The Farmstead

Snowflake challenge #2: Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

The theme of this post is Gallaghers Being Cute With Animals. It's Mucca's fault, she enabled me.

Noel professes very much NOT to be an animal person, but look at him.

This is Boots, whom Noel wanted to name Mr. Whiskers. Not that he cares! Definitely not.

Meanwhile, Liam is an animal person all day long. He currently has cats Sid and Nancy and a dog named Buttons, who he adopted from a rescue in Thailand. He submitted an application through the regular channels, and the people there were half-convinced it was a hoax. The whole story is very cute.


Liam asleep with Buttons.


Liam awake with Buttons.

When he adopted Sid from a shelter in 2018, that was pretty cute, too. Liam Gallagher: can't resist rubbing his face all over a kitten, any more than the rest of us can.


In conclusion, a recent tweet:

I guess I might finish another book before year’s end, but this feels close enough to be pretty safe. NB I have reviews for most of these books in my books tag.

How many books did you read this year? Any trends in genre/length/themes/reading patterns/etc?
Books read: 25
Pages read (roughly): 7450

Relative to past years, more murder mysteries, more rereads (five), more older stuff (four before 1940). Less straight horror. Probably more textually queer stuff? I read a lot on airplanes. I took almost the whole summer off from reading and watched movies instead.

I had a mountaineering phase kickstarted by that one Jon Krakauer book, which also meant reading way more nonfiction than usual. Apparently the key to reading nonfiction is to have specific topics you want to know about, rather than just being like “I want to Learn Things.” Who could have foreseen!

What are your top 3 books that you read this year for the first time?
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Yes, it really is that good, just like everyone says.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. Beautiful prose, top-notch worldbuilding, and some great horror moments.

A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. A shot STRAIGHT to the id.

What's a book you enjoyed more than you expected?
Maybe The Secret of Chimneys, an Agatha Christie novel that I probably read at some point but had forgotten basically all of. The other thing I’d forgotten: how fun Christie is when she’s really on her game. This was a rollicking delight.

Which books most disappointed you this year?
It was disappointing to realize how much worse the sexism was in the Pern books than I remembered. Just absolutely soaking in it. Ugh.

Also, wow, I hated Wild Spaces by SL Coney. Haaaaated.

And I reread Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys and didn’t enjoy it as much the second time around. There felt like too many characters, too thinly characterized. I still love Aphra and the worldbuilding, though.

Did you reread any books? If so, which one was you favourite?
I reread several this year, but the one that I enjoyed the most and definitely the one I spent the most time with was Moby Dick. The langague, gosh. Good enough to eat. Having reacquainted myself with the story, I think I’m going to keep just dipping in and out of it every so often. I found and bought a physical edition I really love, the Canterbury Classic "Word Cloud" edition that is just a pleasure to read and makes dipping in very appealing.

On a related note, I think this year was the tipping point to me becoming a prose snob. The prose in Moby Dick is so rich and chewy and worth reading and rereading. Sometimes it's basically impenetrable, but even so! Incredibly rewarding. And then I open so many new novels and quit on the first page because the prose is so artless.

It's not like I want every novel to be Moby Dick, which also happens to be a timeless work of literature: hardly a fair comparison for a random novel I pick up at the library. However, there are lots of authors out there writing prose that is graceful and evocative in their own ways. Frances Hardinge and Stephen King come immediately to mind, for two very different living examples.

I just cannot be fucked anymore with prose that doesn't show some skill. Life is too short. I suspect this might lead me to reading more classics, which I'm not mad about.

What's the oldest book you read?
The Unafraid, a 1913 adventure romance by Eleanor Ingram (with a textual gay side character!), is the oldest that I read for the first time. For rereads, Moby Dick was published in 1851.

What's the newest book you read?
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, published this year.

Did you DNF (= did not finish) any books?
My most emphatic DNF was the second book in the Briardark series by SA Harian. I reread the first book just to remember what all was going on, then got like fifty pages into the second one and was like, actually I don’t care about any of these characters or the cosmic horror mystery.

Some others I started and wandered off from:
- The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
- The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
- Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
- The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis
- Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby
- Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
- Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

What was your predominant format this year?
Still mostly dead trees around here, although I did listen to a mountaineering book and part of Moby Dick on audiobook, and I read a couple of ebooks during my travels.

What's the longest book you read this year?
Moby Dick, with 561 pages in my edition.

Did you reach your reading goal for this year (if you had one)?
I wanted to read more outside my usual fiction genres, which I really didn’t manage to do other than for a couple of specific items on the to-read list. Speaking of, here is all I read from the to-read list. Honestly five books from the January tbr is pretty good for me lol.

Moby Dick
The Iskryne books (I read the first two)
The Book of Lamps and Banners (Cass Neary #4)
something by ECR Lorac

Any goals for 2025?
My immediate list of stuff I want to tackle or finish is:

Knock Knock Open Wide by Neil Sharpson
The Count of Monte Cristo?
Something… literary, maybe?? Maybe My Brilliant Friend or something by Anne Rivers Siddons.
The Draegaera books (starting with Jhereg)
Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle
The Coldfire Trilogy
Ammonite
Dublin Murder Squad
American Elsewhere
Perdido Street Station (reread)
A Zelazny collection (reread)
The Folly of the World
Maplecroft by Cherie Priest (Lizzie Borden + Lovecraft?!)
Craft Sequence – Max Gladstone

I would say the main theme here is "ambitious," for me if not the author. A lot of older stuff, or stuff that is beloved that I haven't tried, or stuff I've just been meaning to get around to. A couple of those are already on my shelf, and it'd be nice to knock them off the TBR.

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

For those unsure what the heck the Snowflake Challenge is, it's a DW event through the month of January where they post a prompt every other day on snowflake_challenge, and you can respond on your journal to whichever ones you want, at your leisure. (If that's unclear or you're curious for more details, feel free to ask me. I was very confused for a long time about how it worked.)

Anyway! Hi, I'm snick. I'm a fandom old who came to fandom via Buffy the Vampire Slayer a bit after the show had ended. My fannish evolution was something like:
1. Got into Buffy fandom, made my first fandom friends, wrote my first fanfic
2. Got into Supernatural, discovered kink memes, wrote my first porn
3. Got into hockey RPF, learned how to write. As mentioned above, I wrote before that, some that I'm still very proud of, but I feel like I really came of age as a writer in hockey fandom.

Since then I've spent time in the MCU, I got more into horror movies and sometimes into their fandoms, and I got into the band Oasis and have written a bunch of fic about that. I also got more and more into multi-fandom exchanges as a way to fill in the gaps (with mixed success) when I kept getting into smaller, less active fandoms.

These days, this journal is mostly for movie and book reviews and locked personal posts, but I do occasionally post unlocked about my writing or fannish events, that kind of thing. Every so often I even post news or meta about my fandoms, although that doesn't feel like what people do here on DW anymore, alas.

And to answer the other question, I'm doing the Snowflake Challenge because I really like seeing more activity on DW. I'm hoping for some prompts this year that will give me excuses to write about fandom stuff I'm excited about, which as mentioned above I rarely get around to doing. And I look forward to reading everyone else's posts and hopefully interacting with them more. <3

You guys, I love Yuletide. So many things I can read, I got great gifts, people are reading what I wrote... incredible. Here, have some recs.

First, my gifts:
Endless Night, True Detective: Night Country, Danvers/Navarro, 4.6k. My author took my prompt "what if the sun didn't come back" and ran with it. Great apostalyptic vibe here, and my shiiiiip. <3

The Inheritance of Imogen Dearborn, Kyle Murchison Booth Stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 13!!!!!k. Booth needs Ratcliffe's help with an acquisition at a decaying house in the country, and things get weird, as they so often do around Booth. I freaking love this fandom's dedication to casefic*, and this is a wonderful example of a case that's great on its own merits and all the better because the relationship growing around the edges. <3 <3 <3

(*I'm developing the theory that the KMB stories are basically the perfect canon for producing casefic: the canon is already a series of casefics, already in prose, and they're nearly all pretty short. Put that all together, and writers have the perfect model to work from.)

And now for the other fics I've loved so far:
boot error, Companion (2025), Iris gen, 2.6k. Iris confronts life without an operating system. It was great to see Iris here, trying to figure out exactly what it means to be a person when one's whole personality is made of code.

Written in squid ink, Kraken - China Mieville, Billy/Dane, 3k. Not everyone in the Church of the Kraken was blessed with a tattoo in squid ink, but Dane was one of the lucky few, and at a young age too. I loved seeing an interpretation of soulmate marks specifically for this canon, and I loved all of Dane's weird fantasies and fetishes and imagined acts of religious devotion, and how they all got tangled up together.

Touching the Moon, My Sister and the Prince, Marie gen, 4k. This is how it happened; and what happened, after. The canon is a short film that is incredibly compelling considering it's two actors on one set for a single scene. You should watch it and then read this structurally creative and heartwrenching answer to the question of what came next.

Hunger, Dragonriders of Pern, Kylara/Lessa, 2.7k. Both Lessa and Kylara are Searched for Nemorth's final clutch. This Kylara feels exactly right to me: scheming, focused on her own desires and ambitions, fully aware of her own strengths and at least some of the weaknesses of others, and above all with an eye for opportunity. And the actual events, brief though they, promise a very interesting future for this version of canon. :D

The day the riders came, Dragonriders of Pern, OC gen, 1.8k. What if the dragons of Pern and the Impression bond were anything *but* benevolent? Or, alternately: what if the dragons were Lovecraftian horrors? This gets so dark in the best way, and the last line is a knockout punch.

I will probably see a couple more movies before the end of the year, and I’ll update the numbers accordingly, but I think otherwise my answers will pretty much stay the same.

NB I have reviews for most of the movies in my movies tag.

What TV shows did you watch a season of this year?
Creepshow, which wasn’t even good! It just had good guest stars! My trend of one full season of TV a year continues apace.

What TV shows did you DNF this year?
Severance. I got it out of the library, and I still didn’t want to finish it.
Legion. I watched one episode and then got distracted, but I’d like to try again. I do love Dan Stevens.

How many movies did you watch this year? Any trends in genre/viewing format/etc?
I had a Regal subscription for over half the year, so I had a HUGE uptick in new releases watched. Movie stats overall this year (not counting rewatches except where noted):

2025 movies: 30 (plus one that’s technically 2026)
Older movies: 34

Movies seen in the theater (new and old): 33
Movies seen otherwise: 32

I also rewatched two 2025 movies in the theater, three older movies in the theater, and seven older movie at home, for a total of 38 total visits to the theater this year. That is definitely the most I have ever been to the theater in a year in my life, and I had a great time. I cancelled my Regal subscription because I thought I was burned out, but it’s been expired for five days and I already miss it, so I will probably resubscribe. I got way more use out of it than I did my Huly subscription last year and probably my Hulu and Netflix subscriptions combined (both of which I have since cancelled).

What were your movie trends for the year?
Most-watched actor: Jeffrey Combs once again, mostly due to rewatches at this point, but Doctor Mordrid, Dark House, and Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls were all new.

Most-watched genre: Horror by a mile, thriller a very distant second.

Most-watched country of origin: USA, but Australia was second with three, so that’s neat.

What are your top movies you watched this year?
In terms of the sheer amount of joy and delight I derived from it, it’s probably Red Sonja. This is by no means the best movie I saw this year, but apparently it was the movie I needed.

Some other fave first-time watches, from this year unless noted:
- Cuckoo (2024). Weird weird xenobio shit, casually queer, Dan Stevens chewing the scenery. What’s not to love.
- Companion. Smart, fun comedy/thriller(?). Just so tightly written, and everyone was great, most of all Sophie Thatcher.
- Clown in a Cornfield. Another movie way smarter than it had to be, and with so much heart.
- Sinners. Gorgeous.
- On Swift Horses. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying Jacord Elordi was very pretty and sad and gay.
- The Long Walk. I didn't love it as much as the book, but it understood the assignment, and I respect that.
- Hell House LLC: Carmichael Manor (2023). For pure horror, this is the scariest movie I saw this year.
- Wake Up Dead Man. Despite the heavy themes, this was ultimately a good entertaining time, just like the previous ones. I want ten more. 🙏
- Silent Night Deadly Night. A late-year surprise. I went in knowing basically nothing, and I had such a good time. I NEED a sequel.
- Red Rooms (2023). French-Canadian movie about women obsessed with serial killers. Stylish, femslashy as hell, an extremely precise and careful movie.

Other movies you saw this year that deserve more love
- Strange Harvest, a microbudget cosmic horror true crime mockumentary. Yes.
- Him, which absolutely did not deserve to get panned so universally. It had style and ambition, which is way more than I can say for lots of movies I saw this year.
- Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, a cheesy low-budget fantasy/horror movie with a lot more heart than it has any right to given how broad the comedy is.

Biggest disappointments
- Death of a Unicorn. >:( What a soulless, half-assed attempt at a horror comedy.
- The Conjuring 4. Even Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga couldn’t save this piece of dreck. Worse than 3, and that’s saying something.

Movies you finally got around to seeing for the first time
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Omg Chelsea of Dead Meat wasn’t being ironic; Leatherface IS baby. ;__;
- The Shining (1980). Fuck off, Jack Nicholson.
- Candyman (1992). Maybe trying to do too many things at once, but I was pleasantly surprised by how central the question of race was, and the romance/corruption arc was good stuff.
- Crash (1996). We definitely emphasized a different word in the phrase “erotic thriller” than I expected going in.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005). I respect it for what it was and meant at the time, but I did not love it. Heath Ledger was incredible though.
- The Mist (2007). It was fine.

Movies that you had the most fun talking about, whether they were good or bad
Probably either The Ugly Stepsister or The Long Walk, both because they have clear themes about (gross generalization here) characters doing their best in crapsack dystopias and showing how messy that gets emotionally for the characters. Lots to chew on in both of them, although I would say The Ugly Stepsister goes harder (which is impressive considering the other movie is the one where people get brutally shot in the head on screen every few minutes). The logistics of filming The Long Walk were also super interesting.

Did you rewatch any old faves? If so, which one was you favourite?
I got to see Re-Animator in the theater. <3 On film, with a recorded video message from Jeffrey Combs beforehand which someone played on their phone and held up for the audience to see. <333

What's the oldest movie you watched?
A Bucket of Blood, a 1959 thriller/satire.

What's the newest movie you watched?
LOL technically We Bury the Dead, which doesn’t hit wide release until the beginning of January. I saw it at a mystery movie screening.

Did you watch any movies outside of your usual preferred genre(s)?
Red Sonja is sword and sorcery, which I don't really watch, but that's partly because it doesn’t really exist as a movie genre these days. That may explain why it only got one day of theatrical release and zero marketing, which is a crying shame.

I watched indie drama Die My Love for Jennifer Lawrence and regretted it. I watched indie feminist/fable 100 Nights of Hero and… didn’t regret it, I guess, but I did think it sucked a lot on multiple axes. Every time I venture out of my horror niche, I end up thinking I should just watch more horror. :\

Any movies you're excited to watch in 2025?
I am aware of and excited about a surprising number of movies coming out next year!
Scream 7
Ready or Not 2
Dune 3
Wuthering Heights
The Bride
Iron Lung