Author | Lightnews

✨️Night of Wands✨️

@nightingaelic.bsky.social

77 followers 200 following 370 posts

Adult, bi, very into Fallout, currently into Red Dead Redemption 2, The Sopranos, the evolution of feminism, my cats, and running a book club

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 1d

What should Arthur Morgan do next in my current RDR2 playthrough?

🐟 Catch All Legendary Fish
🐾 Hunt All Legendary Animals
🔨 Build Up Camp Amenities
🪛 Craft All Accessories
💀 Free Micah from Prison
🩸 Contract Tuberculosis

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 1d

I'm trying as hard as I can 😢

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 1d

Me watching Bethesda script Walton Goggins and the 76 devs to stick in as many uses of "fuck" in their ad for Burning Springs as possible

Patrick Cosmos @veryimportant.lawyer · Sep 8

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

Reposted by ✨️Night of Wands✨️

erika @yeeeerika.bsky.social · 2d

this headline hums with ancient autumnal dread

atlantic article screenshot
headline: no one knows how big pumpkins can get
sub head: a decade ago, the worlds heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. now the 3,000 pound mark is within sight
by yasmin tayag

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 3d

My 2.5-star review of Neuromancer by William Gibson — That Apple TV adaptation is going to have to pour Case into a slow cooker with some bay leaves and put him on low heat for 9 hours before he resembles anything worth watching onscreen

Text: William Gibson may have adapted and invented many of the tropes that the cyberpunk literary genre is known for, but after reading this book, I can't say that's necessarily a good thing. In fact, if you're familiar with the genre already and are smitten enough to want to read its progenitor, I can't even bring myself to recommend this novel - it feels too cliché, 40 years later.

The familiar story beats about AI developing personalities and desires, a computer-generated parallel world to manipulate, a layer of Cold War anxiety about Japanese industrial supremacy, a hustler from the gutter who is raised from obscurity to take on the elite, the razorgirl who's going to help him do it and sleep with him when she's not busy, the heist, the commodification of humanity, the body modifications, the love interest who was fridged early so the main character can ponder her loss with a cigarette while his new girl does things infinitely more interesting than he ever could - it's all there, and none of it is in service of a story good enough to warrant any of its trappings. It just didn't age well.

My main question for Gibson is this - why is Case necessary to the plot at all, when huge chunks of his story are spent inhabiting the mind and eyes of Molly, the real main character who was shunted to the side in favor of this guy?

Cover for the book Neuromancer by William Gibson.

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 3d

Have played so much Red Dead Redemption 2 recently that I thought the squealing hydraulics of the garbage trucks in my neighborhood were elk bugles

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 5d

My 1.25-star review of Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks — The most horrific part of this book was when the IDF showed up

Text: Max Brooks has hopped from writing about spooky zombies to writing about spooky Sasquatch. Rather than unpack the interesting background premise he sets up about Mount Rainier erupting and cutting off Seattle and surrounding communities from aid, Brooks strands his reader in an affluent, purportedly-green energy mountain town and sics a family of Gigantopithecus descendants on them.

Setting aside the laughable idea of Gigantopithecus surviving unnoticed in some form to the present day, the constant references to Halo Top ice cream, Mission: Impossible, Archer, and the Muppets, and the fact that every one of the diverse characters in the book has the same voice regardless of background, this novel makes the truly heinous decision to directly compare the Sasquatch-besieged residents of Greenloop to the state of the nation of Israel, takes a pit stop to scold anti-Zionist Jews, and then follows that up with the imperative for Greenloop to defend itself and "kill them all."

I guess Bigfoot is Arabic, and therefore deserves to die. Sure, Max.

Cover for the book Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks.

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 5d

Oh, I am saving this for later SO hard

official nikk account @nikk.ca · 5d

absolute workhorse of a reaction image from over 100 years ago

elegant woman blasting a suitor in the face with the NO gun

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 10d

My 5-star review of A Study in Drowning (A Study in Drowning No. 1) by Ava Reid — You wanna move to a house on a cliff that's crumbling into the sea, you wanna move to the seaside SO BAD

Text: I am afraid that Ava Reid's first entry in Young Adult fantasy fiction may never lose its relevance. It's an odd thing to say about a dark academia mystery/romance, I'm aware, but the themes captured in this book feel timeless — however unfortunate that timelessness may be.

Every few months, there's a report about another writer who used his popularity and power to abuse women and girls. Victims are put on pedestals, torn down, ransacked for parts, relegated to the infantilized role of the "muse," or simply tossed aside. It's wrath-inducing. It's exhausting. It's dehumanizing. And it feels like tenderness, to see that same story told in a way where the deception is uncovered and the cycle of harm is halted. It feels cathartic to read about an escape.

The book isn't perfect. The predators in this have their actions softened by magical fate, though perhaps this was intended to show that something beyond innate flaws can create monsters. Effy, the main character, has biases that she never confronts, but she may get around to them in the sequel. Love interest Preston is a tad flat. The whole story ends on a peaceful, anticipatory breath, before the consequences of the plot arrive.

That's alright. It feels good to live a little while in that moment before the leap.

Cover for the book A Study in Drowning (A Study in Drowning No. 1) by Ava Reid.

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 11d

Hi, if you like horse games please go play the free demo of The Legend of Khiimori that's out now on Steam, I am rooting so hard for this game to succeed and I am languishing in my 9-to-5 right now knowing that I have an hour-and-a-half of horseback world-wandering at home to get to

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 12d

You WILL spend the weekend gardening with me to prep for winter

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 12d

My 4.5-star review of Persepolis: The Story of A Childhood (Persepolis No. 1) by Marjane Satrapi — Particularly love the use of black and white space in this graphic novel, it's a real classic, and also ژن، ژیان، ئازادی

Text: In portraying her youthful years in Iran, Marjane Satrapi finds the power within her own powerlessness as a girl growing up during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Satrapi deftly depicts the choices her family made to stay alive, well, and together, and the choices she made to push at the walls she was confined to. This graphic novel is a warm, bloody reminder that there are real people beneath the bullet points of Middle Eastern conflict, below the power players that take up all the air, and behind the struggle for Iranians' personal and religious independence.

Cover for the book Persepolis: The Story of A Childhood (Persepolis No. 1) by Marjane Satrapi.

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 13d

Time for me to re-watch Morning Glory in her honor 😔

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 14d

Half the fun of staying at an AirBnB with my mother is watching her tear apart every single kitchen cupboard just to be nosy and judge their cooking doohickeys

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 17d

AAAAAAAA

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 17d

Help???

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 17d

Umm, what the fuck, Pokémon Go?

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 17d

I've said it before and I'll say it again

Text: "The man who'd put the sword to her neck was uncomfortably buff. He had upsetting biceps. He didn't look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack." ― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

Reposted by ✨️Night of Wands✨️

Rachel Distler @redtiebear.bsky.social · Jan 18

“Who’s this dumbass”
- the phrase that always immediately precedes obsession

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 18d

My 2-star review of The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel No. 1) by Michael Scott — If anyone has ever shared a blog with their sibling as a teenager, please tell me, but that sounds fake as hell

Text: Listen, I'm all for youth fiction that's chock-full of parallel magical worlds and chosen one narratives, but this first entry in Michael Scott's series is so fast-paced that it's bound to give more skeptical readers whiplash. Even 12-year-old me would have been raising an eyebrow at the fact that Sophie and Josh went from summer jobs in cute shops to magical skirmishes with immortal warriors to hidden dimensions with dinosaurs to the last battle of a goddess to prophetic, world-ending importance in the span of 48 hours.

In terms of the twin protagonists themselves, Scott never quite manages to characterize them as close siblings but also as individuals with their own personalities, so he splits the difference and doesn't hit either mark. In books aimed at a younger demographic, main characters can sometimes be flattened so that they're more of a blank slate the reader can project onto, but this only serves to make the standout biographical choices for the twins seem stranger. Their parents are both archaeologists! They're staying with a great-aunt who is simultaneously overbearing and absent from the story altogether! They have a shared blog! They know kung fu! It's too much, and it's all delivered at exactly the moment where these biographical tidbits will be relevant, and not an instant before.

Cover for the book The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel No. 1) by Michael Scott.

Reposted by ✨️Night of Wands✨️

love & barley 🐸🌶️🪏🎃 @loveandbarley.bsky.social · 19d

give greta thunberg a gundam

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 19d

My 5-star review of Uprooted by Naomi Novik — I'm not like other girls because the romantic books with 100-year age gaps that I read are GOOD

Text: Trying to explain the charm of Naomi Novik's Polish folk tale-inspired novel to friends and family may earn you some strange looks and shaken heads. Oh, it's another story about the plain, provincial girl who is raised above her birth because of mysterious magic powers, who is paired with a tsundere wizard at least a century older than her, who saves her best friend and her kingdom from an evil force that threatens to sweep over the entire earth. We have enough of those already, don't we?

The problem is that this book is both kin to, and better than, whatever fantasy pulp they're envisioning. This story does have all of those tropes, and it's telling them well. It's about corruption of all kinds — grief, loneliness, revenge, greed, callousness — and how they can be weaponized to bring down entire families and countries. It's about the fundamental disconnect between those in power and those beneath it. It's about knowing all of your loved one's flaws and choosing them anyway, loving them enough to plunge into an enchanted forest and hack them from the tree trunk that swallowed them whole. It's about reaping what you sow, be it seed or salt.

It's also just a damn good fairy tale. Highly recommended to anyone who grew up with the Brothers Grimm on their book shelf.

Cover for the book Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 21d

It begins

Screenshot of Archive of Our Own (AO3) showing 6 fanfiction works tagged "Charli XCX (Musician)/Taylor Swift".

✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 21d

Taylor Swift's "Actually Romantic" is both feeding the Gaylors AND starting a pop diva beef with brat darling Charli XCX, and if Charli ever feels the need to make a response, she should definitely point that out

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✨️Night of Wands✨️ @nightingaelic.bsky.social · 22d

My 4.5-star review of Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar — Painstakingly humanizes both Ona (affectionate) and George and Martha Washington (derogatory)

Text: If you read this book and find yourself frustrated by the overabundance of speculation about the life and times of Ona Judge, particularly in comparison to the ample detail given about the Washington family, then I invite you to consider why that imbalance might exist.

One of the worst, far-reaching effects of slavery in the United States is its invisibility. It's not a consideration at the forefront of white American minds, when visiting Washington D.C. and strolling through the National Mall, to remember that the beloved Neoclassical structures were built by slaves. In the portraits of George Washington and his wife Martha, the painters didn't include the black men and women who made the first First Family's lives function smoothly. Erica Armstrong Dunbar shines a spotlight on one of those women, Ona, and uses as much historical and contextual information as she can to force readers to see what has been covered up by time, myth, and lack of care.

It made me fume to read pages of George and Martha agonizing over household management decisions in letter after lovingly-preserved letter: Meanwhile, Ona's entire life was upended by said decisions, and there are next to no records of her feelings or decision-making process. She was the Washingtons' legal property, she was illiterate, and to many people of the time, she didn't matter. But she DID matter, of course she mattered! Dunbar's careful use of what little is known about Ona, and all of her historically-contextual asides, MAKE you see that. By the end of the book, you might even come to realize that the invisibility of slavery, and the Founding Fathers' roles within that horrific institution, are perhaps not that invisible at all. Perhaps the invisibility is simply a concerted effort to keep our nation's founding appear to be as pure — and white — as possible.

Cover for the book Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.