So you’ve written your little personal curriculum for 2026 and it includes consumption of more indie movies. You don’t want to see no Marvel no more, you want to see the newest Cannes Palme d’Or and have an opinion on it. You want to explore the world of French cinema, you want to see those movies by those wonderful directors you keep hearing about but can’t spell (i can’t either).

But there’s a problem. You see a movie gets good critics, maybe you read a little post about it from your favorite writer, and they say it’s an absolute gem and totally worth it. So then you open IMDb to see the title and see if you know the actors in it, or where it’s playing near you.

And then you click off because before fucking real who the fuck is gonna see a movie about a woman who dies of respiratory disease because of pollution and reincarnate into a freaking vacuum cleaner and haunts her husband so that he uses her ghost to clean that same factory that killed her. I know, I know we said we were gonna go see indie movies, but maybe not that one. Maybe that one director smoked a bit too much and who the fuck gave him the money for that anyways??!

Well, I saw it and it was a very nice movie, but also I wouldn’t have gone if I had read the blurb. So here are my recommendations on little stuff to do to make indie movies more easily accessible to yourself.1

One: Don’t read the blurb

Yeah, I’ve just said that above. It’s hard to avoid, but really: don’t.

I know you want to know what it’s about, but again: don’t, or else you’ll never go.

I don’t know who really reads those things and then wants to go see them but honestly, I don’t think they exist. And whoever writes the blurbs should either be fired or be paid more (i don’t think i’d do better, even for $1M).

Two: Get yourself an unlimited subscription to the cinema

Not sure if that exists in every single country of the world but at least in France and some places in the USA where you all are there are, there are some plans for that. You pay 20 bucks a month and you can go see whichever movie you want whenever you want (restrictions apply). But those restrictions don’t tend to apply to the indie fucking movies, because the cinemas aren’t making money out of them 🥸

So why take an unlimited subscription instead of paying at will? If your goal is one movie a month, it would be cheaper to pay by the ticker! Well, I’ve just told you, it’s because you’re not gonna read the blurb. And i don’t think you’re the kind of person to pay those extortionate prices to go see a movie BLIND (or you’d be doing that already).

Generally you can still go see the Marvel or the Disney movies with your sub, just maybe not at the peak time slots. Even if you don’t keep up with your new shiny indie goal, all won’t be lost and you will have so much more freedom of mind.

You see a cool movie trailer review that you just skimmed so as to not be rebuked by the weird premise? You just book a ticket and go! Is it shit? Well, go away! It’s that easy, you can just get up and leave. No money lost, no sunken cost fallacy. NO REGRATS!

Three: Get yourself a subscription to someone whom you trust

Now this one is going to take a little bit of time because you need to find someone who has the right taste, but once you find them, bob’s your uncle.

Reviewers (not reviews!) solves the blind blurb problem. We’ve already established you’re not reading the blurb. You might not even want to read the review! Honestly, just look at the grade this trusted gatekeeper gave the movie and go based on that.

I personally subscribed to Télérama. It’s kind of a French New Yorker, and throughout the years, I’ve learned which reviewers have the same taste that I do. So every Wednesday2, I look at the posters carousel of the movies that came out that week. I look at the grades that have been given, I clicked on the picture really super fast with my ninja fingers to just see the name of the reviewer.

Once again, this is the tricky part! Don’t read the tagline, don’t read the title, don’t read the subtitle, THEY WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO RUN THE FUCK AWAY. And you want to see movies, so squint your eyes and find the grade.

Again that bit takes time, maybe a bit of money too. You don’t have to choose an outlet that costs money, maybe your favorite substacker will do. Maybe that’s me?3 I’m free :)

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Figure it out! I can’t help because you probably like very different things than i do. Make sure it’s an outlet from your country because movies come out at different times – that’s especially true for independent movies.

Four: Don’t trust the press

Maybe a bit paradoxical with what I’ve just said, but also every single movie boasts a 4.5/5 rating, “best movie ever”, because they only invited the ones who’d like it. Or they excluded the ones who didn’t give good reviews. Or idk, but they can’t all be so nice!

Anyways, half of that grade is given by radio presenters who like shit, the other half is given by pretentious arseholes who also like shit, but blue. Don’t look at rotten tomatoes either, it’s the average of average people – and your tastes aren’t average!

Do back to number 3 and find yourself that reviewer, they’re the only ones you trust to see things that aren’t inspiring on their own. Of course you can also go see other stuff you want! But for weird shit, stick to their judgment.

Five: When you’re at the cinema, don’t go in the room just yet

If you enter the room, you’ll have to see the ads which is very annoying, but also you’ll have to see the trailers! And this is your second worst nightmare after the blurb, because the trailers are always made of shit. They either show you the only two nice line of the entire movie, or they give it a weird fucking vibe. There’s never been a single indie movie i’ve wanted to go see based on the trailer.

Skip the ads, skip the trailers. Any modern system lets you pick a seat in advance. If it doesn’t, go in during the ads to put your coat down, and tell people you’re going to the toilet. Peek into the room once in a while so you don’t miss the beginning.

In France, i know to come back in once the Disney or the Marvel trailers start, because they always put the biggest promotional budgets at the last minute so that people who like you who try to skip the ads still see them. And you don’t give a shit about the Marvel on Disney trailers because you either know you’re gonna go, you won’t, and it’s not gonna change based on 30 seconds of footage.

Six: Read the review after

You’ve seen the movie? Great! Did you understand it? Maybe not well. In this case go on YouTube, find a little gal that explains the end, and the symbols, and all that shit. Tremendously useful when you don’t know shit – how are you supposed to know what’s new or visionary otherwise? It’s like English literature, you might not agree: maybe the curtains are just blue or maybe it’s just fucking that deep?

Go back to your potential trusted reviewer and compare notes. If you agree, kudos to them, and invite me to the wedding! Start building trust in your heart, so that when they advise you to see the vacuum cleaner movie you’ll go with an open mind.

Seven: Go see those movies AT THE CINEMA

You could see them at home, but honestly, I don’t recommend. You will click off, and close your browser. Don’t pretend you won’t (or you wouldn’t be here asking for advice!)

Use the sunk costs fallacies: you did all that effort to get to the cinema, you got a ticket, you found your room in their maze, you fought the queue for popcorn… you might as well stick it til the end!

Plus, when you’re in the middle of a row, with people left and right, there’s a little more friction to quitting. And this friction is necessary because all indie movies take a little bit to get going. It will be weird, slow, you won’t care about anything or anyone, they won’t be holding your hand to make you like it.

Being in the theater makes you a tiny bit more likely to stick past that slump and see the full thing!

Also, if it’s a foreign movie, you’ll have the good subtitles because when you buy the movie on the Internet or worse if your pirate it (the point of going to see indie movies is to support the industry so wtf would you do that?? at least pirate the shitty marvel movies if you’re broke), even when you buy it legally the subtitles are always fucked. They’ll be too late too early, but in the theater they’ll be on time.

And of course it also looks a lot better on the big screen with a nice sound system, so give yourself every chance you can to enjoy the movie!

Eight: don’t be hangry

Speaking of friction, get some food. No, don’t be the fucking annoying person who’s crunching that popcorn at full volume. But also get yourself a big thing of popcorn because then you have to eat it. You cannot eat popcorn on the street because you would look like a fucking moron and you are a sheep at heart (see previous point), so what are you gonna do, waste the popcorn?

No, you’re gonna eat all of it and maybe that we will take you through the beginning, and then you will be involved in the characters and you’ll stick it through!

Plus it’s much easier to enjoy a movie if you’re fed and watered (but not too much or you’ll have to go pee and miss half the action).

Nine: Do quit

With all I’ve said about all the tricks to make you stay in that cinema, also don’t hesitate to quit if you really don’t like it.

It’s not a contest, you don’t get bonus points for sticking to the end of the movie when you’re bored and annoyed. We can just quit and we should! Don’t torture yourself with bad movies, or you won’t ever go see one again, and you’ll have completely failed at your new year resolution =/

Ten

I really wanted a number 10, but I can’t come up with anything new so I’ll leave you with one parting word from a small teensy-tiny woman: if like me, you’re 4.7 feet4, take a seat booster!

I’ve been presently surprised recently to see that the seat boosters of old, made of hard plastic that hurt your bottom, have been replaced by plush cushions that are really nice on my behind <3

Have fun, save your butt, and let your eyes see the movie!

With love,

By the way, here are a few movie reviews analysis I’ve done recently:

(not that the Predator is an indie movie in any way lol)

Oh, and it’s Paris fashion week so all the instagram baddies are crowding my sidewalk, making me queue at the bakery, and preventing me from going home!

In a desperate bid to procrastinate my short story that’s really going nowhere, I present to you my 5 top dresses to attend awards to.

Caveats:

• You need to be invited to the awards

• You better have negotiated that advance well because holy cow are those dresses expensive

• In this fantasy, i am a 6ft tall slim skinny model and everything fits me perfectly

Come back in 5 years (or less, I’m absolutely open to blessings and miraculous interventions!) for the sad reality of finding a dress on a budget that will fit my 4ft7 (and a half!) frame, with curves and all that jazz.

Hugo Award(s)

I’m of course getting a Hugo award, either for best novel or best series (or both!). It’s the OG awards for science-fiction, so I’ll wear this amazing metallic number from Valdrin Sahiti. The blue and hints of gold are totally giving spaceship, and I feel like the shape is futuristic enough to make me Empress of the Whole Known Galaxy.

Philip K. Dick Award

I’m sorry Philip, but the first thing I think about when you name is pronounced is the gigantic amount of mushrooms of all kinds that you tried to put into your mouth. In your honor, I will therefore become the biggest, most imposing fungus possible.

You know this is the most reality-bending shit available because this pixelated mess is the best I can find in terms of pictures.

World Fantasy Award

This is def a fantasy award, like elves, forest spirits, folklore oriented kind of thing. You win a cute statue of a tree holding a sun, so I think Teuta Matoshi is the perfect designer for it! It’s soft, it’s giving Arwen vibes, and it has the most gorgeous flowers!

Locus Awards

Tbh I’ve never known what the vibe of the Locus was. To me they’re the Hugos little cousin, a bit weird on the side — and also i keep hearing “locusts” which is totally not the same thing. Therefore, they’re my wild card, and I’m hesitating between two Miss Sohee dresses: a peacock feather sleeveless, or a huuuuge embroidered train… Of course i’m taking the jewelry with too!

The Arthur C Clarke

My brain is hardwired to associate Clarke with deep space stories ever since i first read his work as a kid. As such, the only acceptable dress is from Iris Van Herpen.

The internet tells me this costs anywhere between $30K and $100k, BUT i could potentially rent this for $800 (no K) a night, and i think that’s a real steal to dazzle like the space fairy i am!

The British Fantasy Awards

I chose that wonderful Joan of Arc dress (because fuck the English!) and it’s associated bolero (because yay capes!). I like the heavy embroidery (which totally justifies the heavy price tag), and Joan is just the best person to channel for awards night.

Credit where credit is due: I found this dress on Sophie Silvia on instagram, who wore it brilliantly to the Bridgerton premiere.

Money count

A full award season, in which I’m nominated for all the prizes, will require i spend $18K on dresses (if i rent the most expensive ones!) — i better get a good agent and sell all my film rights!

This was a lovely exercise, which taught me I have really expensive taste when it comes to dresses, and reminded me that my own true love is shiny.

Bonus nomination for this Selkie dress, which is gorgeous and so on theme, but not formal enough for the glitz of getting a trophy. Will for sure wear while attending the day-time programming of Worldcon the day after my Hugo!

If you live in Paris, i hope you’re not too bothered by the fashion week people — remember that it’s only the Men’s cycle right now, the Women’s are coming soon and people are so much worse 😭

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Thank you for hyping me up when i showed that Joan dress the other day , , , ,

See you next time,

This is the energy I want to keep in 2026! Culture and creative hobbies are central to my life, and i have the privilege of living right next door to the best museums, theaters, libraries, and craft supplies shops in the world. But inertia is a hell of a drug: if i don’t make an effort (read: lots of efforts, every single tiny step of the very long way), i miss all the chances to discover art. Sure i could open Apple TV and catch up on Pluribus1, but then i’d have to actually pay attention and focus on all the plot and the details to make sense of it. It’s just so much easier to press play on the latest Godzilla instead so that i can scroll my instagram feed at the same time.

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And all this is only about art as i can get it inside my home. If you add the hassle of reservations to museums, finding galleries, getting concert tickets… i just didn’t do any of that in 2025! It’s not a matter of money (I’m still considered impoverished youth by the social schemes), just a matter of effort and getting off my sofa for an experience that wasn’t guaranteed to be great. At least if the movie sucks i can just close the streaming window, and i didn’t even get dressed up in the first place!2

So comes the question: how on earth does one measure a year of art? How do you record, quantify, rate and summarize the most subjective of topics? And how do you get past consumption of art into appreciation of art?

Tracking for the sake of doing

First of all: why track and measure? Are we not in an era of forced productivity? Why would i want to add more stress and new grades to my life when i’ve just graduated college forever?

Well, the answer is simple: when it comes to hard things, if i don’t measure, i don’t do. Exercise happens because i get to fill my yearly habit tracker, and long books get read for the Goodreads pages challenge.

Metrics and goals are absolutely a ploy to make me the best version of myself: they keep me accountable on all the enjoyable things i want to do, but keep being distracted from by algorithms and targeted ads. I wish i were an autonomous independent adult being who can pursue her passions, but i have to confess: i am but a sheep, lead astray by multi-billion companies who want my money, my time, and all of my brain too, thank you very much.

So, with all that said, the foundations are actually simple: i keep a journal. Or more precisely, several journals. I’ve been in my “analog era” since i got enough money for a Leuchtturm journal and I’m making lists every month of books i’ve read, movies i’ve watched, exhibitions i’ve seen, concerts i’ve heard, …

It’s a lot (at least for books and movies, we’ve already established i’m falling short on the other ones), but it happens to be a hobby of mine, more than just an accountability mechanism – little makes me happier than putting stickers down on the page! And little makes me more upset than a half-done spread! So dedicating a notebook to a topic is the perfect solution to make me engage with a topic: i will have to fill the pages, and it will spark great joy, gently pavolving myself into doing more.

Curated lists are a goldmine

Lists shield me from decision fatigue: for all the things i see, there’s at least a list of thing i want to see. This is mainly to combat the choice paralysis i get from opening a streaming app or a theater’s program. I no longer blindly go into the fray and pick whatever strikes my fancy, because i have terrible, terrible, terrible taste and always go for the most clickbaity option (and regret it after). The act of making the list, ie reflecting on what’s available, why it’s interesting potentially, why i want to see it, is equally as important as going to see the thing.

But how do you curate things that you will enjoy? I firmly believe that’s a question between you and your high-brow snotty reviewer, but i’ll tell you my process.

For movies, plays and concerts involves opening Telerama, a French culture review magazine, and filtering their reviews for the 3/4 and 4/4 grades. I then write down the names of movies and tv shows that resonate, and try to get tickets for the plays and concerts immediately. If i put this task off, i know i’ll never go back to it, and then it’ll be sold out. I’ve also gotten myself a cinema “pass” that gives me unlimited movies, and i guilt-trip myself into going twice a week so i get my money’s worth.

For books, i have an excessive backlog of interesting scifi and fantasy already, that i supplement with my family’s recs and the winners of a few French literature prizes. Not all those picks fall into the art category, but they tend to at least have some brains behind them so they’re not too bad either. I’ve also gotten myself a brand new New Yorker subscription to widen my horizons (will see if that plays out or not!).

If you want to start something similar, i’d recommend getting well-paying job so you can afford it (lol), or finding a youth potion so you can get the student discount. If all fails, it’s trial and error until you discover the journalists you a) agree with and b) enjoy reading (because some of them have awful prose and will put me off a great show even when they rave about it!).

Hone the axe and define your taste

The notebooks aren’t only for tracking, they also serve as a way to force myself to reflect on what i consume. For each, i print out a pretty picture (to entice myself to make the page) and then write down some thoughts. I’m not allowed to copy wikipedia (which is a pain to do by hand!), and since i’m embellishing the book as a keepsake, i must write down something decent or else i forward-cringe of re-reading the page in a few years.

You all know the studies: if you write it by hand, your brain remembers it better – and if you make it specific, it’ll stick! Now that i’m processing the books in my own words, i find that i can better resurface why and how it touched me. I always set up a review page in advance and then pray to my perfectionist fears to push myself to write down several sentences.

These lists and records act as a compass for my future self. I document my reactions and where i got the rec from. I’m still looking for my book-guide, but in terms of movies i’ve learned which reviewers i can trust and which ones i just don’t vibe with. That makes it a lot easier to ensure i don’t go see things i’ll hate!

The notebook method might not be the best for you, so take a minute to see what would motivate you. Maybe you write it all down for social media and likes keep you going? Or you systematically go see things with your friends and schedule a drink with them afterwards to compare your takes?

Should i aim for a 5 stars average?

So that’s half of the problem covered: i know how to track where i go and what i see, where to find stuff that i’m likely to enjoy, and i make an effort to record my thoughts on the whole thing. But what about the grading? I’m a data fiend, plotting all my ratings on a graph is the best feeling in the whole entire world! So what is the GPA i’m aiming for?

I cannot – will not – deprive myself of the wonderful joy that a rating graph gives me. But i do want to reflect on what it means for art. Of course, the perfect enjoyment graph for entertainment is 5* all across the board! I want to love my free time and see stuff that makes me laugh or cry, that escapes me to another world. I want dragons and hot men and CGIs and epic orchestra tracks – I am a basic bitch, and my tv show history reflects that.

But i think that for art – “big A” art – the picture is a bit more nuanced. Sure if i get to see beautiful paintings and listen to fabulous renditions of Wagner, then all the better! I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating artistic projects with that same mercantile optimization of happiness. Forgive me for saying the obvious: art isn’t always meant to coddle feelings, it’s also about broadening horizons, making me discover new perspectives, new feelings, new technics, new stuff in general – and i won’t love all of it.

I’m not trying to get a normal distribution of ratings though, because that would mean seeing a fuck ton of mediocre stuff and i don’t want that for myself. I think a healthy goal is to focus on getting a good mix of 3 to 5 stars? That would mean i avoid the crap that does nothing for me, and i keep only the thought-provoking stuff (i can give 3 stars to something i didn’t like but thought had merit, like a very well crafted book but i hated the ending).

Be more than a customer

I could have also talked about “who gets to say what good art is?” but i didn’t feel like getting into all the philosophy of it (not sure i even have an opinion!), so instead i’ll tell you some nice words: I wish for you to see art you like, and maybe art you don’t hate but don’t love as much, and to discover new things in this new year <3

Personally, i’ll do my best to engage actively with the art i see, and while not a critic, i’ll try to share with you my thoughts on it. I don’t believe in hustling or sharing all your life on social media, but i’ll make an effort to get this stuff out of my head and to share it with you here. I only really wrote 3 posts about movies last year, but i’ll try to make more in 2026!

I should also try to put some thoughts on this posts’ twin sister: how on earth do you measure a year of art creation as a beginner, non-professional artist? Cause i want to improve my drawing, my painting, my dancing, and my writing, but i have little idea of how to get there! Let me know any thoughts below on the topic <3

Should I start with a Didion quote? Or one from Sylvia Plath? No, mom said it wasn’t my turn yet! It is, however, my turn to show you all my notebooks and papers things for 2026.

This is once again a self-indulgent, navel-gazing post, but I hope you’ll get some inspiration from my extremely-well-organized and pinterest-worthy aesthetic notebooks.

Jump to a specific section:

• Daily planner: Hobonichi A5 HON

• Long-term daily journal

• Movies + live performances journal

• Reading journal

• Notebook assortment (for nefarious purposes)

Daily planner: Hobonichi A5

I’m way too shy irl to actually pull out my notebook every time I need to write things down, and that’s if I remember to do so in the first place! Also, what if my coworkers snoop and read all my thoughts, have you thought of that? Way too risky, so the ugly apple calendar it is.

HOWEVER, i do need an actual paper calendar that i keep at home, otherwise i never look up anything. The phone is too ugly and dry for me to have any motivation to open it (thank you autism), and so I trick myself by copying notes over to paper. It’s a delicate balance between making sure I do write things down (on the phone) and making sure I re-read them to be on time to stuff (on the notebook).

The phone->calendar operation is the weak point, but again, while I have no motivation to do work, I have LOTS when it comes to decorating a pretty planner! Changing my inks and stickers every month also helps to keep the novelty factor up, so that my audhd brain stays interested.

So for the paper planner this year, I’m using the Hobonichi a5 HON. It has monthly, weekly and daily pages, with lots of space to do everything. I tried having separate planners for different concerns, but I find that I forget to open all of them, and so it doesn’t warrant the cost.

To decorate this journal, I have a few different things.

The main decoration for the monthly pages is going to be The Coffee Monsterz Co sticker kits. She owns a Canadian small business, and her designs are always so cute!

For weekly and daily pages, I’m not using any kind of heavy stickers because it makes the journal too big to handle by the end of the year.

Instead, I’ll mostly be using stamps! I’ve been collecting quite a few last year and I’ve been enjoying them a lot. I scanned a few pages to my computer so i can use them as dividers in my posts, like this :))

In Europe, to shop for stamps, I mostly go to 85 Rue Tranquille and Cafe Analog. Both have excellent great service and amazing selections!

In my weekly pages, I usually make a running log of all the things I do, and how I feel. I’m autistic, and I have a hard time naming and recognizing emotions. To help, I’m using the amazing emotis from The Coffee Monsterz Co. She’s made an incredible amount of little faces, each with the name of the feeling, so that helps me narrow down what I want to express exactly.

Long-term journaling: Hobonichi 5 years

This is a new addition to my line-up, so I’m not sure how it’ll go but I have hope (and a pinterest board full of inspo!). This journal gives you 2 pages per day, each separated into 5 sections: every day for 5 years, you write some things down, and so you can reflect on what you were doing at that time the year before!

I love the concept, but I’m a bit worried I won’t have enough things to say every day. I got the small A6 size, but still. Either way, I’m excited! For now I haven’t found it too hard, but we’re only 7 days into the year.

One problem is that the dates are only numbers – because the days of the week change every year (duh). I’m a bit afraid I’ll lose track of where I’m supposed to write (I’m not very good with the passing of time), and the pages are a bit bland on their own.

So I got a wonderful solution: the dodolulu daily calendar! Every day of 2026, I’ll get a 2cm by 3cm illustrated sticker, with the day of the week. It was a bit expensive, but it looks good so that’s my justification. It adds a lot of color and some life to the insides :)

I’ll need to be careful not to stick them down in the same spot everyday or else I’ll get a “pillow”: that’s when the accumulation of layers in one specific spot makes it much higher than the rest of the page. If you press on the spot, it’s hard and ready to write on, but if you press anywhere else, it gives in, just like a smooth pillow!

Movies journal: OURS Studio A5

Last year I used this same journal for all “culture” stuff – movies, theater, live shows of all kinds, and books – but I ran out of pages by the end of the year.

So for 2026, I’m restricting this OURS Studio journal to:

• Movies & TV shows in the main “weekly” part

• Live shows (theater, plays, exhibitions, opera, …) to the note pages at the back

I’ve done the math and I see about 2 movies a week, with an additional TV show per month – so that will fit since I get a double spread for each week. I haven’t decided yet how I’ll decorate the whole thing, but I’m thinking of re-using leftover stickers from last year!

As for the live productions, I see maybe one or two per month, which should fit into the 30 pages. For them, i’ve already made a little template so i can print a square-but-with-corners-sunk-in (??) that fits just right into the boxes.

Reading journal: OURS Studio Bricks Notebook

So, books have been kicked from the main OURS journal because I yap too much. Instead, I’ve found this tiny one that’s the cutest thing ever. I’m not sure (I’m 200% sure) if there’ll be enough space to write my thoughts (there won’t, that’s what Substack is for lol).

I’m pasting a print of the cover in one box, and writing in the other. I need to find some way of decorating, but for now I’m drawing a blank. Please tell me of any ideas in the comments!

Both the books and the movies notebooks are going to be kept in this lovely plaid cover. I bought this impulsively last year and it’s been the best – it’s water resistant, big enough to store notebooks + stickers and bits of papers, has a pen loop, … what’s not to like (the price, actually).

Notebook assortment for nefarious purposes

I am known amongst my friends for being the journal girl, and so through the Christmas season, I have acquired gifts of all kinds (and bought a bunch more).

In no particular order, with no particular purpose, here are some notebooks i’ll be using:

OURS studio research notebook. I love the paper type and the layouts, so I’m sure I’ll find a way to use them! They are somewhat redundant with the layouts in the culture journal, but I trust in my abilities to invent purposes! This notebook also happens to be very short (30-ish pages) so it’ll be easy to fill up.

Olive+Sun A5 notebook. A gift from a friend, this is a dot grid journal – a blast from my past as a bujo girl! It has a very tasteful cover, and the grid inside is beige so it’s nearly transparent to the eye!

Arches paper. Not exactly a notebook, but I gifted myself a pack of this super expensive watercolor paper! Haven’t tried it yet, but apparently it’s amazing so i’m pumped :))

Canson A4 Mixed Media paper. A way less expensive version of watercolor-compatible paper, for when I feel too scared to touch the real expensive thing! It also handles acrylic markers well, so I foresee lots of great art :)

Endwords

And there goes my whole pile! I’m super excited to use them all, and I’m excited for all of you going analog too in 2026. This is such a fun hobby to have :))

Are you using any of the same notebooks I mentioned? What do you normally put in yours?

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Read you next time,

Tis the year 2026, and as with any January, resolutions abound. Everyone it seems is making “personal curriculums” and “study plans” for the year ahead, and I’ve felt the same push to open my brand new notebooks and start shouting a bibliography from the top of the stairs. But why? I know I won’t stick to any of it (adhd iykyk), that it will bring me nothing but despair that I’ve abandoned my great plans, and that I’ll have only my half-written notebook pages to dry my tears. AND YET, I’m still absolutely brainwashed that it would solve all my life problems!

At first I thought this was just the usual list effect: if you write it all down, in order, with tiny steps, the world feels so much more manageable. In times of uncertainty, order is calming, and when the problems are the economy and the politics – things you don’t really have power over – discipline of the self is the only variable you get to control. Writing the list itself feels good because you’re thinking of your ideal self (hello new year resolutions!), and we love nothing more than a dream!

Writing and then following a curriculum is a way for us, former good grades kids, to be doing all the things we’ve always wanted to do but had to forgo in order to build a life for ourselves. I’d love to be in academia, and I deeply considered a phd, but even in computer science it wouldn’t pay the bills (neither during nor after graduation). Building a study plan is quite close to the real academic lifestyle of researching whatever you want (minus the awful bureaucracy of trying to get paid of course), and that’s deeply satisfying to my starved brain.

However, I was a bit confused initially as to why this whole thing was taking the shape of the curriculum. We already have the framework of “resolutions” for making better versions of ourselves, and the whole “researching medieval representations of beauty” thing used to be an item on that list, usually stored under “i want to dive deeper into my hobbies”.

My personal theory is that, as we’ve gone deeper into the shitshow irl, we needed the return to the classroom setting, as a throwback to a (fantasized) childhood when all we had to do was be good and study. In reality, you had so many more problems than just studying for the test, but you’re forgotten how bad friendship and baby steps for independence were, so the only memory left is relatively easy to deal with – and studying is something we were so good at!

No more bills or worrying about financial futures, we’re now 14 years old again, except this time we’re so aware of how good we had it and are excited to crack open those books and problem sets! What, of course our curriculums have assignments and essays to write, how else would you learn?

You know what else didn’t exist when we were 14? Tiktok. And as any tiktoker worth their salt will say, your curriculum will only work if you’ve set a narrow, focused, and precise topic to explore. Such a breath of fresh air, to have only one thing to look over, with a set reading list. It’s not just good for anxiety, it’s also excellent to help with overstimulation and that choice paradox of there being way too much “content”, everywhere, all the time.

I’m not making my own curriculum, because i think it’s a very stupid idea to self-direct your studies for a topic you don’t master (but that’s “all or nothing” bit of my brain talking, you can totally diy it without actual risks), but i’m following other people’s! I’m reading Paradise Lost with Carson from GlutenbergBible, and I’m studying – well, will start studying once the book arrives at the bookshop – philosophy about technology from Jared Henderson.

I’m already feeling such relief, by just printing out the accompanying substack essays, setting my phone to charge on the other side of the room, and just reading along! That’s where the curriculum shines too: instead of that one big goal, you’re getting bite sized pieces fed to you, with a sense of completion at each step!

More than that, there’s pedagogy involved (another perk of stealing said curriculum)! It’s not just small tasks to do in order, some very smart people put them together so that they’re the right difficulty, and build up upon each other. It solves what we call in computer science the “tutorial hell”: you keep following along some youtube tutorials, one after the other, feeling like you’ve learned a bit each time. But for real you didn’t learn a thing! The various tidbits you pulled from the algorithm didn’t reinforce each other, didn’t slowly amp up the difficulty, maybe they even gave you contradicting information! The curriculum made by your favorite substackers solves all of this – or at least they promise too, we’re only 4 days into January after all.

That’s the main reason why i don’t recommend making your own curriculum – unless it’s your phd thesis theme, but that’s like, entirely the point of the job soo… If you steal it, it’s been conceived for you, and gently brought to life. Sure you can pick up any book and read it! But depending on your skill level and topic, you might not get a lot out of that. I certainly won’t learn shit from reading Heidegger on my own – I’d give up after 2 pages, and wouldn’t pick up on the nuance of the ideas.

I also think there’s 4 pros to following an online curriculum set by whomever:

1. The parasocial relationship makes you a tiny bit less likely to give up (because you wouldn’t want to disappoint your favorite online person, now would you?!)

2. The live element of weekly/monthly posts helps keep you motivated and forces you to actually take those bit sized pieces. I’m ever so slightly worried about my tech philosophy one, because i’ll be one week late due to freaking icy roads slowing down deliveries, and if i let the bite sized pieces stack up, suddenly we’re back to having a full on book to read.

3. You get to ask questions. I have a burner account already set up (anxiety iykyk), but honestly it’s the internet, so you can just say you didn’t understand shit, can they please dumb it down a bit more?

4. They’re normal, <40 years old people! I can’t say how important that is: while the older generations understand that tiktok is frying our brains, I have yet to see them truly get it inside. Young content creators on the other hand, not only get it, but are trained to write for us. The old university professors, for all their great qualities, aren’t optimizing for declining attention spans – they have other shit to do! But the substackers must, if only because that’s how they’re getting paid. Their posts are, to be frank, understandable even at nighttime before bed, when my brain is at its worst. They’re helpful, candid, making jokes and bolding just the right words to keep me focused.

Now, the hour is a bit late, and I’ve realized my question on “why curriculums” has not only found a few answers, but also devolved into praise of the not-at-all-personal curriculums, so I’ll leave you here.

I hope you found some interest in this less formal and less edited version of my newsletter! (my personal resolution for 2026 if you can believe it) If you did, I’ll gladly let you add “subscribe to Rose’s Technofable” to your curriculum’s list of tasks, and will give an official A+ to all who ask.

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Good night,

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Before we start, a note on ratings: they’re half emotion, half enjoyment, half depth and half perceived skill. This means the funny movie without a single original thought filmed on a potato will still get a 10 even if it’s obviously shit. Or the weird art movie I didn’t get, but found interesting after I read a few reviews that explained it, with great care taken to the aesthetic of it all, is also a 10.

In general:

• More than 9: i fully recommend

• More than 7: you should go if it sounds like your stuff

• More than 5: good enough

• Less than 5: don’t waste your time

Author movies (except French)

One Battle After Another. My favorite part of the movie was the car chase scene, i’d never really cared about a car chase before. Or maybe high DiCaprio trying to remember the password? What I didn’t love was the fetishisation of Black women throughout the movie ( said it all here). 7/10 imdb

The Long Walk. I was touched by the portrayal of boyhood, and what the conversation between the boys told us of them ( said it best here). However I found that the movie was somewhat hypocritical in that it wallowed a bit too much in that violence it pretends to decry. Still, a striking movie! 8/10 imdb

Bugonia. Idk if it’s because it’s still so fresh, but i think it’s my favorite movie of the year. This post by explains so well the themes, and why i adored it, and this one by explains all the criticism i have (but i still love it despite those flaws). 10/10 imdb

September 5. About the 1972 Olympics, following an American sports broadcasting team while they try to adapt to the first live coverage of a terrorist attack. Well executed, with tension to keep us awake, and a good handling on the topic: what do you show in this situation. I went away having been entertained and made to think, so that’s a plus! 7/10 imdb

The Room Next Door. My favorite quiet movie this year. In between all the dinos and fascists and whatnots, this was a welcome gentle story (but very sad). The portrayal of both women was amazing in its nuance and care, and I cried all my tears. 9/10 imdb

Resurrection. Didn’t love, didn’t hate. I definitely liked it better after reading a few reviews to understand the references, but i was still bored most of the way. I dearly wish we’d followed the woman’s character, the actress was perfect and I so wanted to be mesmerised! But instead we went around a bunch of disconnected stories, and mostly filmed the (very well done) decors – I lacked human connection most of all! 6/10 imdb

The Brutalist. Part one is my favorite movie of the year in terms of plot. I loved seeing the emigration and arrival into this new American society. The second part was full misery porn and shock for shock value. Doesn’t help that I now severely dislike Adam Brody for his behavior. 3/10 (or 7/10 if you stop at the intermission) imdb

Conclave. My favorite movie of the year when it comes to pure visuals. Came out in 2024, but they always let us catch up on some stuff in January, so I took that opportunity and didn’t regret it! The scenography and the costumes were superb. A bit less convinced by the plot, especially the ending, which was a bit too out of left field to be believable, and didn’t really add anything but shock value to the themes. 8/10 imdb

Eagles of the Republic. This was excellent! It was ever so slightly redundant with the other movies in the Cairo trilogy, but it was still amazing. The writing, the humor when you don’t expect it, the beautiful filming, the great acting… No notes. (the pharmacy scene was my favorite) 9/10 imdb

Maria. The Maria Callas biopic! I think Angelina Jolie did a good job, but I hated the decision to make her sing. I get that La Callas lost her voice by the end, but it was atrocious to hear in the cinema. I liked the rest, I think, especially in how it was filmed. The soft colors and dreamy setting made it all real and not at the same time. 7/10 imdb

A Complete Unknown. Continuing on the biopic trend, here’s Bob Dylan! I liked it better in that it didn’t try to explain too much, and just showed what an asshole he was, while still being a brilliant artist. I can’t stand his voice though, and Chalamet (whom I can’t stand either anymore!) replicated a bit too well. 7/10 imdb

After all that, I didn’t see the Bruce Springsteen movie or the Queen one, because I was too saturated with biopics. I hope the trend dies off soon, so that we can go back to having original plots and characters.

Good Boy. I wrote a fuller review here, but the gist of it is that it was relatively well executed for its non-existent budget, and that I had a horrible time because I hate horror movies. It’ll teach me! Lots of good visual ideas to show a haunted house through the pov of a dog, and so I give it points for imagination! 6/10 imdb

French movies

I’ve been trying to go see more French movies in 2025, because we’re doing great things and I want to support that! So here are a bunch. I’ll try to add the English name if it’s out in the USA/UK so you can check them out.

Roughly from favorite to least:

La femme la plus riche du monde.(The Richest Woman in the World). A (dark) comedy, freely inspired from the Bettencourt scandal1. Deliciously scandalous, excellent performances, truculent dialogues,... There’s a little “eat the rich” edge to it that makes it satisfying. 9/10 imdb

Un ours dans le Jura. (How to make a killing). Wtf is that translated title? A Bear in the Jura mountains is so much better and much more evocative of the plot: after a fatal car crash, Christmas tree farmers Michel and Cathy find 2 millions euros and cover up the scene by pretending a bear ate the victims. Police investigation and cash laundering ensue. Another excellent dark comedy!2 9/10 imdb

L’inconnu de la grande arche. (The Great Arch) Funny that the english title removed the “unknown man” part of the title! This is an historical movie about the conception and buidling of the great arch of La Défense, the big modern (for the 80s) business center right outside of Paris, by a random Danish architecture professor. It was a very nice story, with just enough drama and good acting! You can see the lack of budget a bit – those dudes have 1 (one) jacket each lol, but it didn’t impede my enjoyment. Much better than The Brutalist imo3. 8/10 imdb

Vie Privée. (A private life). Jodie Foster, in a French role! And a good one, that was a lot of fun to watch. She’s a psychiatrist who investigates the death of one of her patients, whom she becomes convinced was murdered. Half murder mystery, half comedy, half family drama, … The pacing was good, I liked the muted colors in the film, and the plot was just drunk enough for me to forget about real life! 7/10 imdb

Chien 51. (Dog 51). Our big expensive action movie of the year! We the French have been so bad at finding money for those, so this makes me hopeful we’ll manage to make more in the future. This specific one is forgettable, with a basic rogue AI plot. But the matte painting on the backgrounds made for a believable half-destroyed Paris, so I’ll forgive it. You don’t necessarily need to get out of your way to see though, it’s very beauf as we say. 5.5/10 imdb

Les enfants vont bien. (Out of Love). You might know (and love) Camille Cottin from Call my agent,4 and she doesn’t disappoint here. It’s a pure French movie about family ties, with a lot of blank stares that mean everything and whispered dialogues, but I like the genre. Her sister disappears (voluntarily) and leaves her 2 children to take care of. The children were good, which is rare enough to mention, and the whole thing was emotional, even if I found it tried a bit too much to make us cry. 6.5/10 imdb

Dossier 137. (Case 137) Léa Drucker has to be one of my favorite living French actresses, but this movie was disappointing. It follows her as an officer in the “police of the police”, investigating alleged police brutality incidents during the yellow jacket protests. Sadly the director chose to stay “neutral” and gave no nuance or depth to any of the characters: Léa is bland, the policemen are brutes, the victim’s family members are poor, kind, sad people… Nothing new under the sun; could have been a documentary – but that’s not what I expect from a fiction movie. 6.5/10 imdb

Animal Totem. (I don’t think that came out anywhere but in France). WTF was that? Not in a Bugonia kind of way, just in a weird French movie kind of way? I think I liked it, but i’m not sure yet. There’s a business dude, with a suitcase handcuffed to the hand, going on foot from the Roissy airport to the La Défense business district. On foot. And he sees animals? This was an ecological fable (idk how to translate that, maybe tale?), and about capitalism too. 6.5/10 imdb

La condition. (untranslated too) A period movie about violent husbands, patriarchy, and sorority. Nowhere as good as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but Swann Arnaud was a convincing villain, and the friendship between the woman and the maid was kind. I wish we’d actually explored the theme of keeping up appearances more: the maid is pregnant because she was raped by the husband, and they make a deal to keep it as the couple’s child, so that the rich woman can be more integrated into society. 6/10 imdb

Kaamelott 2 part 1. This one is personal: if you’re not French, you probably don’t know the untranslatable tv series of the same name: a reinvention of the Arturian legend, except they’re all dumbasses and Arthur can’t deal with it. Originally amazing short jokes (3 minutes long), then developed into an actual story (with 30 min long episodes of unequal quality), it’s now coming to the cinema.

The first movie was mediocre, but it had been so long we wanted to see what was next (can you see the parallels with anyone else?). Except movie 2 part 15 is even worse. The director plots (weirdly), writes dialogues (badly) and develops characters (unnaturally), and the audience is bored as fuck of seeing the same story over and over again. Contrarily to Avatar, I’ll still go see the next movie just in case. 1/10 (it’s not as upsetting as Avatar 3, but close!) imdb

Final words

So here was my retrospective of movies! Once again, please tell me below which ones I need to catch up on. I’m already booked for The Secret Agent in January!

If you want to see my opinion of big budget entertainment as well as animated movies, i wrote about that in part one.

And if you’re more interested in books, I also put together a reading wrap up:

Now I’ll take a break from posting over the holidays (unless I spend all my time putting together a big rant about Avatar 3, you never know), so I wish you and your families a good time, and I’ll see you next year <3

Thanks for sticking with me in 2025!

Love,

I added way too many pictures, so this won’t fit in your email! Please click on the title to see the full thing in your browser/app, thank you :)

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Edit of Edit: here goes the French and indies wrap up!

Before we start, a note on ratings: they’re half emotion, half enjoyment, half depth and half perceived skill. This means the funny movie without a single original thought filmed on a potato will still get a 10 even if it’s obviously shit. Or the weird art movie I didn’t get, but found interesting after I read a few reviews that explained it, with great care taken to the aesthetic of it all, is also a 10.

On the other hand of the spectrum: the big budget movie that is quite good and decent entertainment, but doesn’t deliver what it promised me, is a 0/10 (yes, this is foreshadowing, can you guess the title?).

In general:

• More than 9: i fully recommend

• More than 7: you should go if it sounds like your stuff

• More than 5: good enough

• Less than 5: don’t waste your time

Animated movies

I had a very good year when it comes to animated movies! I saw a total of 6, with 2 rewatches. From least favorite to most favorite:

Memoir of a snail. Starting with the disappointment, this was kinda shit. I’d put it in the “misery porn” category: everything goes wrong, all the time, in the worst, most clickbaity way possible, and the narrator has a whiny voice to make you empathize. The animation itself wasn’t to my taste either (i usually love clay animation!). 3/10 imdb

Zootopia 1. I hadn’t seen it 10 years ago so I caught up when number 2 came out, and I had a blast! I see now why it’s a crowd favorite: the animation is very dynamic, with a ton of hidden puns and fun visual ideas. The plot is basic, but well put together, and overall I had a great time! 10/10 imdb

Zootopia 2. A little less good than the first, but it was still fun. I didn’t find quite as many visual finds, and I found the “will they won’t they” fan service annoying. I wish they’d kept Judy and Nick as pure friends and actually explored that relationship instead of making all the innuendo. Still a very entertaining time! (i love Shakira). 8/10 imdb

Arco. French scifi animation of the year, and it was great! You can see the lack of budget on some backgrounds, and I really really hate how this style of faces look. That’s the exact description of buttface for me! Apart from that, the story was delightful, with friendship, climate disasters, and sentient robots. I 100% recommend it to younger children and teens, and even as a parent you won’t have a bad time! 7/10 imdb

A Castle in the Sky. My Miyazaki rewatch of the year. This was my favorite as a child, and it still is! Arco isn’t in the top category because it doesn’t compare to this in terms of quality of the animation (especially in the backgrounds) and layers of meaning (although it’s not too far). 10/10 imdb

Les Triplettes de Belleville. (The Triplets of Belleville) Another rewatch, I hadn’t seen that since it gave me nightmares as a child. This was a misguided attempt to introduce my foreign colleagues to the best of French animation. I stand by my point that it’s the best, I just forgot it was from 20031, and therefore extremely mocking of the American way of life (but like, a lot!).

The animation is perfect, the visual ideas are surprising in a great way, and the caricature – of the French and the American both – is hilarious. Not the first movie I’d show a freshly immigrated Midwest woman though :/ 10/10 imdb

Big budget movies (except French)

Well, I say except French, but there’s only one that fit the bill anyways, and it was Chien 51 as I said above. I hope its box office success means we’ll get more soon, I’m sure we could do marvels with just a bit more money in the bank!

In no particular order (because i found everything disappointing):

Downtown Abbey 3. In a way, this was the least disappointing movie of the bunch. It was advertised as a fan-service tear-jerker end-of-an-era movie, and it delivered. Mediocre writing, incoherent characters, everyone turns out to be nice and not at all bigoted about anything, and happiness for all!

I don’t love how far up in time we’ve gotten because I don’t like the fashion of the 20s as much, and some of those wigs were horrendous. My favorite thing coming from this movie is the reels series from @aya.in.the.air on instagram! She knows her stuff and is both funny and informative. 6/10 imdb

Superman. You can’t convince me there’s a good story to tell about Superman. When the dude is the incarnation of good, there’s just no narrative tension. Here James Gunn made him a freaking loser – which is the opposite of what Superman is supposed to be – and gave him the power of… influencing people to do bad shit! Yay but no thank you. We don’t need more reboots, please give us some original and interesting superheroes already! 3/10 imdb (also i liked Cavill better)

Jurassic World Rebirth. I like dinosaurs, I don’t love weird GMO dinosaurs that don’t even look good. It was a decent action movie, I guess? But I have nothing more to say (I did not go see that of my own volition, my colleagues made me).2 6/10 imdb

Mickey 17. One of the only movies in this section I can truly say I enjoyed. Lots of great comedic moments, interesting visual effects, and some satire of real-life politicians. The pacing was fast and overall it was fun! Haven’t read the book because Goodreads said the plot never goes past the premise, and I think that’s also rather true of the movie: there’s no real exploration of the theme (capitalism’s exploitation of workers) which is a shame coming from the guy who made Parasite. 6/10 imdb

House of Dynamite. This one gets a deduction automatically for forcing me to watch it at home on a shitty macbook screen – that’s just not how I want to watch cinema! Then it had the gall of being repeating itself, which, for a political thriller, is the worse of sin. 4/10 imdb

Predator:Badlands. I spoke at length about all the stuff that was wrong in this movie, BUT, after a while, i let go of the idea that this was a Predator movie and decided to treat it like a standalone fun buddy movie in space, and things were much better. The creature design was excellent, especially in terms of background fauna, and i had fun all along! It’s not an actual Predator though, so if you’re a fan, don’t go. 7/10 imdb

Avatar, Avatar 2. I rewatched the first two in prevision for the third. Avatar 1 still hits, but i think it’s mostly nostalgia. Watching them both in such close proximity showed me how much Avatar 2 is a mere reheat of the first one. Quite disappointing, but I was making excuses for Cameron: it’s been 20 years, he needs to reboot the whole franchise for new people, he’s saving the new plotlines for the next movie… 7/10 and 2/10 imdb

Avatar 3. A huge disappointment. I’m getting extremely annoyed at directors promising me the world in the trailers and delivering none of it. There was supposed to be an interrogation of faith in hard times, whether a burnt village or the death of a child, life in a mixed family (because Sully still doesn’t believe in shit no matter how many times he repeats that he Sees), being a messiah/blessed/whatever with Kiri, …

Not only was I not witness to a single original thought, Cameron also dared reuse the exact same plot once more. At this point, I’m done and I won’t go see the next movie. 0/10 imdb

Wicked 2. (dis)honorable mention, and which won’t get a picture because i forgot about it until i pressed post on this! Awful awful movie, nowhere near as good as the first one (which i’d rate a “good enough” 6/10), boring af, with shitty songs. I definitely didn’t want to spend 2 hours looking at malnourished actresses going through a surface level revolution. 3/10

What’s your favorite movie of 2025?

I of course eluded this question by making a tier-list, but what are your favorites of the year? I’m not making you choose just one, but i’d love some recs! If you saw anything that you think I’d like please tell me in the comments.

I know in terms of animation, I missed Amelie or the Character of Rain, and I need Frankenstein (does that count as an author movie or big budget? Probably both!) but what else should I catch up on?

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I haven’t spoken about TV shows much, because I didn’t see that many. EDIT: in the end, I count 16, so I might do a similar post to this if you’re interested!

Love,

I’ll start with comics (bande dessinée) which might be easier to gift to people who don’t read much, and then novels + non fiction (but i didn’t have a great year in those last categories so it’ll be quick).

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Comics and bandes dessinées

“Bande dessinée” (shortened BD) just means comics in French, but to us comics is strongly linked to American superhero stories, so I don’t like to use it as a general term.

Drome by Jesse Lonergan. My favorite scifi BD of the year, and it happens to be wordless so everyone can enjoy it! This isn’t hard scifi, there is no spaceship or technobabble of any kind. Instead, it’s more of a creation myth, with an excellent narrative arc, and convention-breaking artwork. It has romance and hubris and contemplations of violence… and it’s absolutely gorgeous from start to finish. It’s also 300 pages long, so it’ll occupy you for a while, and it’s a one-shot so you won’t have to wait for the rest of the story!

For: Your mom who thinks comics are a lower art form, but who loves prestige TV about gods punching each other.

40 days dans le désert B by Moebius. Moebius, a famous French scifi comics artist since the 60s, decides to give up pot and draw his journey. He goes into the “desert B”, ie “désherber”/”weeding out”, and meets amazing creatures. There’s a tiny bit of text opposite each drawing, but it’s nothing Apple Intelligence™ can’t take care of.

For: your pothead cousin or your old rocker uncle

Here are also 2 titles in French only, in case you’re trying to learn the language or don’t mind google translating some bits here and there.

Soli Deo Gloria by Jean-Christophe Deveney. Hans and Helma were destined to a life of labor and poverty, but their gift for music and their love gave way to wonders. Sounds cliché, kinda is, but it’s also told beautifully and with amazing art. 100% recommend, even to people who don’t like comics. This is the critics’ favorite of the year, no matter which outlet — and for a good reason!

For: Grandma who loves classical music, and lovely stories of family, religion and love.

Silent Jenny by Matthieu Bablet. It’s after world collapse, and Jenny is hunting for bee DNA so they can be cloned and the world be fertile again. She doesn’t speak much, but she’ll come out in English this summer if you want to wait. Rich world-building, detailed art, slow-burn tension – this isn’t an action story, it’s more of an ecological fable, but not moralizing, and full of hope!

For: a fan of Mad Max x Nausicaä. There’s also a matching vinyl album if that helps!

Science-fiction and fantasy

Private Rites by Julia Armfield. I liked it less than Our Wives Under the Sea, but it was still quite good. The prose is wonderful, and the melancholic tones were lovely. Not sure about the ending (and please don’t read the back cover before going in, it’s very spoilery).

Gift to: a poet!

Non fiction

Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia by Mike Pepi. My favorite nonfiction book of the year! Extremely well-researched, the first part is debunking some of the tech scene founding myths (like digital tools are neutral, tech will save us, …) and the second is about trying to find solutions from there. Digital platforms have eaten away at institutions, but we can get them back! It’s a hopeful book, not the depressing kind.

For: your hopepunk cousin who wants to see institutions reborn and fight against cyber-capitalism.

The giftable disappointments

I didn’t have a good reading year, to be honest: my most anticipated reads ended up disappointing me, and then i was in a slump and turned to comics instead. BUT i’m keenly aware that the disappointments come from my personal tastes and my stupidly high standards for hyped books, so they’re still perfectly enjoyable and readable for others.

The Strength of the Few by James Islington. I was excited because i really enjoyed The Will of the Many last year, but i didn’t find the same magic in the sequel. While the first book had many flaws (Mary Sue protagonist, weaker middle pacing, some random shit to save the day here and there), it still succeeded at being very entertaining and a page-turner. The worldbuilding was great and i was invested.

Book 2 however splits the POVs in 3, and i can’t say the braiding was done well. I was mostly bored with the characters playing catch up in between scenes, and not as interested in the story. I might still read the next one if the reviews are good (we all know the tragedy of second book syndrome).

Do gift to: your friend who loves Roman-inspired YA, but with more violence (and doesn’t see pacing problem)

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. Another sequel which didn’t live up to its original. The Tainted Cup was an amazing exploration of what it takes to keep an empire alive, corruption, bureaucracy, … with a detective story as the excuse to travel all around and talk to everyone. Sadly, book 2 mostly keeps the investigation side of things, and doesn’t go much deeper into the political analysis. I’ll have to write a full essay about how it does the opposite actually: authoritarianism and dictature look so much better than whatever it was Ana and Din were trying to do!

Do gift to: your aunt who loves detective stories (i don’t) (and also to the Roman empire fan)

Sun Eater by Christopher Ruocchio. This is an older scifi series that i never got to – but i love hard scifi so here goes! I only read the first 2 and i’m not going to continue. The worldbuilding is quite nice, and i like the ideas and themes, but the writing is way too purple for me. The pacing is all over the place, and the author repeats himself too much. I ended up being bored for long periods of time in between short bursts of very interesting material. Sadly can’t get over it to know the ending. I’d totally watch a tv show about it though! The Expanse replacement when?

Do gift to: your Roman-loving friend is getting spoiled this year! Idk what it is with the times or the water, but Romans are making a comeback.

Murderbot by Martha Wells. After the disappointment with Sun Eater, i needed a pick-me-up! The first 2 novellas were excellent, i adored the character, identified with Murderbot so much and had no notes! However, the sequels turned repetitive really fast. No one really has any character arc, and similar situations keep appearing, with similar results. I wish we had some evolution and new situations here and there! Don’t talk to me about the TV show though, it was horrendous :/

Do gift to: your autistic niece in need of a small-bite entertainment (not sure someone who loves the TV show would like the books though)

So that was my little wrap up of the year! Let me end on my favorite page of my culture journal: for all i have to say about Murderbot, i did well on the decorations <3

What about you? What did you read that was good, or bad? Did i give you good gift ideas? Are you getting one of those pretty books for yourself? Tell me in the comments!

In Predator:Badlands, our main character is Dek – a Predator™, the runt of the litter, malformed and sickly. His father tries to kill him as per their customs, but his brother saves him and sacrifices himself to get Dek sent to a very deadly planet, Genna. Once there, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a synth (an android from the Alien™ franchise) and a cute merchandising-friendly alien (not ™). Together, they start hunting the biggest predator (not ™) of the planet, so that Dek can go home with a trophy and earn his place as a warrior in his father’s Predator™ clan.

So here we have it: the first Predator movie told from the Predator’s perspective. I was so excited!1

Before I get into the parts I didn’t like, let’s take a moment for the few things that worked – I don’t want you to think I’m a baseless hater. As an entertainment device, it was quite good! The first half of the movie is a xenobiologist fever dream! Someone definitely had a blast designing planet Genna – imagine if the plants from Little Shop of Horrors had babies with the creatures from Annihilation, then gave them all rabies. There’s a scene where Dek steps on what looks like moss, only for it to release spores that attract flying predators, which in turn lure out a camouflaged beast that makes the original Predator look cuddly. Everything on this planet has evolved to murder everything else, and the film revels in showing us exactly how. This is what Pandora should have been2 – not just beautiful, but genuinely alien and terrifying.

After the Discovery channel documentary, the second half goes back to the very well trodden path of an action movie. There’s a training montage, lots of fighting,3 a big boss, a sacrifice…it’s predictable, but has the good taste of ending rather quickly so as to not bore us out. The relationship between Dek and Thia keeps things moving along, with enough light banter to be fun without being cringe. Overall, solid high-budget action movie!

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🤡 What’s wrong with my face?!?

4The original Predator films worked because the creature was alien. Not just in the literal sense, but in the way it moved, hunted, and thought. It was genuinely other – a walking, clicking nightmare that followed its own incomprehensible logic. You couldn’t reason with it, nor understand it, and that’s what made it terrifying.

Badlands tosses all that out the window and gives us Dek: a Predator who walks, talks, and emotes like a sad human in a rubber suit.

Let’s start with the prosthetics: the original Predator design was iconic as the perfect balance of humanoid and strange, with mandibles that clicked and a face mostly hidden behind. Dek’s prosthetic on the other hand is half-decent, at best. I get that he’s supposed to be a weakling, so maybe some of the mandibules had to go, but he still looks like a severe letdown. I get it: from the producers’ point of view, having a non-human in the main role is a risk! What if the audience leaves the theater when there’s not a single human face in the first 30 minutes? But I don’t think an ultra-humanized face, complete with the worry and sad contemplative boy features, is the way to go. We’re not dumb, we know we signed up for a scifi-fantasy5, we saw the freaking trailer!6

This humanization also extends to the bodysuit: Dek moves like a person. He walks upright with human gait patterns. He gestures with human body language. He even runs with that infamous Tom Cruise trick. There’s no mystery in his movement, no sense that this is a being with different musculature, different instincts, different anything. The original Predator moved like a predator – all economy and threat. Dek moves like an actor trying not to trip over his own feet.

Second: the language. The clicking, the guttural sounds – those were part of what made the Predator feel mysterious. At least half of the problem was that you couldn’t communicate with them in any way! But in Badlands, Dek speaks full sentences in his native tongue, which is then helpfully translated for us via subtitles. Now, credit where it’s due: at least they committed to him speaking Yautja7 throughout instead of giving him a magic universal translator. But here’s the problem: the language sounds like human language. It’s got the same cadence, the same emotional inflections, the same pauses for dramatic effect. It could’ve been Old Norse or Klingon and I wouldn’t have known the difference. There’s no sense that this is how an entirely different species would communicate.

This is the fundamental problem with Dek’s characterization: he’s just a human wearing Predator skin. The original Predator saga was about confronting the unknowable, the dangerous, the other – something that operated on completely different rules and saw us as prey rather than equals. That mystery, that otherness, that horror? It’s been sanded away. We’re not exploring what it means to encounter a truly different form of intelligence; we’re watching a guy with daddy issues who happens to have mandibles.

😤 I will avenge my brother!

This sanding away of the alien-ness doesn’t stop at the physical attributes8. Dek’s inner life is entirely human too – his motivations, his fears, his emotional arc could all be lifted straight from any number of coming-of-age stories. How to train your dragon, Thor:Ragnarok, Avatar9. Hell, even Billy Eliott fits the bill10 – can you get any more modern-world-problems than this?

There is a dire problem when in your movie introduction, 2 out of the 3 aliens are behaving like drunk Vikings. No, a Predator – a solitary alien that works alone and puts violence and war above all – can’t be sacrificing himself to save his brother. That’s just not it!

Whether or not we agree with alien morality isn’t the point. The question is: how does their culture actually work? Show me the mechanics before asking me to judge them. Instead, this movie promises to reveal an alien civilization while actively hiding it from us.

Dek’s motivations?

1. Revenge for his brother

2. Proving himself to his father

3. Earning his place in the clan.

These aren’t alien concerns – they’re the backbone of every hero’s journey ever written. “I must prove my worth to my disapproving father” arc is a well-worn trope (and this movie doesn’t even offer a fresh exploration of it).

And let’s talk about that father for a second: he’s presented as your standard antagonist dad, but that’s exactly wrong. This isn’t some abusive human patriarch – he’s a Yautja elder operating within his planet’s cultural, spiritual, and moral codes. He shouldn’t be an antagonist at all. The original Predators didn’t have human problems. They didn’t angst about daddy issues or yearn for acceptance. They hunted, collected trophies, killed all kinds of random creatures (including humans) with a cold face. They followed their own incomprehensible code of honor. We could project motivations onto them – pride, perhaps, or a warrior’s code – but we were always guessing. They were other.

The thing is, you don’t even need the brother’s sacrifice to launch this story. Want a more interesting version? Make Dek someone completely embedded in Yautja culture – someone who doesn’t question their values or codes at all. He’s judged as weak, a failed Yautja, and condemned to ritual death. And here’s the kicker: he accepts it. Think of it as a kind of seppuku, but administered by another. Honor demands it, and he’s ready. But then something interrupts the ritual – an attack, a malfunction, whatever – and he’s catapulted off-world, crash-landing on this hostile planet. His only wish is to get back home, to finish the ritual and restore honor to his clan. Now you’ve got your reluctant hero without the tired revenge plot, and we’ve actually learned something about how their society works.

Dek’s character could have had (should have had) a deeper, more strongly held, relationship to violence. He starts out bitter and isolated, sure, but through the power of friendship™ with Thia and the cute alien sidekick, he learns to open up. Problem is: we don’t really see much of that. There’s an interesting scene at the start when Thia convinces him to keep her along, because she’s “a tool he can use” – he wouldn’t hear the usual “let’s collab we can be useful to each other” speech. But this was the only scene that touched upon the Predator’s specific way of life. Everything else – the gearing up ritual, preparing weapons, the training montage, eating food over the fire, … It’s all human in nature!

Dek is just a guy who happens to have mandibles. His struggles are our struggles. His emotional journey is our emotional journey. The film takes an alien and makes him relatable by stripping away everything that made him alien in the first place.

I know where this comes from: the producers looked at the Predator and thought: “Do you really think Martha, 45, who’s taking her little boy, is going to stay the entire length?” “Nah, I don’t think she’ll ever take that kid to another Predator movie…” And that was it. The greed for captive audiences makes for dumbed down, useless movies. But still, I’m sad (and upset I spent 10 bucks for it!)

Have you watched any Predator movies? What do you think? Don’t get me started on how Alien:Earth did the exact same thing but worse with the alien, but please tell me below which is your favorite of the Predator saga!

Sorry i left you all without any news for those 2 weeks, but i got a bit busy. I tried to do nanowrimo1 – that’s when you write a full book in 30 days.

And well, i failed. Not entirely, because i did plot a while thing, learned a lot about book structure, and wrote a full (unreadable) 10K words! But still, not only did i not write a full book, i also abandoned the idea on Nov 15th, halfway through the month.

I want to pretend that it’s because the entire org is down (read here if you missed that drama) and there are no forums for community, but honestly i don’t want community when i’m doing that much work lol. It’s exhausting enough on its own to not have to also chat up everyone in the process.

But still, here are some things i’ve learned.

1 - i didn’t have a burning desire to write a book and it was still ok

That stupid advice you get all the time about how “my story needed to be written” or “if you really feel it in your soul, it’ll come out no matter what”... well i think that’s crap.

I’ve never once in my entire life had a burning desire to write any special story. Don’t get me wrong, i like writing, and i take joy in putting just the right words together to say what i want (not that i’m any good at it yet, sadly).

But any story i’ve ever thought of, or even started to write, well if i’d given it up, everything would have been fine. They’re not very original2, so someone else would have written it one day or another. I don’t lose anything by not writing them out, and i don’t feel regret or anything really at the thought of not getting them done.

That’s one of the reasons why i never started nanowrimo: i thought that you really needed to find a story you were at least a little bit enamored with, something that made your heart beat. But that never happened to me, and i very much do want to write stories and be a writer, so i just got started with the first idea that came to mind that was deep enough to warrant novel-length writing (from my beginner’s point of view).

I see a lot of advice saying you don’t need the perfect story to start, just pick one you like and are excited to write. I’ll go further: just pick one that doesn’t seem too bad and run with it. Burning hearts not required.

2 - if you don’t love it, it’ll be harder

Now i’m pretty sure nanowrimo is hard for everyone. When you’re trying to write a novel – that’s about 50k words – you can’t just fly through it without any obstacles. That’s around 1,6k words per day (i never did that, more on schedules later), so it’s a lot. Everyone gets discouraged, everyone struggles (except brilliant assholes but i don’t want to talk about you fuckers!).

BUT, when you’ve chosen a story idea that you weren’t even that much in love with because you’re not in love with anything, well, it’s quite a bit harder. I don’t want to fall into the hardship olympics, but i will still take a stand and say that my experience was the hardest of all, please clap and applaud my miraculous victory defeat!

I was curious to see if after spending so long on the book i’d be more taken with it: no, i’m not. That’s a bit sad to think about, but that’s the truth: i didn’t make me love my story more. If anything, i like it a bit less because i wrote it so shittily – but that’s what editing is for.3

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3 - you ain’t writing 1,6k words a day!

There are the days when i have a 3 hours long dance class, there are the days when i go to the cinema with my colleagues, and then there are the days when we catch up on Zootopia and Avatar (the blue people one) on the office’s big screen because some of us didn’t see those movies and we’ll go see the sequels in the cinema later this month4.

Oh and i also saw an opera which takes FIVE (5) FUCKING HOURS so i didn’t write on that day either.

Anyways, the tip here is to print out a calendar and find which days will be a big fat zero, and which ones you can type it out for forever. Here’s mine for reference:

>>> add photo of calendar

I set various daily goals depending on how busy and tired i expected to be that day. I had a mandatory week of holidays, so that was 3k words days, to compensate for the rest of things (like the week when my New York colleagues visited us and we fined and dined on the princess’s accounts).

The trick is to keep them small so that they’re reachable and you can actually get to your rewards (see point 5 for mine), but also size them up just enough so that they get you writing on days you don’t want to. I had 2 daily goals: write 100 words (to get me started) and then write whatever bigger “real” number i’d chosen for that day.

I quit about halfway through the week of 3k words/day, not because it was unsustainable but because i was tired of the story and couldn’t care anymore. I did reach every single daily goal until then though! I didn’t want to burn myself out on a stupid story so i thought a big break was in order. I’ll probably pick it back up later though, because i think it’s a decent idea!

4 – you don’t need fancy software (but back it up!!)

I saw so many people setting up Scrivener and whatever other complicated things and bobs, but you don’t need all that (i love specialized software like no tomorrow, but i couldn’t be bothered this time). You love it? Live for it!

Otherwise, google docs is just fine. I’d advise one file per chapter + a master file with everything copy pasted in it (it’s easier to check your total work count that way!).

Back that shit up: don’t just leave it in google drive, also download a local copy once in a while. I even printed it out for myself because i’ll want that for editing,5 and also it was satisfying :)

5 - you are a goblin, find a treasure

Since you (i) don’t love your (my) story, you need something to get going and, even more difficult, keep going. The want to be a writer and publish a book isn’t enough, nor is the love of the craft (because you’ll (i have) write (written) it like shit).

So, turn your eyes to reward-land and find shit to gift yourself. You can be poetic and write down kisses from your children whom you love more than anything in the whole entire world, but i’m much more pragmatic.

I did 2 tiers of rewards: daily stuff and “milestone” stuff.

Daily things i got:

• A pastry6 if i started writing before 11am (otherwise i’d spend the night on my computer forcing myself and that’s not healthy. Pastries aren’t healthy either, but they’re French and from a tiny bakery so i’m supporting a local business in a time of need. Don’t @ me).

  • Number claimed: 16

• A book if i write my daily goal (no book on days where the daily goal is 0 because i’m not Cresus) (2 books if buying second hand because it’s good for the planet. I’m not the one making the rules)

  • Number claimed: 15 (lots of good comics too!!)

  • Wallets broken: 1

And then milestone stuff were expensive things i’ve been wanting for a long time but could never justify.

• For 10K words: this gouache set from Winsor and Newton. Apparently it’s good (idk, i can’t do gouache yet) and i’ve always wanted to learn. Couldn’t justify because i can’t paint lol, but that will make me learn (or at least i have pretty paints to look at!!)

I had other stuff planned out, but since i quit i’ll have to ask for them as Christmas presents. Or make myself another challenge. Or just keep wistfully look at them once in a while, not ready yet to spend that much money on headphones or a hair tool (i will buy myself a nice office chair soon though, my back isn’t too happy with my pouf7)

Endwords

That was it, that was all! I hope you enjoyed this little round-up and accepted my apologies for forgetting about you for a full month :) i am truly regretful i promise!

I won’t tell you what the novel is about just yet because it sucks too much. I’ll leave it in a drawer for until after the holidays then i’ll get to writing the end8 so it’s less a pile of shit and more of an organized tower of containers full of shit (but broken down). After that, ask me again :))

How is your life going? Please tell me, i haven’t been reading much on substack this month! Did i miss a big scandal? (last i checked, boyfriends were embarrassing, so catch me up on the tea!)

Did you also attempt nanowrimo? How did it go for you? What would you add to my list?

Read you next time,

Here goes: Indy is a dog, who’s (un-named?) owner is sick of some kind of pulmonary illness that makes him vomit liters of blood every so often. Dude isn’t happy his loving sister keeps telling him to get his ass to the hospital, and so he leaves his city apartment to hole himself up in his late grandpa’s home in the butthole of nowhere. Of course grandaddy died in it, of a similar lung problem, and so did his dog, and everyone thinks the house is haunted. Detractors will say it’s genetic but Indy (the dog) starts seeing things, the owner gets sicker, apparitions appear galore, dude dies, Indy is scared, the sister comes to pick him up (the dog, not the man – well his dead body will fit in the truck i guess).

For all you animal lovers out there: Indy survives the movie. He faces some scary moments—getting caught in a fox trap and being pushed off the bed one time, but he makes it through unscathed (although maybe a bit scared, and also totally sad his owner died).

So, what did I think? Well, I was scared shitless from seeing it in a dark room, on a huge screen, with super high sound volume; but even that’s not enough to brave the social anxiety of making everyone move out of the way in the middle of a super tense movie so I stayed put, put my fingers over my eyes and kinda peeped out once in a while.

Still, now that I’ve had a full week to think about it, I think I quite enjoyed it! It’s not the best movie in the world, I’ll get to that later, but I think it used its special moat in an interesting way!

What scares a dog?

The movie is fully from Indy’s pov. The camera follows him around and never leaves him. This leads to some really nice (non-scary) scenes when he’s in the car, door closed, while his owner is taking a call outside, and we barely get enough sound to understand the content of the conversation.

Something I found very interesting is how little they show the faces of people in the movie. I didn’t watch it again to verify (got traumatized enough on the first pass), but I’m pretty sure we only see the owner’s face once or twice, in the full 1h15 of the movie.

This allows us to focus strictly on Indy, and his emotions, without being parasited by his owner’s. On that note, it’s so interesting how easy it is to read those dog emotions and empathize with them. This isn’t even a dog “actor”, trained for the cinema! And yet, with the camera work and the atmosphere, I suspended my disbelief immediately and only saw the “puppet string” of the treat-on-a-stick for the first few scenes.

So, what does it mean to be a dog in a haunted house? Being a dog and seeing hallucinations isn’t as scary as being a human, in a way. I loved how the movie both adds tension and made me afraid, while also presenting the dog as mostly confused during the whole thing. Dogs don’t understand ghosts, at least not as we do.

The film weaponizes our need to project understanding onto Indy’s behavior. Every time he stared into an empty corner, I found myself constructing explanations, seeing patterns that might not exist. We think we can read dogs, but Good Boy keeps reminding us that we’re interpreting an alien experience of reality. The film’s genius lies in this disconnect: we’re watching a horror movie where the protagonist and audience aren’t even experiencing the same threats.

Indy isn’t that bothered about seeing the mud monster, unless it tries to touch him. The times Indy got scared are the times when he sniffed something out and followed the scent into the basement, where a combination of smell and sound gave him the scaries. Since the camera won’t let go of him, we see several long minutes of him staring out the window, to the still forest where our human senses can’t make anything out.

What’s a dog to do? Bark?

What can Indy do against the monster? He’s not a fearless German Shepherd, far from it. It’s established quite early on that he’s rather of a wimp, always sniffing stuff and whining. Indy does his job, and tries to do it well: regular patrol around the house, thorough investigations of weird scents, some little barking when things get really bad.

But in real life, what is there to do when your owner is dying, when you’re just a dog with no way of calling an ambulance or alerting a neighbor? Indy certainly knows his owner is dying, that his short tamper is just him in pain, that of course he doesn’t mean it when he yells at Indy to get off the bed. Still, Indy never stops trying, but in the end, all the whining and pawing and licking of faces won’t make his best friend less sick, or provide any comfort.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes for me was watching Indy navigate that impossible choice of love vs fear. He doesn’t have access to the story beats like we do – he can’t think “if i just hold out until morning, help will come! He lives in an eternal present, in which his owner sometimes loves him, and sometimes chains him to the doghouse outside. It’s ostensibly an act of mercy, to protect Indy from witnessing his last hours, but for Indy it’s abandonment. He can smell the monster coming but he’s left alone with this danger he can smell but not see.

When he finally manages to get free of the chain, and to run away from the monster, Indy doesn’t flee to the neighbor’s house as I had predicted, he actually comes back inside, into the bedroom, to check on his owner. By this point, the monster has killed him though, and so Indy finds his way into the basement, curls up next to the emaciated skeleton of his predecessor (grandpa’s dog, who presumably faced this same situation decades ago), and waits.

I’ve seen a few reviews say that it’s sad because Indy doesn’t understand death, but i don’t think that’s true: Indy very much understands death and disease, and that his owner is doomed to die that night. The monster isn’t there to show his confusion, he’s here to show how scary and disturbing that truth is, even when you are able to understand it.

Endnotes

I don’t know if the movie will be available to you where you are, but in France it’ll be on Shadowz, so you can watch it at home on Halloween. I really recommend it, just not stuck in the big dark room with strong sound volume like i was lol.

Have you seen it? If not, what other movie would you recommend i watch (from the safety of my home)?

See you next time,

But one thing that keeps coming back, and that i keep being stumped by, is around the idea of writing stuff around books, for an american audience (because that’s 90% of you according to my stats), when i’m not only not american, but also not a native english speaker.

I had yet another experience of it this week: i wrote this little note about classics, which garnered some attention

And then came 2 of my worst nightmares – well, not actually, no one bullied me and i’m very thankful for that! I thought they were representative enough of all the things i fear when i speak about books on here.

Can you give me an example please?

Yes, sure! Let me think for a sec and find you an example of a book considered part of the classics, that’s easy to read, doesn’t require you to look at the footnotes, is enjoyable, is relatively short, doesn’t have weird references to things people would need to look up…

Oh wait, it also has to be in English! Because when you’re debating (that’s a big word, people were just nicely talking to me), you need to convince people, and the best way to do that is to find examples that resonate with them.

You know, The Princess of Clèves that we all read when we were 12 years old – no you don’t, because it’s a French classic, about the French nobility, in the kingdom of France, part of the national French curriculum.

Argh, let’s try again! A little play, funny, with lots of quiproquo, easy commentary on social classes that still so relevant today you don’t need any explanation to understand why that dude is being mocked and that this bit is sarcasm… Molière! The playwright of King Louis XIV of France, who founded the Comédie Française, and who is as widely studied as Shakespeare, in France!

Now you get the point, I won’t bore you with more random French books we teach kids (although do tell me if you’d like a list, i can totally build one of those classics guides i was putting down!).

The thing is, my classics aren’t yours, and i can’t come up with easy classics to read from my own experience at school. The English language classics i read as a child were all difficult, because i was learning the god-damned language they were written in! I’m sure if i picked up The Treasure Island today, it’d be a breeze, but the (extremely) abbreviated version i read at 13 was the hardest book in the entire world!

That’s also why i feel so strongly about those misguided guides of the classics: they are written by people who have usually never suffered to read them, and so they are often missing the mark in terms of how difficult they are to read. There is a difference in language, in how stories were told, in themes, pacing, vocabulary, … that makes it hard to get into a lot of classic books if you aren’t initiated. And when your guide is for beginners, the only thing i see is a random 15 years old wanting to be smart picking War and Peace up just to try and dying of boredom and never wanting to pick a book up again.1

I misspoke

Second nightmare of any socially anxious autistic overachiever non-native english speaker: i was misunderstood * gasp *

Ô rage ! ô désespoir !2

As soon as i dare to say anything nearly close to an opinion in a tongue i only halfway master, i get that awful though: what if they misinterpret what i wanted to say and think i’m a horrible horrible person who wants to kill all the puppies? WHAT WILL I DO THEN???

It’s all good and dandy when i get my usual 100 views on a long form essay (which means no one read past the third paragraph, and i’m generous), but when it’s 4 lines, on Notes, that goes “viral” (it’s 600 likes, but still that’s a lot for me!), then i reach my limit and i start to wonder if i really want to do this and seriously consider closing it all down.

In the case at hand, people though i was talking about prefaces, introduction and footnotes. I wasn’t, i was talking about the “How to get started reading the classics” listicles you can find on substack. And then i spent my afternoon of fame and glory trying to write that down in a tactful manner to explain to my kind commenters that, no, i’m not an anti-intellectualist who wants to ban footnotes and that yes, i do read classics on Kindle specifically so that i can pull up the definition of random words i don’t know (bonus point if their meaning has changed so completely since the time of writing).

Of course that’s all a “me” problem, and i need to focus on self-confidence, growing a thicker skin and all the stuff. But still, i write on substack to be adulated and grow into a thought-mother, not to be taken so off course!

Context, what context?

On that note, we really just don’t have the same context. I keep seeing post among post about the idea of the “western canon”, but on substack, the “western canon” is american + some british bits they learned at school, those 3 russian 80000pages novels, and that one French book that makes you sound cool (Proust, Flaubert, Monte-Christo – choose one).

And i’m not illiterate! I’ve read some Hemmingway, some Shakespeare, some Steinbeck. But did i really read Grapes of Wrath? No, i don’t think ok. Oh yes actually i did! It was called Les Raisins de la Colère on the front jacket though. Does it still count?

To go back to my point about classics guides: Grapes isn’t one i’d recommend to a French audience, because it’s so tied to the problems of its time, and we don’t really study the Great Depression as it happened in the USA. Does that mean French people shouldn’t read it? Of course not! It just means a French person vaguely wanting to “read classic books” shouldn’t start with learning all about that time in history in another country – it would be more enjoyable for them to pick up a French equivalent, idk, maybe Marcel Pagnol or Colette. They’ll find themselves more at home in a description of French rural life, with the French preoccupations of the time, with a political climate they learned about in history class!

And on the opposite side of “easy classics”, the harder ones are also that much harder to read when you don’t have the same cultural background. I feel like i can’t write about Shakespeare, because i didn’t study him in Literature class, i think that we necessarily have a very different experience of Proust when you picked it up voluntarily as an adult, whereas i read him in 3 weeks, wrote 4 dissertations on various passages, and was grilled for 1 hour by my teacher on a linear commentary of [insert passage] for a grade, all that at age 16.

It goes further than the mere cultural difference and the language barrier, studying in class is a different way of approaching the books, that puts you in a different mindset and lets you come away with different lessons. I saw [blogger] say the part she remembers the most about Du côté de chez Swann3 is [insert part], but what i remember most is [how it’s placed in the literary context].4

My favorite character in LOTR is Bilbon!

And now comes the death blow to writing about english language books on the internet, when you read them in your native language: which translation did you pick?

Because i can guarantee that my first experience of The Lord of the Ring was severely impaired by the frankly weird translation choices – like adding a “N” at the end of Bilbo, for some reason?

I mentioned earlier not always knowing if i’ve read a book or not, because i know it so much from its translated title (and Grapes of Wrath is literally a literal translation so it’s on the easier side!). The other side of the coin is the endless Wikipedia > change language > English searches i did all afternoon to get translated names of all my examples!5

I also got a very nice DM from someone wanting to read one of the recs, and asking which translation was best. But how am i to know that? The business of translations, how good/faithful/enjoyable they are, is obscure to me! I wouldn’t know where to find that information in the first place (please tell me if you do!).

And that’s for the great scenario in which the book was translated to English – because most of them aren’t! Especially in the scifi/fantasy/speculative worlds that i affectionate. So where do i find that quote to illustrate my point?

You known you should stop your little rant when you come back full circle: what if, when i find the translation of the quote i want, it’s actually saying the opposite of what i understood? What if i don’t find the same beauty to it, the same poetry, the same analogy? What if it was so mangled (and that’s very true for older works – they would say “improved for the benefit of the readers of the very special country of France”) that it doesn’t illustrate shit at all anymore?

I would say this is my third and most debilitating nightmare. being understood very well, while i confidently spit out a take from my confidently arrogantly arranged soapbox, that just happens to be completely false because i didn’t actually understand the book i was reading.6

End words

I’ve written all of this on my high horse, still kicking from all the adrenaline of having been seen by so many people. It’s not been edited much, but i thought it was important to say all that stuff, in a longer format that all the little notes i’ve been trailing around.

If you have any suggestions on how to get past some of those hurdles, i’m all ears. Otherwise, i’ll come back next week, maybe with a horror movie review? I haven’t done this in a while (i get too scared in the cinema) but i recently saw something really nice 👀

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See you next time,

6

Yay footnotes! For adding context and helping reduce this shit lol – i do hate having to go down to read them though, did you know on substack desktop you can just hover the number and it’ll pop up? And one mobile clicking it reveals the text, without scrolling and loosing your place either!

It feels a bit strange to write this with the results that i’ve had: most posts in this genre celebrate a great amount of growth, thousands of subscribers, and the likes.

This is not such a post, mainly because i haven’t found the attention i wanted. Now, this isn’t to say i hate you, my dear subscriber! I love every one of you dearly (do i?). I don’t think i know most of your names, but i’m still grateful you decided to press subscribe and stayed on here.

(I wish i could add an unsubscribe button right here, but i haven’t figured out how to, sorry)

Back to the point: not everyone gets lots of anything when they start a substack, and maybe this post can be useful if you want to compare stats. I don’t think i’ve seen stats transparency from any other small accounts – which doesn’t mean anything since they’d also be small and have little reach so i’m unlikely to find them (serpent, circle, you know the taste of the tail as well as i do!).

I’m also going to add some advice and lessons learned at the bottom if you’re interested! Now let’s get into it:

The state of the stats

As of this day, i have 109 subscribers (that’s 1 every 3 days, i count that as a win!) and 5.4K total views over the year, for a total of 19 posts (not including this one).

My 3 best performing posts were:

• The review of the writing course was circulated a bit among the students of said course, some of which had the same griefs as me, hence the big amount of comments

• The end of year review seems to have been liked! I’ll definitely re-write another one like it this year.

• The AI post was timely with the explosion of vibecoding and my credentials as an actual software engineer helped (also i used a clickbaity title). I don’t want to be an AI person though, so it’s not greatly useful to know.

Here are the opening rates and views of my last 3 posts:

This is much more in line with my usual stats: between 100 and 150 views, 1 or 2 comments (it shows up as 2 or 4 because i replied 👀), and a handful of likes.

I haven’t gotten a direct sub from a post for the past 12 posts. This coincides with the end of the writing course, so i guess it’s correlated. Most people found me through the forums there. In total, the dashboard shows me 45 people came directly from posts.

I have been getting some new subs through Notes mostly. I can’t find the exact number in the analytics, but i often see 2 notifications in the row: people like a Notes and then subscribe. I guess my shitposting over there has some benefits?!

How are your stats going if you’re in similar place than me? Let me know in the comments or in DMs (i’ll keep if private).

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Last graph for now: traffic sources

As you can see, people mostly come from the substack network (i think that means Notes). There’s quite a few “direct” things, but i think that’s just me typing the URL directly in icognito mode when i’m on my work laptop.

Apparently some people found me through Google (i’m pretty sure all the DuckDuckGo hits are also me on the work laptop lol). I’m not doing any kind of SEO or other optimizations for search engines because that’s the biggest joy-stealer possible and i can’t be bothered.

Where am i going?

Substack and writing are hobbies to me, i don’t do it for money and i have no intention of ever making a living from it. My software engineering job thankfully pays me well while giving me enough free times in the evenings to enjoy myself, so i’ll be keeping it.

Because of that, i find most of the advice on how to grow a substack inappropriate. I don’t have a pain point that i’m solving for people, nor do i want to create a lead magnet or add paywalls anywhere. More importantly, i don’t want to mislead people with marketing tactics or clickbait titles.

I did it once actually, with the vibecoding post, and i think it sums up my feelings well: i only did it because i have little respect for people who use AI to do all their work for them, especially in a specialized job like software engineering which is fraught with dangers. So clickbait seemed fine. But i wanted to write the post because i thought there needed to be more of this type of writing, to warn off young impressionable people from relying on AI for stuff like building payment systems – and again, clickbait helps attract attention to the psa, so i guess it’s morally good.

In general though, i don’t want to be known as an AI person, or as a software engineer, or as a marketing asshole who ragebaits you and tricks you round and round. I want to attract people like me, who click off immediately when the stupid title doesn’t match the inside, who seeks “intellectual enrichment” said a friend, that is to say content around culture that’s entertaining but also has substance.

I was told to be louder

All in all, the 3 bits of advice i’ve kept have been:

• Post more on Notes

• Be a good netizen and like/comment on essays you like

• Make my homepage nice

I also don’t want to be known as someone who posts dumb useless chatgpt notes, so i don’t (how brave of me! i hope you clapped). I try to either shitpost (which is hopefully funny) or say interesting stuff. That means i do struggle with posting 1 Note a day, but i don’t want to force it. I’ve been filling the gaps with pretty photos of my journals and it’ll have to do.

Being the good netizen is moderately easy. I leave likes wherever i get to the end (since i click off rather quick on shitty essays), but i find it hard to leave a comment. I’ve been forcing myself to find interesting and relevant stuff to say, but sometimes i just end up with a “nice post, i liked it” and i find that mediocre. I’ll focus on improving that in the future!

I made me all pretty

Makes me sad that “pretty homepage” is always at the bottom of the advice lists, but i understand why: nearly no-one visits there, and it’s probably better to focus on having clickbaity featured images. But i don’t wanna, and since none of the other advice applied, i spent the time making pretty stuff.

I’ve decided to add a tiny bit of consistency in terms of background color and to mix analog and digital. I handcut letters from magazines, glued them to printer paper, and scanned them with my printer.

Then i use my ipad and procreate to add pictures onto the pinkish background, paste my scanned letters and stamps, and make it all somewhat visually pleasing.

Also i spent hours detouring the letters i use as dividers – it’s completely useless for most of you who read on the app or in email since the background is white, but if you come on my homepage, it looks pretty in transparency.

What else have I learned?

1. Would have probably grown faster if i had been focused on writing trendy pieces and put out one per week.

2. Things would be so much easier if i didn’t have morals and a strong sense of wanting to do things right. It’s not even perfectionism (although i also suffer from that), it’s just that i don’t want to put out half-assed takes on trendy topics that i would personally not want to read

3. This doesn’t mean you can’t have success – it just means i can’t lol. There are plenty of talented and exigent people on this platform who put out great work every week and succeed from it.

4. I probably should focus on one topic (books) and mostly stick to that. That’s what i originally wanted to do, but then the writing course was making us write personal essays so i kept doing that.

5. This makes sense because people (me) want to know what they’re into before giving up their email (i don’t think i’d give myself a subscribe right now).

6. Also, my best posts are about books and they are the ones people liked the most (except the AI one, but we’ve already covered that this isn’t the direction i’m going to – i want a hobby, not a repeat of my job), so it makes sense!

7. For all that i complain about not getting much attention, i’m very happy whenever you like or comment (please keep doing that!), and i have a rather decent opening rate (more than 30%, sometimes even 40%), so i must be doing ok.

That’s it, really! I’m not going to waffle on for too much more, when i don’t really have any other lessons to share. I guess the last one is: of course you’re not going to be famous on substack in a year, only a few outliers do, as for all other social media.

I feel a bit meh at having only talked about how people don’t like me enough, sorry, but that’s really the entire reason why i’m posting on substack. I like writing, true, but the writing can stay in the drafts. If i’m putting it out on the internets, it’s because i want to be seen. It feel so immodest and arrogant to say it out loud, but i don’t want to lie or fabricate feelings! This is a stats transparency post, so let’s be real <3

Now, i’ll stop here for today! I hope i didn’t turn you off by begging for attention (please click the little like button right below 😉) and i’ll see you next time!

Love,

PS: looking at my list of ideas, i think the next ones are going to be about pseudonyms, notetaking apps, and what it’s like to write about books on the american internet when you’re not at all american

Give me your email here to get notified :))

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Want to read more from me? This is me at my funniest:

And this is the post i’m most proud of writing (unimportant spoilers of Severance season 2, she’s really a side side character with 5 minutes of screen time):

Or you can read said 2 best performing posts:

I’m seeing a lot of personal curriculums1 going around, and while I don’t really have time for this right now, I desperately want to be kinda included in the fun. So here goes my reading list of books for this Fall season!

It’s also the entirety of my physical TBR, so I’ll admit I didn’t do any more curation on top of that. I really want to be rid of all of them on my shelves come January so that I can go on a shopping spree, guilt-free!

Fiction

In October, I plan to read MUSHROOMS! For a fungi fan, I still haven’t read Annihilation (or any VanderMeer for that matter) and I plan to remedy that. I got the shiny holo cover of books 1 and 2.

To keep with the horror theme, I also have Don’t Let The Forest In, which I bought because I saw the author shitpost on some platform somewhere and they were great ( , apparently the platform wasn’t substack).

For the rest of the fall, I’ll have:

• A Memory Called Empire by , which is apparently amazing, queer, melancholic, and very well written

• The Spare Man by , a comedy, to keep us warm in those weird times (and I don’t even live in the USA). I really want to get to Lady Astronaut next, but that’s not the one I bought for some reason?

• The Forever War, the opposite of a comedy, but also some hard scifi and I haven’t had any of that in a while. It’s also a classic of the genre, so it got this nice bright yellow cover.

  

Non fiction

I’m not breaking those down by month, because that’s too annoying and there’s no super strong theme between the books.

Well, now that i’ve written this, of course there is: I’ll be doing nanowrimo this November2, so i got some craft books to peruse. They should mostly get read in October (I’ve gotten started already) so that they can be used to prep. From the advice I’ve read, you should really only be writing during November, so I need to figure my stuff out before that.

• Creating Character Arcs – because I already know characters are my biggest weakness (maybe the autism and difficulties to understand others have something to do with it, but i’m not too sure)

• Save the Cat Writes A Novel — because they give you a spreadsheet with percentages of which parts of the book should be which length and in which order, and that’s all very soothing to me!

• On Writing Well — apparently a bible of something — writing, reading, editing?? Idk, I didn’t buy this, it was for free on the sidewalk so I took it.

On a completely different genre, I also have:

• A City On Mars: an exploration of the actual challenges of what it would mean to send people to live on Mars. Not in an Elon Musk kinda way, just in a science people are wondering kinda way.

• The Notebook – as the title says, it’s about notebooks and how people have used them over history. Could be nice (i like notebooks).

In the depressing genre:

• Autocracy, Inc by . Depending on how the world turns out, I might not, just to keep myself sane (or will devour it, out of morbid curiosity). I bought it because I liked the cover and the orange penguin (it’s my first penguin book!), also it won the Pulitzer prize, so why not!

• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. I’ll admit I bought it because of the wonderful pun lol. Also I’m in computer science so algorithms and data biases are orthogonal to my job. A bit afraid it’s outdated (came out in 2017).

• The Great Derangement, subtitled Climate Change and the Unthinkable, about how we speak and imagine stories around climate change and what that says of us. I read lots of good reviews of it so I’m excited (also it’s short and has big margins)

In the self-helpy genre:

• I kinda want to go back to How To Do Nothing, which I started and abandoned last spring. My main complaint was that there was nothing new, because everyone and their mother read it when it came out in 2019, so the ideas have permeated culture or something, and I’ve seen a bajillion youtube videos about it.

• I still have 3 weeks of The Artist’s Way to complete. I’m not liking any better than I did last time I wrote about it

Will this be manageable?

As we know, those kinds of lists (just like the curriculums), are fantasies – of course I can read all the paper books on my TBR before the end of the year! – that rarely get completed.

This one is meant to be moderately manageable, with the constraints i have for the next 3 months:

• of course, autumn stops on Dec 21st, so that means the end-of-year holidays aren’t included (so much less time to read).

• and i’ve decided to maybe enroll in nanowrimo (more precisely Heart Breathings’ offshoot because i like her vibe), so there won’t be much reading in November.

• i’m also shooting for a promotion at work somewhere in Jan/Feb so i need to put in my (normal, French, reduced) hours and can’t read on company time anymore (goodbye Friday afternoons 😞).

I think I can read all the stuff I planned if – and it’s a big IF – I don’t get distracted and buy anything else (or binge watch TV). That’s harder said than done, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

I was going to ask you: what books do you have on your TBR for fall? but now i hesitate in case it’ll tempt me into an impulsive purchase…

I’m also a bit uncertain about the amount of non-fiction on this list. It stems from a bunch of impulsive buys that one time I went to Scotland and had access to bookshops without any queues3, and I was on holidays so a) I was dreaming of the best version of myself who totally reads non-fiction for pleasure and b) money didn’t count.

Now that I’m stuck in front of the pile, I kinda regret it. I love love LOVE fiction, that’s what i read at night before sleep. I can’t quite find the same relaxation in nf, it feels like I need all my braincells for that — and since there’s no dramatic tension, I just close the book and go to sleep.

I’ll try to switch up my reading habit for this, but also I promise I’ll give myself a lot of slack and I’ll have permission to quit anything I don’t love after 30 pages. Vinted will take care of those copies, and so my conscience will be clean (and my wallet ever so slightly larger).

Some fun for the road?

I made punchcards to track my progress. It took a long time. I nearly lost the war with the printer. It wasn’t as fun as I thought it’d be.

Now the books better be good, and I better read all of them so I can post the punched out thing for brownie points on Notes, or else I’ll be mad 😭📇

I’ve made up my mind and decided to ask, and I promise I’ll still read all the comments: What are you reading this fall? Did you make yourself a curriculum? Are you reading new books or old favorites? Did you read anything on my list?

Read you next time,

Today, I’ll share some reflections on the first three weeks of the program. I’m writing this as I’m doing the program in July, on the Saturday before reading week 4 (it’ll come out later because I’m a champ at procrastinating spellchecking and creating graphics). And boy, do I have things to say!

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For those unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron, in which she presents a 12-week program for artists to reclaim their creativity and improve their mood with spirituality. Every week you read a new chapter, do writing exercises, and complete homework before starting all over again.

I appreciate the format: my autistic brain does very well with routine, habit building, and small bites of content with immediate application. But (because there’s a butt), I find that most of the advice given by Julia smells, baaaad, especially in a neurodivergent context.

God, are you there?

I’d heard chatter about the presence of god and religion in this book, but people caveated it because Julia says you don’t need god to read the book. In a way, that’s very true! She states directly in her intro that belief in her specific god isn’t required, and that it can be substituted by any other big force, or just glanced over.

I appreciate her efforts in being inclusive, but she fails in execution. It’s not that I don’t believe in her god, it’s that I don’t believe in any god at all, nor in any big hidden force, nor in any higher power of any kind!

And at that point, her argument fails on its face. Despite her efforts, her framework is still deeply rooted in belief in something. For Julia, creativity is spiritually significant. She systematically calls to that higher power to explain where inspiration comes from, to justify the origin of that force you’re nourishing yourself with, and where you’re getting your talent from. This is wonderful for her, and for all the people she helped, but since I don’t belive in shit, I just can’t access any of that advice!

For example, the conclusion of week 3 is about synchronicity. In theory, I agree with the basic idea (if you do stuff and meet people doing the same thing, you’re likely to talk to them and maybe get opportunities or stuff from that), but Julia’s description was calling on god and them answering prayers, and honestly that’s completely useless to me.

I don’t want any mystical in my creativity, thank you very much

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want that brand of mystical creativity in my life. The myth of the artist with muses and great inspiration is all good and dandy, but I don’t see how I could sustainably have that for myself and not be an exhausted, overwhelmed mess.

I don’t want to receive inspiration from god that needs to be received in all its glory and infinity and urgency. That’s just way too big for me. I want small, manageable, gentle creativity that I can fit into the little spaces of my life. I have a full-time job, can you see how impractical a creative fit at 10am would be?

The descriptions Julia gives of creativity also deeply resemble an autistic meltdown, and that’s just no fun at all. Or maybe just a special interest tunnel, but that’s hardly better because I come out the other way being just as tired and exhausted, and then I still need to do all the housework and go to work-that-pays-the-bills as well.

I just can’t have a mystical experience and go back to real life as if nothing happened! There needs to be some downtime, some recovery. Big emotions and tumultuous all-encompassing creative acts can’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a toll on the artist (I see why the greats are all insomniac addicts with a temper), and Julia ignores that. This romantic chaos that supposedly underlines creativity ignores all I need to be happy: order and routines, predictability in my schedule, and manageable sensory inputs.

One of my biggest pet peeves with The Artist’s Way so far is that Julia comes from a position of great privilege and doesn’t seem to know it. Setting aside the autism-specific stuff, we can look at morning pages: no matter how early I start writing them, I still have to log in for work at 9am, I can’t just stay there until my brain vomits 3 full pages! Julia sees the emotional burden that morning pages can provoke, but she glosses over the practical problems — and the program is full of them.

But I want magic in my life \*whines\*

But then we come to the actual tension in my life right now: I very much do desire a life filled with magic and romanticism and all that jazz! Now I can’t quit my job and start being an artist full-time, but I still want to feel special, for my life to be a story of its own.

I want romanticized walks along the Seine, coffees on a balcony, slow mornings with journal writing, and creative projects that feel meaningful without consuming my entire existence. I want the aesthetic of the artist's life — the notebooks, the inspiration boards, the dedicated creative space — scaled down to fit around my actual responsibilities.

I think my resistance to The Artist's Way goes deeper than just the god stuff, though. There's something about my relationship with this kind of romantization of thinking itself that makes Julia's mystical approach both appealing and impossible for me.

I know there's a causal relationship between my fixation on narrative and my ambivalence towards reality. I want events in my life to be meaningful, to be worthy maybe not on its own but against a broader unfurling story, to interact with other people in clear ways that build into something bigger. The idea that time could pass and nothing could come of it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes days end without offering anything remarkable, things are boring and forgettable. I know life can't be exciting all the time. But also, why can't it be?

This is where Julia's mystical creativity becomes seductive. Her version promises that every creative moment is divinely inspired, that synchronicities will guide you, that your artist's dates will reveal profound truths. It's narrative on steroids—life as constant meaningful development! And I want that with all my heart, while my brain is firing up all its neurons to keep me safe from the inevitable meltdown that would come from constant stimulation.

But I don't think my perspective is unique. A lot of people live their lives, consciously or not, in pursuit of narrative, and are then either gratified or dissatisfied by the result. "Do it for the plot," we tell ourselves, you know?

Oh wait, everyone feels this way

I initially stopped this piece after that "not unique" paragraph, but I realize I can't in good conscience end there. I'm not unique (duh), and I'm so not unique that all the good French poets talked about it before me (with much better words!)

The French have this whole phrase for it — "le désenchantement du monde" — which basically means we lost the magic when the world got modern. Baudelaire1 was crying about it in the 1800s, watching factories sprout all over Paris, and trying to find beauty in the grime. And here I am, 200 years later, having the exact same crisis!

It's weirdly comforting and deeply annoying at the same time. Like, great, I'm part of a grand tradition of people who can't just accept that the world is moving on, the train of progress, blah blah blah. But also, if we've been dealing with this for centuries and still haven't figured it out, what hope do I have?

The worst part is, now that I’ve remembered my literature classes, I did open those French poetry books, and yes, I did find it validating and soothing. How cliché; my teacher was right: art will help you when you feel sad.

Some argue that our desperate search for meaning in creativity is part of the problem. They say that we should accept the mundane nature of creative work, embrace the ordinary, and find peace in the absence of cosmic significance (or find a god, but I’m not leaning that way for now).

I think they're missing the point. It's hard and monotonous to be alive: the yearning for magic isn't the problem — the problem is that it's mostly inaccessible to us in this world. Julia’s (and society’s) idea of creativity demands too much: divine inspiration that can't be scheduled, overwhelming spiritual experiences that leave you drained, synchronicities that require constant vigilance for signs.

So I have no conclusion and no advice, only to try for yourself and find little bits of magic and happiness where you can. Sorry, that feels a bit off, a strange way to end this little newsletter — honestly this entire last section feels a bit unfinished. But then so do my thoughts on this topic: this is very much top of mind for me right now, and I am nowhere near having understood enough to make a clear stand.

I feel a bit upset and shameful at sending this to you. I have better standards than that for the quality of writing I want to put out — but this feels like a seasonal feeling other might also go through so it felt thematic! If you have any tips or revelations of your own, please do share them below, I am very much in need :)

On that wonderfully depressing tone, have a nice week and see you next time,

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Or if you need a pick me up, a lighter, funnier, brighter bit that i wrote:

If you want to stay melancholic, that one will do:

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As September approaches and sign-ups for new activities open, I’d like to take some time to promote my new favorite activity: Scottish Country Dancing.

Some background: I’m French (not at all Scottish), I hate dancing, I hate touching people (which is half of why I hate dancing), and I’m autistic (I hate new stuff, improvisation, not knowing how to act, ie all the other things needed for dancing).

The idea of “moving naturally” to music is paradoxical to me; it feels painfully alien. Why does everyone else look good and has a good time while I feel like a robot running low on battery? I learned music as a child, and was even in the school orchestra1, so it’s not like I have no rhythm or no idea how that works. Moving my fingers on the keys is all good and dandy, but my butt, is stuck in an invisible plaster cast and i’d like to keep it there, thank you very much.

All this to say, I’m far from the right candidate for dance classes. And yet, I’ve fallen in love with Scottish Country Dancing (abbrv. SCD because that’s a mouthful!). So let me tell you why.

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DIAGRAAAAAMS

Be still my geometric heart, here comes the best-selling, clickbait-but-delivers-on-its-promise, autistic-baiting, absolutely fantastic point of SCD: diagrams!

SCD movements involve skipping across the dancefloor with trajectories akin to that of a bee, and like a bee, we follow pre-planned, repetitive, unchanging choreographies. AND they’re written down in standardized, clear, bright, squarely-made diagrams. To my autistic brain, this is a GIFT STRAIGHT FROM HEAVEN!

There are 2 types of rhythms in SCD, and for each you need to learn 2 steps: one to stay in place and one to move; so in total you’re learning 4 (2 of which are variations of skipping like you did in kindergarten). Once you’ve mastered that, you’re good to go and learn all the different combinations.

You can turn around your partner holding hands, without holding hands, skip around in a circle, draw a figure eight around your friends, or do quite a few other formations (there are 354 represented in the archive, although that includes quite a few duplicates but a tiny bit different). And every single one of them can be neatly represented with tiny little squares and arrows. How wonderful :)))

Now, what better way to represent such a repetitive, logical, progressing choreography than… DIAGRAMS! The joy of my heart, the bottom of my soul, diagrams are my bread and butter, I cannot live without them.

This is just the way I was recruited: I wasn’t really convinced by the promise of “everyone can do it” and didn’t trust the “you really don’t need the flow” (because it’s always a lie!), but as soon as someone flung out a diagram from their bag, I was in.

Mandatory BYOS (Bring Your Own Stick)

My utmost favorite part of SCD is the stick you have to put up your butt. For someone who has no “moves,” it’s a godsend. The basic posture is standing tall and proud with your head up, straight as a broom, but with the arms slightly relaxed2. You will move your legs quite a bit, but always in a strictly sensible fashion, and your butt will stay firmly planted in its plaster cast. There’s no ambiguity about what to do with your body – the form is clear and consistent.

This is exactly what's missing from most dance forms – clear instructions! No one at a club ever hands you a manual for how to move your hips or what to do with your face. But in SCD, there's no mystery. Every movement has a name, a proper form, and a specific purpose.

What I love most is that at no point - and I mean NO EXCEPTIONS - do you have to "get loose," "feel the music," or "let it flow naturally." On the contrary, maintaining that controlled, dignified bearing is essential to the dance. After all, it's the Queen's dance - we're not here to "throw it back" or "drop it low"!

While this may remind you of ballet, there's a crucial difference: you can become proficient enough at SCD to enjoy yourself and participate in balls after just a few lessons, whereas ballet requires years of dedicated practice before you can perform even basic routines with any grace.

Social dancing is social distancing (no touching)

If you weren't already reluctant to touch people you don't know (I was), you might have become allergic to touch after the pandemic. Well, not to worry, SCD is bullish on social distancing! The standard formations keep dancers at a comfortable arm's length, and even partner work maintains plenty of personal space.

Unlike other social dances that require close embraces or constant physical contact, SCD emphasizes graceful spacing between dancers. When sets form, each person stands about one-and-a-half arm(s)' lengths from their neighbors—enough room to execute turns without invading anyone's bubble.

Movements involve skipping across the dancefloor all on your own, or at worst touching someone’s hand. The “holding” of hands is more of a lighter brush because you’re gonna let go in 2 seconds anyways. Even during more intricate formations, contact is minimal and fleeting. At worst, you’ll be touching both hands *gasp*!

There's something wonderfully liberating about dancing vigorously while maintaining your personal space bubble. You can focus on your own movements and footwork without worrying about awkward body contact or getting too close for comfort.

(the men are all barefoot in this video, honestly idk why and it’s kinda creepy. i promise in general we’re all nice and proper and wear cool dance shoes!)

Everyone else looks like shit

The slightly less good point of a formal dance activity is that everyone is old. Now, not everyone – some branches (Paris included, see above videos!) have managed to keep recruiting some new blood, but the average age is rather on the up side of the curve. It can feel isolating being surrounded by people in a completely different age bracket.

But I’ve found that this age gap actually helped me a lot! I’m not in the best physical shape3, so I’m always quite apprehensive when going into a new sports class. There’s nothing i hate more than being surrounded by young women for whom the exercises are super easy, who are super flexible and all that shit.4

SCD can be a strenuous activity if you do all the steps the right way, participate in all the dances of the night, and apply yourself to jumping the highest. HOWEVER, while some older dancers are in great shape (thanks to keeping up with the practice), many are not (because there’s only so much you can do once you reach 70 years old). They are still excellent dancers, with encyclopedic knowledge of the movements, their history, how to perform the most interesting combinations of steps, and will always end up in the right place at the right time.

BUT to do so, they “walk,” not “dance.” It’s a low impact, low(ish) cardio way of participating, that’s entirely acceptable in class and in balls. If you choose your partner well, you can end up in a low-intensity set of dancers, who will gladly point you in the right direction at every step and who won't yank you into one of those whirlwind circles spinning madly around and around, completing ten rotations before the rest of us can finish one.

All in all, the mix of ages has done great things for my confidence as a beginner: it’s ok to not be able to perform the steps from the get-go; half of the room won’t be doing them either (and never will again). And the other half of the room is showing you all the energy you can put in if you so wish, and the level of artistry you can aspire to.

(not gonna add a video for this one because that wouldn’t be very nice. I do stand by my point though)

Have I mentioned how old everyone is?

Being autistic, I find typical dance venues incredibly challenging. My brain doesn't filter background noise like neurotypical brains do - there's no such thing as "background" noise at a dance—it's all screaming right in my ear, all the time.

I’ve found that traditional SCD events (the ones that are marketed to everyone, including old people) are very accommodating of my needs! They start early in the evenings (Paris starts their balls at 7pm), don’t last too long (15 dances give you about 2 hours), and therefore end early too (Paris gets kicked out of our rented rooms around 9:30pm). Oh and everyone is old and kinda deaf, which means the music level is kept relatively low (so people can hear each other talking). It’s usually live music anyways, which sounds very different from modern amps or whatnots.

Of course, the younglings will go to the after party in some random flat with lots of alcohol and ear-destroying levels of music, as they do5. But for once, I can participate fully in the main event without having to manage sensory overload or excuse myself early. It's not that SCD was specifically designed for neurodivergent folks - it's just that the traditional format happens to create an environment where we can thrive.

Do you have a regular dance practice? What’s your relationship to dancing? I’d love to know if you were in the same position as me but learned to love “normal” dancing (like we see in the movies or nightclubs)!

You can either leave me a comment below (public) or reply to this email (only I will see! — and I don’t repeat secrets 👀)!

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Now, if this post is a bit too positive for you, and you’re craving my usual ranty, uptight and judgmental self, I’ll let you check out one of my other recent (or not so recent) posts:

See you next time,

So let’s go back to the sex scene in A Court of Thorns and Roses, and understand why they didn’t give me the ick and make me close it immediately.

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Before that, a tiny refresher on the plot for those who haven’t read it (but honestly my post from last week does the trick so much better 👀):

• In book 1 (also called ACOTAR3), our main girl Feyre (“FAY-ruh”, she’s not the fairy one though, completely human) gets into a Beauty and the Beast scenario where she’s captured by Tamlin (a Lord of the fairies) and has to fall in love with him to rescue his kingdom from the villain – she does, she nearly dies, she becomes a fae, all is saved, YAY

• In book 2 (also called ACOMAF4), turns out Tamlin is an abusive asshole, and Feyre escapes with a magic trick that allows Rhysand (another Lord, how else would she become a Lady duh) to kidnap her to his castle one week a month. He opens her eyes to the situation, she leaves Tamlin, falls in love with Rhys, turns out they’re fated mates. He nearly dies, she nearly dies, (+ a political magical plot behind the scenes with new villains they need to fight), all is saved, YAY

A gentler YA start

As is so often the case for women who write fantasy, Sarah J. Maas was pushed to tone down A Court of Thorns and Roses so it could be sold as YA5. The logic from her publisher was the usual mix: men don’t read fantasy by women, your Throne of Glass readers are already YA, and the romance makes it too soft for proper fantasy anyway. Despite the marketing, ACOTAR became a massive success with adult women — so massive that it kicked off a whole wave of fantasy-romance crossovers now branded as romantasy.6

I think that YA angle played a big part in why I got hooked in the first place. Book 1 leans hard into YA territory: less sex, less groping, fewer constant reminders that the characters are hot and desperate to get into each other’s pants. I don’t like those parts too much – have I said I was asexual and sex-adverse already? – so the YA packaging worked like a protective shield. It gave me space to get to know the characters before the clothes started flying off. Yes, the sex does show up eventually, but even then it’s dialed down enough that I could skim past without losing my place in the story.

What’s funny is that even with aphantasia, I can still wince at some of the most popular body descriptions. A lot of romantasy authors play in the bigger, bolder, gigantic-er field – to the delight of their readers! But even without a mind’s eye, I imagine that a cock so huge you couldn’t wrap your hands around it would be... uncomfortable. The YA-friendly edits kept that kind of talk to a minimum, and body parts relatively realistic (if you look past the bat wings), so it was much more approachable for me.

Book 2 is where the Adult label kicks in. I suppose the success of Book 1 with adult women convinced the publisher to drop the pretense7. That said, I sometimes wonder if Book 2 started off aiming for YA too, and then got upgraded with bonus sex scenes later. What strikes me now is that those scenes aren’t actually necessary to the plot. In a lot of romantasy, some crucial information – the prophecies, the schemes, the magic loopholes, etc – gets exchanged mid-thrust, which makes skimming dangerous. I personally hate it. I don’t want to do more than glance at those pages because otherwise I’m turned off entirely. But if I do that, I risk losing track of what’s going on.

It’s not that Maas writes those scenes better than anyone else in the genre. Let’s put aside the garbage books rushed to cash in on the trend, because that’s not productive. But even the decent ones lose me if they don’t have that YA buffer at the start. I also tried Maas’ new series Crescent City after I DNFed8 ACOTAR (more on that abandon later), but it was so filled with romance and sex from the get-go, tightly integrated into the plot, that I couldn't get into it.9

Intimacy in a Safe Place

Now let’s finally, actually address the fae in the room: sex. A Court of Thorns and Roses is not a demure, closed-door fairy tale: it birthed the fairy porn genre for God’s sake! As an asexual person, I often react to graphic sex scenes in fiction with anything from boredom to mild discomfort.10

I worried ACOTAR might be too much for me when the clothes started coming off. And indeed, there were moments I felt like an awkward eavesdropper more than an enraptured participant, but crucially, I never felt truly alienated. In fact, I was struck by how comfortable I was skimming over the intimate scenes, even if they didn’t arouse me in the way they might an allosexual11 reader. I’m still skimming because i don’t like to read the details of it, but the experience ended up being almost academic at times – observing how two characters connect physically, parsing what it meant for their relationship. It’s more like moving over the historical background of, say, the origin of thread used by peasants in 13th century France, in order to get to the part that interests me: what did their clothes look like. The origin of thread (or the details of sex) isn’t bad to read, or factually (morally) wrong, i’m just a bit bored and don’t really see the point.12

But then, why are those specific sex scenes not alienating to me, when so many others are? I think it’s because ACOTAR’s depiction of intimacy felt safe to me, in multiple senses.

First, from a narrative standpoint, the sexual content in ACOTAR is framed in a very consensual and emotionally-driven way between the characters we’re meant to root for. The first time Feyre and Tamlin become intimate, it unfolds after a significant build-up of trust and mutual longing. It’s heated – yes, furniture gets clawed and there are passionate bites involved – but Feyre is a willing, enthusiastic partner. The scene is written to be erotic, yet it didn’t strike me as vulgar or gratuitous; it felt like a natural culmination of their simmering tension. Crucially, consent and care are always evident.

Even later in the series, when the sexual encounters get more frequent and more explicit, the characters communicate and prioritize each other’s comfort. As someone who has no personal interest in sexual activity, I really appreciated this emphasis. It allowed me to read on without that internal siren going “this is gross or problematic – bail out!” I’ve encountered other books where dubious consent or hyper-realistic descriptions made me extremely uncomfortable. Romantasy in general gets a very bad rep, because most of the sex scenes are incredibly badly written, and say stuff like “a cock so big it can’t fit in my hands” or climaxes achieved through mind control, but i feel that ACOTAR thankfully steers clear of those pitfalls.13

In fact, Maas does something interesting by externalizing the truly predatory or abusive sexual behavior onto the villains, where it’s clearly condemned. For example, the main antagonist, Amarantha, rapes several of the male characters, including Tamlin and Rhysand. Notably, these violators,both male and female, are depicted as unambiguously evil, and they meet fittingly nasty ends.

The men are kinda nice?

Maas also creates a somewhat odd but effective dynamic: the male heroes are given vulnerable backstories such as having endured abuse, and the narrative firmly positions non-consensual intimacy as abhorrent. This is especially visible in Rhysand’s redemption arc. Once we learn that he was abused so badly for so many years, it’s easy to believe he does have good intentions, and there’s little doubt he means it when he speaks of consent to Feyre.

I also quite like how the male survivors were given trauma in a male-specific way. For example, for a significant portion of Book 2, Rhysand denies — even to himself — that he was raped, insisting instead that he went along with Amarantha’s demands to protect his people. And in a way, he did: he chose not to resist, hoping to spare his cities from her wrath. But that doesn’t make it any less coercive. His response mirrors real-world patterns, where men often struggle to name their experiences as harm — instead framing them as sacrifice, strategy, or duty. The narrative doesn’t mock him for this or brush it aside; instead, it gives him space to reckon with it on his own terms. His eventual confession of the pain he endured marks a turning point, deepening the connection between him and Feyre — both of whom have been abused, both of whom are trying to learn how to be safe again. This mutual vulnerability becomes the emotional spine of the book, allowing their relationship to develop not through savior dynamics, but through recognition.

By contrast, Tamlin never articulates his own trauma — it lingers as subtext, manifesting instead through control, silence, and emotional shutdown. His refusal to acknowledge the harm done to him ultimately isolates him. He doesn’t have space to grieve, and doesn’t really have much of a friend circle to rest on for help. His mental health is neglected and his trauma results in emotional suppression and silence, which keeps him in the cycle of abuse.

It’s not about me

What remained on the page for the romance was intimacy with a halo of safety around it – something passionate, yes, but also tender, protective, and based on trust. That made it far easier for me to engage with. I could vicariously appreciate the idea of that physical closeness without any of the real-world fear or distaste I might normally feel. It’s fiction; it’s sanitized passion. There’s no risk, no lingering discomfort once I shut the book. Everything is neatly confined to the realm of fantasy where no one gets an STI or has an awkward convo about boundaries – those things either don’t exist or are glossed over in this world.

Reading these romantic and sexual scenes as an asexual, aromantic person, I had the comforting distance of knowing it’s not about me. I wasn’t imagining myself in Feyre’s place (I never “self-insert” when I read; the concept of wanting to be swept off my feet by a domineering fae lord is frankly more terrifying than titillating to me). Instead, I felt like an observer in a safe bubble, almost like a researcher watching an exotic animal do its mating dance – fascinated, maybe a little amused, but untouched.

One asexual acquaintance of mine quips that she reads romance like she’d watch a documentary about mountain climbing: utterly intrigued by the feats on display, but with zero desire to participate herself. That captures my experience perfectly. ACOTAR let me watch these characters fall in love and consummate that love with all the poetic fervor in the world, while I remained curled up on my sofa, an impassive if not intellectually engaged onlooker. And because I don’t visualize the scenes , I experienced them almost entirely as words and emotions, not as a vivid sexual slideshow.

I was more invested in what it meant for Feyre and her love interest – how it signaled a shift in their relationship, how it affected their trust – than in any physical sensations described. In a way, I think my detachment actually heightened my appreciation of the writing and emotional beats. I noticed the metaphors, the little moments of vulnerability in the dialogue post-sex, the way those scenes were less about body parts and more about two lonely people finding solace in each other. It was intimacy painted in broad, dreamy strokes, not gritty realism. And that, to my surprise, I could not only tolerate but actually enjoy as part of the story’s tapestry.

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is this: I never felt excluded by the romance in ACOTAR, even if I couldn’t relate to it from personal experience. The book invited me in as a spectator rather than demanding I empathize as a participant. That made all the difference. I could care about the romance without yearning for it. I could be moved by Feyre’s happiness without once desiring a similar situation for myself. It’s a delicate balance, but when a story nails it, it creates a truly inclusive kind of magic – one where even a loveless soul like me can bask in the glow of fictional love.

Roses in Reality vs. Roses in Fiction

At the end of this journey, I found myself reflecting on the nature of fantasy versus reality in a new light. I’ve often been asked, sometimes skeptically, why I even bother reading or watching romances if I’m aromantic and asexual. Isn’t it boring or off-putting? I usually answered with something along the lines of, “Well, I enjoy the characters or the humor,” or “I like some romances in subplot doses.” But now I think I have a better answer, one crystallized by my experience with A Court of Thorns and Roses: I can enjoy fictional romance precisely because it’s fictional. Its unreality is not a bug – it’s a feature.

In real life, the kind of passionate love depicted in ACOTAR is something I will likely never feel. And I’m okay with that; it’s not a source of sorrow for me, just a fact of who I am. But in fiction, I get to witness an idealized version of romance, one unencumbered by the parts that repel or alienate me. The fictional romance remains perfect and untouchable – an untarnished ideal – because it’s not mine. I can savor the rose without pricking my finger on any thorns. There’s an almost poignant irony in this: I, who have never experienced romantic or sexual desire, found myself swooning over a romance novel. It didn’t change me or “cured” anything (trust me, I closed the book still entirely asexual and aromantic), but because it allowed me a safe window into that world of feeling. Through Feyre’s eyes, I could taste the adrenaline of falling in love, the solace of finding a partner who truly sees you, the triumph of a love that beats the odds. None of it is real, and that’s exactly why it works.

When I finished A Court of Thorns and Roses, I had to laugh at myself a little. Here I was, an French aro-ace reader who typically disdains romance, feeling a warm glow because two imaginary faeries got their happily-ever-after. The me from a few years ago might have cringed; the me now has made peace with the paradox. Loving a romantasy story doesn’t make me any less asexual or aromantic. If anything, it underscores how one’s orientation isn’t a simple on/off switch for what stories we can enjoy. We don’t need to want a romance for ourselves to appreciate the narrative beauty of one. Sometimes it’s precisely our not wanting it in reality that makes it beautiful in fiction. For me, romance in books can be like a work of art in a museum: I can admire its colors and composition, be moved by it, even cherish it – all while never once feeling the impulse to take it off the wall and make it part of my everyday life.

And so I admit it: I loved A Court of Thorns and Roses. I loved it for its thrilling fantasy adventure, for its subversive take on fairy-tale love, for its indulgent trope-fest that made me giggle and gasp in equal measure, and yes, even for its intimate moments that gave me a peek into a human experience I’ll never quite share. It swept me away and then gently returned me to my own world, unharmed and perhaps a little wiser. That’s the promise of a good story, isn’t it? – to let us live a different life for a while, with no lasting consequence except insight and empathy.

In the end, I remain what I was: a woman who does not feel romantic or sexual attraction. The difference is, I no longer feel like romance is an alien language meant for others. I can read it fluently, even if I don’t speak it natively. I can take joy in its telling. Feyre’s happily-ever-after remains unsullied in my mind, a vivid myth that hasn’t been dulled by any messy reality of my own. Perhaps that’s the secret: for those of us who stand outside the garden of love, fictional roses are the ones that never wilt, never draw blood. They are, in a word, perfect – precisely because we will never pluck them. And so we can love them, in our own curious, detached, and wholehearted way, for as long as we wish.

So, what did you think? Leave me a comment below (public) or reply to this email (private, only i see it)!

Did I manage to give you another perspective on romantasy, if you weren’t the target audience? Are you interested in reading ACOTAR now?
And if you are the audience, how do you experience those books? Do you lap it up, skim some bits, don’t feel anything? I’d love to compare notes!

Reminder you can read the original post here:

Further reading:

• On Pleasure & Violence In Paranormal Romance, an interview of Sarah J Maas and Laurell K. Hamilton for ReactorMag

• A different perspective by Allie Daisy King, who is asexual and still loves smutty romance for what it is (instead of skimming it like i do)

Thank you to everyone who helped me write this post: , , , , .

I never meant to read a fantasy romance novel, let alone fall in love with one. As a 24-year-old woman who is both asexual and aromantic — that is to say I don’t feel any kind of sexual desire, nor do I fall in love — I’ve spent most of my life feeling alienated by stories that revolve around grand passions and steamy encounters. Romance, to me, has always been a foreign country: alluring in theory, but not somewhere I’ve ever wanted to visit.

Add to that the fact that I have aphantasia — my mind’s eye is essentially blind — and you’ll understand why “his smoldering gaze” and “her flowing locks” do absolutely nothing for me. I don’t just feel detached from fictional intimacy; I can’t even picture it — and so I’ve spent years assuming romance in fiction just wasn’t written for people like me (because it’s not).

So it was with equal parts skepticism and curiosity that I picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses, (known by its acronym ACOTAR to millions of ardent fans. The year was 20201, and this book had taken the internet by storm. On BookTok and Goodreads it was lauded as the height of “romantasy,” a hybrid of epic fantasy and bodice-ripping romance. Friends who know my sci-fi/fantasy leanings insisted I give it a try, assuring me ACOTAR had enough magic and adventure to make the love story go down easy.

I skeptically cracked the cover, fully expecting to DNF2 by chapter three. Instead, to my own astonishment, I was hooked. I tore through the book in two feverish days. By the end, I found myself emotionally invested in a fictional romance for the first time in my life. The obvious question hit me: Why did a romance-averse, aphantasic, aro-ace reader like me end up loving a fantasy romance about fairy lovers?

To explain why A Court of Thorns and Roses captivated me, I need to first convey how profoundly unlikely that was. As a child, I skipped the “kiss the prince” pages in fairy tales because they meant nothing to me. In my teens, while my peers were swooning over movie heartthrobs3 and trading dog-eared romance paperbacks, I was trying to read a popular YA romance, hitting the inevitable chapter where the love interest’s shirt comes off, and feeling utterly lost. Was I supposed to be excited? All I could think was: this scene is doing nothing for me, why are we detouring from the plot?

By the time I was 20, I had confidently accepted that I was aromantic4 and asexual5 and that the genre of star-crossed lovers and steamy clinches6 just wasn’t my genre. If anything, I was slightly judgmental about it. I’d inwardly groan at the clichés: love triangles, jealous alpha males, destined soulmates, gratuitous sex scenes to keep the reader interested.

Frankly, I often found fictional romance boring at best and baffling at worst. I approached romantic tropes the way an anthropologist might approach a strange cultural ritual: with detached, academic interest and a bit of ironic amusement.

You can imagine, then, my attitude going into A Court of Thorns and Roses. The book’s premise is its romantic core: a human girl, Feyre, is taken captive by a lethal faerie lord, Tamlin, in a deadly enchanted kingdom — and of course they begin to fall in love…

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The Familiar Surprise of Fairy Tales

A big part of what ACOTAR did, I eventually realized, was mix the familiar with the unexpected in a way that worked for me. Contemporary media often returns to an old truth: we’re drawn to stories that echo familiar patterns, with an interesting poke of surprise. Maas’s writing hits exactly that sweet spot. She is deliberately playing with well-worn tropes — and then tweaking them just enough to feel fresh.

On the “comforting” side, the story structure of book 1 is a classic fairy-tale quest: “Beauty and the Beast” revisited. Maas serves up the expected beats: initial hatred and fear between pretty Feyre and her captor Tamlin, forbidden wanderings in magical gardens, and a growing sexual tension. He’s every inch the brooding “beastly” love interest — cursed to wear a mask, hiding both his face and his feelings.

Normally, I’d scoff at that archetype like I did for every supernatural bad boy creature since Twilight7, and ACOTAR certainly comes close to the line. Tamlin’s jealous outbursts and territorial behavior are portrayed as dangerously attractive in the early chapters, in line with a certain romance-novel logic that equates “angry and possessive” with “passionately in love.” Feyre herself, who’s had a loveless upbringing, interprets Tamlin’s protectiveness and bursts of fury as evidence that she’s special to him. I remember bristling at that — part of me was mentally shouting, “Red flag, girl, this isn’t healthy!” Tamlin even restrains Feyre with magic when she disobeys him, scoring dangerously high on the violent-o-meter. It was the kind of dynamic that usually would have me slamming the book shut.

But here’s where the “gentle touch of surprise” came in. Maas wasn’t content to simply romanticize the Beauty-and-Beast trope; she actively subverted it as the story progressed. About three-quarters through the novel, the plot took a hard turn that utterly changed the game. Tamlin is kidnapped by an evil faerie queen, and suddenly Feyre — our “Beauty” — must rescue her “Beast” by descending into a perilous underworld. This gave Feyre agency in a way I hadn’t expected; she transforms from prisoner to savior, proving her love through bravery and wits rather than just sweet words.

For the last quarter of the book, we quickly move back to the plot devices of fairy tales — 3 deadly trials (including a goddamn riddle) to save a prince — but with a tone shift to the darker tones of old fairy tales instead of YA romance. Once Feyre is under the mountain facing the villain queen, Tamlin — who had loomed so large as the love interest — suddenly fades into the background. He becomes oddly passive, more damsel than hero, barely interacting with Feyre at all while she suffers on his behalf.

Now, this is a perfect execution of a fairy tale retelling! I’ve become jaded from the bit-lit8 era, to see the same stories be told in nearly the exact same way, over and over again. For once, we get a new development — and one that truly feels empowering for our heroine. Up until the end, Tamlin doesn’t come to the rescue, or manage to free himself at all. Ok, he does deal the killing blow, but Feyre was actively dying at this point so the scene faded to black and was explained to her in 2 short sentences lol.

Then the narrative energy pivots sharply towards Rhysand — a dark, enigmatic faerie lord who is ostensibly an enemy but aids Feyre for his own mysterious reasons. He’s fascinating when Tamlin, in captivity, has gone dull. Feyre finds Rhys infuriating, dangerous, immensely attractive, and the reader can’t help but notice the chemistry. I had a moment of, “Wait a minute, this guy is more interesting… is the story actually leaning that way?” But by the end of the book, Tamlin and Feyre do reunite and share the expected fairy-tale kiss among “meadows of wildflowers”. A neat happily-ever-after…on the surface.

The Big Love Switcheroo

Fairy tales and modern romance are natural companions. They both heavily rely on tropes and repetitive structures — girl meets boy, boy dates girl, girl kisses boy, boy marries girl. It’s one of the main characteristics of the genre, and it serves the similar goals: be entertaining and comforting — we know there’ll be a happy ending, so we can let go and enjoy the story.

But there are things you just don’t do in romance, like changing out the main love interest. You can get away with it in “family” series, where you switch out the heroine for her sister in each book. But in a standalone book, you only want to let go of Prince Charming until things cool down a little, so that you can build the tension back up with heaps of jealousy and ultimately have your heroes making up in the corner. You don’t, ever, switch your dude out entirely after building him up for 400 pages!

But it turns out (as the sequel confirms in spectacular fashion) that Maas was not actually endorsing the controlling Beast as the ideal partner — it was just the partial, biased, somewhat unreliable narration that comes with a teenage girl. In the next book, Maas flips the script completely. Tamlin had been neglecting his beloved Feyre, refusing to help her with the trauma she endured to save him, isolating her from her friends, controlling her movements and clothing — all under the guise of safety from the enemies they just escaped. In book 2, he finally breaks into the visible stages of domestic abuse, with bouts of rage that destroy her room and belongings, dangerously throwing books at her face, and ultimately holding her prisoner in his castle.

From there on, we switch into the main fairytale theme of book 2: a retelling of Persephone and Hades. Rhysand — High Lord of Night and resident of the very literal Court of Nightmares, also under a fricking mountain — exploits a magical loophole to whisk Feyre away for one week each month. While she initially experiences it as an abduction (and rightfully so!), Maas uses that forced proximity to slowly elevate Rhysand as the true love interest who values Feyre’s freedom and strength.

In contrast to Tamlin, Rhysand allows her to train and learn to defend herself from her still-present enemies. He teaches her to read — the very skill she lacked to win the last trial when she was rescuing Tamlin — and he also becomes her guide into the laws and rituals of the Faes, allowing her more autonomy and letting her make her own informed decisions.

Maas used this structural shift in the love interests to quietly critique the very tropes she’d been indulging. The feminist reader in me found it deeply satisfying that the tale ultimately rejected the old “angry possessive male = romantic” notion. Instead, true love in ACOTAR is built on mutual respect and the heroine’s empowerment. That thematic undercurrent resonated with me, because it addressed one of my core frustrations with romance tropes. Maas gave me the trope payoff and a critique of the trope, all in one package. I was both amused and impressed — it’s as if the book got one step ahead of my eye-rolling and said, “I know, I know this is problematic — trust me, I’m going somewhere with it.”

Fairy Tales Have Good Bones

Aphantasia means I can’t see anything inside my head. Now, that can be somewhat of a problem when reading, because it means I can’t always enjoy all the descriptions as they were meant to be. I make do though, and I can still enjoy most books.

But something that struck me while writing this piece is that fairy tales are an excellent base for me to enjoy! I’ve heard the stories a thousand times, often as a child in picture books, in the Disney adaptation, read at school, at home, by grandma who made funny faces… I have a thousand experiences of them, in all their details, so even if I can't picture any of it, they are associated with lots of good feelings. The very derivativeness of ACOTAR paradoxically makes it so much more vivid and fresh in my head.

Another stroke of genius from Maas, is pairing up on the love-interest switch with a fairy tale switch. In the first 2 books, we were starting essentially from scratch again in terms of plot, and redoing the entire dance of courting. Book 3 doesn’t — no change of boys, no change of tales — and it felt dull and boring to me. Somehow re-doing it all again was more fun that continuing the relationship!

On a less analytical level, I also have to admit: all those tropes I thought I hated? When executed well, they are fun. The novel is shamelessly trope-dense — it stuffs in everything from the “enemies-to-lovers” setup, to the mystical “soulmate bond”, or even the paint-by-numbers melodrama of “there’s only one bed and it’s so cold outside”. Normally, I’d snort at a contrivance like that, but by the time it happened, I was so invested in the Feyre/Rhys dynamic that I relished the tension. It turns out I can enjoy a good trope as much as the next girl, when it’s given a fresh context and when I care about the characters!

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Did I make you want to start this series? Are you yourself asexual or aromantic? If so, what is your relationship to romance in books or tv?

Thank you to , , and for helping me edit this essay.

Further reading about aphantasia:

At first, you decide not to, because that’s what smart people do. But then you fail the captcha, so you try again on the next slide. This time it’s traffic lights. And you select the itsy-bitsy bit that sticks out of the main box…

And you fail again. Why? Are CAPTCHAs just badly designed? Am I just bad at them? Somehow my mom never gets stuck (and she’s not good with tech), so what’s the trick?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you squinted at distorted text

Before the motorcycles and traffic lights, there were squiggly letters.

By the early 2000s, the internet was shifting from a nerd playground to something more mainstream. Normal people were signing up for email accounts, leaving comments, joining forums. And with them came spam — lots of it. Bots flooded sign-up forms, scraped data, posted junk links, and overloaded forums with scams and nonsense. It wasn’t just annoying; it could bring down entire sites. Web services needed a way to separate humans from scripts — quickly.

The original CAPTCHA was simple: show users a warped mess of letters and numbers, and ask them to type it in. A digital eye test of sorts. It worked because bots couldn’t read – at this time, machine vision was all but a scifi dream. To bots, a distorted “g” might as well have been a Jackson Pollock.

These tests spread fast. Yahoo, Google, MSN, — everyone slapped CAPTCHAs onto their forms. The word CAPTCHA itself became the catch-all term1. It wasn’t user-friendly — even humans struggled to read the mess — but it worked well enough.

Your Civic Duty: Typing “Participated” into a Box

By 2007, the text-based CAPTCHA got a small upgrade. Instead of random squiggles, it started pulling real words from scanned books — fragments that OCR2 software couldn’t read. Ink smears, crooked printing, faded letters. Too messy for machines, but still legible to humans.

That was the premise of reCAPTCHA. It looked like a normal challenge, but behind the scenes, users were helping digitize old books and newspapers. One word in the test was already known — it was just checking if you were human. The other word was unknown. That was the real goal: get millions of people to transcribe it. In 2010, it’s estimated that 100 million CAPTCHAs were completed every single day.

Most users didn’t realize they only needed to get one word right — they just tried to do both. Which, of course, was exactly the point.

And naturally, the bots got better. Of course they did — we were the ones training them. Every time someone typed in a blurry word, it became another labeled datapoint for OCR. After years of this, machines started beating us at our own test. So text CAPTCHAs had to go. The future needed images.

How the “dog” caught the “car”

Once bots learned to read, we moved on — because nothing can stop progress, not even the bots we’re trying to stop. In the early 2010s, CAPTCHAs started showing image grids instead — blurry pictures of pets, food, storefronts, street signs. You’d be asked to click all the chimneys, or all the tennis balls.

This wasn’t just about keeping bots out anymore. The OCR trick had worked so well, big tech recycled the formula — this time to train computer vision. Early image CAPTCHAs like Asirra asked users to distinguish cats from dogs. It was simple, effective, and gave researchers a goldmine of labeled data. At launch, humans passed it 99% of the time. Bots had no chance. But that didn’t last: within a year, researchers had trained models that could solve it 10% of the time. But at scale, “barely good enough” is all you need to cause damage.

Since 2012, Google has leaned hard into visual grids: crosswalks, buses, fire hydrants. Not coincidentally, the same things their self-driving car project needed help with. Every click on a blurry stop sign becomes training data for a neural net behind the scenes.

So now, here we are – staring at a little square. A sliver of a traffic light poking in. Should you click it?

The arms race of getting all your data

By now, the image itself is a decoy — a user-friendly wrapper for what’s really going on. What determines whether you pass a CAPTCHA isn’t what you click, but how you click it. Mouse movement, hover time, typing rhythm. Google’s reCAPTCHA doesn’t just ask if you’re a human — it watches you act like one. And if your setup looks too clean, too fast, or too private… well, that’s suspicious.

This is why you can click the square with the tiny sliver of traffic light — or not — and still pass. There’s no correct answer. It’s not about accuracy; it’s about probability. You just have to act enough like a human, on a device that acts enough like everyone else’s.

And if that sounds a little shady... well, it is. Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 is entirely invisible — no checkbox, no challenge. It runs in the background, collecting behavioral signals and browser data, scoring how likely you are to be a bot.

This 2023 study found that all current CAPTCHA challenges not only cost users a lot of time, they discriminate based on education, and worse still, they are useless to combat bots.3 Modern spam systems run circles around them. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT can solve all variations of them, which is what allows for the “search the internet” capability. Funnily enough, they use CAPTCHAs themselves as anti-bot prevention.4 But the grid puzzles stick around not because they work as gatekeepers, but because they work beautifully as data funnels.

And you know what? That tiny square with the sliver of traffic light? Click it. Don’t click it. It doesn’t really matter. Just move your mouse like you mean it – and be a good little product they can harvest.

So… what now?

So, if you’ve been failing CAPTCHAs to the point of losing your mind — congrats. That probably means you’ve managed to make your browser just private enough to be suspicious. Honestly, I respect it. Keep going.

That said… I’ve eased up on my own adblockers. Not because I’ve stopped caring about privacy, but because, well, I need to get through forms without doing six rounds of traffic lights. I’m all for giving Big Tech the middle finger — but I’d also like to browse in peace.

So my work laptop? Wide open. No shields. No blockers. It’s not really mine anyway. I don’t do anything personal on there. It’s already compromised by design — might as well let the bots think I’m the most average, compliant human on earth. My personal laptop is still a bit more secure, but I don’t block all cookies as I used to, just enough so I can browse in peace (which is worse: endless captchas or 5 pop-ups?).

If this all feels a little more twisted than you expected… yeah. Same here.

Want to read more from me? Here are 3 pieces I think you’ll enjoy:

• How to not vibecode yourself in the foot, or some advice as a software engineer so that you don’t regret using AI to code

• There is no TV inside my mind, about my experience with aphantasia (i can’t see shit when i close my eyes)

• Dreaming up the threats of the future (on the French army’s payroll), about that time we the French paid scifi writers a fuck ton to imagine all the dangers we’ll face in the 2030s

Thank you for reading and see you next time! The next post will probably be about Severance (i know, shoring up after the storm) and more specifically the character of Gretchen. Putting that here in case you’re reading, so that you hold me accountable :)

edit: well I ended up switching the order of those posts, so you can read the Gretchen piece here <3

Thank you to everyone who helped me edit or encouraged me to write this post: , , , , .

I’ve recently re-read Tracy Durnell’s Using personal weeknotes as a tool for attention, and i’ve decided to do the same! I realized i was reading hers all the time and always found some value in them, so here goes.

Weeknotes are a little summary of my week, published in public. They’ll include some stats to keep me accountable about projects (typically writing, publishing, notes, …) and some random collections of links, thoughts, pictures.

I’m very much doing this for the exact same reasons as Tracy, so check out her post above if you want to know more. And check out her blog in general, she’s great!

Now, i don’t want to spam anyone, so i’ve made a different category for them. In short, if you don’t want to see those, and only want to receive my usual essays, click this unsubscribe link and toggle the Weeknotes setting.1

Reminder of my posting frequency if you’re afraid of spam (i very much am): at most 2x a month for regular essays, and at most 1x a week for those weeknotes (ie 4x a month, if and only if, i remember to do them, and don’t loose interest).

Subscribe now

Let’s get started:

Highlight starting this weeknotes practice

Looking forward to watching Murderbot (my reward for writing and getting this out!)

Stuff i did this week

because there’s nothing like self-promotion to start the week with :))

• i published an essay about the character of Gretchen in Severance. As i said in this note (spoilers in both links!), i have a lot of gripes with season 2 in its pacing and its handling of the mystery elements. However, Gretchen truly isn’t one of them. She was perfectly written and is one of my favorite parts!

• i researched stuff for 4,5h

• i wrote for 4h

• i spent 50 minutes writing and publishing notes (for a total of 6… could do better!)

  • i’m very bad at self-promotion and short form taling, but i really want to improve that!

• I discovered Calvin Drifter Studio and his Procreate tutorials. He’s great at explaining, and the level of difficulty is just right for a complete beginner like me.

• I’ve started to make sticker templates for my new planner! I bought an Erin Condren planner, and they’re perfect for adding lots of stickers to. I’m playing with my Silhouette machine and getting stuff ready (the planner starts in July).

  • the hope is to make stickers at home, with my own designs (well, reproduced from tutorials, but still)

  • great discovery: watercolor brushes! They make very simple designs look good and like they’re more complicated than they are — but they’re super simple to use! Once again, i’m using Calvin’s pack, but there are a ton available on the market

• failed to get Lorde tickets… i was third in the Ticketmaster queue, but my browser just crashed and didn’t load the seat selector thing so it sold out in 2 minutes before i could get anything :,(

Random stuff i'm thinking about

• about hobbies: everyone is saying - don't do it for other people, don't be performative, do it for yourself... but honestly if i don't do it for others, with some pressure to make it complete enough that i can show it off, then i just won't do it at all. It's great that you can make yourself be free of external stimuli and stuff, but i would like you to stop shaming me for not being able to. It takes effort to do tasks, even if i enjoy them, and i don't want to be "less than" when i read a book because i'll write a review, or draw a picture so i can post it on Substack.

• what it means to be pseudonymous on this blog, what i tell and what i lie about, and why was it so hard to choose a name? Will probably be my next essay.

• a retex on swimming and the 0 to 1650 program (0to5k in the pool). I've finished week 3 out of 6, so you'll see that post in a few weeks! Or maybe i’ll hype myself up and make little doodle to post on Notes instead?

• why do people keep trying to writing fiction on substack? Little ranty note bc i hate to navigate stories on here

• reminder: Mother’s Day is next week in France!

• Substack's Pricing Model is Fine, Actually, ie why it's not a good idea to tip writers, actually (duh). I see this idea thrown around way too much, but i really don't see how it can work, and not bring writers back to a newspaper model where they are each paid 2 pennies per post.

  • Just look at how Medium writers are faring: it's not at all better to have that "general" sub that gets distributed among the people who read. Same thing for youtube: the big players get all the money and everyone else is fighting for scraps

I need advice on…

• 🖨️ recommendations for a printer!

  • I’m thinking of going for Epson ET-8550 because it’s:

    • available in Europe

    • a “tank” machine (i’m done buying cartridges!)

    • able to do big formats (not that i’ll use them, but i like the idea lol)

    • not too too expensive (600€ is the top end of my budget)

    • good quality for pictures (and stickers!!)

  • but if you have any other recommendations, please leave them below or reply to this email :))

Currently reading

A Drop of Corruption, book 2 of The Tainted Cup (60% in)

I loved book 1, even though i'm not usually one for detective stories — the fantasy elements drew me in and kept me interested. For now i'm not convinced about ADC, i don't get the same pull. I think it’s because they aren’t talking about mushrooms and fungi and contamination as much, it’s much more of a normal story and i’m kinda bored.

Endnotes

Well, that was it. Thanks for reading if you did, reminder you can unsubscribe just from the weeknotes by clicking the button below and toggling “weeknotes” only :))

If i sparked any thought, question, answer, please leave them in the comments, DM me, or reply to this email (only I see email replies).

See you next week.

Edit: i’ve abandoned this idea of weeknotes after all, it’s a bit too much to do, and it’s hard to keep it focused without a clear direction. I’ve found that it’s actually better to post those little things bit by bit on Notes as they happen, instead of making a round up!

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