(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

I just finished Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee, a short story anthology set in the same universe as the Machineries of Empire series. It was overall good, but a bit like a game of pass the parcel: every so often you'd unwrap a layer and there'd be a lovely little thing, but other times you'd unwrap a layer to find newspaper. Or, in other words: some of the short stories were published in actual sci fi magazines, and others were posts on the author's blog. You can tell which is which.

I've also been rewatching an old favourite anime of mine, Log Horizon. It's one of the many, many 'trapped in a video game' stories, but instead of being focused on escaping, or harem nonsense, or 'and now the main character will do cool things with swords', it's about building a worthwhile society in the new world they live in. There is strategy and politicking, my favorites! Also, it's a trapped in an MMO story that actually gets MMOs? And you can see that on the micro scale, where cooldown timers are acknowledged and matter in the action scene, and the macro scale, in that the vast majority are MMO nerds and are written as such.

I've been poking away at creative things. I've been doing a lot of knitting, and clearing out my UFO problem (ie, my unfinished object problem). I've also been doing some writing. I've got a larger fic project, that's mostly playing around with canonically supported but uncommonly used characterisation in the Silmarillion (ie 'Wow, very few people actually write weirdly chipper!Maeglin, even though that is Fall of Gondolin canon'). And I've been procrastinating on that by working on some Magnus Archives fics, and letters for future exchanges. I also have a vague temptation to write manifestos for all my Log Horizon ships, or write a post comparing the relative merits of different covers of Gurenge. (I have been listening to a lot of different versions of that, and slowly becoming this xkcd comic.)