Friday, July 15, 2022

Quick Sips 07/15/2022

Literally I’m mostly just reading this week. June turned out to be a behemoth of a month for short SFF releases, and July is no slouch either, what with a lot of the quarterlies I cover putting out works. That means without even counting Lightspeed and Fantasy, which have been a little late in getting out review materials this month, I’m staring down over 100 works of short SFF, including 30 from Decoded Pride and another ~20 from Strange Horizons thanks to the fund drive issue. Eff. As such, I might be pushing off reviewing the August LS/FM until next month (which might also include the September issues if those are out a little earlier next month). Just another month in the life of a short SFF reviewer.

Aside from reading a lot, I’ve also been hard at work for my non-profit, planning a number of events and getting a couple of big projects ready to launch, including a local LGBTQ+ census and resource guide. These are two things that I care a lot about and, especially with the resource guide, I’ve been fighting to get to for a long time now. Getting them near launch is incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time, especially because getting institutional support has been difficult if not combative at times. But it’s going to be soon now!

Otherwise, things are things. I’m also waiting to get my first(!) ever(!) award trophy(!!!) in the mail and my husband is probably getting sick of me staring out the window hoping the mail person will come up the driveway. It’s rather surreal, winning an award, and especially because for me it was completely unexpected. I love We’re Here but did not think that there was that much support for it out there! Just wow! Especially after being up for other awards and feeling like there was more of a “chance” at winning, this is…weird. But nice. Definitely do not want to stop people from nominating and voting for We’re Here for all the awards. ALL OF THEM! Ahem.

In comic book reading, I have powered through to the end of what Marvel Unlimited has for the first Excalibur series. Which…is actually a lot? Like, I was not expecting it to be so much. There’s still a few issues missing around just after Alan Davis left (the issues where Rachel left and Captain Britain became Britannic) and then the last ~10 issues of the series where I think Captain Britain and Meggan get married. I gotta say, things never truly recovered from the Davis era, but I do think that the series wasn’t too bad, and while I dislike Pete Wisdom, having Nightcrawler, Colossus, Kitty, Rahne, Moira, and Douglock made for some interesting reading. Meggan and Brian seemed a bit surplus at that point in a crowded cast, but there were still moments. I hope that the last holes in the series are filled in soon.

Less stellar was the direction that X-Factor went, and I did push through the scant few issues Marvel Unlimited had of that series post-Age of Apocalypse. The stuff where they get back to being a team primarily of villains was interesting, but also not really done well. And the cast really struggled because, well, most of them hated each other. Which is a problem with villain-center team books. They aren’t team players, and these characters at least really don’t care to be anything other than villains. As a post-AoA book I’m curious about the direction it might have gone, but I’m not too broken up that there’s such a large gap. With those two ticked off my list, I might try and circle back to any minis or one-shots I missed, but we’ll see. I don’t think Generation X has many issues, either, so I might go through those before getting back to the more “core books” of Onslaught. We’ll see.

In watching things, I did finish the latest season of Umbrella Academy, which was mostly fun. The Alison stuff came off as a little forced to me, to be honest, but not entirely so. It’s a soap opera style plot but with superpowers and aliens, so I’m willing to be forgiving. I wish they’d let Klaus have more queer story-beats but I guess they switched that over to Viktor which was I think mostly well handled. Not happy they didn’t let Fei and the rest of the Sparrows have more queer points, but here we are.

And that’s about it for me. I hope you’re all doing great. Cheers!

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