salinea | Reading

When last we left off in booklogging, I was feeling a powerful urge to read some nice sober nonfiction, so I picked up Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life.

genarti has been singing Goodman's praises to me for the past many years and I am glad to say I now wholeheartedly agree! She's very good!

The thing that is notable about Ruth Goodman as a historian is her emphasis on physical, material culture: there's a passage where she walks through a Tudor suit of clothes stored at the (I think?) V&A museum going through all the physical evidence of how it was constructed and what we can learn from it, capping with the charming fact that it was put together in such a hurry that a couple of pins were accidentally left in the lining. In addition to doing the research to look at the prints that show us what it was like to iron the ruffs or use the bread-ovens, she has then gone on to iron the ruffs herself, use the bread-ovens, etc., and she tells you about it and what she's learned from it and what it was probably like to live it in a very straightforward and readable way that lets you follow along with the process of drawing reasonable conclusions from the evidence and practice at hand.

Some of the info is stuff I had general previous knowledge of or aligns pretty well with what I would have guessed, some of it I sort of knew but nonetheless hit me with a "man I never thought about that" (the existence of secular theater in England only predated Shakespeare by like 50 years! he almost missed it completely!), some of it was the full HOO BOY the past is a DIFFERENT country, and some of it was the equally powerful HOO BOY the past is the SAME country. Had a great time! My only real complaint about the book is that it contains various prints of some of her source material but the picture quality is GODAWFUL -- clearly meant to be in color, the contrast in the black-and-white version that I have is so low that I couldn't make out a Dang Thing. "This print shows --" well, okay, Ruth Goodman, if you say so, I will believe you! I certainly can't see for myself!

forestofglory posting in

ladybusiness

Thanks funnily enough to Superman vs. Meshi (which I talked about in my recent post about Superhero comics) I’ve been reminded that I love slice-of-life manga and I have been reading a lot of it!

Slice-of-life manga are stories about everyday life. They often center domestic labor, and feature community building. (These are things that I want in cosy SFF but have had mixed luck finding.) I find slice-of-life manga soothing but also I appreciate that they focus on things that often aren’t considered “story worthy” but are important.

The manga often have a wealth of detail about specific crafts or professions. What kind of tools people use, how things are made, etc. I always find this interesting and fun to learn about!

Slice-of-life manga are generally sweet and cute. They often feature small everyday moments and family and friends bonding. I have a special fondness for the ones that have very detailed descriptions of food, when characters say stuff like “The X and Y in this dish really brings out the Z” even though it makes me hungry sometimes.

Slice-of-life manga can overlap with all kinds of genres. The ones I’ve recced here are all set in contemporary Japan but I’ve also read a couple of post-apocliptic and historical slice-of-life stories, and I know there are other genres out there like fantasy that I haven’t explored yet.

I’m still learning the genre but I wanted to share a few of my favorites so far:

Hirayasumi by Keigo Shinzō— A story about two cousins living together in a small house in Tokyo. The younger cousin is an 18-yearold woman who just moved to Tokyo for art school, and the older cousin is a 29-year-old man who works a kinda dead-end job. He inherited the house from an old woman he befriended who didn't have any relatives. It’s very charming, I find both of the cousins relatable in different ways.

I really enjoy all the environments in this! The characters' rooms feel like a little glimpse into who they are. And the cityscapes are so warm and lived in!

(This is very popular at my library at the moment so this rec is for volumes 1-4)

Laid-Back Camp Vol. 15-17 by Afro— This is about a club of high school girls who go camping both together and separately. There are lots and lots of details about food and camping equipment, but I also enjoy the relationships between the girls and their growing friendships.

This also has wonderful landscapes. There are scenic campsites, of course, featuring lakes, mountains, trees, etc. But there are also good scenes of people traveling on buses, trains, roads through the mountains, etc.

Yotsuba&! #15 by Kiyohiko Azuma— A very cute manga about Yotsuba, a preschool girl, her adoptive dad, and their friends and family. It’s just full of everyday things like going shopping, trying new foods, and looking for rocks. Yotsuba is so lovable and also determined in everything she does, she really makes the whole thing work.

Silver Spoon, vol 14-15 by Hiromu Arakawa—This is a charming story about a city kid who goes to an agricultural high school to get away from everything. I love all the details about food, farming equipment, and rural life. The types of issues that Japanese farming families deal with in this book feel very familiar and true to life, from my limited experience of US rural life. They worry about things like land succession, how much to invest in big machines, etc. The author grew up on a farm and is clearly drawing from that experience.
Content note: death of named animals

Have you read any of these? What did you think? What other slice-of-life manga would you recommend?

queenlua

I think many Swarthmore students often try, immediately after graduating, to accomplish a critical task at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way. I am not referring to your next jobs. Many of you will be doing jobs next year that you will be underpaid in and overqualified for. Tough luck on that, but it’ll get better eventually.

What I am thinking of is that many of you will try to do good and change the world for the better. And I do not think that you should. I think that this is exactly the wrong time for you to try and you will try to do it in exactly the wrong way. In trying, you misunderstand what it is that you are best qualified to do in the coming years, and you misunderstand exactly how it is that you go about doing good in the world [. . .]

If you set out to change the world for the better a week, a month or a year from now, with will and determination, with a sense of commitment and dedication, you are like an agronomy student setting off to practice your best cow-milking technique on a jaguar. It is the wrong time, but more importantly, it is the wrong attitude. People whose only goal is a total, overall or general change to the world for the better are people who end up disillusioned at best, and at worst, become the tools of–or weapons of–more cynical and calculating people.

What you are qualified to do tomorrow, or the next week, or the next year–not just qualified, but superbly capable of doing–is bearing witness. You are qualified to see the world as it is, to observe it meticulously, without blinders or filters. You are qualified to tell the truth, with rigor and discipline. This may come as some news to you, given how conflicted and ambivalent academics have become about what constitutes truth, and for good reason. Truth is not simple. It is not black and white. It is never predictable. Two people can witness the world honestly and end up seeing something very different, and both visions can be equally true. Truth is often a matter of perspective, and is often found through insight, inspiration and creativity.

Truth is hard, not easy. You can see it, if you will only allow yourselves to. That’s what critical thought does for you. That’s what ethical intelligence really is.

Your job now is to open yourselves as fully as you can to the richness and mystery of the human condition, to its irresolvable contradictions, to the dangers of knowledge. Don’t look away because you’re not supposed to see something. Don’t let anyone bully you out of being curious, or having a passion for knowledge. Don’t ever convince yourself that you have an obligation to lie, or to conceal the truth, to simplify things for reasons of political expediency [. . .]

If you look at the people who really have changed the world for the better–because most injustice is systematic, and really does require systematic attention from organized groups of people fighting for what’s right–you’ll see that most of them didn’t set out in life with the activist’s version of a “will to power”, determined above all things to change the world for the better. Nelson Mandela just wanted to escape an arranged marriage and live his life the way he wanted to. Gandhi just wanted to be a lawyer. If you want to change the world, just wait. The opportunity will find you at the right time, and when it does, your commitment to change will be organic, a part of your life rather than something outside of it. It will arise from within the conditions of your journey through the world rather than from hubris or fierce neediness.

—from Timothy Burke's Last Collection Speech (2002), emphasis mine

loosely-relatedly: one of my biggest personal annoyances with certain strains of "on" "line" "discourse" is how seemingly ignorant so many people are of the complexities involved in operating any organization with more than 40 people, anything with a nontrivial operating budget, and so on. sometimes the people involved are teenagers, or severely depressed, or just so unjustly and frequently exposed to Just The Bootheel End Of Things that they kinda don't want to hear about "perspective" and ok sure i get it. and plenty of times "uhhhm actshully this is just The Way You Gotta Do Things In A Big Evil Company" is a cop-out so ok i get skepticism toward that too. but sometimes people who really ought to know better seem willfully ignorant of, idk, obvious business realities like "you gotta pay a market rate for people to work for you" and stuff like that, and i always wonder if they... failed to do this, basically? whatever corner of the world you're in, you can pay attention and notice how things work there! and that's important work that, crucially, can't be done by machines; human judgment comes from humans

FFXII isn’t the most fun game to play. It’s drawn out, labour-intensive and opaque. Whether deliberate or not, though, the results work. All these disparate elements converge on the idea that if you do ever have the opportunity to change the world, the choice will be unclear, and it will not give you everything you want. If nothing else, this deserves praise for being so profoundly at odds with the ideology running through so much of game design that the aim should be to reward or satisfy the player.

—from this old blog post, emphasis mine

Okay here’s another story: the current era of formal verification has been dominated by the cost of proof. Specification has taken second place—we can’t even verify systems with simple specs, so why worry about everything else? Now, thanks to advances in modern AI, we may soon live in a strange world where proofs are cheap and abundant. If that happens, I think we will quickly verify every compiler and microkernel, then find that we’re stuck. Even Claude can’t tell us what to want.

[. . .] It’s a formal verification cliché that writing the specification tends to uncover most of the bugs in a system. To me, this suggests an analogy between specification and programming—both are tools for expressing what we want. In one way, this is a pessimistic thought: no tool can remove the burden of clarifying our ideas. But also, it gives me some hope. Programming is very difficult, but through careful tool design, we’ve made it available to hundreds of millions of people. With luck and skill, perhaps we can do the same for specifications.

—Specifications Don't Exist from Mike Dodds at the Galois blog, emphasis mine

something something, "spec-writing as a form of bearing witness / using-human-judgment / changing the world." also: the map is never never never the territory! also re: tools: horse and rider as one

. . . even highly automated systems, such as electric power networks, need human beings for supervision, adjustment, maintenance, expansion and improvement. Therefore one can draw the paradoxical conclusion that automated systems still are man-machine systems, for which both technical and human factors are important.

—from Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge

one way i've been thinking about that paper upon most recent read: it is true in many many systems that there are bad things that are parasitic on good things. automation in a power grid is good (better reliability at cheaper cost) but it's bad if the skills to recover from failure are lost. as in every system one hopes one could come up with a strategy for mitigating the bad while benefitting from the good, but, y'know, real-world track records on this is pretty mixed!

i_llbedammned

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Music: Stargazing- Myles Smith

full_metal_ox posting in

fancake

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings/Characters: Mo Xuanyu, Wei Wuxian (mentioned), Nie Huaisang (implied), Lan Wangji (mentioned; implied); Mo Xuanyu/Himself, Mo Xuanyu & Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian (mentioned; implied), Mo Xuanyu -> Nie Huaisang (one-sided)
Rating: Explicit
Length: 4,927
Content Notes: Body Modification (voluntary), Cannibalism (mentioned as part of the culture), canon-typical ritual bloodletting, Classism, First Person POV, Needles, Scenery Porn
Creator Tags: Masturbation, Voyeurism, mermaid Mo Xuanyu, Non-Human Genitalia, Prehensile dick, Worldbuilding, Abyssal Mermaids, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, In that most of the sects are benthopelagic sea critters, And Wei Wuxian actually gets to talk to Mo Xuanyu, Monsterfucker Mo Xuanyu, POV Mo Xuanyu, Hair Kink (minor), self-bondage (minor), Misunderstandings

Creator Links: (AO3)

LesbianlazerOwl; (Dreamwidth)

lazerowl; (Twitter)

gay_lazerOwl

Theme: Unreliable Narrator, Cultural Differences, Interspecies Pairings, Languages & Linguistics, Mermaids, Pining, Worldbuilding, Xeno/Alien Biology

Summary: Mo Xuanyu lives alone at the edge of the habitable world, continuing Wei Wuxian's work and strengthening his cultivation. One day soon, he hopes to surpass the Yiling Laozu's power and follow him into the unknown. Complications arise.

Creator Notes: (Cut for length.) ( Continue. )

Reccer's Notes: LesbianlazerOwl’s AU where the Jiang and Jin Sects are deep-sea merfolk is a strange and rapturous gem that turns Lovecraftiana upside-down (from the POV of a character embodying everything Lovecraft abhorred: a queer Asian—here turned sea creature—looking to monsterfuck.)

With all the haughty smarter-than-the-sheeple dudgeon of the alienated Emo Kid, Abyssal Merman! and Seeker of Arcane Knowledge Mo Xuanyu follows his idol the Yiling Laozu’s forbidden explorations of the mysterious and unfathomable surface—where, according to rumor, he found love with an eldritch air fairy! (Should the author ever see fit, I’d love to read a Wangxian prequel.)

LesbianlazerOwl compresses an incredible amount of atmosphere and implicit worldbuilding into just short of 5000 words, in ways that encourage still further speculation (the Sunshot Campaign is referenced; what could justify such a name in this world, and what were the Wen—creatures of the infernal blazing heights of the Epipelagic Zone?)

Fanwork Links: Rise and Shine, by

LesbianlazerOwl for

Shadaras: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42602655

Collections: Mutual Masturbation Exchange.

ravensilversea posting in

recthething

Made a rec list of some of my recent fanfiction bookmarks over on my journal! 2 Avatar: The Last Airbender recs, 2 Honkai: Star Rail, and 1 rec each for DCU, Star Trek, BBC Sherlock, The Murderbot Diaries, Katekyou Hitman Reborn, Sunrise on the Reaping, My Hero Academia, MDZS/The Untamed, and a fannish Original Work

caramarie

A talent agency wants to get into the glamping business; the locals in the rural area they pick for the site are very critical of their plans. This includes the local odd-job man, who is the main person the film follows. The agency feels if they can get him on board, the rest will follow.

This description belies how long it takes for any of this plot to come up, and how much of the film is just people walking through the woods. Or wood chopping. The film is not in a hurry about anything.

I’ve always looked at summaries of Hamaguchi’s films and thought hm, sounds like it is not for me. But I went to this because it was a Film Society screening so why not ... and it turns out it was not for me! I spent maybe the first half hour daydreaming while nothing much happened, then paid more attention once we got to comparatively exciting things like tense community meetings, although even then I would not say I was super-engaged.

Then there was the ending. I am not entirely sure what happened or why, but boy did I suddenly feel depressed!

I think we can safely say I will not be seeking out any more of Hamaguchi’s films.

hamsterwoman

13. Alix Harrow, The Everlasting – so far we’re three for three with me having mixed/complicated feelings about the Hugo novels. With this one, on the one hand, this is the longest thing by Alix Harrow I finished (I got bored not very far into The Ten Thousand Doors of January), and also I found this more interesting than the deconstructed fairy tale novella I read for Hugo homework the other year – so I do think this is Alix Harrow making progress as an author and also as an author who appeals to me in longer form. On the other hand, my enjoyment of this book steadily diminished the more of it I read – I thought the first 20% or so was really good, and by the end I was just really frustrated with it, and had been yearning for the sweet release of being done with the bloody thing from at least 80% on. ( Major spoilers from here )

Three write-ups on my flist that I read at various points while being mired in this book and really enjoyed (and can now go back and comment on, yay proper keyboard!)
-

cahn: x
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skygiants: x
-

chestnut_pod: x

Novel (3/6): All three I have read were ambitious but flawed in various ways and to various degrees, and frustrated me at different points. I think I could probably map my enjoyment of / frustration with them over time, and would have to figure out how to rank them via area under the curve. But my gut feel is Incandescent ahead of the others and then… probably The Raven Scholar > Everlasting, but there’s a shorter book inside The Everlasting that I would’ve put above ‘Raven’, and maybe even above Incandescent… Pity that wasn’t the one I was reading…

*

Hugo homework continues in watching stuff format:

Mickey 17 – I first became aware of this movie via Tim Key being in it, because my Elis & John Facebook people were posted about it. Tim Key has a very small role as the pigeon guy, so this in no way helped me understand what the movie was about. I still had no sense of that when I saw it on the Hugo nominees list, but at that point decided to check it out if the occasion would arise. And the occasion did arise, as it was part of the in-flight entertainment on the trip over to Europe. I had not, for example, realized that Robert Pattinson was in it (many times over XD) ( More, with spoilers )

So ultimately… meh. I’m not mad I saw it. I probably wouldn’t even be mad if it wins the Hugo, because there is some stuff there I liked, and I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the other movies I’ve seen, either. But it’s definitely not going at the top of my list.

Sinners – I’m not really sure how to think about this one in Hugo context because, while I enjoyed and appreciated the movie overall, the speculative element specifically worked the least well for me. ( Is the spec premise a spoiler? No other spoilers, I think )

BDP Long (3/6): So… I dunno. In terms of Hugo homework ratings, I definitely put this above Mickey 17. I kind of think KPOP Demon Hunters will actually stay with me more than Sinners, because of the eldritch critters and some of the tunes, but I don’t think it’s a better movie. So I think my current rankings are Sinners > KPOP > Mickey 17. But none of these are movies I loved, and none of these are movies I hated; they are just different levels of not-my-thing, and I guess this is me trying to rank them at how effective I thought they were at doing what they set out to do, minus how much they annoyed me personally :P (Ironically, Mickey 17 was the one I expected to like the most, but it just lost me with where it went…)

I could’ve also watched Frankenstein and Superman and possibly even Andor on the plane, but ran out of time / didn’t really feel like it, so I suspect this is likely where my BDP Long voting will end, but considering I’d seen zero of the titles when the list was revealed and had not much interest in any of them, that’s actually pretty good, I think.

On the flight back, I gave myself a pass from watching Hugo homework, and watching TV instead.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – I fell off the ASOIAF TV show bandwagon a long time ago – I watched season 1 of GoT (and enjoyed it with quibbles), but then where s2 was going with my beloved Tyrells switched the ROI on the effort of watching an HBO show, and I just stopped, and have not watched anything since, nor the spin-off(s?). And my interest in ASOIAF as a series/Westeros as a world has waned to… well, not probably nonexistence, yet, but it’s not much of a draw, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the lore and history and names that were at the top of my mind when I was active in

westerosorting, so the activation energy is a lot higher, too. But! I’ve always had a soft spot for the Dunk & Egg stories, and the reviews from both friends and critics were sounding really good, so I did want to see this one, and there it was.

And I liked it! And when the Westeros theme from Game of Thrones started up, that did send a little shiver down my back, because I do still remember the excitement of watching the amazing credits animation back in season 1, when everything was exciting and brimming with potential. But, back to the show itself. ( Spoilers )

But overall, I had a really good time, and I look forward to the second season.

Stashing the Lost in Adaptation link, mostly for my own reference.

Gavin & Stacey – so, I’d heard about Gavin & Stacey just, sort of, vaguely, as a well-known British TV show – I think it has a tendency to come up on House of Games as a source of lowbrow questions? – but I had no sense at all of what it was about, or what decade it had come from, or anything at all, until Taskmaster s21 introduced me to Joanna Page, and since I found her so delightful, when I saw that was one of the options on the in-flight entertainment roster, I decided to give it a shot. And I thoroughly enjoyed the first season and would be interested in watching the rest.

( More, with marked spoilers at the very end )

lessonsinescapology

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umadoshi

Reading: One of the libraries I use suddenly acquired 91 more ebook copies of The Gate of the Feral Gods (DCC book 4), so I'm reading that. I also started Abra Berens' Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables.

Watching: We're halfway through Widow's Bay now and, I think, pretty invested.

Materialism: In the last couple of weeks I've tipped over into desperately wanting new jeans that, y'know, actually fit well. (The ones I've been wearing for ages are passable but just not great, and it relatively recently occurred to me that I can probably get away with wearing normal jeans with metal bits [to which I'm allergic] most of the time, since I'm rarely out of the house for very long. And while years ago, the "coat the skin-touching metal bits in clear nail polish" didn't actually work well, there's always the option of just plain sewing fabric bits over those spots.) Yesterday I spent a truly appalling amount of money ordering an array of jeans from a couple of different stores, most of which will be returned...but hopefully I can get a pair or two I actually like out of it.

Growing: The lettuce is still doing well! I think that's going well enough that we'll try it again next year and see how it does when the elevated planter is closer to the house (which it has to be after this season). I probably won't opt to grow spinach again; the plants are doing okay, but only three came up and they're not producing enough to Do Something With Spinach, so their leaves are just getting tossed into salads with the lettuce.

Meanwhile, the sole cucumber plant now seems to be serious about growing, and the tomatoes are flowering to varying degrees. Apparently we should go out and do a bit of hand pollination, and we really need to do a bit of pruning, at least on the three indeterminate plants.

Foodstuffs:

scruloose made the Easy Swiss Chard Stir Fry from Omnivore's Cookbook to use the rainbow chard from our first week of farmshare, and if making it again, would increase both the garlic and soy sauce and also make it in the wok rather than the deep frying pan, which wasn't quite up to the mass of the chard greens. Sadly, I didn't like it much, which I suspect is a general chard thing rather than being due to this recipe. But we may try it again sometime.

Farmshare from last week (week 2): onions, new potatoes, strawberries, beets, parsley (flat?), and celeriac. This time the fridge wasn't straight-up exploding with greens. We still have to use the beets and celeriac, both of which are new to me; I think in both cases we're just planning to roast them and see what we think.

Having a car of our own means being able to just...get up and go to the produce stand we really like (which does sadly mean lower odds of making it to the corner farmers' market on Saturdays, but I'm hoping we'll still make it there during berry season). We went both Saturday and yesterday morning. The summer strawberries are just wrapping up (we tried four varieties through them over the last few weeks: Brunswick, Laurel, Jewel, and Evelyn), and yesterday we were able to also get our first raspberries and cherries of the season (both were sold out by the time we got to the front of the line on Saturday, which is a bit alarming given that we got there within half an hour of opening time). All of the remaining strawberries got roasted yesterday.

Current Mood: busy

zirconium

Rehearsal:

Watch on YouTube

As a part-French duet ("Si Demain"):

Watch on YouTube

At Miscast 2026:

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: nostalgic

profiterole_reads

Netflix's k-movie Husbands in Action was fun and a little slashable. When Si-nae gets kidnapped, her former husband and her current husband team up to get her back.

At first, they spoke too fast and I couldn't understand them, but after a while, either they slowed down or I got used to it, because I started understanding better.

duskpeterson

At the end of the corridor stand familiar high doors; these doors are plated with silver. Flanking them on both sides of the corridor are the living quarters of the High Lord and the living quarters of the senior-most council lord. The latter is likely to become High Lord in turn. These chambers switch back and forth; when a senior-most lord becomes High Lord, his chambers become those of the High Lord, and the chambers of the recently deceased High Lord become those of the new senior-most lord.

As for the Map Room, you may already have visited there; it is where receptions are held. When not in use for receptions, the Chara meets here with palace residents or else makes military plans for his empire – hence the chamber's appellation.

The best view in the palace of the black border mountains can be seen from this room's windows.

[Translator's note: The Ambassador has good reason to remember those windows. Blood Vow shows why.]

caramarie

Blades of the Guardians (d. Yuen Woo-ping, 2026)

Yuen Woo-ping adapts a manhua, which I feel must have been long running just from the number of characters.

A bounty hunter gets hired to escort a scholar-revolutionary to the capital; they gain companions along the way, need evade figures from their past, etc etc.

The action scenes were better when Yuen Woo-ping was working in the 80s. Probably safer now, but alas for the CGI. The one that was funniest to me was the fight scene that took place in a sandstorm, because that was a particularly windy day here but still our wind was not that dramatic.

Whilst being crammed full of plot, there were some things I thought could have been cut, such as the flashbacks to the bounty hunters past with his former comrades. It got a bit overindulgent.

Watchable, but not particularly memorable, I would say.

Obsession (d. Curry Barker, 2025)

A young man wishes his crush would love him ‘more than anyone in the world’. ( Read more... )

petrea_mitchell posting in

anime_manga

In The World is Dancing, the setting is beautifully realized, the animation is excellent, and the writing is... serviceable. I'm going to keep watching this for the history lessons and the lovely dance scenes, but it's not going be one of my top picks of the year.

Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, though, is the complete package. It's another great setting, combined with a unique art style, and it may not get as auteur-y as The World is Dancing but the script is an order of magnitude better. This one will probably be on the list on the best things I've seen this year. (Not on my Hugo ballot, though, since this is straight historical drama, no actual witchcraft.)

Sparks of Tomorrow got picked up by Netflix, which I don't currently subscribe to.

Recommendations from Iwamoto-senpai turns out to be about bishōnen with flower-themed supernatural powers, so already not my thing. Bishōnen who are allegedly in middle school, though the title character looks and acts like he's about 30. Plus the school is run by the military, this is a few years before Japan kicks off WWII in Asia by invading Manchuria, and the writer seems quite enthusiastic about the characters getting into uniform and using their abilities for the greater glory of the increasingly militarized state so nope nope nope nope nope.

Red River is actually in Anatolia, not Mesopotamia, but still, an interesting and unusual setting. It's a question of whether it can become the grand sword-and-sandals epic that the OP promises before I get too annoyed by the heroine who has to repeat every new piece of information back in her internal voice, distracted by the off-brand Vivaldi incidental music, or driven away by the "misdemeanor assault is the first step on the road to true love" school of romance writing. I'll try one more episode.

The Ghost in the Shell is almost a period piece too, being a re-adaptation starting from the beginning of the manga and tearing away the '90s cyberpunk vibe to return it to the look and feel of the 1980s. And it does an excellent job. I'm not sure I ever saw all of the first movie; I only recognized one scene in the remake, but like the new version of that scene much better. It really reminded me a lot of Patlabor, which shouldn't be surprising since they're of a similar vintage.

Other things there were moments that reminded me of that were more surprising: The Italian Job and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Saga of Tanya the Evil is still Saga of Tanya the Evil. There's been a movie in the interim, which I should watch since Crunchyroll has it available, but it was easy to pick up the thread again.

Goodbye, Lara is billed as a tribute to the Hans Christian Andersen story, but it steers midway between that and The Little Mermaid in the premiere. The sea witch in particular looks like a Disney villain and borrows Ursula's line about how she's just helping, when she clearly has an ulterior motive. Unlike Ursula, though, she seems genuinely disappointed by how Lara's first try turns out. I think the main thing to worry about is I'll be much more interested in what's going on with her and certain other undersea events which are barely explained than I am in the potential teenage romance that this story is going to focus on.

Dara-san of the Reiwa Era is a comedy about a pair of gender-nonconforming siblings and a newly reawakened half-snake goddess with giant boobs. If you think this is going to be one of those shows which consists of being crass and loud as a substitute for being funny, though, it's about as far from that as possible. The humor is mostly observational and the whole vibe is more like a solitary retiree starting to open up to a couple of neighborhood kids. If this season weren't so full of good stuff I would probably watch more of this.

Also if this season weren't already so full of good stuff, the buzz about Kaiju Girl Caramelise and Grow Up Show would get me to check them out.

coffeeandink

I have been taking notes in my sadly decayed handwriting and will try to type and organize them on the train home. I have been very much enjoying the panels even, or perhaps especially, when I want to argue with them.
The train departed 20 minutes late and arrived in Boston 10 minutes early. Why are you capping your speed, Amtrak?! Is it not enough to cruelly deny me actual high-speed rail?
This trip always fills me with nostalgia because I took the same Acela/Northeast Corridor line back and forth to college.
Books finished on the ride up/the night before registration: Susan Casey's The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (trying too hard for poetry but has 100% convinced me the ocean is Very Cool and We Need to Protect It from Capitalist Exploitation) and Tahsan Mehta's The Liar's Weave (smart and affecting and, though I hate to say it, probably without enough context to do well in the West without some revision; I am glad her breakthrough book here was Mad Sisters of Esi, which I think will do much better, and is also just weirder, wilder, and stronger).
People met up with: kate_nepveu, sparkymonster, skygiants, genarti, rilina, oracne, gwynnega, ninamazing, and probably someone I've forgotten.
Replacement copies of midlist fantasy books of the 80s and 90s acquired: 4
Things I have recommended to con attendees and recommend to you:
- Tanith Lee Humble bundle (26 books for $18!)
- Trung Le Nguyen's live skeeting of Pride and Prejudice, which he has never read before
- Interview with a Vampire/The Vampire Lestat on AMC, which I have been meaning to write up for like three years now

juniperphoenix posting in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Star Trek
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Kirk and Spock
Content Notes/Warnings: n/a
Medium: cross stitch
Artist Website/Gallery:

vulcartist

Why this piece is awesome: This is the fight scene from "Amok Time" in cross stitch, complete with shadows and highlights and the slash across Jim's shirt. I can't imagine how many hours this took!

Link: Amok Time cross stitch

selenak

In which the hopefully first season ends, which was excellent, and only the fact this is a spin-off of an AU show on Apple + makes me fear for its future. Seriously though, I hadn't been quite sure what to expect going in - the only pitch I'd heard were variations of "the Soviet perspective on the "For All Mankind" story - but it really turned out so much more and indeed not "same story, different perspective". I mean, if you want to get technical: This season of "Star City" takes place simultanous to the first three or four episodes of the first season of "For All Mankind", and other than footage of the premise of both shows - the Soviets making it to the moon first - and a short news excerpt of Colm Feore as Wernher von Braun (watched scornfully by the Chief Designer in the pilot - there are no identical scenes. There are some thematic parallels and contrasts going on, and of course two of the characters are younger versions of characters the FaM viewers will know as their older selves, but the great thing about this show is that it manages what so few spin-offs do: it works both completely as its own thing, no knowledge of the first show necessary, and simutanously you can regard both shows as complimenting each other, as this great review points out, which calls Star City the optimistic dystopia to For all Mankinds technological utopia (with flaws).

Most importantly, for any narrative: Star City develops its own characters and makes this particular viewer care deeply for them, instead of just relying on carry-over affection from FaM, and it finds a diifferent way of telling its story appropriate to its different setting instead of just copying what worked before. The acting, music, and use of filmic means are all superb, and while not every single scene works for me (including one in the finale, more about this beneath the spoiler cut), what doesn't work for me is so much in the minority that it never takes from my overall fascination. Basically: go watch, if you can, whether or not you're familiar with the mother show.

Now, on to my actual review.

( Spoilers will always have Venus )

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Bad Wiessee

flo_nelja

In addition to my assignment I wrote a short treat this time!

Title : the bodies you left lying around
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Brothers Karamazov
Characters/Ships : Ivan->Smerdyakov
Genre : Dark, angst
Summary : Smerdyakov's thoughts during the last hour.
Rating : T
Disclaimer : This belongs to Dostoevsky
Word Count : ~1300
Warnings : Suicide, incest, mention of parricide, mention of animal abuse, blasphemy, the whole

( Link to AO3 )

Title : Blame it on the Moon
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Card Captor Sakura
Characters/Ships : Yue->Clow
Genre : Angst
Summary : Yue confesses his love and it doesn't go well.
Rating : PG
Disclaimer : This belongs to Clamp
Word Count : ~600
Warnings : Short mention of memory erasure

( Link to AO3 )

And I also got two gifts! <3

trying to bleach it out by jounoism (Bungou Stray Dogs, Akutagawa->Dazai, M)
He’d never even asked if Akutagawa wanted to follow him someplace else, if he wanted to say goodbye to the Port Mafia and leave everything behind.
Maybe because they both already knew the answer to that.

he is, so to speak by ouie (Brothers Karamazov, Smerdyakov->Ivan, T)
Ivan comes back to Fyodor Pavlovitch's house.

sholio

I was tagged on Tumblr on a "5 favorite fics you've written" meme and - while I don't do these all that often - decided to do this one and ended up cramming at least 15 in there and could EASILY have done more.

So I figured I'd copy it over here. (On a side note, it turns out that Tumblr's HTML editor generates "clean" HTML; I thought I was going to have to paste into the rich text editor on DW to avoid having to recode all the links, but the results were - urgh - and then I switched the tumblr post into HTML to copy that out, and it worked perfectly.)

( An ever-expanding cornucopia of favorites )

DW really doesn't have the "tag people into a meme" culture of Tumblr and similar sites, but feel free to get it spreading around DW as well if you think it looks fun!

glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanvids/fanart/podfics/other kinds of fanworks/fics/fancrafts have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

profiterole_reads

The first episode of Tomb Raider King was a lot of fun. Perfect for fans of The Lost Tomb/DMBJ!

I knew it was based on a Korean webtoon, 도굴왕, but I expected it to be in Japanese, not in Korean. Yay for extra practice! \o/

It's available on Crunchyroll.

profiterole_reads

The graphic novel Girl Haven written by Lilah Sturges and illustrated by Meaghan Carter was a lot of fun! :D Ash and a few friends are transported to Koretris, a girl-only world, in order to save Queen Cassandra. What does it mean about Ash's gender?

I loved how this concept was dealt with. It tackles forced feminisation (Ash would like something to happen so that the decision is not hers to make), but the story has her answer her own questions. Junebug is another questioning character, testing they/them pronouns at the end of the book. There's also sapphic representation. For more LGBT Quick Reads, check out my rec list.

----------
Netflix's Enola Holmes 3 was great, as always.

I enjoyed the investigation, the anti-colonialism, and of course the fourth-wall breaking.

duskpeterson

At one time, the cellar of the current palace was made up of dank, dim chambers where the palace's slave-servants slept and sometimes worked. When the previous Chara made up his mind to free all the palace slaves, there was much discussion over what to do with the former slave-quarters. The somewhat belated consensus by the palace officials was that these rooms were unfit to live in. There was talk of turning the rooms into storage rooms.

To everyone's amazement, the palace's community of eunuchs came forward and asked that the dank, dim chambers be given over to them. They had never before had a place in the palace that belonged solely to them. Many of them, being recently freed slaves, had lived in the slave-quarters; they considered this their home, one that might finally belong to them, rather than to their slave-masters.

The Chara graciously granted them their new quarters and forbade anyone who was not a half-man from entering the quarters, except by invitation of the eunuchs.

I can testify that the eunuch community has done a marvellous job of redecorating the cellar, so that it is bright and cheerful. One room alone has not been touched: the slaves' punishment room, which remains as a stark reminder of this place's bloody past.

If you are invited to visit the eunuchs' quarters, I strongly advise you to visit the punishment room. My advice grows even stronger if you keep slaves yourselves.

[Translator's note: Free-man's Blade includes a visit to the slave quarters, courtesy of a half-man.]

renay posting in

ladybusiness

We're halfway through 2026! ( Read more... )

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Slice-of-life Manga Rec List

loose link collection re: world-changing, automation, judgment, agency, etc

"You and I stargazing, Intertwining souls"

Mo Dao Zu Shi: Rise and Shine, by LesbianlazerOwl for Shadaras.

Recent Bookmarks Rec Post

Evil Does Not Exist (d. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

Reading and watching roundup

Update. Of sorts..

Day-late weekly proof of life: An impending deluge of jeans | Garden update | Various food things

RIP Bonnie Tyler

Husbands in Action

FIC: The Map Room (Tempestuous Tours)

Movie update

Blades of the Guardians (d. Yuen Woo-ping, 2026)

Obsession (d. Curry Barker, 2025)

Summer anime premiere notes

Quick notes on Readercon

Amok Time cross stitch by T’Kay Vulcartist (SFW)

Star City 1.08

Fics - Just-unrequited - Brothers Karamazov, Card Captor Sakura

Five or possibly 15 or 20 favorite fics

Community Recs Post!

Tomb Raider King

Girl Haven + Enola Holmes 3

FIC: The half-men's quarters (Tempestuous Tours)

Let's Get Literate! Mid-Year Reading Check In

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