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My Yuletide assignment fic is already posted. I have 1500 words of a treat written, too, so there’s a good chance I will manage to finish it and have it beta-read before works reveal. And in between writing my Yuletide fics I also managed to finish a filthy Big Dragon PWP I started writing a year ago. It’s in beta-reading right now and I hope to post it the next week.
ClaireBell
Episode 5 was, again, very good.
A bit more with minor spoilers here.I loved Claire and Bell’s honeymoon phase. But it also filled me with dread, because I know what that means – a lot of angst and drama in the next episode for sure. 😊 And I think things will get much worse for Dao, too.
Burnout Syndrome
Episodes 1 and 2 were excellent and it made me very happy. But wow, I’m getting a serious case of second lead syndrome with this drama. Especially since Koh is a very unlikable asshole right now in a very realistic way.
Spoilers here, too.I really don’t care about a possible redemption of a ruthless and filthy rich pro-AI tech bro. I don’t want him to get together with Jira. Heh, I’m getting flashbacks to Theory of Love and my hatred of Khai here. I wonder if I’ll change my mind about Koh later.
Of course there is definitely some red color under Pheem’s very nice and soft surface, too. He’s gorgeous and super hot, true. But he seems really passive for now. He claims to be very unhappy in his current situation at work, at the same time also saying he can't change anything about it. And it sounds like such a weak excuse.
Also I’m very impressed with Gun’s ability to have chemistry with literally everyone. In this drama I don’t mean just Dew and Off, but Thor, too.
And yay they did let Gun and Dew kiss. It was a short kiss at the end of the 2nd episode, but I’ll take it. And hope for more later. 😊
Heated Rivalry
Well, ok, this show is getting its own tag, too. Because episode 3 exceeded my expectation. I loved it so much. Francois Arnoud is fantastic as Scott, hot and gorgeous and charismatic as hell. Robbie G.K. is great as Kip, too. They have nice chemistry, and their NC scenes are fire.
More here with spoilers.For me they did a good job with showing in such a short time the whole development of Scott and Kip’s relationship, and that staying in the closet takes a toll on Scott, and why he behaves the way he does. And I loved how the showed the contrast between Kip who has supportive friends and a great, loving relationship with his dad, and Scott who is basically alone all the time, before he gets together with Kip.
And they left out their public kiss and Scott’s coming out for one of the next episodes. This is what Francois Arnaud said in one interview:
"What changes the game for Shane and Ilya happens later in the season, and I would say that the emotional climax of the season involves all of these characters, and the stories are intimately connected," Arnaud says before quickly clarifying: "It's not a foursome!"
Heh, I love that he felt the need to clarify that.
Sono Teruko was born in 1846 in Edo (later to be Tokyo) in a well-to-do doctor’s household; her two brothers both became doctors as well and her sister Haruko a teacher. In 1865 she married a local samurai; their daughter Toyoko was born in 1868, but as the world changed around them with the Meiji Restoration, Teruko quarreled frequently with her husband over his drinking and his way with money (his samurai-style way of doing business was not profitable). In 1871 she left him and returned to the family home, now in Ibaraki, with her daughter.
After teaching along with Haruko for some time, she left for Tokyo to study the law (leaving Toyoko with her sister as the future inheritor of the household). In 1874, after a short apprenticeship, she became a daigennin or unofficial lawyer, the only woman to do so, and brought her daughter to Tokyo now that she had a means of support. Over the next eleven years she won numerous cases, becoming a celebrity for her elegant and practical clothing and hairstyle as well as her legal skills. It was increasingly difficult to make a living, however (in the hot summer of 1876 she ran a popular but short-lived icehouse as a side hustle), as the legal system became formalized: to be a lawyer you had to pass an exam, and to pass the exam you had to go to law school, and to go to law school you had to be a man. Facing the end of her legal career, Teruko decided to focus on education for women. She consulted the philosopher and supporter of women’s education Fukuzawa Yukichi, who said cynically that since most men studying overseas wasted the money spent on them, she ought to start off with nothing and earn on her own account.
In 1885 she set off for San Francisco, where the first thing that happened was a bank failure that left her penniless. With help from a local church, where she became a Christian and did mission work among Japanese sex workers, she started from scratch, working as a maid while she attended elementary school to master English and eventually graduated at the age of forty-two. She continued her studies in Chicago and New York, meanwhile setting up women’s groups and giving speeches on human rights and welfare for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She also published an autobiography in English.
In 1893 she returned to Japan, pausing to report to Fukuzawa that his snide remark had come true and leaving him speechless. The following year she launched the Komatsu [or Kisho?] Girls’ School, which taught reading, writing, calligraphy, arithmetic, accounting, English, and various household skills; its opening ceremony was attended by Tsuda Umeko among others. The school was funded by the church, however, and eventually closed down after Teruko’s views on education clashed with the official line. She began to drift away from Christianity, becoming a Buddhist nun in 1904 and settling down in a quiet temple, from which she continued charity work supporting education, the Red Cross, and women’s rights. She died in 1925 at the age of seventy-nine.
We've passed check-in week! The following pinch hits & the pinch hits on the last post are due at 11:59pm EST on Saturday January 24th 2026. To claim, please reply with your AO3 name, and let me know which recipient/PH number you want. You're also welcome to claim by emailing mod.modzilla@gmail.com. You can swap from your current assignment to a pinch hit; if so, please say that's what you're doing - otherwise I'll assume you're picking up an assignment on top of any current assignments.
Minimum requirements: An art gift must be a completed comic at least 10 pages or 40 panels long; a fic gift must be a story at least 10,000 words long. You can also fulfil a pinch hit by giving two complete half-length works, if your recipient has opted into that for the fandom(s) you are creating in. Any work must be for a fandom your recipient has requested and one character/relationship/worldbuilding tag requested in that fandom, and must avoid their DNWs.
Pinch hits can now be claimed in 5k or 20-panel increments if the recipient has opted into receiving half-length works. Please say in your claim if you're claiming a pinch hit for 5k (fic) or 20 panels (comic), and for what fandom.
We've passed check-in week! The following pinch hits & the pinch hits on the next post are due at 11:59pm EST on Saturday January 24th 2026. To claim, please reply with your AO3 name, and let me know which recipient/PH number you want. You're also welcome to claim by emailing mod.modzilla@gmail.com. You can swap from your current assignment to a pinch hit; if so, please say that's what you're doing - otherwise I'll assume you're picking up an assignment on top of any current assignments.
Minimum requirements: An art gift must be a completed comic at least 10 pages or 40 panels long; a fic gift must be a story at least 10,000 words long. You can also fulfil a pinch hit by giving two complete half-length works, if your recipient has opted into that for the fandom(s) you are creating in. Any work must be for a fandom your recipient has requested and one character/relationship/worldbuilding tag requested in that fandom, and must avoid their DNWs.
Pinch hits can now be claimed in 5k or 20-panel increments if the recipient has opted into receiving half-length works. Please say in your claim if you're claiming a pinch hit for 5k (fic) or 20 panels (comic), and for what fandom.
For no good reason (yes I'm procrastinating on something), trying to decide tonight which is the most WTF of the music videos I have had to watch and rewatch and rewatch this year. Is it the WTFFFFF of the "clink clink" visual in Yum Yum? Or is it Shwekey deciding to stop the song right in its tracks to do a commercial for Baron Herzog? They are both so WTF.
1. If you had to participate in one Olympic event, what would it be and why?
2. What is the one song you always sing along to?
3. Do you wear a seatbelt in the car?
4. Car, SUV or truck and why?
5. Are you a good/bad driver? Explain.
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**
Concrit and comments very welcome! Take and use as many icons as you like, credit is appreciated. If you want to know whose textures and brushes I use, take a look at my resource post.
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.
This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)
(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)
So what cool podfics/fancrafts/fanvids/fanart/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.
BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here
It is snowing! And I have a Cricket-cat on my desk and a Mantis-cat on the cat tree behind me; ever since we got back from our Thanksgiving vacation trip they have been sweetly clingy, especially to me. (Though I have to give props to the cat-sitter we hired through Rover.com; though I warned her that our neighbor, who had cat-sit for us previously, had never actually seen our cats, she coaxed them out of hiding on day 2 and by the middle of the week they were literally eating treats out of her hand - part of the Rover deal is daily pet photos, so I have proof!)
What I've recently finished reading:
In audio, We Are Legion (We Are Bob), book 1 of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor, which B had downloaded from the library for our long drives to and from Scottsdale because he'd seen reviews that compared it to Murderbot. (Spoiler alert, it was nothing like Murderbot, other than that the main character is a sort of human+computer hybrid, has drones as auxiliaries, and did the equivalent of hacking its governor module - uh, removed the controlling code? - early on.)
Bob is a nerdy engineer in the early 21st C (i.e., now). After selling his tech company to a bigger one for a ton of money, he signs up to have his head cryonically frozen to be revived in the future - and straightaway gets hit by a car, killed, and frozen...and revived in the mid-22nd C into a world where the US is now a theocracy competing with the Brazilian Empire and China for world dominance. Eventually Bob's brain-copy is put into a space probe and launched amid an incipient terrestrial nuclear war, at which point the story branches out into exploration of a variety of SF staples: sentient space ships, exploration of strange new worlds, terraforming, first contact with primitive alien life, space war among competing powers, space colonization, and so on.
It's very obviously written by an engineer who is a science fiction fan, with copious homage to various classics in the genre. Lots of handwaving around the science, including one bit I have a hard time accepting, that copies of Bob (and Bob eventually makes lots of copies of his brain, which are then further copied by his copies) all differ slightly from the get-go. It seems to me an exact copy would only begin to diverge once it started having different experiences. The viewpoint characters, all iterations of Bob, don't have particularly interesting or extensive arcs; it's more that each one picks a different mission and goes after it, and we get their narrative. There is no romance or sex.
I think I probably would have abandoned it somewhere in the middle had I not been listening to the audio version, but it was sufficiently entertaining to carry us through two long drives. It's the first of a series but has a reasonable ending, even though there are many threads left hanging for future books.
In text, I started but did not get all that far into Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. Cool premise, smooth writing - but I disliked Alice, the viewpoint character, and there was just something off-putting about the whole thing. It's possible that I'm just not a fan of "dark academia" - it feels vaguely unfair to me, please keep dangerous activities for fully-grown-up adults! Anyway, I put it down, and picked up...
The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman, which was a recommendation from P. Djèlí Clark as part of the NYT "What to Read" series, in a set of "Great Fanatsy Novels With Unlikely Heroes." Which turned out to be a nice reminder that I should not read things that I don't enjoy and should read things I do, because I totally fell into this book and loved it a lot! Medieval-ish crapsack fantasy world in which the thief Kinch Na Shannack must go on a quest for the Taker's Guild in order to clear the debt he's incurred through his education in thievery.
What hooked me into the story was the first-person narrative voice, which is rambling, profane, and funny as hell. The other characters are entertaining as well, and there are a lot of truly excellent female characters. I also really liked the worldbuilding, from the weird magic, to the linguistic and geographic details, to the slowly-unfolding history of the goblin wars. There are a lot of tiny guns hung on the wall early that go off to great effect late, which I always appreciate. There is also a cat.
Alas this is the first book of a series in which the second is expected to be published next year, but it does end in a reasonable place. Also there is a prequel which I have already checked out.
What I've recently finished playing:
I completed Monument Valley 2, which was just as delightful as the first game! However, I'm having difficulty getting Horizon Forbidden West to run now, for some reason, so I may have to abandon my NG+ and find something else to play. ETA Whew, it finally worked! Though, we'll see how long I manage to replay before wanting to do something new.
This website is an unromanticized purview of historical health care, with an emphasis on household and community practices shared and recorded by women, along with the overlaps of medicine and cookery.
(Content note: Hoffelt, with her lived experience, research into historical context, and insistence upon practical results, has a whole catacomb apiece to pick with both the patriarchal medical establishment and the proponents of a Magical Pagan Witch Sisterhood who got burned by the millions for providing safe and reliable herbal abortifacients.)
The deadline for a simple default on Yuletide is 9pm UTC on 10 December - just under one week from now. Please check the link - this isn't the same time of day as recent years.
The default deadline is the cut-off point for defaulting on your Yuletide assignment without a penalty. This applies if it's your first Yuletide, or if you posted successfully last time you signed up or took a pinch hit. Default before this time, and you're free to sign up again in future. If you're not sure whether the default deadline applies to you, please talk to mods (yuletideadmin@gmail.com).
Sample reasons to default:
You want to
You can't reconcile the canon, your writing strengths, and your recipient's DNWs
Life got in the way
A new installment of canon ruined your ideas
You use generative AI such as ChatGPT, and you just saw the rule that that's not allowed in this event
You can't see how to get the characters to do what you want them to do
You want to
People default every year for a variety of reasons. We don't need to know why, and we wish you well. When we open sign-ups, we recommend that you don't sign up unless you're confident you can write a story by the deadline. But after you've signed up, things may happen, and it's okay to withdraw, if that's what makes sense for you. See full information about defaulting at the FAQ.
To default, go to your assignment at the collection, and press the default button.
Assignment deadline
All original assignments, and all pinch hits sent out prior to the default deadline, are due at 9pm UTC 17 December (which is a DIFFERENT time of day to last year). Countdown
Pinch Hits
We have an outstanding pinch hit at yuletide_pinch_hits. Please get in contact if you can help!!!
Betas & Beta Help Needed
We warmly welcome beta reader volunteers at the beta post and on Discord. See the FAQ for more information about finding betas if you need one!
Note: on the Yuletide Discord, requests for betas, or for brainstorming help that might give away what you're writing, are handled by DM-ing someone who currently holds a Hippo role. Please read the server FAQ before seeking a beta. Give your Hippo the relevant details and make sure you can receive messages back.
Keep Yuletide Madness in mind. The Madness collection is for stories under 1,000 words and stories which do not exactly fit the fandoms and characters requested. These works must still be gifts for other participants.
AFK post
We will also put up an Away from Keyboard post shortly on the yuletide comm. The purpose of this post is that if people know they won't be able to respond to their gift until late in the anon period, or even until the new year, they can let their author know ahead of time. (Not being able to read and respond until several days after the collection opens is normal, though - many people will have family and other obligations!)
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened. And specifically, if you would like to get a treat, we need your AO3 name so we know whom to give it to!
There were some really cool stories in here and I'm glad we read them. Not everything was to my taste, but the quality of writing was high. It was great to explore folklore outside of Western traditions and see the connections and contrasts.
The group will continue with As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, which is a title that might be relevant to the interests of a few of you here! It's a brand new collection that just came out this year and I'm really looking forward to it.
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