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beegabberel.bsky.social
Bee
@beegabberel.bsky.social
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Wide ranging critic fighting tooth and nail against any audience. they.
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beegabberel.bsky.social
I wrote a couple thousand words about a year of A Year of UFO 50 and UFO 50, lensing paratexts, and just lookin.

uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2025/11/beyo...
An unalloyed positive: spending the time listening to the designers that make up the hosts, the guests they talked to, and the voicemailers that became as integral a part of the project gave me a more robust understanding of each of the fifty games, often making me appreciate even the ones I kind of hate playing. That is the bread and butter of a critical appraisal project, in my opinion, and it turns out making bread and butter are both hard to do.
November 11, 2025 at 10:16 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
today i am 37 years old, which means its the fifteenth time i have made a birthday gift for you, the internet

this year: A Decadent Year, a zine with 3 recipes developed for an 8-inch cast iron skillet

download the pdfs (to read online or print) here: beegabberel.itch.io/a-decadent-day
a picture of the physical copy of A Decadent Year, a zine
October 4, 2025 at 4:17 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
(the rest of the list as it stands as of a few days ago, which i think attests to how much good shit ive finished this year; Broken Earth , multiple SGJ books in the back half of that long of a list is bonkers.)
September 20, 2025 at 2:49 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
been sitting on this loose ranked list of all ~60 books ive read this year so far and it shocking to me that ive 1) read so many absolute bangers this year and 2) genuinely fucked with the upcoming Danielewski harder than Moby Dick. Tom's Crossing really chewed me up so good
September 20, 2025 at 2:40 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
lmao
September 11, 2025 at 11:17 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
i was thinking about blogging so i was skimming my blog and i genuinely don't know if this thing i wrote in 2019 is a description of a real season of television or if i fully made it up? is stalker a real tv show. if it is i guess i know why i hated that season?
31. Stalker: Solstice Season 3 of Stalker is the show that Channel Zero was always threatening to be; unbelievably boring and without even loose, speculative threads to grab. It's woke (in the pejorative sense) Channel Zero. It sucks. There's a scene where the vlog lady recreates Leave Britney Alone. Stalker is an anthology series, and this season is about a killer called the Druid stalking a particular apartment building over a 24 hour period on the solstice. A year prior the Druid killed a dude named Kit who was fucking everyone in the building. On the anniversary he hunts a bunch of other people down. Among the players are a middle aged white nationalist and his slutty popular daughter, a lady who vlogs, her closeted husband, his secret lover, a gentrifier who owns a coffee shop and his ace partner who does QA on VR games, a horny teacher, and two families. The two focal characters are high school-aged daughters of these families; one is a refugee from Afghanistan, the other the daughter of a biracial lesbian couple (one of whom set herself on fire the same(?) night as the killing the year prior). Each episode covers about three hours, with plenty of time for flashbacks, over the course of 45 minutes. For the most part it's one of those slashers where the focus is on the "inventive" kills. This is among the least interesting choices you can make in terms of making me give a shit. The formula is almost always: establish a character as having a single trait then use a physical implement of that trait in the murder. The lady who vlogs, for instance, is sure to have vlogging pop up in her death sequence. It's a show about sweet deaths that signals aggressively that it has a moral high ground. It is tedious! It's a show about sweet deaths that signals aggressively that it has a moral high ground. It is tedious! Somehow, though, despite playing just about everything wrong the final episode turns out interesting. The reveals are not particularly interesting. But it does lead to a situation where the two focal characters get to play off each other. Which really ends up working. Prior they have the sort of chemistry that makes sense - two high school besties who will probably drift apart over the next five years. In the final episode they really go at it in some interesting ways, though. Also the ultimate moral of the story is "don't quote retweet no-follower accounts to dunk on them," which is pretty funny.
August 26, 2025 at 12:11 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
Ranged Touch Investigates the Cascade
May 1, 2025 at 2:29 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
For the last 4+ years, this display is probably the thing I've been proudest of. With help from the Prisoners Literature Project, I curate a selection of (prominently featured) titles that people can buy and leave behind the counter, which we regularly send to the PLP to distribute.
A display of books in a variety of genres with a sign advertising "Would You Like To Help Send Books To Prisoners?"
April 23, 2025 at 9:10 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
thats my chronology
a UI list of all the UFO 50 games, highlighted in the UI by games played in blue, games beaten in gold, and games completed with extra requirements in cherry red
April 8, 2025 at 8:02 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
got UFO 50 when i had covid in january, finally tonight got the final garden gift. i love this game.
a picture of the garden from UFO 50 with all elements added a UI version of the previous picture
April 8, 2025 at 7:54 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
Dierks Souls specifically intrigues me because this is where I personally was with Dierks Bentley in 2016, that strange year when i reviewed roughly 400 country records
the first half of a 4-star (out of 4) review of Granger Smith's 2016 album Remington, the logline of which reads "I can't recommend Remington enough to anyone who takes country music seriously, and can appreciate its weirdness." a continuation of the review of Remington, which reads in part "If country as a genre is a working-through of the terms of white working class solidarity, then Remington is either some false-consciousness PSYOP or it's a real exploration of just how internally complicated that can get without even beginning to fracture on its face."
March 10, 2025 at 9:42 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
today is the first Valentine's Day since 2016 that I didn't bother my friends & community to make or share music with me for an annual compilation. it feels... oddly fine. there's still 9 albums worth of dope shit out there to discover fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com
February 14, 2025 at 7:02 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
was looking for something else & ran across my review of Westfahl's attempt at canonizing William Gibson as a fundamentally business-oriented author & honestly i cooked with some of this
a quote from a review in Strange Horizons, which reads: "Gary Westfahl's new book William Gibson, the second entry in the University of Illinois Press's Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, is a beautifully designed book and an impressive piece of research. The bibliography, which comprises the last twenty-eight pages of the book (excepting the index and end matters), is unarguably the most comprehensive available for one of the most widely-debated figures in science fiction in the latter half of the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century. Westfahl has also graciously made it available on his personal website. Which is fantastic, since it's the only bit of this book worth reading." a quote from a review in Strange Horizons, which reads, "To see this, one only needs to be aware of how Westfahl reads "The Gernsback Continuum," an early story by Gibson which was taken as a clarion call by The Movement, who would later be referred to as cyberpunk writers. In it, a photographer on assignment takes pictures of various buildings across America that have a particular 1930s science fictional aesthetic. Outside of Tucson and high on speed, he sees the "semiotic ghosts" of this aesthetic come to life, in the form of massive crystalline towers and flying cars. As the hallucinations become more prevalent, he ultimately ends up in a cheap motel in Los Angeles, performing an exorcism with cheesy Nazi-themed pornography and depressing world news. In what is easily the story's most memorable line, the protagonist describes this apparition of an alternate Tucson as possessing "all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda." According to Westfahl, "the story actually pays fond tribute to the now-quaint prophecies of science fiction writers and futurists of the 1920s and 1930s, and ponders how their visions still influence residents of a future they failed to predict" (p. 37, emphasis mine). He goes on to suggest that, despite his own dismissal of Bruce Sterling's influential reading of the story as "driven by an ideological agenda unrelated to Gibson's concerns" (p. 37), Gibson himself "is not entirely uncritical of these outdated predictions" (p. 37; emphasis mine) citing passages where Gibson describes the inhabitants of this alternate Tucson as smug and unaware of the unpleasant realities of technological progress. Westfahl concludes that "there is no anger in these descriptions . . . like his protagonist, Gibson both observes and is part of the Gernsback Continuum" (p. 38)." a quote from a review in Strange Horizons, which reads, "As a scholarly text, William Gibson is a combination of impeccable research and wretched interpretation. But the title of the series and its publisher positions it such that this very well might not matter. The very fact of its publication is enough for the genre's old guard of fans, and an academy removed from the ground-level battles, to see it, as the back of the book declares, as "the definitive book on William Gibson's career." If that is the case, then we can only hope that this book serves as Gibson's gravestone. If, however, Gibson's work is better than Westfahl's readings suggest, as I suspect it is, then we can hope that William Gibson takes its proper place in history: as the punchline to a joke in a footnote of a future fan history, and nothing more."
January 31, 2025 at 5:01 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
got the Hieron fanzine today and its gorgeous
A picture of the cover A Chaotic Cataloging: A Seasons of Hieron Fanzine One interior shot of the A Chaotic Cataloging with a gold background and comic panels a blurry photo of Samot and various player characters around him a recipe, upside down, from the Seasons of Hieron fanzine
January 29, 2025 at 5:11 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
lmao nice
January 23, 2025 at 4:50 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
my lil blurbs
screencap of http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2024-in-review-part-one/, which reads Bee Gabriel Hello! It’s been a while. I usually go long, but there was a surprising amount of great speculative fiction this year, so here are some quick hits. (an image of the cover of The Novices of Lerna by Àngel Bonomini) Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall fundamentally changed my relationship with the color red. The Novices of Lerna is not a trans novella, but Ángel Bonomini conveys gender dysphoria better than anyone else I’ve read. The Tainted Cup introduced me to Robert Jackson Bennett’s playful prose and maybe too jam-packed worldbuilding. The Angel of Indian Lake beautifully capped what might be the best horror trilogy of all time, and then Stephen Graham Jones followed it up with one of the most fun books he’s yet written in I Was a Teenage Slasher. Speaking of horror: Rivers Solomon’s Model Home ranks among the most devastating books I’ve ever read. screencap of http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2024-in-review-part-one/, which reads I luxuriated in the world of P. Djèlí Clark’s (maybe slightly too) twisty The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. Alongside doing all the stuff she does consistently well, The Seventh Veil of Salome has, for my money, the best character work Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s done to date. Funny homunculus dads that turn out bitterly homophobic? A Choose Your Own Adventure story that actually uses the form productively? Some weird flash fiction I have no idea what to do with but somehow also really works? It’s a shame more people haven’t read Rubin Reyes Jr.’s There is a Rio Grande in Heaven. In a year of notable historical reimaginings of literary characters, Nisi Shawl’s The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox stood out for its brevity and masterful control of voice. Plus the speculative elements rule. How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster is a novel in stories by Muriel Leung that’s really weird. Cockroach nightclub. I really, really, really loved Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox.
January 6, 2025 at 7:54 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
revisiting strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/... &

1) The Shannara Chronicles was fun, that weird MTV moment with it & Scream was neat

2) I've been on my bullshit for so long, wow
screenshot reading "The popular understanding of Terry Brooks's long-running series is probably best encapsulated in Lin Carter's words, originally published in his survey of Fantasy in The Year's Best Fantasy: 4 (1978): "the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read." This quotations is listed under the "Influences on the fantasy genre" section of the Wikipedia page for The Lord of the Rings. Joanna Russ famously dubbed the first novel in the series, The Sword of Sha Na Na, in her essay "SF and Technology as Mystification," writing that it "is not that [Star Wars] is as bad as [The Sword of Shannara], but that both are bad in exactly the same way," which she explains is the way in which they are both primarily produced for their addictive qualities. Books like The Sword of Shannara (1977), according to Russ, "satisfy a need partially, and at the same time they exacerbate it . . . [producing] not just enjoyment or desire but intense craving . . ., not just intense craving but sudden intense craving which must be satisfied at once." Shannara is, in other words, an also-ran and a pernicious, if not downright terrible, example of the genre. That both Russ and Carter gloss over some of the stranger aspects of what would become the (up to this point) twenty-eight-novel series is not exactly a knock of their criticisms. The aspects that have since made Shannara very clearly different from The Lord of the Rings were there from the beginning, but they were hardly emphatic." screenshot reading "The ultimate example of this in Brooks's novels is his Word & Void trilogy. Marketed at the time as Brooks's non-Shannara urban fantasy series, the novels focused on a couple of young adults in 1990s Illinois being given magic powers to fight off demons. Seven years after the final book in the series was released, Brooks began a new trilogy which covered the Great Wars; Armageddon's Children (2006) made explicit the connection between the Word & Void trilogy and the Shannara novels. Much like how the Insane Clown Posse's unveiling that their violent, sexualized, cartoonish rapping was always in service of leading their followers to the Christian God, Brooks's eventual enveloping of the Word & Void novels into the greater Shannara-verse was met with a mixture of consternation and annoyance—and acknowledgement that, in a boring way, it all kind of did make sense."
December 6, 2024 at 5:30 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
(plus a bonus spicy take)
Screenshot reading "Other Books I Didn't Finish: Moby Dyke (Krista Burton) I made it about half an hour into the audiobook of this and, since we hadn't even touched the subject matter, bailed. Burton's lengthy introduction about how the book came together, which, yes, it did, I'm listening to it, I know it exists, if you really need to do this could we not have it as an afterword? needled at me in a number of ways. Burton's self-identification as a lesbian married to a trans man is… something. Queers have all kinds of identifications and interpersonal relations are interpersonally defined and etcetera, and the political valence of lesbianism with respect to trans political violence is maybe as fraught as it has ever been (e.g. TERFs), but I know, for me, I would have a hard time being in a relationship with a man, as a nonbinary person, who identified it as a Gay relationship (or with a woman who identified as exclusively straight). Not a huge deal, but one of those personal things." Screenshot reading "Probably the big one was the way Burton positions Covid, at least in the part of the intro I read, as functionally over the moment the first vaccine was released. It's primed in a hugely selfish way - Burton recounts feeling isolated from lockdown but also moving to a rural community and having a midlife crisis in what you might call the Autostraddle house style (not pejorative, necessarily). Her genuinely evocative descriptions of being crushed between queer bodies at the club blithely skates over what is still an ongoing mass disabling event, and I think that sucks, in itself and because it gave a very strong impression that one of the central questions about what we do about keeping these queer spaces alive given the pandemic world we live in was likely to be blithely ignored. Also there was just what felt like eight pages recounting how Burton was maybe going to write this book back in 2018 and missed the opportunity and now she's feeling old and was so worried and at a certain point I was like fuck it I'm just going to listen to a mediocre Sy Montgomery book on this walk instead."
December 5, 2024 at 2:05 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
just me blogging thru the books i didnt finish, post two thinks through one I knew I was never gonna get through and why that might be
Screenshot reading "There are any number of reasons to go into a book knowing you're not going to finish it. A textbook, for instance, is rarely meant to be read cover to cover. The same might be said, say, of historical tomes picked up for research purposes. The best selling book of all time, as we all know, is primarily interacted with in excerpt from the pulpit. Short story anthologies can occupy that same space. They are often approached as a sort of sampler platter, a way to get hold of a writer's style or introduce yourself to a scene or movement. Generally speaking (especially when I read them for review), I approach them from the opposite valence. Over a decade ago, I reviewed a collection called Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction and talked about how it used the form of the collection to more thoroughly integrate the genre with historical materialism. I explicitly called it "the future of science fiction" (it is no longer available for purchase, the publisher having quietly broken up). I enjoy this act; engaging with and speculating upon the decisions of the editors, threading theme and image into something hopefully more than the sum of its parts. Not with this book, though." Screenshot reading "There are masterful moments and missteps here. The filmic writing—the pinwheeling arms, the owl's 'hoo'ing cutting the dream—works, as does the description (like I said, gross) of a tick the "size and shape of a lightbulb hot with [his] own blood." It is immediately visual. It is that same filmic impulse that leads to a line like "leaving the moon like a bright eye pressed to the glass," however, which kills the pace of the sequence, and which is indicative of how the story meanders to the point that it kills its own pace."
December 5, 2024 at 2:03 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
oops after posting that i saw transit had put out another bookseller-focused newsletter that i also showed up in
November 22, 2024 at 12:04 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
(liked it so much they put me in the newsletter, lol)
November 21, 2024 at 11:56 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
I thought I did a pretty decent job here of unpacking what it means to not have a "mind's eye" but still to have a drive to read for the image
screen capture of a portion of a blog post which reads: "To be, maybe, slightly more direct: I cannot picture smoke "which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays" in my head. But reading an image with such a vivid, evocative description, I can know that when I encounter such smoke in my life, I will comprehend it better. I will find beauty where I might have missed it, had I not read this sentence, even if I don't recall the line in all its specificity in that exact moment. And, it is important to say: this is not always, or even often, a question of "beauty." It is often a question of aesthetics, but not even just that. Language communicates, but not always directly; when language is rendered into an image with dimension, it can alter perceptions more broadly."
November 19, 2024 at 9:57 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
Buzzing Off is a new blog series that I'm attempting, a sort of diary of all the books I start & abandon. The first post is up now, on Keiichiro Hirano's really interesting novel Eclipse, being a bookseller, and reading for images with aphantasia uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2024/11/buzz...
the cover of Eclipse, a novel by Keiichiro Hirano
November 19, 2024 at 9:49 PM
beegabberel.bsky.social
this is among the most reprehensible things anyone has ever put into text
November 4, 2024 at 5:01 AM
beegabberel.bsky.social
good to know the nightmare of west oakland bart station's anti-houseless, pro killing-everyone-in-a-fire gates are expanding, and they got someone to write about how beautiful they look (badly)
November 4, 2024 at 4:56 AM