rax | Reading

Today I have had MRI #1 (NHS), booked follow-up appointment #1 (NHS; in June), and also booked follow-up appointment #2 (private; next Thursday).

( feeeeeeeelings )

But. BUT. I made myself put the allotment keys in my pocket before heading out for the MRI (the allotments are right behind the hospital) and then did spend two hours Communing With Plants (by which I mostly mean "weeding", obviously, which is I suppose a kind of Communion) in pleasant weather, and. And. The cherry blossom is out. Only two clusters of it so far, but -- that's two more than a week ago, and the rest of the tree is thinking really hard about it. The unfortunately sited apple I appear to have inherited is also absolutely riotous. The garlic chives are finally Properly Established. I got to graze on allium and spinach. Small fierce joys, and that.

howtobeawerewolf_feed

https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/what-do-you-mean-youre-not-qualified-to-sell-pianos

New comic!

No voting today, because Top Web Comics is being pokey.

Follow me on Blue Sky if you're so inclined!

I started uploading to Webtoon again! If you're in for a reread, feel free to follow me there! I'm trying to pump up my numbers so I can get ad revenue soon :D

The site is being sluggish today, so if you have an issue reading pages at the moment, try coming back a bit later! Not sure what's up, and it's technically not my problem, so hooray! Anyway, yes, all of these are actual job titles or listings that I was able to scrounge up for comedic value. I like this page, because it feels like I haven't brought out Malaya's chaotic side in awhile lol

If you're up to it, please follow/support me on Patreon if you'd like to see art that I'm working on ahead of time, because that is mostly what I'm doing with my time off anyway. You can also download the Volume 1 ebook and the Kickstarter digital artbook, plus see whatever I'm working on ahead of time.

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Tote bags, hoodies, tshirts, prints and mugs are all available in the Hivemill store! The hoodies are unisex sizing, but the tshirts run rather fitted, so I recommend sizing up! Book 1 is available in paperback and ebook format, as well as the merch from the Kickstarter :).

HTBAW Fandom Wiki is up and running! Thanks to Myk Streja and ShitaraRen for tons of help with moderation efforts and everyone else who's done a ton of work on adding information and filling out the Wiki. Thank you everyone for contributing and it's an amazing and super detailed resource!

Feel free to check out my goofy Amazon store if you're so inclined, or even if you don't need anything from my shop, just using this link will earn me a small commission from things you buy on Amazon regardless of what it is (this is an ad, as I get a tiny commission if you do buy something)! Thanks to everyone who's come out to support me through Ko-fi and Patreon!

https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/what-do-you-mean-youre-not-qualified-to-sell-pianos

sovay

It took a month to wing its way from Münster in a small international envelope stickered with a great tit, but a bisexual oystercatcher just arrived in the mail courtesy of

spatch. It is currently in situ on my shelf between the axolotl and the white quartz, backed by A. E. Housman, A. C. Jacobs, and Robinson Jeffers. I saw some ordinary and really nice ivy while out walking.

Current Music: Mike Doughty, "27 Jennifers"

sovay

Following a rather friably sleepless Easter, I slept nine or ten hours and resent dreaming of poetry without bringing it out with me this time. I was spending time in evocatively broken-down places by the sea.

March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).

After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:

"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."

Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.

Current Music: Sydney Carter with Bob and Carole Pegg, "The Holy Horses"

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5801

kaberett

Reading. She's A Beast archives, forever and always (by which I mean that I am now up to October 2023).

Another few pages of my Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone) reread.

Also an absolutely baffling academic paper that is technically relevant to my academic interests but which... doesn't really explain why what it's doing is better than state-of-the-art, sure as hell doesn't demonstrate it adequately with an appropriate range of reference materials, and cites only my reference materials paper and not my one on actual real life rocks, which it absolutely should, especially as it is citing [redacted for professionalism] like it's a solid contribution to the field.

Writing. Manuscript is over 10k words???

Listening. Hidden Almanac continues; presently we are relistening to another chunk I've theoretically heard once already but actually slept through. Knitting during it continues a good way of preventing myself from falling asleep. I continue to enjoy myself. (Eminent Domain and Tapping Of Ley Lines is the chunk we're currently in.)

Playing. Games various with... nieces and nephews??? plus A's other relatives, particularly Boggle, Shithead (to which I have been newly introduced), and Five Crowns.

Cooking. ... I made a big batch of chilli? I made a big batch of chilli.

Eating. Many and various exciting cheeses. Some excellent potato dauphinoise that I didn't have to cook.

Exploring. North Leigh Roman villa, Chedworth Roman villa, some surrounding woodlands, and Davis's Copse near Curbridge (BLUEBELLS).

Making & mending. A's glove progresses, by which I mean I've stalled a little over the past few days because I foolishly decided I didn't need to bring my circs with me and therefore I am knitting flat on DPNs and it is Suboptimal. But. Nearly ready to turn around for the other side of the flap. Nearly.

Growing. Lemongrass much cheerfuller for having been put back into the warm box. No evidence of aubergine yet (yes I know I'm late). Broad beans now actually properly coming up!!! Oca doing nothing. Cherry finally just about ready to start blossoming as of Wednesday; josta definitively blossoming and really quite green; project Build Up Spinach Seed Stash progressing nicely.

Observing. Pheasants! BLUEBELLS, both as a sea in woodland and on banks with primroses. Cowslips. So many excellent spring flowers. Pheasants; COOT EGGS; Egyptian goslings; and I have spent the past couple of days being Menaced by a Canada goose that is OUTRAGED whenever anybody... passes it... on a tarmac drive... even if they're doing so in a motor vehicle. All extremely satisfactory.

sovay

I freely admit that I ground my way through the protracted heteronormative anxieties of Strange Lady in Town (1955) for the continued presence of twenty-three-year-old Lois Smith as Spurs O'Brien, one of those mixed-up motherless tomboys who just needs her gender trouble sorted out by her father's remarriage to a strong feminine role model if you believe the screenplay and looks such a late nineteenth century baby dyke in her ranch jacket and jingling boots that you feel she's just waiting for motorcycle clubs to be invented. Her crush on a cavalry lieutenant is narratively doomed and might in any case have been envy. Put her in a ball gown, she's right back in trousers and string ties the next scene, heedless and gallant as any young grandee. I mean when Dana Andrews drags his heels on the sub-screwball romance through which the picture manifests its stresses over the place of professional women, Spurs does her best to run off with Greer Garson herself, all the way back to Boston. "I don't know, Doc, except—well, except I can't figure out any sort of life without you." What did the film think it was doing with her? I don't even know what it thought it was doing with the slap-kiss of its textual couple, but I took an awful screencap just because of the lingering way Spurs sees herself out of a room with Garson's Dr. Julia Garth in it. Once she gets over the rebound, she'll make some Eastern belle ring. "But what a woman!"

Current Music: Amindi, "Green House"

sovay

The moon looks like a Constable watercolor in black and olive and cratered parchment. I have seen the latest pictures of Earth. I can't turn off the part of my brain that brings around you may leave here for four days in space, but I worried so much about that launch.

This morning was marked by the municipal pruning of trees on our street. When the racket moved far enough around the block to become merely obnoxious, I went back to listening to byways of Flanders and Swann. In the afternoon Hestia saw a cardinal in the yew and almost went through the glass.

I recognize that midlife m/m amid the mussel beds of North Wales is the single most stereotypical choice I could make out of this year's lineup for Wicked Queer, but I am still seriously considering On the Sea (2025). It would be a sure bet if I didn't have to think about parking at the MFA.

I would like the next week to involve much less talking to doctors. None would be an ideal.

Current Music: Bren Joy, "Headline"

kaberett

The fancy bakery had Two Cardamom Buns left when we got there, so I got one of them, and we took our Pastries down to the New River (which is still neither of those things) for the traditional springtime pursuit of Watching The Waterfowl.

Coot the first very obligingly stood up to show us their eggs after really not very much waiting at all, and they are still eggs! No gaping maws there yet. Coot the second was a total surprise to me; I think I'd not been along that particular stretch recently. This one was Not Obliging At All and indeed remained resolutely circular atop its nest, removing its head from beneath its wing only once and only briefly, but we deduce from the fact that it was atop the nest that Orbs Exist.

Pastry course then actually took place sat on a bench just down the bank from a very sleepy pile of Egyptian goslings all huddled up, until they were Alarmed by bread and then gradually heaved themselves up to investigate grass. I remain fascinated by the differences in size evident at this stage of development within the one clutch.

Also; found a bridge hidden in a hedge. Collaborated on iterating toward a solution for a problem. Picked things up and put them down again. Indulged some special interest. Good Job Team.

sovay

I had a miserable day and the night has not been an improvement, but

rushthatspeaks sent me Rina Sawayama's anthemically queer "This Hell" (2022) and

spatch stuck his head around the door of my office with an upside-down Peep in his mouth like something out of Bosch, so I think we're all set for Good Friday. Previously I had been cheering myself up with the 1984 BBC Titus Groan and Gormenghast and a 1945 photo of Donald Swann.

Current Music: Rina Sawayama, "This Hell"

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5800

or a boatswain

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5800

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5799

good job Moray

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5799

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! How is it Pesach already? Open the door to the stranger. The most important thing.

Not being a person who celebrates April Fool's, I found it unnecessary to spend more than an hour waiting in the office after my ophthalmologist's appointment in order to discover that the hold-up was my insurance refusing to cover every single relevant ointment in this country to which I am not allergic, but

spatch met me afterward with two boxes of matzah and a tiny surprise salt maple chess pie that we have until sunset to disappear and a postcard from

regshoe was waiting for me when I got home.

I really feel like last month just broke up in parts around me, or vice versa. Yesterday my afternoon was devoted to MGH. Hestia purred sleekly and a little excitably as therapy.

Current Music: Michael Flanders & Donald Swann, "Twice Shy"

howtobeawerewolf_feed

https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/mal-is-going-to-help-as-little-as-possible-out-of-spite

New comic!

Vote over on TWC to see thumbnails!

Follow me on Blue Sky if you're so inclined!

I started uploading to Webtoon again! If you're in for a reread, feel free to follow me there! I'm trying to pump up my numbers so I can get ad revenue soon :D

Raise your hand if you think Mal will actually end up sitting back and letting all this potluck stuff be planned without her input...anyone?

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https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/mal-is-going-to-help-as-little-as-possible-out-of-spite

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5798

the plank at Cubetown is 400 meters long, sentient, and horny

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5798

kiya

Visible

To learn young
That
To be seen
Is
To be hurt

To discover
That
To be seen
Wrong
Bleeds tears

To wish
That
To be seen
Were
Even real

To know
That
To be seen
Is
Never simple

To wonder
If
Being seen
Will
Work out
This time.

lb_lee

Psychodrama and Realitymashing (by Rogan)
Series: Essay
Summary: my favorite genre that doesn't exist.
Word Count: 3114
Notes: Winner of the March 2026 fan poll! This essay builds on my previous realitymashing essay, “All Narrators are Unreliable,” and you’d be best-served reading that first. This essay is dedicated to Sam Kieth, the original champion of comics realitymashing, who died March 15th. Sam Kieth’s work on Zero Girl and the Maxx are what originally inspired us to make comics, and our work as you know it wouldn’t exist if not for him. Rest well, titan.

What is psychodrama?

One of my favorite genres, though it doesn’t formally exist as far as I know, I call psychodrama: a person working through their own (or someone else’s) mind, memory, or imagination, made into “real” places or people. (“Real,” for the purposes of this essay, means, “must be dealt with and taken seriously.”) ( Read more... )

Current Mood: I DID IT
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/26966.html

howtobeawerewolf_feed

https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/just-a-light-bit-of-childhood-trauma-in-passing

New comic!

Vote over on TWC to see Tom in his attractive days

Follow me on Blue Sky if you're so inclined!

In the version I posted on Patreon, I put that Crescent Lake is in Sara's territory, but some people pointed out that it was technically not claimed, so I changed the wording a bit. (This is why posting stuff early to Patreon helps me out a lot, tbh.) The idea is that Sara had a whole pack of werewolves running around in an area that she would have been responsible for at least knowing about, which could potentially downgrade her standing with the werewolf council. Anyway, that's not what's important on this page lol

I started uploading to Webtoon again! If you're in for a reread, feel free to follow me there! I'm trying to pump up my numbers so I can get ad revenue soon :D

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https://www.howtobeawerewolf.com/comic/just-a-light-bit-of-childhood-trauma-in-passing

lb_lee

Two bits of news!

First of all, we will be presenting a shortened form of our many-selved history lecture (along with, by request, a brief talk about how we came to do what we do and what it entails) at a little trauma and dissociation conference, from 3-7 pm on Friday, April 3, at Franklin Patterson Hall at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

The second thing is, the essay I owe y’all will likely be late. Sorry guys. Ny died, Meagan got convicted of first-degree bullshit, this month has been challenging.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/26860.html

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5797

Moray could lay an egg like a monotreme if she wanted

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5797

my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

xe's miles above the desert, xe drops Shaymins down

mrgh

How to Be a Werewolf - What do you mean you're not qualified to sell pianos?

You might be the strange delightful

Your body cannot lie

Recognition

vital functions

Ain't nobody write me like you read me before

Glitter always shimmers in the limelight

some good things that have happened today

We're burning up together, baby, that makes two

Or A Boson

Moray Is Competent

Go right on over to meet your doom

How to Be a Werewolf - Mal is going to help as little as possible, out of spite

Walking The Plank

TDOV

Visible

Essay: Psychodrama and Realitymashing

How to Be a Werewolf - Just a light bit of childhood trauma, in passing

Plural History in Amherst

Marsupial Supremacy

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