juushika

Yet more Robert/Chris Goes Wrong fanfiction! And, yet again, I have managed to sneak Robert banging Chris's mother in here. It's my favourite thing.

Title: The Verge
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: 14
Pairing: Robert/Chris, with some Robert/Celia
Wordcount: 3,500
Summary: Chris steels himself. “Do you ever feel something might... happen between us?”

( The Verge )

rachelmanija

Ezra, an Ojibwe teenager, has to flee Minneapolis when the home of the racist teenager who bullied him burns down, and he becomes the prime suspect. He goes to Canada to run traplines with his grandfather.

Where Wolves Don't Die is mostly a coming of age story; the thriller/mystery element is present but minor. It was recommended to me "Like an Ojibwe Hatchet," which definitely captures a lot of the vibe though it's about learning in community and family rather than isolation. Ezra goes from boy to man while he learns the old ways with his grandfather, who he loves. It's engrossing and moving. I liked that Ezra actively wants to stay with and learn from his grandfather rather than resisting it and having to come around.

Content notes: Hunting and trapping is central to the story.

osprey_archer

(I actually wrote this review before my trip, then ran out of time to post it.)

Sometimes you just know, just from looking at a book’s cover, that this book is in some way For You. Such is the case with Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, with its Jon Klassen cover of a fox standing on a wooded hill gazing across a plain at a sunset. I’ve looked at this book for years and always meant to read it and somehow never quite picked it up.

But at last I’ve read it, and I was correct that it IS for me, full of solid fox action (which you would expect from the cover) and also surprisingly serious musings about war (which you would not guess from the cover, but it works).

War is coming to the country. Which country? The country, which is similar to America but perhaps not America. With whom? The enemy. What for? The water. Why? Because the humans are war-sick. This vagueness might not work for me in a different book, but here it works well to highlight the destructiveness of war, not only for people but for the land and the animals.

Peter’s father has joined the army. Since Peter’s mother is dead, he’s going to live with his grandfather, which means he needs to get rid of his pet fox Pax. So Peter’s father drives him to an isolated road, and Peter throws Pax’s favorite toy into the woods, and Pax chases after it.

But as soon as Peter arrives at his grandfather’s house, he realizes he’s made a horrible mistake. There’s nothing for it: he’s got to run away and trek cross-country to find Pax.

Meanwhile, Pax intends to sit by the side of the road and wait for his boy. But hunger and thirst force him to begin exploring the forest, where he meets other foxes… and they discover that the human armies are drawing closer.

Really enjoyed this. Great fox POV. There’s a sequel, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Pax lives. Don’t want to give too many spoilers, but I found Peter’s journey unexpected and satisfying, and Pax’s journey pretty much what you might expect from that summary but also satisfying. Sometimes stories hit certain beats for a reason, you know?

tamaranth

2026/041: Temeraire — Naomi Novik

You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it. [p. 196]

Audiobook reread: I first read this as an arc in 2005, and reread in 2019. I still love this book a great deal, and had a better sense of the pacing when I listened to the familiar procession of events. Splendidly read by Simon Vance, who gives Temeraire a very slight 'foreign' accent, perhaps hinting at his mysterious origins. I'm so tempted to buy the audiobooks of the whole series...

Current Mood: cheerful

thawrecka

In my rewatch I reached my favourite ever episode of Prince of Tennis -- the one where Kaidoh gets amnesia from a tennis ball to the head, and starts to act like a cat. Cured, of course, by another tennis ball to the end.

It's brilliant, amazing, just as good as I remembered. I laughed just as hard tonight as I did 20 years ago!

mrissa

This is more partial even than usual, because I've had some download problems that I've since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.

This Is Not a Love Poem, Alexandra Dawson (Reckoning)

I Met You On the Train, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)

The Doorkeepers, A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)

Unsettled Nature, Jordan Kurella (Apex)

Straw Gold, Mari Ness (Small Wonders)

No Kings/No Soldiers, A.M. Tuomala (Uncanny)

Blade Through the Heart, Carrie Vaughn (Reactor)

Antediluvian, Rem Wigmore (Reckoning)

rachelmanija

An epistolatory novel about the friendship between an American Jew, Max, and a German, Martin. As Hitler rises to power, their relationship sours, in some expected ways and some less expected, as their characters are revealed.

Very short, very powerful, very technically skilled, a quick easy read with an unexpected and unforgettable outcome. Seriously, don't click on spoilers if there's any chance you'll read the book. That being said, I read it because Naomi Kritzer told me the whole story and it was still great. Thanks for the rec!

The book was published in 1939 under a male-sounding pseudonym, but the style feels almost modern and the themes feel incredibly modern. There's an afterword about what inspired the book, which which is worth reading. Taylor had some German friends who seemed like kind, wonderful people, who became fervent Nazis and abandoned their Jewish friends. In a question so many of us are asking now, she wondered, What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?

( Read more... )

osprey_archer

I have returned from my travels! In fact I returned a few days ago, but have been busy with post-trip errands/releasing Diary of a Cranky Bookworm/convincing the cats that I still love them despite CRUELLY ABANDONING them; and therefore have not had time to post.

Lovely trip! Started in Boston, where I stayed with

skygiants and

genarti and watched the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (emotionally destroyed me, will post about it later) and also various movies from TWO perfectly timed film festivals, one featuring films by Katherine Hepburn and the other featuring Spunky Girl Reporters, about which films I will ALSO post later. Crushed that I didn't get to see Katherine Hepburn as a Girl Athlete in Mike and Pat but I simply could not spend ALL my time watching movies. Other Boston highlights:

1. At long last, I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner! Loved the mix of artworks from different places and periods and media - an entire corner devoted to lacework! some excellent tapestries! beautiful musical instruments, and I so hope that sometimes the museum has concerts where these lovely instruments get played. Loved the lack of labels so you can just drift about absorbing without getting bogged down with facts. Delicious Italian Renaissance courtyard. A bit disappointed that you couldn't wander through the garden the way you can in the Cloisters. Happy to report that for once the museum store had postcards of almost all my favorite paintings!

2. Much good food! We picked up cakes and chocolates at Burdick's, croissants at Lakon Paris, and a Pi Day special of FOUR pies, three savory and one sweet. Also an amazing afternoon tea at the Courtyard Tea Room at the Boston Public Library, followed by a repeat visit to all the murals (I think the Galahad cycle is my favorite although Sargent is also spectacular) plus a side trip to a room with some delightful dioramas of Famous Artists at Work.

3. The USS Constitution! A very suitable excursion for Year of Sail, especially on point because the ship just got a little cameo near the end of Hornblower and the Hotspur. Loved being actually inside the ship and seeing the hammocks crowded in, the galley in the middle of the deck, the lieutenants' little cubicles and the captain's larger quarters with an actual bed, albeit quite a narrow one, note that down for fic purposes.

And then away we went to meet up with

asakiyume at the Yiddish Book Center, where

skygiants and

genarti handed me over for the second part of my journey. We toured the Yiddish Book Center, made a cranberry-pecan tart, visited Bright Water Bog--

This link takes you to

asakiyume's entry with pictures of the ice forming on the bog. It also mentions eating the cranberries cold from the bog water and the absolute delight of a swing hung between two pines by the waterside. Absolute thrill. Nothing in the world like a swing.

We also hit up the Smith College Spring Bulb Show, a welcome infusion of color and light after a long cold winter. And we made some of the decadently rich hot chocolate from Burdick's, hot chocolate so thick it's practically chocolate sauce (in fact I ate/drank most of it by dipping croissants in), and watched Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers and My Father's Dragon, about which more anon...

Simply a delightful trip!

tamaranth

2026/040: Enshittification — Cory Doctorow

Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet ...is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet. [introduction]

Audiobook, read (with vigour and enthusiasm) by the author. Doctorow's foundational argument is something most internet users will agree with: that big internet sites, such as Facebook, Amazon, and the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, have become much less usable and user-friendly over recent years. (I would add Del.icio.us, Vinted, Goodreads, LiveJournal...)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: angry

siderea

Boston locals! Blue Heron, an acapella early music ensemble, is throwing a three-day shindig to celebrate Guillaume de Machaut (died 1377), May 1-3, mostly involving talks about Machaut's works, talks about his lyrics, talks about the illuminations in the manuscripts his works come from, concerts of his music, and also a little ars subtilior tacked on the end just because.

More info https://www.blueheron.org/machaut-weekend/

Affordability note: They have a free ticket option as part of the "Card to Culture program" for people with EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare(!) cards*, and a discounted "low cost" option.

Of note, the "Opening Festivities: Keynote, Performance & Sing-Along" on Friday night includes (emphasis mine):

a keynote talk by one of the world’s leading scholars of 14th-century music, Anne Stone (CUNY Graduate Center), performances of pieces in several of the genres represented in Machaut’s oeuvre, and a sing-along of the Kyrie from the Messe de Nostre Dame.

Which: huh. Huh. The Kyrie, huh? Wow. Now that is certainly a choice. I commend their bravery. Were I in better health, I would consider showing up just to be in on the shenanigans.

If you're curious what the Kyrie from Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame sounds and looks like, here you go.

* There is no separate ConnectorCare card like there is for MassHealth. They mean your regular insurance card, which if it's a ConnectorCare plan should say so on it, or so the Mass Cultural Council, whose program it is, thinks.

siderea

The YouTube algorithm pseudorandomly served me this, thereby answering the question I'd had on a distant back burner forever, "Hey, didn't I hear something about colored cotton cultivars once upon a time? Cotton that you didn't need to dye? Like back in the 90s?"

If you are a fellow fiber freak or interested in agriculture or organic crops or the underappreciated problem of sustainable clothing production, you may find this as fascinating as I did:

2026 Mar 7: Good Yarn Bad Knits [goodyarnbadknits YT]: "The Yarn That Almost Saved The World"

Watch on YouTube

rionaleonhart

By wordcount, The Goes Wrong Show is now my fifth most written fandom of all time, even discounting the fifty-plus Goes Wrong fills I wrote for the Three-Sentence Ficathon. This is an insane development; I started writing for this fandom two and a half months ago. Everything else in the top five is something I've been into for a decade or more.

I wonder what's made me fall so hard into writing for this fandom; slapstick stage plays are not my usual fandom fare! My best guess is that it's a combination of factors:

- There's enough Goes Wrong canon for me to get to know and care about the characters, but, at the same time, there is not enough Goes Wrong canon to satisfy me, so I'm uncontrollably driven to create more.

- In particular, there's very little Goes Wrong canon that shows the characters offstage! There's enough to get me interested in what happens offstage, and a couple of fascinatingly insane canonical details about the characters' personal lives (I am never going to be over the fact that Robert has canonically slept with both Chris and Dennis's mothers), but their offstage lives are left as a largely blank canvas that I can't resist painting on. There's a very obvious stretch of unexplored territory, and that sort of thing is always going to invite fanworks.

- Although this is a small fandom and my fics for it don't generally get a large readership, it's got enough life and passion in it to feel like I'm sharing with an enthusiastic small community, rather than dropping my work into a void. I've received a lot of really lovely comments, which have been very encouraging ♥

- I find Robert and Chris's voices very easy to get into. They're both middle-class, English and inclined towards slightly pretentious and/or old-fashioned phrasing, and, let's be honest, so am I.

- I'm very attracted to Robert Grove (as played by Henry Lewis), which is a fun novelty; it's pretty rare for me to find anyone seriously attractive. As a consequence, my writing about him has a refreshingly genuine horniness that I hadn't realised was lacking in a lot of my shipfic! It's very easy for me to write about Chris being attracted to Robert, and to believe wholeheartedly in that attraction, however unhappy Chris might be about it.

- Robert Grove is just a very fun character to write. I think a large part of it is as simple as that. He's loud, he's imposing, he's larger-than-life, he blithely causes problems for everyone, and everything he says or does is ridiculous. Plus he's straightforward in a way that proves extremely handy when writing shipfic; I've often had to struggle with characters who refuse to acknowledge their own feelings or dance endlessly around each other, so it's refreshing to write a character who will decide 'we should have sex' and then make that opinion very clear.

- It's been a long time since I last got heavily into a comedy fandom, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to write comedy!

I'm so glad I was introduced to this stupid show. This is the best time I've had in a fandom in years.

siderea

[requires both audio and video]

Jonasquin on YT (previously) has written a wholly original motet in the 16th century style after Desprez upon the cantus firmus "Seven Nations Army", for the words of Psalm 10, verses 2, 3, 7-11.

Comment would be superfluous.

2026 Mar 20: Jonasquin YT: "A 16th century motet for the US President"

Watch on YouTube

Click through to the video on YT to see the translation in the description.

primeideal

( link contains actual spoilers, this is not really spoilery )

siderea

I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why:

2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat. Ada Palmer [DwarkeshPatel YT]: "Why Medieval Books Cost as Much as a House" (1 min, 7 sec):

Watch on YouTube

Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book hand written costs as much as a house.

And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris, the library from Europe's perspective, has 600 books.

There's definitely more than 600 books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing.

And at the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books.* There are libraries in China with thousands of books. Because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus.

Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.

* Three hundred thousand. It's been thirteen years and I am still not remotely over that fact. Every time I encounter it anew, my SCA persona gets acrophobic trying to imagine a library that big and has to sit down and put her head between her knees so she doesn't pass out.

siderea

The previously expected ICE enforcement surge never materialized. Curious.

I wonder if this just means they're short-staffed. Or perhaps distracted.

(I also wonder if somebody made a judgment call not to try what they did in MN in MA, but have largely rejected the notion. It would not be to anybody's advantage if they did, on either side, but I'm not seeing a lot of good judgment in evidence anywhere.)

rionaleonhart

I think this is the worst title I've ever given a fic.

Fun fact: I've now officially posted an entire quarter of the Robert/Chris fanfiction on AO3. I think this means there's not enough Robert/Chris fanfiction on AO3.

Title: Mixed Beans
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: 14
Pairing: Robert/Chris, with references to Robert/Celia
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: Robert books a romantic getaway with Chris's mother. There is a misunderstanding.

( Mixed Beans )

osprey_archer

My new book is out! Diary of a Cranky Bookworm has been in the works since 2011, undergoing a long and meandering composition process, and it's a bit of a shock to realize that it's actually out there in the world. Go little book go!

Diary of a Cranky Bookworm cover

May 12, 2012

Dear Diary,

DISASTER. I thought college application essays were bad enough, but now I have to write a summary of my diary??? Horrifying. I’m just a high school senior in a small town in Minnesota, getting up to shenanigans with my friends, retreating to my Treehouse to daydream about slipping into a portal fantasy, and discovering to my horror that my long-time nemesis is maybe, possibly, actually a delight.

And I might be a little bit in love with her.

Which is an unwelcome Realization, as it is sure to cut disgracefully into my reading time. And that’s already in short supply, in between college applications and AP calc and my friend Arielle who always thinks she’s in crisis maybe actually being in crisis for real.

Is that enough of a summary? I sure hope so, because it’s time to meet Georgie for our weekly trip to the library!

rachelmanija

This spooky ghost story has a central pairing that I feel like I may have requested as an original work: Widow/Female Fake Psychic/Ghost of a Female Bog Body.

My Darling Dreadful Thing is set in the Netherlands in the 1950s, which is a selling point all by itself as I love unusual settings. Roos is a young woman whose abusive fake psychic mother forces her to participate in her fake seances. But though Roos does not communicate with the spirits sought by the desperate, grieving customers, she actually does have a spirit companion, a bog body whom Roos has bound to her and named Ruth.

Roos is delighted when Agnes, a biracial (Indonesian/Dutch) widow, takes her as a companion and spirits her away to her neglected Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is otherwise occupied only by Agnes's sister-in-law, Willamine, who is dying of tuberculosis, and has a marvellously bizarre Gothic history. Roos falls hard in love with Agnes, with whom she has a surprising amount in common.

But this whole story is being told in retrospect, as a series of interviews Roos is having with a psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she's mentally fit to stand trial for murder. Something very bad happened at the mansion...

( Read more... )

Very enjoyable, very gothic, very atmospheric. I'm excited to read van Veen's other two books. I looked her up to see if she's actually from the Netherlands (yes) and learned that she's one of a set of non-identical triplet sisters! I don't think I've ever read a book by a triplet before.

cupcake_goth

Work yesterday left me incredibly frustrated. The ducks that are nibbling me to death have mutated to giant size and with razor-sharp beaks. Because I was so frustrated, I decided I needed to reread one of the most disturbing sets of Hannibal AU fics I've ever encountered: A Gifted Student and A Letter to My Abuser. They're gorgeously, awfully written. (If you decide to read them, pay close attention to the tags oh god pay close attention to them.)

A Letter to My Abuser is, in some ways, the harder read for me, because when I first read it I tried to figure out why I identified so hard with a side character; Ollie, so giddy to meet his literary idol, but forcibly warned/ran off by this AU version of Will Graham. When I read it last night, my brain went "ohhhhh, yeah, Neil Gaiman", and then I had to read some fluffy fic to scrub my brain.

I hope his victims get closure. And that they win the legal actions against him, because they deserve the money they're suing for.

---

EDITED TO ADD: I used to subscribe to FKAHerSweetness' Ko-Fi, as she left Ao3 and only posted her fic behind a paywall. I eventually ended my subscription because as time went on, I didn't enjoy how she wrote Will. She writes AUs only, and more power to her, but they became something I didn't want to read.

Profile

juushika

March 2026

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

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Reading

Fanfiction: The Verge (The Goes Wrong Show, Robert/Chris)

Where Wolves Don't Die, by Anton Treuer

Book Review: Pax

2026/041: Temeraire — Naomi Novik

(no subject)

Short stuff I've liked, first quarter 2026

Address Unknown, by Kathrine Kressman Taylor

Back from Massachusetts!

2026/040: Enshittification — Cory Doctorow

Syncopated tritone hockets for everybody! [early music, MA]

Foxfibre [text/ag]

Unhand Me, You Fiend.

"Dum superbit impius" [music, pols]

Very minor spoilers for "Project Hail Mary" (book and movie)

The cost of literacy [medieval hist]

Massachusetts not the next? [Ω, MA/US]

Fanfiction: Mixed Beans (The Goes Wrong Show, Robert/Chris)

Diary of a Cranky Bookworm release

My Darling Dreadful Thing, by Johanna van Veen

(no subject)

Profile

March 2026

Expand Cut Tags

Tags

Style Credit