(no subject)

Jul. 31st, 2025 07:52 am
skygiants: Audrey Hepburn peering around a corner disguised in giant sunglasses, from Charade (sneaky like hepburnninja)
[personal profile] skygiants
I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when [personal profile] osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is [personal profile] osprey_archer's post.

I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.

I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!

The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.

To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.

Now both [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] ep_birdsall, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," [personal profile] osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)

However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.

Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'

With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.
genarti: woman curled up with book, under a tree on a wooded slope in early autumn ([misc] perfect moments)
[personal profile] genarti
I’ve been meaning to read more Adrian Tchaikovsky for a while now, first because a number of my friends really like his stuff, and then also because I read his book The Doors of Eden and really enjoyed it. (The character work in that one was hit or miss, but the speculative biology was enormous fun in directions you rarely see done well that also aimed directly at my interests, so I had a great time with it.)

The joy of finding a very prolific author is that there’s a ton of stuff to read, but the difficulty of finding a very prolific author is figuring out where to start. Handily for me, this one was on the short list for the Hugos this year! And it was my top pick – I really loved it.

More details -- no spoilers beyond the first few chapters )

(no subject)

Jul. 27th, 2025 11:17 pm
skygiants: Izumi and Sig Curtis from Fullmetal Alchemist embracing in front of a giant heart (curtises!)
[personal profile] skygiants
I was sitting outside at work two weeks ago reading Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines when our regular volunteer suddenly popped up next to me. "What are you reading?!" she demanded, and I blinked at her, and she said "I can't remember the last time I smiled as much reading a book as you were right now! Please tell me the title, I have to read it!"

So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)

So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.

Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)

As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.

Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.
petra: A blonde woman holding an electric guitar (Corner Gas - Wanda rocks out)
[personal profile] petra
97 years isn't long enough to have someone that amazing around.

My favorite song by him, as an old erotica-peddler, is "Smut."



What's your favorite?

(no subject)

Jul. 26th, 2025 08:00 am
skygiants: a figure in white and a figure in red stand in a courtyard in front of a looming cathedral (cour des miracles)
[personal profile] skygiants
There are some books that I can't read until I've achieved a pleasing balance of people whose taste I trust who think the book is good, and people whose taste I trust who think the book is bad. This allows me to cleanse my heart and form my own opinion in perfect neutrality.

As it happened I hit this balance for The Ministry of Time some time ago, but then I still needed to take a while longer to read it because, unfortunately, I was cursed with the knowledge that a.) it was Terror fanfiction and b.) it was on Obama's 2024 summer reading list and c.) I had chanced across the phrase "Obama says RPF is fine" on Tumblr and could not look at the front cover of Ministry of Time without bursting into laughter. And I wanted to come to this book with a clear heart! an open mind! so I waited!

.... and then all of that waiting was in fact completely fruitless, I was never going to be able to come to this book with a clear heart and an open mind, because, Terror fanfiction aside, I'm like 99% sure that it's either a direct response to Kage Baker's Company series or Kaliane Bradley is possessed by Kage Baker's ghost. Welcome back, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax! The mere fact that you're so much less annoying this time around means I'm grading on a huge curve!

Okay, so the central two figures of The Ministry of Time are our narrator -- a second-gen Cambodian-English government translator whose mother fled the Khmer Rouge, and who has gotten shuffled into a top-secret government project working with 'unusual refugees' -- and Polar Explorer Graham Gore Of The Doomed Franklin Expedition, who has been rescued from his miserable death on the ice and brought forward into the future by the aforementioned top-secret government project.

The project also includes a small handful of other time rescuees -- Graham Gore is the only actual factual historical figure, and frankly I think the book would be better if he wasn't, but that's a sidenote. Each time refugee gets a 'bridge' to live with them and help them acclimate; in Gore's case, that's our narrator. The first seventy to eighty percent of the book consists mostly of loving, detailed, funny descriptions of the narrator hanging out with the time refugees as they adapt to The Near Future, interspersed with a.) dark hints about the sinister nature of the project and the narrator's increasing isolation within it that she repeatedly apologizes to us for ignoring, b.) dark hints about the oncoming climate apocalypse, c.) reflections the narrator's relationship to her family history, and d.) intermittent bits of Terror fanfiction about Gore's Time On the Ice.

I do not think this part of the book is necessarily well-structured or paced, but I did have a great time with it. Does it feel fanfictional? Oh, yes. The infrastructure that surrounds this hypothetical government project is almost entirely nonexistent in order to conveniently allow the narrator long, uninterrupted stretches to attempt to introduce Graham Gore to various forms of pop music; [personal profile] genarti described it cruelly but perhaps accurately as "Avengers tower fanfic". But I like the thematic link between time travelers and refugees, and I like the jokes, and I like the thing Bradley is doing -- the thing Kage Baker does, that I am extremely weak to -- where just when you're lulled into enjoying the humor of anachronism and the sense of humanity's universal connection you run smack into an unexpected, uncrossable cultural gap and bruise your nose.

Now, this only ever happens with Gore, because Gore is the only one of the refugees who is a real person in several ways. Margaret (the seventeenth-century lesbian) and Arthur (the gay WWI officer) are likeable gay sidekicks, and then there's a seventeenth-century asshole whose name I've forgotten. At one point Arthur tosses off a mention to his commanding officer 'Owen who wrote poetry' and I nearly threw the book across the room. Have the courage of your convictions, Kaliane Bradley! None of these coy little hints, either do the work to kidnap Wilfred Owen and Margery Kempe from history or don't! But Gore is obsessively drawn and theorized and researched, because, of course, the whole book is largely about Being Obsessed With Gore, about interrogating why the narrator, a not-quite-white-passing brown woman from an immigrant family, has built her whole life around this sexy British naval officer turned time refugee, symbolic of the crimes and failures of empire in six or seven different directions. A bit navel-gazey, perhaps, but as a person who spent five books begging Kage Baker to think at all critically about the horrible British naval officer turned time refugee she'd built, I'm just like, 'well, thank God!'

And, again, for the five people who care, I cannot emphasize enough just how similar Gore is to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax and yet miraculously how much less annoying. They both have a code of ethics formed by the loyal and genuine belief in the good work done by the British Imperial project (thematically and historically reasonable); a shocking level of natural charisma combined with various secret agent skills at weaponry, deception, strategy and theft (extremely funny, extra funny with Gore because as far as I can tell what we know about him From History is 'normal officer! popular guy!'); and -- such a specific detail to have in common! -- Big Sexy Nose That The Man In Question Is Really Self-Conscious About.

And both of them, of course, end up struggling to navigate their positionality in the Imperial machine, between government operative-with-agency and experimental-subject-with-none.

So that's the first seventy to eighty percent of the book, and then, in the last twenty to thirty percent of the book, the dark hints finally resolve into the actual plot, which is IMO successful in theme but completely goofy in actual detail )

A handful of recent books

Jul. 26th, 2025 02:00 am
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)
[personal profile] genarti
I've read various books recently that I have a lot of thoughts about, and want to write up as they deserve. (A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Alien Clay, and The Ministry of Time are currently clamoring loudest.) In the meantime, though, here are some recent reads that I managed to be less longwinded about!

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff )

The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov, translated by Anne O. Fisher )

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington )

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn )

Familect phrases

Jul. 25th, 2025 11:04 am
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I love hearing about the phrases people have incorporated into their family dialect (familect) that require explanation.

Here are some examples from around my house:

A "fuzzy" is a polar fleece jacket. (source: unknown)

Cat food comes in two varieties: gooshy (wet) and crunchy (dry). (source: Two Lumps webcomic)

"Bloop bloop?" means "Would you care to engage in sexual intercourse with me?" (source: a Tumblr post from someone who heard elk mating calls, parsed them as 'bloop bloop,' and started using the noise with their partner for the purpose, which cracked us up)

"One day... when you least expect it..." means, "I am contemplating taking you to bed." We almost never say the "I WILL HAVE SEX WITH YOU!" bit. (source: the second linked George Takei PSA)

The cat, as is the way of cats, has a zillion nicknames, including "Bunny," "[The] Fur," "Miss Fuzzbutt," and "Catface." T. S. Eliot violently underestimated the number of names my cats tend to accumulate, and none of the options are effin' ineffable. (reference: not how he officially spelled it but what we all heard)

Fanfiction author/Gamer OTP

Jul. 24th, 2025 05:51 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
"Honey, why does the person you're playing a game with and watching a stream of look like that?"

"He's wearing a Mickey Mouse skin."

"I didn't know you could skin Mickey Mouse in your game."

"Yep."

"And you're the one with the socially acceptable hobby."
petra: Batman in silhouette with his hand on Spoiler's shoulder (Bruce & Steph - Keep the comm on)
[personal profile] petra


If Jeangu Macrooy gets two new fans today, one of them is me. If they get 1000 new fans today, I hope some are them are because [personal profile] buggery linked me to this video and I passed it on.

It's an earworm.

a collection of book reviews

Jul. 23rd, 2025 05:09 pm
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
[personal profile] philomytha
I write up books when I read them and forget to post the actual review, so here's a collection of books I've read sometime in the past six months.

The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran
As recommended by [personal profile] black_bentley, a constant pusher of fantastic books, thank you! This is all about fear and courage in warfare and their relationship with shell-shock and other psychological traumas of war. The author was a trench doctor in WW1 and then later became Churchill's personal physician, though this book is almost entirely about his WW1 experiences, written in 1942. It was a really fantastic read.

Sometimes the biases of the era come through: Moran occasionally comes out with stuff about how 'good racial stock' is required for avoiding shell shock and cowardice, but it always feels like those are platitudes he's occasionally diverted by before getting into the practical, vivid and very sensible things he has to say about the causes of mental breakdown, based on his WW1 observations. He has a lot to say about the differences between a professional standing army and a citizen army of conscripts, about how men in a citizen army react to danger, how good morale and esprit du corps are protective against mental trauma, how fear operates and how to combat it, what courage looks like, what kind of leadership soldiers respond to and its impact on the mental wellbeing of the soldiers - he doesn't use modern jargon for any of this, but that's what a modern reader would take from it. He talks a bit about the different branches of the service and how the air force and navy and submarine service have different impacts on mental health both because of the different demands of the service - the group isolation of a ship vs the largely solo isolation of a fighter pilot - and because of the different traditions and beliefs these services held about themselves, and compares that to experience of the infantryman in the trenches.

In an odd way I found it a very relatable and reassuring book. It made me realise that I'm pretty confident I have the type of courage Moran talks about, to hold firm when horrifying things are happening because others are depending on you holding firm, and confident not in a sort of wishful-thinking I'm-sure-I-could-do-that way, but the same way I'm confident I can spell miscellaneous: I've done it, or something as like to it as a middle-aged woman in peacetime can get, lots of times before. I recogised a lot of the emotional dynamics he describes, the way you recover after a sudden shock of violence, the temporary unravelling and how your mind and body heal up again, and I also recognised the factors that protect, or in their absence damage, your ability to hold firm, both practical - food, sleep, rest breaks, humour, health - and moral - the belief in what you are doing and why, social support from others doing the same thing, the conviction that failure is not an option. A really good, insightful book.


Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans, Daniel Cowling
Apologies if the title causes you to get a song stuck in your head for the next week, I already had the song stuck in my head and then tripped over the book. This is a decent general overview of the British occupation of Germany 1945-9; Cowling doesn't go into anything in tremendous detail but gives a little bit of lots of things. I've read books that take a much deeper dive into certain aspects - the Berlin Airlift, the T-Force memoir and also the bonkers sigint book, plus a general book on the postwar atrocities across Europe - and so some of this was a bit top-down overview compared to that. The chapter on 'fratting', for instance, was interesting read against the memoir with its candid details about German women selling sex for food, and the relationship with the former owners when living in requisitioned property. Though, given the memoir's emphasis on partying and having fun and hiring one's friends, that certainly backed up Cowling's chapter on the ineptitude and bad behaviour of the military and civilian government. Cowling's argument comes across a bit incoherent at times - there's an awful lot of 'wow the occupiers were awful and incompetent and made a total mess' followed by a chapter on the rapid recovery, economic growth and stable democratic government in West Germany afterwards, so you're left wondering just how Cowling thinks these two accounts fit together.

There was quite a lot about the economics of the occupation, I did love the chapter on the black market and some of the unforeseen consequences. The 'money for old smokes' scandal was ridiculous: British soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany got a free ration of cigarettes, fifty a week. Cigarettes were the de facto currency of German civilians, the mark being essentially worthless in 1945-6, and so you could trade your cigarettes with German civilians for anything from accordions to dental care (though sex was usually paid for in chocolate or other food). And one thing you could trade them for was German marks, lots of them. But there was one place where German marks were used at their official exchange rate, and that was NAAFI shops. So you could take your free cigarettes, sell them for an awful lot of German marks, then take the German marks and exchange them in the NAAFI shops for whatever you wanted. Which included postal orders and savings bonds in sterling, which you could deposit in your nice British bank account. If you saved up your free cigarettes for a few months, with 500 cigarettes you could easily get £100, which was a tidy sum. And it seems that practically everyone stationed in Germany realised this at once, because this particular type of transaction led to a £50 million hole in the occupation's budget. Which is an argument for the incompetence of the British administration, certainly.

And as for the title, Cowling doesn't ever really engage with the question: were we beastly to the Germans, and should we have been. It's interesting to compare this book to Keith Lowe's Savage Continent, which is a much broader book in scope and yet also vastly more detailed and incisive: Lowe really engages with the question of human suffering on all levels and the historian's ethics, he talks about the lack of acknowledgement of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war attempts to prosecute war crimes and care for refugees, about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe and how the very real suffering this caused is used by historians of particular political bents who want to argue that the Germans were the real victims of WW2 and setting it in the context of what else was happening and to who... by contrast Cowling never really gets into the difficult questions. He quotes an awful lot of British newspapers and their opinions of how generous or harsh we should be to German civilians postwar - in many ways this is a British newspaper account of the occupation: how it was perceived at home in the context of what was happening politically in the UK, and that's about the level on which Cowling engages with the question. He gives brief snapshots of varying attitudes - a display in London of daily rations for German civilians which was designed to show how much worse off they were in 1946 than British civilians (whose food was rationed even more severely than in wartime) ended up with a lot of people thinking the Germans were still getting much too generous an allocation. On the other hand Cowling also includes stories of British soldiers routinely handing over their rations to famished German children. But he never really engages with it beyond this superficial skim of attitudes, and he also avoids exploring the German perspectives and what they thought about it. So, a good general overview of the occupation and introduction to it all, but go elsewhere for insight and detailed analysis.


Paid To Be Safe, Margaret Morrison & Pamela Tulk-Hart
The final of my IWM wartime novels, written together by two ATA ferry pilots about a fictional ATA ferry pilot. So not quite a memoir, but strongly based on real experiences and set at real airfields. I really enjoyed this, it's deftly written, captures the essense of the experience beautifully and is full of fascinating detail. And also death: this is a book in which a lot of the characters die, because it's wartime and that's what happens in wartime and I don't doubt that the main character's experience of multiple bereavements is both realistic and realistically written.

Our heroine is Susan Sandyman, who managed to escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive and has just arrived back in England, with husband and infant child both dead and desperately in need of something to think about that isn't that. And she learned to fly back when she lived in Malaya, and so she joins the ATA to become a ferry pilot, and we follow her adventures until the end of the war. There's a tremendous amount of fantastic detail about the training process, vivid descriptions of life in the training schools, the different people Susan meets and what the training is like, and all the things she learns about all the different aircraft and the process of learning how to cope with a job where you might fly five different types of aircraft in one day, compared to the normal RAF training where you might only ever fly one or two. There were some fantastic stories that must have been drawn from life like how a caterpillar in a pitot tube can very nearly make you crash.

The title, Paid To Be Safe, is what was drummed into the ferry pilots: their job is not to take any risks, their job is to transport the valuable and much-needed aircraft safely from A to B, their job is to keep themselves and their aircraft safe at all times and to know how to never get into dangerous situations in the first place. Despite this it is still a dangerous job, and ferry pilots die in training and in service - as I said, this is a book where sudden death can happen to anyone at any point, whether it's disease or bombs or airplane crashes, a very wartime book with this constant thread of trauma running underneath everything else.


The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
This was a really good Terror forced proximity AU readerfic that had an incoherent plot sellotaped to it. Loved the time travellers getting to know each other and the modern world, and their characters were drawn fairly well, but all the other characters were pretty bland, and the main character and narrator in particular was very much a generic-tumblr narrative voice. There was plenty of drama and excitement and events, I whizzed through the book waiting for the moment when it would all make sense, but it never did, the plot was just tacked on to try to explain to the non-fandom world why the author was writing Graham Gore/modern reader self insert. But despite that I'd have read another 100k of Time Travellers Have Adventures With Bikes And Spotify, especially if it had involved more about one of the secondary time travel characters, Captain Arthur Reginald Smyth, retrieved from the Somme about five minutes before his death and by far my favourite of the characters for highly predictable reasons. A fun but frustrating book.

Currently reading

Jul. 23rd, 2025 03:47 pm
vaznetti: (lost in the wash)
[personal profile] vaznetti
On Wednesday, even!

Almost finished: Ombria in Shadow, Patricia McKillip: This is one of my favorite McKillips and one I reread frequently. I feel like the worldbuilding is more distinctive than some of her other works from this period, maybe because it's set in a decaying city which is vividly sketched in. It also feels a lot more dangerous and high-stakes than some of her later work, at least to me, and I love Mag and Lydea and Faey. I still do not entrely understand what is going on at the end but that certainly is typical of this phase of McKillip's writing.

Midway: Cato the Younger, Fred K. Drogula. I forgot that I owned a copy of this so I was particularly delighted to find it on the shelf. I think it's very good; Drogula does a fine job of maintaining his impartiality while making it perfectly clear what kind of person Cato was, and how much responsiblity he bears for the collapse of the Roman Republic through sheer bloody-minded assholeishness. But he also isn't presenting Cato as a simplistic, moralistic figure: he was also very good at navigating and directing Roman politics in his lifetime, and Drogula also does a good job explaining why the system was perhaps particularly vulnerable to manipulation by men like Cato (or Caesar, his nemesis.)
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)
[personal profile] chestnut_pod
( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

piano blather

Jul. 22nd, 2025 12:21 pm
queenlua: (Default)
[personal profile] queenlua
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

Austen Exchange Letter

Jul. 21st, 2025 01:22 pm
vaznetti: (Default)
[personal profile] vaznetti
Hello Author! I'm so excited to finally be signing up for this exchange, and the tag set is full of really cool options. It has been really tough to narrow my choices down, and I am enthusuastic about all of my requests, so much so that I decided to write a letter to keep track of my prompts. I also want to say that all these prompts are only suggestions, and if you have a story in mind, go for it! I love receiving stories which are a total surprise (obviously provided they don't clash with my DNWs.)

General Likes and DNWs )

preferences about fanfic for Austen canons )

Right! On to the prompts and comments for each request! As I said above, these are just suggestions, so feel to take whatever we matched on in a new direction if you prefer.


Mansfield Park - Jane Austen: F!Edmund Bertram/Fanny Price; Mary Crawford/Fanny Price; Tom Bertram/Henry Crawford; Tom Bertram/Fanny Price )


Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen: Caroline Bingley/Colonel Fitzwilliam; Caroline Bingley/Fizwilliam Darcy; Lydia Bennet/Colonel Fitzwilliam; Lydia Bennet/George Wickham; Jane Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy )


Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen: Colonel Brandon/Elinor Dashwood; Elinor Dashwood/John Willoughby; Edward Ferrars/Lucy Steele; Elinor Dashwood/Lucy Steele; Marianne Dashwood & Eliza Williams )


Crossover Pairings, so many crossover pairings: Caroline Bingley (P&P - Austen)/Any Hero From Another Austen Book (Any Other Austen Book); Tom Bertram (MP - Austen)/Caroline Bingley (P&P - Austen); Caroline Bingley (P&P - Austen)/Mary Crawford (MP - Austen); James Benwick (Persuasion - Austen)/Fanny Price (MP - Austen; James Benwick (Persuasion - Austen)/Marianne Dashwood (S&S - Austen); Elinor Dashwood (S&S - Austen)/Any Hero From Another Austen Book (Any Other Austen Book); Any Antagonist (Any Austen Book) & Any Other Antagonist (Any Other Austen Book) )
petra: Superman looking downward with a pensive expression (Clark - Beautiful night)
[personal profile] petra
The sidekick with no fear (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DCU (Comics), Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent & James "Jimmy" Olsen
Characters: James "Jimmy" Olsen, Clark Kent
Additional Tags: Drabble, Crack
Summary:

Jimmy's not from around here either.

*

Inspired by this Tumblr post.

Scotswap 2025

Jul. 20th, 2025 01:39 pm
vaznetti: (wandering albatross)
[personal profile] vaznetti
I survived Scotswap 2025! Just kidding -- but it's been a long time since I have done a single fandom exchange and it is really nice to be able to read everything in the tagset. This exchange didn't have an anon period, so I can post about my gift and my story today!

I received this great AU in which Marthe does her best to extricate herself from the Dame de Doubtance's plans for her. It's beautifully written and there are some killer lines about how Marthe sees herself in relation to her brother:

Vagabond (3264 words) by morethanfantasy
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny & Marthe
Characters: Marthe (Lymond Chronicles), Jerott Blyth, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Character Study, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: But it had always been about him the same way it had never been about Marthe, his shadow-self, his equal and opposite. exploring one way Marthe might have walked out on Francis Crawford and fate

And I wrote a story about Richard, reflecting on his relationship with Francis after the shipwreck in Ringed Castle:

the ancient customs of our ancestors (1965 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny & Richard Crawford, Mariotta Crawford/Richard Crawford, Richard Crawford & Sybilla Crawford
Characters: Richard Crawford, Mariotta Crawford
Additional Tags: missing scene - Ringed Castle, Introspection, Gavin and Sybilla Crawford were not the greatest parents, Sibling Rivalry, letter-writing, Unsent letters
Summary: After meeting Francis at Philorth, Richard Crawford returns to Midculter, wondering whether the brother he thought he knew had ever existed at all.

Now I am off to sign up for [community profile] austenexchange -- I seem to write so much Austen fic for other exchanges, I don't know why I have never signed up for this one before.
petra: A man in a fedora with text: Between the dames and the horses, sometimes I don't even know why I put my hat on. (Cabin Pressure - Dames and horses)
[personal profile] petra
Stephen Colbert is the only thing I have watched on CBS for a very, very long time, and even him, via clips.

Except for the time we were in NYC and went to a taping, which was good fun.

Paramount: How dare this man we hired to speak truth to power speak our truth to our power!

Trump: BWAH HA HA HA

Fans who grew up on the Colbert Report and are growing inured to canceled shows: ...okay, so who's going to hire the most popular guy in late night TV now?

I find it upsetting that one of the loudest voices pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is losing his position, not because Colbert is flawless but because what the fuck, censoring satire much? Being able to laugh at the assholes in charge is a survival mechanism.

Self-soothing with John Finnemore.

I don't like the modern internet

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:08 am
petra: A blonde woman with both hands over her face (Britta - Twohanded facepalm)
[personal profile] petra
No shit, there I was, updating my LinkedIn profile -- you know, the one under my wallet name -- for the first time in (mumbledy), for professional reasons that do not involve looking for a job.

LinkedIn: You want to connect with [personal profile] marcelo and [personal profile] mary!

Me: ... I really, deeply wish you did not know that. Also, and this is important, neither of those people lives on my continent, and I have never so much as spoken on the phone with them. How do you know I know them, since I met them via writing porn about DC Comics characters 20 years ago? How can I make you un-know it? What arcane nonsense lurks in the data-mining?

Don't worry -- if I only know you through fandom, I ain't connecting via Linkedfreakin'In unless you give me the okay, because WHAT.
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