Thank you kindly to the following fen who sent me postal mail in January: a letter from oldtoadwoman, a handmade needlepoint card from smallhobbit, and handmade "the god of feathers" art from mific. I am blessed to be the recipient of these lovely words and crafts and arts. <3

No deadline, no stress, multifandom prompt table challenge for creating fanworks in the Soulmates trope. If you are into this trope...or want to get into this trope...check out the 5 Soulmates Challenge. This link will take you to all the info and FAQs about how the prompts and the claims work for this challenge.

So many WIPs - I never used to read the damn things, but HR has corrupted me! The advantage of having several WIPs on the go is that something updates every day, often more than one. The main downside is remembering which plot or AU storyline the WIP is about. I often reread the last chapter, esp. if it's a few days since the fic updated.

I know where to draw the line by magneticwave (wrote the great AU where Shane's a surgeon). It's a new WIP (10,000 word 1st chapter) and is really excellent, with a mature 26 y.o. Shane with a trick knee who's in the Metros with 22 y.o. hotshot Ilya. Lots of hockey detail, great writing & characterisations, a closeted oblivious Shane, and Ilya on the prowl.

My two other main fave WIPs are Basingstoke's Lovers, or English is a damn funny language which continues to be brilliant, and Glittercity's Never Been Bitten, the vampire AU with interesting power dynamics (rich obsessive club owner vampire Shane who's nervous of the ingenuity and aggression of humans and Ilya, the chaotic bartender who's trying to seduce him.)

I've also been charging through all CorvidCordelia's works.

I read Half Agony, Half Hope a while back - it's a longfic based on the premise that Ilya gets traded to Montreal about 3 years after Shane breaks it off after the tuna melts hookup, so they're now on the same team. A great mix of angst, drama, lust, and of course, the requisite happy ending!

Careful Fear and Dead Devotion is another longfic, a complete AU in which Shane and Ilya are young actors looking for a break who are cast as Finn and Dane in the TV series "Ember and Ice". It uses the Quinn audio-erotic story as the plot of the drama they're starring in, so if the mention of Ember and Ice as a "fandom" put you off, don't be - no knowledge is needed of E&I and the inherent ludicrousness of that work doesn't intrude. Scott and Kip are the showrunners! It's kind of analogous to Hudson and Connor in HR, without being in any way RPF. It's a great story, and I loved it.

And Walking Through Windows a fork in the road AU where Ilya fucks up the Tampa All Stars reconciliation (after Shane accepts he's gay), and they then only see each other on the ice when their teams play, for ten years. Which is inherently very sad, but the story starts then, when they're both recently retired and Ilya learns that Shane's about to marry a man. You can imagine what happens, and I was unsure if I'd like it as I dislike partner betrayal, but CorvidCordelia is a bloody good writer and absolutely sold it to me, with a wonderful story that I couldn't put down (gave myself eyestrain again, damn it!)

I am possibly done with PDXWLF. I ventured out to a specific spot tonight because I recognized the address and was confident they'd deliver. I'll do a photo post... actually right now:





The CD clad house. Yeah, I know this intersection. I know it would be worth the trip.

I went out early, thinking to grab a burrito and then meander/photowalk a mile to two towards it. Burrito, portable food, right? Yeah, the lady who made mine was maybe new and needed to wrap it in multiple layers of foil for it to hold together, and she blamed me for it being a mess because I didn't order rice in it. So, I basically wound up walking around eating a pile of food and soaked tortilla in a make-shift tin foil bowl. It was okay. (Honestly, I shouldn't have paid for for that mess, but there was only one place I could get food along my planned route. I just really need to stop relying on being able to grab food while out and about, it keeps going sideways.)

I am hoping this is going to be recorded and available online, I assume it will be, but am hoping to confirm. Wow, that is going to be a conversation. This is a very often discussed book about the problems of hockey culture. Picking her to interview him is really interesting. (In my experience 'in conversation with' means the second person is basically doing an interview, and has been picked for being someone very well informed/related to a topic as opposed to being picked for interviewing skills)

A few random health and surgery things I forgot to mention in the longer write-up:
- I really had absolutely zero suspicion that it was appendicitis. The one thing I remember hearing about it, sometime back when I was a kid, was that it is impossibly, excruciatingly painful. That you can't function if your appendix bursts. Something about being unable to stand on one foot, or unable to jump because of the pain? I don't know how much of that is "old wives tale" vs. "typical of most people, just not all" but while this was definitely painful, it didn't strike me as debilitatingly so. Occasionally the pain would spike to what I'd call a 9/10, but that would fade back to a 5/10 after about twenty seconds, which is firmly in the "I've worked through worse" category.
- Related to the above, I've had and worked through menstrual cramps that were more painful. I've *seen* studies talking about this very thing, but because of that, I just sort of assumed "well, this can't be anything too serious, then."
- They had a really hard time getting blood samples from me. My veins just... retreated. When they did get blood, it kept clotting before they could do the tests they wanted it for, so they put me on a blood thinner for a few days. The bruises from some of the blood draw sites *just* disappeared fully as of today.
- I am *really, really* glad that the surgeons took a second look at the CT scans and decided to operate. The initial CT analysis (I don't know if this was a CT tech's read of it or an automated analysis) gave such vague and inconclusive results. Which isn't wrong, per se; apparently my guts were just trashed, ha. But if the surgeons hadn't taken that additional look, hadn't determined that even though the CT listed appendicitis as a "secondary" concern, it really looked like it might be appendicitis that needed treatment... things could have been pretty bad for me. I already wonder how long it'd been having issues, for it to have already perforated, abscessed, gone gangrenous. Was two days (Friday night onset of symptoms until Sunday night surgery) really long enough for it to have gotten that bad? Waiting longer would have likely pushed me toward the sepsis stage, and I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that.

Last week I did get my expected denial of leave from the state, which my HR department appealed. Today I got the notice from the state that my application has finally been fully submitted, and that they have all required information. So NOW it can finally be reviewed. Good thing I don't, you know, have rent or bills or anything!

Speaking of bills... For as much as I've complained about my insurance, they really did cover the vast majority of my stay, which is a huge relief. I didn't know what sort of bill I was going to get stuck with. The total for my time at the hospital ended up being nearly $100,000. It was more than $96,000, and my insurance paid over $89,500 of it. I owe around $6500. That is still a lot of money for me, and certainly not pocket change that I have lying around, but it's certainly not as life-ruining as $100000 would be.
(Also granted, some of that is the hospital upcharge. Each tylenol pill was $3.50. Each bag of IV fluid was $90. Each day of "room and board" was over $3000. Surgery and anesthesia were billed for one 15 minute block and then per minute, which tells me the surgery itself took an hour and 16 minutes.)
I may still owe another $1700 for the anesthesia, which has been billed, but my insurance has not responded to.
Apparently my urgent care appointment cost $390, despite it literally being five minutes of poking me in the stomach and telling me to go to the ER. I paid $50 to be seen, and my insurance paid $140, so I still owe them $100, too.
Of course, I'm going to have to apparently go to the fucking hospital again to give them money, because when I try to make a payment on their handy website, it just gives me an error and tells me to speak to customer service... which there is no contact info for anywhere that I can find on the website.

I returned to work last Friday, which was really just a chance to catch up on everything that happened while I was gone. (My manager and our lead instructor apparently got into it, and got a divorce no longer feel able to work with each other. My company made the absolute worst knee-jerk decision regarding a "solution," which has left everyone angry and resentful. My manager was responsible for two locations, so they took her second location away and gave it to the lead... even though he has had zero training and has zero idea how to do any of the office work that a center requires. There is no other staff up there. Manager is angry and resentful that her center was taken away; Lead is angry and resentful that it feels like he was thrown into the deep end with no training. They both think the other is getting rewarded.)

I can't say I feel fully ready to be back to work (and judging by some stupid mistakes I made, my brain isn't 100% back in the game,) but for the most part it's okay, and I'm definitely far, far readier than I would have been the week before. I was definitely not ready for a 10-hour day on Sunday, but it is what it is.

Yesterday I felt pretty good, and got together with Taylor for a good chunk of the day. We watched a movie and read and it was nice. I managed without falling asleep in the middle.

Today... all I really did was sleep. I woke up at 7:00 and fell back asleep until nearly 10. Two hours later, I was ready to go back to sleep, and dozed on and off for hours more. This feels like a stupid backslide.

Otherwise, healing seems to be going fine. The first and third incisions are healing really well. The middle one (in my bellybutton) hurts, but I think it's because the scab cracked, and the sharp edges dig into the tender stuff underneath depending on how I moved. It doesn't look bad, just hurts a little. I've been able to manage without the lidocaine patches for a couple days now, which is good.
Still a bit bloated, and haven't had a chance to go on walks the last couple days, but it's definitely better than before.
Food is still sitting fine. My guts are see-sawing back and forth between extremes of how they'd like to misbehave, but things are still moving through the tubes, which is all I can really ask for.

Alex is sick. :( Some sort of head and chest thing. Sounds similar to what I had back in 2024, which lingered for months. I hope this one passes faster, but it's a nasty cough. He had a fever for a while, but that passed. Miserable. I also really hope that I don't get his crud. I've been through enough, lol.

---

...and as I'm writing this post, our kitchen ceiling just started leaking. Guessing the upstairs neighbor's dishwasher or something. Super! Time to go deal with that!

The leak is made all the stranger because during my hours of dozing, I dreamed there was a leak in the ceiling next to my bed. It was a brief snippet of the dream, but still, bizarre.

ETA: Ceiling leak addressed. Kids in the apartment upstairs flooded their bathroom. Better result than it could have been! Emergency maintenance came by, and cut away a few bits of drywall to try and make sure that it dries out. They'll check again tomorrow.

Oh no I fell into Vampire Survivors again. A few days ago I said I had no idea where to go for game progression, but there is an actual "unlock" menu so I followed that for a bit and now I have ten different things I want to do next, and I definitely want to complete the 1.0 achievements because of the cool prize - and after that there is a very cool Castlevania DLC as well! ( Spoilers )

Last weekend my gf and her friend L and I tried out Hanabi (I had only played it online before) and that was a lot of fun. We also baked four different kinds of Vanillekipferl because why not?, and they were very good.

On Monday together with more friends we watched Wake Up Dead Man, the third "Knives Out" movie, and had a great time. It was in turns (and sometimes all at once) tense, exciting, emotional, and very funny. All of us suspected the murderer from the beginning but it was still great to see it all play out. I would like several more movies in this series please.
This one felt a lot more, hm, grounded than the second one, not "rich people on a remote island" but instead a small community with characters that felt like they could be anywhere. (Unfortunately, in some cases.) I suspect that there were some things implied that I missed because I think in the US religion is very closely related to social class, and also I'm pretty sure Catholicism has different connotations, but it still worked very well.

I'm still watching a lot of Hermitcraft and some other MCYT. Season 11 is a lot of fun, and can barely wait for Decked Out 3.
Mid-Offs 3 is soon, and the draft on Friday! It's an event where top Minecraft speedrunners coach people with little to no MCSR experience through a tournament. Scar is in this one and I'm excited, and I think False could do really well too. Though afaik neither of them have any MCSR experience, unlike e.g. Ludwig who's been playing for the past month or so. I saw a couple of clips and enjoyed that people made dozens of parody songs for him.
Then the Hermitcraft charity event is in April again (Cleo will participate IRL this time, yay!) - the weekend before my exam unfortunately >.< But what if I'm really really well prepared... And didn't get distracted by MCYT Battleship in March either...

I wish I could be more complimentary about Emor's stadium.

As a feat of architecture and engineering, it is on par with the Chara's palace. As a place of entertainment, it is appalling.

Out of all the dismal spectacles that take place here, I can only recommend the chariot races. These can be quite as bloody as the other acts that take place here, but at least they do not involve beasts and prisoners. Charioteers are highly esteemed and highly paid for their skillful work, and they care for their horses tenderly. The chariots – works of art unto themselves – achieve speeds that are said to rival that of royal messengers. I'd recommend keeping your small children and sensitive women away; crashing chariots often result in mangled bodies. But a chariot race is certainly worth witnessing, at least once.

[Translator's note: A chariot race will appear in an upcoming novel, Motley Mayhem.]

Still amused at the line I had to revise a few days ago: "She left right before [rest of sentence]"

There was nothing wrong with that sentence except. Except. "She left right".

So I had to revise and this line haunts me :P

* I realized that the fictional hockey team name in this original fic would not work. Klickitat Cats is an amazing sounding name, a Portland reference and a cryptid reference. But the street/region name comes from a local tribe and no way would a Portland team would overlook that and use the name that way unless they were themselves Klickitat.

Poly-b-us would be an amazing pun name for a local team, but the amount of Portland brain rot you'd need to fully get it is too much. Like, a team would use the name but the layers would be lost on readers. (Could use it as a one-off background joke, though. Also, Oregon is the Beaver State so I'm surprised none of our IRL recc league teams haven't snagged Beaver Skate)

* Guess who walked 2.6 miles for a PDXWLF exhibit that turned out to not be there? Yup, that's our PDXWLF. I think I am going to hit one more location, one that I am hopeful for, and call it good for this year.

* Heated Rivalry related link - This is a really good breakdown as to how Shane and Ilya being in the same division effects them and the story.

This weird creature was a sticker from Abi Stevens Art. I picked it this week for the vibes. I still feel kind of weird and off, like a bizarre and monstrous serpent bird, so that seemed appropriate.

This week was the final stretch of recovery and my return to work. While I still feel like it wasn't quite enough time, I have been feeling far better than I did the previous week. I did have a few reasonably productive days at home, where I started to get caught up on some of what I'd missed. The week itself was difficult, though. The news on Wednesday about my friend Mark passing was... heartbreaking. I still just don't feel like he can be gone.

Goals for the week:

• I did finally catch up on DW
• I wrote up my January book reviews
• I finished reading We're Here
• I took more walks
• I returned to work
• I did not work on my reading page
• I did my getyourwordsout check in: 12542 words
• I did my tracker grids for the next month
• We paid rent
• I started reading Hell Bent

Tracked habits:

• Work - 1.5/7 - I returned for a half day on Friday, resuming my regular schedule on Saturday
• Household Maintenance - 5/7
• Physical Activity - 7/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
• Non-fiction Writing - 6/7 - three days of over 500 words, three days of over 1000
• Meta Work - 4/7
• Personal Writing - 6/7
• Other Creative Things - 0/7
• Reading - 6/7 - I finished reading We're Here and started Hell Bent, plus read a small bit of my ebook side-read; Alex and I finished The Sun Dog and started The Luminous Dead
• Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday had various background stuff, watched some reviews later; Monday had youtube in the background, then later watched agility qualifiers for the Westminster dog show; Tuesday Alex and I went to see Iron Lung (enjoyed it!) and later watched more dog show stuff; Wednesday watched more dog show stuff and some video game videos; Thursday was more game videos and later some of the Olympic snowboard qualifiers; Friday watched a paranormal video, a review, and some game videos; Saturday had news in the background.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 5/7

Total words written: 8105, all non-fiction; some about the stresses of paperwork, some about my friend's passing, some on book reviews

No ICE in Minnesota bundle at itch.io: 1400+ games for $10 donation that goes to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

Notable items include:

• Baba Is You (video game)
• A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build (video game)
• Calico (video game)
• ECO MOFOS!! (TTRPG)
• Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition (TTRPG)
• Tangled Blessings (solo TTRPG)
• Be Seeing You (GM-less TTRPG)
• Rosewood Abby (Brindlewood style TTRPG)
• Three Magic Eyeland collections (...nobody else may care about stereograms but I love them)

* I got jumped by an off-leash dog, who knocked my headphones off and my phone got pulled from my pocket. My phone is alright, but my headphones are toast.

* The largest obstacle towards Jason Hawes acquiring the Conjuring House has been cleared. Things are not final, but the shithead's attempt to snipe the house has been thwarted. Things are looking... good?

Last night I went to the Electric Blocks and also branched out a bit along the east side. Still need to make a list of what else I want to hit before the festival is over.

I've also taken a bunch of video clips which are hard to post there, but here are people gathering for the illuminated bike ride

After I wound up at Wonderlove and had the first cider I'd had in a while, nice dry one. They've got screens with 3 separate Olympic feeds on it so there was skiing, skating and curling all playing at once.

Anyway, here is Cuddlebug:







( More pics )

Finally, the perfect week to use this fantastic sticker. This is one Alex got for me. "It is what it is, and it's pretty terrible" indeed.

This week was pretty much solely dedicated to recovering. Or... it would have been, if I hadn't had to go to such lengths to get so much nonsense paperwork signed. Those frustrations pretty much overshadowed everything else, and made it harder to really do anything else, including things like sleep. It's been dealt with as much as possible at this point. I was annoyed at how far behind I felt on everything. As much as the stress kept me from sleeping well, I feel like I did sleep a lot. Healing seemed to be moving the right direction, and food all sat reasonably well. Pain stayed manageable. Started trying to walk more, as advised.

Goals for the week:

• I did finally get the medical paperwork signed (thank you so much to the nurse I saw)
• I did start reading We're Here, a queer-themed anthology
• I started to work on my January reviews
• I visited Taylor on Saturday
• I finished the leave application
• We went and got crickets

Tracked habits:

• Work - 0/7
• Household Maintenance - 7/7
• Physical Activity - 3/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7 (the bit I colored in on the tracker was an oops)
• Non-fiction Writing - 1/7 - over 500 words
• Meta Work - 1/7
• Personal Writing - 1/7
• Other Creative Things - 1/7
• Reading - 7/7 - I mostly read We're Here, and Taylor and I started Gideon the Ninth
• Attention to Media - Sunday watched news and protest coverage; Monday more protest coverage and I watched music videos for a while; Tuesday more protests, then some video game reviews/essays; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday had random youtube in the background; Saturday I watched Sinners with my mom and Taylor, and later more news coverage.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 5/7

Total words written: 517 on a review

Huh, it doesn't look like I ever posted about Delay of Game... or any of the Ari Baran hockey books. Having taken a posting break has things disordered.

I've read 3 of the 4 books in the Penalty Box series: Game Misconduct, Delay of Game and Home Ice Advantage. I've had multiple people recommend the fourth book in the series, Goaltender Interference, to me. I do like goalies being interfered with, in certain ways. So, I am excited to get to it... but I've also got book club books to read first and I also like to alternate hockey books with non-hockey books.

Series so far overview: Ari Baran's books are the only hockey romances outside of Rachel Reid's that I've really enjoyed. Some other hockey books I've read can best be described as 'books that exist'. The first book is good, but also a bit rough... in every way: writing is rough in places, sex is rough and scenarios under-negotiated, dark side of hockey very leaned into. Later books are less rough, but if they have a editor I would like to give them notes. Ari has a weird habit of repeating sentences and ways of describing things. The instances of repetition are far apart in the book, but still it's something that should be caught. First book is good but rough, second book... drags a bit get is very good by the end, third book is solid all the way through. Endings can feel a bit abrupt.

* Game Misconduct - ( Read more... )

* Delay of Game - ( Read more... )

* Home Ice Advantage - ( Sideplot spoilers )

I started with the main/downtown section of the festival and boy do I have regrets. There is a reason I usually mind the outskirts of the festival for interesting photos and experiences.

The Portland Winter Lights Festival is a 2 week thing with over 200 art installations and events. Last year they ranged from giant metal fire breathing dragon at the waterfront to 'store that happens to sell a few glow in the dark items is open late'. Also, last year I saw a drag king performance based on I Saw The TV Glow. It is a highly varied experience, and the website is deeply unhelpful. I can tell you already that some of the images this year are concept art and not actually was what done. There is cool stuff, but to find it you just need to keep hopping around hundreds of sites and hoping.

I've had a good time at the festival in the past. One year it happened during that extended snowstorm/power outage Portland had and I remember trudging through deep snow to see the fire powered light events, a truly surreal experience.

Anyway, the main downtown space can get crowded and people can get pushy. I don't have a sense of balance so people pushing me side to make a hole for their group is A Problem for me. Some lady wanted to push through a line I was in, rather than go around. I asked her to cut behind me instead of in front for a specific reason, and she had a expletive filled crash out at me.

I hopefully got at least 2 good pictures, but yeah, there is a reason I usually skip the main area. I am *hopefully* hitting the Electric Blocks and some east side stuff tonight, then I'll start sorting through lists to see what else I want to hit. The only exhibit up on St John's is... an art exhibit that's been there year round for years.

Also, damn, just like I need a dedicated Mike Bennett folder I need to start a PDXWLF folder.

Well, January wasn’t quite the heroic initial push to conquer the TBR list that I’d hoped… but I think I have a reasonably good excuse for that, ha. I had a vestigial organ try to murder me to death! I’d hoped that the time in the hospital, and the subsequent recovery would, at the least, provide me with extra time to read. Unfortunately, it was sort of the opposite. My attention span and brainpower were basically utterly fried. The first couple days in the hospital I couldn’t even attempt to read, though Alex brought me my book. While I did finish it eventually, I then still struggled to read more than a few pages at a time, even once I was home. Oh well. This at least seems to be improving, though now I feel behind and am trying to chill out on myself a bit, ha.

Ultimately, I finished four books for January:


(A very... evocative cover, ha.)
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Horror (subgenres: queer, post-apocalyptic, contagion/mutation/zombie, splatterpunk) (f/f, m/f) - ebook novel
3.5/5

Years ago, a virus swept across the world. It caused anyone with a large enough amount of testosterone in them to mutate, turning them into animalistic, violent creatures, driven to attack, rape, kill, and devour everything they can catch.
In this post-apocalyptic world, various settlements have found some sort of balance. Trans women Fran and Beth are “manhunters,” traveling around to kill rampaging “new men” and harvest their organs; one of the few ways they have to get the hormones they need in order to avoid succumbing to the plague themselves. On one of their trips, they also encounter Robbie, a trans man who has been living on his own for years.
More dangerous than the packs of feral men are the TERFs who have started to take over most of the region. They do not look kindly on the trans women who remain, wanting to wipe them out even more than the remaining new men. But one of the only “safe” refuges from the TERFs is a bunker under the control of a wealthy heiress, where everyone is forced to bow to her whims. Having fled there for safety, Fran, Beth, their long-time friend Indi, and Robbie quickly learn that the bunker may be just as dangerous as anything they were trying to escape. As the TERFs escalate their ideological war, there may be no safety left to find.

My thoughts (too many of them), some spoilers, content warnings:

I don’t always do content warnings for books, but this one definitely comes with a content warning. Warnings for blood, gore, moderately-graphic on-page rape, body horror, torture, and cannibalism. Warnings also for a lot of often extremely virulent transphobia: much of this is external, but there’s also a lot that’s internalized, or sometimes directed at trans characters by other queer and trans characters. There’s a lot of dysphoria. Fatphobia, also both external and internalized. Coerced sex work (though there is also uncoerced sex work.) Pregnancy, including experimentation done on pregnant people, and impregnation with monstrous fetuses that leads to violent death.

(With my ratings, I’m now trying to specifically weigh the aspects I liked/found great or good against the aspects I did not like/found to be bad or less good.)

Starting with the aspects I did find pretty great:
This is extremely queer, and I appreciate the amount of queer rage it contains, honestly. (And very specifically trans rage.)
The tension is so excellent. There’s an early scene where Beth has to restring her bow while the men they’re trying to escape are drawing closer, and it had me completely on-edge the entire time. (There are other examples throughout, but man, that early scene set up the tension extremely well.)
The characters are all extremely conflicted and imperfect. Sometimes this is infuriating! But I appreciated all of them.
The TERFs are so much worse than anything else. Even held up against murderous, ravenous, rampaging monsters, the TERFs and their brand of entitled cruelty is the worst thing on page.
The book portrays different types of exploitation really well… it feels weird to call that a thing I “like,” but I definitely did. Exploitation and manipulation happen in a ton of subtle and overt ways, just as it always does.
This book has a lot to say about palatability. What type of queer is palatable or desirable vs. what kind of queer is “gross” or “expendable.” This feels like it’s far too often at the forefront of real-life issues, and the sanitization of queer communities, and respectability politics, and on and on.
As miserable as a lot of the world itself is, and how often communities and individuals fail each other, there is an ultimately hopeful feeling of a queer community winning out, but in a way that to me did not feel trite or unearned or easy.

The stuff that I felt a bit more mixed or neutral about:
This is not an aesthetic or pretty apocalypse. It is pretty unrelentingly grim and miserable… which doesn’t bother me on the whole, but just how unrelenting the misery was got to be a bit much eventually.
The book is extremely body-focused, in a way that verges on sometimes feeling grotesque. But that also sort of made me assess my own feelings on some things, because… is it grotesque? Or is it just focusing on things that are “traditionally” not something considered “desirable”? (There’s a lot of focus on fat, on armpits, on bodies looking/smelling/feeling strange, on flaws being narrowed in on, on the “unattractive” features that a given narrator is focusing on.) I feel like it’s a bit of both.
Of course, it also makes sense that there’d be a focus from several of the characters on their own physical presence. Trans bodies (Fran, Beth, and Robbie are all trans) and fat bodies (Indi is a fat cis woman), are marked. Even in this hypothetical apocalypse, there are certainly understandable reasons that the characters we have would be very aware of their own bodies and the bodies of others.
There were some painfully familiar bits of queer infighting. The most obvious is probably when a character is thinking back to when the virus first struck… how the “you are safe here” completely queer-friendly housing collective, the people who wanted to portray themselves as the most accepting and loving and open-minded people possible… were willing to turn on those less-palatable members of their “community,” particularly the trans women who don’t pass sufficiently. (While, of course, weaponizing social-justice terms to justify it to themselves.) This feels #tooreal, but also…a bit too real. Like it was almost vindictively About Someone. (Though perhaps not! I’ve seen mentions of drama regarding the author, but I don’t know anything about it, and don’t care to look.)

The stuff I was less fond of:
Alas, splatterpunk remains Not My Genre.
I really don’t consider myself squeamish (and it’s not like it made me nauseous, or I had to put the book down, or anything like that), but some of the gore and torture got to be a bit much for me. Blood and guts and gore don’t particularly bother me, but cruelty, and particularly sexualized cruelty does. (The same issue I had with Maeve Fly last year, though I liked this book more.)
I do not know anyone who wants to fuck as much as basically every single character in this book does. (And it really was basically all of them.) I don’t think this is me being prudish, or being weird about what kind of characters these are or what kind of sex they’re having. I’m good with all of that! I just fundamentally Cannot Relate. Too ace to be interested in fucking so much, especially under the circumstances, ha. It didn’t bother me so much as just make me kind of eyeroll with an “again?!” a few times. (And like… yes, I do also read romance and erotica and things by choice, where the expectation is a whole lot of sex. But I know that’s what’s on the menu when I read those genres; this had more of a “come on, time and place!” feeling.)
There was a line near the end that left a sour taste for me. A character watches the TERFs in a final retreat, trying to save themselves over trying to help their so-called “sisters,” having turned to the worst and most extreme violence they could muster in order to root out their enemies—a queer, mostly trans group. The character watches them and thinks, “They’re just men.” And like… I get it. They are the worst of what they said they hated: all the traits they were proud to try and get rid of, the things they claimed were only the immutable purview of evil, culturally-poisoned and inescapably monstrous men, plus the “new men” that are functionally zombies, who truly do only have the instinct to enact violence… It’s pointing out that for all that, the TERFs embody the worst of everything they claimed to naturally be above, everything they were supposed to be excising from the world in pursuit of their cis female utopia. But particularly so late in the book, it rubbed me the wrong way to still have this statement that horrid amoral attitudes belong to men, and if women are displaying those attitudes then they simply are men, actually.

This was the final of the Tor Nightfire Humble Bundle books! Knowing that this isn’t really my subgenre of choice, I don’t know that I ever would have picked it up otherwise… though perhaps I would have, looking for queer horror. I have picked up another book by this author, which is sitting on the infinite TBR.

(I do like the subtle creepiness of one blood-spattered pillar.)
Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire
Book 11 of Wayward Children
Fantasy (subgenre: portal) - physical novella
4/5

In Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, one of the rules is “no quests.” When former student Nancy returns through her Door, several of the current students break that rule yet again. When someone finds their Door, they’re supposed to get to go home, to the place that they truly belong. For Nancy, that was always the Halls of the Dead, where she could be a living decorative statue, dedicated to a peaceful and contemplative existence. Now that peace has been shattered: something has awoken and enraged the spirits of the dead in the underworld, causing them to attack the living, hunting and killing her fellow statues. Nancy risks her place behind her Door to come and seek help. Students Kade, Christopher, Sumi, and a newer girl, Talia, agree to help find out what is causing the attacks. As they investigate, they begin to discover uncomfortable truths about how much or how little the Lord and Lady of the Dead have been caring for their servants.

My thoughts, fairly brief, only vague spoilers:

It’s nice to be caught up on this series, finally! (Man, it’s been more than a decade since it started??) One of my goals from last year was to catch up on this series, and I’m glad that I succeeded.

This was a good entry. I was honestly delighted to get to see Nancy again, our very first protagonist from the series. This book also did a good job of, again, showing why her world was appealing to her. Being a living statue sounds horrible to me, but it succeeds in selling why it works so perfectly for Nancy.

There is a reveal midway through the book that I saw coming only as it was approaching the characters finding out, and it was great. Absolutely my ideal way to call something is calling it right before the confirmation.

I really liked Talia and her moths. I don’t know if we’ll have her with us for long. She might be here to fill the party out a bit (since we’ve had a few characters at this point find their Doors as the adventures continue, which whisks them off-page.) She also might be a future protagonist or one of the next to find her Door. (Which is her stated goal; she’s noticed that the people who keep going on the forbidden quests are the ones finding their ways home.)

It’s hard to call it a huge complaint, but sometimes I wish these weren’t novellas. Often it feels like I’m just really getting sunk into the world and the story, and then suddenly the story is over. “I want more” is a pretty mild complaint, but one that I definitely felt this time around.

The ending definitely gave me a bit of an “oh no! But oh yes!” feeling.

(I love the snake.)
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Book 1 of the Alex Stern series
Fantasy (subgenres: dark, contemporary, dark academia, occult) - physical novel
5/5

Alex Stern was certainly not the type to end up in an Ivy League school. She’s a high school dropout and small-time drug dealer, traumatized too many times over to count. After a terrible event, something about her catches attention: she sees “Grays,” or ghosts, a unique and desirable (to some) ability. This grants her the offer of a full-ride scholarship to Yale, with the caveat that she take on a role within the powerful secret societies at the university. She must work for the “Ninth House,” House Lethe, a group dedicated to monitoring and policing the rituals of the other societies, to ensure they don’t go too far.
When her mentor disappears under questionable circumstances, Alex is left even more adrift than she already was. Then a town girl is murdered, and Alex suspects it has something to do with the other societies that Lethe is supposed to keep in check.

My thoughts, vague spoilers, a couple content warnings:

Finally! Something I was looking forward to that I enjoyed just as much as I thought I would!

Content warning: sexual assault, in some cases including substance use to override consent. Blood, violence, gore. Classism. I feel like those are the big ones that stood out to me, but that’s probably not an exhaustive list.

I guess this book (though I initially mostly heard praise) is now “divisive” but. Whatever. I loved it.

I really enjoyed the magic system in this. It’s built off of a bonkers array of different relics and rituals, with everything from extremely minor effects to world-altering ones. In some cases, this sort of system would bother me; I don’t usually like a system that feels too convenient, where every hurdle winds up with an “easy” magical solution. Despite the answer to “is there a spell/relic/magical answer to this problem?” almost always being yes, it didn’t ever feel like a convenience. The costs are often high, or the limitations are strong enough that it introduces new problems, and the wide array of those magical fixes also, I thought, enriched the world a bit. It really highlights the premise that these secret societies have a TON of history—much of it stolen and plundered, some of it gained through their own knowledge or effort—to draw on.

I know I’ve heard a lot of people say they didn’t like the “dark academia” aspects, that they hated the way the societies are portrayed… I did like it. I liked that it leans on the occult aspects as being key to their existence, and uses this to really heavily emphasize the corruption and privilege and nepotism that are inherent in this kind of society in reality. It also emphasizes the very real attitudes that so many wealthy and privileged people hold. Of course much of their magic is stolen in the form of looted artifacts and appropriated ritual; that’s an extension of the mentality that the upper class holds, where anything they want can and should be theirs! Of course “but it’s a funding year” is used as an excuse not to hold someone accountable; that happens all the time! So, so much of what these societies do is… petty. They kidnap a hospital patient to vivisect him and read his entrails… so they can predict the stock market. They utilize a magical drug that compels unwavering submission as a date rape drug. And yep, I fully believe that’s exactly how a wealthy, privileged frat boy would behave if he had access to these things.

I’ve also heard that this portrays the setting really well. It certainly conveyed to me a very strong sense of place, though I have no personal experience with New England. But I’m told by someone who does have firsthand knowledge that it was a very good portrayal. I loved that!

The book weaves back and forth between two timelines: one when Alex first arrives at Yale, and is learning what her role will be from her mentor Darlington; the other when Alex is on her own after Darlington’s disappearance. I thought that the two timelines, while not being very far apart chronologically from each other, contrasted really well. Both involve Alex feeling somewhat lost, but in different ways, and her mentality is different enough in each of them that I never had a hard time tracing which of the two timelines we were in. I thought it also did an excellent job of doling out information: we slowly find out more about the incident that led to Alex being noticed, we slowly find out more about Darlington’s disappearance. Alex gets to serve as a bit of an unreliable narrator, but it never came across to me as her obscuring that information in an unnatural or contrived way.

There are three fairly rapid-fire… I won’t say twists so much as reveals toward the end. One I’d expected. One I didn’t see coming at all, but it did a lovely job of reminding me of the various subtle hints that had been dropped earlier, so it did not feel like an ass-pull. The third I had been hoping for, but was afraid it was a vain hope, and it leads us toward what I expect the second book will deal with, and I’m excited to read it as well.

A lot of what I liked really comes down to feeling like aspects were pulled off well. Several of these things (the availability of magic, the dual timelines, the rate at which we find out information the protagonist does have but does not share freely, the way a twist is handled, etc.) could have felt weak or like a contrivance to me, but in my opinion they were done skillfully enough that I enjoyed them instead.

(Delightfully creepy, and of something specific from the book.)
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
Book 2 of the Sworn Soldier series
Horror (subgenres: monster/supernatural) - physical novella
4/5

Alex Easton and kan* retainer, Angus, are taking a vacation, heading to the hunting cottage that’s been in the Easton family for generations. Alex isn’t thrilled with the plan—ka would honestly prefer to stay in Paris—but the cottage provides an opportunity for Angus to invite Miss Potter, the mycologist they met when visiting the Ushers, to visit as well.
When they arrive, they discover that the man who kept up the lodge has passed away after a severe illness. Rumors and superstitions fill the nearby town: that these illnesses are caused by a moroi, a supernaturally monstrous woman who comes in dreams and steals people’s breath.
Alex and Angus hire an older, widowed woman and her grandson to help around the lodge, the only people from town enough in need of the money to ignore the superstitions. Then the grandson gets sick with the same symptoms that apparently killed the previous caretaker. Alex doesn’t put any stock in the stories of the moroi… but when nothing seems to help the young man’s illness, and ka starts having strange dreams of kan own, it starts to seem like there’s something strange happening after all.

*Alex’s native language has multiple sets of pronouns, including “ka/kan,” a set of pronouns used only for soldiers, which supersede any other pronouns that a person may have used before.

My thoughts:

While I didn’t love this book quite as much as I did What Moves the Dead, I did still really enjoy it!

Best aspects:
I still really enjoy the recurring characters. Alex is enjoyable and different enough from the “usual” protagonists that I’m used to reading that I find it really enjoyable to spend time with ka. (Even as kan skepticism frustrated me a little bit, although ka still does a decent job of pointing out that in hindsight it might frustrate ka a bit, too.)
I was happy that Miss Potter came back! I like her and her mix of proper English lady and resentment over not being taken seriously in her field. I’m happy she got to find some interesting mushrooms.
I really liked Alex’s descriptions of the past as a place that is still in some sense real and happening… it’s a thing that really made sense and connected for me. This connects to the way Alex experiences PTSD, which also feels relatable to me. It’s not something that I feel is dwelled on, but it is an aspect of the character that comes up.
The descriptions of Alex’s dream, and how unutterably hellish it seemed also really worked for (and horrified) me. It’s possible that this was in part because I was reading this part while I was in the hospital post-emergency surgery, and had a really awful night that seemed never-ending before I read that part, ha.
The moroi was very creepy. I also liked all the weird little superstitious tricks that the Widow was trying to utilize.

The stuff that felt like a slight drawback:
One of my favorite parts of the previous book was how there were little details that served multiple purposes. Something would serve as a subtle current detail (Alex is feeding an apple to kan horse), while also laying groundwork for something else in a way that didn’t feel obvious (this establishes the presence of the apple orchards that later become relevant.) In this case, there was a similar detail, but it felt more heavy-handed, and indeed I was correct that it was specific foreshadowing. This wasn’t terrible, because ’foreshadowing is a literary device…’ but it didn’t have quite the subtlety that I’d admired the first time around.
I didn’t find the plot quite as gripping as the previous one, but honestly that’s a pretty minor complaint. It was interesting and engaging enough that I always wanted to read more and find out what was happening, but I just didn’t feel quite as attached to this book’s new characters as I did the ones in the previous book. Bors (the grandson) is sweet and I wanted things to go well for him, but I never felt hugely connected to the Widow or the priest.

---

This is a bit belated into February, so I’ve already finished two more books for this month:
- We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2023, a short story anthology edited by Darcie Little Badger
- The Sun Dog by Stephen King, Alex’s and my most recent read

I am currently reading four books:
- Our Bloody Pearl by D.N. Bryn, my ebook side-read
- Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, my main read
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, co-reading with Taylor
- The Illuminated Dead by Caitlin Starling, co-reading with Alex

After this, my plan remains the same for my main TBR:
- What Stalks the Deep (Christmas gift; sequel to What Feasts at Night)
- Point of Dreams (Pride storybundle ebook)
- The Hobbit (Tolkien!)
- The Map and the Territory (Pride storybundle ebook)
- The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien!)
- These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (Pride storybundle ebook)
- The Two Towers (Tolkien!)
- Be the Sea (Pride storybundle ebook)
- Return of the King (Tolkien!)

I am a bit sad that this seems likely to take longer than I’d hoped… My most ambitious plan was to have the above completed by the end of March, but I think that’ll be a struggle. More realistically, this seems likely to be the plan into April or even May. I’ll try to find some more reading time and brainpower out to get through more than I have been.

(My favorite place to read is when I’m taking a bath… and I can’t take a bath for another month+ until my incisions are fully healed, sobcry.)

I’ve also had, ahem, a “compelling argument” made to me that perhaps I should just give in to the shoulder devil telling me to bump Heated Rivalry up the list. I haven’t seen the show or read the book, but it’s certainly the in thing right now! I’m never into fandoms when they’re happening! And I do own the first three books as ebooks…

I’ve had Heated Rivalry on my “official” TBR list, where it’s sitting at #212… but I could choose to put it on the “ebook side-read” list instead, in which case I just have to finish that current book instead of… two hundred or so, haha. And I always reserve the right to “promote” the ebook side-read to primary read status if I’m super into it… So that one may be jumping the line, haha.

(I did also give myself the handful of “free spots” on my TBR as “rewards” for when I finish a reading goal, but I won’t hit one of those until I finish LotR, which would still be a few months out.)

The most full and complete TBR list that I have (including all main reads, ebooks, short story anthologies, ebook humble bundles, etc.) is up to 601 books, which is frankly ridiculous.

From this thread at Bluesky - When people ask how to get into GA SF I always say that the right way is via some of those fat "Best Of" short fiction collections.

Long discussion, many comments, mostly agreeing that yep, the way to get people into SF is anthologies, not novels, especially "best of" anthologies rather than whatever theme-of-the-day was popular. Also many people agreeing that many of "the classics" do not hold up today, and "Heinlein juveniles + the Foundation trilogy" is not a good suggestion for a young teen who might be interested in scifi now.

So... if you were building an anthology of The Great Science Fiction, with a focus specifically on non-SF readers who might be interested, what would you put in it?

( Some limitations may be in order )

I've photographed his work a LOT over the past several years, and yesterday I saw him in the wild... or rather leaving his new workshop location. I wanted to repost some pictures of I've taken of his stuff over the years for context, but that's the downside to my main photography folder being 34,154 Files in 517 Folders. That's far from every photo I've ever taken, only select photos go in. I have spent time organizing it, but... not enough?

Anyway, you can get his vibe from these pics I think.



Where the magic happens:




He runs the sticker, keychain and pin exchanges across Portland. He did the Crypto-zoo, Dinotopia, The Portland Aquarium and runs the Wonderwood Springs D&D/RPG themed cafe in St Johns. I know I've posted about that place and can picture the images, but I cannot find them right now. I might need to start a dedicated Mike Bennett folder. Originally known online as Regional Memesmith, he is part of the fabric of the Portland arts scene.

( Wait, remembering his old psued jogged a memory )

* There is now an easter egg on google.com if you search for Heated Rivalry. Rachel's reaction.

* There is going to be a Baldur's Gate 3 TV show! *thinks about this for three seconds* Yeah, there was talk of this when the game was blowing up and everyone agreed it would be a bad idea. Also, it's a continuation so it will be based on one of probably hundreds of possible end-game states and this show will be based on one of the popular ones. And

spoiler title

Astarian is going to be either dead, evil or unable to travel. His non-evil ending is staying in the Underdark because he becomes vulnerable to the sun again. Rather than a game that is about exploring the choices you like, popular or not, it will be tied to what will sell the best. One of the appeals of games is not being tied to that. Even if you would choose to be a male Tav romancing Shadowheart, you are still choosing it not being fed it.

A brain, because that was the only organ sticker I had. But that was probably the bit of least concern while I was in the hospital.

This was a terrible week!

Goals for the week:

• Nothing! I was in the hospital Sunday - Thursday!
• I guess I did technically try to get all my leave stuff sorted out, though I did not succeed
• I guess I could also put "manage to get discharged and go the fuck home" on the list, haha

Tracked habits:

• Work - .5/7 - I worked a half day on Sunday before I went to the ER
• Household Maintenance - 4/7
• Physical Activity - 0/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
• Non-fiction Writing - 1/7 - over 1000 words
• Meta Work - 0/7
• Personal Writing - 4/7, though three of those were very short phone updates from the hospital
• Other Creative Things - 0/7
• Reading - 1/7 - I finished reading What Feasts at Night
• Attention to Media - 6/7 - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I watched various nonsense that I couldn't focus on while in the hospital; Friday had some stuff in the background on youtube but still didn't focus on anything; Saturday we watched a lot of news coverage after Alex Pretti was murdered.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 5/7

Total words written: 3367 words written about my time in the hospital

This is actually all of December and January, which I wrote up for my professional blog.

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo is horror, a genre I read only rarely, but I was completely gripped by the 1930s rural setting. Leslie Bruin, a trans man and veteran nurse of World War One, now works for the Frontier Nursing Service. Sent to the tiny, isolated town of Spar Creek, he is quickly put on his guard by unfriendly townspeople and louring forest, but stays to try and help young Stevie Mattingly, a tomboyish local whom the entire town seems to want to control. The building tension is very effective, and finally explodes in dark magic and violence. Trigger warnings for off-screen sexual assault and some gory justice doled out towards the end.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is very excellent. It's a magic school story from a teacher's perspective, which fully demonstrates the ridiculously huge workload of a senior administrator/teacher and the difficulties of having a "human" life separate from teaching. It has great characters and deep worldbuilding, and even shows what graduate school and career paths the students might take. The solidly English middle-class point of view character Sapphire Walden, socially awkward with a doctorate in thaumaturgy, is brilliantly depicted, including her grappling with how to communicate with her students who vary in race and class. This novel read as a love letter to teachers and teaching that also showed their humanity with its mistakes and flaws.

Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn is first in the "Elemental Blessings" series, a secondary-world fantasy with magic and personality types associated with/linked to elements or combinations thereof. The protagonist, for example, is linked mostly to water, which has a relationship to Change; in her case, she's part of major political changes. The story begins just after Zoe Ardelay's father has died. He was a political exile, and Zoe has mostly grown up in an isolated, tiny village. Darien Serlast, one of the king's advisors, arrives to bring her to the capital city, ostensibly to be the king's fifth wife. At this point, I was expecting a Marriage of Convenience, possibly with Darien. This did not happen; instead, the first of several shifts in the plot (much like changes in a river's course over time) sent Zoe off on her own to make new friends. While there is indeed a romance with Darien, eventually, it was secondary to the political plots revolving around the king, the machinations of his wives, and Zoe's discoveries about her heritage and associated magical abilities. I enjoyed the unexpected twists of the plot, but by the end felt I'd read enough of this world and did not move on to the rest of the series.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett is second in a series, Shadow of the Leviathan, but since my library hold on it came in first, I read out of order. As with many mystery series, there was enough background that I had no trouble reading it as a standalone. This secondary world fantasy mystery has genuinely interesting worldbuilding, mostly related to organic technology based on the flesh and blood of strange, metamorphic creatures called Leviathans who sometimes come ashore and wreak destruction. The story revolves around a research facility that works directly with these dangerous corpses and is secretly doing more than is public. Protagonists Dinios Kol and his boss, the eccentric and brilliant detective Ana Dolabra, are sent from the imperial Iudex to an outlier territory, Yarrow, whose economy is structured around organic technology and the research facility known as The Shroud. Yarrow is in the midst of negotiations with the imperial Treasury for a future entry into the Empire when one of the Treasury representatives is murdered. Colonialism and the local feudal system complicate both the plot and the investigation. If you like twists and turns, this is great. There are hints of the Pacific Rim movies (but no mecha) in the leviathans, and of famous detective pairings including Holmes and Watson and Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, the latter of which the author explicitly mentions in the afterword. (Similarities: Ana likes to stay in one places, is a gourmet of sorts, sends Kol out for information; Kol has a photographic memory and is good at picking up sex partners.)

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett kicks off the Shadow of the Leviathan series. Kol and Ana begin the story in a backwater canton but soon travel to the imperial town that supports the great sea wall and holds back the Titans that invade in the wet season. The worldbuilding and the mystery plot are marvelously layered, and Ana's eccentricities are classic for a detective. I kept thinking, "he's putting down a clue, when is someone in this story going to pick it up?" and sometimes, I felt like the pickup took too long. This might have been on purpose, to drag out the tension. As a writer, I was definitely paying attention to the techniques the author used.

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher is first in the "Saint of Steel" series, which has been recommended to me so many times by this point that I've lost count. While the story is serious and begins with an accidental massacre, the dialogue has Kingfisher's trademark whimsy, irony, and humor. When the supernatural Saint of Steel dies, its holy Paladins are bereft but still subject to a berserker rage no longer guided by the Saint. The survivors are taken in by the Temple of the White Rat and then must...survive. Paladin Stephen feels like a husk who serves the White Rat as requested and knits socks in his downtime until he accidentally saves a young woman from danger and becomes once again interested in living. Grace, a perfumer, fled an abusive marriage and has now stumbled into a murderous plot. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious deaths in the background eventually work their way forward. This was really fun, and I will read more.

Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher is third in the "Saint of Steel" series and features the lich-doctor (coroner) Piper, who becomes entangled with the paladin Galen and a gnole (badger-like sapient), Earstripe, who is investigating a series of very mysterious deaths. Galen still suffers the effects of when the Saint of Steel died, and is unwilling to build relationships outside of his fellow paladins; Piper works with the dead because of a psychic gift as well as other reasons that have led to him walling off his feelings. A high-stress situation helps to break down their walls, though I confess that video-game-like scenario dragged a bit for me. Also, I really wanted to learn a lot more about the gnoles and their society.

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher is second in the "Saint of Steel" series but arrived third so far as my library holds were concerned; I actually finished it in February but am posting it here so it's with the other books in the series. This one might be my favorite of the series so far. Istvhan's level-headedness and emotional intelligence appeal strongly to me. Clara's strong sense of self made me like her even before the reveal of her special ability (which I guessed ahead of time). They were a well-matched couple, and a few times I actually laughed out loud at their dialogue. I also appreciated seeing different territory and some different cultures in this world. I plan to read the fourth book in this series, and more by this author.

Wrong on the Internet by selkit is a brief Murderbot (TV) story involving Sanctuary Moon fandom, Ratthi, and SecUnit. It's hilarious.

Cold Bayou by Barbara Hambly (2018) is sixteenth in the series, and I would not recommend starting here, as there are a lot of returning characters with complex relationships. Set in 1839 in southern Louisiana, the free man of color Ben, his wife Rose, his mother, his sister Dominique and her daughter, and his close friend Hannibal Sefton travel via steamboat to an isolated plantation, Cold Bayou, for a wedding.

As well as the inhabitants of the plantation (enslaved people and the mixed-race overseer and his wife), the sprawling cast includes an assortment of other family related by blood or otherwise through the complex French-Creole system of interracial relationships called plaçage or mariages de la main gauche. These involved White men contracting with mistresses of color while, often, married to White women for reasons of money or control over land rather than romance. The resulting complexities are a constant theme in this series, as Ben and his sister Olympe were freed from slavery in childhood when their mother was purchased and freed to be a placée; meanwhile, his half-sister Dominique is currently a placée, and on good terms with her partner Henri's wife, Chloe, who later has a larger role in the mystery plot.

Veryl St.-Chinian, one of two members of a family with control over a vast quantity of property, is 67 years old and has decided to marry 18 year old Ellie Trask, an illiterate Irish girl whose past is revealed to be socially dubious. Even before Ellie's rough-hewn uncle shows up with a squad of violent bravos, tempers are fraught and no-one thinks the marriage is a good idea, because of the vast family voting power it would give Ellie. Complicating matters is the inevitable murder and also a storm that floods the plantation and prevents most outside assistance for an extended period.

Hambly is one of my autobuy authors and I greatly enjoyed revisiting familiar characters as well as seeing them grapple with mystery tropes such as "detective is incapacitated and must rely on others for information" and "isolated assortment of plausible murder suspects." She's great at successively amping up the danger with plot twists that fractal out to the rest of the story, and though justice is always achieved in the end (as is required for the Mystery genre), the historical circumstances of these books can result in justice for some and not others. I highly recommend this series if you like mystery that successfully dramatizes complex social history.

I finished books 1-7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl in two weeks, and more importantly I managed to drag both my gf and DD into it too - I think that's one of my strengths :) I had a great time.
( spoilers )

Slight downside, DD and I haven't started our Hades 2 1.0 playthroughs yet, since we planned to start at the same time and she just got to book 6 of DCC ^^ Hopefully soon though.

Instead I played a few runs of Vampire Survivors again. Good for occasional short play sessions that don't require much brainpower (though it is easy to forget to look at the time...) I don't unlock something every run but almost, which feels very cool and like I'm getting somewhere even though I have no idea what to do/where to go for actual game "progression." I might look it up at some point, idk.

(I also considered exploring the new Minecraft updates - I want to find a happy ghast! And ride a nautilus!, among other things - but I lost one set of good armor/tools in the End and another in the Nether a few months ago, and both are very possible to retrieve but I haven't found the motivation yet to either get one of them or make myself new gear. Possibly keepInventory would have been a good idea after all.)

Speaking of games, specifically board games: in early January with L and two of her friends we played Wingspan, which was a lot of fun, and then we tried out Earth, which we also enjoyed a lot. That one we tried first in single player, and then we decided to try the version where you play in teams but quickly switched back because it gets a lot more tactical quickly. The third long game the three of them played was Forest Shuffle - I detect a theme ^^
We also played a quick game of Pandemic. And this reminds me that L and I didn't get a chance to play Hanabi yet, hopefully soon.

It's also been ages since I gave an update on my group's TTRPG games and our current Stars Without Number campaign! We got to level six, which means I can now do "normal" teleports without Committing Effort and it feels fantastic. And I got some other cool abilities too, like imprinting on a party member to teleport back to their side even when they are out of sight.
( Recent adventures )