Finished since the last reading post
The Lost Abbot, with a suitably large and confusing number of deaths during Matthew and friends' stay in Peterborough looking for the abbot who seems to have disappeared.

Also finished The End of Innocence. It was good, a mix of personal stories interspersed with the more factual narrative. With it being a book originally published in the mid-1990s and reprinted in 2021, as a reader you have a different point of view than the first readers at the time.

Currently reading
In the middle of The Instrumentalist Harriet Constable, which I'm really enjoying. And have just about made a start on The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

Reading next
Not sure

After five months and eight appointments, the tooth that started troubling me in June now has its permanent crown. The fitting it today was a bit trickier than I or the dentist had imagined, but we got there in the end. We have a health-related cashback benefit at work so I finally put the paperwork together and submitted a claim. Usually, it's just a question of attaching your receipt and that's it, but with so many appointments and payments made in stages, I ended up putting together an entire document in addition to a scan of the treatment plan and scans of the receipts. Not sure if it works out, and even when it does, it's not going to be anywhere near the entire cost of treatment, with my cover being just at the basic level where I don't pay anything extra.

I think I'm due a normal check-up soon, but perhaps that will be pushed forward with the number of times I've been at the dentist over the past months.

This morning brought sunshine, slightly hazy, but absolutely gorgeous nonetheless. I ventured out for some parkrun tourism and it was great to be out in that sunshine, even if the wind was rather brisk and chilly.

My train from Edinburgh departed at midday, so I didn't really have time for anything apart from parkrun. The journey was uneventful and I spent it reading. And the cross-London transfer and train journey home were equally unremarkable. There were some delays and changes on GWR trains after Storm Claudia, but that didn't really affect me, as I'd always aim for whichever would depart next. All the issues were apparently further west down the line.

Today, I started my day by heading out to the National Galleries Modern. There's actually Modern One and Modern Two, but I only went to the former. There are some sculptures outside, too. Like the name suggests, the art on display is from 1900 onwards or so, mostly organised thematically. Very enjoyable. I had lunch there before taking the steps down from the museum to the riverside and following the Water of Leith walkway for a while for my walk back towards the city centre. There's an Antony Gormley sculpture in the river, and a riverside AIDS memorial.

Before going to the National Museum of Scotland, I made detour to the National Galleries National shop. At the National Museum, there was so much to see I barely made it through two areas.

The weather today was a clear improvement on yesterday: clear and bright if not particularly sunny, although breezier and a bit colder than yesterday. It had cleared rained during the time I'd been in the National Museum, and there was some more before I made it back to where I'm staying. I probably don't have time for anything much tomorrow before my train south departs.

The main plotline of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) alone -- with no sidequests, exploration, minigames, or collections -- takes ~50 hours. So, roughly, 2 old-fashioned US TV seasons of 22-26 episodes or 3-4 epic Peter Jackson movies. Here's that plot, summarized:

( Massive spoilers )

Last night, instead of starting to settle for the night I headed out to travel to London Euston to catch Caledonian Sleeper to Edinburgh. I got onboard soon after it opened after 10.30pm and settled down to sleep fairly soon, but wasn't really asleep when we departed a quarter to midnight. I slept rather fitfully and when my alarm went off at seven in the morning I thought there was something odd going on. It took me a little while to figure out what it was from what was hearing and what Caledonian Sleeper had messaged. We were being held at Carlisle because the line was blocked ahead. The reason was initially cited as a broken-down train, later they suggested the breakdown was related to flooding on the line. In any case, we stood at Carlisle long enough that the Edinburgh portion ended up arriving over two hours behind schedule. That was actually fine with me, as I'd been wondering what I'd do in the morning if it was raining heavily and I'd have two hours to kill. In the end, I just took my bigger bag to left luggage and headed straight out to the National Galleries of Scotland, the National, and enjoyed looking at art there. After it, I went to St. Giles and had a look around and did some walking about at the castle end of the Royal Mile. And then went to the castle, where I had the official guided tour, followed by visiting some of the buildings at the site. Even on a grey rainy day, the views were wonderful. And although rain made it harder to just enjoy walking around, it wasn't anything I hadn't expected and the forecast for tomorrow is better.

The last two Forever Knight episodes I went through were fairly meh. So I found myself pleased to get to "The Fix," a much better episode (on the vampire side of the story, at least; the cop side, not so much).

A cure! At last! But... not really. Ups and downs. And Nick eats another guy's lunch. Rude!

( Read more... )

Finished since the last reading post
Co-intelligence by Ethan Mollick, which was OK. It's subtitled Living and working with AI, so that's what it does, proposing principles of how to adopt AI and the roles you can usefully cast into—as a coworker, tutor, and so on.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, with Jackson trying to find the biological family of a woman whose adoptive parents moved from Yorkshire to New Zealand when she was a baby, and feeling he's not really getting anywhere, totally unaware of all the other changes happening in the lives of the people who he needs to talk to. This book kept surprising me.

Currently reading
Started reading The Lost Abbot by Susanna Gregory, where Matthew and company are in Peterborough looking for the abbot who's disappeared but many assume is already dead. No progress with anything else, I don't think.

Reading next
I've packed one more book for this week's trip but mostly just keeping with the books I'm already reading.

(batdina, this is to your address. ~grin~)

I realized today that when I started engaging with The Legend of Zelda (TLOZ) in a fanfic kind of way, and mentioning it here, I did it with no overview or explanation, as if you all either necessarily already knew or wouldn't care to know. Please let me remedy that now! :-D

The Legend of Zelda is a Tolkien-inspired Japanese RPG video game franchise with 21 main-series games and many spin-offs since it appeared in 1986. I played the first game on a relative's console in, I think, '89. A live-action movie is coming in 2026; I'm anxious. (At least it must be better than the regretted '89 cartoon.)

The different games tell different tales. They combine puzzle-solving, combat, and exploration gameplay to unfold a story and theme. To grotesquely and unfairly oversimplify, Ocarina of Time is about nostalgia and loss and consequences; Majora's Mask is about fate and loss and meaning; Tears of the Kingdom is about community and loss and rebuilding; Twilight Princess is about identity and loss and choice; Link's Awakening is about reality and loss and truth...

The usual setting is the kingdom of Hyrule and its surrounds. The usual leads are Link, the hero, representing courage; Zelda, the princess, representing wisdom; and Ganondorf, the villain, representing power. The most important macguffins are the Master Sword, aka the sword that seals the darkness, and the Triforce, a sacred embodiment of the energy of divine creation balanced as courage, wisdom, and power. Most Hyruleans are ordinary humans, if usually with pointy ears, dividing themselves into sub-groups by region or culture. There are also several other sentient species. This universe has technology, magic, divinities, and demons.

While some of the games are direct sequels to others, most happen hundreds or even thousands of years apart, and so are both fully-functional standalone stories and intricate parts of a complex canon web. The games have not come out in chronological order. The timeline is controversial; it begins in unison, splits into three AU lines, and then those three lines eventually reunify.

The various Links, Zeldas, and Ganondorfs -- and other recurring characters -- throughout the games may or may not be reincarnations or descendants of each other even within the same timeline. All Zeldas are descendants of the goddess Hylia (Skyward Sword). We have had blonde, brunette, and red-haired Zeldas. Only one Link is known to be a descendant of another Link (Twilight Princess); we know of once that there were two Links alive at the same time (The Minish Cap). We have had blond and brunet, tall and short, child and adult Links. Every Ganondorf so far has been born to the Gerudo people, at least one century apart, with a similar build and coloring.

All* mainline TLOZ games are well-regarded in the gaming community, nominated for or winning awards as well as usually selling well. A few are universally considered masterpieces. These days, most fanficcy fans are into Breath of the Wild, its sequel Tears of the Kingdom, and their two non-mainline spin-offs, Age of Calamity and Age of Imprisonment, which wrap non-TLOZ gameplay around TLOZ story cores.

Thank you for joining me on this tour. I appreciate it! :-D

* Okay, okay, maybe not so much Tri Force Heroes, Four Swords Adventures, Spirit Tracks, and Phantom Hourglass. But I think that Spirit Tracks is underrated.

... but the next project has progressed to the point I cut the pattern pieces today. There was a moment of concern when I started cutting the pieces from the rib as I'd thought I'd ordered more than I needed, but I realised I hadn't accounted for the narrow width. There was just enough in the end, though, so I don't have to scramble for more right now. I didn't proceed to sewing yet as I wanted to make some progress on the jumper I'm knitting.

In other news, yesterday, after coming back from the cinema, watched the new Time Team episode, covering a couple of summers of digging at the abbey at Cerne Abbas.

I've been reading a lot of stuff for class, including articles and on-topic chapters from various books. But I also managed to finish some of my books in the past couple of months.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: I really enjoyed this fantasy novel about a demon and the city that she loves and considers hers. Nghi Vo is a favorite and this was so good. I loved the characters and the descriptions, and the worldbuilding was really topnotch.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: this is a re-read, inspired by brightknightie's mention of it in her post re new vampire media community. This book precedes Stoker's Dracula by 25 years or so, and while I do like Dracula better, this is a really interesting early sapphic vampire story and worth checking out.

What You Are Looking For is in the Library: by Michiko Aoyama: this was a nice read. Like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this novel is a series of vignettes about different people who visit the same library, where they find books, etc. that change their lives. There is some interaction between people from different vignettes at times, but for the most part, each one is a standalone story about the particular character. The book is well-written and the individual stories are quite lovely and sweet. I actually decided to read this book because I liked the cat on the cover, lol, not because I had any idea what it was about. I'm leaning toward more plot-based fiction these days, so while I enjoyed this and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I don't really need to read more of these types of books.

Up Next/Already Started Reading:

A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo: one of my favorite authors, this novella is #6 in the Singing Hills cycle.

The Double Tax by Anna Gifty Opoku Agyeman: discusses the "pink tax" on women generally, but focuses on the added costs for women of color, specifically Black women.

Wild Faith by Talia (now Tal) Lavin: an investigation into the rise of the Christian right, starting with the Satanic panic of the 1980s.

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo: what it says on the tin.

Japan at War: An Oral History by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F Cook: just started reading the intro. The authors interviewed Japanese people who lived through WWII and documented their stories. Their focus is on how they talk about it and how Japan addresses and acknowledges, if at all, the war and their role.

The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami: his latest, and a counterpart to one of his earlier novels, which I read a long time ago.

I saw The Choral mentioned in the local indie cinema weekly email, but when I went to book it for today, it had disappeared, so I checked the screenings at Vue and booked that instead. Looks like it's listed on the indie again, so whatever reason it wasn't available when I looked, it was resolved later, and I could have gone there after all.

Anyway, it was a good way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon but on the whole, it was a bit shallow and stereotypical. Some of that was probably because of the ensemble choral society aspect, so there were a bunch of central characters and all had to had their backstories told very economically. And it was yet another work to point to the enduring fascination about the first world war.

Seen making the rounds in a bunch of journals...

Go to your Works page on AO3, look at the tags, and see what the answers to these questions are.

1. What rating do you write most fics under?

Teen and up (19 out of 35 works on AO3).

2. What are your top 3 fandoms?

i. Forever Knight (TV 1992) (14)
ii. Oz (TV) (10)
iii. TIE: The Dresden Files (TV) (4) and Grantchester (TV) (4) (I expect Grantchester will pull ahead by the end of the year)

3. What is your top character you write about?

Nicholas Knight (Forever Knight) (13)

4. What are the 3 top pairings?

i. Tobias Beecher/Chris Keller (5) (Oz)
ii. Leonard Finch/Daniel Marlowe (4) (Grantchester)
iii. Nicholas Knight/Lucien LaCroix (2) (Forever Knight)

One of these things is not like the others lol.

Beecher/Keller was my absolute toxic OTP jam 20 years ago. (Don't fall in love with a serial killer, mmmkay?)

Nick/LaCroix (not an OTP), also pretty toxic.

All four of those jokers have killed people!

Meanwhile, Leonard/Daniel, my sweet, wholesome, emotional support OTP from my emotional support murder show. Look, murder only happens around them; they're not committing the murders so it's fine.

5. What are the top 3 additional tags?

i. Drabble (7)
ii. Case Fic (6)
iii. Flashbacks (5)

6. Did any of this surprise you?

Not really, no. I still have a bunch of old fic floating around out there, but I don't think that would have made a big difference in these results even if they were on AO3.

Here are some recent fannish things I've happened to see and would like to share!

Spotlight: This Halloween, I helped a friend hand out candy. She lives in one of those fancy neighborhoods where every lawn is decorated and kids roam in hordes. Among the costumes, I saw: ( list of costumes )

Ficathons, fests & communities

• Create & engage
  • smallfandomfest accepts prompts through 11/21; claiming and posting runs to 1/31.
  • ushobwri ("you should be writing") has its annual November community support social.
  • in-universe-fest celebrates unusual fanwork formats and approaches through 11/22.
  • pokeprompts holds the 15th annual Pokéxchange. Sign-ups close 11/14; assignments by 11/19; due 12/17.
  • The "Leaf and Lore" Discord server hosts a month-long Tolkien writing challenge where you set your own goals; they close the server on 12/13.
  • toothpastejuice hosts a "Rarest of Rarepairs" prompt meme through 1/25.
  • withinadream hosts a challenge for works based on "the viral Craigslist ad offering to be a disreputable fake date to an interested party's family Thanksgiving dinner" through 12/01.
  • minutia_r hosts a poetry promptfest (no end date).
  • purimgifts, the annual exchange featuring characters "who are at least one of: women, Jewish, or persecuted (preferably by evil viziers)," has sign-ups and nominations 1/02-08; due 2/23.
  • pinchhits is a forum for pinch-hits in exchanges. For example, seasonsofdrabbles is seeking pinch hitters.
  • whenisitdue tracks many more events than I note here!
• Enjoy & share
  • rec_cember is a month-long recommendations event (with sign-ups).
  • fancake (themed fanfic recs); November theme: "mystery & suspense"
  • gensplosion (gen fanfic recs)
  • het_reccers (m/f fanfic recs)
  • fanart_recs (fanart recs)
  • recthething (fanwork recs)

Sidelight: I'm continuing my first Breath of the Wild playthrough. I've freed three divine beasts, and I'm still loving it, but I'm beginning to get down to quests with which I'm struggling enough that I just have to walk away, hoping to come back later. The "Blue Flame trial" requires a precisely timed arrow shot that I can't seem to make; it feels impossible. And the stealth section of the Yiga hideout is frustrating, having to start all over with the tiniest misstep. I do have the "Champions' Ballad" DLC to look forward to when I get that far.