A passing Falcon & Winter Soldier rec

This is the place by solgarmr (56K, Sam/Bucky + Zemo)
Captain America, Bucky Barnes and one of the most dangerous men on earth take a break from the world and learn that talking about their feelings isn't really that bad.

This is tagged Sam/Bucky, but is actually more like Sam/Bucky/Zemo or Sam/Bucky + Bucky/Zemo ... but in a really unusual way. So basically, you don't encounter true relationship ambiguity in fanfic very often. Not in the sense that the story is intentionally coy about what's going on, but rather, it's that most fanfic hits very traditional romance beats, and this doesn't. Instead it exists in the slippery, awkward relationship zone where even the people involved can't quite nail down what's happening here. It's not exactly platonic, not exactly romantic, and not exactly smarm. But there clearly is something going on - something tender and fraught and slow-burn, for all three legs of the triad, but in very different ways. The writing is awkward in places, but the story makes up for it (for me).

It's sweet and unusual and painful and weird, and perhaps one of my favorite things that I've read in the fandom so far.

Tab-closing links

A total mishmash here.

• Places to donate to help southern Lousiana posted by yhlee.

• Twitter thread summarizing an interesting large-scale study on effects of community masking on COVID in Bangladesh. A few interesting takeaways from looking at the graphs: with community-wide masking in the real world (i.e. masks as actual people use them, which probably involves some people being diligent and others not), the demographic where they mainly found significant differences in COVID rates and symptoms was in elderly people wearing surgical masks. Cloth masks appear to be overall pretty useless but may reduce symptom severity somewhat. They found no statistically significant difference for masking vs. not masking in the non-elderly, possibly due to either low mask compliance or low rate of symptomatic cases. The thread has a lot more information on methodology and results.

• And for something totally different and much more fun, Whumptober is back and here is the list of 2021 prompts. I still preferred the old style where they had just one prompt per day and then an alternate list that you could swap into any day where you don't like or can't write the prompt; now there are three prompts per day to choose from, plus an alternate list. Last year I took one look at this and noped out due to choice paralysis. This year I might try it, though probably not the whole thing.