annavere | Network

Fandom: The West Wing
Pairings/Characters: Sam Seaborn/Josh Lyman-focus; also includes Sam/OMC, Josh/Amy and Josh/Donna
Rating: E
Length: 347,597 overall
Creator Links:

jaegecko
Theme: Amnesty, Ambiguous Relationships, Backstory, Character Development, Epic Works, Fandom Classics, Getting Back Together, Missing Scenes, Mutual Pining, Politics, Research, Series

Summary: The Turningverse is a series of stories that interweave with both canon "West Wing" episodes and each other. Each one is self-contained, so feel free to begin anywhere you feel moved to do so.

Reccer's Notes: THE big Sam/Josh fic, and it earns all of its accolades! The author is incredibly knowledgeable about the day-to-day realities of political campaigners and White House staffers, flawlessly interspersing their own original scenes with canon. And the central relationship is so perfectly, tragically flawed: two men who are intrinsically drawn to one another, struggling to overcome the lack of privacy inherent to their position, burgeoning resentment, and some of the most heart-breakingly realistic internalised homophobia I've read in a long time. And that's not to mention the fic's version of Lisa, Sam's initial fiance, who becomes a very important character just as flawed and with just as complicated a relationship with Sam and Josh as they have with another. I devoured these fics and never wanted to stop!

However, be aware that the final fic of the series (the intended second-last part) was never fully completed. As a result, the series never reached the point where the couple gets back together for good. I recommend ending with 'Interlude for two voices' if you can't bear that; I sure stayed there for a while until I could bring myself to go on! :')

Fanwork Links: The Turning universe

fanweeklymod posting in

fandomweekly

Here are the entries for this week's challenge:

( List of entries )

In order to vote, please reply to this post using the form provided. All comments are screened, and entries are listed in the order they were submitted. For your vote to qualify, you must fill out your entire voting card (all three spots) in order to be counted. First place votes are worth 3 points, second place votes are worth 2 points, and third place votes are worth 1 point. Meeting the bonus goal on an entry gets an extra point for that submission.

When voting, please copy/paste the ENTRY NUMBER and the FIC TITLE from the list above into the spot you're voting for (this prevents accidentally mis-numbering a vote and casting it for the wrong entry). It should look like this:

First Place: 61. Fic Title Here
Second Place: 88. Another Fic Title
Third Place: 47. Finally a third fic title goes here

Please note that you cannot vote for your own entry, and that votes cannot be made anonymously. You do not have to be a member of the community in order to vote, nor have submitted an entry for this week; everyone is welcome to participate in the voting. IP addresses are logged to prevent duplicate voting.

Voting closes Wednesday, December 31, at 9:00PM EST.

chestnut_pod

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Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: City Hall - Vienna Teng

ysabetwordsmith

This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, January 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "short forms." I'll be soliciting poetic forms of 60 lines or less, so basically below my epic range rather than only the short-short length of 10 lines or less. Free verse below the length limit is also fine. Here are 15 short forms with descriptions. Among my favorite short forms not listed there: hexaduad, indriso, sestina, villanelle. This list of 168 forms is alphabetical. Poets Garrett has my favorite list of forms, including a list of repeating-interlocking forms. Their main page has links to poetic forms of 3-10 lines. Plus a few of my own: A darrow poem is a short, haiku-like musing by dark elves. A khazal is a Whispering Sands desert poem in couplets. A moose track is a repeating-interlocking form. A tweet wire is a tiny 10-line poem designed for Twitter. Some short forms, like haiku and tanka, work well as verses in a longer poem. I have The New Book of Forms by Lewis Turco so most forms should be in there. You can also prompt with a link to any exotic form you find; I collect these things.

In addition to forms, I also need topical prompts. One-word or short-phrase framing will assist in keeping them small enough to fit within the theme. Here is a huge list of common themes. This page of idioms has alphabetical and topical listings. I love writing poems about an individual word; see The Phrontistery (WARNING! Black hole caliber time sink ahead!) for glossaries. Have an orientation that is not well represented in literature? Ask for a sexual, romantic, or other orientation! If it's not on any of my lists, just include a description or link to one. I also list gender identities and my characters with disabilities. Want to help me play with my bookshelf? :D I have The Conflict Thesaurus, The Conflict Thesaurus Volume 2, The Occupation Thesaurus, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, The Urban Setting Thesaurus, The Rural Setting Thesaurus, The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, The Negative Trait Thesaurus, and The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus. Simply click "Read Sample" and view the table of contents for a list of cool ideas. You can prompt a sestina with six end words; I usually pick 5 short flexible words and one long exotic word, but I'll work with whatever I get. Favorite characters, threads, series, settings, etc. are also fair game but this is NOT the time for long plotty prompts. Consider combining a name or title with a short form, theme, or idiom. If you like to prompt with photos, this is a great opportunity for that. Just type in a topic (see above for possibilities) and click the Image link in your favorite search engine.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

Arts and Crafts America is ideal for picture prompts, or just name a craft.

Clay of Life suits words from Yiddish, Ladino, or Hebrew.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman suits Italian forms, most of which are short; also Italian words or phrases.

Hart's Farm suits Old Norse poetry or words.

Kung Fu Robots goes with Chinese forms.

Lacquerware suits Japanese forms.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

Current Mood: busy

mossy_bench

Considering various RL priorities, I'm trying not to get too ambitious with my fannish goals. However, I admit I occasionally suffer from eyes-bigger-than-my-stomach syndrome. I wrote down what I thought was a pared-down and doable list for January, but looking at it now, it seems a bit long. :0 We'll see!

Keep up with my DW reading page as well as with Tumblr mutuals
Write and publish the last part of my cross-dressing identity porn fic
Listen to a new-to-me audio drama that has fannish potential
Finish reading Beware the Villainess, then see if there's any fic I like
Dive into and roll around in Beyond Evil fandom on Tumblr, AO3, etc.
Continue working through my Marked for Later
Relatedly, leave more comments on AO3, aided by my commenting bingo card (link to image) from FanArt Frenzy (a multifandom challenge taking place in January)
Do Seasons of Drabbles

If time permits, there are a couple more 'stretch goals' I have in mind, but let's not get ahead of ourselves!

ysabetwordsmith

This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It fills the "Genes" square in my 11-1-23 card for the Drabble Fest Bingo. It has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. This is the first poem in the series Crystal Wood.

Warning: This poem is dark science fiction along the lines of ecological horror.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

viridian5

I put up some photos from 2019 I rediscovered. They whole batch looks a bit like a fever dream.... Lighting in window displays isn't always consistent from night to night and sometimes result in a "softer focus" look. You can see them at my Flickr.

+++

More of the original lights that came attached to my Christmas tree just burned out. Barely any still work, and the tree's not that old! I keep buying lights to apply manually.

I went shopping online for replacements for my burnt-out vintage multicolor flower Christmas tree lights, and the prices I'm seeing are nuts. The low end is like $25 after shipping and handling costs. The high is $100-something???

(I don't like the "cold" tone of the colors of new multicolor LED Christmas lights.)

+++

Kind of a PSA resulted from my own experience....

I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17, and it's reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes: it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. The images are properly attached in iTunes but not on my phone anymore! Part of me keeps trying to find a pattern in the image switches but so far keeps running into a wall. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it many times, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

An example of some of the hunh:

"Want" through "Bare" is all the same Cure album, Wild Mood Swings, but with four different incorrect cover arts. "Open," "High," and "Apart" are from the Wish remaster.

My chats with Apple Care--Regarding the issue with my iPhone 17 not syncing up properly with iTunes--didn't go great. I spoke to two people via Chat who couldn't help me, the last one asking me to attempt two solutions that might make other things worse. One thing I definitely will not be doing is paying for a monthly Apple Music subscription just to properly access music I already own. So I scheduled a phone call from a Senior Team member for the evening, hoping that person can create a solution we can all get behind.

Apple called me 12 hours earlier than scheduled and using the wrong phone number, even though I gave them the correct number and time during the chats twice, then sent me an e-mail about how they couldn't contact me. Shocker. I replied to both e-mails with the correct stuff. Then they still didn't call at the correct time, so I instigated and Karen-ed myself into getting a call from Apple senior support immediately.

It was illuminating in some bad ways.

There's a known issue with this in the current iOS: 26.2. (That showed up in my 17 but not the SE, which was also running 26.2 when I traded it in, so I'm thinking there may be some setting or programming stuff also involved we can't figure out? More people have 17s and such than SEs, so a lot of people have to be having this issue.) But since it's "just" about music, it's not something Apple will immediately resolve.

My other problem is that I have a lot of music I burned myself from CDs, so Apple Music might get rid of those if I'm not careful. Because it's third party! Legal issues! (I didn't realize until this phone call that apparently lots of record companies and music business people are suing everybody over rights.) Who knows if I should really have this stuff!

So the senior service guy said he would not suggest I delete the library and create a new one in case stuff I own but Apple doesn't approve of goes missing.

He's a DJ, and he says he pirates stuff himself. He was like, "Yeah, we're all turning into pirates. And I work for Apple." Because people will ask for a song while he's working but it might not be in his internet, legally feasible library. Brave new bullshit, enshittified world stuff.

The senior support guy says he has a ton of songs on hard drives that aren't connected to the internet to keep them safe from getting taken away or changed.

It's funny having an Apple employee saying he prefers flip phones.

Since I prefer to listen to the music I already own, even if the images are wrong, over potentially losing swaths of my songs, I'm sitting put.

I have music burned off CDs from local NYC '90s bands that never got a real record deal, stuff from singles CDs in the '90s, rare bands, rare music, and Apple wouldn't provide me with that kind of stuff even if I were willing to pay to get them over again. I still rip music off CDs into Tunes. I did it one night recently to test the sync problem, and saw that even sending over a single new music file screws up the cover album art image on the 17. (I have a disc drive as part of this laptop, not an external drive.) I have thousands of songs, and some of those CDs I don't have any more.

He commends me on avoiding subscribing to Apple Music, given the conditions I mentioned. With what this guy told me about Apple policing music, I'm not sure I trust them. I'd say 98% of my music is "third party," which means Apple distrusts them and doesn't guarantee they won't be borked and doesn't care if they are. Sorry, Apple, I'm not going to buy all my music from you just so you approve of what's on my phone.

So I'd have to be careful in my choices of what I do.

~snerf~ Here I am, listening to a Cure song on my phone with a Poe album cover on it, angry at everything.

So. Wish we all had a better solution available now. I have a brand new iPhone 17, as part of my family's plan, so switching away from Apple is unfortunately not an option. I had no idea things were reaching this point until this problem led me to contact Apple Care.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: "Bananafishbones" by the Cure

maevedarcy

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ysabetwordsmith

Be careful with each other

How activist groups can build trust, care, and sustainability in a world of capitalism and oppression.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

sineala

So everyone in fandom has become obsessed with the gay hockey show, and

lysimache and I watched it a couple days ago. Neither of us care about hockey (I think we are both hoping that fandom decides to care about baseball, though this seems unlikely -- but, hey, it's 42 days until pitchers and catchers report) but we do like gay things a lot.

It was nice? I mean, it's not going to be my new fandom, but I'm not sorry I watched it. I did nearly give up after the first two episodes for narrative reasons that I will explain below.

( Spoilers )

It's only six episodes, so... you might as well watch it if you like gay shows, I guess? It's not bad.

I somehow own the first book. I am not sure yet if I will read it.

Current Mood: okay

devilc

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ysabetwordsmith

Today we went up to Champaign-Urbana.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

bluapapilio

Episode 6: Morikawa takes Aichi along to another card shop called PSY that only shows itself for certain people and encourages him to join a tournament. A girl gets in his face and stares at him. 😅

Then a really tall woman with a funky hairdo challenges him to a duel. ...I kinda want to try that hairstyle just for fun.

A card shop run by all-women is cool. And while Aichi lost, he got a new card and learned a lot!

Episode 7: Morikawa vs Kamui, the latter of course won. Aichi gets pressured to follow Kai by Kamui along with Miwa who want to see where he lives. He catches them and is naturally unhappy, Aichi took the wrap and asked Kai to tell him his situation if he wins, but Kai says he isn't ready and to stay out of his business. "If I want you to know then I'll tell you."

Kai vs Kamui, Kai wins though Kamui lasted a while. Before Kai leaves, Aichi promises to faces him someday.

Episode 8: Did Emi have to be so mean? I mean maybe she didn't want him to get hurt? But it's good for beginners to participate and get experience!

Aichi tries to sign up last minute but a guy Kishida throws in his application too and there was only one spot left. Kishida is voiced by Konishi Katsuyuki. Ironic to hear him call out "Alfred?!

Aichi did so good!! He's just going to continue getting better even if he can't beat Kai yet.

Episode 9: Oh, Misaki's in the tournament!

Poor Aichi is so nervous and beating himself up for it, but it's just because he cares so much.

Morikawa may not be bullying Aichi anymore but he's still hopeless. He'll only improve if he starts taking the actual game seriously and not just what he wants out of it. And he gets a big thumbs down for looking down on Misaki!

Misaki and Aichi won, hah. =P

Current Mood: anxious

enchanted_jae posting in

adventdrabbles

Title: Bundled Up Against the Cold
Author:

enchanted_jae
Character(s): Harry/Draco, ocs
Rating: G
Warning(s): None
Art medium: MS Paint
Summary: Playing in the snow
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.
Created for:
♦ Jae's Advent Drabbles No. 29
♦

dracoharry100 Christmas Challenge 2024 No. 29 - Christmas Star
♦

adventdrabbles Prompt No. 29 - snowman pals

Bundled Up Against the Cold

lebateleur

Games: I am now the proud owner of Warhammer: Dawn of War Onslaught and Wyrmspan, and am going through the rulebooks ahead of playing them with Geek BBQers in the new year.

Music: Alas, I skipped both yesterday's pub session and today's house session to focus on end-of-year adulting, so didn't do much with music this week. Nor do I dare to practice at home, given how bone dry the apartment is.

Podcasts: N/A

Roleplaying: None this week, but ma soeur did get me a ridiculously funny D&D themed mug, which I have been enjoying with an obscene amount of tea.

Television: We wrapped of The American Revolution, which was excellent overall, as have been the conversations with the GC and other friends who've watched. It's amazing how differently this history--and various aspects of it--are or are not taught depending on what school district you grew up in.

We kicked off the weekend with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was great fun to see in theaters and just as fun to watch at home. Doric and Holga are such great characters, as is Simon, but Xenk will always be my forever character from this movie.

The Fellowship of the Ring, which is a permanent winter movie for me (just as the book is a winter read). The characters look nothing like the characters in my head, but oh my god did Jackson get the look of the world down cold. And National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is one of those childhood movies that, like The Princess Bride, I could probably recite in real time.

The GC & I weren't planning on watching AEW: World's End this past Saturday, but then one of the Geek BBQers offered to host, and it turned out to be a really solid PPV with tons of good matches. I loved seeing Babes of Wrath and FTG get their wins; the Darby Allen/Gabe Kidd match was intense, Mox's storyline is coming out of the doldrums at last, and Joe, Swerve, and MJF are guaranteed fire whenever they're in the ring, let alone when they're in it together. It was a small watch group, only six people at its height, and one of them was a curiosity attendee who'd never watched wrestling before. But she is also a TRPGer and former gymnast who got it immediately, and it was a ton of fun watching her get into what AEW is about. On top of that, we got to commune with bonus cats.

The GC and I started Max Headroom: a rewatch for me and new show for the GC. Max Headroom is sadly, criminally, largely forgotten today...probably because of how freaking prescient it was. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely A Lot of vintage '80s elements in this series, but. This show really did predict the future in a lot of uncomfortable ways. Cambridge Analytica-style micro-segmenting of audiences? Yup. Novel digital technologies that literally kill people? Yup. Megacorporations covering it all up for profit? Yup.

"Wow," said the GC when we were about 15 minutes in, "this is just Cyberpunk 2077." And it is. "Wow," said the GC after Max Headroom made his first on-screen appearance, "that's just...Jim Carrey." And I'd never thought about it before, but he's right. Or more accurately, Jim Carrey stole his entire shtick from Matt Frewer's Headroom and no one acknowledges it. We started with the show (I can't find my copy of the movie) but we're already two episodes in and it still really holds up.

Video Games: It's been a bit of a rough week, so I've leaned heavily into two of my major comfort games: Botanicula and Thank Goodness You're Here. We also got--but have not started playing yet--Sea of Stars

これで以上です。

goodbyebird

+ I thiiiink I'm up to date on my comment replies? My inbox turned into a right mess with all the holiday emails thrown in, sorry if I've skipped over you.

+ Tis the time for End of Year Lists, and I enjoyed Every Sapphic Book I Read This Year by

Lesbiature.

+ I actually spotted the Beehive Books illuminated version of Carmilla in a local bookshop! I didn't know their fancy editions were becoming that widespread. I backed their very first kickstarter back in the day, happy to see they've expanded. Their editions are works of art. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for a sale so I can snap it up.

+ Finally installed Vegas Pro 22 I got from Humble Bundle, and there were separate ticky boxes for Vegas Pro and Deep Learning Model. I'm assuming that's their AI bullshit? If so, GOOD. Maybe I'll venture into discord again, most vidders have abandoned ship here and I'll very likely be in need of moral support. These gay vampires won't leave me alone and I may just have to do something about it. (this is 98% likely to never result in a finished vid, my track record is very conclusive)

+ Big shoutout to

lgbtrainbow for letting me do one icon at a time. Such a fun but also easy way to go about iconning. Though I now have three colors laying in wait for when they come back around lol. I am ready to pounce. Please join us and icon All The Gays.
(I may actually have an icon post before the year ends whee)

In the meantime I've written up not one but two tutorials based on earlier PSDs, because once again I'm having to re-learn how to make icons 🫠

❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
Rec-cember Day 29
Stranger Things
love is a battle i can win by

palmviolet (24,653 words). Christmas 1994. Nancy faces her fears. The sense of found family and friendship in this <3 (also another Christmas fic yay)
She taps the end of her ballpoint on her lip and looks idly around the terminal. The bank of seats she’s sitting on is empty. But as she watches, actually, someone comes down to sit a few seats away from her. It’s a woman, short-haired, in men’s trousers and a collared shirt. She’s got sharp eyes and freckles dusted over her cheeks; the shirt, open at the throat, shows off the hint of warm brown collarbones.

She doesn’t sit for long. Soon enough she spots someone entering the terminal and she jumps to her feet, the sort of raw delight emanating off her that’s hard to look at. She rushes forward and embraces the person. Another woman. And it’s 1994, and the world’s come a long way, but not long enough for them to kiss here in public, but Nancy can tell that they want to. She can just tell. And she doesn’t know where this sense came from, where she learned it or when. How does she know? How does she know that’s what they want to do?

Not because she’s felt that way herself. She remembers the few times she and Jonathan were apart for any length of time, the way she’d feel itchy and unsettled the whole duration and yet still strangely reluctant to see him return. She wouldn’t kiss him in the airport, though she’d kiss back if he kissed her. It was a problem of knowing neither how to live with him nor how to live without him; it was a problem they all experienced with each other, moving away from New Hawkins in dribs and drabs as they did. Joyce calling Jonathan four times a day and forgetting the time difference, waking them just as they went to bed. Nancy doing the same to Mike and Holly, just in the mornings.

She checks her watch. It’s eleven twenty-eight; she puts her notebook away and gets her things together, passing the two women on her way out, and she has to avert her eyes. She can’t look at them. Her cheeks are furiously hot.

merrileemakes posting in

booknook

Arms Race: And other stories By Nic Low

Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent who divides his time between Melbourne and Christchurch. His writing on wilderness, technology and race has been widely published and anthologised on both sides of the Tasman. His first book was Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd prizes, and named a New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review book of the year.

This was a real mixed bag of stories, not in quality or interest but in tone. They ranged from very speculative future dystopias to... I don't even know what the counter to spec fic is. Normie? Mundane? I can't remember the last time I read garden variety fiction. But one of the Low's mundane stories was a total riot - 'Rush' describes a group of First Nations Australians styling themselves as the Aboriginal Land Council of Minerals and digging up a war memorial in central Melbourne to prospect for gold. It was bang on in tone and hilarious in the way it perfectly captured the double standards and unconscious (or just fucking conscious, really) bias of colonised Australia. (hey remember the time when a brown muslim woman tweeted on ANZAC day about the human rights violations Australia was inflicting on (brown and mostly muslim) refugees and the backlash was so strong she lost her job, had to move house and eventually had to flee the country?)

I had to check to see when this book was published to work out which of the many sacred First Nations sites destroyed by the resources industry could have prompted this story, but considering the book is 11 years old there's too many to even consider.

I also really liked 'Facebook Redux', about a 70 year old millennial who digs up his old Facebook Profile to find his dead wife's old profile and gets scammed by Russian AR hackers. A really prescient story about what we broadcast online and how it can be used against us.

Low's style of not using quotation marks for speech was a bit challenging to get used to, but it was worth persevering to experience the depth and variety of these well-crafted stories.

5/5 stars. Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.

Current Music: Tuck Shop Ladies - Hi Vis

whimsyful

Once a Villain, by Vanessa Len

The third and final volume in the YA time travel urban fantasy Monsters trilogy, this definitely cannot be read without the previous two installments.

Continuing right where Never a Hero left off, the book starts off with main antagonist and Joan’s half-sister Eleanor having finally succeeded in creating a world where monsters rule over humans and she reigns over all, and the plot revolves around Joan and the othes desperately trying to find a way to undo this and return to the world they know.

First of all, I have to talk about that resolution to the love triangle—

major ending spoilers

I had suspicions from the structure of the earlier two books (ex. the division of page-time between the two male love interests) that Len might be going for a poly/throuple ending, but I wasn’t sure if she had the guts to go for it in a mainstream YA series. I’m very pleased to report that she did, in fact, have the guts to go for it! Even though generally the soulmate/predestined trope is not a romance trope I’m fond of, and having the predestined couple turn out to be actually be a predestined throuple all along only slightly mitigates my indifference, but otherwise I really liked how this played out. One of my worries was how she was going to flesh out the Nick/Aaron side of the throuple, but I thought Len managed to concisely convey the sense of a deep, intense relationship between the two in an alternate timeline, enough that I could buy the current versions working out—though I could have read an entire book about about gladiator!Nick and Scarlet Pimpernel!Aaron (hopefully the fanfic writers will tackle this).

The worldbuilding continues to be one of the most intriguing parts of this series, and in this installment I really liked the depiction of a dystopian alternate world where humans and part-humans were basically slaves. The time-travel continues to run on vibes and Doctor Who-esque rules, but I didn’t mind since we got some cool action sequences and juicy character interactions (in particular, I loved every instance where a character has to interact with a different timeline’s version of someone they cared about) out of it.

As for weaknesses, I thought Joan was a pretty reactive heroine in this book, and it did sometimes feel like she’s going along with the requirements of the plot instead of having a distinctive personality of her own that actively drives the plot forward. I also found the epilogue/ending to be a bit too unbelievably happy in terms how easily all the conflict between human and monster society were resolved—I would have preferred if it ended more on a hopeful work-in-progress instead. And as with the previous two books, I felt like the prose could have been prettier on a sentence-by-sentence level.

But overall, I quite enjoyed this trilogy, and thought Len explored some pretty cool ideas even if she didn’t 100% stick the landing. I’m definitely looking forward to her future works!

Goodbye, My Princess by Fei Wo Si Cun (trans. Tianshu)

A bit of an odd duck of a book. Translated Chinese webnovels have been steadily growing in popularity in the Anglosphere, but most of these are danmei (M/M). I’ve seen this book marketed as YA het fantasy romance, despite 1) covering some pretty mature topics (liked forced abortion), 2) there being exactly one fantastical element in the setting—a magical amnesia-granting river—and is otherwise full on historical fiction, and 3) having an infamous tragic ending, which would preclude this from being considered a romance by Western genre conventions. What this really is, is a tragic romance, and an excellent example of the genre.

mild spoilers under the cut

The plot: Xiaofeng is a cheerful, naive young princess from the desert kingdom of Xiliang who has been in a loveless arranged marriage with Li Chengyin, the crown prince of the Li empire, for the last three years. It has not been a happy union—Li Chengyin alternately fights with Xiaofeng or ignores her in favor of his preferred noble consort, and Xiaofeng mainly copes with the stifling nature of court life by crossdressing and sneaking out of the palace to roam the city with her faithful maid/bodyguard A’du. Then one day she encounters a stranger who claims to be her lost love from a life Xiaofeng can no longer remember. As Xiaofeng tries to piece together what had happened in the past, she and her husband finally start growing closer, but what she doesn’t realize is how truly brutal the royal court is, and that some memories are better left forgotten.

The entire main story is told entirely from Xiaofeng’s first person narration, which was a very effective and immersive choice. She is a naive, kind-hearted and trusting person stuck with limited language and cultural fluency in a foreign court stuffed to the brim with schemes and intrigues, and everyone knows it. So you only get a glimpse of all the political intrigue as they all fly completely over her head (these schemes only get explained in full in the epilogue/side stories told by the side characters) and have to try to figure out for yourself what’s actually going on. There is also an excellently done character progression as she slowly loses her innocence and happiness and is ground down into despair—her voice starts off rather silly and childish and then grows both more mature and much more sad.

The author Fei Wo Si Cun has a reputation for angsty, obsessive, incredibly asshole male leads who are basically a forest of walking red flags. But it worked very well for me in this story because it becomes very clear after a certain point that the male lead Li Chengyin is also the main villain and primary antagonist of the story. In fact, the book can be seen as a deconstruction of the common “kind-hearted naive princess marries a cold ruthless prince from an enemy kingdom and then they fall in love” trope/storyline. Li Chengyin is incredibly ruthless and cunning because that was the only way to survive the intrigues of the royal court and stay alive as crown prince. Xiaofeng’s warm and open-hearted personality is like catnip to someone with his personality, but being a monster who loves only one person does not make him any less a monster, and so he loves her but he also destroys everything that she loves, and it all ends in tears.

Overall, recommended if you’re in the mood for what’s essentially a perfect tragedy, starring a pair of lovers so doomed even being granted a clean slate and a second chance by Fate is not enough.

A note about the translation: the English translation is by Tianshu, and this is one of the best Chinese-English translations that I’ve read recently. There is no awkward “translationese” or jerky sentences—the prose flows smoothly and is downright lovely in many parts, and overall feels like a labor of love. I also liked the choice to link footnotes to all the bits of classical Chinese poetry that’s quoted in text. The one choice I’m puzzled by is the change in structure; the original novel (or at least the version I found online) had 42 chapters in the main story, plus some bonus chapters that are snippets from the POV of certain side characters (these are technically not necessary to read but highly recommended). The English translation aggregates the text into four very long chapters/parts instead, plus the bonus side stories. I’m not sure why Tianshu decided on this grouping, as this means there is no easy point to take a break in the middle of a very long part compared to the original.

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (trans. Faelicy & Lily)

My first danmei cnovel, and I had a great time! About Shen Yuan, a young man who hate-read the entirety of a super popular and clichéd cultivation harem webnovel and died while in the middle of raging about how terrible the writing and plot holes are...only to wake up having transmigrated into said webnovel, as the villainous mentor who will face a brutal end by the OP Gary Stu male protagonist. Now he has to somehow get into the guy's good graces to avoid his canon fate and fix the original novel's plot holes...and of course this being danmei he accidentally changes the romance from M/F one-dude-with-a-massive-harem to M/M along the way.

Shen Yuan's running commentary mocking the the cliches of the hackneyed harem cultivation webnovel he's been unwillingly transmigrated into were hilarious, and I also loved every instance where he had to stay in character as this cool and unmoved master while internally swearing and freaking out. He's also a very funny example of an incredibly unreliable narrator.

My only complaints were that 1) I wish the female characters got more to do (not unexpected for a danmei, but it’s still disappointing to have several intriguing and layered male side characters whereas all the side female characters are much more flat in comparison) and 2) that sex scene sure was...something. Still, this was incredibly fun to read, and I'm definitely going to check out MXTX's other works!

maevedarcy

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

shadowkat

It was hazy and rainy all day, until I got home and the clouds parted and sun swam through along with gale force winds. Brrr.

So today, cubicle wall mate aka Art History Major (AHM) and I were discussing Broadway shows. Apparently they had seen Hades Town and it went over their head, they didn't get it at all. (Hades Town is a musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth).
( Read more... )

Why can't I find people offline that like/love the same things I do? It shouldn't be this hard?

****

In other news...I decided to listen to and kind of watch the 60 Minutes expose of the El Salvador Prison from Hell - that the Trump Administration is sending all these people to. After CBS yanked the segment from the US's 60 Minutes broadcast yet somehow forgot to yank it from Canada's broadcast - where it accidentally aired, got leaked on the internet and subsquently went viral. It was leaked repeatedly on the internet by various folks (as often happens with banned and censored content that people know about) - and as a result - is now the most watched episode or segment of 60 Minutes and by the most people since 60 Minutes inception. (That's kind of huge, 60 Minutes goes back to...1968, so it's roughly 57 years of age. And it's certainly had huge stories in the past - it first aired during the Vietnam War and prior to Watergate). It's the curiosity factor. I admittedly watched for the same reasons. (And I wouldn't have - if it aired on CBS as previously planned - since I've not consistently watch 60 minutes in ages.)

Internet: 1
CBS (aka Skydance Media): 0

I found it on Instagram. They keep yanking it from Youtube, so folks put up their own recordings of it on TikTock and share on Instagram. It's really hard to censor things in the age of the Internet. We have too many social media platforms, and folks perfected the art of sharing censored or banned content back in the early 00s, while they were in junior high and undergrads in college. They know how to share stuff. I know how to find and share stuff, and I'm not techie in the least.

I don't think I need to go into the gory details? ( sigh a brief summary and my reaction )

***

It's windy here, but no rain at least. My knee still hurts whenever I go up or down steps. Considering it is multiple flights of steps, this makes sense. I have managed to limit it a little - by no longer switching trains at 4ths and 9th Streets. I also rescheduled my hair appointment for late February - to avoid the steps at that stop for as long as possible. Icing three times a day. Doing my exercises. Hopefully it will improve. I live in fear of the MRI.

***

Angel S3 - Episode 6 - Billy - is oddly enough one of the better episodes of the series. Small wonder - it was written by Tim Minear and Jeffrey Bell.

The episode is perfect noir thriller, except for one thing? It is a wicked and biting critique of the noir genre - by exposing the misogyny within it, calling it out, and giving it a ripe spanking. I was impressed. Not only does it comment on the misogyny in our society and culture (which both series do rather well and at a time period in which that rarely happened - this was 2001 before the Me#Too Movement), it also manages to move forward various character arcs, and set up two new star crossed romances that span the series. This episode blew me away - I'd forgotten it - and is a great companion piece to That Vision Thing (Episode 2 of S3).
( spoilers )

Buffy S6

I'm rather enjoying these initial episodes. I always did. The middle is the weak portion of the season. And I see the cracks in the various couples romantic lives.

Putting a pin in that.

It's late and I need to go to bed.

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22degreehalo in fancake - The Turning Universe by Jae Gecko
fanweeklymod in fandomweekly - [#284 | Home for the Holidays] Voting Post
chestnut_pod - A whole entire year's worth of nonfiction
ysabetwordsmith - Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, January 6, 2026
mossy_bench - Tame-ish Fannish Ambitions (Jan. 2026)
ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "Trees of Glass"
viridian5 - Curl into a ball like you have more fun
maevedarcy - Quick Update
ysabetwordsmith - Activism
sineala - Heated Rivalry
devilc - XOver: FNL-Justifed CH 11
ysabetwordsmith - Today's Adventures
bluapapilio - Anime Check-in: Cardfight!! Vanguard ep. 6-9
enchanted_jae in adventdrabbles - Day 29, Harry Potter, Harry/Draco, Bundled Up Against the Cold
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goodbyebird - (no subject)
merrileemakes in booknook - Review: Arms Race: And other stories by Nic Low
whimsyful - Recent Reading: Asian Fantasy + Romance
maevedarcy - End of the Year Reading Update
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[#284 | Home for the Holidays] Voting Post

A whole entire year's worth of nonfiction

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Tame-ish Fannish Ambitions (Jan. 2026)

Poem: "Trees of Glass"

Curl into a ball like you have more fun

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XOver: FNL-Justifed CH 11

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Anime Check-in: Cardfight!! Vanguard ep. 6-9

Day 29, Harry Potter, Harry/Draco, Bundled Up Against the Cold

Monday Media - December 29 Edition

(no subject)

Review: Arms Race: And other stories by Nic Low

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End of the Year Reading Update

Monday Monday....Rainy Days and Mondays...

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