEAM FEELS. There was NOT ENOUGH FRIENDSHIP for me. And would it have killed the Duffers to make Will and El BFFs? Apparently so. It got real sloppy toward the end, too, losing interest in characters in peril (Erica! Mr. Clarke!) and not checking back in with them AT ALL. And that final boss battle was boring. Like Joyce wasn't even a little bit dirty at the end. But I still love the characters and the finale didn't destroy my love for the show, and in this era of television, that's not nothing. Watching all five seasons at once was a great decision and kept me happy for a month.

But when I finished the first part of S5, I desperately wanted more, immediately, and felt all out of sorts for like, a day, until I remembered fanfic. So I went to the Stranger Things tag on AO3, filtered by gen, and sorted by kudos, and I am only going to say this once but the people tagging their Steve/Eddie and Steve/Billy fics gen need to open a fucking window. Though not either of the authors I just recced, because, as you'll see, they didn't tag their explicit relationship fics "gen," and also those came from my bookmarks.

I read, or started to read, several of the things I found on the first few pages of hits, but kept getting that sinking feeling you get when you realize the fic you're reading was written by someone who doesn't remember the 80s—probably because they hadn't been born yet.

A selection of slides from my imaginary PowerPoint presentation on the 1980s:

If you're making a joking reference to popular benzodiazepines, it's Valium, not Xanax.
Private homes were more likely to have answering machines than voicemail, but even those wouldn't be common until the late 80s and early 90s.
The telephone was the phone. No one called them landlines because there was just the one kind.
VCRs were still new and very expensive ($500 to $1,000 or more)—so if you were worried about paying the bills you probably didn't have one—but if you did have one, you'd be more likely to rent movies from an independent (and often janky) shop than buy them, as movies on VHS were very very expensive (around $100) when they first hit the market.
The only way you're renting a video from Blockbuster in 1985 is if you lived in Dallas, Texas.

I will permit Eddie saying, "My bad," however, because it's funny.

Bonus 1990s slide:

If you were playing Mario Kart in 1996 it would have been on the Super Nintendo; there was no Mario Kart on the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

I know it's crass to complain about free entertainment, but the cognitive dissonance is real. Many of these things could have been solved with the slightest bit of research, but, on the other hand, you don't know what you don't know, like working class people weren't routinely drinking bottled water in the 1980s, magic eye stereograms became ubiquitous in the 90s, not a decade before, and if you were at the hospital, that thermometer wasn't going in your ear.

And so I trudged on through my disappointing search results. I didn't want to exclude relationships (except for Steve/Billy which can get lost) because some of them are canon and, thus, could be considered gen, so there I was, wading through pages and pages of fic labeled gen that was decidedly not gen, when, in the midst of that relationshippy soup of search results, I found it. The fic I had been looking for. A fic that was just like the show, with a new big bad and EVERYBODY (from S2) in it, where the romantic relationships fit into the story without overwhelming it. Excellent voices. Very well written. And looooooooooong.

In A Strange Land (180411 words) by MrsEvadneCake
Chapters: 12/12
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Jonathan Byers & Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Past-Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler
Characters: Steve Harrington, Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Will Byers, Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper, Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers, Scott Clarke, Sam Owens (Stranger Things), Billy Hargrove, The gang's all here.
Additional Tags: Action/Adventure, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, POV Multiple, Period-Typical Homophobia, 80's Music, Eldritch Abomination, Horror, Steve Harrington-centric, Pre-Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, So many horror references, Honestly Pretty Mediocre Babysitter Steve Harrington

Summary: Doom comes to Hawkins, Indiana. Population est. 30,000.

It's cold, that's all, and the breeze is kicking up. That's why Steve feels the chill go up his spine like someone dropped an ice-cube down his back.

"Why wouldn't I be real, El?"

"The Aboleth got you."

Highly recommended. With the small caveat that it seems to think winter break happens in February?

That fic was so satisfying I stopped digging through the gen tag and moved on to the relationship soup, but lord it's a jungle out there. I did manage to find these three excellent Mike/Will fics all by myself:

( Three post-canon Mike/Will fics )

But I saw some shit out there that I can't unsee. Some of the kids just aren't all right. So it's time to get out of the tags and ask for recs: If you have favorite plotty or tropey fics that focus on a pairing—that preferably still involve Hawkins and most of the cast and don't include the redemption of Billy Hargrove, but I'll read anything if it's good—I'd love to hear about it. And of course if there's excellent plotty genfic I've missed, I need to know about that immediately.

cimorene

One of the many things we learned by doing them wrong when initially renovating this house when we bought it was that you can't just go to the hardware store and buy an affordable faucet for a sink.

I mean, you can, but you shouldn't. There are cheap, crappy faucets at these stores!

What you should do is buy the reliable, standard, plumber-recommended workhorse brand of faucets, even if they cost a lot more.

So we have three faucets in our house, and two of them are ones we picked out at a hardware store and have given trouble from day one, and one is one that the plumber brought with him, and is a standard model of the standard brand that is in all the apartments around here.

The crappy kitchen faucet finally, after being a headache for the last six years, reached the end of its usable lifespan a couple of days ago when I turned it on and there was a loud KACHUNK! noise and then the two little plastic screen-thingies that were apparently just GLUED in the opening shot out into the sink. They were broken and impossible to put back. Since then the faucet has just had a big round open end like a garden hose (lol), and when you turn it on the water shoots out and sprays across whatever you're wearing unless you very carefully turn it on only a little tiny bit.

We have learned our lesson and are going to buy the same brand that's in our downstairs bathroom sink this time. We are not 100% sure if we can install it ourselves, in spite of having watched people installing sinks so many times in videos. I guess I need to watch a few more of those and then if we give up we can always call a handyman (we hope to avoid this because we don't like calling people).

cimorene

When we lived on the outskirts of Turku, going into downtown to run errands was already a bit of an Expedition, because it entailed a pleasant or idyllic walk to and from the bus stop of about 6-8 minutes, plus about 20-25 minutes on the bus, and then walking around the city center - possibly overcrowded, but full of beautiful buildings and trees.

Now that we live in the country, I'm still closer to the Turku city center than many people are who live in a North American metro area. I can walk to the bus stop (5 minutes, unpleasant scenery) and take a bus that puts me down near the center in about 50 minutes. But that trip feels excessive for a shopping expedition.

There's a big shopping center called Skanssi between us and Turku that is more convenient, about 35 minutes by bus, but the bus doesn't actually stop that close to it so you have to walk like ten minutes (it is very much designed to be visited by car, unlike the city center). And the mall itself just has RANCID VIBES. I hate being there! It's something about the interior architecture and the lighting maybe? The actual finishes are nice, the decor is fine, the lighting isn't UGLY. It is pretty dim inside, which has to be on purpose, but it's more like they were trying for a cozy or intimate or restful light instead of glaring? But instead it's oppressive in there. I always just want to get out. The K-Citymarket hypermarket attached to it is our closest Citymarket*, and it's much more brightly lit but still feels looming, oppressive, suffocating, sullen, and unwell. And I honestly do not know why! Maybe it's not actually the light, maybe it's sounds outside the regular hearing range or something?

So I've been thinking for a week whether it's preferable to go to this rancid-vibed mall, 35m by bus + 10-15m walk, or all the way to Turku, 50m by bus + 5-10m walk. The former SHOULD make me feel better because of the walking and fresh air, and I usually prefer less time on the bus because it's less chance to get trapped near someone's perfume; but would the rancid vibes counteract that?

*The other stores vary in vibes, but none of the ones near us are even close to this bad. Citymarkets Kupittaa and Länsikeskus are both reasonably Ok, and Prisma (Citymarket's competitor, the other Finnish grocery chain) Tampereentie is a little worse, while our closest Prisma at Itäharju is mostly nice, with some bad vibes in one end of the supermarket side. The nicest hypermarket near us is Citymarket Ravattula, Littoinen. I like this one so much more that I ALMOST would go to it instead (it's nearly 40 minutes by car, instead of 15 or so to Itäharju).

cimorene

‘Sir,’ intoned Dr. Fell, drawing the napkin from his collar and sitting up in dignity, ‘let me assure you I have been listening with far closer attention than my admittedly cross-eyed and half-witted appearance would seem to indicate.'

—John Dickson Carr, The Dead Man's Knock (1958)

(I rate this book 2/5, however.)

cimorene

I need to hand wash a bunch of wool things. Three sweaters with soot on the cuffs can be washed in the bathroom sink, but there are two big wool blankets which won't fit in that sink. And we don't have a laundry tub! I remember when I was four or five we were living in an apartment that only had a shower, not a tub, and I was afraid of the shower, so my mom had a laundry tub for me to bathe in and at that age I fit in it comfortably. It was one of those round zinc ones. I've never even seen those for sale as an adult, and I love hardware stores.

I have seen sturdy black plastic tubs that are about that size and larger at hardware stores - they're used in construction, to mix concrete and thinset and mud and stuff in. Not sure that would be a sensible purchase though (it's so big!). My current idea is that I could wash blankets in one of our biggest size of plastic storage bins. The problem is all of them are full of stuff being stored and I'm not sure which one would make the most sense to temporarily borrow.

Another consideration: drying. Drying takes AGES when it's cold. Wool absorbs a lot of water and therefore takes a long time to dry, and sweaters have to dry flat. I suppose we can put the things in front of the stove and light a fire, but we can't keep it going until they're dry. I suppose I have to do this one wool object at a time.

ETA: I should just wait until it's spring and I can dry the blankets outside. The sweaters are more urgent than that, but they are also smaller. I'll just have to try to dry them by the fire.

runpunkrun

I posted my first fanfic* TWENTY NINE YEARS AGO TODAY. My most recent fanfic† was posted less than a month ago. And today I am finishing up a fanfic‡ I started in 2011.

* The X-Files
† Star Trek
‡ Stargate Atlantis

cimorene

I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.

viggorlijah

this is completely ai code but i did go through it to check it's fine. It is ridiculously simple: Typing Game. You can escape back to regular browser by pressing shift+alt+x as noted in the corner of the screen.

Basically, this allows the toddler of your choice to bash away merrily at your laptop for A-Z and 0-9 characters without messing up your computer. Lily took great delight in spelling out her name and various short words. The space key will clear the screen, with up to 9 characters displayed at any time, older characters dimming.

Brought to you by an afternoon of having to reload various typing/kids apps that Zoe and Lily enjoyed but my computer very much did not.

runpunkrun

Had a dream I was in a drugstore and Bad Bunny was sitting up in the balcony and he threw a bottle of aspirin at me and I ran across the store and scaled the wall to get up in his face about it.

cimorene

I really wish we could be trying one new recipe a week right now, but we have not yet recovered from winter sufficiently to prepare even familiar quick recipes all the days that we have planned.

It did get warmer, though. Not all the way up to freezing, but it's no longer quite so miserable indoors. A winter cold snap always makes it harder to obtain firewood. Hopefully that will end as well. But I got a splinter in my right thumb the other day when trying to feed the fire, so I am inclined to avoid that. It's too tiny and nearly invisible to get out and mostly not painful, but its presence infuriates me.

denise posting in

dw_news

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for

dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update

dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update

dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

cimorene

Yesterday I sat down to make a consecutive list with ratings (by hand, because it's just nicer to write with a fountain pen) and it took three hours.

I have read a total of 19 by John Dickson Carr, counting the first one a few years ago (Castle Skull) and The Hollow Man, from the bookclub list in Wake Up Dead Man. Several more of his early books have the same irritating features as these, but his later books frequently do not. He has other weaknesses - most strikingly, his focus on surprising puzzle solutions sometimes leads to endings that are flat, thin, and/or ridiculously silly, like in the acclaimed The Judas Window (1938, 4/5, rec) and the less-beloved The Ten Teacups (1937, 3.5/5, rec). I can recommend about half the ones I've read so far. The only ones I would rate 5/5 apart from the previously mentioned Till Death Do Us Part (1944) are 1939's The Black Spectacles, 1944's He Who Whispers, and 1938's To Wake the Dead. I give 4.5/5, however, to 1935's The Red Widow Murders. Yet I nearly DNF 1942's The Emperor's Snuffbox (2/5) and 1935's Death Watch (3/5) and I ranted about 1937's The Burning Court (1/5) for a good ten minutes.

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sometimesalways

Reading

stranger things happen

the good faucets

Stores with rancid vibes

Or as much dignity as you can with a walrus mustache

Clearly I should only do Stuff to the fire while wearing leather gloves with long gauntlet cuffs

happy fanniversary

Talking about the weather...

if you have very small children

obviously a higher-end pharmacy

Blanket tent limbo

Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(

I've read 61 detective novels this year so far. Lol.

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December 2017

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