kit vaillancourt
Bio
Kit is a former english major writing about niche books, old movies, and general oddities. They dream of disappearing in the Arctic under mysterious circumstances. Follow them on Instagram or twitter @kitnotmarlowe.
Stories (13/0)
- Top Story - August 2022
When the Living Bury the Dead Top Story - August 2022
Wake up babe, a new 95 Theses just dropped. For those lucky enough to not have your lives inundated by the relentless hellscape that is Twitter, you may have missed the latest discourse. The microcosm of wokescold-eat-wokescold that is Book Twitter (booktwt for short) has once again proven that reading and being utterly illiterate are not mutually exclusive. At 10:39 pm on August 17, a thread dropped which rendered the general atmosphere of Twitter somewhere between uninhabitable and euphoric. The thread–the poster of which remain unnamed to avoid further harassment of her–started like this:
By kit vaillancourt2 years ago in Geeks
- Top Story - October 2021
Ranking all 20 'The Royal Diaries' BooksTop Story - October 2021
Since the dawn of time, well, 2018, when I started reading and ranking children's books (see here, here, and here), people have been clamouring for a Royal Diaries ranking. After enough peer pressure, it's finally time to put aside my anti-monarchist beliefs and give the people what they want.
By kit vaillancourt2 years ago in Geeks
Ranking all 13 'I Am Canada' Books
Overall thoughts Let me get something out of the way: I didn’t want to read these books. Maybe that’s too strong of a statement. I’m something of a purveyor of children’s historical fiction. Previously, I fulfilled an insatiable decade-old desire lodged in the back of my brain to read and rank all 33 Dear Canada books, and determined that some of them are fantastic. Then, I set my sights a little further south and read and ranked all 43 Dear America books with slightly less exciting results. Then, I was supposed to read and rank The Royal Diaries—which is Dear Canada/America for kids who haven't developed class consciousness yet or, are really into Elizabeth Tudor/Cleopatra/Anastasia Romanova—and then I didn’t. It wasn’t for lack of resources, all of the books were at my local library. Instead, I fell into a reading slump last summer that I’m still crawling my way out of. My chance to include a Royal Diaries installment of this series vanished right before my eyes.
By kit vaillancourt4 years ago in Geeks
10 Episodes of Sawbones to Keep You Company in Quarantine
So, COVID-19, huh? Having been declared a global pandemic by the WHO, many countries have instigated quarantine periods, and people are buying TP en masse despite the fact that this isn’t 1846 and nobody’s going to die of dysentery. For their safety, most everyone except for minimum wage service workers are confined to their homes for two-week periods of self-isolation. I’ve been in Shanghai since just before quarantine started, so I’m an old pro at the whole ‘staying in your apartment for weeks on end, only leaving to get snacks, and thinking that I might die if someone doesn’t hold my hand soon’ thing. Oh, wait, that’s just my clinical depression!
By kit vaillancourt4 years ago in Geeks
- Top Story - November 2019
The Staying Power of CasablancaTop Story - November 2019
My dad and I are both classic movie fans, it's one of the few things we bond over. We have a ritual of meticulously combing TCM’s weekly schedule and recording anything that sounds interesting. It started last summer; I was too depressed to go outside, and instead sat for hours, near-vegetative in front of the TV as Ben Mankiewicz talked about movies I’d only heard referenced in passing. I like a little bit of everything; my dad, as of late, watches anything related to WWII—typical middle-aged white dad fare—and that’s really where it starts.
By kit vaillancourt4 years ago in Geeks
Can We Stop Pretending that Going to Movies Alone Makes You Quirky
Searching the simple phrase "going to the movies alone" garners 748 million results, the first being an /r/AskReddit thread titled, "Is it weird to go see a movie alone?" Scroll a little farther and you’ll be met with headlines such as "An Evening Spent Going to the Movies Alone," "6 Rules for Solo Movie-Going," and "Forget Netflix: Going to the cinema alone is life’s greatest guilty pleasure." People are equal parts scared of going to the movies alone in fear of looking sad and lonely and invigorated by the concept of solitary cinema-going as though it makes us a cut above other moviegoers. The truth is that going to the movies by yourself won’t make the other people in the theatre laugh at you for being the poor sap with no friends, but it also won’t earn you a gold star on your manic pixie dream person checklist. I’m aware that taking advice on what is and isn’t quirky from a person who once got up early on a Sunday to attend a showing of Gone With the Wind, of which the only patrons were a handful of senior citizens, my $9 cup of frozen yogurt, and myself, might seem strange. Hear me out.
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Humans
Ranking All 43 'Dear America' Books
Previously on 'I gradually lose my grip on reality binge reading children’s historical fiction', we looked at the Dear Canada series, and I discovered that they're... actually really good! Because of the response to that article, and because I enjoy tormenting myself with questionable diary fiction, I decided to go back down that particular rabbit hole to the weird and wild world of Dear America.
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Geeks
Emily Carroll Imagines Girlhood with Teeth
Next month, horror artist Emily Carroll will be coming out with a new comic titled When I Arrived at the Castle. It's a gothic lesbian vampire comic, a sentence in which every word gets more and more exciting. In anticipation for this release, I am going to be looking back at Carroll's previous comic, Through the Woods.
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Horror
The Voyager Golden Record: Humanity's Soft Place to Land
There's an X-Files poster on my bedroom door. You know the one: a grainy photo of a UFO blown up against a canopy of pine trees with "I WANT TO BELIEVE" written in block letters across the bottom. TheX-Files poster. And while I deign to admit it, I'm a poser. I've seen maybe 10 full episodes of the show (and read the two fun YA prequels about teenage Scully and Mulder solving crimes in the 70s) and have no intention of continuing. Serialized media and my commitment issues aren't the best combination. But still, that poster has been on my door for two years and will continue to remain there in the future.
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Futurism
- Top Story - February 2019
The Winchester Mystery House and Other MirrorsTop Story - February 2019
One of the house's 40 bedrooms, specifically the one where Sarah died. “She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”—Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Horror
What to Read After 'Code Name Verity'
If you're reading this, then I assume you've read Elizabeth Wein's 2012 young adult historical fiction masterpiece, Code Name Verity. If you're reading this, then I also assume that you're still not over it. Don't worry. I picked up Code Name Verity almost exactly a year to the day ago and I'm still not over it. I don't think I'll ever be over it.
By kit vaillancourt5 years ago in Geeks