matt_doyle

So! I was reading a webcomic and something a character said made me think of the old "the best offense is a good defense" adage and the overall importance of ensuring one's base is strong before attacking others.

And this is an easy concept to understand in the world of sports, but...what if you're writing in a setting without said sports?

Also, what if you want a game to demonstrate the concept explicitly? Like, it could be a lesson all kids learn while young by learning to play this basic game.

What would that look like?

The first thing to come to mind is dice and tokens. There needs to be a limited resource so players have to choose between building their foundation or extending their reach. There also needs to be an attack function. And the attacks should rollover so that a strong attack wipes out several weak enemies at once. It should also be fairly simple to set-up and explain since this would be a game for kids.

I'm trying to decide the goal of the game... It could be like tic-tac-toe and Tak with extending a road or connecting two points. Or it could be like 7-Minute Empire (might have remembered the name incorrectly) in which the goal is claiming the most territory. Or it could be like Risk where you're wiping out your enemies. Or like Chess or Capture the Flag, even, where you want to corner and conquer a single piece.

All of them have pros/cons for the lesson. Territory capture might be the most flexible, while combat might be the easiest to explain.

If you have an option between increase power or increase reach, both options must be important for the ultimate goal of the game. For that reason, territory or Capture the Flag seem to make the most sense.

What I have in my head at the moment is a checkers or chess board. Players take turns placing pieces. They can choose to occupy new squares, adjacent to any of their current occupied squares, or they can choose to stack. But let's make it even simpler so that this is a game that could be drawn on paper easily. Let's make it a 5x5 diamond. Each player starts with one piece in the corner closest to them.

You roll a die. 1d6 to keep it simple. The number on the die is how many tokens you can place or move. You can place tokens on top of your current tokens or in any adjacent (NSEW only; no diagnonals) squares. This includes on top of enemy tokens. If you place a token on top of an enemy, both tokens are removed and return to their respective players. This does mean you can also move a stack.

Let's say you have a stack of three next to an opponent's piece, and you roll a 2. You can move the top tokens from your stack on top of your opponent. The opponent's piece and one of your pieces are removed. And you are left with a single token in the new space.

This does suggest there should be a height limit. Let's say that stacks cannot be more than 6 tokens high. For now, let's allow someone to move an entire stack, leaving a blank spot behind.

But, say you have a situation where you have a stack of 6 and the row ahead of you has a single token, a stack of two, and another single token. And let's say you roll a 5.

You move 5 off your stack (leaving one behind) and on top of the first single token. Your stack is now 4 high (yours and theirs removed). Move done.

Alternatively, you could move 3 tokens off the stack of 5. This leaves two of yours in the next space. Then you move both of those onto the next space, removing the stack of two. The row is now 3 of yours, blank, blank, 1 of theirs.

The goal is to capture your opponent's corner or to hold three total corners.

I need to play around to see how this plays. Maybe stacks should have a max height of 4...

Anyway! Building up stacks around your corner and one other corner is the best way to prevent the other team from winning. If you can defend two corners, then you can pick whichever battle is easier for one of the other two. And, if you go for their stronghold, you can sacrifice your extra corner if needed.

I'm not sure that this really teaches the lesson, but it might be fun to play?

ETA: Each side has a total of 50 pieces? That feels like a lot for a game, though. Maybe 25 single pieces and 5 5-point pieces? You could play with pennies and nickels as long as you had a way to distinguish between players. Oh! Heads and tails. One person plays Heads and the other person plays Tails. You get 25 pennies and 5 nickels. And you have to keep 5 pennies in reserve at all times for making exchanges with a nickel. Honestly...it'd probably be easier to play with 50 pennies each. So you'd just need a dollar in pennies, a 5x5 board, and 1d6. ...If you don't have a die, you could get six extra pennies. Shake and drop them. If you play heads, you get 1 move per head. If you play tails, you get 1 move per tails. Or, if you have just one extra penny, flip it 6 times and count the number of heads/tails for the number of moves you get.

ETA: If you reduce down to a 4x4 board, I think you could trim to 50 total tokens, 25 each. Maybe even down to 40 total tokens (20 each). That might be the better route. The smaller board would also force more decisions sooner, I think. (Maybe 24 total for a 3x3 board (12 each), but I think that would be too small for interesting play).

ETA: Oh! And what if one of the moves you can make is a bank stack. So, like, if you roll 3, you can place 2 on the board and 1 in your bank. No--better. Your stronghold (your corner) can serve as a bank. You can take from that stack to augment any turn you make. The coins from your stronghold can go to any space you control. The stronghold is a normal stack otherwise, and so can only be so tall. Maybe it can have +1 on the stack. So, if the stacks are normally limited to 5, your stronghold can be 6.

So, you have a stronghold 4 high, and you roll a 2, you could move 3 from your stronghold + 2 for your roll. Only pieces generated from a roll can attack, though. But! You could move a piece from your stronghold on top of a stack and then move that stack to attack. I feel like this adds an extra strategy element to the game. And strengthens the original message/intent.

lullabymoon posting in

inkingitout

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

cofax7

I probably didn't need to, but I have taken all of next week and the following Monday off. My workload is fucking insane but fuckit, I can only do what I can do, as multiple people told me this week.

I have just borrowed Cahokia Jazz and a YA novel by EK Johnston from the library, so I'm set for that. And I'm meeting my oldest friend in the world in LA next month, so she can go to the desert for the first time, so we're sending each other links and stuff, and that's fun.

Tonight I will set up the batter for those insane Dark and Stormy cookies -- though I do them as bars, it's so much easier and the texture is more controllable -- and tomorrow I will make a crustless quiche for my BIL's birthday. Sunday is a cookie exchange, Monday is wrapping. It's gonna be a nice week, or it would be if not for all the rain.

Why did the rain wait until I was on vacation?

Happy holidays to y'all!

muccamukk

Archive of Our Own: Protect Your Contact Information From Scammers.

In the last year, AO3 has seen a rise in "art commission" spambot comments. The bots leaving these comments pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for a fan's fic. After convincing their targets to contact them off AO3, they scam their targets into paying for that art. Fans have reported that after sending payment, they either received AI-generated art or nothing at all.

If you receive a scam comment from a guest, you can press the "Spam" button on the comment. This helps train our automated spam-checker to better detect this type of behavior.

If you encounter a scammer that has a registered account, or if you encounter a guest posting scam comments on someone else's work, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:

Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.

In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".

In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."

Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.

If you encounter a scam commenter on someone else's work, you can let the work creator know the commenter is likely a bot and link them to this news post.

(Thanks to JT for reminding me where the post was.)

Current Mood: pissed off

muccamukk

Fandom and Art Stuff

elasticella: sapphic stocking stuffers.
Lots of great prompts! Open for fills until 31 December, or they're all full, whichever happens last.

Street Art Utopia: The Giant Kitten.
By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain

Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack.
I read this, and was like "hmmmmmmm." Because it seemed plausible that there were bots or whatever, but also a lot of people I'd seen critiquing the album were definitely humans that I knew. But also human conversation can be driven by bots without the humans realising it. And also, I don't care enough about TS to look into the whole mess. Then I saw the following.

MedusoneDeluxe: Rolling Stone embarrasses itself to defend Taylor Swift. Again. (Video: 41 Minutes).
I love it when people actually read the research. So probably not a significant number of bots, but also the science is so sloppy it's impossible to tell.

Trans Rights Are Human Rights
The Walrus: Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.
Lovely, thoughtful look at how we see gender, and maybe kids have this more figured out than a lot of adults to. Older piece, but I enjoyed reading it again.

The Guardian: The WI and Girlguiding have been pressured to exclude trans women – yet the law is clear as mud by Jess O'Thompson.
The Guardian published something non-terrible about trans people in the U.K.! Do the Dance of Joy!

CTV News: Skate Canada to stop hosting events in Alberta due to sports gender law.
Solidarity! From a national sporting organisation! A MIRACLE!

Canadian Politics Stuff
The Tyee: Human Rights Tribunal on RCMP Methods Delays Decision Nearly a Year.
This is some fucking bullshit. The elders are dying of old age before they're seeing any kind of justice. I am enjoying how Amanda Follett Hosgood is so out of fucks to give on the publication ban that she's basically putting up a bright red arrow pointing to A.B.'s name, even if she can't actually say it. Which is John Furlong, incidentally. And seriously, fuck that guy.

The Globe and Mail: Leilani Muir made history suing Alberta over forced sterilization.
This is an older obit, but I dug it up for a school project, and thought it was worth sharing. Not enough people know about Canada's eugenics policies.

Times Colonist: Residential school survivor says he will protest OneBC at other campuses.
We shouldn't need our elders to be superheroes, but nonetheless many of them are.

Times Colonist: Water-contaminated fuel caused crash of Port Hardy-bound plane: TSB.
This is neither here nor there, really, but I find Transportation Safety Board investigations really interesting. Even if they take a really long time (i.e. I found this while looking for information about a more recent crash, but will probably have to wait a couple years to find out what happened to that guy).

Slightly Dated U.S.A. Politics Stuff
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American: December 6, 2025.
Beautifully ties in the events of Pearl Harbor with the politics of today.

Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Parks's Historic Protest.

The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into, as the site says, new patterns, new connections, new relationships. Solidarity is always about connection across difference, about the way you stand with someone you have something crucial in common with but who may be different in other ways. It is a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole. It is e pluribus unum.

lassarina

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

watersword

I have finished the daisy which covers the tea stain on this t-shirt! I am very proud of myself.

Satin stitch, French knots, stem stitch, and fishbone stitch.

rydra_wong

(Re: the previous entry.)

Dragonslayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough (also known as Oreo and S'mores, Biggie and Smalls, Pikachu and Snorlax, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and any other name the fandom can come up with) are one of the most iconic boss fights in the entire Dark Souls series.

There are much harder ones in later games (and in the DLC), but they're still legendary and still regarded as a Serious boss fight.

They're also a famous mid-game difficulty spike and cause of rage quitting. Conversely, if you can get through O&S, people often say you should have the skills to beat the rest of the base game.

The major issue is that it's a duo boss fight, with one agile speedster (Ornstein) who can zip most of the way across the room in a single move, and also throws lightning, and one heavyweight bruiser (Smough) who is slower but not that slow -- he has a charge attack to close distance fast that hits like a freight train -- and does huge amounts of damage.

So for the first phase of the fight, you have to try to keep track of where they both are simultaneously (not to mention where you are in relation to the room, so you don't back yourself into a corner and get trapped) and constantly manoeuvre to try to be able to get in a hit on one without being hit by the other.

If you kill one of them, the fight goes into a second phase where the surviving one absorbs some of their powers (so if it's Smough, he gets lightning, while if it's Ornstein he gets sized up and picks up part of Smough's moveset) and also restarts with a full and vastly increased health bar. Though there is a general consensus that the second phase is more manageable than the first phase simply because you're not having to fight two bosses at the same time.

Illustrative example of someone doing the fight:

Watch on YouTube

(You can summon an NPC or other human players to try to help you, but the bosses get extra health to compensate and it's still tough. And also I have been having enormous fun trying to beat all the bosses without summons so far, and am averse to the extra complications and unpredictability of having more people -- human or NPC -- in the mix while I try to figure out a fight. Though I've also had enormous fun being a summons for other people on boss fights, so zero disrespect to people summoning*, it's an excellent game mechanic.)

As I may have mentioned once or twice, my brain has huge difficulty tracking multiple moving objects (which is why I can't drive or cycle on the road) and I have the reaction speed of a slime mould.

So yeah. I knew O&S are the big mid-game stopper and I was very aware that this could potentially be the point where I hit a wall and the game became flatly impossible for me. Or at least where I'd have to summon to get through it.

And that did not happen. I solo-ed O&S.

It took multiple sessions over multiple days before I mastered it, but that's standard for me on DS boss fights. And I had SO MUCH FUN. It's SUCH A COOL FIGHT.

I did a thing that was a real achievement for me and I am very proud, and especially given the shitshow this year has been, I'll take it.

{*Necessary disclaimer only because Dark Souls fandom has historically had a section who are toxic as fuck and would like you to know that you didn't really beat the game if you summoned or used magic or whatthefuckever else they disapprove of.}

muccamukk

These are probably going to be short and sweet, given I read them in late August through September. I'll hopefully catch up to where I am now by the time next term starts, and I go back to only reading stuff for school. Expect a bunch of books about gender, followed by all the romance novels I read on my off time, lol.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, narrated by Jefferson White
I had only the vaguest memories of the account of Haymitch's games from Catching Fire, or anything else from Catching Fire, for that matter. I never did read the other prequel. If Haymitch is one of your favourite characters, and you just want backstory on all the olds who show up later in the original series, this is solid fun. Collins did a good job of thinking through where everyone came from, and how they got like they are when Katniss meets them. Effee showing up is especially fun. We also get confirmation of several queer characters (which I assume she wasn't allowed to do in 2008), and an interesting note about the Capital banning generative A.I..

I enjoyed all the themes of the amount of groundwork needed to put into a revolution, and how the lives of the people in this story eventually led to the events of the first books. Especially how the characters themselves feel like they've failed and wasted everything, but the reader can tell how it's more a process of (horribly) figuring out what works and what doesn't.

At the same time, it didn't feel like a story of only moving pieces into place for the "real story" that will start later. It certainly doesn't read as a stand alone novel, but it does stand up as being about these characters in this moment. Haymitch is such a sweet kid when we first meet him, and is a bit more of a dynamic lead than Katniss (i.e., he actually likes people and wants to talk to them), and given the pile of characters we meet for the first time (because these games have twice the number of tributes), each of the new people get enough development for the reader to become least somewhat invested in what happens to them (spoiler alert: it's the Hunger Games, so...).

I always found the games themselves the least interesting part of the earlier books, which is largely true here as well, but the story still moves along pretty fast. They probably would've been more interesting if I remembered what the story was supposed to be, as Collins puts a lot into the contrasts and surprises. The post-games section did draaaaaaaaaaaaag though. Especially the recap of the games we'd just read about, and the part that was set up as this huge poetic tragedy. I think if you're like... 14, you'd be weeping through the end, but I found it overdone, and thought her editor should've made her stop.

Still, I'm happy to have read it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I hadn't read these in fifteen years, so I thought I'd swing back through to remember what we were supposed to know about all the characters we met in the prequel. Enjoyed it. Games still dragged.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
So most of the characters from Haymitch's book actually show up here, it turns out. So I read this one. Enjoyed this too, though found the games section dragged a bit. The love triangle continues obnoxious, and I did myself the favour of not reading Mockingjay again.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
I've been hearing bits of this quoted since it came out, and it's quite good. I think the target is more people involved in public life, but it was still good to listen to, these being the times that were given to us. I know it's his area, but I wish there had been more examples from autocracies other than 1930s Germany, for the sake of variety, if nothing else (there were a handful of comparisons from the Soviet bloc, but it was very Nazi centric).

I think it's on YouTube for free, if anyone wants to listen. I'll probably go back to it later, so that I take more on board.

Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians by Austen Hartke
Solid primer if you're interested in the a gender-diverse approach to Christian theology. Hartke talks to a variety of other trans and non-binary Christians, especially those involved in ministry, about their relationship with God and the Bible. Each chapter focuses on a few lines of scripture, which are largely clobber verses, and discusses how they can be seen as trans affirming. It's really beautifully expressed, and thoughtfully takes on some difficult parts of the Bible. Hartke does talk about how frustrating it is to feel like he has to spend so much time justifying himself and talking about the clobber verses, when he just wants to talk about religious gender euphoria. He's since put out a second edition, which might refine that approach, but I haven't looked at that yet. I really appreciated this edition is an intro, however, and helped me put together a church service for Trans Day of Remembrance.

camwyn

Canceled my Duolingo subscription today. I've been using Babbel for Italian and I think it works better in terms of getting concepts across; Duo's basically vocab practice and trying to use it to start learning Dutch is kinda slow going for everything except pronunciation. Gonna start working on the copy of Dutch for Dummies I bought from Thriftbooks a while ago.

Meanwhile, on a different linguistic front, I am perfectly happy to allow older, sexist language to persist in the lyrics of one specific Christmas song. I've said it before, elsewhere, but it's Hark The Herald Angels Sing. This is because when I was a wee little sprog of about eight, I read C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. All of them, all the way through, in the original order (as written, not as events chronologically happened). And that same year, we sang all the verses* of Hark The Herald Angels Sing at church. And we got to the third verse, and I hit these lyrics:

Mild he lays his glory by
Born that Man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of Earth
Born to something something something

I stopped listening at that point because I had just had the sudden experience of being informed, in church, that Jesus was born for both humans and dwarves. Given that Lewis had casually informed the reader in The Horse And His Boy that they could look up certain facts in 'any good history of Calormen at your library', this was kind of an odd moment.

My mom explained it to me later that Lewis was the only one who meant dwarves when he said 'sons of Earth', and also pointed out that 'veiled in flesh the Godhead see' did not mean the equivalent to those Jesus statues with the Sacred Heart on his chest, but... for a while there, dwarves were a thing.

So Hark The Herald Angels Sing gets to keep the male-oriented lyrics in my book. Because dwarves.

*A bit on the unusual side even at Christmas for Catholics; most Masses I've been to have generally done one or two verses of any given song or hymn, versus the handful of Protestant services I've been to where they sang every single verse of every single song

elisem

I have met the deadline and posted the thing! Now we just have the week between today and Reveal Day, also known as "the week where I find all the hidden typos and fix them." Main Collection Reveal Day for the fics is the 24th, and is followed by Author Reveals on January 1.

This year was more work than previous years, for a very particular reason. I got COVID for the first time in October, and while I got very lucky (Paxlovid turns out to work for me, yay!), I am so easily drained to exhaustion, by pretty much anything including brain work, which has never been this bad before. Also, I'm used to multitasking, and hoo boy do I need different strategies and approaches now.

I'm planning for a very long recuperation, since it looks like that's the smart way to go. But here we are, and today is a milestone day. The story is a story, and it's posted, and now I can catch up a little on my Etsy shop (I hardly posted anything new while writing) and my eBay offers (I'm selling most of a half-century's worth of queer and related subjects library, since I'm not a working journalist any more and somebody really should get use out of these books and periodicals).

It's been a long time. I had forgotten the peculiar satisfaction that comes with meeting a deadline.

watersword

I spent yesterday evening re-reading Helen Dewitt's The English Understand Wool, one of the best books I've read in the past few years, and reading T. Kingfisher's Snake-Eater, which I loved.

A friend is stopping by to keep me company while I make snickerdoodles, and this has prompted me to sweep and run the vacuum cleaner; this evening I will go to needlecrafting and there will be a colleague there.

rydra_wong

... I just beat Ornstein and Smough.

For anyone who would like context -- Symbalily meets and gets to grips with O&S, from the timestamp: https://youtu.be/3TKhwbveyVE?si=14uuwYlVq1ywUwRk&t=5681

muccamukk

Which included a bunch of American Political movies, watches/rewatches of said being inspired in part by current events.

Dave and Independence Day: When the East Wing got it, in memory of the White House, and a time when we expected presidents to be non-terrible, or at least rational. Also, Nenya hadn't seen them.

Good Night and Good Luck: Following Keith Olbermann turning out to be the real villain in the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, and me remembering that even when I agreed with his takes (circa the Bush administration), I thought he had a hell of a lot of nerve to use that sign off. Also, Nenya hadn't seen it. Also, I couldn't find a good quality copy of the 1986 biopic I grew up watching (though I see there's a passible one on YouTube).

A Few Good Men: Because a man made a lot of art that mattered to a lot of people, and that should still mean something. Also, I'd never seen it.

mrissa

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Material goods/archaeological evidence in the study of this period. It's slightly awkwardly balanced in terms of who the audience is--I have a hard time that people who need this much exposition about the era will pick up a book this specifically materially detailed--but not upsetting in that regard.

Elizabeth Bear, Hell and Earth. Reread. Returning to my reread of this series in time to still have all the memories of what's been going on with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and their connections to faerie realms; as the second half of a larger story, it goes hard toward consequence and ramification from the very start of the volume.

Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age: Europe in the 1840s. I feel like this is trying for more than it achieves. It goes into chapters about Romanticism and the advent of science and some other things, and then there's a second section with chapters about major empires. But what it doesn't do is actually talk about Europe in this period--it's fairly easy to find material about England, about France, even about Russia, but there's nothing here about Portugal or Greece or Sweden. It's not a volume I'm going to keep on the shelves for the delightful tidbits, because it's not a tidbit-rich book. Also some of the language is '90s standard rather than contemporary. So: fine if this is what you have but I think you can do better.

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism From Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. Good ground-up Third World environmentalism thoughts.

Victoria Dickenson, Berries. One of my friends said, "a book about berries, Marissa would love that!" and she was absolutely right. It is lushly illustrated, it is random facts about berries, I am here for it.

Emily Falk, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Interesting thoughts on working around one's particular brain processes--the third "c" that did not make the title is "connection," and there's a lot about how that can be used to live lives closer to our own values.

Margaret Frazer, Heretical Murder. Kindle. One of the short stories, and possibly the least satisfying one of hers I've read so far: there's just not room for questions, uncertainty, or even a very human take on the life experiences of heretics in this milieu. Oh well, can't win them all.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. If you're an English Civil War nerd, this book on the lead-up to it will be useful to you. I am. It is.

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater. A near-future desert fantasy that was creepy and exciting and warm in all the right spots. This is one of Kingfisher's really good ones. Also Copper dog is a really good dog--I mean of course a good dog but also a well-written dog, a dog written by someone who has observed dogs acutely.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Lyrical writing about gardening in the face of more than one apocalypse at the same time. Laing loves many of the same reference points as I do, in life, in literature, and in botany, so I found this a warmly congenial book.

L.R. Lam, Pantomime. This is very much the first volume in a series; its ending is a midpoint rather than an ending per se. It's a circus fantasy with an intersex and nonbinary protagonist, and it was written just over a decade ago--this is one of the books that had to exist for people to be doing the things with intersex and/or nonbinary characters that they're able to not only write but get published now.

Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Glorious. Some favorites from past collections and some searing new work, absolutely a good combination, would make a good present especially for someone who doesn't have the prior collections.

Daniel Little, Confronting Evil in History. Kindle. This is a short monograph about philosophy of history/historiography, and why history/historians have to grapple with the problem of evil. I feel like if you're really interested in this topic there are longer, more thorough handlings of it, but it was fine.

Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? Really good analysis of how we parse things as alive and having rights, and also how riverine biology, ecology, social issues are being handled. Personal to the right degree, balanced with broader information, highly recommended.

Lars Mytting, The Bell in the Lake and The Reindeer Hunters. The first two in a series of Norwegian historical fiction, not more cheerful than that genre generally is but more...active? relentless? I really like this, they're gorgeous, but people will die sad deaths, that's how this stuff does, it's just as well that I'm taking a break before reading the next one because too much of it can make me gloomy but just the right amount is delightful. The symbolism of the stave church and its bells and weaving and all the weight of rural Norway hits in all the right ways for me.

A.E. Osworth, Awakened. This queer millennial contemporary fantasy is not rep of me, it's rep of the people I'm standing next to a lot of the time, and that's powerful in its own way. Many of you are that person. This does things with magic/witch community that feel very true and solid, and it's a fun read.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Mirage City. The latest in the Evander Mills mysteries. This one takes Andy to Los Angeles and his childhood home, in pursuit of missing (queer) persons. Some of them turn out to be perfectly well, some of them...a great deal less so...but the B-plot was focused on Andy's relationship with his mother, whose job turns out to be something he didn't know about--and will have trouble living with. The last line of the book made me burst into tears in a good way, but in general this is a series that has a lot of historical queer peril, and if that's something that's going to make you more unhappy than otherwise, maybe wait until you're in a different place to try them. I think they continue to stand reasonably well alone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear. Reread. Okay, so at some point in early October I earnestly wrote "reread King Lear" on my to-do list for reasons that seemed tolerably clear to me at the time. Things on the list tend to get done. Somewhere in the last two months I forgot why this was supposed to get done. If there's a project it's supposed to inform, reading it has not helped me figure out which project that is. I'm not mad that I reread it, it still has the bits that are appalling in the most interesting ways, but...well. A mystery forever I suppose.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Discussed elsewhere.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I got this in the mail today and immediately read it. Now, yes, it is December and my TBR is perilously small. But also: new Murderbot! Yay! Still delighted to see more of this series.

In this episode: Murderbot has installed code that allows/requires "emotion checks" periodically, so we get to see the self-awareness process evolve with that (and sometimes devolve...). Murderbot is also assisting with the extraction of several humans, including juveniles and an elder. Juvenile humans do all sorts of things that alarm, annoy, and in some cases terrify Murderbot. This is all to the good.

("Terrified" is never the response to an emotion check. Obviously. Like the kid in The Princess Bride, Murderbot is sometimes a bit concerned, that's all. Definitely only a bit concerned.)

Unfamiliar systems, unfamiliar humans, what else could be called for here...oh, wait, is it the consequences of Murderbot's own actions? WELP. Lots of fun. Still recommend. Don't start here, it's mid-ramification.

elisem

Yes, I am cutting it close. I blame getting COVID Halloween week, and having to rest like a potato. Which I am still doing, but I have advanced to the stage of literate potato. I hope. Because this thing is due in, what, fifty-some hours?

Anyhow, I came here to post that I have reached the milestone in writing the current draft where I just reread a section and said out loud, "OK, so there are actually a few bits in here that aren't completely shitful." Like, it's a known milestone. So that's encouraging.

Onward.

(Yes, that's why nothing new is in the shop this week. I have been on a schedule of sleep, write, sleep, write, with meds and basic necessities in there as needed. Not enough oomph left to photograph new work and still write and edit. Potato has limited spoonage here. But Potato is too proud to default on Yuletide. Please point people to go shop in the Etsy shop, though. Potato is fretting about this being a rough December for so many artists. Oh! Remind me to tell you about Boxing Day, which is going to be completely bonkers in a new way.)

ailelie

In my current project, here are the bits I need to write before I am done with this chapter (I have been so close to finishing for two months now; I've just been short on time and mental mana):

The political route
- Finish the conversation with Damithi, which is a three part thing. First, the MC interjects during Damithi's convo with reporters. Then, Damithi and the MC play a game of Truth. Finally, if the MC impresses during the game, Damithi hands over what the MC wants. (If the MC doesn't impress, they get a partial victory instead).
- Plan and write the conversation with Erim Kyte. This one should be harder than Imaric's, but easier than Damithi's.
- Plan and write the blackmail scene with Erim's paramour.

Plan and write the council meeting and the vote on Feylon's plan. At some point during this meeting, I need a good enough cliffhanger to entice readers to buy the book. That cliffhanger will likely be the announcement of the vote results.

Double-check my logic to make sure everything is resolved correctly.

Test for errors

It both is and isn't a lot. I just need to sit down and write.

watersword

On my way out the door to a vigil for last night's mass casualty incident; today is also the thirteenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, and there was an antisemitic mass shooting in Bondi Beach, Australia yesterday.

I do not know how I am going to get through this vigil and come home and light my chanukiyah, with its engraving, More life. The great work begins.

ETA: Ran into some coworkers at the extremely well-attended vigil and they came home with me to light the chanukiyah, and that helped.

ailelie

Does LLG need minigames? No. Do I really need to ensure each card game I'm creating for this story that isn't even about card games works? No. Am I doing so anyway? Of course.

The games are:

Frut (probably need a better name): A partner game similar to 31, but adapted for the Bard deck. Plus, instead of a stack with a single card, a hand is dealt to the table and the remaining few cards are removed face-down from the game. So card counting, instead of cheating, becomes strategy.
Maze: A solitaire game I'm still finalizing. It involves moving a marker over a 3x3 grid following specific rules to remove cards. The goal is to end with as few cards as possible. This I will genuinely just sit and play sometimes.
Truth: The latest. Basically like the drinking game, but you place a card face down when you state something you think is true of the other person. If you're right, they flip your card and it goes to your score pile. If you're wrong, they get your card and can choose to play it later or discard it. This is the game I'm currently debating even needing though it *does* make for an interesting scene...

Profile

matt_doyle

October 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Dec. 21st, 2025 02:03 pm

Reading

growing strong

2026 promo banner

Staycation!

Since I just had to dig this up:

Links Links Links

What Are You Playing Wednesday

I finished a project!

Okay so more context

Reading Wednesday, the Dog Days of Summer Edition

(no subject)

Yuletide progress: it is posted!

good things

So

Finally Updated My Media Tracker

Books read, early December

Platform Decay, by Martha Wells

Yuletide progress

To Write

(no subject)

(no subject)

Profile

October 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags