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2025 Review/2026 Visions

AO3 Stats

Stat	2025	2024 then	2024 now	All years
User Subscriptions:	295	269	-	-
Kudos:	884	410	599	57624
Comment Threads:	129	99	104	3547
Bookmarks:	134	59	105	13732
Subscriptions:	21	1	3	1503
Word Count:	45047	9238	9238	957299
Hits:	15183	3550	6166	598872

45k! Much better than last year. Still not close to my 2018-2021 heyday of 100k+/year, but, uh, idk. I guess I need to learn to forgive myself. Or just get into a new fandom. The large numbers came from mostly Guardian fandom (RIP, for all I can remember is the fucking trashfire harassment campaign), bracketed by MDZS at the start (before my flist got anywhere near it, ofc) and Star Wars at the end.

I posted 49 things to AO3 in 2025. Again, mostly for Battleship – some fic, some art, a few vids, one fanmix.

Popularity

( Read more... )

Self-recs

Art/Comics
Hard to pick, this year! I decided against the art listed above, and instead have a mermaid:
Moongazer

(Honorable mention to Die Before You Wake, an OW F/M M-rated comic that is peak cdrama trope)

Fanmix
As is by now tradition, I made an Expanse fanmix! This one's about Laconia, and I uhhh got a bit fancy-ass about the formatting. I long to make a fanmix where the pull lines make a CYOA poem like Obligations 2 (image) by Layli Long Soldier, but, uh, at what point does a fanmix stip being a fanmix and instead become something else? Anyway, this is a regular, linear fanmix, but with the songs plonked into columns based on whether they are about the Leader, the People, or the Planet.
Write the History

Vid
I only published three this year (made a fourth, have one missing like 15 seconds, and then there's my festivids draft). My favorite is actually one of the unpublished ones, I think, but of the published ones I choose this one:
Sister Moon (Side Story of Fox Volant)
Yuan Ziyi is peak and I love the fight scenes and also how she does not compromise her principles for a man.

Fic

Best Title is shared between Breast Foot Forward (OW, F/M, making the most of being forcibly remarried to an Emperor young enough to be your son) and Ka-BOOB (OW, F/F, having your way with the concubine you've been told to breast expand), both of which are lactation kink boob expansion Battleship fics.

"But Pingu, did you write anything other than boob-focused OW porn?" Oh yes I did! This year the theme seems to have been "understated, maybe wistful, potentially hopeful". Have three, with escalating positivity:
Watching the world come undone (MDZS, Wei Wuxian/Jiang Yanli, 1.1k) post-apocalyptic, making the most of a bad situation
Horizons Deep (SWTOR, Acina/Sith Inquisitor, 1k) "What does one want when the wanting is done?" wistful yearning-ish
End of Exile (Expanse, Filip Nagata, 1.3k) post-canon, hopeful ending
(+ OW on the mood: With Eyes Wide Open, F/M steampunk ritual sex)

"But surely you wrote something weird this year????" A bit less weirdery than is typical of me, but I did write something on the unusual end:
reborn (MDZS, Wei Wuxian/OFC, 1.8k)

Wei Wuxian gets resurrected by ... matriarchal necromancers?

I did so much research for this, considering that it's for Battleship, speed writing event extraordinaire. The ruling clans bear the Eight Great Surnames of Chinese Antiquity and then I went on a deep dive of what other Chinese surnames have the woman radical in them. (Spoiler: exclusively the Wei of Wei Wuxian. He was made for this!)

"Pingu, I want something dumber!" OK, have this
The Emperor's New Woes (OW, F/M, 2.1k)

Emperor Zhao Yiqin has, to the consternation of all of his ministers and his eunuch friend Lan He, bought a stack of talismans (which obviously won't work, come on, Your Majesty) from a Daoist (charlatan) in an effort to guarantee conception of a son and heir. Things don't quite go as anyone expected...

Emperor hires Daoist to guarantee that he'll conceive a son with the Empress; ends up being the one carrying the baby. Smut is Emperor/Empress, emotionally the core relationship is Emperor/Head Eunuch (who is plotting to mpregnate the Emperor later).

2025 Resolutions & did I do them

Write 10k
Yes! I wrote over 40k! That's as many as four tens!

Be more present on DW
Uhhhhhh no. Did not really happen. I think I need some level of fannish fixation/new and improved energy.

But on the community front, I did befriend

tavina via battleship! (Like the one (1) good thing that happened relating to the battleship 2025 mod team. Jesus fuck was that a clusterfuck.) And I got the rest of Team Pear! Tower and Volcano just bye'd off, but now I have a new community of peeps in the After Pearty. One quarter of a point?

Get a new vid_bingo card and make at least one vid
This also didn't happen! However, this didn't happen because the new round didn't start, so I'm pleading force majeure.

2026 Resolutions

Go to a Cultural Event at least once a month
The opera. Ballet. Some other dress-up event. I am giving myself permission to skip July, as I will probably be back home, and idk if there's anything in August, but the goal is 12 events.

Community in fandom, part 1
I think I need to get into a new fandom. Does anyone on DW want to suggest a new fandom for me? Science fiction books and historical/scifi cdramas preferred. In addition to my love for worldbuilding and weird stuff, I love significant female characters that don't have romance-related plots. Must have a fandom on DW that is not just me. (No Murderbot, Guardian, MDZS.) I just want the 2018 Guardian fandom energy and idk, I guess the chance to fall in love with something new. I only need like 2-3 other people, I think, if they're willing to fall in and be active about timeline posts and fanmixes and stuff.

Community in fandom, part 2
I am a member of the fanwork exchange community and shall continue with that. I have

space_swap, but also, I am (with some friends) building a replacement for battleship. Please welcome

taggle to the world! Everything is still under construction, and none of what we have is on DW, but we're tentatively thinking about an early summer date and should have things up in ... a few months?

Real announcements will, of course, wait for us to have something to announce; consider this an executive pre-announcement.

Current Mood: accomplished

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meme

2025 fic meme

Previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

Number of fics written: 18

Fandoms:
Solstice (MoaCube Visual Novel) (3)
Sunless Sea (3)
Blaseball (2)
House of the Dragon (TV) (2)
A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms (1)
Invisible Inc. (Video Game) (1)
The Mandalorian (1)
琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV) (1)
The Old Guard (1)
The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien (1)
Sunless Skies (1)
Superman (Movie 2025) (1)
Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer (1)
Until Eternity - Blackbriar (Music Video) (1)

Categories:
General Audiences (9) | Teen And Up Audiences (7) | Explicit (2)

NAWA (16) | CNTW (2)

Gen (8) | F/M (4) | M/M (3) | Multi (2) | Other (1)

( the rest of the questions )

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recs

books read: 2025 december

Well, due to the possibly impending loss of LJ, I did import meiface@LJ to this account, which has overwritten my profile and tags. So be it. (Oh, the years of history are probably worth it.) Also created a mirror of my writing comm, chineseink, to save all that fic I never bothered to upload to AO3. Will I now? Eh.

Meanwhile, it's back to work tomorrow so slowly dragging my mentality back out of tropey cnovels and into caring about the real world. But there's still so many things I want to read!

( Books, December 2025 )

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The frost roads

It's Sunday afternoon, and I've got one more day of holiday tomorrow before heading back to work on Tuesday. It's been a good, restful, and much-needed break, and I'm hopeful that the aftereffects will remain for some time once everyday life resumes. (I'm resolutely trying to redirect my mind every time it contemplates global politics, because the panic spirals are intense.)

This weekend has in many ways been one in which I gradually reset myself to standard weekend routines: two hours at the gym yesterday (after a month without attending either of my classes due to illness and then Christmas holiday closures; my legs hurt), trundling around the market with Matthias to get the week's fruit, vegetables, and other groceries, 1km in the pool this morning. I've kept up swimming and daily yoga pretty much throughout the entire holiday, so apart from the absolute arctic temperatures when walking to and from the pool, that wasn't too much of a shock to the system.

Last night Matthias and I watched our first film of the year, Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery. As with the previous two, this one is tropey good fun, stealing gleefully from just about every famous locked room mystery, and involving the murder of a truly unpleasant Catholic priest in a small American town. If anything, the skewering of contemporary US politics is even more blunt than in previous films in the series, but given — with the mystery solved, and everything revealed — the various unpleasant avatars of the far-right malaise get their well-deserved comeuppance, I was quite happy for this element to be front and centre. I felt as if Daniel Craig wasn't quite as invested in this third outing, so I wonder if it might be the last, but still found it enjoyable enough.

This year's reading is off to a good start. I deliberately saved Murder in the Trembling Lands, the twenty-first (!) book in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series of historical mysteries so that it would be the first book of the new year, and I'm glad that I did so. If you've not picked up this series by now (or lost interest at an earlier stage), there's not much here that will convince you to change your mind, but if you love it as much as I do, you'll find all the familiar elements present and correct: the great sense of place in Hambly's evocation of 1840s New Orleans, the complex network of relationships in Ben's family both by blood and by choice, the tenacity with which Ben and his besieged community of free Black residents of the city try to build and preserve and sustain their lives of fragile safety in the face of all the individual and systemic pressures trying to overwhelm them, a mystery that takes us back into buried secrets of Ben's, and other characters' pasts that refuse to remain buried and threaten to bubble up to destroy them, etc. In other words, a solid contribution to what is now a sprawling series — but one to which I am always happy to return.

I followed that up with a slender little book, The Wax Child (Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken), which is a lush, lyrical, almost dreamlike account of a horrific series of witch trials in Denmark in the seventeenth century. The writing is powerful and lush, interweaving the unfolding catastrophe rushing towards the accused women with excerpts from contemporary Danish books of witchcraft.

That's it in terms of reading and viewing for now (except to say that if you have access to the BBC, I highly recommend David Attenborough's latest documentary, which is a single, hour-long episode focused on the urban life of animals in London — with some surprising creatures and moments!). I've filled a few prompts for

fandomtrees, I've caught up on both Dreamwidth and AO3 Yuletide comments, and I'm going to try to keep the remaining day-and-a-half of holidays slow and gentle. We're getting takeaway tonight, and will spend the evening vegetating in front of the TV. Tomorrow, I might wander into town to visit the public library, and then take the Christmas decorations down, and then the year will start to rush on, unfolding in front of me.

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books,
books: 2005

Books of 2025

How many?
128, including comics and manga. Biggest year in over a decade.

I did a lot of buddy reading this year, with

osprey_archer and

tullycat (separately), as well as a non-fandom friend who wanted to get back into reading.

2024 - 105
2023 - 84
2022 - 85
2021 - 60

How many not by men?
66

Most books by a single author?
13 by Joan Aiken -

osprey_archer and I did a read through her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series and it was wonderful.

Longest and shortest?
Shortest was The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard - plays are short!

Longest was Dune by Frank Herbert which was simply too long.

Favourite?
Butter by Asako Yuzuki really stuck with me for how it explored food, murder, and feminism.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jiminez was amazing, an epic fantasy that feels arrestingly original.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a classic for a reason, who would have thunk it.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, from the 1960s, I feel this should be way more widely known as a work of feminist speculative fiction.

I liked all the Joan Aiken reads to varying degrees, but special mention to The Stolen Lake which is an absolutely bonkers take on Arthurian legend and alternate history, starring Dido Twite my favourite girl in the world.

Favourite re-reads:
Heaven Official's Blessing by MXTX

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Honourable mentions:
Don't Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee, which were very funny and scarily prescient about the devaluation of art.

The Racket by Conor Niland is an excellent tennis memoir from a journeyman player.

Your Utopia by Bora Chung is a great collection of science fiction short stories.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scam, made me despair of humanity - but was so entertainingly written!

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures was a lot of fun.

Least favourite?
The Season by Helen Garner - sorry it was not good as a sports book or a memoir.

Oldest?
King John by Shakespeare, which I also saw staged as a read-through by Bell Shakespeare.

Newest?
I don't usually read a lot of new releases but this year was an exception. Emperor of Gladness, Cactus Pear for My Beloved and Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You were all released around the same time. Oh and Kings of This World by Elizabeth Knox.

Any in translation?
Tons! Mostly Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

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Another doodle, hi

Swirly multicoloured doodle in colour pencil. Looks a bit like a person with a topknot.

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Linkspam Now Living In a (More) Criminal Nation

( 'They are saying it baldly: this is an oil grab.' )

Current Mood: hopeful

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meme

January talking meme 2026

You may remember the drill: pick a date and give me a topic. I will write at least 100 words on it. Or pick several topics or leave the exact date up to me.

"A topic" can also be one of the following: a drabble/ficlet prompt, making me pick last year's best X (or my top 3/5/etc X), a request for rec(s) or just something you've wanted to know about me. If I feel it's too personal I'll just access-lock it or say I can't answer even under lock, no problem.

I used to do this in December, but the last couple of Decembers have not been conducive to memeing. So I'm doing this in January and seeing whether that works.

(I really do enjoy semi-structured excuses for talking, but tragically don't usually mesh with the Snowflake Challenge. So like, feed me Seymour etc. :D)

Previous years' masterposts: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019.

3.
4.
5. how I choose the books I read/where I find book recs (

garonne)
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. Feelings re my own original writing. (

hoarmurath)
12.
13. Feelings re my own fanfic writing. (

hoarmurath)
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25. Favorite handicraft (all fiber arts etc) pattern of 2025 (

hoarmurath)
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

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2025 in Review: Sewing!

Here’s a round up of things I sewed in 2025! It was a good sewing year for me. This a lot of pictures so I divided it up into sections.

Clothing

This year I got back into sewing garments for myself. Here’s some of what I made. (I don’t seem to have taken pictures of everything)

Jacket!

And I made three of these tunics but I only found pictures of two of them

I also made several shirts for the kid, but again didn’t photo document them very well. But here’s one picture:

Doll Clothing

I sewed a lot of clothing for my 18 inch doll! Mostly Tang dynasty inspired hanfu. I used this project to learn more about hanfu and also pattern drafting. I drafted all the hanfu patterns using a book and I feel more confident about pattern drafting now. (Maybe not confident enough to draft something for me)

Here’s the first outfit I made:

Then I decided I wanted to make a round collar robe for that hufu/crossdressing girl look. I started by making a jacket -- it took several tries to get the pattern right

All those versions really paid off though because my first try and a robe went perfectly:

Then I made a reversible robe – I wanted to do that open collar look I’ve been seeing in dramas

And here’s the second lined robe I made

I also did Tang Dynasty girl outfit:

And in not hanfu doll clothing I altered a pattern so I could make my doll a matching tunic to mine

Quilts

I didn’t sew a lot of quilts in 2025 – I was working on other things. I did send two quilt tops to a friend to quilt and then finish those quilts though. Here some pictures:

I also sewed up a quilt top which I’d cut out all the pieces ages ago but then left sitting around for a while.

Here’s some in progress shots

And the finished quilt top :

I don’t have any specific goals for 2026 sewing, but I have several quilt tops in various stages of completion that I hope to work on. I also have another top for myself cut out, and some fun fabric set aside for other garment projects. And I have plenty of ideas for more doll clothing too!

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Media Round Up: Loose Ends

It’s been ages since I did one of these! But I haven’t been reading or watching much that I want to talk about the last couple of months. I read a couple of things that I just don’t have anything to say about, and a ton of fic which I never include in these round ups. And I’ve watched almost nothing – not even mini dramas

But there’s couple of things I did want to talk about and I thought it would be nice to post about the last little bit of 2025 media before I start a new running notes document for the new year.

Crush of Music—This Chinese reality show is the one thing I have been watching recently. Crush of music is a show where songwriters demo original songs and then through a mildly gameifed process are matched with a singer (or two) who then performs the song. It’s the second season of Melody Journey, but I have no idea why the English title is different (the Chinese title is the same) It's a really fun low stress show and features some of my favorite singers! (Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen) I can't really rec the show though because the subtitles are very very bad -- I'm just watching anyway even though I can only understand about half of what people are saying. But it turns out that not understanding the show makes for very slow watching

Off Menu: A Graphic Novel written by Oliver Gerlach drawn by Kelsi Jo Silva—Cute YA graphic novel in D&D-ish world. It’s about a cook called Soup – kind of a coming of age thing with lots of cooking and community. Very Charming!

The Fellowship of The Ring— R has been reading LotR to the kid, they haven’t quite finished but they are close enough to done that we watched the 1st movie. I’ve never been huge into LotR but it was fun to watch – so many classic lines! I did kinda find myself wishing that the characters' names would show up on screen the first time they appear the way they do in the cdrama I watch. NZ remains very beautiful!

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Friday open thread: picking things up, carrying things forward, setting things down

It's the first Friday open thread of 2026. In customary fashion, I'm going to use the following prompt, which I feel is the right question with which to start a new year:

What are you planning to leave behind in 2025, and what are you planning to pick up and/or carry forward into 2026?

( My answer )

On that rather fraught note, what about all of you? Do you have anything you want to leave behind, or carry with you?

Entry tags:

challengers,
fanfic

Yuletide 2026 story: If Destiny's Kind (Challengers, OT3)

If Destiny's Kind (7877 words) by likeadeuce
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Challengers (Movie 2024)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tashi Duncan/Patrick Zweig, Art Donaldson/Original Female Character(s), Art Donaldson/Tashi Duncan/Patrick Zweig
Characters: Tashi Duncan, Art Donaldson, Patrick Zweig
Additional Tags: Road Trip, Fix-It, Stanford Era (Challengers), Art Donaldson's POV, ATP Friendless Losers Club, cw: ableist language, internalized ableism, i told tashi not to use sexist language about other women and she called me a dumb bitch
Summary:

By the time Tashi told Art she was leaving Stanford to rehab her injury and start training for the pro tour, he’d already heard it twice, from other people.

Yuletide reveal!

Thank you to dreaminghour for writing Today's Gonna Be the Day, HIStory3 Trapped, Jack/Zhao Zi. I do like this portrayal of Jack, the beginning and uncertainty of building their relationship.

I finally wrote a Yuletide fic this round! It's Obvious Things, Li Lianhua, Fang Duobing, Di Feisheng, Mysterious Lotus Casebook.

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tv shows

December TV shows

Staying at home over Christmas certainly meant Matthias and I were able to finish up a lot of TV shows this past month: six in total (plus a three-part BBC documentary about 1990s/2000s girl bands which was very good, but didn't say anything you wouldn't have expected from a documentary on that topic, so I don't have a lot to say about it myself).

The other shows were:

House of Guinness, a glossy, soapy historical drama about the quartet of 19th-century siblings who were heirs to the real-world brewing empire. This is another Steven Knight vehicle, with all his hallmarks: stylised comic book sensibility, anachronistic music, very broad-brush engagement with the politics of the era (in this case 19th-century Ireland), and larger-than-life characters whose various attempts to deal with their considerable problems just keep escalating the situation and spawning new problems. I enjoyed this, although I felt the tension was slightly dampened by the fact that most of the characters were insulated from any serious consequences due to their wealth and social position.

The third season of The Diplomat, a blackly comedic geopolitical thriller starring Keri Russell as a career American diplomat who, after postings in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, ends up posted as the ambassador to the UK. She's expected to be ceremonial and decorative in a cushy job, but suddenly lands at the centre of an international political conspiracy and scandal reaching into the highest levels of power, and struggles to deal with her embassy's, her country's, and her own personal responses to the fallout. The balance between comedy and political thriller is much more on the political thriller side of things this season, although there are still some hilariously awkward moments, but ultimately what I felt it was really about, at its heart, is the appalling tension between the undeniable benefits and utter indignity of being an ally of the United States from the 'democratic West' (quote marks because geographically some of the countries I'm including here are located in the Asia-Pacific part of the world), even when its government is led by people who at least aspire to the ideals of the post-WWII international order.

Season 10 of Shetland, which I'm continuing to enjoy with the new leads. The mystery this season had an almost Icelandic saga feel to it (cycles of grief, buried secrets, and revenge in a small, isolated community), the landscape and settings remained as starkly gorgeous as ever — and more fun to me this time because literally every Lerwick location was now familiar, and Matthias and I had a great time spotting various landmarks.

The Beast in Me, a psychological thriller in which Claire Danes plays a critically acclaimed author suffering from writer's block and struggling under the weight of grief at the death of her young son, which ended her marriage. She's living in upstate New York alone with her dog in the family home, which is quite literally falling apart around her, when she becomes tangled up in the saga and scandal involving her new neighbour — a wealthy New York property developer accused of murdering his wife. This has an excellent cast (the neighbour is played by Matthew Rhys with brittle intensity), and the story is tightly told, if a bit too conveniently wrapped up at the end.

Season 3 of Dark Winds, the historical mystery series set in the 1970s and starring Zahn McClarnon as a Navajo Tribal Police officer investigating various murders that take place in his community. This was, as always, excellent, with a stellar cast, a tremendous sense of place, and a really subtly written undercurrent of the ongoing effects of intergenerational, colonial trauma, what justice really means in such a context, and the limits of such justice. It always takes ages for new seasons of this show to make their way to the UK, and I'm already impatient for the fourth season.

The final season of Stranger Things, which I'm counting as a December show, even though I only watched the final episode last night. I have to admit that I was losing patience with the show by the last season (I had no idea the fourth season wasn't going to be the last, found watching it something of a slog that I was doing for completion's sake, and then realised with a great deal of irritation that there was no time in the final episode of Season 4 to wrap up all the various plot threads, at which point Matthias informed me that there was to be an entire additional season), and when I discovered that most episodes of the fifth season were going to be the length of short films, it felt like a self-indulgent last milking of the cash cow. So my expectations were low: it was bloated with characters, overloaded with the weight of its mythology, and the idea that it would be able to find satisfying ways to wrap things up, conclude convincing character arcs, and tie up all the various dangling interpersonal character relationship threads seemed to me far-fetched — but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed several of the middle episodes, the more clichéd emotional beats seemed perfectly calculated to appeal to me (the conclusion of Will's story this season in particular really hit me in the heart), and for the most part I felt the whole thing was handled in a satisfying way. I've never felt the slightest bit fannish about this show, so my investment is quite superficial, but on that level, although I was losing patience last season, the destination was, overall, worth the journey.

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Yuletide reveals!

I matched one of my 'why not try this' fandoms this year in Yuletide and had a lovely request for Heyer's Cotillion. I've never written Heyer fic, or any Regency romance fic unless you count the more Heyeresque parts of Bujold, but she's a longstanding favourite author and I wanted to have a go, and Cotillion is such a fun book, one of my absolute favourites of hers. And Lord Legerwood is one of Heyer's many delightfully sardonic older men and so writing his POV was tremendous fun - I had a couple of false starts trying to write something for this request, but once I started writing Lord Legerwood it all came together very smoothly. And a comedy of misunderstandings seemed very appropriate for Heyer.

By Special Licence (Heyer - Cotillion, canon pairings, epilogue, 2000 words)

To get into the spirit of the thing, as well as reading Cotillion a couple of times through I have been slowly reading through all the Heyers, partly to get the voice and also because it's always like this when I pick up one Heyer: I have to read all the other ones immediately afterwards. I haven't reread any of the Georgian ones yet because I wanted to keep my head in the Regency voice, but now that my fic is all done I will be getting to them because what can beat These Old Shades - the first Heyer I ever read, not necessarily the best place to start except of course it is the best place to start. Anyway, I have been reading through the Regencies more or less in favourite order, so I've now reached Arabella - which has many things I do love but the 'told a silly lie and now have to stick to it' trope isn't one of them. (Top ten Heyer Regencies, not in order: Frederica, Venetia, A Civil Contract, Cotillion, Friday's Child, The Nonesuch, The Foundling, The Unknown Ajax, The Reluctant Widow, Black Sheep.) But even my least favourite Heyers are still fun to reread.

And as well as what I wrote, the authors of my gifts are revealed:

morvidra wrote Happiness In Time Of Joy (Wimsey missing scenes from Busman's Honeymoon)

longwhitecoats wrote Double Exposure (long Wimsey casefic with Harriet/Peter/Bunter)

fullborn wrote Wandrers Nachtlied ('The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' Theo/Clive fic).

Thank you all very much!

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Midorikawa Kata (1872-1962)

Midorikawa Kata was born in 1872 (or maybe 1869?) in Tottori, where her father was a samurai retainer; her maiden name was Wada, and after her father led a failed rebellion she was adopted as a baby by the Hori family, of similar rank. At age fifteen, she began to study Chinese classics and etiquette at the local temple in order to prepare for marriage. The following year, she married Miki Setsujiro, son of a local banker. She was seventeen when her first son, Masao, was born, and twenty when his brother Tsutomu appeared.

In 1895, aged twenty-three, she divorced Setsujiro on account of his infidelity and went to Tokyo, taking Tsutomu with her. She was escorted en route by seventeen-year-old Midorikawa Kikuo, on his way to enter university. In Tokyo, she consigned Tsutomu to his father’s family and entered the nursing school affiliated with Tokyo Imperial University, where she was also baptized. She graduated in 1897; although her good grades led to a suggestion of studying in Germany, she worked as a visiting nurse for five years and then went to Hokkaido to marry Kikuo, who was working as a journalist in Otaru, writing pacifist and anti-authoritarian editorials protesting offenses against the Ainu as well as the Ashio Copper Mine problem; he spent the rest of his life on the authorities’ list of left-wing suspicious characters, followed by policemen.

Now with a son and three daughters, they returned to Tokyo in 1908, where Kata worked as a nurse while raising her children; her income was sometimes all the family had during the periods when Kikuo’s left-wing views put him out of work. In 1919, she learned about Mrs. Pankhurst and the women’s temperance movement in the UK from Kikuo while he was working there, and set up a Tokyo branch on her own. In 1925, she established a Women’s Suffrage League, arguing for women’s rights from the housewife’s perspective, and submitting petitions on women’s suffrage and women’s rights in general to the Imperial Diet. In 1927 she founded the Women’s Rights Protection Association, issuing the journal Joken [Women’s Rights].

Kikuo died in 1934. In 1945, when Kata was seventy-three, women’s suffrage became a reality. She died in 1962 at the age of ninety, still fighting the Japan-US Security Treaty of 1960.

Between Kikuo, her children from both marriages, and Kata herself, they had a remarkably wide circle of notable friends, colleagues, and relatives. Her oldest son Masao, better known as the poet Miki Rofu, was part of the “Akai Tori [Red Bird]” children’s literature movement and well acquainted with Yamada Kosaku (Tsuneko Gauntlett’s brother); her son Michio, a movie cameraman, taught Ozu Yasujiro his trade, while her daughter Yoshiko was married to the director Uchida Tomu and their son was Uchida Issaku (known for directing the Kamen Rider movies). Sumiko, the oldest daughter, worked in broadcasting for NHK along with her husband; Kunie, daughter number two, was an academic, and Kiyo, the youngest, became director of Japan’s first facility for multiply disabled children. Kikuo’s professional and political life brought him into contact at varying points with the poet Ishikawa Takuboku (husband of Setsuko), the author Kobayashi Takiji, the revolutionaries Kotoku Shusui (lover of Kanno Suga) and Sakai Toshihiko, and the politician Hara Kei (husband of Sadako and Asa). Kata herself became involved, through her women’s rights activism, with Hiratsuka Raicho, Ichikawa Fusae, Yosano Akiko, and Nishikawa Fumiko among others.

Sources
https://www.asahi.com/articles/photo/AS20210427003216.html?iref=pc_photo_gallery_next_arrow (Japanese) Click through the image to see selections from a picture book about Kata’s life (I couldn’t find more images)

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Candy Hearts Letter

Hi! I have previous past letters with likes lists and prompts that still hold true, so feel free to peruse old letters, though please be aware of my current DNWs and requests.

For ease of finding me: tuesday.

What I've written and what I want as a gift can differ, so for best results, please rely on my likes and DNWs over what you may find on my AO3 works page.

This letter is A Lot due to having years and years of material to copy-paste from for my general likes, etc. I'm taking advantage of how Chocolate Box is set up to request a single fandom I'm excited for, and if a work has my requested relationship and medium, so long as it avoids my DNWs, I will be very happy! This is just to give my creator a ton of direction for things I do like and some optional prompts if my creator wants them. You can skip to the things you think will be relevant in the letter, or the whole letter entirely.

( Text Likes )

( Art Likes )

( General Likes )

( Horror Likes )

( Ship Likes )

( Smut Likes )

Do Not Wants

( General DNWs )

( DNW Clarifications and Explications )

( DCC AI/Carl request & fandom specific DNWs )

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Yuletide reveals post

This year for Yuletide, I wrote one fic:

The Doorway to Home (3677 words) by genarti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Changeling - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Martha Abbott/Ivy Carson
Characters: Josie Carson (The Changeling)

I'd never actually read The Changeling before, so it wasn't what my recipient and I matched on. But when I saw it on

deifire's requests, I suddenly remembered seeing Author of The Changeling! on the cover of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game as a kid. I loved and reread The Egypt Game multiple times, EVEN THOUGH it had betrayed me on the first read by not actually being about ancient Egypt, so that's a mark of its quality, and I thought, "Well, these prompts sound interesting and I do like Zilpha Keatley Snyder, so maybe I should take this as impetus to read it!" And I did, and I loved it to bits, and here we are.

This fall ended up being very busy, between assorted travels and illnesses and upheavals, and so what I actually did was read the book and then let it marinate in the back of my head for a while, and then do a reread as I put together a timeline of what happened when throughout the book, and then write the entire thing in a frantic rush right before the deadline. But I had a wonderful time nonetheless! It was one of those experiences where you start writing and it just flows.

skygiants as usual was a last-minute rock star about betaing, DESPITE AS I HAVE JUST LEARNED WRITING AN INCREDIBLE GIFT FIC FOR ME IN A SNEAKY NINJA WAY--

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(no subject)

Aha! it's Yuletide reveals time!

So my Yuletide recipient this year was

genarti, who is either just about to find out this fact from my post, or has known for weeks and is just biding her time to reveal her knowledge and I'm just about to find out that fact after she reads this. Stay tuned for breaking developments!

So, for her, I wrote The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom, a fix-it fic for the kdrama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born about the most dysfunctional lesbian of that whole cast of lesbians picking up various postcanon pieces of herself and incidentally the rest of the troupe.

HOWEVER, for obvious reasons, I had to immediately come up with a decoy fic, so from the beginning having read

raven's Yuletide letter at the same time I happened to be rereading The Dispossessed I decided I was also going to write a treat for

raven that I would present to

genarti as my assignment, which ended up as More A Comment Than A Question, a strange little timebending fic about Shevek's daughter contacting Laia Aseio Odo through time and space and not really necessarily making the most of it.

Tangled webs, etc; after I had confidently reported submitting my decoy fic on deadline to

genarti,

raven's prompt went to the pinch-hit list and I had to frantically fake a different panic than the panic I was actually feeling -- ANYWAY. Hilariously,

raven discovered my identity immediately due to the usernames reveal error whereas

genarti was at church through that entire event and thus remained completely oblivious (unless, of course, she isn't, see first paragraph above.) A very chaotic Yuletide on several fronts! But I had a lot of fun writing both fics although I would prefer not to be wrangling quite this much deception every year.

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New Year’s Resolutions

Looking at my New Year post for 2025, I see that my plans were (1) plant a garden, and (2) compost. (1) I achieved in a small way: I planted herbs, I ate fresh herbs, I planned my guest meals around being able to airily comment “I need some chives” purely in order to waltz out onto the patio and clip the chives fresh. (However, the non-herb parts of the garden grew outside of my control, and I must do a better job with them in 2026.)

I was stymied in (2) by the small size of my yard and the voracity of the local wildlife, who enthusiastically dug up anything I buried to compost. However, a friend has started to compost, so I save my compost things in the freezer and bring them along to add to the heap whenever I visit, so at least it’s all getting composted eventually.

The New Year’s Resolution I actually kept was one I stole from

genarti later in January, to read one book from my physical To-Read shelf each month. I achieved this! A couple of months I even read two! One month I DNF’ed the book, but upon consultation with

genarti we agreed that, as this also achieves the ultimate goal of removing the book from the Unread Book Club, it still counts.

I also managed to keep pace with any new book purchases as they came in, meaning that the number of books in the Unread Book Club is in fact smaller. So I’ll be continuing with this resolution. At the present rate, I should empty the To-Read shelf in 2027. Naturally I will celebrate with a trip to John K. King Books and return with a massive pile of books with which to restart the Unread Book Club.

Otherwise, my goal for this year is not to start any new reading projects. Read at whim! I do want to continue the Book Log Challenge, because it is a good way to remind myself of authors I’ve been meaning to read more books by… but it often happens that I’ll be reaching the end of a particular list and really just don’t feel like reading anything by the last author or two.

That is fine! I can simply decide to strike that author and move on! The list is an aide-memoire, not a binding document. Maybe I should change the tag to Book Log Frolic rather than Book Log Challenge.

…Having said this, I was all set to strike Project Hail Mary because I keep looking at the book and going “Naaaah don’t feel like it,” but then

rachelmanija posted it was one of her favorite books of the year, so… Okay, I have to at least pick it up. Give it twenty pages or so to grab me. That seems only fair, right?

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2025 Resolutions & did I do them

2026 Resolutions

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( General DNWs )

( DNW Clarifications and Explications ) ( DCC AI/Carl request & fandom specific DNWs )

( DNW Clarifications and Explications )

( DCC AI/Carl request & fandom specific DNWs )