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mozaikmage

Link to playlist here.
Fic the playlist is for is here.
Romance ga ariamaru: title drop! The plaintive way Kawatani sings “ariaMAru” just really encapsulated the vibe I was going for with this. And I mean the fic is kind of about going from years of sporadic occasional contact to suddenly spending an Excess of time with each other, so. I like it. I headcanon Kuroo as a gesukiwa liker because they were at their peak of popularity/relevance at around the same time as when he was in college.

Aoi, Koi, Daidaiiro no hi: Everyone I know with the most sophisticated music taste really likes Mass of the Fermenting Dregs. I like them fine, but I headcanon krtsk as having cooler music taste than me, and I do think it makes good train ride music.

Unbelievers: I listened to this a lot when writing my first krtsk fic so putting this on the playlist brings me back to that frame of mind

The stars will stay here: Kino is easily the greatest Russian rock band of all time, but this song’s a bit of a deeper cut for them. I like it! I think it’s fun. The chorus I think is the most relevant (rough TL by me): “I got caught in a net and I can’t get out (doodoodoodooo) / your gaze/ hits me like an electric current/ and the stars, having fallen, will all remain here/forever remain here.”

Yoake no machi de sayonara wo: I like it and having headcanoned kuroo as a gesukiwa fan thought it appropriate to add to the list

Put your camera down (English): I am content with taking in this moment caught in time.

Portugal: another fic’s author notes connected this song to Kagehina which made me scream but also Talking is Hard was my writing soundtrack for most of 2018, and is thus heavily mentally associated with my peak postcanon hq fic production period. Magic spell for making me write.

Watashi igai watashi ja nai no: coke commercial song :sob: but also a fave, and also I think describes Tsukki pretty well.

Do I Wanna Know: AM was my writing soundtrack for my first krtsk fic ever (I associate the album with work because my high school art class always played it start to finish during Work Time lol), for a while the playlist had R U Mine but then I decided this fit better.

Junkie: not thematically relevant I just liked the sound and wanted a Frederic song that wasn’t oddloop lol because they’re a J-indie Band that I think kuroo might like. I guess a little thematically relevant: the fed-up part.

Take me out: yaoi song

Eve Stepper: underrated hitorie banger. I love the melody, the chorus, wowaka’s voice (rip), it fills me with an intense unnamable forward-propelling energy and thus belongs on a writing playlist for me.

Starship Syncopation: I like to think kuroo listens to things like this when home alone.

The Adults are Talking: they’ll get it right some time.

Shunrai: this was not a j-drama ending theme (though yonezu has done several) but if it was I would’ve watched that drama. I love kenshi yonezu so much. This song is on the playlist because I like it and because of the chorus bit that translates to “to give shape to it, to give voice to it, would be so incredibly fraught…”

Hyperventilation: most interesting radwimps song. I think this is what the inside of tsukki’s head sounds like when he’s stressed out lol.

Senkou Shoujo (Put your camera down but Japanese): The English version isn’t a one-to-one translation, so it has a slightly different vibe in each language, which is why I wanted to include both versions. I like both versions!

Ai Ren Cuo Guo: Not a lyrics-based addition for once, I just like the vibes and like imagining krtsk listening to this on the train. I think it sounds nice :) Placement on the list determined by where it sounded best in the musical flow, not where it appears in the story

Sympathy: “now we’ve got that sympathy, what I’m to you, you are to me, let’s go”

Delusionalism: I like how it sounds after Sympathy.

Melancholy Kitchen: I like how it sounds at this point in the playlist, and it’s an underrated older Yonezu where he sounds a little younger and rougher than in his more recent stuff. The song is about a relationship falling apart due to a communication breakdown and one person cooking things badly, so not that thematically relevant, but I like the fun melody and the way it feels intimate and ultimately optimistic.

Hachimitsu: Spitz was most popular in the 90s so I thought it’d make sense as a band for Kuroo’s dad to be into, and then I listened through this album as a test to see if it made sense for the context in which I mentioned it and decided that yes it is in fact totally perfect.

Not Appearing In This Playlist: Lamp Genso, despite being mentioned in the fic. I do think Tsukki would like them/that album, I just didn’t want to listen to it while writing because it’s too slow and downbeat to keep me typing lol.

rionaleonhart

I doubt my first effort at Eden's Garden fanfiction will make me popular within the fandom, but, look, someone had to write this.

Title: Unaccounted For
Fandom: Project: Eden's Garden
Rating: 15
Pairing: Wolfgang/Diana
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: Diana was in the boiler room for fifty minutes before the blackout. What happened during those fifty minutes?
Warnings: drugged kissing, fear of sexual assault, generally miserable

( Unaccounted For )

mrissa

Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)

Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)

Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)

With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)

And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)

Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth, Kate Francia (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Jacarandas Are Unimpressed By Your Show of Force, Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gorgon, Gwynne Garfinkle (Penumbric)

In Connorville, Kathleen Jennings (Reactor)

Orders, Grace Seybold (Augur)

~~Brooklyn~~ Beijing, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)

lightreads

Betrothed to the Emperor and Emperor's Wrath

2/5. M/M fantasy romance about the royal twins raised to kill the emperor of the encroaching empire, except when they are presented, the emperor chooses the brother to marry, not the sister as planned. And then stuff happens.

I got sucked in based on the trope set, even though I knew damn well this was not going to satisfy. And I was right. There’s something extra frustrating about someone doing tropes you’re into, but with such limited skill that nothing really lands. Here, for example – the books are trying to do fake/pretend relationship but whoops it’s also real, but they’re so incoherent about it and so impatient to get to the porn that I couldn’t keep track from one scene to the next whether we were treating it as real or not. These books also do that thing where our first person narrator totally misses that the guy is into him, but it’s done so clumsily here that it just makes him look incredibly, pathologically stupid.

/cranky

mrissa

In May the subscribers of If There's Anyone Left got to read my short story, The Things You Know, The Things You Trust. Now it's free to read online! Go, read, enjoy!

lassarina

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landofnowhere

My Life and Functions, Walter Hayman. Walter Hayman was a mathematician who worked in complex analysis, but I heard about him first because of his daughter Sheila Hayman, descendant of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, who made documentaries about her family history (I watched the one about her family and the Nazis, which was powerful, and have still not watched the one about Fanny, because I don't think I'm its target audience.) Walter Hayman had a life that was in some ways not that unusual for a mathematician of his time and place, but still had some interesting features: he was born in Germany, grandson of the distinguished mathematician Kurt Hensel. Kurt Hensel retired and then died early enough to be protected from the worst effects of the Nazis, but Walter was Kindertransported to an English boarding school as a child, and lived the rest of his life in England (excepting some brief stays in the US and other travel). He married three times, outliving his first two wives; his first wife became a math educator who founded the British Math Olympiad team (with his help); his second wife was his former grad student who had come to the UK from Iraq, and he converted to Islam for her (but still continued to be a practicing Quaker), and his third wife was a successful writer and businesswoman.

This all sounded interesting enough for me to track down his memoirs, though I found it a bit disappointing, in particular because it didn't go into detail about the things I was most curious about. The sections about his early years were the best, but after that it became rushed. The title is appropriate; he does sometimes switch abruptly from reminiscences to a mathematical discussion (which I could follow but is not my field). However, I did learn details I'm not sure I actually wanted to know about his relationship with his former grad student who he eventually married, which was even more problematic than that description makes it sound like. It's interesting that he spent his life around smart, influential women; in addition to his wives, his Ph.D. advisor was the groundbreaking Mary Cartwright, and he had four daughters who all went on to have successful careers. But he doesn't come off as particularly feminist or thoughtful about gender.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. This is a fairy tale novella, using many of the classic tropes, and a well-constructed one, as one would expect from Novik. I enjoyed it.

Teresa, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Like the last Ayrton Zangwill I read, this is a un-proofread OCR'd copy: the book has just entered Distributed Proofreaders and will be on Project Gutenberg when fully proofread (at which point I expect I'll post about it again!). As I've come to expect from Edith Ayrton Zangwill, the writing is great, the social commentary is excellent, and I gulped the whole thing down in a day. The book feels like a response to Middlemarch, specifically the prologue that talks about all the latter-day analogues of St. Teresa of Avila who didn't reach their full potential, and this book's Teresa could be one of them (some characters compare her in-book to her saintly analogue).

Teresa starts the book as an idealistic girl fresh out of boarding school with a strong and inflexible sense of morality learned from her mother, who is a relic of the Victorian era but also a committed socialist -- and the theme of socialism throughout the book really helps Teresa's morality not come across as mere priggishness. (Vicki, who I am very grateful to for scanning the book from the British Library, commented that Teresa reads as possibly on the spectrum, and I think she has a good point there.)

Like The First Mrs. Mollivar, this is a story about two people who never should have gotten married to each other, and how they navigate being married anyway. Also like it, there is lots of good parts in there that is not just about the miserable marriage; I particularly liked Teresa's badass lady doctor cousin, though I'm sad that her roommate got shuffled out of the way to make room for a heterosexual love interest (the book does not use its femslash potential).

sushiflop

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skygiants

I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.

The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.

Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.

ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.

And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )

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Lost in Lualand

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Nominations Closing Soon

Got It In Excess: The Playlist, annotated

Fanfiction: Unaccounted For (Project: Eden's Garden, Wolfgang/Diana)

Short stuff I liked, third quarter 2025

Betrothed to the Emperor and Emperor's Wrath by Kai Butler

Now free to read!

What Are You Playing Wednesday

wednesday books have complicated families

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