Sunday, January 4th, 2026 09:55 pm
Sunday, January 4th, 2026 07:05 pm
I moved all the shelves around in the spare CD rack and have turned it into a dedicated shrine to Sir David Attenborough *g*. My entire Attenborough DVD collection in one place, except for my Christmas present of "Asia" (currently by my bed because I'm watching it).
It snowed on Thursday night; about a centimetre lying everywhere when I went out at half six on Friday morning, and about half of that had melted by the time I left the pool to go up to the office, but most of that is still lying now. I had very little trouble getting in, but it sounds like most of my colleagues struggled; my oldest colleague broke her shoulder very badly ice-skating a few years ago (was off work for months) and she's really nervous about ice now - she'd clearly freaked herself out quite badly by the time she got in on Friday. I did look at the trampled and half-melted station car park on my way home and think "this is going to be lethal once it refreezes" but the round trip to church on Saturday was fine. And the bus driver saw me coming and waited as I "ran" for the bus (half the pavement was clear, but I was tiptoeing very carefully over the other half...).
It's mostly stayed below freezing, occasional spikes up to 1 or 2C. And more snow due tonight, although the forecast is no longer saying "bits of snow every day for the next week", and it's going to get warm enough (four or five whole degrees!!!) that it ought to melt by midweek.
First day back at work was noisier than I expected; there were half-a-dozen people in on my team, although we were the only ones on the whole floor! The one manager who was in brought a giant tin of fancy M&S biscuits, on the basis that if we all had to be in we deserved something nice. Monday will be back to full normality, though. I'm consoling myself with the fact that I have a day off later this month; I'm going to a Thursday night concert (Mahler 1), and decided to treat myself to not having to get up at six the next morning!
It snowed on Thursday night; about a centimetre lying everywhere when I went out at half six on Friday morning, and about half of that had melted by the time I left the pool to go up to the office, but most of that is still lying now. I had very little trouble getting in, but it sounds like most of my colleagues struggled; my oldest colleague broke her shoulder very badly ice-skating a few years ago (was off work for months) and she's really nervous about ice now - she'd clearly freaked herself out quite badly by the time she got in on Friday. I did look at the trampled and half-melted station car park on my way home and think "this is going to be lethal once it refreezes" but the round trip to church on Saturday was fine. And the bus driver saw me coming and waited as I "ran" for the bus (half the pavement was clear, but I was tiptoeing very carefully over the other half...).
It's mostly stayed below freezing, occasional spikes up to 1 or 2C. And more snow due tonight, although the forecast is no longer saying "bits of snow every day for the next week", and it's going to get warm enough (four or five whole degrees!!!) that it ought to melt by midweek.
First day back at work was noisier than I expected; there were half-a-dozen people in on my team, although we were the only ones on the whole floor! The one manager who was in brought a giant tin of fancy M&S biscuits, on the basis that if we all had to be in we deserved something nice. Monday will be back to full normality, though. I'm consoling myself with the fact that I have a day off later this month; I'm going to a Thursday night concert (Mahler 1), and decided to treat myself to not having to get up at six the next morning!
Sunday, January 4th, 2026 10:59 am
I rang in the New Year by haunting liminal spaces, by which I mean getting stuck overnight at LAX on New Year's Eve after missing multiple connections due to weather and deicing.
For Yuletide 2025, I finally got the opportunity to write The Good Place:
Icarus (1882 words) by shrift
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Good Place (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Chidi Anagonye, Jason Mendoza, Michael (The Good Place)
Additional Tags: Humor
Summary:
I also was lucky enough to receive two Yuletide gifts:
For the Greater Good (2552 words) by lapsedpacifist
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Edgin Darvis/Xenk Yendar
Characters: Edgin Darvis, Xenk Yendar
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Banter, Undercover, Some Humor
Summary:
an extraordinarily versatile hammer (1365 words) by kormantic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murderbot (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Letters, uncomfortable information, Platonic Relationships
Summary:
For Yuletide 2025, I finally got the opportunity to write The Good Place:
Icarus (1882 words) by shrift
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Good Place (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Chidi Anagonye, Jason Mendoza, Michael (The Good Place)
Additional Tags: Humor
Summary:
Attempt #479 aka Chidi and the series of escalating disappointments.
I also was lucky enough to receive two Yuletide gifts:
For the Greater Good (2552 words) by lapsedpacifist
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Edgin Darvis/Xenk Yendar
Characters: Edgin Darvis, Xenk Yendar
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Banter, Undercover, Some Humor
Summary:
Edgin does a good deed and pretends he's Xenk Yendar's husband to save the man's life.
Too bad Xenk didn't actually need any saving.
an extraordinarily versatile hammer (1365 words) by kormantic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murderbot (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Letters, uncomfortable information, Platonic Relationships
Summary:
— excerpt of personal correspondence from the desk of Dr. Ayda Mensah, President, Freehold Polity
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026 10:19 pm
Today started off really well! Woke up and decided, hey, that fic recced on bsky looks good, I should read that! Then I watched a vid! All before I even got up to feed the cat!
Then I saw the news, and that's enough said about that.
I had some good fic-writing thoughts while I was on my walk, and hoped to have a chance to something up, but alas. I did check off all the major items on my to-do list today (and one of them was re-starting a huge project that I've been procrastinating for decades while the project scope snowballed) and found a book online I thought I'd have to travel to see (a family tree/history put together by a distant cousin).
The fic I was thinking about is a hockey story I've wanted to write as a second chances romance for more than a decade, but thought it was too big for my skill level. My skill level won't grow if I don't write it, and I'm mostly just writing it for me, anyway. These days my brain doesn't want it to be second chances, and therefore it's no longer a romance, but I'm kind of interested in poking to see what it does want to be.
Definitely did too much, but the choices continue to be not overdoing and never making progress or staying within my known limits, which hasn't been working out well.
Then I saw the news, and that's enough said about that.
I had some good fic-writing thoughts while I was on my walk, and hoped to have a chance to something up, but alas. I did check off all the major items on my to-do list today (and one of them was re-starting a huge project that I've been procrastinating for decades while the project scope snowballed) and found a book online I thought I'd have to travel to see (a family tree/history put together by a distant cousin).
The fic I was thinking about is a hockey story I've wanted to write as a second chances romance for more than a decade, but thought it was too big for my skill level. My skill level won't grow if I don't write it, and I'm mostly just writing it for me, anyway. These days my brain doesn't want it to be second chances, and therefore it's no longer a romance, but I'm kind of interested in poking to see what it does want to be.
Definitely did too much, but the choices continue to be not overdoing and never making progress or staying within my known limits, which hasn't been working out well.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026 10:15 am
As I've discussed, in 2025 I discovered knitting podcasts on youtube. I've been knitting fairly consistently since 2015 (I just passed my 10-year anniversary on Ravelry), but seeing how other people are doing it, and what they're knitting, has fanned my enthusiasm to new heights. I don't have infinite time to knit, and as I've said to various people this fall, it's a good thing I have a day job to prevent me from giving myself carpal tunnel from too much knitting! Technically, I think it would more likely be De Quervain's tendonitis, because I'm a continental knitter, but you know! But in any case, I don't have so much time to knit that my greater enthusiasm has resulted in significantly increased output. I've vastly enjoyed what I have knit, though, and probably I did knit at least a bit more than I would have. I've also learned a lot, and gained a better appreciation of how much I already know!
In honour of all the knitting, I hunted down a knitting meme I made up (possibly converted into a knitting meme from some other craft, or from a writing meme or something), much longer ago than I thought. I used it to review my 2018 knitting, and posted it to the now-dormant![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
knitting community! It's time to bring it back for 2025 and the cusp of my 2026 projects, which I hope will be numerous!
Please feel free to adopt this meme if you have also been crafting this past year, and please let me know if you do!
( 2025 Knitting Meme )
In conclusion, have my biggest little niece goofing around and modelling some of my 2025 projects:
In honour of all the knitting, I hunted down a knitting meme I made up (possibly converted into a knitting meme from some other craft, or from a writing meme or something), much longer ago than I thought. I used it to review my 2018 knitting, and posted it to the now-dormant
knitting community! It's time to bring it back for 2025 and the cusp of my 2026 projects, which I hope will be numerous!Please feel free to adopt this meme if you have also been crafting this past year, and please let me know if you do!
( 2025 Knitting Meme )
In conclusion, have my biggest little niece goofing around and modelling some of my 2025 projects:
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026 10:11 am
I have a bunch of game codes going spare for anyone who wants them! We don't have to be mutuals or anything, and feel free to pass them along to other friends etc. Please take them! Some of these games are great, but I can't play two copies.
( list of games )
( list of games )
Friday, January 2nd, 2026 11:09 pm
Just finished watching Heated Rivalry and am having a lot of feelings, as one does. Not entirely sure what some of the feelings are, just yet, but I think I'll spend some time this weekend poking at them to see if they're amenable to identifying themselves. It's so wonderful that this beautiful brilliant show exists and is creating so much joy at a time when it's so needed.
Right before this, we watched The Pitt, which felt like it was starting to rearrange me as a person in a really good way, and this might be a little, as well.
It's been so long since I've had a fannish conversation, so long since I've had a fandom, that I almost don't even know what to say about anything (not sure I ever did! mostly i just showed up and stuck around). Hopefully there will be plenty of conversations about both of them so I can join in sometimes :)
Right before this, we watched The Pitt, which felt like it was starting to rearrange me as a person in a really good way, and this might be a little, as well.
It's been so long since I've had a fannish conversation, so long since I've had a fandom, that I almost don't even know what to say about anything (not sure I ever did! mostly i just showed up and stuck around). Hopefully there will be plenty of conversations about both of them so I can join in sometimes :)
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 10:42 pm
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 08:28 pm
Aha! it's Yuletide reveals time!
So my Yuletide recipient this year was![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti, who is either just about to find out this fact from my post, or has known for weeks and is just biding her time to reveal her knowledge and I'm just about to find out that fact after she reads this. Stay tuned for breaking developments!
So, for her, I wrote The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom, a fix-it fic for the kdrama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born about the most dysfunctional lesbian of that whole cast of lesbians picking up various postcanon pieces of herself and incidentally the rest of the troupe.
HOWEVER, for obvious reasons, I had to immediately come up with a decoy fic, so from the beginning having readraven's Yuletide letter at the same time I happened to be rereading The Dispossessed I decided I was also going to write a treat for raven that I would present to genarti as my assignment, which ended up as More A Comment Than A Question, a strange little timebending fic about Shevek's daughter contacting Laia Aseio Odo through time and space and not really necessarily making the most of it.
Tangled webs, etc; after I had confidently reported submitting my decoy fic on deadline togenarti, raven's prompt went to the pinch-hit list and I had to frantically fake a different panic than the panic I was actually feeling -- ANYWAY. Hilariously, raven discovered my identity immediately due to the usernames reveal error whereas genarti was at church through that entire event and thus remained completely oblivious (unless, of course, she isn't, see first paragraph above.) A very chaotic Yuletide on several fronts! But I had a lot of fun writing both fics although I would prefer not to be wrangling quite this much deception every year.
So my Yuletide recipient this year was
genarti, who is either just about to find out this fact from my post, or has known for weeks and is just biding her time to reveal her knowledge and I'm just about to find out that fact after she reads this. Stay tuned for breaking developments! So, for her, I wrote The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom, a fix-it fic for the kdrama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born about the most dysfunctional lesbian of that whole cast of lesbians picking up various postcanon pieces of herself and incidentally the rest of the troupe.
HOWEVER, for obvious reasons, I had to immediately come up with a decoy fic, so from the beginning having read
raven's Yuletide letter at the same time I happened to be rereading The Dispossessed I decided I was also going to write a treat for raven that I would present to genarti as my assignment, which ended up as More A Comment Than A Question, a strange little timebending fic about Shevek's daughter contacting Laia Aseio Odo through time and space and not really necessarily making the most of it. Tangled webs, etc; after I had confidently reported submitting my decoy fic on deadline to
genarti, raven's prompt went to the pinch-hit list and I had to frantically fake a different panic than the panic I was actually feeling -- ANYWAY. Hilariously, raven discovered my identity immediately due to the usernames reveal error whereas genarti was at church through that entire event and thus remained completely oblivious (unless, of course, she isn't, see first paragraph above.) A very chaotic Yuletide on several fronts! But I had a lot of fun writing both fics although I would prefer not to be wrangling quite this much deception every year.
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 03:21 pm
I received the absolutely delightful:
The Day After (4505 words) by rabidsamfan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey
Characters: Mervyn Bunter, Harriet Vane, Peter Wimsey
Additional Tags: Missing Scene
Summary:
And I wrote:
Closing Ceremony (1651 words) by Sage
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Summer War - Naomi Novik
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Argent of the Woven Blade/Elithyon
Characters: Elithyon (Summer War), Argent of the Woven Blade
Additional Tags: Yuleporn, Yuletide, Yuletide 2025
Summary:
The Day After (4505 words) by rabidsamfan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey
Characters: Mervyn Bunter, Harriet Vane, Peter Wimsey
Additional Tags: Missing Scene
Summary:
A coda to Busman’s Honeymoon.
And I wrote:
Closing Ceremony (1651 words) by Sage
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Summer War - Naomi Novik
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Argent of the Woven Blade/Elithyon
Characters: Elithyon (Summer War), Argent of the Woven Blade
Additional Tags: Yuleporn, Yuletide, Yuletide 2025
Summary:
Elithyon & Argent, before the curse.
Tags:
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 08:00 pm
Happy new year! I was thinking about doing some sort of year-in-summary thing but it just seemed much too exhausting. I still have November and December booklog plus the year in review for that and honestly I've spent most of the past week lying around limply reading Yuletide stories. I was going to post about that also but again with the too much effort.
However, tragically tomorrow I have to go back to work, so I am having to bestir myself to prepare for that.
In the meantime, my washing machine broke on Monday, with a load of laundry inside it, and apparently all the washing machine repair people are off until next Monday. Dad very kindly came over today and wrestled it out of the slot, which allowed us to revive it for long enough to finish the last few minutes of the cycle it was doing; we still don't know why it started erroring, and I don't trust it enough to wash anything else, but I no longer have a pile of clothes festering in there and I'm taking that as enough victory for now.
I also finally built the bookcase I bought on my November IKEA trip, and while Dad was here he volunteered to rearrange it and the CD racks I was using it to supplement. I have reshelved everything, with gaps for future acquisitions, and it all looks very beautiful; I have one CD rack left which will need rehoming, but I haven't worked out what to do with it yet. Possibly overflow DVDs, but there's no room for it in the spare room with the rest of the DVD storage. ETA: have just tucked it in the corner by the door and will work out what to put in it later.
And now, time to make packed lunch for tomorrow and go to BED.
However, tragically tomorrow I have to go back to work, so I am having to bestir myself to prepare for that.
In the meantime, my washing machine broke on Monday, with a load of laundry inside it, and apparently all the washing machine repair people are off until next Monday. Dad very kindly came over today and wrestled it out of the slot, which allowed us to revive it for long enough to finish the last few minutes of the cycle it was doing; we still don't know why it started erroring, and I don't trust it enough to wash anything else, but I no longer have a pile of clothes festering in there and I'm taking that as enough victory for now.
I also finally built the bookcase I bought on my November IKEA trip, and while Dad was here he volunteered to rearrange it and the CD racks I was using it to supplement. I have reshelved everything, with gaps for future acquisitions, and it all looks very beautiful; I have one CD rack left which will need rehoming, but I haven't worked out what to do with it yet. Possibly overflow DVDs, but there's no room for it in the spare room with the rest of the DVD storage. ETA: have just tucked it in the corner by the door and will work out what to put in it later.
And now, time to make packed lunch for tomorrow and go to BED.
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 11:34 am
Happy 2026! Is it as wild to you as it is to me that we're this far into the twenty-first century? 2026! I hope it's kind to all of us!
My New Year's Day is off to a slow start so far. I closed out 2025 yesterday by dealing with travel shenanigans. I spent Christmas day here in Victoria, but flew back to Vernon on Boxing Day. I was scheduled to fly back to Victoria via Vancouver yesterday morning at 9:00 am. I woke up at 5:45 am in preparation for leaving for the airport in Kelowna, 40 minutes away, by 6:30 am, and that was when I discovered that my 9:00 am flight to Vancouver had been cancelled at 2:00 am, and that I had been automatically rebooked on a flight to Vancouver leaving two hours earlier than my originally-scheduled departure, at 7:00 am. Thanks, Westjet! I was able to re-rebook myself on a different set of flights back to Victoria, via Calgary, leaving Kelowna at 3:00 pm, and had a nice extra morning of visiting with my parents. My flights went smoothly when they happened, if you can call flying to Alberta to get to Vancouver Island from the Okanagan smoothly, and I was able to reclaim my bag, find (and scrape the frost off of) my car, pay for parking, and escape the airport with no issues.
Then I got home and discovered that while I was gone, Cormac and Liz cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, washed all the dishes I didn't have time to wash before I left for Vernon, and most dramatically, cleaned out my fridge! When I've referred to my fridge as my shame cave over the past few years I have not been joking, and a few weeks before Christmas I actually had a dream that I was evicted from an apartment (not this one, it was part of a whole living in France again scenario) because my fridge was too disgusting. I'm torn between delight that my fridge is now clean and abject horror that Cormac and Liz have witnessed the totality of how gross it was. Cormac says that it wasn't as bad as he was expecting giving how I talked about it, but I extremely beg to differ. On the strength of all my feelings about that, I didn't stay up until midnight to see the New Year, but went to bed around 11:00 pm.
Anyway, I'm a functioning adult, I swear!
I still owe my compendious 2025 meme post, which my original plan was to complete yesterday afternoon once I was back in Victoria. Lol! I plan to work on it this afternoon, among other things. The point of this post, however, is mainly to be my response tosnowflake_challenge challenge #1. Hi! I'm monksandbones, again, a competent adult! You can find more about me in my dreamwidth profile, but the short version is that I grow reforestation seedlings as my day job, and outside of work (which there is less of than I'd like, often), I knit, I'm a curler (playing in two curling leagues at the moment), I lurk in fandom, I try to squeeze in a little volunteering and climate activism where I can, and I do my best to be a cool aunt to my three niblings.
I've never managed full participation insnowflake_challenge, and I'm sure I won't be able to do all the challenges this year either, but I'm aiming to participate where I can. For almost the first time since I started online journalling on livejournal in 2003, my posting collapsed in 2025. Part of that was that for the first time I really felt like it was silly to be posting about the mundane details of my life and expecting people to read it, and part was being too busy and tired to fight that feeling and post anyway. But I hate not having posted about anything that was going on!
I want to post more regularly again in 2026, and my goal is to letsnowflake_challenge help with that. I'm less reliable in commenting and responding to comments than I'd like to be, but I'm always open to them and I'm happy to meet new people! Please come and talk to me about Tolkien fandom, hockey (I'm up to #6 on the library hold list for Heated Rivalry, which is, in addition, sold out at all the bookstores I've tried, and I'm dyyyyyyyyyying because the wait is killing me), PWHL hockey in particular (go Goldeneyes!), tree- and reforestation-related topics, knitting, mundane life details, delightful child/nibling shenanigans, and curling! Especially curling! There must be other curlers and curling fans out there on dreamwidth, and if there aren't, I'm prepared to make some!
I'm always reading my reading list, even if I'm not posting or commenting, and again, I'm hoping to improve on that this year. If you're reading this, welcome (sorry about the fridge discussion), and I hope 2026 and the 2026snowflake_challenge bring us all the level of journal activity we want!
My New Year's Day is off to a slow start so far. I closed out 2025 yesterday by dealing with travel shenanigans. I spent Christmas day here in Victoria, but flew back to Vernon on Boxing Day. I was scheduled to fly back to Victoria via Vancouver yesterday morning at 9:00 am. I woke up at 5:45 am in preparation for leaving for the airport in Kelowna, 40 minutes away, by 6:30 am, and that was when I discovered that my 9:00 am flight to Vancouver had been cancelled at 2:00 am, and that I had been automatically rebooked on a flight to Vancouver leaving two hours earlier than my originally-scheduled departure, at 7:00 am. Thanks, Westjet! I was able to re-rebook myself on a different set of flights back to Victoria, via Calgary, leaving Kelowna at 3:00 pm, and had a nice extra morning of visiting with my parents. My flights went smoothly when they happened, if you can call flying to Alberta to get to Vancouver Island from the Okanagan smoothly, and I was able to reclaim my bag, find (and scrape the frost off of) my car, pay for parking, and escape the airport with no issues.
Then I got home and discovered that while I was gone, Cormac and Liz cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, washed all the dishes I didn't have time to wash before I left for Vernon, and most dramatically, cleaned out my fridge! When I've referred to my fridge as my shame cave over the past few years I have not been joking, and a few weeks before Christmas I actually had a dream that I was evicted from an apartment (not this one, it was part of a whole living in France again scenario) because my fridge was too disgusting. I'm torn between delight that my fridge is now clean and abject horror that Cormac and Liz have witnessed the totality of how gross it was. Cormac says that it wasn't as bad as he was expecting giving how I talked about it, but I extremely beg to differ. On the strength of all my feelings about that, I didn't stay up until midnight to see the New Year, but went to bed around 11:00 pm.
Anyway, I'm a functioning adult, I swear!
I still owe my compendious 2025 meme post, which my original plan was to complete yesterday afternoon once I was back in Victoria. Lol! I plan to work on it this afternoon, among other things. The point of this post, however, is mainly to be my response to
snowflake_challenge challenge #1. Hi! I'm monksandbones, again, a competent adult! You can find more about me in my dreamwidth profile, but the short version is that I grow reforestation seedlings as my day job, and outside of work (which there is less of than I'd like, often), I knit, I'm a curler (playing in two curling leagues at the moment), I lurk in fandom, I try to squeeze in a little volunteering and climate activism where I can, and I do my best to be a cool aunt to my three niblings.I've never managed full participation in
snowflake_challenge, and I'm sure I won't be able to do all the challenges this year either, but I'm aiming to participate where I can. For almost the first time since I started online journalling on livejournal in 2003, my posting collapsed in 2025. Part of that was that for the first time I really felt like it was silly to be posting about the mundane details of my life and expecting people to read it, and part was being too busy and tired to fight that feeling and post anyway. But I hate not having posted about anything that was going on!I want to post more regularly again in 2026, and my goal is to let
snowflake_challenge help with that. I'm less reliable in commenting and responding to comments than I'd like to be, but I'm always open to them and I'm happy to meet new people! Please come and talk to me about Tolkien fandom, hockey (I'm up to #6 on the library hold list for Heated Rivalry, which is, in addition, sold out at all the bookstores I've tried, and I'm dyyyyyyyyyying because the wait is killing me), PWHL hockey in particular (go Goldeneyes!), tree- and reforestation-related topics, knitting, mundane life details, delightful child/nibling shenanigans, and curling! Especially curling! There must be other curlers and curling fans out there on dreamwidth, and if there aren't, I'm prepared to make some! I'm always reading my reading list, even if I'm not posting or commenting, and again, I'm hoping to improve on that this year. If you're reading this, welcome (sorry about the fridge discussion), and I hope 2026 and the 2026
snowflake_challenge bring us all the level of journal activity we want!
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 11:30 am
Due to the combo of the ongoing Eight Days of DWJ project and being on the Otherwise judging committee, this has been one of my best years in recent memory for reading actual books and my worst for keeping up with write-ups.
( Books read, 2025 )
As usual, I'm hoping to write up many of the ones I missed and will probably not in fact actually get around to most of them, so feel free to ask me about any of them -- I'll try to either do a short version here or get myself together for an actual post!
( Books read, 2025 )
As usual, I'm hoping to write up many of the ones I missed and will probably not in fact actually get around to most of them, so feel free to ask me about any of them -- I'll try to either do a short version here or get myself together for an actual post!
Wednesday, December 31st, 2025 04:12 pm
For my last post of 2025 I feel it is incumbent upon me to talk about the wildest television show I watched in 2025, the kdrama Genie, Make A Wish.
The high-level premise of this show: a GENIE, who is also SATAN, has been IMPRISONED for ONE THOUSAND YEARS because he's supposed to seduce humans into CORRUPTING THEMSELVES and instead he met a PURE SOUL who used her WISHES FOR GOOD and caused him to LOSE his BARGAIN with GOD.
Now! he has met her REINCARNATION! however! instead of being a PURE INGENUE WAIF! the reincarnation is an ETHICAL SOCIOPATH who has been STRICTLY TRAINED in NOT MURDERING PEOPLE by her BELOVED GRANDMOTHER! and whose first reaction on meeting a magical immortal genie is 'at last! someone I can ethically shove off a building!!'
(This meeting happens in Dubai, btw. The show is very obviously at least in part sponsored by the Tourism Board of Dubai and the cast are frequently hopping back and forth there to Shop Our Beautiful Bazaars and speak in variably competent Arabic; however, as a result, this means the backstory involves historical trade routes! the last time I saw that was in Queen Seondeok!)
ANYWAY, now, the challenge is on: will ethical sociopath Ki Ka-young be CORRUPTED by SATAN the GENIE? or will she once again make SELFLESS WISHES and condemn the genie to have his THROAT SLIT by an ANGRY ANGEL OF DEATH?
There are also some side characters! People in Ki Ka-young's orbit include her SAINTLY GRANDMOTHER and her BEST FRIEND, a LESBIAN DENTIST. People in the genie's orbit include his GIANT PANTHER MINION, the ANGRY ANGEL OF DEATH, and a SMALL BOY who consistently beats him in Mortal Kombat. There are also some LOCAL COTTAGECORE YOUTUBERS, a circle of ADDITIONAL JUDGMENTAL GRANNIES, a RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT SERIAL KILLER, an EVIL IMMORTAL CHILD, and DANIEL HENNEY, in a role that ( I will not spoil except under a cut )
Let me be clear: is this drama good? no, I do not think so. Do I have arguments with its determinations about what does and does not count as a selfless wish? sure. Did I enjoy it? TREMENDOUSLY. Did I at any point have any idea what was going to happen next in this absolute mad libs of a plot? NEVER ONCE.
however, the thing that made me shriek most about the drama is a major mid-show spoiler ( regarding Beloved Grandma )
The high-level premise of this show: a GENIE, who is also SATAN, has been IMPRISONED for ONE THOUSAND YEARS because he's supposed to seduce humans into CORRUPTING THEMSELVES and instead he met a PURE SOUL who used her WISHES FOR GOOD and caused him to LOSE his BARGAIN with GOD.
Now! he has met her REINCARNATION! however! instead of being a PURE INGENUE WAIF! the reincarnation is an ETHICAL SOCIOPATH who has been STRICTLY TRAINED in NOT MURDERING PEOPLE by her BELOVED GRANDMOTHER! and whose first reaction on meeting a magical immortal genie is 'at last! someone I can ethically shove off a building!!'
(This meeting happens in Dubai, btw. The show is very obviously at least in part sponsored by the Tourism Board of Dubai and the cast are frequently hopping back and forth there to Shop Our Beautiful Bazaars and speak in variably competent Arabic; however, as a result, this means the backstory involves historical trade routes! the last time I saw that was in Queen Seondeok!)
ANYWAY, now, the challenge is on: will ethical sociopath Ki Ka-young be CORRUPTED by SATAN the GENIE? or will she once again make SELFLESS WISHES and condemn the genie to have his THROAT SLIT by an ANGRY ANGEL OF DEATH?
There are also some side characters! People in Ki Ka-young's orbit include her SAINTLY GRANDMOTHER and her BEST FRIEND, a LESBIAN DENTIST. People in the genie's orbit include his GIANT PANTHER MINION, the ANGRY ANGEL OF DEATH, and a SMALL BOY who consistently beats him in Mortal Kombat. There are also some LOCAL COTTAGECORE YOUTUBERS, a circle of ADDITIONAL JUDGMENTAL GRANNIES, a RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT SERIAL KILLER, an EVIL IMMORTAL CHILD, and DANIEL HENNEY, in a role that ( I will not spoil except under a cut )
Let me be clear: is this drama good? no, I do not think so. Do I have arguments with its determinations about what does and does not count as a selfless wish? sure. Did I enjoy it? TREMENDOUSLY. Did I at any point have any idea what was going to happen next in this absolute mad libs of a plot? NEVER ONCE.
however, the thing that made me shriek most about the drama is a major mid-show spoiler ( regarding Beloved Grandma )
Tags:
Wednesday, December 31st, 2025 03:32 pm
Sometimes I still get comments and kudos on Transfigurations and my other Harry Potter stories.
Of course I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, fandom belongs to the fans, and the outpouring of love and work and time that created the fandom was ours and remains ours. On the other hand, I don't like the ongoing link to someone who has traded in a career as an author for one as a full-time pro-hate activist.
I don't want to take the stories down. I don't want to orphan them. I just want to be able to take some pleasure in them again.
So starting with 2026, I'm making donations to https://transgenderlawcenter.org and https://give.thetrevorproject.org in honor of fanreaders. That way when the titles come up in my email, I'll have a nice, warm feeling knowing that they're connected with people who are doing something positive for the lives of trans people.
(Thanks toterminally_underwhelmed for recommending the organizations.)
Of course I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, fandom belongs to the fans, and the outpouring of love and work and time that created the fandom was ours and remains ours. On the other hand, I don't like the ongoing link to someone who has traded in a career as an author for one as a full-time pro-hate activist.
I don't want to take the stories down. I don't want to orphan them. I just want to be able to take some pleasure in them again.
So starting with 2026, I'm making donations to https://transgenderlawcenter.org and https://give.thetrevorproject.org in honor of fanreaders. That way when the titles come up in my email, I'll have a nice, warm feeling knowing that they're connected with people who are doing something positive for the lives of trans people.
(Thanks to
terminally_underwhelmed for recommending the organizations.)Tags:
Wednesday, December 31st, 2025 03:07 pm
books
The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club #5) by Richard Osman. This one just didn't grab me. Too many criminals, not enough Murder Club.
Xmas
was good, though delayed until Monday. I had a nice time, even if one of my gifts to my parents was redundant. The food was pretty great, though.
yarning/etsy
My Rock Star Lestat art doll sold on Christmas Day! Yay!! After which I finished a donation hat. And then another hat while reading Yuletide. I missed yarn group due to traveling for Xmas, though I got a commission for a Kermit green kickbunny, so I worked on that over my belated holiday. And I got a commission for an Older Daniel Molloy art doll yesterday, yay, so I'll be working on that over the next couple of days.
yuletide
reveals are tomorrow! Yay!
#resist
Tuesday, January 20: #50501 Free America Walk-out, 2pm local time. https://www.FreeAmeri.ca
Happy New Year, everyone! Please be safe as you enjoy kicking 2025 to the curb! <333
The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club #5) by Richard Osman. This one just didn't grab me. Too many criminals, not enough Murder Club.
Xmas
was good, though delayed until Monday. I had a nice time, even if one of my gifts to my parents was redundant. The food was pretty great, though.
yarning/etsy
My Rock Star Lestat art doll sold on Christmas Day! Yay!! After which I finished a donation hat. And then another hat while reading Yuletide. I missed yarn group due to traveling for Xmas, though I got a commission for a Kermit green kickbunny, so I worked on that over my belated holiday. And I got a commission for an Older Daniel Molloy art doll yesterday, yay, so I'll be working on that over the next couple of days.
yuletide
reveals are tomorrow! Yay!
#resist
Tuesday, January 20: #50501 Free America Walk-out, 2pm local time. https://www.FreeAmeri.ca
Happy New Year, everyone! Please be safe as you enjoy kicking 2025 to the curb! <333
Tags:
Monday, December 29th, 2025 08:11 am
The Queen's Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis did quite a good job of giving me historical context around the lives of artisans and upwardly mobile bourgeois in 17th and early 18th century France and only a mediocre job IMO of convincing me of its central argument, but I was reading it for the former and not the latter so I can't say I was disappointed per se ...
As the author, historian Joan DeJean, introduces her narrative, she was browsing the National Archives when she came across two documents: the first, appointing Jean Magoulet as official embroiderer to Queen Marie-Thérèse of France; the second, decreeing that Magoulet's daughter Marie Louise should be put in prison and deported to New Orleans on charges of prostitution. DeJean immediately dropped what she was doing to Get To The Bottom Of This and went on a deep dive into the entire Magoulet family as well as the family of Louis Chevrot, the young man whose involvement with Marie-Louise resulted in the charges above.
In order to write this family saga, Joan DeJean has pulled out every relevant family document -- marriage licenses, birth certificates, guardianship statements, criminal charges, recorded purchases, etc. etc. -- and she does a clear and interesting job of explaining what we can learn from them, what these kinds of documents normally look like and what their context is, what the specific features of these family documents imply, and letting you follow her logic with your own brain. I appreciate this very much! I had no idea, for example, that it was standard in 17th-century France for the court to appoint a guardian for any child who lost a parent, even if they still had the other parent living, to ensure that their financial interests were protected, something that came up often in this narrative where a lot of kids were losing parents in situations where their financial interests were not particularly protected. It's a really good example of historical detective work, how you can draw a picture of a family through time through the bureaucratic litter they leave behind, and I appreciated it very much.
On the other hand, Joan DeJean also occasionally slips into writing like this --
In the course of their attempts both to get rich quick and to save their skin when they got into bad straits, the Queen's Embroiderers became imposters, tricksters, con artists nonpareil. They lied about everything and to everyone: to the police, to notaries, to their in-laws. They lied about their ages and those of their children, about their professional accomplishments and their net worth. They caroused; they philandered; they made a mockery of the laws of church and state. The only truly authentic thing about them was their extraordinary talent and their ability to weave gold and silver thread into the kind of garments that seemed the stuff of dreams. In their lives and on an almost daily basis, haute couture crossed paths with high crime.
Savage beauty indeed.
-- which made me laugh out loud every time it happened. So, bug, feature? who could say ....
Anyway, Joan DeJean makes a pretty good argument for most of the family gossip she pulls out about the Magoulets and the Chevrots, but the center of her argument about the Great Tragic Romance between Marie-Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot rests on a really elaborate switcheroo that I simply do not buy. In drawing out her family saga, DeJean has become obsessed with the fact that there seem to have been two Marie-Louise Magoulets, one being more than a decade older than the other, and, crucially, also more than a decade older than Louis Chevrot; ( I guess this is technically spoilers for a three hundred year old scandal )
But a.) context about material culture and craftsmanship is what I was here for and context is what I got, in spades, and b.) if you're going to invent a historical conspiracy theory, make it as niche as possible, is what I say, so despite the fact that I don't BELIEVE DeJean I still spiritually support her. Has she perhaps connected a few more dots than actually exist? Perhaps. But I still certainly got my money's worth [none; library] out of the book!
As the author, historian Joan DeJean, introduces her narrative, she was browsing the National Archives when she came across two documents: the first, appointing Jean Magoulet as official embroiderer to Queen Marie-Thérèse of France; the second, decreeing that Magoulet's daughter Marie Louise should be put in prison and deported to New Orleans on charges of prostitution. DeJean immediately dropped what she was doing to Get To The Bottom Of This and went on a deep dive into the entire Magoulet family as well as the family of Louis Chevrot, the young man whose involvement with Marie-Louise resulted in the charges above.
In order to write this family saga, Joan DeJean has pulled out every relevant family document -- marriage licenses, birth certificates, guardianship statements, criminal charges, recorded purchases, etc. etc. -- and she does a clear and interesting job of explaining what we can learn from them, what these kinds of documents normally look like and what their context is, what the specific features of these family documents imply, and letting you follow her logic with your own brain. I appreciate this very much! I had no idea, for example, that it was standard in 17th-century France for the court to appoint a guardian for any child who lost a parent, even if they still had the other parent living, to ensure that their financial interests were protected, something that came up often in this narrative where a lot of kids were losing parents in situations where their financial interests were not particularly protected. It's a really good example of historical detective work, how you can draw a picture of a family through time through the bureaucratic litter they leave behind, and I appreciated it very much.
On the other hand, Joan DeJean also occasionally slips into writing like this --
In the course of their attempts both to get rich quick and to save their skin when they got into bad straits, the Queen's Embroiderers became imposters, tricksters, con artists nonpareil. They lied about everything and to everyone: to the police, to notaries, to their in-laws. They lied about their ages and those of their children, about their professional accomplishments and their net worth. They caroused; they philandered; they made a mockery of the laws of church and state. The only truly authentic thing about them was their extraordinary talent and their ability to weave gold and silver thread into the kind of garments that seemed the stuff of dreams. In their lives and on an almost daily basis, haute couture crossed paths with high crime.
Savage beauty indeed.
-- which made me laugh out loud every time it happened. So, bug, feature? who could say ....
Anyway, Joan DeJean makes a pretty good argument for most of the family gossip she pulls out about the Magoulets and the Chevrots, but the center of her argument about the Great Tragic Romance between Marie-Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot rests on a really elaborate switcheroo that I simply do not buy. In drawing out her family saga, DeJean has become obsessed with the fact that there seem to have been two Marie-Louise Magoulets, one being more than a decade older than the other, and, crucially, also more than a decade older than Louis Chevrot; ( I guess this is technically spoilers for a three hundred year old scandal )
But a.) context about material culture and craftsmanship is what I was here for and context is what I got, in spades, and b.) if you're going to invent a historical conspiracy theory, make it as niche as possible, is what I say, so despite the fact that I don't BELIEVE DeJean I still spiritually support her. Has she perhaps connected a few more dots than actually exist? Perhaps. But I still certainly got my money's worth [none; library] out of the book!
Tags:
Saturday, December 27th, 2025 10:52 pm
Christmas was good but also SO MUCH. By the end of Boxing Day lunch I was trying to work out how much longer I had to stay in company, but I ended up in my mother's living room where she was silently playing a game on her new tablet and my sister's fiance was silently playing a game on his phone, and I just sat there silently reading on my phone for an hour and felt much better.
Family updates:
Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:
Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.
But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.
Family updates:
- my sister is engaged! this came as a surprise to me and the brother who doesn't live near her, although mostly because we thought they were already engaged (there have been casual discussions about weddings going back some years)
- my sister's endometriosis op in the autumn revealed that she does not in fact have endometriosis, but she did have a nasty tumour-y thing which was not cancer but apparently also not not cancer and now she is down one ovary and fallopian tube, which is particularly upsetting for her because all of this was part of the fertility investigations they've been working on
- my middle nephew is dating a boy! He is definitely the least surprising candidate for this out of my niblings. Apparently he is not presently interested in labels, only in dating the person he likes, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, particularly since he's fourteen
Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:
- three trays of sausage rolls (vegetarian spanakopita; sage and onion; cheese; chorizo; black pudding; "Chinese takeaway" (with five-spice, hoisin and soy sauces); homemade by my sister's fiance and apparently all very delicious - obviously I only had the spanakopita ones)
- two trays of cheese potatoes
- two sticks of garlic bread
- a tray of pigs in blankets
- three small trays of brie and cranberry parcels
- a pack of chicken goujons
- a small tray of beef and stuffing Yorkshire puddings(?!?)
- a Greek omelette / fritatta thing
Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.
But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.
Friday, December 26th, 2025 10:40 pm
Every year I'm like "I should really read the Neon Hemlock novellas" and then perhaps I actually manage to get around to reading one of them, but this year I ... thought I had read all of them because I thought there were only four published but it turns out in fact now that I check there were several more than that. Well! I read four of them! They were all very gay and very tropey; under these subheadings, I enjoyed two of them quite a bit, one of them didn't hit for me, and the last one I found incredibly frustrating, for personal reasons.
The two I liked were No Such Thing as Duty, by Lara Elena Donnelly, and The Oblivion Bride, by Caitlin Starling. Both of these have a definite air of fanfiction about them: No Such Thing As Duty is a 'what if my favorite historical guy met a sexy vampire' fic, the favorite historical guy in question is W. Somerset Maughan. I have come to the conclusion that I'm really quite charmed by this sort of thing as long as the favorite historical guy in question is not a pre-existing big seller like Christopher Marlowe or Charlotte Bronte but someone who I actually have to look up:* the author's real victory is in making me Wikipedia their special historical guy and go 'whoa, sure, lot going on here actually'
*I'm aware this is very subjective and there are many people out there who don't have to go to Google to know basic things about W. Somerset Maughan. But they ARE a lot fewer I think than the people who don't have to go to Google to know basic things about i.e. Lord Byron. That said, if you are experiencing boredom at the idea of Yet Another Sexy W. Somserset Maughan fic, I'd love to know about it.
The Oblivion Bride meanwhile is a classic Lesbian Arranged Marriage fic that, per the author's note, appears to have grown out of a Dishonored fic the author wrote several years back. I don't know anything about Dishonored so I can't tell you much about that. What I can tell you is that she's a normalgirl cadet member of an important family who's been thrust into an important political position because all her actual aristocratic relatives have mysteriously died, she's an icy cold Murder Alchemist General and also Magical Detective who's marrying her by order of the prince to solve the mysterious deaths and keep the political assets in the hands of someone loyal to the throne; could they actually fall in love? The answer will shock you! Anyway, I like tropes, and I like lesbians, and I like that Caitlin Starling is never afraid to lean into her id; I was as happy to read this in novella form as I would have been on AO3.
The Dead Withheld by L.D. Lewis is the one that didn't quite hit for me -- it's a supernatural noir about a PI who can talk to the dead investigating the cold case death of her wife, and it is doing exactly what it says on the tin but something about it never quite grabbed me. Too short? Not enough oomph? Anyway, it might grab you!
and The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas drove me up a wall, in large part because the worldbuilding it's doing is extremely playful and interesting and fun -- it's set in an alternate universe where a South Asian empire was the major early colonial power instead of Rome, and their abandoned artifacts and technology power contemporary superheroes. The protagonist is an academic dating a superhero; the text is heavily footnote-studded and 50% of the footnotes are really fun and interesting little explorations of this alternate history. Unfortunately for me, the actual plot laid on top of this rich worldbuilding is all Gay Superhero Relationship Drama and the other 50% of the footnotes are gossipy anecdotes about the protagonist's sex life. This is certainly going to be a feature for some people but was, alas, a bug for me; every time I went through the effort to click through the annoying footnotes format on my digital edition I was really hoping to get a meaty paragraph about what happened after Siddhartha marched into the city of Rime and did not feel rewarded any time I got a smug half-sentence about shibari instead.
The two I liked were No Such Thing as Duty, by Lara Elena Donnelly, and The Oblivion Bride, by Caitlin Starling. Both of these have a definite air of fanfiction about them: No Such Thing As Duty is a 'what if my favorite historical guy met a sexy vampire' fic, the favorite historical guy in question is W. Somerset Maughan. I have come to the conclusion that I'm really quite charmed by this sort of thing as long as the favorite historical guy in question is not a pre-existing big seller like Christopher Marlowe or Charlotte Bronte but someone who I actually have to look up:* the author's real victory is in making me Wikipedia their special historical guy and go 'whoa, sure, lot going on here actually'
*I'm aware this is very subjective and there are many people out there who don't have to go to Google to know basic things about W. Somerset Maughan. But they ARE a lot fewer I think than the people who don't have to go to Google to know basic things about i.e. Lord Byron. That said, if you are experiencing boredom at the idea of Yet Another Sexy W. Somserset Maughan fic, I'd love to know about it.
The Oblivion Bride meanwhile is a classic Lesbian Arranged Marriage fic that, per the author's note, appears to have grown out of a Dishonored fic the author wrote several years back. I don't know anything about Dishonored so I can't tell you much about that. What I can tell you is that she's a normalgirl cadet member of an important family who's been thrust into an important political position because all her actual aristocratic relatives have mysteriously died, she's an icy cold Murder Alchemist General and also Magical Detective who's marrying her by order of the prince to solve the mysterious deaths and keep the political assets in the hands of someone loyal to the throne; could they actually fall in love? The answer will shock you! Anyway, I like tropes, and I like lesbians, and I like that Caitlin Starling is never afraid to lean into her id; I was as happy to read this in novella form as I would have been on AO3.
The Dead Withheld by L.D. Lewis is the one that didn't quite hit for me -- it's a supernatural noir about a PI who can talk to the dead investigating the cold case death of her wife, and it is doing exactly what it says on the tin but something about it never quite grabbed me. Too short? Not enough oomph? Anyway, it might grab you!
and The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas drove me up a wall, in large part because the worldbuilding it's doing is extremely playful and interesting and fun -- it's set in an alternate universe where a South Asian empire was the major early colonial power instead of Rome, and their abandoned artifacts and technology power contemporary superheroes. The protagonist is an academic dating a superhero; the text is heavily footnote-studded and 50% of the footnotes are really fun and interesting little explorations of this alternate history. Unfortunately for me, the actual plot laid on top of this rich worldbuilding is all Gay Superhero Relationship Drama and the other 50% of the footnotes are gossipy anecdotes about the protagonist's sex life. This is certainly going to be a feature for some people but was, alas, a bug for me; every time I went through the effort to click through the annoying footnotes format on my digital edition I was really hoping to get a meaty paragraph about what happened after Siddhartha marched into the city of Rime and did not feel rewarded any time I got a smug half-sentence about shibari instead.
Tags:
Thursday, December 25th, 2025 11:34 pm
I am not allowing myself to dive into the Yuletide archive this year until after reveals due to a bunch of other reading commitments that have to get done by early January, BUT! I obviously made an exception for my own
THREE
INCREDIBLE
GIFT
FICS:
The Knight Under the Apple Tree
“Our crop is well tended,” Celia protested, despite all evidence that it was not. “It grows copiously out yonder.”
Oliver turned his head to look out the window. “Indeed, the grass outside does grow most mightily.”
“It is a sheepcote, sir; as the name suggests, it is for the keeping of sheep. Thus grass is essential.”
“And yet I do not see the sheep.”
I asked someone to sell me on As You Like It's Celia/Oliver side ship and I have completely received my wish: this fic is SO cute and does such a lovely job filling out the relationship between these characters until it feels like something that fully exists and that I want to root for
A rainbow-stripe in another proper world
“None of it ever happened,” said Uncle Nirupam in his precise way, “and so we have no memories of it, of course. But the instincts remain. I felt the same way when I first visited this world. I thought, is this where they burn people like us?”
The first of two excellent Witch Week fix-it fics -- this one is a short little outsider-POV gem in which Janet Chant and Nan Pilgrim are married, which is not something I would have ever thought of in a million years but which delights me deeply! galaxy brain!
Remember, Remember
“To produce the required crispiness, the mandrake is dipped in wallpaper paste, dredged in sawdust, and then pan-fried until it is completely burnt on all sides,” Nan recited obligingly. “It is served with a side of slugs poached in their own slime. Their chewy texture provides a perfect complement…” Estelle was howling with laughter by this point. Nan, as always in such moments, felt as though she were being carried along by an inexorable flood of words quite independent of herself. A rhyme was pushing insistently at the inside of her head, and she let it out without the least idea where it was going to finish up:
“Crispy mandrake, extra fancy,
Bring me something
Chrestomanci!”
and THIS one is a luxurious and voice-perfect THIRTEEN THOUSAND WORDS spent with my beloved terrible children as their memories are returned by way of an encounter with the TRAGICALLY ABANDONED SENTIENT GARDEN IMPLEMENTS. ABSOLUTE GALAXY BRAIN AGAIN ... I'm so happy ...
and having been Yuletided well beyond my deserts, I now leave the archive for now but I look forward to reading everyone's recs on the other side!
THREE
INCREDIBLE
GIFT
FICS:
The Knight Under the Apple Tree
“Our crop is well tended,” Celia protested, despite all evidence that it was not. “It grows copiously out yonder.”
Oliver turned his head to look out the window. “Indeed, the grass outside does grow most mightily.”
“It is a sheepcote, sir; as the name suggests, it is for the keeping of sheep. Thus grass is essential.”
“And yet I do not see the sheep.”
I asked someone to sell me on As You Like It's Celia/Oliver side ship and I have completely received my wish: this fic is SO cute and does such a lovely job filling out the relationship between these characters until it feels like something that fully exists and that I want to root for
A rainbow-stripe in another proper world
“None of it ever happened,” said Uncle Nirupam in his precise way, “and so we have no memories of it, of course. But the instincts remain. I felt the same way when I first visited this world. I thought, is this where they burn people like us?”
The first of two excellent Witch Week fix-it fics -- this one is a short little outsider-POV gem in which Janet Chant and Nan Pilgrim are married, which is not something I would have ever thought of in a million years but which delights me deeply! galaxy brain!
Remember, Remember
“To produce the required crispiness, the mandrake is dipped in wallpaper paste, dredged in sawdust, and then pan-fried until it is completely burnt on all sides,” Nan recited obligingly. “It is served with a side of slugs poached in their own slime. Their chewy texture provides a perfect complement…” Estelle was howling with laughter by this point. Nan, as always in such moments, felt as though she were being carried along by an inexorable flood of words quite independent of herself. A rhyme was pushing insistently at the inside of her head, and she let it out without the least idea where it was going to finish up:
“Crispy mandrake, extra fancy,
Bring me something
Chrestomanci!”
and THIS one is a luxurious and voice-perfect THIRTEEN THOUSAND WORDS spent with my beloved terrible children as their memories are returned by way of an encounter with the TRAGICALLY ABANDONED SENTIENT GARDEN IMPLEMENTS. ABSOLUTE GALAXY BRAIN AGAIN ... I'm so happy ...
and having been Yuletided well beyond my deserts, I now leave the archive for now but I look forward to reading everyone's recs on the other side!
Tags: