shadaras

so the last time I posted here was at the beginning of the month, hm. well! hello, I still exist!

1.
I've been at a different work site for 2.5wks, which was a lovely break. Chill worksite, small job; just me and one journeyman who I enjoy working with. He was like "this is one of the best jobs I've ever worked" about it, which is a wild contrast to how the big job we'd both been working (and are returning to tomorrow) is one of the worst.

The little job isn't fully done, but we can't do anything else until they get all the remaining parts in. The hope is that when that happens (in a month, maybe...? nobody had estimates.) they'll call us back to finish it, since we know what's going on and what the plan was. This is especially pertinent because we were not given particularly detailed plans, and then proceeded to change a lot of it (memorably: one unit we were supposed to install couldn't be installed where they wanted it because of service requirements, so it had to be flipped and therefore everything coming from it had to be re-routed to accommodate that).

also, we just want to go back, since it was a nice job.

Back to the big job tomorrow, and...

well, not looking forward to it. In theory it'll wrap at some point this summer. idk when. But it's a job site where everyone always seems stressed and that trickles down and makes it so much harder than it needs to be.

(also, like, having lunch at 10:30am as the only break in the day is. not ideal? yes we get out at 2:30 but man the clock usually feels so slow between 11am-2pm...)

2.
I drew a cover for On the Lord's Estate the other week!

[Click to View Image]

Left to right: Mal, El, and Benny.

I've known more or less what I wanted to draw for bk2 since... mm, the halfway mark of writing it, maybe? Important to have all three of them together, important to show Mal happy, important to place it in the conservatory. I'm very happy with how it came out—especially Mal. <3 Mal turned out just as I was hoping as far as expression/vibe goes.

This also means that

hafnia and I have started posting bk3! Of the Lord's Family is the happy ending. <3 featuring healthy communication, family feelings (if the title wasn't a giveaway), and everyone settling into their lives. It'll be the end of this trilogy, and then it'll be time for various stories about the kids.

(which means more thinking about what I want to do with Rhei, and also continuing to noodle about Tolly... many ideas, only so much time and energy, but also no rush beyond my own internal "BUT I WANNA HAVE THIS DONE SOONER" feelings. xD)

3.
I've been keeping up with the new Star Wars cartoon Maul: Shadow Lord, and it is such a funny example of Disney Star Wars Overconnected Bullshit in a few very specific ways.

a. No characters are really introduced. You are expected to simply already know who they are. Even as someone who has watched pretty much all the Star Wars cartoons, I was not aware of who some characters were because some of them were introduced in comics about Maul. (Additionally: the prequel comic series for this show has 2/5 issues out as of right now, as the show airs. I think this is hilarious.) HOWEVER.

b. Even the characters who were not previously introduced are given particularly in-depth introductions. This is mostly confusing because I expected them to be introduced somewhere, since it took until episode three for two major characters to have their names spoken on-screen. Their names have been known via promo material? But didn't show up in the show? This is fine if it's intentional but it's so weird when it's the same vibes as characters who were introduced in comics.

c. I mean this isn't a Disney problem specifically but it sure is very Star Wars: There is only one (1) prominent female character, one (1) prominent secondary female character, and one (1) tertiary female character allowed at a time. It was honestly really funny when the tertiary character got Sent Away and then a new tertiary female character showed up a couple scenes later?

anyway I like it well enough when it's not Fight Scenes, and sort of don't care when it's Fight Scenes, but since it's a show for like tweens I think it's forced to have Fight Scenes in every episode. Which, like, that's fine but I find it more fun to watch Maul attempt to seduce everyone into helping him than I do watching the flashy lights show of a combat sequence involving blasters and/or lightsabers.

4.
It is finally spring. Flowers are blooming, the trees are turning green with new leaves, and the weather is consistently above freezing! These are all good things!

5.
anyway while I'm thinking about it, right, I meant to post this (which I wrote like a month ago at least) and now I have! Mouse! :D

The Question of Crushes, 2.4k, gen, wherein a teenager is interrogated by a like eight year old about if they have a crush on the kid's oldest sibling.

today I have been a lump due to WEATHER but since I haven't gotten to responding to comments on my last post about work bullshit, have an update re: work bullshit!

Tuesday they say "hey, we're going on short weeks!" and are like "I guess you can take a layoff if you don't wanna do that" and people are mostly just like "UH!!!"

Wednesday I am informed that I'll be going with one of the journeymen to another job starting probably next Wednesday. (Also one of the journeymen is like "yeah, I called [company I worked for before this] and they said they'd take me back") (Also we learn that a select few people would be staying on full weeks anyway!)

Today we are all informed, not even by the bosses, that they will not be doing short weeks after all. So. You know. Super cool of them, definitely didn't shoot themselves in the feet re crew morale and general good-will.

It's all very, "you're doing a shit job of communicating and are gonna lose people because of this", because I don't think the journeyman I'll be going to that job with wants to come back. I don't blame him; we're at the stage of the job where a lot of the work is "figure out what got missed/didn't happen because we didn't have the necessary pieces at the time", which means a lot of working around shit that's now in our way, etc etc. Plus this whole debacle about work hours.

Hello, I exist, life's been busy and I've been tired.

1.
I read all of Witch Hat Atelier (up through ch94, for future!me's reference if I ever think to check), which means I have more than hit the point where it's like "oh! there's the part where this story is about trauma metaphors!". But also all the bits that make me cry are the bits about the kids talking about how much they've learned from their friends and how they can stay true to themselves and their dreams and how magic is for bringing joy and life to the world, so. The part of the Angsty White-Haired Man's life that's about him going "teaching is the most rewarding thing I ever could've done" is the part that interests me, not the "oh THAT'S how we're making visible the childhood trauma that defines you" part, y'know?

2.
Some more MOUSE (this fic does have a title, and eventually I will finish it)

[Rhei stands] next to Mouse, gazing at the city they’re moving away from. Its buildings are beautiful, it rises gracefully from the water, and it stands so proudly against the sky. Many of the rich and powerful of the city might have made ugly choices, and continue to make them, but the majority of its people are just that: people, doing their best in less than ideal circumstances.

And they look at Mouse, who made the bravest choice they could make, and who doesn’t seem to quite realise the enormity of what they have chosen and how rare it is to be able to do.

It is nothing like anything Rhei has ever done, a kind of choice Rhei doesn’t think they’ll ever need to make, and Mouse was willing to sacrifice their whole life for not a promise but a chance at something better.

Rhei can’t help but admire that.

3.
The weather is SO WEIRD this week? It's in the high 60s F every day EXCEPT Thursday, where it drops back down to MAYBE 40F at the highest, which is lower than the lows the rest of the week. It is also closer to NORMAL NEW ENGLAND EARLY SPRING than the high 60s F.

Today, at least, I have not had any headache from pressure changes! Which is nice, since yesterday I was grumbly about it and I have ever expectation that I'll be like "ughhhh" about it the rest of the week.

4.
Work is doing Bullshit, but when they tell us only the broad strokes of their plans for Bullshit and it mostly makes everyone go WTF, I will await further specifications about how exactly it'll manifest. (They want to go to short weeks. This is... them playing a game with what they're contracted for and how many hours they have available. I am very curious how many people are going to go "fine, lay me off then" instead.)

5.
I think it's very funny that I'm like "right, I should post, say hi, etc" on Trans Day of Visibility, a day that I keep forgetting that it is.

anyway hi I'm trans when I think it's useful to use that term, guess I'm visible today or something?

1.
I'd love for the weather to settle down; over the last week I think I've had... two days of feeling Actually Definitely Human, two days of feeling terrible (weather-linked migraines yay), and the rest in muted tiredness where I'm like "well this is tolerable but still not good." Tomorrow evening is when the next storm is supposed to hit here, which means probably both tomorrow and Tuesday are going to be very "haha you wanted to have a brain? and function?" days, which is frustrating but... so it goes, shall manage.

2.

seasonalremix's due date for works came by yesterday and everyone got things in on time! It's delightful! I'm excited for the remixes to be revealed next week so everyone can see them!

If you're interested in participating in the next round, sign-ups will open next week and we're currently inviting people to suggest tropes to add to our trope list.

3.
Yesterday afternoon a friend organized a party that was six people (inclusive of them) who had all gone to college together (not all in the same year, but I think we all overlapped by at least one year) and one person who (a) knows me and the organizing friend well and (b) has a house that's good for hosting groups. Fascinating set of people. Mostly we played board/card games! And learned that we could understand the rules for Four Doors (co-op game about gathering relics and lighting a beacon), a game none of us had played before (and which was very fun; would play again. the last round was especially delightful as we worked out how to min-max our way to finishing the game in one turn rather than three. and by "we" I mean "one other friend and I, as the people who understood the rules and Cared A Lot"), more easily than Zounds (Shakespearean Go Fish with a few extra rules, more or less), a game which... also none of us had played before but you'd think that "it's basically Go Fish" would be more comprehensible. xD (Unsurprisingly, the Shakespeare nerd who owned that game won it even before the extra points for completing the quotes on the cards were tallied up.)

It's also a bit... mm, I hadn't seen two of those friends since graduating, pretty much? So it's been like a decade? (Might've seen them once or twice in passing since then, but not for an extended time?) But yeah, nah, fundamentally we're still the same kind of people/friends as back then, despite that time. Just one of those things where you have a bunch of introverts and only sometimes can manage the whole "keep in touch when an external force isn't maintaining that connection for you" thing.

(Also I think that the Zounds thing of "the person who goes first is the person who most recently acted in a play" should've been expanded to "person who most recently played a ttrpg/larped" for that group, since that would've gotten it to something that happened in the last month rather than something from uh over a decade ago. xD Whatever, we can Play By The Rules I Guess since people did have an answer for that. But I think that roleplaying games are Close Enough when you've got a group of nerds who are mostly not theater nerds but who have, at some point, played a ttrpg...)

4.

hafnia wrote me a 15k story as a celebration of two years of friendship. <3 Unsurprisingly, I adore it (it was written for me! by someone who knows me very well! with like zero input from me other than "idk, you could write me wingfic?", a thing that she was like "well YEAH OBVIOUSLY" about, so it's like no input at all xD) (she's going to be like YOU HAD INPUT and yeah I guess but it was all "yeah that sounds good <3" and "yesssss :3" and the like) and I would like more people to read it.

The fuzzy line between intimate friendship and romance! Knowing where you fit in each other's lives! Finding balance between two lifestyles which might seem incompatible at first glance! Wings! Art and language and community!
The Winged City (Original Work, 15k, F/NB, rated E for "oh yeah there's a short sex scene in there" but mostly it's T-rated FEELINGS)

5.
Have some more Mouse <3 I think it's funny that this chapter is one I'm calling "The Voyage" and it has been 2.6k and the ship has not yet departed on said voyage. This is fine. The vibe/focus is still accurate, and I'm almost to the ship taking its leave...

Mouse orbits the atrium. The priest watches from their vestibule, but Mouse knows when their attention turns away, the priest satisfied that Mouse knows the rites and is comfortable performing them alone. There is ease in them, a kind of dance as they make their bows and sign their wishes—words being too easily overheard—to the symbols of the moon’s many phases. The entryway is the closed eye; opposite it is the open one. The walls between are lined with other doors framed with idols, most of which would open into full shrines to the god’s aspects.

They halt at the moon’s open eye, which here—in a city of contracts and arguments of truth—is considered the primary aspect of the Lord of the Moon. Mouse doesn’t know if they believe that. The closed eye is the one they turn too most often, but right now…

“Your eye is upon me,” they murmur, and hear it ripple through the open chamber and up the tower to the god’s ears. “May it continue to bring me good fortune.”

To say anything else here, where the priest listens as well as the god, would be too much. Mouse bows again, then continues their unhurried honoring of every phase of Jiraci Mooneye. They are all one, in the end, and Mouse cannot say for certain which showed him House Ilizana’s sigil and thus the path to a new life.

When they return to the entryway, the closed eye of the god inset in onyx above it, the priest says, “Walk in the moon’s light, sibling mine.”

“I’d rather walk in the moon’s shadow,” Mouse says, and for a moment they think the priest will scold them.

Instead, the priest laughs. “Perhaps one day I will see you wearing his eyelid as a cloak,” they say. “May he watch over you until you find your path.”

Mouse turns to face the priest, unsettled, but their eyes are closed and a smile peaceful on their face as if they’ve been dozing the whole time.

There is nothing to be done but to make their final prayers—May your shadow be warm and welcoming, may those who wish ill upon me overlook my presence, may my footsteps be quiet and my eyes open to the night’s mysteries—before they exit to rejoin Rhei in the city’s streets.

mm, in service of Remembering To Post, a bit from the thing I'm working on right now:

Quail and Olive’s does serve both quail and olives, but turns out to be named for the proprietors, a married Orcish couple who tease them about being on a date until Rhei waves their hands and says “We’re friends” in an exasperated tone that, wonder of wonders, convinces them it’s true.

Later, most of what Mouse remembers is that Rhei keeps pushing more onto Mouse’s plate and hands them the wrapped bag of leftovers—“to share with your father”—because they had ordered far more than it was possible for two people to eat. Mouse doesn’t remember the taste, just the warm light and the way Rhei banters with Olive and smiles at Mouse, including them even though Mouse barely speaks aloud, too overwhelmed by the richness of the food and the way they’re assumed to be a person and not a slave.

Rhei leads them back through Adrium’s streets, calling a glowing orb to their hand to light their path. At Mouse’s start—Adrium is not a city of mages but a city of merchants—Rhei says, “Elf blood,” rather apologetically. “El sighs over the odd array of spells I’ve learned to cast, but light is useful and not too hard.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Mouse says, because Rhei seems to expect some response.

“If you want to learn, you can. Not from me,” Rhei adds a moment later, laughing. “I’d be shit at teaching magic. But Tsarra—she’s the magic-user on retainer at the House—or El probably could teach you the basics. Don’t worry about it right now, there’s no rush, but— It’s an option, should you desire it.”

Desire is something too big for Mouse to consider right now. They’ve desired little things in the past—clean new clothes, a full night’s rest, a piece of cake—but the only big thing they could think of is the freedom they have just begun to attain. They nod, say nothing, and let the strange feeling of possibility bubble through their chest. It feels like anxiety and anticipation, and Mouse can’t look too closely at anything but the longing to see their father again.

(otherwise: work is work, school takes too much time and is sometimes very visibly "we need to say you've been in this building for X number of hours" more than "we have specific things to teach you", and Daylight Savings Time stealing an hour throws off my bodyclock so much.)

1.
I'm far enough from the coast that the blizzard spinning up to hit the Northeastern USA tomorrow/monday is ~only~ going to be a major storm, but still, man. Forecast of another foot of snow when not all the snow from the last big storm has been cleared? And this time wet snow and wind? It isn't going to be fun! I don't expect a power outage but it sure is a possibility, and I expect work to be cancelled on Monday because of this. (I wistfully hope for Tuesday as well but it doesn't seem likely in this industry; so long as the roads are clear-ish and the parking lot and site are plowed enough to get in, it'll be open.)

2.
Went to the other local dojo (not mine, but our cousin dojo; they're about the same distance from where I live now, but that was not always the case) this past Thursday out of "I have Energy right now and also god I miss people and the practice." Absolutely delighted all of them by showing up, and when I was like "yeah Thursday evening fits my schedule better right now" they were all "soooo you're gonna keep coming then?"

And, well, yeah. I will! I like those people! Also I'm going to be taking nidan in a few months and I should be taking class once a week at least in the lead-up to that, just to keep the practice in my body even if it isn't practice dedicated to that test. The sensei there will kindly give me some opportunities to practice with an eye towards the test, especially since his own yudansha like training with me, but it isn't something he needs to do. Neither is the yundansha offering to stick around after class to do specific training with me; that's out of the kindness of their hearts and friendship, and it is truly lovely.

3.
Sometimes I think about what "being good at X" means to me and then sigh about how yeah okay I am generally comparing myself to people who I personally perceive as being "good at X", which tends to mean "better than I am", which means that it is going to be a skewed perspective.

This brought to you by thoughts about cooking. xD.

Thought A: going "...wait if you're asking about salt because you normally salt your rice, please eat some before you do because I salt the rice water (a thing I hadn't realised you don't remember to do)" at a friend last night.

Thought B: ...yeah okay the ability to eyeball pancake ingredients and their ratios and make proper pancakes without needing to keep adding more wet/dry ingredients is a learned skill and speaks to Knowing Things About Cooking. (didn't add enough leavening agent but also I do not actually care if I eat flat pancakes xD they don't need to be fluffy so long as they're Good Flavor.)

Thought C: my belief that if I cook something I will like the thing I cooked even if I was going "idk this is probably a good combination of flavors/stuff" rather than following a recipe, and that the main thing keeping me from being better at cooking is "having more kitchen gadgets" and "bothering to look up recipes to follow instructions" and not "an inability to pull that off", is not a mindset that a lot of people have? I think? Which seems odd to me but I do just Like Cooking, even if it isn't a Major Hobby the way it is for some folk I know.

4.
I spent like all of Tuesday dead of migraine and didn't feel human until maaaaybe Wednesday evening but realistically Thursday morning when I woke up and was like "oh wow I was Out Of It". I am dearly hoping that this nor'easter blizzard isn't going to lead to something similar, but, well. It's the sort of thing that likely will anyway.

5.
Relatedly, I have not written much this past week because of brain being melty and also Doing Things With People. Weird.

But people are good, and I like hanging out with them once I get myself to actually Do That. Initiation/activation energy is the harder part than socialising, and I usually remember this consciously but that doesn't make it easier to apply that knowledge consistently.

6.

hafnia started running the short-form airship heist Eberron campaign I've been hyped about for like six months. xD Finally got to play my Warforged Cleric last weekend! And started getting a sense of the Eberron as it's interpreted for this campaign world, which also means starting to have feelings about what I want to do for the long-form campaign that'll happen after. (Half-Elf, wings, Mark of Detection. Normal stuff! Probably a soulknife rogue or a circle of the moon druid, possibly a bard of some sort; depends on LORE and also if I can bear to part from skillmonkey nonsense.)

The Warforged Cleric is a fun character, though, and it's always a joy to start playing a character and see them start turning into a Person rather than a Vague Concept. I hear that some people can plan things more? But nah, I write a sketch of backstory and a few prominent character traits and the rest can develop through play and interaction.

Conduit (it/its) is a Cleric who, like pretty much all Warforged, served in the Last War. Since the war ended, it and its squadmates have been building a Warforged enclave/outpost in the lower reaches of Sharn, and have recently been going "wait fuck there are organics who want to live here too because we've made a safe place" and realising that this requires More Money than they have. So Conduit, as one of the community leaders and someone oriented towards healing/caretaking anyway, is very willing to take a moderately sketchy job stealing an airship when it's offered.

This surely will not have Consequences!

The next session (for my group; this is being run for a few different sets of players) is tomorrow, in a feat of "wow everyone has two weeks in a row free?" that is rarely managed xD The Consequences will begin coming to roost then, I'm sure, and force all of the PCs (who have no particular attachment to each other) to interact more and give a shit about something other than the coin and their personal lives.

7.
In utterly unrelated fannish things, I am excited for the Witch Hat Atelier anime! It has a full trailer and an air-date now! It is making me want to reread the manga, especially since I think I'd have an even better time with it going in with expectations of "slow-burn story about insular mage cults" rather than "cute slice-of-life mentorship story". (It is both of these things. I like both of these things. Only hearing about the latter when the former begins taking a greater share of the plot is a very ??? thing to experience when one binge-reads manga.)

anyway here's the trailer!

Watch on YouTube

I get tomorrow off! I'm looking forward to that, especially since I finally feel pretty human again, no more lingering illness.

1.
The horizon has glimmers of color as I drive to work, these days. It's very nice! It also means I'm cynically like "it's going to be sunrise when I'm driving to work and then daylight saving is gonna happen and it'll be dark again", because that's just how it goes.

2.
Periodically I remember that doing things gives you more energy for doing things, inclusive of how hanging out with people means you have more energy for hanging out with people? Truly the most annoying thing, knowing that sometimes forcing yourself to do the thing will result in feeling better! But also sometimes you need to not because of being out of energy/spoons. Balancing this! The worst!

3.
Star Trek: Discovery s3 continues to be overall good!
(When did I last talk about this. Ep4, apparently! So!)
s3e5 "Die Trying": I adored the set design for the seed ship. This was a good example of moving the plot along while setting up a farewell episode for a crew member who wouldn't be continuing on!
s3s6 "Scavengers": I want the miniseries/full arc of this episode. I am extremely here for the Michael/Phillipa/Book trio! I also think that having more time to dig into the prioritization of "solve the Burn" vs "obey Starfleet structure" vs "save people" would have been excellent.
s3e7 "Unification III": I will indeed cry upon seeing old footage of Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Uh. idk, the Qowat Milat are always cool? This episode progressed arcplot, mostly?
s3e8 "Sanctuary": god I really want more specifics about what Book's empathy powers are. Fun antics around following the letter of the law with Starfleet protocol, and makes it clear that yeah the Emerald Chain is gonna be the arcvillain. Also, Adira comes out to Stamets as nonbinary! in a scene that's very "okay yeah this is meant to be #relatable to teens", which isn't a bad thing but also I fundamentally am like "but it's Star Trek, why would a nonbinary person be worried about if they'd be accepted in Star Trek?"
s3s9-10 "Terra Firma", parts 1 and 2: A two-episode farewell to Mirror Phillipa Georgiou. I loved this as a character study for her! However! It makes the season's pacing really weird, since there are only three episodes left in the season and these two episodes were basically not about the arcplot at all. Phenomenal for the relationship between Michael and Phillipa, though, holy shit.

Truly a lot of my feelings about DSC s3 are that it doesn't seem to quite know if it's an episodic show or an arcplot show, and that leaves me resenting both the cutaways from episodic plots to arcplot scenes and the cutaways from arcplot for episodic plots. xD I still enjoy it because of the character dynamics, and I'm glad Tilly is starting to get what she's owed, but it's kind of messy plotting. Looking forward to the finale anyway, and I also expect that s4 will have an easier time with figuring itself out since it won't be as busy trying to establish the new time/setting as well.

4.
I also watched the first 9 episodes of Duet of Shadows a republican-era cdrama with ~19min episodes about very butch4butch investigator protags. Definitely having a good time! The first case/arc is basically "a trans man opera singer got outed and died", for reasons that turn out to not be a gender-related hate crime (his gender is very respected by those who know him! there's a scene in which someone who knew him hands one of the protags a binder and is like "pls use this instead of bandages"!). I think this is fun. Not everyone will. xD Curious what the next case/arc will be, and shall see how long it takes for me to finish it!

5.
Watching Yanxi Palace slowly continues! We're seven episodes in now, and Yingluo has attracted the Empress's attention (positive). The brief cut back to the eunuch tasked with figuring out who the quick-witted maid (Yingluo) is for the Emperor in the midst of that was very funny. But mostly these episodes have been about how clever and ruthless Yingluo is, and how those are necessary traits in the inner courtyards of the imperial palace.

6.
Six Sentence Sunday is always a fun meme. This is more than six sentences, but it is Sunday!

“Ms. Warram,” Ames said icily, his patience worn thin, “you have not even given me details about your offer. Your letter said nothing about compensation, support, or even a timeline for prototyping. It merely told me what you wanted from me, and nothing about this conversation leads me to believe I will enjoy the environment of your trading company. Treat me with the respect the title of Chief Engineer implies and I might consider visiting your workshop to make an informed decision. Otherwise, I do not see any reason to continue this conversation."

Emeline sat up straight, hands folded in front of her, that ring catching the light. He still couldn’t quite make out the design on it. “Amaranth dev Citronel,” she said, “I will show you the workshop. You will come with me?”

Ames opened his mouth to say “No”, but the light kept gleaming from Emeline’s eyes and ring, and he couldn’t concentrate through them. His tongue felt thick and heavy, as did the rest of his body.

It occurred to Ames, as the light stole over him, that he had been so busy worrying about the mundane side of predatory business contracts that he hadn’t even thought about a mage dead-set on taking him.

His lips said Yes, and Ames’ last conscious thought was that, if nothing else, Rhei would know something was wrong as soon as they arrived back in Jogan’s Rest.

1.
Requisite superbowl posting: I moved to Patriots territory as an adult, and that means that I find the constant chatter about them annoying and thus wanted them to lose and would've found it extremely funny if they'd scored zero points overall. They did score some points in the end, but they sure lost terribly anyway!

I have also now seen the only part worth seeing, which is the halftime show, which was very good! It just also made me think about how...

brief bit about USA Politics

There's this oddity to watching it and going "this looks like, and feels like it's for, the community I live in" (the town I live in is if not outright majority Hispanic/Latinx very close to it, and majority Puerto Rican within that), when it also feels like a political statement to have a Puerto Rican performer as the star and for him to sing in Spanish, celebrating that heritage, as a contrast to the constant background noise about ICE in Minnesota (and elsewhere; that's just the main area making national news, not the only place ICE is hunting).

I don't know that I have any coherent thoughts about that. Just, well. USA politics sure are something, and The Big Football Game is a platform for them.

2.
Talked to my dad on the phone yesterday for almost two hours. Got the Family Update from him, which is about what I expected: my mom is stressed, my grandmother is doing better, my twin is As He's Been with a lead on Doing More Stuff Actually, which is good.

It's interesting talking to my dad because it's very. Well. I talk to him and I see patterns of behavior that I exhibit manifest in him, in much the same way and for much the same reason. And I'm just like. Well, I sure am your child in some very specific ways, aren't I. It's never going to be one-to-one, of course, but it's... still nice to see.

3.
It is perhaps going to start being NOT HORRIBLY COLD in a day or two, with the metric of "not terribly cold" being "highs consistently above freezing", which is still cold but a lot more tolerable than the month of ARCTIC FROST we've been having. It means snow might slowly start melting! And that leaving for work at the coldest point in the day is going to be less "oh god I hate being outside even if it's only for a minute or two".

4.
in the continued vibe of "ah yes actually share bits of this as I write it", this is still mostly set-up!

I'm a bit, I could name the trading company something less on-the-nose about them being shitty, but consider: nah. That's something relatively easy to change later, and there is an island chain that'll eventually be relevant anyway, so...

“The Southern Chain Trading Company.” Ames didn’t see any change in expression on Vesta’s face, but her beard hid some of the subtleties. “I haven’t heard of them before, and was hoping you had.”

“Southern Chain.” Vesta frowned. “They’re… new here. If I thought you had any interest in business, I wouldn’t tell you more for free, but most of what I hear is that they’re building themselves up right now. They’ve only recently established a business house in Anaxa—they came up from the south, from Rakorran or Recharron or something like that—and are mostly trading southward, but they’ve bought a few things from Yscor—we’ve better prices for certain goods, even accounting for shipping down the river.”

Ames nodded thoughtfully. “That would explain why they sent me a letter.”

Vesta looked at him, dark eyes glinting under furrowed brows. Slowly, she said, “If they offer you something, don’t accept unless it’s more than Rhei would give you. I don't think they know the northern coast well enough to give you a good deal, and I know you don’t want to leave.”

“I know.” Ames inclined his head in half a bow. “I want to hear their offer. I doubt I’ll accept it.”

On Sunday I was like "I am dragging myself to aikido out of obligation and habit" and my friend C was like "yeah you look beat". Aikido was good, though, two of K-sensei's students who mostly only show up to her Tues/Thurs morning classes were at weapons class, and showed up early to learn some more basic weapon stuff, which meant that when I showed up my typical ~15min early I got pulled into immediately demonstrating an exercise and then practicing in with the others.

Also went "yeah, the absolute hardest thing to do when practicing ma'ai with weapons is for uke to not flinch" to one of those students, prompting sensei to pause class so that she could more formally talk about how difficult yet important a practice this is. Because, well, the natural instinct when someone is stabbing at you with a weapon is to move out of the way. This is an excellent survival instinct! However! That is not the practice when nage is supposed to be learning how to enter in such that they can properly stab through uke.

On Monday I woke up and was like "I feel like shit!" and have proceeded to spend the entire week thus far dragging myself to work because Capitalism while keeping myself vaguely person-shaped via cold medicine. This has worked out alright mostly because for the majority of this week I haven't had to do anything particularly cognitively difficult at work. (Tasks included: "Put up linears on this floor", which was interrupted by "Be firewatch for the person doing welding", before I was allowed to return to that first task, and then told to do various other things that meant putting up one set of linears that should've taken a few hours took like three days.)

I also went to bed at like 8:30pm last night (due to being at work from 6:30am-2:30pm and class from 5pm-7:45pm... not counting commute time for either, of course...) and woke up this morning like "wow I feel like a person!" until I got up and was like "oh we have CHANGED kinds of feeling ugh, not removed it, rip".

Things I have spent time doing:

- Catching up on the Great Gundam Project (podcast), by which I mean I have now caught up to like last autumn/the end of the Dragonball Z season (which is about the Gundam adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is apparently surprisingly good, but they spent more time talking about DBZ, their backup/non-Gundam show) (considering that this is a podcast I listen to in large part for going "please let me gain knowledge of anime people talk about but which I am only occasionally interested in watching", learning more about DBZ is genuinely a delight.) There is still so much more GGP to catch up on. xD This is a great podcast for listening to during work so long as I'm working alone, because I think it's generally entertaining and also I don't care if I miss a bit due to NOISE or BRIEF CONVERSATION, since I'm not invested in the details of the anime. (I am invested in The Episode Number Pokemon Name Game, though. I do not care about Pokemon. I do not know Pokemon. I think making the host who did not grow up playing Pokemon guess what Pokemon the episode number belongs to is a very funny game because I also do not know Pokemon and so listening to someone go "uh it looks like this, maybe it's called [something related to what it looks like]?" is very fun.)

- Watching FatT's Outward letsplay (which is technically a patreon bonus for their side podcast about videogams xD), by which I mean putting it on as background noise and looking over at the video every time Jack and Austin start going "oh no" or "what's THAT". The idle noise of people playing a videogame I don't have specific investment in but do enjoy seeing progression for is such a particular form of entertainment that usually I only like as background for doing chores, but hey if I'm feeling meh it works well more broadly.

- Thinking about, but not writing, story xD Like. How does one make it impossible to know what happened to someone who got kidnapped when "you can magically communicate short messages to known people over distance and get a response" is a given? The answer is magic warding, which is Deeply Concerning when other states that get No Connection (rather than No Response) would be, like. Unconsciousness/death. (Sleep probably feels different.) (This isn't even going to come up until I get through another few things!)

- I have also been keeping up with FatT: Perpetua, FatT: Realis, and CR: Araman and am enjoying them all. xD No deep thoughts, they're all fun but in very different ways/genres.

1.
The guy in my cohort who I work with (which is an excessively long way to frame who this is, but whatever) was talking to me this afternoon and then was like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? It might be uncomfortable." and proceeded to just be like "Uh. It's kind of personal? It's about you?" when I was like "idk, what's it about?" until I was like "Just ask already", at which point.

"So I was thinking about this the other day, and I was looking at your chest, and"—at this point I figure out what he's trying to ask—"I'm pretty sure you don't have boobs?"

I tell him that yeah, I had top surgery, and then am like "So, this would have been a lot easier if you started out by telling me you had a question about what I've done to medically transition." and he's like "wow you're so smart you have such good words about this" when it's more like "I have been immersed in this culture for nearly half my life, I'd better know how to talk about it in a way that's both clear and polite".

He's nice, and wants to know things because he's curious, and mostly I'm like "yeah I have zero problem talking about this, I do not worry about people overhearing, I know some people are stealth (for good reason!) but mostly I don't talk about it because there's no reason to."

anyway this conversation included: (a) me telling him what a binder would look like under clothing, (b) me explaining that "how far are you in the process of transitioning" is a meaningless question because everyone's path is different, (c) him going "yeah everyone thinks you're a man" while not knowing what I mean when I was like "yeah everyone thinks I'm a cis dude", and (d) saying "the polite way to ask if someone has further transition stuff planned is to ask that and not say so are you planning on having bottom surgery". (apparently he follows some trans guy on tiktok who's been chronicling his bottom surgery process? which is cool, and I'm glad that's a thing the trans dude is comfortable doing and that my cohortmate was comfortable asking, but also, my guy, this is such a personal thing and it's more polite to ask generally...)

2.
A friend on discord was like "oh god pushing myself to work consistently with full focus at my full-time job is hard and I'm getting home exhausted and how do I deal with this, ahhhhh", and I ended up going "...okay I have Thoughts", because, well.

Welcome to what I've been working out ways to deal with for the last year? The kind of drain is different (I know they do a more academic/mentally stressful job), but the effect is often the same.

copied text of the thoughts I put on discord

- knowing that when I get home I will not be capable of doing anything until I (a) shower [necessity of physical job, but also just nice transition/feels-good thing], (b) eat [again, needful, gotta fuel the body], and (c) pet my cat who missed me very much and is going to demand to sit on me for a good 10-15min as soon as I sit down [this is why these things must happen in this order]
- accepting that there's going to be some time before I want to do anything again. for me this means not expecting anything of myself until like 4pm, when I've been home for about an hour
- knowing that I will probably only get One Major Thing done in the evening, and using that knowledge to prioritise. (sometimes this One Thing is like, required evening classes. or therapy. or aikido. sometimes this One Thing is working on a writing project. sometimes it's Friend Time. depends on the day.)
- I am deeply fortunate in that I enjoy cooking, but I also know that I do not have energy to cook every day of the week. this means that when I do cook, I make sure I make meals that generate leftovers not just for work lunches but for workday dinners, hopefully with enough variety that I am not eating the same thing for five meals in a row or the like. (I'm fine eating the same thing for every work lunch in a week so long as dinner is something else.) regardless, make sure you have plans for weekday dinners (takeout, leftovers, making food, frozen meals) and that you know what days you'll be capable of preparing for the days when you'll have less energy.
- accepting that some days you just... won't do anything other than poke around the internet reading fanfic and talking to friends?
- that said, if you know what you want to do and can scaffold that (like, having a friend to body-double with while you're doing chores/bookbinding/writing/whatever), making sure you know your limits is important. maybe don't expect more than an hour of "productive" time an evening right now, especially mental energy, since you're using a lot of that at work right now.
- if you know what you find restorative (showers, listening to music, reading books, petting your cat, etc), then explicitly scheduling time to do that after getting home and before doing something "productive" might also help, since then you can do something enjoyable before asking more of yourself.
- because I know my body will always wake me up at 4:30am (an hour before alarm), I require myself to be in bed around 10pm. so I'll get offline between 9-9:30pm so that I can get everything together for the morning, brush my teeth, do all my other bedtime routine stuff, etc. I'm usually tired by that time anyway! I am not doing anything useful! I still whine about it because I wish I could stay up later, but I've found that having a regular bedtime helps immensely with having the ability to cope with the next day. (sleep in general does, and for me that means enforcing my own bedtime, since my body enforces the other end.)

idk, sometimes I'm like "wow I feel so young and not great at adulting" but then friends who I know are older than me and who I think of as better at adulting were like "nah that was good advice <3" and I'm just. dunno. One of those things where it's really easy to see where you want to improve, all the places where you let stuff fall down, but that doesn't mean you're doing poorly overall?

Like, yeah, I would love to have a cleaner apartment. That'd be so nice. I do not have the spoons to do that all at once, and I sort of barely maintain the level of "this doesn't mortally offend me" cleanliness that I do. But it's something where if I really cared I could do something about it, I know how, it's just... prioritization. The only creature I share this space with is my cat. I almost never have friends over (partially because of feeling like the space is too much of a mess to host visitors, partially because it is my space and I don't want anyone else here).

...most of the conversation that spawned from me saying all that up there was about food and how much thought it takes to cook food, which: mood. so glad that my brain accepts variations of the same stuff pretty much all the time as being sufficient. (Doing other things would be fun too! But it isn't needful to me.)

3.
did I have other things.

a.
It's been COLD. It should hit highs of 32F-ish for a few days next week, though! That's very exciting and I'll be like "wow so warm" even though the likely lows on those days are forecast for uh ~10F. So, you know, warmth is relative. At least the storm predicted for this weekend seems more likely to swing out to sea than dump more snow on us?

b.
I've seen this song/music video linked a few place (re-found it most easily from

donutsweeper), and it's very good: Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Minneapolis (which is about exactly what you'd expect, and contains video clips of said streets)

c.
Having a teacher go "the only reason I'm letting it slide that you're drawing in class is because you get good grades; don't let other students think you're getting away with something" is baffling to me. Like. Tell me to stop drawing on the school-assigned tablet during class and I will draw on paper instead. Nothing will change about how I keep myself from being bored during lectures that are 90% "I am reading text off powerpoint slides". (Also this is the only way I will focus, anyway.)

d.
As motivation to myself to write enough more of this to have something more fun to share by the end of the weekend, a tiny bit from the opening of That Novel I Want To Write:

[The letter] was, by Ames’ estimate, blunt to the point of being rude. He set the note down delicately on his desk and glared at it, as if that would grant him insight into the writer’s intentions. His skill with objects was in crafting them, asking wood and metal and stone to come alive in his hands and hold magic in their shapes, not in looking at what already existed and finding meaning in it like the Inquisitives of Tal-Tamorn did.

(I have recalled that one can title posts and that once upon a time I did that more frequently xD should get into the habit again, it's fun)

1.
The storm will be rolling in today (probably snowfall starting late morning/noontime), with projected snowfall of over a foot, heaviest in the late evening/early night.

It is unlikely that I will be working tomorrow, based on this. It was one of the big things folk were talking about on Friday! "Do you think you'll make it in on Monday?" on everyone's lips, and the answer was usually "idk, depends on the plows/roads" with a side of "it'd be cool if the work site shut down though, then we could just relax and not think about it". [ETA: Foreman sent out a text saying that we indeed are not working tomorrow "Stay safe, enjoy the weekend, GO PATRIOTS", because obvs everyone also needs to care about Patriots vs uh I think Broncos...? tbh I'd be cheering for the Broncos but really I simply do not care about football enough for that. xD]

New England is pretty good about dealing with snow, so I'm not particularly worried about the storm. Got grocery shopping done ahead of time, I live in an apartment that's fairly well insulated, etc. Shouldn't need to go anywhere until the snow has stopped and the streets are clear.

(A police car just drove slowly down the street, siren on, for the purpose of annoying the people who left their cars on the wrong side of the street into moving said cars to places that abide by the parking ban. I expect that in another hour I might see tow trucks if they haven't. This doesn't happen for normal snow bans—the plows just go around them and leave them a bit buried in snow—but, well, this storm is RATHER BIG and I see why the city would rather that not happen.)

2.
At work on Friday, end of the day, I was about to wrap up when the back door for one of the elevators opened (this is the one that we Do Not Use) and the woman who operates it stuck her head out and was like "I haven't seen you at all today! How're you doing?" at me.

I proceeded to have a Very Normal Conversation with her and then, after she left, my coworker/cohortmate was like "were you FLIRTING with her?" and I was like "No??? Just because you (probably) do doesn't mean I am?"

however upon further review I'm like "yeah no the way I interact with her absolutely could be read as flirting" and also a bit "huh she did not need to start that conversation at ALL", so, you know. (I am not opposed to flirting with her, she's cute, I'm just. too aro for this. xD in a "flirting is fun but it's not going to be serious" way.)

(also there's a bit of me going "god if I'm gonna have cute women flirt with me I want them to be queer, and I present as a dude at work in a way that means I do not expect people to realise I'm not cis/that a woman flirting with me should be a queer act" with this. like. I pass. I do not really care to and in some ways do not wish to, but it sure is useful/safe to know that to most people I'm just another dude working at a construction site.)

3.
At class on Wednesday night (I do not like evening classes! never have!) I was bored for like... all of class... because I already understood what we were going to be doing (I knew this from the week before). Which meant I was drawing, because Why Not. Pencil and paper, that day, because it was a practical class and having a sketchbook out was simpler than having a tablet out.

The teacher, when he came over to be like "so you're bored", was like "nice art", and then one of my classmates was like "wait, is this what you do during class all the time? I thought you were taking notes. you're good!" and another was like "dang, why didn't you go to art school?"

It's... odd. I do not think about my art as particularly good, due to having friends who do art at a (semi)pro level and following a lot of pro artists' work. But yes, objectively I am a Skilled Hobbyist? I can generally draw things that look like what I want to draw? If I focused on practice (especially doing life drawing studies) I'd get better faster but... I'm still pretty good at this, yeah.

Anyway during class yesterday I took the design I was working out on Wednesday ("that looks like Nami from League of Legends", one classmate said, which I do not think is true except for the "looks like a water-person" aspects, but that's sweet anyway.) and drew him out in color to see the design better.

At some point I will name him (his baby name is Sunshine, I think, but that's not his name) and he only exists as a baby/child during the timeline as currently established, though I drew him as an adult, and I still need to write the story about his parents (and when they accidentally conceive him) but hey, here's my pretty boy who's even quarters of dragon/orc/triton/elf. xD (mild nsfw? no clothes but also no detailed genitals and no intended sexiness.)

( two images under cut )

4.
My friend and I have started watching The Story of Yanxi Palace, one of

tavina's recs, and we are delighted by it. Mostly we're pointing at Our Protagonist (Wei Yingluo) going "THE AUTISM OF IT ALL" (occasionally going "haha she and Maomao [The Apothecary Diaries] would be so fun to watch interact"). We're also going "look at this bitch! (positive)" about Noble Consort Gao, wanting good things for Empress Fuca, and contemplating how bored Emperor Qianlong seems while bemoaning Qing Dynasty Men's Hair. (He has a very nice smile! He looks good bald! Except then we see his hair and sigh loudly.)

We're only three episodes in and Yingluo has already caused so much chaos and trouble. It's great. This is such a wildly different vibe from the last show we watched (The Story of Minglan), but both shows are gorgeous and care so much about MATERIAL GOODS and this one in particular is set in a SPECIFIC TIME in such a way that one could in fact look up more about the styles of dress and meaning of earrings/hairstyles/etc.

5.
I thought I had another thing xD uhhhhh some rapid-fire stuff since apparently I don't want single-paragraph sections otherwise:

a.
Still slowly watching ST:DSC. xD s3e4 was a meditation on how Trill work now and how Adira is a very cute character but also very much A Teen and meant to be relatable to teens more than me, an adult. More interested by how Discovery has a personality and watching the bridge crew (plus Georgiou) have a dinner party that goes bad and then make up with each other. And Michael not following strict Starfleet protocol.

b.
Reminded myself, this week, of the difference between talking on the phone for "migraine means I can't look at screens but I am BORED and I wanna talk to you" reasons vs "I am awake and wanna hang out with you but there's stuff I gotta do that requires my body but hey I can talk on the phone while I do that" reasons. It's a lot nicer when one's a person and not a lump, oddly! One feels a lot more like they're participating equally in the conversation that way! Wow! Such surprise!

c.
The remix event (

seasonalremix) that

hafnia and I are running got SEVEN WHOLE SIGNUPS (including the two of us), which is tbh pretty good for the first time we're doing the event and how it's a rather atypical sign-up/event structure (and that we weren't promoing it particularly hard). It's a good number for hand-matching, too, since there's variety but not an overwhelming amount of data to sift through. Excited to see how it'll shake out!

d.
I wanna work more on writing Rhei and Ames' story (since, y'know, I now know what their son is gonna look like :P), and as part of that have started writing down my mental outline/figuring out a timeline. Might post excerpts here as I write, once I get to actually writing? It's fun sharing things as I go! And also with dw I do not need to worry about character limits the way I sharing bits with friends on discord. xD

threesentenceficathon began yesterday! I've posted... more fills than I think so far. xD I started listing them and then went HM OKAY THAT'S A BUNCH ACTUALLY:
Leverage ot3 fluff
Obi-Wan/Asajj post-PT AU [also on ao3 because it got away from me a bit xD]
Julien's unrequited feels for Aranessa (CR Araman)
Silt Verses, godsummoning
Olruggio/Qifrey angst (WHA)
Kara/Lee (the thin line between fighting and fucking) (BSG 2003)
Thimble+Occtis reunion (CR Araman)
Jyn/Cassian, after the war (I wanna clean this up into a proper fic xD)
Jyn/Cassian, nightmares
LHoD, Genly Ai+Estraven, nightfall
Hal+Bolaire, theater (CR Araman)
Obi-Wan/Padme, "love is stronger than hate"
Sophie/Howl, "I've never done anything wrong in my life"
Teor/Wicander, nonhuman cocks/first time (CR Araman)
Michael/Tilly, carnal (NSFW) (ST DSC)
GaoQiao, "Are you hard?" (QZGS/The King's Avatar)
Benny/Mal(/El), "I think we need to talk about that I love you and also that I'm pregnant"
Occtis/Vaelus, solving the problem of Occtis' virginity (CR Araman)
Jyn/Cassian, "second to the right and straight on till morning"

I also posted some prompts. They're hiding in there somewhere. But mostly the fun is in making little ficlets, for me.

[eta: I'm adding to this list as I go, mostly for my own records/ability to find them again later]

2.
I've watched through s3e3 of Star Trek: Discovery, and I adore Starfleet Honor but also every time Georgiou is on screen making snarky comments and beating people up and looking at Michael with maternal pride I care naught for Starfleet Honor because I'm too busy thinking about how much Georgiou is delighted to see Michael get rougher around the edges after her time alone in the future.

This also means I have just met Adira Tal, who I know will become a major character and who is also going to come out as nonbinary once we get more into that story, and I am curious about how that'll unfold considering that Adira has a Trill symbiote and I have some feelings (mostly sighs) about nonbinary characters and the plurality aspects of such an arrangement. But hey, can't really have proper opinions on it until I see how it plays out in the show, you know?

3.
Testing at my dojo went very well! Love to see two people take very good tests perfectly appropriate to their level! Love also to see one of them have a worse randori than usual simply because he was clearly exhausted by the time he reached it, but hey even that was still perfectly reasonable for the level the test expects; I just know what he's capable of.

It was also like "HUH OKAY" seeing him do one technique (hanmi handachi shomenuchi iriminage) because I saw my own technique in how he did it. I get it! I know why! I did it with him a bunch when he was learning it! I just!

I do not think of myself as One Of The Sensei despite it being pretty clear that a lot of the white belts absolutely do think of me that way. This is mostly because I don't teach regularly, and so nobody calls me sensei on the regular.

4.
This weekend has been full of CLASSIC WINTER SNOW. After testing yesterday I detoured to the local state park and spent an hour walking a path that was very covered in snow and also icy beneath said snow. There were a couple other people out in the closer bits of this path, but once I turned onto the loop fewer people tend to go on anyway, it was clear that nobody had been there for at least a hour, so it was all FRESH CLEAR SNOW and that was gorgeous and really peaceful to spend time in.

I know intellectually how relaxing and restorative it is for me to spend time in the woods, especially if I can find woods where I won't hear/see other humans, but it's always a bit of an oh! right! feeling when I experience it again. Shall try and hold on to it, but it's always easier to go out into the woods during the beautiful times than when winter fades once more into dreary slushy/icy grayness instead of this perfect high-contrast fresh new fluffy snow.

Pictures under the cut! I took way more than this but I didn't feel like uploading all of them and I think these are nicely representative!

( four photos from a snowy walk in the woods )

Sometimes adulthood is going "oh wow for once I don't have anything I need to do once I get off work" and promptly going and doing an errand and then washing dishes and doing laundry once getting home.

Assorted brief notes:

1.
My dojo is doing kyu testing this coming Saturday, which will be delightful. The two people testing are more than ready for these tests. (There's another person who we've been trying to get to test for years and it's just a matter of "please come consistently for a few months and take this test already!" at this point.)

2.
Wednesday evening classes are just. Draining. I do not like needing to be at school from 5pm-8pm. I didn't even when I was in college! Now it's just like "I wake up at 4:30am because of work, why must I suffer like this."

Also next week is going to be very boring because this week was a "oh shit the guest instructor suddenly can't make it" week and so they sort of half-assed an unprepared version of what they were gonna do next week. So. You know. I understood what they were teaching from the half-assed version, the teachers know that, but since most of the cohort was like ???, next week will be them going step-by-step through it with more prep. Which will be useful, and is good pedagogy, but is also going to Bore Me.

3.
h/t to

trobadora for talking about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which mostly got me going back to Star Trek: Discovery, since Academy is set after Disco.

which means I am currently re-watching the first episode of s3, because I watched the first two episodes when they first aired and then fell off because... idk, it was Oct/Nov 2020 and I was running headfirst into QZGS and infinite flow cnovels...? But hey, Disco is a fun show, I'm so fond of Michael Burnham, and s3 is in some ways a soft reboot due to being right after the timeskip, so! Looking forward to actually getting to know the future timeline.

I do think that a huge amount of why I fell off is just... 2020 being 2020. Because I don't think I had nearly as much fun with this the first time I watched it, and now I'm just like "wow this is such good tropey fun, s3e1 is using so much good trope stuff to set up Michael/Book".

4.
god I feel like I had some other things. hm.

A podcast reminded me that Escaflowne exists, and that it's an anime that I probably would have been obsessed with as a teenager if I'd seen it then. Mecha and guys with wings. Normal things. xD I feel like it should be on crunchyroll but it's not? Alas. Probably for the best if I'm going to actually watch Star Trek right now, but I do want to at some point experience this show.

5.
Work is very nonsense.

...I think I was going to give examples, but, idk. just. nah. it's! a lot! and mostly not outright bad, just tiring, and takes too much time, as work does.

The thing about Martha Wells' Queen Demon is that I really adored Witch King and then was mad about the fact that it wasn't a stand-alone book because I didn't feel a need for more in that universe.

Queen Demon is a perfectly serviceable book. I generally like Martha Wells' writing and her casts of characters. However. One of the things that I did not mind in Witch King but do mind in Queen Demon is the dual timelines. I suppose they weren't precisely directly connected in Witch King either, but there it had the effect of explaining who Kai was and providing all the backstory to the world. In Queen Demon, it's like...

I can see echoes but it's not direct. It ended up feeling like I was intercutting between two novellas with a shared world/cast, rather than one book that built its thematic/narrative push along a split timeline.

And yeah that probably wasn't helped by how I read it (in three sittings, more or less, each a couple weeks apart), but...

The main feeling I had about this novel was that every chapter seemed designed to end on a cliffhanger, which is perfectly reasonable design/structure for a novel, but also way more annoying when you know that you're not going to be immediately following up on that bit of time when you begin the next chapter.

This then leads into my biggest "I didn't like this" about the book, which is that it ends in much the same way as any of its chapters end, just on a bigger scale. Which, like, yeah, that's normal for a book in a series, I guess? But it's not how I'm used to Martha Wells books in series ending! She is usually pretty good about wrapping things up instead of ending on "here is a dramatic change in status quo that we are not even providing characters time to have an emotion about before cutting from".

...which then leads to the biggest question I have about bk3, which is:

So if the naming schema so far has been "magic-user + royalty title", does that mean the next book will be named for the Immortal Blessed or the Hierarchs?

( spoiler-tastic specific ??? about the ending )

(yes I will read bk3 when it comes out but I still think that I liked Witch King as a standalone more than Witch King as a series.)

Over the last ~week,

hafnia and I went "sooooo what if we ran a multifandom remix event" and now it is up and ready for signups! We're hoping it'll be a fun time, and we'd love to have you join us. <3

Remix Through the Seasons is a quarterly, trope-based multifandom event hosted on ao3.

Participants will write one new story (between 1-5k) and then be assigned another story written for the event to remix. These stories can be in any fandom (including Original Work). Matching will be based on the stories' tropes (and creator DNWs) rather than pairings/fandoms. Remixing works from one fandom into another is allowed (even expected).

Schedule:
Signups open: Now!
Signups close: January 24
Assignments sent: January 31
Original works revealed: January 31
Remix works due: March 14
Remix works reveals: March 21
All author reveals: March 28
All due dates etc are at 11:59pm GMT on the listed date

DW Comm:

seasonalremix
Ao3 Collection

(getting everything finalised involved spending a couple hours on a discord call editing the gdoc full of rules and only occasionally getting distracted talking about other things, which tbh is pretty good for how many moving parts there can be for stuff like this and how easy it can be to get sidetracked talking to your bestie. we think the rules are clear! ask questions [preferably on the comm] if they aren't! <3)

In non writing thoughts, by which I mean I wanted to talk about aikido and then realised that maybe I should mention watching a movie first, since I finally watched the new Benoit Blanc movie. xD

I watched Wake Up Dead Man today with

hafnia, who had seen it once before and was like "I am BITING MY TONGUE not to point out the REALLY GOOD FORESHADOWING", paused the movie at two points to tell me about (a) her opinions that the reading list in-universe could've been better (with her suggestions) and (b) A Science Complaint (while going "this is the only thing that annoys me about this movie"), and was delighted to agree with me about how well they used LIGHT. The cinematography was gorgeous, the plot was very fun, and I adored Father Jud and Martha and enjoyed going "ughhhh" about how awful many other characters were. The film quotes/references I caught were also great!

also my twin messaged me right as I was finishing the movie to tell me about a post he'd seen saying that the opening scene of the movie was filmed at the same location as Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video, including a tweet (bsky version) (bweet, my brain wants to say, but I think it's skeet. or just, y'know. tweet.) from Rian Johnson going "yes, it was, and I was the only person on set excited about this fact", which I thought was very funny in its own right and also incredible timing.

anyway, AIKIDO

Last night we had a new year's eve practice, and there weren't many people there, but—

There is so much joy in doing aikido on a mat where the practice is meant as meditation, and there are few enough people that you don't need to worry about throwing anyone into anyone else (or off the mat), and the people who are there are all advanced and so you don't need to worry too much about taking care of them (because their ukemi will take care of them).

( let me save your reading pages from how much I'm talking about aikido )

Sensei also was like "you could take nidan tomorrow and be fine" when I said that it was sort of frustrating knowing that in this, the lead-up to when I'll be taking nidan (at the end of May), I'll probably not be practicing more than once a week on average. She's right! I know she's right! I could take it tomorrow if I were asked to!

But it'll be better with more practice and active reminders of the stuff we don't do very often. Reversals (uke becomes nage). Weapon take-aways. Some nage-holds-the-jo, maybe? I'm solid on everything else, I think, though it's always nice to review koshinage. Working with friends on shodan prep last year means that most of it's in my body via taking ukemi, anyway, which is good.

Start of a new year, fun! I hope it's a good year; certainly I'll try and work to make it good for me. <3

hafnia got me to sign up for

getyourwordsout with her this year, which should be fun. I'm doing it as a habit pledge, because that's usually not very hard for me and tracking wordcount seemed exhausting. (Which also means that Write Every Day folk will start seeing me around again in those posts. xD I have missed that since my writing brain plunged into a hole over the summer! I think I've crawled out of it now!)

anyway, VERY IMPORTANTLY, Yuletide creators have been revealed, so I can talk about what I wrote for it! :D

My assignment was for

china_shop, and we matched on The Spear Cuts Through Water, a book I adore and which I offered because I was like "okay if someone requests this fantastic book surely they will have ideas for what to write" and also the idea of having an excuse to read the book while thinking about the voice and feel of the prose was exciting.

I wrote a brief epilogue fic, barely over 1k: After the Moon Rose Anew (T, 1,048 words, Jun/Keema, post-canon)

Judging by all the lovely comments, I succeeded in my goal of matching the novel's prose! Most people commented on the voice! Considering how beautiful and lyrical the prose is, it's truly a joy and a relief to know I could match it for even a thousand words.

Also, it was just fun to reference as much as I could of what I found really cool about the prose: the layered POVs, the omniscient style that drifted between POV easily, the occasional brief asides to background POVs... Honestly, the poetics are easier for me to be confident in! I know I can do poetic prose; it's the smooth movement between heads that seems natural and is easy to follow that I wanted to learn from.

And

china_shop liked it, of course, which is the most important part of a gift—especially one for a friend!

Which: The odds of matching to a friend in Yuletide are... not that low if you both know you're in the same tiny fandom and that you're both going to request it, but I hadn't realised that

china_shop was going to request The Spear Cuts Through Water until after I'd already offered it, and she could of course not know I would offer it! Certainly we'd talked about the book before, but it's still very special to have this kind of match happen by chance. <3

The other fic I wrote for Yuletide was a pinch hit.

wolffyluna went up for PH, and one of the fandoms requested was Oathsworn, an actual play podcast I love. I knew that if WolffyLuna had listened to it, it was because of my promo posting about it. So, y'know. The pinch hit went up one evening, and I told myself that if it was still up when I got home from work the next day I could claim it.

It was still up. So. I claimed it, and proceeded to spend the weekend mainlining episode transcripts and internally screaming about what even I was going to write, oh god, this would've been a lot easier if I'd gotten it as an assignment (which I could have! I'd also offered Oathsworn!) due to the time crunch.

I'm very pleased with what I came up with, especially considering the time pressure. And WolffyLuna liked it, especially the scenes I added post-deadline because I was like "WAIT I NEED THIS TOO", which made me very happy that I'd taken the time to write and add them. <3

I dream of what I'll become next life (3.5k, T, CNTW, Waloot-centric) is a character study of my favorite character, and also includes a dive into the chosen of the gods, a specific religion within the world, and also Waloot's whole deal of being an ordinary person who died, came back, and was one of the most magically powerful people in the area by the time the story concluded. She has a lot of angst. I gave her a bit of time with some weird horses (as WolffyLuna requested!) as part of helping her deal with that.

This, and the gift WolffyLuna wrote for me (my suspicion that we'd be trading Oathsworn fics also factored into taking the PH), are the first works for the fandom on ao3! Yay for Yuletide! It's very exciting! I hope more people take a chance on this COMPLETE actual play podcast! An ongoing apocalypse, a last stand against the oncoming hordes, and a lot of people desperately doing their best to survive and be in community with each other despite not always liking each other very much!

1.
The darkest part of the year is always the hardest to remember to, like, be a person and not just curl up being grumbly about the long cold dark.

But, well, I do feel more like a person the more I act like a person and interact with people, as much as I might wish to be a lump and zone out while watching streams/tv that ask nothing of me.

2.
Yuletide revealed works!

There was perhaps 30min of AHHHH about 20min after reveals due to an Ao3 bug that revealed creators alongside works. Considering that this happened to Battleship this summer and the mods heard crickets from Support at the time, perhaps now that Yuletide hit the same bug (and solved the immediate problem with advice from the Battleship mods) Ao3 support will have more data and motivation to figure out wtf happened there and make sure it can't happen again.

Anyway, I received two Yuletide gifts:

The Promise (1222 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Oathsworn (Actual Play Podcast)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Dorado the Adamant & Nabain Palisade
Characters: Dorado the Adamant, Nabain Palisade
Additional Tags: and the absence of Serikali, Post canon, Missing Scene, Dialogue Heavy, Major Spoilers
Summary:
“Did you ever speak to Serikali?” Dorado asked.
“Not as often as I would have liked.” The broken promise settled over his shoulders like a yoke. But even under that weight, he still could carry curiosity. Dorado was direct: if she changed topic, there had to be a reason.

This is for a fandom that, as the author's note says, I wrote a promo post last year (and then mentioned again during Battleship season when people were asking about good actual play podcasts), and am thus inevitably the reason this person got into the show. <3 Delightful to get a gift for it! I was not expecting one, but also when I saw a gift show up for me and no fandoms I'd requested in the collection list I was like "omg... perhaps..." and it was!

This is a lovely little coda adding into the Oathsworn epilogue, about what people are willing to do for the sake of their community and what secrets they're willing to keep and why. Absolutely delightful.

The other gift is WORLDBUILDING VIA TEXTBOOK EXCERPTS

The Dresediel Lex Project And Its Consequences (2385 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Maestre Gerhardt
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Epistolary
Summary:
Excerpts from documents found in Tara Abernathy's bag before her graduation from the Hidden Schools, sketching out the historical project to understand undeath and some pertinent later findings.

aka, someone taking me up on my Worldbuilding and Atypical Narrative Stuff things. <3 Absolutely delightful. A+ look into how weird it is to do SCIENCE to the magic of Becoming A Lich and Living Forever As An Undead Being. The change in thought about said magic from the first excerpt to the last is very fun, and it's a good look at a bit of magic that the series itself takes rather for granted.

I have also received absolutely lovely comments on both of the fics I wrote for Yuletide! Further commentary about those after author reveals; I had a great time writing both of them for very different reasons. xD <3

3.
Been thinking about projects for the new year and things I want to do and how, as much as I'm like "ughhhhh I am TIRED all the time" it is annoyingly true that often if I do things anyway I will end up having more energy overall.

So.

Fundamentally I believe in my ability to Write Stuff so long as I, y'know, actually focus and put time into it. xD The part where I need to get myself to actually write instead of zoning out on the internet is the hard part, usually! But I would like to actually write about the blorbos I've been rotating in my head since this summer.

There's this part of me like "that would be easier if you had a TITLE for it" and I'm like "OKAY SO GIVE ME ONE" about it. (

tavina most of the time I do not feel your pain about this BUT IN THIS CASE it feels weirdly true, considering that my brain can give me the primary arc of the story and the vibes I want but the idea of WRITING it is somehow ???. if a title helps I will sigh loudly but also be like "yeah okay sure".)

but I would like to be able to actually explain about my blorbos and their not-romance (it is an ADVENTURE STORY and they are absolutely Together but also get mad if one's like "so your BOYFRIEND" about it) (they are a half-triton/half-elf and a half-orc/half-dragon because why be Normal about your multiracial fantasy characters) (the half-dragon gets kidnapped to build an airship and that's what kicks the whole thing off) which means I need to WRITE IT

so really if I have any goal for next year it is probably simply "please actually write full draft of that <3", which, to be clear, is Very Doable based on how many words I am capable of writing xD just gotta make them words about this.

4.
It snowed the day after Christmas (or, well, the evening of Boxing Day into the early morning of the 27th), fluffy dry snow that's perfectly aesthetic and wasn't too much of a pain to clean off. Tonight it's supposed to be FREEZING RAIN, however, which is so much more UGH and is going to make going to work tomorrow Special. (I wish I got more time off for the holidays, but, whatever, it's not like I would do anything in particular except rest and read and write.)

5.
The dojo did get a new heater in. It's the same as the old heater, I'm pretty sure, except newer and thus works properly. xD

6.
A friend made me watch the first four episodes of I Am Nobody, a cdrama that they were like "I think you'll like it!" about because of the traits: Has Women (aka: is not actually a BL) and Is Modern Cultivation (because I'd made a comment about the Legend of Xiao Hei that they should've told me it was modern cultivation and not just "it has a cute cat! look at the cute cat!"). The thing is, it has women by virtue of being Probably Het (I think fandom is mostly like BUT BOYS about it) and the modern cultivation is "secret sects keep magic secret" and not the far more interesting "magical cultivation sects are integrated into everyday modern life" that Xiao Hei included.

So like... it's a show that I'd have fun watching with them, because it's honestly really well done for what it is, but unlike either friend I was watching with (either the one showing this to us or the other one new to it) I am not compelled to watch the rest on my own? It leans too much into comedy and not enough into the sort of worldbuilding or character dynamics that actually get their claws into me. Not a bad thing about it, really! I see why people like it! Just. Not as much my jam as that friend had hoped for.

7.
I watched del Toro's Frankenstein on Christmas Day, and spent the entire time talking with my friend about the use of color in that movie. It definitely understood what Frankenstein (the novel) was about! It portrayed The Themes (consequences of one's actions; accepting responsibility; the relationship between creator and creation) very well. It also did not shy away from gore and blood and the surgical nature of it all! (Also there were wolves that Did Not Act Like Wolves At All but also they're A Metaphor in the end so... whatever..) Very enjoyable, glad to have seen it!

ah yes I should show y'all a picture of my precious darling tucked into the couch blanket <3 (sometimes she is ENTIRELY UNDER this blanket and I send a photo of a round lump to my friends and helpfully label it "catte".)

( cat photo under cut )

okay, some updates while I'm thinking about it at all:

1.
I never did say that I did get my ears repierced, did I xD But I did! It's been like a month! The piercer was like "so, let's just re-open those old holes, I bet they're still fine, just maybe a little finicky", and she was correct. A lot easier to heal from something that's just expanding old scar tissue than making a new hole in the body, obviously, which is good because tbh I wasn't excited about tending to a new wound.

So I can wear ear shinies now! I need to acquire more of them, especially more interesting studs that I can wear during work/aikido. xD Dangly earrings are pretty but inconvenient when doing very physical stuff.

she was ALSO like "you have skinny earlobes!" and I was like "uh?" and she was cheerfully like "this means that even the tiniest studs I have are going to be a little loose on you and the average stud will be noticeably loose" (true, btw) and then "do your ears get cold particularly easily?" (no, actually, they don't?). It was all very "this is not a body part I think about the variance in very often but yeah someone who does body mods/piercings sure would have thoughts about this!". xD

2.
The heater in our dojo, which has been dying for years, has finally given up the ghost. Considering that our dojo barely breaks even most of the time, uh, not good to need to replace that in the middle of winter. We shall see how paying for that ends up working, considering that it only broke like last Friday and we only got someone to look at it today, and they haven't provided a specific estimate yet (just a rough ballpark upon identifying the failed part). Fun times!

3.
It is WINTER and COLD now.

...yeah that's about it.

This does mean my cat will paw at the blanket I keep on my couch and then curl up in expectation that I shall Tuck Her In, which is absolutely adorable of her. <3

4.
I finished my Yuletide draft and made eyes at a friend who also knows the canon to beta-read it, so I don't need to worry about that until they get back to me. I had a lot of fun doing canon review for this one! One of those canons where I didn't have any particular ideas but did think it'd be fun to write for someone who had some prompts/thoughts about it, and: I was right!

5.
Talked to my dad yesterday about family and life and books, and it's very funny how at once I got so much of my taste in books from him and how much more willing he is to read moderately shitty epic fantasy than I am. Admittedly, this may just be a factor of age and that he grew up reading more stuff in that genre (by which I mean: Male Gaze Power Fantasy) than I did, and so has way more tolerance for it than I do. He's perfectly happy to read whatever else I place in front of him! And he enjoys it! He just also reads these. xD

6.
god, idk, did I have other things to say

work is work. it's fine. I would like more sleep. whatever.

7.
I'm still somehow keeping up with Critical Role: Araman? I zone out of combat (normal) but this mostly just means that I'm willing to listen to that while doing other things even moreso than the more story-centric content that I'll listen to while driving or doing dishes etc. I think the part I enjoy most is that they're doing multiple tables and focusing on one table at a time, but the opening scene for each episode is from one of the other groups, a teaser of what they're getting up to/going to be doing when the focus switches to them.

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shadaras

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