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A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, KJ Charles, romance novel. Sequel to The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, following a minor character from that book some years later. You don't absolutely need to have read that one but this one will spoil many events of that one so I would probably read them in order for maximum fun. Like the previous, Charles is very good at making a plot conflict a relationship conflict and vice-versa. Good stuff.

irilyth

Disruption Week continues, with a visit to the dermatologist for an annual skin check. Everything looks generally fine, so yay. Got some work done in the afternoon, made Salmon Fiocchetti from the TJ's cookbook for dinner, and Quentin showed me Slay The Spire after dinner, a new game he got for his birthday.

irilyth

Happy New Year! If you are a Fool, anyway, and I am. (Although Wikipedia claims that this idea -- that April Fools Day originated from mocking people who celebrated it as the first day of the year -- is not entirely backed up by the evidence. Ah well, perhaps only Fools believe that story.)

An ok day at work today; we're all still getting used to the new normal, and I have a pretty big backlog, which is annoyingly psychically burdensome, but is more like "ugh" levels than like "gah, total despair" levels. It's also been a weird week in other ways, with the kids' birthdays on Monday, some running around town driving Amy to a dental appointment on Tuesday, lunch with Matt today, just finding it a little hard to get into a rhythm. There's opportunities for things to get better, though, and I'm looking forward to trying to realize those.

A thing that happened in March that I forgot to mention: My uncle (my mom's sister's spouse) Tom died. :^( He'd been in and out of the hospital, and not in very good shape for a while, and was at home in hospice care for his last few days, so it wasn't sudden or shocking, but is still sad. My sister Aunt Jo is going to be in the US for a conference in the LA area at the start of April, and I'm meeting her there to have dinner with our dad, and then we're both going up to the SF area to spend some time with our aunt, a couple of days for me and a couple of weeks for her. There'll be a memorial ("celebration of life"? are those the same thing or subtly different?) at some point, not sure yet when.

Another thing that happened in March is that I've been doing more with "AI" at work; it's been a general push from the company for a while, and I am somewhat eye-rolling about it, but the rest of my immediate team (DevOps) mostly shares my views about it, and we're working together to come up with ways to use it in ways that seem safe and effective. Software Engineer (SWE) type folks are somewhat more free to just turn it loose and see what happens; we can't risk doing that in situations where it has access to our credentials that let us do things like destroy production databases, so we have to be a bit less zealously enthusiastic than those folks. One distinction I've enjoyed recently is using it at build time, when you can ask it how to do things, and help craft scripts andn stuff; vs using it at run time, like having it do things in automated pipelines. We're much more comfortable with the idea of AI-written things in pipelines (which we can review and understand) than we are with just letting it do stuff on the fly. Anyway, I know everyone hates AI in general, but it is in fact a pretty powerful tool (at least when your company is paying for high-end versions of it -- oh, and another advantage of the build-time approach is that we still have the scripts even if (when) the pricing realigns to match the actual costs), if you are in fact competent enough to handle power tools.

irilyth

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Well, I suppose I could try to write some things about March. What the heck happened in March?

Happy birthday to us! I turned 55, and the kids turned 17 and 14. There are good days and bad days, but they're both still pretty great. Juniper got her driver's license. Quentin has continued to play at weekend LARP events and CIT at afterschool ones, and is now signed up to CIT at the April Break week day camp. I played some pokego, but didn't walk enough, except on days where I walked 10 - 15 km and could barely move the next day, this is a kinda stupid pattern. Not much Magic, although Q and I have gotten back into it a bit recently. I continue to aspire to play more, but haven't figured out how/where/when yet.

Work has been tough. I joined Care.com in 2014, a couple of months after the company had gone public; in 2020 we were acquired by media conglomerate IAC as a private wholly-owned subsidiary; and then a few weeks ago, we were sold to private equity firm Pacific Avenue Capital Partners. The IAC years had a lot of ups and downs. The PACP weeks have so far been pretty bad, with some really rough cost-cutting measures. You hear a lot of stories about private equity firms buying companies and dismantling them, and we're all really hoping that's not what's going to happen here, and upper management assures us that it isn't, and some of the immediate changes may be hard for now but good in the long run, but, oof.

(I knew this next aphorism wasn't original to me, but I wasn't sure where it came from, but I have lately learned that it was Gavin! Thanks, Gavin.)

You know what they say in New England: March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a cold wet pissed-off lion. Pretty accurate this year anyway.

irilyth

[* I wrote this on Feb 28th, but then I found that I'd jotted down some sketchy notes each day from Jan 1st - 14th, and decided that I should post those first, but it was too late at night, and then I failed again to start after all. Here's the post from Feb 28th. *]

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Been a while. It's been cold, with lots of snow. Today was beautiful, though, and I had a nice afternoon doing a pokego event, although walking 13+ km, when I hadn't done much walking for a while, has me pretty sore.

What else has been going on. We've continued to watch Stranger Things, up through the end of Season 4, but haven't yet started Season 5, but probably will, but we're not super enthused about it. I watched the two seasons of Hazbin Hotel, and liked it; it's a little like Steven Universe but with a colossal amount of swearing, sex, and drugs. I guess it's not actually all that much like Steven Universe, other than being an animated musical? (Is it actually "a musical"? There's a song or two each episode, and the songs are pretty great, which is a lot of what I like about it. Is Steven Universe a musical? Maybe not.) Anyway, if it sounds like the kind of thing you would like, I think it's a pretty enjoyable instance of that kind of thing.

Everyone's got a cold; Juniper had it first, and is the most over it, and then Quentin and me and Amy, in approximately that order. Perhaps we'll all be all better by the end of the week.

Probably other stuff too, but that's what happens when I don't write regularly.

irilyth

[* On Feb 28th, I decided to start trying to post regularly again, and wrote a post, but then I found that I'd jotted down some sketchy notes each day from Jan 1st - 14th, and decided that I should post those first, but it was too late at night, and then I failed again to start after all. Here's those sketchy notes, with occasional comments written today in brackets like these. *]

Three sentences about 2026-01-02

Low-key day, pretty well forgotten. Quentin's hair is snarly but he's working on it. Stranger Things S2:E5.

Three sentences about 2026-01-03

MTE League at Omar's, finished our stuff, it was fun but somewhat annoying, I feel somewhat intimidated by more experienced players even when they're super friendly, not sure what my ideal MtG experience would be. Hair improving. Stranger Things S2:E6, no Elle!

Three sentences about 2026-01-04

Piplup Community Day, lots of walking, gave up a bit early, still just feeling very exhausted overall, hope I can walk tomorrow. Hair failure. Stranger Things S2:E7. Elle! Or I guess she's Jane now. I wonder which name she'll go with. Up way too late being dumb playing with Magic cards.

Three sentences about 2026-01-05

A bit of a slog at work, important thing that took a lot of waiting. Walking not too bad! Stranger Things S2:E8, Quentin very pleased about Mind Flayer. Hair is great!

Three sentences about 2026-01-06

Cleared cars in the morning, we keep getting like half an inch of snow at a time. More slog at work, Stranger Things S2 finale, pretty dramatic and some good emotional beats, not so sure about the plot/worldbuilding but enh.

Three sentences about 2026-01-07

Lunch with Matt, sluggish day at work, abandoned at pokego, Magic with Q, no Stranger Things. Up late being mad about MSP.

[* Pretty sure that "abandoned at pokego" had something to di with arriving late and others had left already by the time I got there, or something. That happened at least once; could've been as far back as January I suppose. Oh, and pretty sure that "MSP refers to the Gestapo (ICE) invasion of Minneapolis / St Paul. *]

Three sentences about 2026-01-08

Exhausted collapsed back to sleep. Made honey mustard salmon for dinner. Stranger things S3:E1, to bed.

Three sentences about 2026-01-09

Dead Cells w/ DVS, yellow curry meatballs, a friend of Juniper's over for a movie.

Three sentences about 2026-01-10

Kyurem raid day, D&D fell through, Thai for dinner, Stranger Things S3:E2.

[* "D&D" here refers to Quentin's D&D game, which I think we were planning to host, but then people couldn't make it after all. *]

Three sentences about 2026-01-11

Slow day, Quentin outing, TJ's risotto thing for dinner.

[* I wonder what the outing was. Ah, TSOR suggests that it was an Xmas present from Chaos & Gina, a trip to an arms and armory museum in Worcester. I wonder if we liked the risotto thing -- we've been making things from the Trader Joe's cookbook, and have acquired some new favorites, and I sort of thought there was a risotto thing that we'd had once, and apparently there was, but I now don't remember anything about it. *]

Three sentences about 2026-01-12

Ok day at work, Quentin podcast interview, Stranger Things S3:E3.

[* Quentin was doing a podcast for a school project, and interviewed me for it about my experiences playing D&D as a kid. It was fun. :^ ) I don't think I ever heard the finished result. *]

Three sentences about 2026-01-13

Sluggish, Magic.

Three sentences about 2026-01-14

Sluggish, Raid Hour,

[* Well those last two entries aren't super informative. I suspect the "Magic" one was against Quentin, and not something more exotic at Omar's, because I don't remember going up there on a Tuesday, and it's not on my calendar. I wonder what else I was going to write after the comma after Raid Hour, or if that was just a typo. *]

psocoptera

All of Us Murderers, KJ Charles, 2025 novel. A sort of meta-Gothic mystery with bonus romance, extremely page-turny as Charles tends to be. I had to have Dental Work and managed to get myself *three* Charles books in preparation/consolation, although, not to jinx anything, but so far at ~24 hours I am in less of a state of being unable to do anything but languish than I thought I might be. Anyways, I recommend this one even if you aren't specifically looking for Distractions, (although if you don't like Charles' romances I don't think you'd like this even though it's less primarily a romance).

psocoptera

The 2025 Otherwise Award has a winner, an honor list, and a long list, here with descriptions or below the cut with my comments.

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psocoptera

Here's my entire nominating ballot, unless I make any last-minute changes.

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psocoptera

Short stories:

Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld.

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, B Pladek, Lightspeed.

The Repairers of Reality, Shaenon K. Garrity, Drabblecast.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills, Uncanny.

Six People to Revise You, J.R. Dawson, Uncanny.

Novelettes:

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed, Reactor.

Phantom View, John Wiswell, Reactor.

The Twenty-One Second God, Peter Watts, Lightspeed.

Barnacle, Kate Elliott, Reactor.

psocoptera

A few more recommendations. I have not done as much reading this year as I would have liked to but I'm running out of time, so, here's what I have.

Short stories:

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Nice riff on "swords into plowshares" and "pen is mightier".

Last Meal Aboard the Awassa, Kev Coleman, Lightspeed. A doomed ship has a party. (This one from the Locus list.)

The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead, E.M. Linden, PodCastle. Migration and memory. (Nebula nominee.)

Six People to Revise You, J.R. Dawson, Uncanny. Letting other people fix you. (Nebula nominee.)

ETA: The Fate You Choose, Nadia Radovich, Apex. Atalanta choose-your-own-adventure.

Looped, Nadia Radovich, Heartlines Spec. A time loop, with knitting.

Five Things You Can See, Nadia Radovich, Strange Horizons. Future selves.

Novelette:

Barnacle, Kate Elliott, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Life in a company town.

ETA: The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Uncanny. NOVELETTE. A meta story about fantasy books and what they mean to people. (Nebula nominee.)

Novellas:

The Chronolithographer's Assistant, Suzanne Palmer, Asimov's. NOVELLA. A young man avoiding the sea becomes a printmaker. Palmer is always a good time.

Murder on the Eris Express, Beth Goder, Asimov's. NOVELLA. A spaceship AI and a mystery.

psocoptera

Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei, 2025 science fiction novel. Two sisters in a post-collapse near future sail in search of the third. By description this sounded like something I would be into but I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been reading it for a book club; I just never wanted to know that much what was going to happen next. There was one cool vivid scene on the boat with unexpected music and an aurora and phosphorescent whales, I liked that. And I guess I'm interested in different takes on this kind of world and this was one.

psocoptera

Drome, Jesse Lonergan, 2025 graphic. Stunning fantasy epic that blew me away with what it did with color and formal structure. Lonergan establishes a five by seven grid of square panels and then combines and subverts them in fascinating ways, bringing the gutters in to become motion lines and new divisions. The comic opens with an invocation of the four colors of printing, cyan magenta yellow and black, in a creation of the world sequence, and returns to that in a very meta way in the climax. There is *so much* going on in the character and world design and paneling and the way panels act as both time and space and the use of negative space and callbacks to sword-and-sorcery comics and retro superhero costuming and amazing vivid action sequences and mythological weight (no spoilers but there was definitely some "wait, is this... ??", except not exactly). Funny moments and touching moments and sometimes actually manages to hit larger-than-life heroic grandeur. But really it comes back to the art. Everyone else is writing free verse and this thing is a villanelle. Damn.

So, if Drome has catapulted its way to the top of my Hugo graphic nominations, where does that leave the rest of the list. To recap, I have read: The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Second Shift, In the Land of Simplicity, Flip, The Other Jay & Eve, Who Killed Nessie?, Testament, A Song for You & I, Strange Bedfellows, part of A Garden of Spheres, and Drome. From which I guess, picking in more or less favorite order, I want to nominate: Drome, Nefarious Nights, Flip, Testament, and then... maybe Song? for the last slot? Or maybe Simplicity has more of a shot at the ballot, and it would be neat to get that on? Hmmm.

psocoptera

A Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.

Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.

Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.

And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)

ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.

A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/

psocoptera

Mickey 17, 2025 science fiction movie directed by Bong Joon Ho and staring Robert Pattinson as a hapless space colonist who has agreed to be killed and reprinted over and over again as a way to escape Earth. I'm always excited to see a movie try to do what I might call "real science fiction" and there were some interesting elements and moments but I didn't really feel like it all hung together. Maybe if it had tried to do a little less? I was more interested in the sfnal or personal character story than in the political satire parts. I mean, I was interested in seeing a movie do a multiple-bodies story, and I'm interested in first-contact stories, but I didn't end up feeling like it said anything particularly interesting about either, alas.

psocoptera

I still hope for another round of Annual Take Advantage Of My Best Friend's Comic Purchasing Day, but in my first pass at sitting in her living room and reading her books, I enjoyed:

The Other Jay & Eve, Emma Jayne, 2025 graphic. What if you and your roommate got duplicated for money and then you met up with your duplicates and then you found out they were *engaged*. An obviously instantly compelling premise with good execution, although I initially felt like it didn't reach a satisfying conclusion, but on further reflection I think it worked, and definitely worthwhile overall.

Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith, 2025 graphic. A murder mystery at a convention for mythological creatures, which one newbie hotel worker has been left by her coworkers to staff. Fun premise and a bunch of the joke made me laugh.

Testament, J. Marshall Smith, 2025 graphic. A nun and a caretaker robot, the last survivors of a one-way mission of planetary exploration, contemplate their situation. This is exactly the sort of thing I like - space nuns, quiet sad thinky stuff about how space exploration might really work and who would do it and what it would be like, beautifully illustrated alien biology. Recommended to fans of To Be Taught If Fortunate, Scavengers Reign, and maybe anyone who remembers whatever that Robert L. Forward novel with the one-way mission was.

psocoptera

I have my laptop back! There is much rejoicing and also catching up! The one thing I will say about having my battery and remaining functional port fail more or less simultaneously is that I only had to pay the open-the-case fee once, yay efficiency, otherwise I do not recommend it.

Anyways! Some things have happened, such as the Nebula nominees coming out! Here, or below the cut with my comments.

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Camp Victory: for fans of the TV show Huge

February 2012

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Camp Victory: for fans of the TV show Huge

Member Posts

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel

Three sentences about 2026-04-02

Three sentences about 2026-04-01

Three sentences about March 2026

Three sentences about 2026-02-28

Three sentences about January 2026

All of Us Murderers

2025 Otherwise Award

my full 2026 Hugo nominations

my 2026 Hugo short fiction nominations

2025 Online Short SFF Fiction - Post Two

Saltcrop

one more graphic novel, and picking some graphic novels

more graphic novels

Mickey 17

some graphic novels

2026 Nebula Nominees

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February 2012

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