Lost in Lualand

an early note on Winnaretta Singer

2026-02-15T22:50:13Z

i'm in the middle of Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac by Sylvia Kahan, which is fascinating so far. i'm really looking forward to doing a writeup on it once i'm done. tl;dr: it's a biography of this chick who was the Big Lesbian Money in the Parisian music scene during her lifetime; she personally commissioned a bunch of Composers You've Heard Of and had them debut at her salons and such.

and, yeah, as i said, a full writeup will come later, but rn i'm just noting something that struck me / gave me an unexpected Some Kinda Feeling, idk—

( this is probably all really banal to ppl who read more history and/or queer theory than me idk lol )

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Da Capo al Fine (new Clair Obscur fanfic)

2026-02-10T14:15:24Z

This time, Aline will fix it. This time, she'll make it right.

---

Aline & Verso, Verso & Clea, time loop + bad parenting + psychological horror + etc, ~16k words.

Read here on AO3.

( author's notes (spoilers ahead) )

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[book post] The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

2026-02-05T01:59:51Z

This was a really solid page-turner. I think marketing did this book a little dirty—the cover art gave me romantasy vibes, and the marketing copy called it "dark epic fantasy," but I don't think it's quite either of those things? It's a full-speed-ahead court intrigue throwdown that happens to be in a fantasy setting. A very cool fantasy setting, to be clear, and I could imagine some fun building-out-of-the-world if there's ever any more books in this universe, but as-is, most of the action here is about secrets and close spaces rather than magic or battles or romance.

( Read more... )

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[book post] Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant trans. Douglas Parmée

2026-02-05T01:11:21Z

I saw this summary of Bel-Ami somewhere...

The story chronicles journalist Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power from a poor former cavalry NCO in France's African colonies, to one of the most successful men in Paris, most of which he achieves by manipulating a series of powerful, intelligent, and wealthy women.

...and was like "oh my God this is SO my shit I must read it IMMEDIATELY." (And then was pleased to discover I apparently already downloaded it a few months ago, so, uh, apparently past-me had the same thought and just got distracted haha.) Anyone who knows my taste knows that "messy drama," "scoundrels being scoundrels," "terrible dinner parties," "dudes seducing and/or being seduced by cougars," and so on, are all on the shortlist of Things That Are Instantly Interesting To Me, and BOY HOWDY does Bel-Ami deliver on all those fronts.

What I wasn't expecting was—

( moderate spoilers for the ending, if you care )

Anyway, this was a rollicking good ride; fun as all hell; if it seems like the kind of thing you might like, you will in fact like it, give it a shot. I kept shouting "oh NO" while reading, was occasionally hollering at Duroy to KEEP GOING or NO STOP; it was a rush.

I only knew of Maupassant via his short stories (aside: is it more correct to refer to him as "Maupassant" or "de Maupassant"? no idea how the French name thing works here)—I read "The Necklace" out of one of my mom's textbooks when I was a kid, alongside a couple others I don't remember as well—but I'm surprised I'd never heard of him for his longer stuff! It moved along at such a gallop and was so entertaining throughout. I dunno if you'd want to teach it in high school, exactly (see: aforementioned blackpilledness; I'm not sure if Maupassant is trying to say anything Super Deep here or if he's simply just giving an Incisive, Biting Look at society, which doesn't make the best class material I suppose), but I enjoyed the ride so much. Like a classier and cleverer high-concept The OC, or something. It's possible that tinge of blackpilledness might've been wearying at a longer length, but as-is, I was captivated throughout.

Other scattered stuff I remember enjoying:

( Read more... )

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[book post] Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

2026-02-05T00:29:16Z

I managed to miss the explosion of "romantasy" as a genre so entirely that, when I went to a writer's workshop a year and a half ago, and a fellow workshopper read one of my stories and was like "yo, you could totally make this into a romantasy and make bank," I was like "oh cool, thanks! what's romantasy, again?" And when another workshopper sidled up to me afterwards and said, hey, this is good but it is absolutely not romantasy, do NOT take that other person's advice," I was like "oh cool, thanks! uh, what's romantasy, exactly?"

I then proceeded to spend all my time post-workshop frittering around writing a bunch of Exactly What I Want To Write without bothering to learn a single damn thing about The State Of Modern Publishing or researching the market at all, so, y'know, thank you kindly fellow students & sorry that your thoughts were so wasted upon me...!

But even so, I managed to vaguely glean a couple factoids and takes about this whole "romantasy" thing. Y'know, the sorts of takes you see on Tumblrs and in Substacks and such—"let women enjoy things" vs "they're pornographic trash" or whatever. Which sure rhymed with some stuff I remember hearing when Twilight was a hit, so when I finally got around to reading Fourth Wing, I was expecting... something like Twilight, right? Something not-really-to-my-tastes but nonetheless satisfying and pulpy? Like, I read the whole series back then, and while I didn't love them and wouldn't have read them if they weren't a popular phenomenon, like... they were in fact a pretty good time! I remember the third book in particular having a very satisfying progression and a cool final battle! I liked the weird Americana backstory stuff with that Jasper guy! The vampire baseball shit was legitimately charming! It was very easy for me to read those books, even as a judgy know-it-all teenager, and see what the appeal was.

I say this to establish some non-snob credentials because I worry I come off like a dragon here sometimes. "I can enjoy fun and normal and kinda trashy things," I say, persuasively and convincingly.

But like... Fourth Wing... really...?

Even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium, I found myself cringing at so much of the language—every instance of "for the win" was like nails on the chalkboard of my soul; so much of the language was just stupid or self-contradictory on a line-by-line level. And by God it repeats itself, often, as though it's worried you're... only barely skimming the text? only half-paying attention? so you need basic stuff repeated to you over and over? but it managed to do this so much it annoyed me even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium! Ahhh!!! (I commented on Tumblr that part of this might just be a "house style" thing? I guess?? if so I hate it???)

And there's so many logical/plausibility inconsistencies—each minor in their own right, each which might be easy to overlook on their own—but they pile up so much I was just left wondering what the stakes were or what basic facts were or who or what I was supposed to care about, so often, that I was just confused and annoyed most of the time.

Like:

( This section is literally me just scrolling through my Kindle notes and rambling on everything I marked with a "???". It gets so long oh my God. )

( the rest of my thoughts )

...in conclusion I do not think I am the right person to aim to try and write anything in the category of "romantasy" anytime soon.

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books read; fics written

2026-02-03T09:08:07Z

i have been so miserably sick for nearly two weeks now. woe is me!

***

during that time, in varying states of lucidity i have finished reading:

* The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (good)
* Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (terrible)
* Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant trans. Douglas Parmée (LMAO???)

if you would like further commentary on any of the above, lmk and i will pontificate accordingly~

***

in varying states of lucidity i have also been dashing off fills for the three sentence ficathon. mostly variations-on-the-theme-of-Clair-Obscur-incest because empirically that is What The People Want & i aim to please: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six.

***

HOPE ALL Y'ALL ARE COUGHING A LOT LESS THAN I AM; take care; ta for now~

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end-of-year fanfic meme

2026-01-01T21:49:36Z

time for the annual tradition~

Total number of completed stories: Six! They are:

Four Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn fics:
* Man of Letters (Pelleas & Naesala, Pelleas/Micaiah/Sothe)
* a way in the wilderness (Naesala/Leanne)
* Solstice (Reyson & Lillia)
* snake & sweet flower (Sothe/Tibarn/Reyson)

A Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fic:
* thrash the lake white (Verso &/ Sciel)

And my Yuletide fic, which was written for the James Tiptree Jr. story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever":
* That Which Crieth Unto Me From the Ground (...er, weird sentient birdlike things...?)

( rest of the meme under the cut )

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That Which Crieth Unto Me From the Ground (a James Tiptree Jr fanfic)

2026-01-01T21:21:41Z

The price of Seeing was the Stones; every true-living creature knew that.

(70s-style "weird" scifi horror/xenofiction pastiche. it's riffing on the James Tiptree Jr's short story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever", but probably reads OK canon-blind. ~5k words.)

Read here on AO3.

( author's notes (spoilers) )

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thrash the lake white (new Clair Obscur fanfic)

2025-11-24T04:17:03Z

"Verso," Sciel says, smiling brightly, "I'm starting to think you don't want our little expedition to succeed."

---

Verso’s working toward another end. Sciel won’t let that happen.

Set during Act 3.

Sciel &/ Verso, ~7k words.

Read here on AO3.

( author's notes (contains spoilers for the fic) )

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piano notes (october)

2025-10-26T08:53:40Z

just a bit of this & that—

( Read more... )

also, shoutout and/or critical support to this madman who listened to all the scarlatti sonatas & ranked them. i don't 100% agree with all his takes (at least, on the much smaller subset of the sonatas that i listened to lol), but i DID find some p sweet sonatas i would've otherwise overlooked and the article's vibes are good!

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piano notes (september)

2025-09-25T20:50:52Z

the good news: my partner got me a fancy audio interface* for my birthday <3 so i can pull nice recordings off my piano now! and i broke it in by recording myself playing Verso's theme <3 it was very fun <3

the grind:

( Read more... )

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partial notes on Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux

2025-09-22T22:02:06Z

When, in the course of human events, one reads a little bit too much of Marilynne Robinson's incredible prose, and then plays a little bit too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and thus gets the two very different types of work all muddled in one's head, and is thus seized with the need to go spit out many thousands of words of Clair-Obscur-fanfiction-in-the-style-of-Marilynne-Robinson, but becomes aware partway through the project that one's understanding of the culture and structure of the Paris Conservatory during the Belle Époque era is incredibly thin, and this lack of understanding is really becoming awkward given that one has gone and invented an entire subplot involving multiple professors at aforementioned conservatory in one's fanfiction based on a passing mention in canon that "oh such-and-such character went to conservatory" and literally nothing else—well, it thus becomes necessary to go read a well-regarded biography of a contemporaneous French composer to amend that lack of knowledge.

Which is how I found myself reading Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux (translated by Roger Nichols).

("You really have a knack for nerd-sniping yourself," a friend observed dryly when I explained my present pitiable state of affairs. Yeah I sure do, huh.)

As I've been reading this primarily for convoluted fanfiction research purposes, what follows should not be construed as a review or anything even approaching one (I haven't even finished reading the book yet!), but, more of a... thinking-aloud session? Because there's a great deal that's amused me, and also a great deal that's made me very ponderous, and also stuff that just straight-up confused me (recall my aforementioned staggering lack of historical/contextual knowledge)... and yeah the only way I know how to think these days is via blog posts, apparently.

( Read more... )

Oh, also, one last funny bit about the translation: there's a bunch of words that are left with the French spelling, for no particular reason I can discern? The funniest of these is "rôle," which is always spelled the French way, even though there is no semantic difference to be had there. Whatcha trying to prove with that little hat over the O, lol. Though I guess The New Yorker still spells coordinate and cooperate as "coördinate" and "coöperate" so. I guess we all have our little spelling hangups :P

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wake up babe new cole wehrle board game just dropped

2025-09-01T02:10:44Z

I (finally!) got a chance to play John Company (2022 edition) with some friends last week :3

For those not familiar: Cole Wehrle is a very interesting board game designer who I've blathered about before; he tends to make board games with asymmetric gameplay and complex mechanics... but the complexity of the mechanics usually feel less in service to Making Stuff Hard and more in service of Providing A Nuanced And Detailed Experience. (The way Bird Guy described it was, "I feel less like I'm playing a board game and more like I'm engaging with some sort of... interactive art-piece-slash-simulation? in which I'm roleplaying something dictated by my position in the game?" And, yeah. That really is the best description of the Wehrle board game experience. This one included!)

ANYWAY. Jotting down some brief thoughts for posterity and/or anyone else curious about this game:

( Read more... )

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piano update

2025-08-31T21:25:38Z

on the one hand: last time i publicposted about piano here i got such fun & lovely comments

on the other hand: surely further navel-gazy blathering on that theme would only be boring though

on the other other hand: but i am writing that kind of thing down anyway, for like, My Own Purposes, so like, idk maybe someone else would be curious to see

on the other other other hand: ~~this is all probably incredibly cringe to watch i'm so mediocre at piano for someone who took lessons for so long sigh~~

synthesis: okay, this post is public rn, but i reserve the write to access-lock it at any time out of shyness/self-consciousness haha. it will probably not be interesting unless you want to hear What I Learned About Piano Today-type stuff~

( Read more... )

anyway yeah. that sure was two thousand words about Picking Piano Back Up As An Adult, please and thank you

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Seattle Recommendations (2025 edition)

2025-08-15T18:30:10Z

Creating a new version of an older post because some of those recommendations were a little dated.

( Ballard )

( West Seattle )

( Fremont )

( Uptown / Lower Queen Anne / Downtown Kinda )

( University District-ish )

( Capitol Hill )

( Georgetown )

( Classical Touristy Stuff That Is Pretty Good Even Though It's Touristy )

( Miscellaneous Further-Afield Spots )

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Notice of Worldcon Attendance

2025-08-07T00:43:49Z

I will be at* Worldcon!

* as in, "I live here so it is trivially easy for me to be around Worldcon" haha. I do have a membership & may drop into the con itself but that's not guaranteed yet, something something PTO days

If you're following me on here there's a pretty good chance I'd get a charge out of meeting up irl; feel free to reply here (all comments screened) or shoot me a DM or send me a messenger pigeon or whatever

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piano blather

2025-07-22T20:54:16Z

Clair Obscur got me to hit the keys again lol. it's been a while!

( my piano background )

anyway, Clair Obscur has a lot of piano-centric tracks and i was like hell yeah, if they were designed for piano and sound not-too-bad surely that's doable right

(i say with the tone of a middle-aged guy who played football in high school like "YEAH I STILL GOT IT" 0.8 seconds before i have a heart attack from doing yard work too hard)

ANYWAY. pieces i've been piddling with:

( nattering on about the pieces i've been playing )

anyway i've been wondering if i should get a one-off lesson with a piano teacher or something? the problem is i know that's not a market piano teachers really want to be in, right, like "hi i'm an annoying amateur who wants to show up a couple times, play the repertoire i want to play, and you give me some hot tips before i disappear again" is... not as appealing as a regularly-recurring student lol. but it's been so long since i had any formal instruction, and the formal instruction i had back in the day was... pretty mongrel-ish:

( piano pedagogy )

anyway whatever. i'm having fun! that's the main thing! but i also like hearing myself talk, hence this post LOL happy tuesday

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clair obscur: expedition 33 retrospective

2025-07-08T11:02:39Z

Okay, yeah, as people watching my Tumblr may have already noticed, I gave Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a try on a whim (mostly because of this post tbh) & I had a grand old time & now I'm here to dump some thoughts about it before I lose them forever.

Full disclosure, a big reason that I got SO into this game (devoured it in ~2 weeks) was because Bird Guy got into it too, at exactly the same time, and did you know it is VERY fun to blast through a big bombastic game in Your Favorite Genre alongside the love of your life? Highly recommend it. We were heckling each other and swapping strategy protips and speculating wildly about the plot together the whole time; it was SO weeby in our household lol.

We historically have somewhat divergent tastes in video games (he plays FPSes, Soulsbornes, and grand strategy games; I tend more toward turn-based tactical RPGs, narrative-driven RPGs, stealth-action games, and platformers). There's also a lot of places where our tastes overlap (we both love a good puzzle game, hence both of us getting oneshot by Blue Prince a few months back, and we both enjoyed e.g. Breath of the Wild), but up until now I don't think he's ever liked anything in the (admittedly fuzzy) space of "big, bombastic, narrative-heavy 90s/00s-style RPGs."

( a list of all the ways this game is a big fat love letter to A Specific Era Of RPGs )

So, yeah, the game nailed a 10/10 on "bottling up a bunch of highlights from the RPGs-of-a-specific-era into a modern Essence Du Jour." This will probably make me sound either sappy or deranged or both, but I really do feel like it let me share something precious and lovely with my husband in a way that finally got him to enjoy it too, and I'm pretty grateful for that. Sort of like the first time I took him to see fireflies in Kentucky because he, a west coast boy, had never seen them before.

Combat, however—combat is very different than any mainline Final Fantasy game, and it rules, actually.

( what the combat is like )

The plot's another thing I was a little apprehensive about going in. The premise sounded a little stilted/weird/cheesy to my ear, and the vague rumblings I'd heard about the game online made it sound like it was all going to be some sort of philosophical-dilemma-disguised-as-a-story sort of deal, which is just not interesting in to me. (I very seriously entertained majoring in philosophy; I've taken classes on "what if we were a brain in a vat tho" kind of dilemmas; I get the appeal. I just don't find it as appealing these days :P)

Without spoiling, I'd say it doesn't really demand deep philosophical wrestling any more than, say, Christopher Nolan's Inception does—it's there if you want it and I'm sure forum nerds are arguing about it at we speak (<3 you forum nerds, you are my people), but it's mostly focused on some broader thematic concerns and the attendant characters. I don't think the characters or their world are quite as juicy in terms of their interpersonal dynamics or as fully-fleshed-out-in-relation-to-their-world as, say, the Final Fantasy 10 cast... but they're interesting enough (Verso and Maelle prove particularly chewy), there's good synergy in the ensemble, and the game REALLY leans hard into the light-and-dark interplay suggested by the title. The bright/charming bits are SURPRISINGLY goofy and silly and disarming for it; the grim bits are grim in a PG-13 way but no less satisfying for it.

Okay that's al lthe general stuff. Some more spoiler-y and off-the-cuff thoughts below—no major spoilers but if you're like "I do not even wish to Know The Name Of Potential Bosses In The Game," yeah, here's your chance to stop reading.

( vaguely spoilery stuff )

oh god also i forgot to mention the soundtrack. straight bangers, every single one of them. i have the sheet music for "alicia" and "verso" sitting on my piano as we speak. truly it is the 90s again and they got their own damn Uematsu lol

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more science more love

2025-06-10T22:59:44Z

Last migration season, I subscribed to this nifty newsletter by a PhD student at UCLA—an "Early Bird Arrival Forecast" that sends personalized emails based on your location, and tells you which birds are early/peaking/late migrants in your area. It's data that I probably could figure out via other sources, but I suspect the data backing his emails is superior, and his simple summary & targeted recommendations were very handy for me to get a sense of what I might see in the field—"ooh, warbling vireos are peaking this week; let's go find one!"

Anyway. I enjoyed his recommendations again this migration season, and also, ngl his final email of the season this year weirdly made me tear up a bit:

There are no birds forecast for this week or last week, so it's time to close down the Early Bird Forecast for your region. Very sad :(

Thank you so much for participating in the second season of the Early Bird Forecast! A few asks from me before you go:

[. . .]

2. Last year, I provided a link for people to donate to me personally (AKA to "buy me a coffee"). In light of recent realized and proposed cuts to government-funded science programs, this year I would like to steer people towards donating to nonprofits that do efficient and important conservation work at home and abroad. A few good charities in this mold are Birdlife International, The American Bird Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy. If you would like to look for something more local, check out your city or region's Audubon chapter.

3. If donating is out of the question for you, consider contacting your representatives and let them know that you believe federally-funded science is worth supporting. The Early Bird Forecast is actually a by-product of a NASA-funded research fellowship I received in graduate school. If the current administration's proposed budget becomes law, funding for NASA-funded research like mine will decrease by over 50%. This science funding is cheap in the grand scheme of things – If you are the average taxpayer, you paid $0.0006 for my research (thank you!). Plus you get Early Bird Forecast for free, what a steal!

Happy Summer!

god knows a phd student could always use some spare change; incredibly classy of him to point towards Science As A Whole rn instead.

something something "he's not giving up & i'm not either" etc

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Catch-Up Book Post

2025-06-05T22:51:31Z

Been a while since I bookblogged here, huh? This isn't EVERYTHING, but this post already took me fucking hours to type up, so, let's get into it—

Jhereg by Steven Brust
Mickey7 by Ashton Edward

Both of these books were romps, though the former is the more compelling overall package.

( Jhereg )

( Mickey7 )

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (DNF, 48%)
Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (DNF, 54%)
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thích Nhất Hạnh (DNF, 24%)
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright

Look, to tip my hand, I'm in the (very!) early phase of writing a weird fantasy/historical/pastiche-y novel that dares to ask questions like "damn what was it like to be The Greatest Haterliest Poaster Of All Time" and also "what if Martin Luther was a chick" and "what if Martin Luther was two people instead of one" and "what if those people ~~kissed~~ failed to kiss" and "what if Martin Luther were a radical pacifist on top of all the other crazy shit he was doing" and "what if sacred music was actually efficacious and had geopolitical implications" and so on. I blame Lyndal Roper specifically for presenting a portrait of Martin Luther so vivid and intriguing that I could not help but go patently insane over him thereafter.

The logical next step for researching such a novel would be to read up on the theology and history of that period, because even if I'm VERY heavy on the pastiche aspects, it's nice to understand the historical context and some contemporaneous sources/writings for the period of history I'm interested in, if only for riffing purposes, yaknow.

Alas, however, I'm a magpie with no self-control, and thus easily beguiled by Every Other Book I Trip Over On The Way To The Stuff I Should Actually Be Reading, which is how I wound up with this grab-bag of rather more contemporary theology.

All of which I am entirely unqualified to properly evaluate, to be clear, as someone who's variously identified as "Southern Baptist," "Christian agnostic," "deist," "Quaker," "neopagan," "animist," and "some weird woo bullshit syncretic thing ig, sorry it's cringe I know" at various points in my life. But that sure won't stop me from prattling about 'em on my blog.

( That All Shall Be Saved )

( Honest to God )

( Living Buddha, Living Christ )

( Surprised By Hope )

Aside: all of these books felt pretty repetitive. Something to do with the genre, I guess? No way to theology-y people to feel like they've gotten your point across without restating it three different ways? IDK.

ANYWAY. I should probably quit dicking around with these books for a bit, since, y'know, novel. I gotta read more Martin Luther himself and also probably some John Calvin. (Alas this means my copy of Kosuke Koyama's Five Mile an Hour God will likely remain mostly-unread on my shelf. Did I mention I'm a magpie. Books pile up in my home whenever I get on a weird pseudo-reasearch-y kick, and I am blessed with an indulgent partner who just keeps buying me more bookshelves instead of telling me to cut it the hell out, which is very sweet of him, but also I could really use someone to stop me before I commit more Irresponsible Spending Crimes... though I saw someone the other day comparing book-buying to wine-buying, e.g. hey it's valid and normal to let some of them age in the cellar & have more than you'll be able to drink; you want to have good wine when the time is right! and UNFORTUNATELY this is very effective for allowing me to continue in my profligate ways. RIP me.)

...okay yeah I couldn't find any way to fit Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik into all of this. Spinning Silver was very good, but I don't have much to say! The primary romance was a total nothingburger, but that's fine because mostly the book is about Miryem girlbossing her way through Rumpelstiltskin and that shit totally rules. I would like to read several more books about moneylenders Being Incredibly Good At Their Job. The book gets a bit bloated and flabbier as it goes along (though the parts with secondary-girlboss Irina and horrible little man Mirnatius can stay; those bits were great) but never enough to knock it down from the "very good" tier. Fairytale retellings aren't normally my thing but this one was solid.

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"What's In A Scene" signpost

2025-06-04T00:32:33Z

lavendre has a fun post up, where they've done a dissection of A Scene From Fiction That Resonated™, to try and pick apart the why/how of said resonance works

and that's such a fun idea that i'm vaguely gesturing that other dreamwidth ppl should try it out, so i can read more good posts :P

I WILL PROBABLY DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS MYSELF, TOO, just... i'm somewhat distracted atm... so all i can do now is gesture that "hi i'm gonna do this and you should too"

off the top of my head, some scenes that i think i'd personally probably find fun to write up:
* the Christmas party in Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel
* the "Time Passes" chapter in To the Lighthouse
* the "You are tiring yourself, Joseph" bit in The Glass Bead Game
* any of a number of scenes from Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which i've read more recently than all these and found more puzzling so that's probably the juiciest candidate. ("hey Lua if you've read that one recently then where's the book post about it" shut up)

anyway yeah happy monday everybody

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snake & sweet flower (new Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn fanfic)

2025-05-20T04:45:33Z

When the march on the Tower of Guidance begins, Sothe knows his place is at Micaiah's side.

But Micaiah sends Sothe with Tibarn's army instead, to watch over Pelleas there.

Tibarn, the man who's threatened to kill Sothe once before. Tibarn, a man Sothe doesn't much respect or like. Tibarn, who is not Micaiah.

And also: Tibarn, the man that Sothe keeps having weird dreams about, ever since he threatened to kill him.

Sothe/Tibarn/Reyson, ~10k words.

Read here on AO3.

( spoiler-y author's notes )

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tier list of my fanfiction

2025-05-14T20:56:14Z

I made this mostly for my own benefit / out of curiosity, because I was basically asking myself the question "okay, if someone's first exposure to my work were piece [x], am I happy with that or am I doing a yikes emoji." Very vibes-based and obv reflects my own biases, and I haven't reread all of these recently so maybe some are better/worse than I remember! But here we go:

( Read more... )

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[book post] Home by Marilynne Robinson

2025-05-01T01:25:23Z

I was having a chat with someone recently about different theories of soteriology—as a former Southern Baptist amongst a bunch of thoroughly-secular-from-birth jackrabbits, I get a charge out of explaining weirdo protestant folk-theology stuff when it comes up—and when I mentioned there's a set of Christians who believe "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose," he was surprised and puzzled.

"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."

I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.

He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"

I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.

Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.

Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.

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100 books meme

2025-04-11T04:23:59Z

here's a list of 100 books that were formative to me in some way, changed me in some way, etc etc

some books have aged better than others but are still there out of, y'know, honesty

i am probably forgetting so much shit from my childhood lol. alas i am not in front of my childhood bedroom bookshelf so i cannot stare at it to try and remember!

ANYWAY. how many books overlap OR (because this is more interesting than a number): any overlaps we share that are particularly exciting? any books you want to hear me ramble about?

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