Izzy Hands (right): a man who needs a multi-party introduction to hugging.
I talked about the Feral Five (Archie/Fang/Frenchie/Izzy/Jim) in the previous post about favourite poly ships, but for this manifesto I'd like to expand that further to All Deck on Hands—the inarguably perfect ship name for Izzy Hands and the entire crew of the Revenge.
(And how much do I love being in a fandom where a polycule straying into the double digits has a name and a fanbase?) Exact numbers on this polycule vary based on who's aboard the Revenge when the story's set, but for me, I'm most often adding Lucius Spriggs, Black Pete, Roach, Wee John Feeney, and Oluwande Boodhari to the previous fivesome in a post-canon setting.
There were a lot of Leonard Cohen songs in the running, but his 1988 I'm Your Man album fit tidily into the lineup, and this is one of the tracks on it that I'm always in the mood to listen to. (That said, I might also be sneaking in a cover of a Cohen song later on in the series.)
Title: Here We Are Fandom: Chance (2015) Relationships: Amir Abbas/Trevor Bunting Rating: General Word Count: ~850 Content Info: n/a Summary: An early morning during the first Ramadan of Trevor and Amir's marriage. Notes: Written for the 2026 round of bethefirst. This story is also available on AO3.
The short film this fic is based on was made available for free online by its director, and I really recommend it if you're in the mood for a very sweet later in life romance between a socially isolated widower and a refugee fleeing state violence with his own loss who meet in a London park one day and offer each other a new lease on life.
For 1987, we have a track off Robbie Robertson's first solo album after leaving The Band and following a decade of largely producing, collaborating, and doing soundtrack work. It's also one of my "two nickels" in terms of all-time favourite songs that ended up being covered by Rod Stewart exactly four years after they were released.
I won't have a chance to tuck in until tomorrow, but this year's bethefirst collection is open!
This challenge involves writing the first fic for a fandom, and this time out there are 37 fics with 37 newly minted fandom tags, ranging from early 20th century contemporary novels to fantasy webcomics, horror podcasts, and art films.
So today's Wednesday, so I have that off, because I am part-time employed and Wednesday thus became the Best Day of the Week.
I also have Thursday off this week, because I had work on Saturday, so we get a protected day off for that (as well as some time in lieu and a bit extra per hour because it's the weekend) and mine is always on the Thursday. We have an unofficial work Saturday every seven weeks, but we can put it up for grabs if we can't work that weekend (or even if we don't want to) and they tend to be very easy to get rid of. Some of the others will nab as many Saturdays as they can, because it's a quieter work day and a week day off. I'd personally rather have my weekend intact with Husband, but it takes all sorts. It's unofficial because as far as the rest of the hospital is concerned we're not open. We'll only be six or seven people there, and we're largely there in order to give ourselves a helping hand so Monday's work load isn't quite so huge.
This week I also have Friday off because it's the first of May and according to our general agreement we are supposed to have the right to have that day off. Well, that doesn't actually work in reality because there's an obvious limit to how often you can just arbitrarily close down the work place when you work in the health sector and we already don't work weekends (sort of) and holidays. So we usually have as many people having the day off as possible and it's determined by drawing lots where the people who didn't win last year are guaranteed it this year.
And then after that of course it's the weekend. So through sheer luck I've managed to get five days off in a row. That's like a little holiday. I shall make a great deal of progress on my puzzle.
Today, I've taken the bicycle into town to have it serviced, and treated myself to coffee to go for the trip home. I can pick it up tomorrow, and I'm sort of toying with the idea of going in and just having a coffee and some breakfast at the Espresso House before I go to the bicycle shop. I could bring a book. Right now this idea is very tempting. It's not unlikely tomorrow I'll just want to get the bike and go home as quickly as possible.
Also accidentally picked up a succulent. It was flowering, it wasn't my fault! It only took Husband a couple hours to notice it. Can't sneak anything past him...
Spent by Alison Bechdel is a 2025 fictionalized memoir about a cartoonist (coincidentally named Alison Bechdel) who lives on a farm in Vermont with her partner, running a goat sanctuary while trying to write a graphic novel (or maybe it'll be a television show?) about capitalism (or maybe it's about her group of middle-aged queer friends).
The real Alison Bechdel is the creator of the long-running and groundbreaking comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) and the award-winning graphic novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007), and that knowledge is something I think Spent depends on. It's not just that Sparrow, Stuart, Ginger, and Lois—and a grown-up Jiao Raizel—from Dykes to Watch Out For are fictional!Alison's neighbours in this, or that fictional!Alison is grappling with having an autobiographical success publicly leave her creative control through adaptation. The heart of this work exists in a very specific instant, where a queer leftist artist in middle age and the middle class is sitting at a career crossroads in the global car crash of late-stage capitalism, finding herself in an uncertain position between privileged and marginalized, mainstream and fringe, consumer and creator, progressive and out of touch.
My favourite parts of this book were the subplots with the characters from Dykes to Watch Out For—particularly storylines like Stuart and Sparrow expanding their relationship to a throuple, only for their poly kid to nonetheless jump to the conclusion they're both having affairs—and I found myself wishing I were reading it as a serial strip that could add up to more time with them. But that might be saying something about where and when I'd rather be.
This is a book that got me thinking about a lot of its topics, but more through its general timeliness and the role of Bechdel's work in the culture than through a connection with the characters or something in the writing hitting particularly hard. Still, while even the lighter stories didn't quite land in the right place for me to see myself revisiting them on rainy days, I do want to imagine a better future where I get to go back to this book someday and see it as a snapshot of a weird moment in time where we were all trying to figure some stuff out. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as anyone's first Bechdel, but I'm glad I read it.
I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!
Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!
Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.
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polyamships for the prompt to write a ship manifesto for a favourite poly ship. 
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