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Challenge #5

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show (or any other of your choice - game, comic, anything else)! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.
Creative prompt: Write a fic or original story about a character reluctantly doing something they are hesitant about.

Have you all seen this year's Oscar-winning film for best animated feature Flow? Because you really should if you haven't.

The film won the Oscar for best animated feature, but it was also nominated for best international film (Latvia). It's an absolutely beautiful movie about a cat trying to survive alongside other animals in a post-apocalyptic world where the water level keeps rising, and finding unlikely friendships with the other animals in the process (found family!). The visual storytelling is excellent. There is no dialogue, just the animal sounds and music. The animals are not anthropomorphized; they act and react as the animals they are. The film really does a good job making each of the animals a character and highlights their emotions, yet their basic natures remain. There is suspense and sadness, but also humor (and even in a post-apocalyptic world a cat will still want to knock things off a shelf). And the resolution, though sad in some ways, is also really lovely and hopeful.

There is a ton of terrific gif sets, fan art, and meta for the film on Tumblr, but

terapsina summed it up perfectly in this gif set.

I love this movie so much.

Also:
Black Cat Adoptions Are Up. An Oscar-Winning Animated Movie May Have Helped
The Global Success of Academy Award-Winning Animation Flow Has Helped to Increase The Adoption Rate of Black Cats (no links, just a captioned pic set with a very cute black cat alongside the cat from the film).

Previous Days
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

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china_shop

guardian_wishlist is returning next month, yay! It's my favourite event. It runs like

fandomtrees: people sign up with a wishlist of things they'd like to receive, and then anyone can make them gifts. One of the things I love about it is that every year I make things that would never have occurred to me otherwise: the SID Team writing RPS, Arthurian-inspired AU, tea shop AU, Zhu Hong learning martial arts, Li Qian joining the SID, etc.

I find most of my own prompts revolve, by default, around my main /-pairings, so I try to make a conscious effort to include gen and &-pairing prompts in my signups too. And (speaking not as a co-mod, but as a co-participant) I'd like to gently encourage everyone else to do the same, if they'd like to receive that kind of thing, because I love writing little gen and other-pairing things (as well as SW/ZYL), and prompts are love. :D

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china_shop

From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, chapter 4:

As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do.

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

rachelmanija

Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.

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silveradept

Current Mood: giggly
Current Music: Disparition - The Ballad of Magnus and Axel

We're already more than halfway through the planned

sunshine_revival, but that means prompt number five has come to say hello to us.

Challenge #5:

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.

Creative prompt: Write a fic or original story about a character reluctantly doing something they are hesitant about.

( See! Hitler On Ice! See! Jews In Space! )

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silveradept

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Daft Punk - Robot Rock

Let's begin with a zine constructed for those who feel like the U.S. Fourth of July holiday is not very representative of the country. Or that it is very representative of the country, and there needs to be a lot of changes.

A useful ponderance on how humans will ascribe beneficence to things they believe are genuine, and will declare things that are identified as copies and knockoffs to have malice, or at least ugliness, associated with them, even though humans, as a whole, are very bad at determining which is authentic and which are not, since that determination tends to be the domain of experts who have studied and have to make such determinations based on their studies and whether a possible forgery matches what they have studied. I think the more interesting thread to tease on this piece is the one that's about the value of enjoying a good fake, because "enjoying a good fake" is pretty well at heart of most human entertainment. We know so many of the stories we tell contain elements of fakery, or special effects that make the fake appear real, and yet we willingly go to them, sometimes repeatedly. I think that's the more interesting route, and the excerpted piece walks around it without answering it. If we get something useful out of the forgery, does the fact that it's a forgery mean that we have to discard everything associated with it? In some cases, the answer is yes, often because the things that came with the forgery are anti-social and harmful to other people, but some of the Pratchettian lies are very, very useful to us. Do we need to discard them, as well? Why are we so upset when something that is warranted as true turns out to be false, even if it is useful, but we do not have similar upset for things that do not warrant themselves as true, even though considerable effort goes in to making them appear as if they are true?

A victory! After a visually impaired man died from falling off a train platform that did not inform him of the edge of the platform, tactile paving has been completed on all of the train platforms so that hopefully there are no further tragedies of the nature of Cleveland Gervais. If someone needs an example of the saying "Regulations are written in blood," this is the kind of thing they can be pointed at.

( And then, the things that are less victorious )

Last for tonight, The Lavender marriage, where at least one of the participants is queer in one form, but the marriage is to someone who the law will see as being right and appropriate, providing protection for the queer person about being seen to obviously as queer.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

torachan

1. Well, the door repair guys did not come today, but they rescheduled for next Tuesday, which is at least not that far away. And I still took my day off, since I'd already said I was going to, so that was nice.

2. This morning I broke a glass bottle in the sink and got a couple small cuts on my hand and one bigger one on my finger, but thankfully it's not "going to the hospital" level. Rather than being a slice, it seems to have cut a little chunk out, so it was bleeding a lot and awkward to bandage. It's my right hand, but my second to last finger, so not a finger I use a whole lot.

3. Since the guys cancelled on us we were able to go to Disneyland earlier, which meant less traffic and less heat (though it was still warm and sunny). We had a really lovely lunch at a restaurant we haven't eaten at in ages.

4. Ollie tongue!

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torachan

We ended up going down to the park earlier than planned since the door repair guys had to cancel on us. Bummed about them having to reschedule but I was very glad to get an earlier start.

( Read more... )

coffeeandink

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

coffeeandink

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Starting in the mid-70s, she has has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won two Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh resurrected her college major and Master's degree in Classics to focus on Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories, some of them also incorporated into two novel collaborations with Morris and a solo novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

lannamichaels

It's not exactly a secret that I hate Miles Vorkosigan being in the military, so for RL reasons I was thinking hmm could Miles instead become a doctor, and then followed up immediately with "absolutely he could not" and in fact I could not think of any position in a hospital that he would be suited for, but then I realized I was overthinking this.

Miles would be a great plumber. It's perfect for him. No boss, just clients, and he can pick the interesting jobs. It's bounded but also a place for creativity. He has to find out what the problem is and fix it. Because of his size, he may even be a better choice for certain jobs than other plumbers. He can pick his hours by picking the clients and the jobs, and then hyperfocus on a problem until it's over. If he wants, he can pack his schedule, or he can relax it. But he's not answering to anyone and people are grateful for his help because it's a problem they can't fix themselves, and it's also necessary: everyone will at some point require the assistance of a plumber.

The only problem is that there's no wonderful recognition and pride from his peers, unless we can get him to value the opinions of other plumbers, and then he can just brag about all the impossible disasters he fixed before breakfast. The sense of accomplishment is built-in, as in the sense of being valuable and needed.

And I feel like even Miles Vorkosigan would not find a way to commit treason whilst doing it.

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torachan

1. I had two meetings today but both went quicker than I thought they would.

2. The guys are coming to fix the back door tomorrow (they got the part in that they needed to order), so I decided to take the day off and then we can go to Disneyland afterwards for lunch or dinner.

3. Gemma is very put out at being interrupted.

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Companions poll, the emotionally unavailable alley cat and the trivia-obsessed fennec fox came first equal with 42.1% each, followed by the stoic capybara with 35.1%. Hugs won the ticky-boxes with 66.7%, followed by frittered-away time with 38.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Audio: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed. Full of cultural specificity and lots of wonderful observations about humanity in general, and art, and death. More emotion-driven and theme-driven than plotty. Beautifully written. So good!

Audio: Swordcrossed by Freya Marske, read by Omari Douglas. I just finished this, and oh my goodness, it mashed all my buttons! It's a light, secondary world, urban-historical m/m romance with guild politics and secrets, swordplay and skulduggery, and people being messed up by their rich guild-house families. I hereby declare (for myself, at least) a sub-category of enemies-to-lovers that is "playful-enemies to lovers". You know, when there are compelling reasons not to trust each other, but they like each other enough that they can't help teasing, admiring, and developing inconvenient loyalties, despite the suspicion. (There are tons of other examples, and I would like to read some more of them. In fact, the Guardian drama falls squarely in this category, as does White Collar a lot of the time.) The two leads of Swordcrossed clicked so well -- I laughed out loud at the banter, and again, often, in sheer delight.

Thoughts about depictions of falling in love in fiction.

There was one thing it did particularly well, for the main pairing, that I'm still emotionally and analytically rolling around in. I think it's quite hard to show people falling in love: I've seen it done via one character obsessing about the other's secondary sex characteristics, which I don't find convincing or interesting. Or sometimes an author has a character notice how good-looking the other is, and from that, the reader is supposed to intuit attraction and emotional curiosity/investment -- but it's never quite clear to me if the "good-lookingness" is subjective or objective, and there are plenty of objectively good-looking people that I don't want to even be in the same room as. Other times, what we're shown is physical attraction as a stand-in for emotional connection, followed by kisses and/or sex as a stand-in for a lot of things. (I've done all of these, of course; fandom is particularly rife with all of this because most of the time a fic author and their readers go into the story pre-invested in the ship.) Anyway, in Swordcrossed, Marske teased all these layers out by having the couple acknowledge their attraction and start an intense "casual" thing with an expiry date, semi-independently of catching feelings. The development of loyalties and being on the same side (in cahoots!), and the delicately depicted tenderness, understanding and mutual care were wonderful precisely because they weren't implied just by sexual attraction, and because it was the feelings, not the sex, that disrupted the characters' plans. It was delicious. (Perhaps I just need to read more fuckbuddies-to-lovers, with a side-order of people-in-denial-in-love, lol.)

tl;dr I found the "falling in love" part very satisfying, and it's making me think about how I might be able to do that better in my own writing.

In terms of the audiobook, Douglas's narration was fantastic and very hot for the sex scenes. A++++ (And for people who've already read Swordcrossed, there's an excellent 18k fanfic for a background pairing by

marquis, which works as a supplement to fill in some gaps.) (How is there not more than one other fic for this book, though? I went to AO3 expecting a "Red White & Royal Blue"-sized fandom.)

Audio: I'm two chapters into Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, and approaching it, as recommended, one chapter per day for now (though I'm not sure my limitations need enhancement).

Ebook: I'm sort of dithering between The Black Cauldron and getting back to Werecockroach, and consequently not reading anything... and now I've opened The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing for a re-read, but not actually started that either. Also, Guardian -- we're in the home stretch.

Paper: Having reached the end of my third and last library loan renewal period, I finally sat down and read No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Ryan Estrada in about two and a half hours. It's a graphic novel about a university traditional-dance club going on an overnight hiking trip in 1980s Korea. The military regime is a constant looming presence, but it's gently funny and sweet as well as eye-opening. I really appreciate how this and Banned Book Club, by the same authors, depict life, friendship, and resistance under authoritarianism. Also, it made me want to try Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, one of the banned books mentioned.

Btw, does anyone else remember

obsessive24 and her amazing fanvids? Looks like she has a queer fantasy trilogy coming out soon.

Kdramas
I finished My Dearest Nemesis and loved it; an adorable depiction of whole-hearted fannishness and the search for love and acceptance. Am now an episode into First Night with the Duke and still in that "not yet hooked, but willing to be" state of quantum uncertainty. I've also randomly picked up my abandoned rewatch of the Cdrama noona romance, Nothing But Love. (This is a rewatch I started with my late friend J, way back when; he bounced off it because he hated all the male characters.)

Other TV
Finished Murderbot, Poker Face and Étoile, which I enjoyed in that (descending) order.

Just me grumbling about Étoile; please skip if you love it!

My deep loathing of Crispin overshadowed a lot of my enjoyment; they kept making him quirky, and I was worried they might try to redeem him. And lo, by the end, Jack was turning to him for advice, wtf??? I don't super enjoy incompetent management (Jack seemed to have no idea what he was doing most of the time; who hired him?) or artistic people being assholes (Tobias, sit down and let the dancers do their jobs!). Mostly, though, my problem was Amy Sherman-Palladino's tendency to let her characters chat endlessly with no story or drive; the party episode was very rambly. I thought she'd got better with Mrs. Maisel, but this was (fittingly, I guess) more like Bunheads, just on a grander scale.

That said, I loved Mishi and Cheyenne's mother, and I liked Geneviève. Cheyenne was funny some of the time, and I enjoyed her sojourn in the cemetery with her mother (despite it literally not going anywhere), and Geneviève's advice to her about The Slip. And I liked Tobias' breakup.

tl;dr: I should have stuck with the gifset.

More Fringe with my sister. The cases of the week are more interesting than the season arc to the point that we both forgot, in a ten-minute break between episodes, that Olivia was kidnapped.

The Secret Genius of Modern Life with Hannah Fry s02e01, which was fun like always, but with disturbing "look how effective surveillance is" undertones.

And a whole bunch of Bluey, the kids' cartoon, which is omg so adorable and funny. I'm not even into kidfic, and I love it!

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Also,

mific and I are working on an intentionally Dreamwidth-specific comm for people to post or link to meta discussions about writing. Watch this space.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, random episodes of Letters from an American, Midnight Burger, possibly some other things but I'm having technical problems with Pocket Casts atm. (The app controls are obscured by the phone controls, as if the app thinks my screen is bigger than it is; anyone else having this problem?)

Films
Jurassic World: Rebirth -- this was such silly fun. I'm pretty sure the bad guy was built from a template, but the dinosaurs were wonderful. Favourite part:

spoiler

the dozing T-rex -- so tense, yet so funny.

Writing/making things
The glittering ice sculpture of my oomph has become a puddle. Anyway, this was my entry for the Science round of

fan_flashworks:

Title: Winging It (600 words) [General Audiences]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Characters: Ya Qing, Lin Jing, Zhao Yunlan, Zhu Hong, Original Yashou character, Da Qing
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Yashou Renewal, Education, A New Era for the SID, Kidfic, Drabble Sequence
Summary: The Crows need a science tutor.

Life/health/mental state things
The weeks are flicking past at a frightening rate. I'm constantly in a state of "is this just my baseline sore throat, or am I coming down with something?" Note to self: that online Harvard course you signed up for? Do it.

Cats
Cure for ongoing minor cat health niggles: book a vet appointment for later in the week. Within two days she was fine, and I cancelled the appointment.

Korean
I randomly listened to a TTMIK episode (the texting vs phonecalls one) and understood maybe 10% of it? That's not nothing. (Aside: Hyunwoo's theory of why young people take phonecalls on speaker is that the young people were all on FaceTime as babies, so they didn't acquire the "hold phone to ear" habit. I was pleased with myself for catching that, then realised he'd reiterated it in English. ;-p)

Food
My sister brought me a packet of Selena Gomez Oreos, for the laughs; I'm pretty sure those were my first oreos ever. (Selena is mildly cinnamon-flavoured, if you were wondering.) | I made lemon honey last week (10/7/25); I always go through a few rounds of buying lemons and not getting started before they go a bit squishy, but in the end, it never takes as long to make as I think it will. | Also made enchiladas, including the sauce, and a no-recipe beef casserole. Yesterday I made pumpkin and kumara soup. I have plans to try lemon chicken (via

autodach) and to make no-recipe risotto this week. It's hard to fathom that a few years ago I rarely cooked.

Good things
Sunshine! Audiobooks with great narrators. Kids' cartoons. Ginger in everything. Fandom and Guardian. Writing (*presses face against the shop window*). Washing on the line. Dreamwidth.

Poll #33363 Retribution

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

View Respondents

The best revenge

View Answers

is living well
27 (75.0%)

is sweet
7 (19.4%)

is served cold
5 (13.9%)

requires two graves
4 (11.1%)

leaves everybody blind
1 (2.8%)

other
0 (0.0%)

ticky-box full of writing theory
12 (33.3%)

ticky-box full of brain being empty, but not in a meditation way
17 (47.2%)

ticky-box full of dabbling your toes in a tray of soft, cool, shimmery sand
15 (41.7%)

ticky-box full of the ancient language of shadows and flight
18 (50.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
29 (80.6%)

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I don't want to fake it but I gotta know

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