cahn

cahn @ 2025-12-26T07:53:00

2025-12-26T15:53:05Z

Merry Christmas and happy Yuletide!

At some point I'll post more about the Christmas part of it (summary: very long day, ended up being fine but was not so sure it would be earlier in the day), but bc of RL holiday commitments I may not get around to yuletide recs (I will try my best, though!) and I wanted to make sure I mentioned my amazing Yuletide presents, especially since the fandoms weren't wrangled for, uh, well, all three of them, but two of them didn't even have Unspecified Fandom and so didn't show up in the fandoms list for a while. Although they're there now, all hail the Yuletide mods and fandom wranglers!!

In the order in which they were received:

Courting the Chamberlain (3740 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sieben Jahre - Tanja Kinkel, 18th Century CE RPF, Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum/Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Ludolf von Katte, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Additional Tags: Complicated Relationships, Character Study, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Male-Female Friendship, Yuletide Treat, Backstory, Unspecified Fandom - Freeform
Summary:

How Caroline Daum ended up marrying Frederick the Great's lover: or, how to find yourself a suitable match in Frederician Prussia.

So instead of requesting 18th CE RPF this year, I requested fic for the 18th CE RPF German novel Sieben Jahre which is all about, well, Frederick the Great and his brother Henry/Heinrich (my problematic fave!) and their entire super dysfunctional family, and all the fascinating people around them!! Caroline Fredersdorf shows up very briefly but is awesome and memorable, and one of my prompts was for her backstory -- and I got this great story, both tender and hilarious, about how she ended up getting married to the King's chamberlain and lover Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf! It doesn't require any book knowledge, although knowing enough of the 18th CE history to know that Fredersdorf was, in fact, Fritz's chamberlain and lover is probably useful :)

I also got two (!!) Tiptree stories! (!!) James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is one of those writers who had a fundamental effect on me as a young SF-reading adolescent. Yuletide rules allowed nominating anthologies this year, so I jumped on that because I love all these stories so much. And I adore how both of these stories interrogate the original stories' assumptions and open up new ways of looking at them!

That the Deity Who Kills for Pleasure Will Also Heal (6260 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., On The Last Afternoon - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Rape, Explicit Sexual Content, Ecocide, Agoraphobia, Background Human Sacrifice, Background Harm to Mice, Penis Fencing, Perhaps Something Will Be Saved From the Wreckage, Post-Canon
Summary:

Mysas says you’re gods from the sky, like the elders warned us. I think you’re just people. Gods wouldn’t look so frightened all the time, or sweat so much...

Ten thousand afternoons later, space travelers make contact again.

Post-canon for "On the Last Afternoon," dealing with what it means to be human; and the battle between humans and the ecosystem, and where does one draw the line? This can be read without knowing canon (it takes place generations after canon, in fact), although it's definitely very much in dialogue with the very different mindset of that story. (Sorry, I can't find an online version of the canon story.)

Remembering the Director of the Seventh Recitation: Oral Histories from the Imperial Archive (3597 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., The Women Men Don't See - James Tiptree Jr., The Last Flight of Dr. Ain - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Ruth Parsons
Additional Tags: Oral History, Post-Canon, "Main Character Death" Just In the Sense That Everyone Dies Eventually, Background Ruth Parsons & Althea Parsons, Vietnam War, Lunar Forestry
Summary:

Five memories of Ruth Parsons, afterwards.

Post-canon for "The Women Men Don't See," with some worldbuilding taken from "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain." Just a really interesting set of interviews with a diverse set of aliens and humans and fascinating worldbuilding, about a potential future for Ruth Parsons and her life, that has a lot of thoughts about axes other than the women/men axis. Just really great. This can definitely be read without knowing "Flight," and while helpful to know "Women," it's not necessary, I think, to enjoy it. (The canon story is archived here, although the formatting is a little weird.)

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More books I looked at in December

2025-01-03T18:37:48Z

( Spoilers for Some Desperate Glory )

( Spoilers for... Ayn Rand's life? )

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Kairos/Chronos books (L'Engle)

2025-01-03T03:58:22Z

Okay, so now I can FINALLY post about how this fall I did the deep dive through a whoooooole bunch of L'Engle's books!

( There turn out to be a lot of Kairos and Chronos books. )

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cahn @ 2023-01-02T09:02:00

2023-01-03T06:24:28Z

Merry Christmas? and happy Yuletide? and happy New Year? As usual for this year, I am way behind, and actually I managed to drop or refuse to play with a number of balls over Christmas -- I think I had a minor case of burnout this year, which I'm sort of bemused by as I had a lot less going on than in previous years. I only had to organize not-all-that-much music for one morning (not two mornings, I did not have to organize the evening music-intensive performance), I didn't have to organize any instrumental rehearsals (Awesome Musical Family Mom: Should we get a bunch of people together to do an instrumental thing? Me: ...I'd be the one coordinating all these rehearsals, wouldn't I. ...no.), we didn't fly anywhere (which, given the weather, I'm rather grateful for). I did a lot of knitting instead of anything any more intensive than that.

Things I did do: ( Choir conducting, dad's memoirs, skiing )

One more thing I did (a more conventional reveal post here):

This fall I reread The Perilous Gard, a kidlit/YA-ish (Newbery Honor) book from 1974 about a young woman who, in the last days of Mary Tudor's reign, gets sent to an out-of-the-way castle that may or may not be associated with the Fair Folk. This book I adore to little bits and pieces. I love everything about it, although on this reread I was amused to find that I have read the last third or so so many times that I basically have large portions of it memorized, and then the first two-thirds I only remembered rather vaguely. (although I really enjoyed rereading it! It's just that those parts are in a lot of ways setting up the last third, that was and is super iddy for me.) ( minor spoilers )

All the characters are just wonderful, even the ones who have only very slight appearances. Kate's father shows up for... maybe a few paragraphs?? ...and he is delightful; you can totally see how important he is to Kate, and how important Kate is to him, and how Kate turned out the way she did <3 Sir Geoffrey has a fairly minor part in the story but he's also fully-formed and totally great! And the young future Elizabeth I has a single scene, but I've been imprinted with her and that's how I've thought of young Elizabeth ever since. And I love Alicia too! And as for the Lady, and the worldbuilding of the People Under the Hill, and Kate and Christopher... well, as I said to selenak, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor all my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents. (looking at you, Holly Black! Sorry!)

I've always loved that Kate gets to save the day, and she gets to save it rather a lot; one of the things that struck me in this reread was how many times Kate's brain saves the day, but not in any way that feels overtly 21st-century (though her father clearly is progressive for his time in the way he teaches her, and Kate clearly is extremely intelligent and thoughtful). There are several things about her that save the day, of course, not just her intelligence -- also her stubbornness, also her ability to value what is real, also her compassion, also her sense of what's right -- but it was interesting to me on this read that it's also in large part her intelligence and extreme dose of common sense, which leads her to realize e.g. that something's wrong with Christopher's story in the beginning, how to find Christopher under the Hill, how to get out near the end.

Another thing I loved was how Kate's and Christopher's rationality complement each other. Kate: as skygiants said in her awesome review, Kate Sutton has no TIME for your manpain. She will call Christopher out every time he's being Super Drama Emo Boy! Which is, admittedly, a lot of times! (also I ABSOLUTELY 100% LOVE that this is (yet another) major quality of hers that saves the day!) But then there's also the part where Christopher will also counter Kate's subconscious assumptions that he's Super Dramatic Romance Knight with things like, but what about worrying about cleaning out the drains!

Basically I love these two a lot. Kate in particular is just really an awesome heroine -- she's so individualistic that I felt it was hard for me to extrapolate what she'd think about a situation that wasn't in the book, which I feel I don't usually have a problem with. With Christopher, I did feel like I had a much better idea how he would respond. ~~he would talk about drainage, probably~~

This was also the only example in my childhood that I can think of where, in the boy-girl romance, it is the boy who is described as extremely conventionally attractive and not the girl! I also love ( spoilers )

Also also! one of my favorite lines continues to be the one that Kate thinks about the Guardian of the Well: Questions, thought Kate savagely; why even now couldn't the thing tell a plain lie, like an honest man? (It's a line that comes near the climax of the book, in an incredibly tense scene, and yet it always makes me laugh when I come across it. It's so Kate. Kate is just so great.)

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Things I read during Yuletide Season this year

2022-01-01T18:02:50Z

(A more conventional reveal post here.)

-Reread A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate and had many many deep conversations with sprocket about how a magical school would feel/think, chronology, all the parts where Novik did or maybe did not think about where she was going in TLG when writing ADE, El as a massively unreliable narrator not just as regards her own feelings but also as regards actual canon historical events and dates and numbers thereof, etc.

-Did the deep dive into reading The Waste Land, which I'd of course read before but never taken the deep dive with. You guys, there's nothing like trying to do pastiche to make one realize that a canon author is a freaking genius. And also Eliot is a total troll, those footnotes, omg. (I am convinced he would absolutely positively put a rickroll in his poetry if he were writing today.)

I bought the edition by Helen Vendler because a) I recognized the name b) it had better footnotes (not just Eliot's) than the other paperback editions in the bookstore c) it was a very small paperback and I could carry it around with me everywhere, which I did for the last two months.

-Reread a bunch of rheinsberg posts, especially Katte's last letter, the Puncta.

-Reread a few chapters of 1 and 2 Kings, and also this interesting article casting Ahab and Jezebel as the victims of Bad Publicity, which I am super taking with a Very Large grain of salt (now that I know to mistrust pop historical articles basically Always) but which is still fascinating to think about.

-Read the Atlas Obscura article about Cannibal Ants in a Polish Bunker (which I had actually read before but had completely forgotten I had read) which is super creepy and super fascinating and with a happy ending, except that when I was telling D about it, he was like, "wait, you mean they set the cannibal ants LOOSE ON THE WORLD??" which, uh, hadn't been my takeaway.

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Christmas and Yuletide

2021-12-27T18:26:57Z

Merry Christmas and happy Yuletide, two days late :)

We had a lovely Christmas. Christmas Eve we went to D's church and got to do candles for Silent Night, which E. remembered from pre-pandemic and A. didn't. A. got legos and E. got a board game which entertained them basically the whole day (E likes to play board games with other people less than she likes to read the rules and play games with herself). It turned out great that we got home two days early, as we had time to go grocery shopping before Christmas and had a proper Christmas dinner instead of sandwiches in the car, which had been our previous plan and which in retrospect was probably... not the best idea. We'd planned for D to roast a chicken, but when D got to the store, he called me and we had a conversation that went something like this (okay, I probably was not quite as vocal in real life):

D: They're out of chicken, but they have duck. Want me to get duck?
Me: ???? I don't really understand a world in which this is a question you have to ask?? OF COURSE I WANT DUCK. If I'd known they had duck I would have asked you to get duck! YAY DUCK
D: *laughs at me, gets the duck*

Anyway, D roasted the duck (he is getting good at roasting things) and it was wonderful, and we talked to my family and D's family on phone/facetime, and E was able to play Minecraft with (K/B/'s)D. And then on Sunday we had the last of our musical church performances, and they went... much better than we had any right to expect, really <3

AND I got some lovely lovely Yuletide presents and I love them! tl;dr one-line teasers:

1. 16th-C lovely arranged-marriage friendship plus murder; don't need to know canon
2. The Duke of Alba in (metaphorical) opera buffa
3. 18th-C writing my ships of everyone/music
4. Madness: Gram Tillerman is the best
5. Madness: brilliantly allusive poetry fusion of Wallace Stevens and Frederick the Great

First, my gift, in 16th C Hapsburg RPF, about the teenage Margaret of Parma and her arranged marriage to Alessandro de' Medici (a bastard and a black man and the first Duke of Florence), and his canonical murder. No canon knowledge needed, as it's explained in the story. Margaret and Alessandro are both awesomesauce, and in the story they have such a lovely (and historically plausible) friendship that it just makes me so happy. And the scenes with Margaret and Alessandro's mistress (which are much more complex and interesting than one might expect from a wife/mistress conversation) are also pure gold. Definitely worth reading even if you don't know anything about the period! <-- me, mostly

Murder in Florence (8977 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Taddea Malaspina, Taddea Malaspina/Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici & Ippolito de' Medici
Characters: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Taddea Malaspina, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, Cosimo I. de' Medici, Françoise de Lannoy, Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Caterina de' Medici, Ippolito de' Medici
Additional Tags: Murder Mystery, Coming of Age, Arranged Marriage, Illegitimacy, POV Female Character, Politics, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Male-Female Friendship, Misses Clause Challenge, Chromatic Yuletide, Renaissance Era, yule be first, Yuletide, Yuletide 2021
Summary:

When Alessandro de' Medici is murdered, his teenage bride Margaret of Austria may be one of the few people sincerely mourning him - and determined to find out the truth. For the killer is one of Alessandro's closest friends, and Alessandro, the first Duke of Florence, both a bastard of uncertain parentage and a black man, had more than his share of enemies...

I also got a treat in the same fandom! Now THIS one is about Barbara Blomberg, the mother of Emperor Charles V's illegitimate heroic son Don Juan of Austria, who managed to fox both the Duke of Alba (yes, THAT Duke of Alba) and Philip II! If you are a fan of Don Carlo(s) and/or Les vêpres siciliennes, which I know a few of you are, and would be interested in a tale where the Duke of Alba is starring in an opera buffa instead of an opera seria, this is the story for you :D (The historical Don Carlos is mentioned, but only in passing, in a way where you could conceivably headcanon in the opera if you wanted.)

Bad Reputation (2778 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Barbara Blomberg & Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba & Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain
Characters: Barbara Blomberg, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens, Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain, Juan de Austria | John of Austria
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Character Study, Dark Comedy, Winning at life
Summary:

The Duke of Alba might be King Philip's most feared general and the terror of the Netherlands, but even he is an utter loss on how to deal with one woman: Barbara Blomberg, former lover of the late Emperor Charles V., mother of Spain's latest national hero - and determined to live her life exactly the way she wants to.

I also was pleased to get a treat in 18th C Frederician RPF, which is about the first meeting of Frederick the Great (back when he was just Prince Friedrich and his lover/best friend Katte had just been executed by his father) and his life partner/valet Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf. The most lovely thing about this story, for me, and which I think will appeal to some of you as well, is the lovely lovely descriptions of music and how both Fritz and Fredersdorf feel about music, and how they start to form a bond because of the shared way they feel about it. (Also, Fredersdorf is greeeeeat and this story leans into that.) I don't think you need to know canon except what I've just said.

A Prussian Christmas Tale (7430 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE Frederician RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Curt Christoph von Schwerin
Additional Tags: First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Christmas, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Having survived a year of imprisonment and haunted by the death of Katte, Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia is determined to focus on nothing but ambition, and shut out all sentiment. But the Christmas of 1731 has a surprise in store for him: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf...

Then, two treats in Madness! The first is a small treat about Gram Tillerman, whom I love very much, and I was so happy to get something that centered on her, especially since the books are more centered on the kids, and she's such a fascinating character.

I know who you are (439 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Abigail "Gram" Tillerman
Additional Tags: Character Study
Summary:

A brief reflection on Abigail Tillerman as her grandchildren invade her life.

The second is a riff on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird applied to Frederick the Great, Voltaire, and Frederick's brother Prince Henry, and his friend/friend-with-benefits Lehndorff, and I totally did not expect this cracky, touching, allusive brilliance. Unfortunately I think it might be pretty hard to follow if you didn't already know something about the canon. (Though if you've read some of the Frederician fics, that might be enough for some of it -- e.g. if you've read the Voltaire fics in the fandom, that would probably be enough to follow the Voltaire parts.) But it's still lovely even if you don't get all the references :D

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Frederick (781 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Voltaire (Writer), Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802), Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff
Additional Tags: Poetry
Summary:

I was of three minds.

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Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 22 (or: Yuletide 2020 edition)

2021-01-01T18:41:19Z

ETA: Whoops, I missed my cue -- this might as well be the next discussion post, I guess! :)

This is about the fic I didn't author (I have another reveals post for the fics I did author).

So my goal this Yuletide was NOT to write any historical fandom (because hard!) and just enjoy the excellent stuff that other people wrote. And... that sort of happened? I didn't end up authoring anything history-intensive? Buuuuut I ended up spending a lot more time than I did on any of my own fics working with mildred_of_midgard on her fic, which she was worried about being able to pull off because she had had this completely insane idea to write a long casefic about Frederick the Great that every time I turned around had another twist put in :P :) She supplied me with what we called a "rough opal in matrix" bus pass casefic, and I cut away the matrix that remained and in some cases carved the opal -- that is to say, writing additional text for some of the scenes, what we liked to call "putting in feels," and in at least two cases entirely rewriting and/or restructuring the scene she'd written. She didn't always keep what I wrote (which we'd agreed upon in the beginning), but when she did (which was most of the time :) ) she then went in and rewrote/restructured what I put in to wordsmith (some of the words I gave her were really rough) and match her style, adding even more scenes -- that is, polishing it up and adding some gold and diamonds -- and voila, a beautiful pendant, I mean, story :)

I'm really proud of it and also it was really fun and also what I could handle this year, especially because mildred did all the parts I thought were hard and also wrote all the parts involving actual history or subtle AU before I was brought in so I didn't actually have to know historical stuff (though I guess I will never forget the battle of Leuthen now), and took full responsibility for how the whole thing turned out, so all I had to do was be like "Here, I'll write some rough feels for you for this scene!" The funny part was that I would often then write a paragraph justifying why I *had* to write the scene the way I did, and more likely than not mildred would be like, "yeah, I was sure you would do that, of course it should be written like that." (The most glaring example of this was where I inserted the Letter of Doom at the climax. I was worried there was some reason she didn't want it there, but she said, no, she just didn't have time to put it in herself and was just trusting me to do that :) ) She started jokingly calling me her "other self," to which I replied that it was with 1000% less angst and frustration -- as Frederick the Great's brother was his "other self" (which actually comes up in the fic) that he could trust to do all kinds of competent things, but they had a relationship that was, um, fraught? radioactive? Whereas this was just fun :)

Mildred did so much more than I did (we estimated a 90%/10% word ratio, not even counting the part where she wordsmithed a lot of my text) that I felt very uncomfortable being listed as a co-author, but hey, ~3000 words is a respectable Yuletide fic length :)

Yet They Grind Exceedingly Small (30384 words) by mildred_of_midgard
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Anna Amalie von Preußen & Wilhelmine von Preußen, Anna Amalie von Preußen & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen, Wilhelmine von Preußen & Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia
Characters: Anna Amalie von Preußen (1723-1787), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758), Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802), Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1732-1780), Wilhelmine von Hesse-Kassel (1726-1808), August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Alcmene 1 | Frederick the Great's Italian Greyhound, Voltaire (Writer), Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, Suicide, Alternate Universe - Dark, Siblings, Canon-Typical Violence, Mystery, Tide of History Challenge
Summary:

January 1758. Prince William is dead, some say of a broken heart. Frederick wants to absolve himself of blame for William's death. Henry schemes to end the Third Silesian War on his terms. Amalie and Wilhelmine team up to find out what really happened to their brother. Alcmene just wants to be told she's a good dog.

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The Book of Esther, ants, flute music, etc.

2020-01-02T06:30:27Z

(Or: December 2019: the month D would say to me before bed, "What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?")

Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)

I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):

-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)

-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)

-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.

-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures

-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)

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Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

2020-01-01T15:24:21Z

In the last several months, as anyone who reads this DW knows, mildred_of_midgard and selenak and I have been part of this quite frankly amazing Frederick the Great fandom, and I sort of assumed that the two people in this fandom who actually knew anything, mildred and selenak, were going to write fics for Yuletide, and I (who know nothing except what they've told me in the last several months) was going to awesomely enjoy reading them. In fact, mildred wrote a Fredersdorf fic for selenak's prompt which I betaed, but then mildred's medical issues got bad enough to interfere with her writing fic (making the beta edits would have involved a substantial amount of rewrite), and she wrote a post lamenting she wasn't going to be able to produce any yuletide fic. Meanwhile, I had two fics that I was pretty sure were from selenak, and I thought it would be a shame for her to write us fic and for her not to get any :(

So then mildred and I had this (very paraphrased) conversation (mildred_of_midgard has her own account here, and she has promised to reproduce the actual conversation in comments to this post):

me: You know, we should really write something for selenak! Now that I've read what you wrote about Fredersdorf, I think I could take a stab at her Fredersdorf prompt, if you edited and otherwise helped me out with historical stuff and also if you don't mind it being way more about music than something you would write.
mildred: YES GOD YES ~~and also oh you sweet summer child thinking you know enough to write this~~. [Mildred was far FAR nicer than this in real life.] For starters, here are 3500 words [really!] of things I know for a fact you don't know about Fredersdorf.
me: ...I was clearly overoptimistic. But I can work with this. Um, also, all the creativity-generating bits of my brain are already being used for my assignment, so can you also come up with an idea for the fic and also answer all my historical questions?
mildred: Sure! While I'm thinking about this, have 2k more words of historical grounding! Ok, and here are some ideas too. In fact, here's a whole plot for you!
me: Great! *writes 4k words of the plot*
mildred and me, more-or-less in unison: You did all the hard parts!

Then mildred fixed all my extensive historical errors and was fortunately able in between various medical woes to add various parts like the entire Wilhelmine subtheme and the entire last scene, and we deleted some of my words, and then I wrote some more paragraphs about music at her request and edited some of her stuff. I estimate that I probably ended up writing ~4.5k of the final fic, and mildred ended up writing ~ 2k of it (does that sound about right?) Of course that does not count the... I have no idea how much historical consultantcy stuff mildred ended up writing in the end, but I imagine it was significantly upwards of 10k :P And of course she wrote the detailed endnotes :D It also does not count all the words written in comments to the google document where we argued things like that Fredersdorf should be more zen than mildred wanted to write him and less zen than I wanted to write him :)

Although mildred and I mostly agreed on things, I had final veto power (and I did wield it a couple of times), so any remaining problems should be thought of as mine :) I'm very curious, though, as to how evident the collaboration was, and how evident the seams were, as I think mildred and I have very different writing styles, but it went through enough editing passes and discussion that I suspect much of the differences got at least somewhat smoothed out?

Counterpoint for Two Flutes

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cahn @ 2019-12-25T21:04:00

2019-12-26T05:12:17Z

Merry Christmas and/or Happy Yuletide, if you celebrate either :D

We are having a lovely one. I survived music week and it was actually really wonderful. (My ward is crazy talented right now and I spent a whole week having various conversations with various people about how we were doing Too Much and it was all Too Much and then we had this set of two amaaaazing music programs and everyone was like "okay, it's still probably too much but we still have to do crazy music because it's soooooo good!")

D got remote control cars "for the kids" (seriously, one of the big pros of having kids is that you can get them all the toys you actually secretly want but would never actually buy for yourself -- several years back I got them Hungry Hungry Hippos, which I have wanted ever since I was a kid, and it was exactly as great as I'd thought it would be) and all of us had a blast with them. We are hanging out with D's dad for Christmas Day and I'm glad that worked out. He seems to be doing pretty well, only three months after D's mom's death, better I feel than we had any right to expect -- he seems pretty cheerful and functional. (And he did even when we saw him for the funeral. I wonder if for him it was a relief in some ways. It's hard to tell what he's feeling, though.) More Family and Friends to come, too.

Also, I kind of won Yuletide?!! I got 3 stories and they are all amazing.

Two of them were assignment and treat in my crazy awesome Frederician fandom eeeeeeee! <3 The assignment was written to what was honestly my favorite prompt (and which I was super not expecting to be written, so much so that when the tags went up I shook it and then was like "wow, what could this possibly be?"), "What would happen if Frederick the Great's abusive dad killed him as a young man instead of his boyfriend Katte, and his beloved sister Wilhelmine teamed up with Katte to avenge him?" It's got so much strong emotion and is so cathartic, it's so good! I don't think you need to know much more than I just described to read the fic, although it will make the fic more resonant to read the historical endnote first. (Don Carlo(s) fans, Fritz and Katte were a major model for Carlos and Rodrigo, and the fic has the strong relationships that I love DC for, so you might consider reading this if you are interested in the AU where Rodrigo lives and Elisabeth and Rodrigo bring Filippo to justice for killing Carlo :D)

Fiat Justitia (10924 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE Frederician RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte, Hans Herrmann Von Katte & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) & Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) & Friedrich Wilhelm I von Preußen, Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia & Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria
Characters: Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758), Hans Hermann Von Katte, Friedrich Wilhelm I von Preußen | Frederick William I of Prussia, Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria, Franz Stephan von Lothringen | Francis I Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich Wilhelm von Grumbkow, Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, POV Female Character, Katte Lives, Brother Feels, Brother-Sister Relationships, Grief/Mourning, Justice, Survivor Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Alternate History, Yuletide Treat, Misses Clause Challenge
Summary:

August 1730: Crown Prince Friedrich attempts to flee his abusive father and dies. His lover, Hans Hermann von Katte, escapes with Friedrich's sister Wilhelmine. Come what may, Wilhelmine is determined to avenge her brother...

The Frederician treat is a Five Ways (five!) that Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia never met, which, translated into cahn-speak, is Five Treats For Meeeeee :D Seriously, each of these is brilliant and could have been a treat all by itself. This one you proooobably need to know a little more canon to appreciate, although there are also helpful endnotes at the end of each chapter and again if you read those first it may be enough information to read the fic.

Five Ways in which Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia did not meet (10362 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: 18th Century CE Frederician RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Franz Stephan von Lothringen | Francis I Holy Roman Emperor/Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Other(s), Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria & Joseph II, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria, Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria / Franz Stephan von Lothringen ×
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF), Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina, Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758), Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor, Franz Stephan von Lothringen | Francis I Holy Roman Emperor
Additional Tags: Rivalry, Enemies, Seven Years' War, Character Study, Developing Relationship, Alternate History, Keep Your Enemies Closer, My Best Enemy, Yuletide, Misses Clause Challenge
Summary:

1740: Two young monarchs ascend to the throne: Frederick II of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria. Over the next few decades, the rivalry between them will change Europe forever. Yet they never meet face to face. But there were five times in their lives when they might have done...

My other treat was in The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith, which I adore so much and I'm always so thrilled to find out that anyone else has even read these stories, much less Written Me a Story! This one was tagged "Mass Death" and "Dubious Ethics" and it's the kind of thing where I am really glad they tagged but given that they tagged I was so looking forward to this and it did not disappoint! It's about how Santuna became the Lady Alice More but really it's about the weird crazy ethics (or lack thereof) of the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality and I love it! I think it can be read without knowing canon, although you might need to know going in that at this point in canon the underpeople (animal-derived people) are considered to be much less than "true" people.

The Girl Who Failed (5702 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Santuna | Lady Alice More, Lord Jestocost
Additional Tags: Underperson, Dubious Ethics, Mass Death, Number-names, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

The expedition succeeded: on that, all the witnesses agree. Even Lady Mmona, who warned so direly at the outset. Even Lord Jestocost, who was personally responsible for the cleanup...

“It went wrong,” said the girl Santuna at the inquest. “And it was my fault it went wrong. If that was a success, I want no more successes.”

I have not had time to read anything else. Hopefully I can start browsing more tomorrow :D

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Happy Fritzmas! (*) / Frederician discussion post 7

2019-12-26T05:03:23Z

Frederician fandom is the best! 3 stories in main archive and 2 stories in Madness, eeeeeeee and I have only managed to read my own gifts so far (well, I guess Madness isn't open yet either, but even if it had been I wouldn't have managed to have read them) but they are so goooooood

Also, I would like to apologize on behalf of the fandom that none of us apparently managed any Fritz/Voltaire. Some of us, uh, didn't know enough about Voltaire, and we are Taking Steps to attempt to rectify this in the future if anyone requests it, say, next year. Just saying.

I'm making this post because the last one has an insane number of comments, but I still owe SO many comments on the last post and I kiiiinda would like to read and comment on Yuletide stories for the next week as time permits so I almost hope this post doesn't get much action and then we resume in the new year? (Especially since there is a limited amount of discussion we can do on the fics right now!) :D I was thinking of making another post anyway for reveals.

(*) My husband D came up with this :P :)

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cahn @ 2019-12-02T14:17:00

2019-12-02T22:23:34Z

December is the month in which my ward goes crazy with musical activities.

Bishopric: cahn, would you like to be in charge of the ward musical fireside [evening event] again like you were last year?
Me: NO. Thank you.
Bishopric: Um, okay, thanks for being honest with us!
Me: You're welcome! :D

Things I have done in the last two weeks:
-Figured out how to play a cello part on viola without embarrassing myself (did not take too long)
-Helped E figure out how to play a viola part with quartet, choir, and conductor without embarrassing herself (E would tell you this took Much Too Long)
-Planned out Christmas Sunday morning music (on one hand, this was not hard as the choir director did most of it; on the other, people keep helpfully asking if they can be in the program and I am like... this would have been MUCH MORE HELPFUL a month ago)
-Planned out instrumental number for fireside (this took way longer than I feel it should have)
-Fielded fireside drama regarding instrumental number (much milder than previous fireside drama, thankfully)
-Did NOT play with choir in additional church (stake) Christmas thing last night, nor did E (which I thought we were going to have to do), for which we are all grateful, not least the audience
-Wrote 3/4 of a Yuletide fic (I am a little worried this is a Zeno's fic, though... I keep thinking it is going to be done and then I am like oh crap I have to Fix The Thing, and the Things To Fix keep Happening, so I don't even have a complete bus draft yet)

Things I need to do in the next two weeks:
-Learn a piano part
-Rehearse with the singers for whom I'm playing piano
-Rehearse choir number with E at a tempo that it turns out is way way faster than we were taking it, after having worked with E for two weeks to slow it down
-Rehearse the instrumentalists for fireside
-Possibly rewrite a cello part into treble clef for one of them
-Possibly figure out rehearsal time for (another) singing number
-Write the rest of my yuletide draft ~~and beg for beta help~~
-Start writing a fic treat

~~why do I do this to myself~~
~~because it's fun~~
it will be more fun once it's done

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cahn @ 2019-11-24T21:19:00

2019-11-25T05:21:36Z

Talking to D about my Yuletide woes isn't perhaps exactly helpful, but at least it's amusing?

Me: My Yuletide fic has So Many Issues. There are way too many infodumps of worldbuilding information. I actually think the solution here is that I should make it longer...
D: That way it's more like info-dribbles? Hmm. I was going to say it's like the Weber solution, only he really does have just infodumps.
D: 'Then, the earth cooled.' That's the Michener solution!
D: Or, you could put all the worldbuilding in appendices. That's the Herbert solution!
D: Or, you could run out of room in the appendices and write another whole book. That's the Tolkien solution!

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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

2019-11-06T17:06:24Z

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

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Yuletide tag set is out!!

2019-10-22T03:56:39Z

-Not much opera this year (I did nominate Pelleas et Melisande), although one of the ones that is there is Der Rosenkavalier, which I have been intending to watch for some time, so I'd better get on that

-Someone(s) who is not me nominated Cordwainer Smith AND Zenna Henderson!! Who are you mysterious person/people so we can be friends???? <3

-Every year I'm all "I just don't know if I'll be excited about offering anything in the tag set" and every year it turns out this is not going to be a problem roughly thirty seconds into looking at it

-should I go for the "easy to write will be able to dash off in an hour and it will be great" offers or the "will inevitably get sucked into a morass which I have no time for and may not even turn out that well" offers. Why am I even asking, I know which one I'm going to pick

-I waffled a LOT but ended up using my third slot for Charles Williams' Arthurian poetry; I made a promo post here.

-Making a separate Yuletide tag post for Fredericians :)

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Merry Christmas, Happy Yuletide

2017-12-26T16:40:22Z

We are spending Christmas in Maui with my dad's family! This side of the family is really great and while there is inevitable DRAMA between the older members of the family, the rest of us just mostly roll our collective eyes at them. And Maui is great and the beach is great!

The awesomeness of this vacation was somewhat marred by our Christmas tradition of getting deathly ill. First me then E got really sick (it felt like flu but probably wasn't the flu because we only spent one day feeling like we were about to die, though several days after that feeling not-great), and D got sunburned because if he forgets even one spot when triple-coating himself then it's game over (A seems to be fine... so far), so we have spent more time napping and staying in our room than we would generally have done, but on the other hand that's what vacation is about too, right? :)

ALSO. I got this amazing awesome Yuletide present, you guys, and I know it is totally relevant to the interests of some of you. (In fact I kind of wonder if one of you wrote it...) I asked for Llyfr Taliesin, particularly the Battle of the Trees, and I got what is basically a missing episode from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion that slots right in after Gwydion and Gilfaethwy's rape of Goewin and before the whole Llew Llaw Gyffes episode, and this story makes more sense of everything -- Kat Godeu is given structure and sense by its function in the episode, and the episode itself draws in elements from the Fourth Branch that, darn it, should have been there! Anyway I adore it and it is seriously worth reading.

When the Trees Were Enchanted (4673 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Llyfr Taliesin | Book of Taliesin, Mabinogion (Myth)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Gwydion (Mabinogion), Gilfaethwy (Mabinogion), Rhiannon (Welsh Mythology), Arawn's Wife (Mabinogion), Arawn (Mabinogion)
Additional Tags: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, The Battle of the Trees
Summary:

How Arawn King of Annwvyn pursued Gwydyon after the death of Pryderi, and how Gwydyon called up an army of trees to fight for him.

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Earthsea

2017-01-02T23:03:47Z

Now that Yuletide reveals are over (I have a more conventional reveal post here) I can finally inflict on you guys all the feelings I have about Earthsea, which I read again for the first time in many years (at least ten, maybe fifteen) this fall.

...I have a lot of feelings.

( The second trilogy, which I reread first. )

( The first trilogy, which I read second. )

( Le Guin and style. )

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cahn @ 2016-12-27T20:52:00

2016-12-28T04:59:28Z

Merry Christmas and Happy Yuletide! I am still alive! Okay, so, I realize I am waaaay behind on well, life in general, and the documentation thereof, but I had to say something about my (four!! You crazy awesome people, you!) Yuletide fics because they are marvelous and also because I am worried no one will see them, partially because they're all in small fandoms to begin with and partially because of a sequence of events that wasn't really anyone's fault but which meant the ones in Tiptree fandom didn't get wrangled (*) :(((((((( So please go read and shower love on these, pleeeease!

My gift:
Firebound (2345 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Der Ring des Nibelungen | The Ring of the Nibelung - Wagner
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Ambiguous or Implied Relationship(s), Brynhildr/Sieglinde
Characters: Brynhildr | Brunnhilde, Loge (Ring des Nibelungen)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fate & Destiny, References antisemitic stereotypes
Summary:

There isn't much to do at the top of a desolate mountain, bound by inviolate will, except to chat.

I asked for Brunnhilde and Loge, talking, because the way Ring is set up they have a lot of the same concerns, and would that not be awesome? Answer: yes! Yes, it is awesome! It is especially awesome when Norse myth and gnomic wisdom is interspersed throughout, when Sieglinde plays a prominent role even though she's not actually in the fic except very briefly, and when it is AU that is fix-it, which is totally what I want from Ringfic. I was really pleased by this and you should definitely read it if you have any interest in the Ring Cycle or Norse myth at all!

My treats were all in my requested fandom Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree, Jr.. The link should get you to where you can see all the fics, as well as a tiny ficlet that some anonymous person wrote to get the fandom wrangled only that didn't happen, but anyway.

The Greek Origins of Certain Words (2788 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Science Fiction, Post-Canon, Body Modification, Dysfunctional Relationships, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

“It’s a dying field,” Elsie said, “pornography.” She and Desmond were in bed together and she had taken to idly fidgeting with his body, as though he were terrain she was mapping: that was the term her industry used for relatively unmarked flesh. The terrain.

This is an amazing piece of work, possibly written by undead Tiptree (heh, wouldn't that be a story) -- it is so point on and spectacularly Tiptree in both voice and theme. It's sort-of-kind-of a sequel to, or at least takes place in the same universe as, "And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" -- but you don't need to have read the story to read this. Not only does this story replicate the breathless cadences and seventeen-new-worldbuilding-ideas-a-minute SF that characterize Tiptree's best work, but it's brilliantly about Tiptree's major themes: sex, love, biology, and what it means to be human. Especially the sex part -- from one point of view this fic is one extended (philosophical!) sex scene with kink, but the sex is crucial: it's part and parcel of examining the philosophical and SF-ian underpinnings of the universe, story, and humanity. This is just amazing. If you like Tiptree, this is basically required reading! But in general, if you are interested in stories about sex, love, biology, philosophy, what it means to be human, and/or in darn good SF, read it!

As Though to Breathe Were Life (2922 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Original Character-centric, Alien Cultural Differences, Not Entirely Hopeless
Summary:

“It’s a human thing,” I say. “The struggle, you don’t get how much we need it. Really trying, setting your heart on something grand and impossible, win or die.”

This is the one I feel extremely protective towards, because not only is it in a super-small unwrangled fandom but it's also in Madness! So I worry a lot about it not getting anything like its fair share of love. Anyway, this one is also super worth reading and you should all read it. It isn't Tiptree pastiche and actually reads much more like original SF, and therefore I think you don't need to have read any canon, and it's enjoyable even if you hate Tiptree -- but yet has all those Tiptreeian themes -- what does it mean to have free will, or not; what does it mean to be human, in all its pain and glory and terribleness. It is heartbreaking and wonderful.

(Also, I am totally guessing that morbane wrote this for me. If so, thank you!! If not, well, take this as a compliment :) )

The Dead Authors Podcast Chapter 60: James Tiptree Jr. (1299 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., The Dead Authors (Podcast), 20th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: James Tiptree Jr., Alice Sheldon, H.G. Wells (The Dead Authors Podcast)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Yuletide, Time Travel, Gender Issues, Feminist Themes, Trans Character, Politics, RPF, Star Trek References
Summary:

"I must ask, should I be addressing you as James, Tip, Alice, or Raccoona?"

Man, I wish I'd had the idea to cross over James Tiptree Jr. as a guest on the Dead Authors Podcast! (If you haven't listened to this podcast, you should at least listen to the Ayn Rand one, which is completely hilarious.) I've only listened to a couple of them, but I get the impression that generally in the podcast the "dead authors" tend to stay in their previous-life personas; here we get Alice Sheldon changed by her journey to the future into someone who can articulate things about feminism and trans-issues that she was not able to do in her own life.

(*)( Cut for discussion of how no one did anything wrong but we all lost: fandom names and tag wrangling. )

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yuletide media

2016-01-07T02:51:37Z

So! This Yuletide I got some lessons on writing design. (Actual Yuletide reveals post here, very abbreviated because of life; here I mostly just like to talk about what I read/watched.)

First: I read a whole lot of Damon Runyon and also watched a couple of Youtube high school productions of Guys and Dolls. (I also watched some of the movie — Marlon Brando is amazing, but it turns out that the raw musical is actually rather more charming than the movie.) Damon Runyon is basically the master of voice and also the master of the humor-laden plot-heavy short story. Reading a lot of stories at once can get a little, hmm, repetitive? But he has a way with plot twists and last-line zingers that I can only dream of properly replicating!

Second: I reread The Fountainhead, which is of course completely the other way around. It's not completely devoid of humor (…Atlas Shrugged might be? It's been a long time since I've been able to get through much of AS), but it's not a humorous work as a whole, and what humor there is, is very dry. And it's definitely… a long-form work as opposed to the short sweet Runyon stories. I do think that Fountainhead was very informative and educational for me in how to manage and write a (very) long-form work, which Rand is good at. It's hard, at this point, to separate my current reading from my original very indulgent high-school reading, and there are plenty of times I think the book might have been stronger if she'd cut some obviously-authorially-beloved scenes, and obviously there's a lot of philosophical padding that could have been cut, but even so I do think she sustains interest through an extremely long novel which is mostly about guys designing buildings.

Of course, one major way she does this is by piling the tropes on top of tropes; I don't think she did it consciously, but, I mean, she couldn't have piled more in if she had tried: hurt/comfort, angst, the essential woobie (hi darling Peter!), smarm/slashy slashy Roark/Wynand, competence kink, dubcon/noncon (let's face it, that's what that initial Dominique/Howard encounter was all about) -- which is super amusing.

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Happy Yuletide, Merry Christmas

2014-12-25T23:40:54Z

(My dad's) family is having a reunion for Christmas! Everyone is too busy skiing (and, in the California kids' cases, playing in SNOW ahahahaha SNOW I just saw a SNOWFLAKE MOMMY now I'm going to throw a snowball at you!! Here is how you make a snow angel!) to think about anything else, really. It seems a little weird to me to ski on Christmas (I kind of feel bad for the ski employees?) but it's fun to have a white Christmas!

In any case I am not doing skiing this trip, so instead today my mom and I had basically an all-day conversation (which was (mostly) nice and which we haven't gotten to do for years), and also I basked in WINNING YULETIDE. Because that is what happened this year. Because ~~three~~ five(!) people (possibly fewer, I guess, but I'm betting they're ~~three~~ five different people) ARE INCREDIBLY AWESOME. Seriously, if I had gotten one of these fics I would have declared myself to have won Yuletide. And I have never even gotten a full-length Yuletide treat before! Anyway! I usually link stories on my other page when I do recs, but these are all so amazing that you should all read them and I don't want to wait to do a rec post because I want everyone to read them Right Now (and kudos and comments because they deserve All the Love) because they are That Brilliant.

You don't need to know canon to read any of them, though they will be especially brilliant if you do know canon.

First, my assigned writer WROTE ME A CORDWAINER SMITH STORY. The Old Ghost of Peaceful Repose is an amazing original SF story in the style of and universe of Cordwainer Smith, who wrote these incredible stories about people and robots and the animal-derived underpeople. It's filled with zany humor and worldbuilding and compassion and craziness and totally random poetry, just like canon. (And allusions! Possibly to another yuletide request I had... see below...)

Then I got two full-length treats as well(!)

And Even the Graves Are Lost is an interactive fiction expanding on the events of Preiddeu Annwn, a Welsh Arthurian poem, and it is just perfect. It is pitch-perfect in medieval-Welsh voice, elegiac tone, story, everything. If you have any interest in Arthurian literature or medieval Welsh literature or in thinking about how audiences and tellers of stories interact (which is where the IF comes in), go read this. Right now.

Bardd is a story that explains what is going on in Preiddeu Annwn. I include the reference because, although it's a neat Arthurian story even if you haven't read the poem, it is especially brilliant if you have.

ETA. AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES. ...I should have waited just an hour! As soon as I posted this, Madness went live and I have two fics there which are also completely marvelous! I'm going to have to finish that rec post soon! THANK YOU MYSTERY AUTHORS, YOU ARE THE BEST.

My third yuletide fandom was Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going," which was the one I least expected a fic for, given its understated nature and number of signup offerors... and so I was thrilled to get a drabble for it, This Cross of Ground, which encapsulates what I love about the poem: what remains when belief is gone? Something of what was, some last remnant, but divorced from meaning, or taking on new meanings.

And then another full-length treat in Madness! Three fillings of Prydwen is a crossover of Preiddeu Annwn with Y Gododdin!! and female-centric, with the kind of critical deconstruction of both events that you only get from looking at it from that perspective. And even with understated F/F! Of course you want to read this, right?! It's just lovely -- I didn't even know this is what I wanted, but I so did.

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Die Zauberflöte (Mozart/Schikaneder): recordings

2014-01-02T21:59:24Z

I may have gone a little overboard in listening/watching different versions. Note that these are very personal opinions… all you have to do is go on amazon to find people who strenuously disagree with me :)

Note that I do not know German, so cannot remark on that, and I mostly don't pay attention to the dialogue in recordings that contain it. I also have not generally talked about Papageno and not much about Pamina, for the simple reason that pretty much every recording I listened to had awesome singers for both.

First, I want to talk a little about the video recording I liked best, which is available on Youtube here with English subtitles. (I do not yet own this, but in the next Amazon run will buy it.)

BBC (2003): 4/5. Very solid singing and acting in this one. SIMON KEENLYSIDE, as usual, steals the show as Papageno. Dorothea Röschmann is a really great Pamina, very sweet, a very lovely singer, who is very believable in her whole arc; I really like her interpretation. Her acting during and after the Queen's big aria makes my heart break for her. I like Will Hartman very much; I think he believably acts his despair at having to repudiate Pamina, although his voice acting is not nearly as good as Röschmann's. Diana Damrau is a great Queen of the Night, her singing very natural and lovely while still nailing all the notes, although I sort of thought her costuming was a bit over-the-top (it reminded me of the Galadriel scene in the movie version of LOTR).

I liked the direction very much. And an interpretation I haven't seen in the other versions I watched: in the trial scenes where Tamino has to repudiate Pamina, it's awful for him. Really awful. To the extent that when the chorus comes in with a cheering aria after that, it's played more like a dirge, with him on his knees in despair. And when he then tells her to step back ("Zurück!"), it's a cry of despair, like his heart is being torn in two. Which, as far as I'm concerned, it should feel like for him. (In my fic/interpretation, I took this a little farther, where Tamino realizes he should not have repudiated her. I think this production definitely had this as a conscious subtext, though they didn't quite take the last step into making it more explicit.)

As far as I am concerned, this is the video Zauberflöte to get. Of the ones I've seen, I think this is my favorite so far. I don't own it yet, but I will in my next amazon order. The subtitles are not very accurate, as far as I can tell.

Now more than you ever wanted to know about the audio recordings. These are all available on Spotify (which is how I listened to them). ( Solti, Gardiner, Mackerras (Sung in English), Ostman, Abbado, Bohm, Klemperer )

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Die Zauberflöte (Mozart/Schikaneder)

2014-01-02T02:55:30Z

So AUGH finally it is yuletide reveals and I can Talk about The Magic Flute! (A more conventional reveal post, complete with my Flute backstory headcanon, is here, including treats in Dark is Rising, Wicked, and Mary Russell.) This Yuletide I went from liking this opera very much to being obsessed and utterly in love with this opera. I really think some of this is the most sublime stuff Mozart ever wrote (yes, okay, there's Figaro and the Exultate (the Tu coronis virgine AGH) and the Requiem,… fine, I'm being a little hyperbolic), some of the most meaningful. If I ever learn German, it well may be because of this opera, the same way that the Divine Comedy and Figaro, between them, got me to learn the small smattering of Italian that I know.

It's hard for me to know what to say about this opera to explain why I love it so. It's a very odd opera, really. It's a fairy tale, with a Prince and a Princess (or at least the daughter of a Queen), but one that doesn't really use, or subverts, fairy tale tropes: it starts out with a prince who flees from a dragon and faints, and a trio of women who kill the dragon, and it just goes on from there. It's highly symbolic and almost dreamy, but includes a bird-man who is very cheerfully down-to-earth. It turns into a Masonic initiation rite halfway through, but with the addition of a moving arc for the main female character that is combined with the initiation rite (a little more on that later). It defies categorization, even in the genres one thinks it is in, and that's part of what I love so much about it.

What I really love about it, I think, is that it's about the power of love, and mastering oneself, and the power of music. The music really is sublime, with new layers every time I listen to it. There were parts I listened to twenty times in a week, and I loved them more after the twentieth time than after the first. There were parts I had as earworms for days on end, and I didn't mind because they were such wonderful parts to have in my head. Mozart knew, I think. He knew that human beings were capable of great darkness, and he also knew they were capable of amazing love and forgiveness and redemption. It's all there in the music.

It is healing music. It is what I needed, to spend a month immersed in this opera. It was a Yuletide gift for me, to get this assignment.

(I could tell you about driving a rental car on the other side of the country with Pamina's voice ringing out: "Die Wahrheit! Sey sie auch Verbrechen!" Or the uncountable times I paused because I had to hear the end of the track that was playing and couldn't finish whatever I was doing until the track finished. Or the time I almost lost it hearing a particularly beautiful rendition of the random part "Drey Knäbchen, jung, schön, hold und weise…" Or the terrible church service at in-laws' church during which I kept myself from sobbing uncontrollably by forcing as much as I could remember of the "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" quintet through my head…)

Random notes:

-The opera is full of terrible lines like "Without [a man] all women tend to step outside their own sphere of activity." And then I read the booklet to the Solti recording I own (more on that in a separate post, much more than you ever wanted), which pointed out that it's also a highly Masonic opera (I mean, I knew that too, I just wasn't paying attention to it), and so it's actually kind of cool that in this Masonic (read: totally male) context that Pamina gets to be in the climax of the opera and is admitted as an initiate. And very in keeping with the Da Ponte operas, the climaxes of which are about reconciliation and forgiveness, especially between the sexes. OH MOZART YOU SUBVERSIVE. I went from being mildly annoyed by the sexism to just utterly adoring Mozart. (Well, that, and it's really hard to hear "Tamino/Pamina mein, O welch ein Glück!" and have any annoyance at all.)

-I guess maybe it's because the first recordings I listened to made it clear that Sarastro and Pamina's father were two different people, but I never had that sense at all, and it was shocking to me that this is a common interpretation.

-I feel very strongly that there is a reason the Pamina-Tamino-Sarastro trio (Soll ich dich, Theurer! nicht mehr seh'n?) starts with Pamina against the combined Tamino-Sarastro and ends with Pamina/Tamino singing together against Sarastro. I am just saying!

-D (who is not particularly into opera, although I occasionally drag him to something he HAS to see) likes to refer to this opera as "that one where no one could be bothered to think up different names for the characters." I have to say that I have typed "Pamino" and "Tamina" a lot this month...

(Edited 1-2-14 to add in missing umlauts, thank you thistleingrey!)

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merry christmas, happy yuletide

2013-12-29T00:38:54Z

Merry Christmas and Happy Yuletide, somewhat late. I am currently celebrating my husband and brother-in-law obtaining working wireless for my parents-in-law (both husband and his brother were like, "Parents! ~~This is unacceptable~~ Here is a nice working wireless router for a Christmas present!"). My in-laws are the most awesome people ever, have I mentioned that? They're just this really nice, wholesome, dependable Midwestern Lutheran family, very sweet, very nice, not at all prone to the emotional drama of, um, another family I might be conversant with. Every single one of them is really nice! Is that not totally weird?!

E is, to my great relief, very much enjoying her cousins, particularly the girl cousin who is about 1.5 years older; they are both much less extreme people than they were last time we saw them (maybe 9 months ago, we suck as relatives) and get along a lot better. She has been walking in the snow and sledding and playing games with her cousins and she is never gonna want to leave. Also, all the girl cousins got adorable "poochie" doggy purses which they all absolutely adore; the feminist parts of me (and of my sister-in-law who is the cousins' mother) are completely overshadowed by the parts of me (and sister-in-law) who think it is totally cute that all three of them carry them around everywhere and love them madly.

Yuletide: Assignment recipient seems to have liked my gift, which is quite a great relief for a couple of different reasons I'll talk about at reveals. The treat also seems to be doing quite well with recipient and otherwise. Due to Doing Family Togetherness Things, I haven't been reading as much as I might have otherwise, but I do have some recs, including my present, which if you persist past the SPAG issues (and what 11k (!!) fic wouldn't have those, I expect) is a lovely People (Zenna Henderson) fic.

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my life right now is music drama and yuletide

2013-12-12T20:16:19Z

Number of Christmas music events for my church done so far: 1
Number of Christmas music events for my church yet to do: 3
Number of songs I am supposed to be performing in, not counting choir: 6
Number of these I might be able to get out of: 2
Probability I might be able to get out of them: 20%

Number of songs the Bishop told us he wanted at the Christmas service: 2
Number of songs we had planned on doing: 6
Number of times the choir director told me about her unrighteous desires to throttle him: 3
Number of extremely diplomatic emails I had to write: 2
Number of songs the Bishop's counselor insisted upon when he heard about what was going on: 5 (so, yay)
Number of times I have replanned the stupid special musical number because of being unsure as to how many songs we were doing: 4

Number of songs we have for the Christmas evening event ("fireside"): 9
Number I would like: 10-12
Probability of ending up with either too many or too few songs: 70%
Number of songs we had before G. realized that I was in charge, not Other Dramatic Person: 6

Tempo of "O Come All Ye Faithful": 88-104
Tempo we actually sang it at last Sunday: 60
Number of people who have expressed general concern to me over the organist's tempo lately: >10

Number of Yuletide fics I had time to write: <~ 1
Number of Yuletide fics I have actually written: 2
Number of additional prompts I keep looking at longingly: >5
Frequency at which I have to tell myself NO: ~2x/day
Number of additional fragments I have ANYWAY: 2
Probability these will actually turn into fics: 50% for one, 10% for the other
Probability Yuletide writing may be how I deal with stress: 80%

Number of non-music, non-Yuletide, non-work related Christmas-ish tasks I have on my to-do list right now: 7
Rate at which tasks are added to this list: 3/day
Rate at which tasks get taken off this list: ~1.5/day

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yuletide media consumption?

2013-09-19T16:29:00Z

Before yuletide signups open, what media should I consume or re-consume? (These can be things you've nominated, things you think I should read/watch that other people have nominated, 5-minute fandoms that you think I'd enjoy...) It should ideally be fairly short (meaning single-book or no more than 3-4 hours of watching time).

If I haven't posted about it here in the last year or so, you can take it as given that I probably need to review it at least a little before making the plunge to offer it. (And this doesn't mean I'll actually offer it, of course, but I'll think about it :) Maybe even request it?)

My list so far:
-Soon I Will Be Invincible (Grossman, would be first read)
-Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) (does anyone have a youtube link they really like? would be a reread, but first watch)
-Romeo es Julia (would be first watch)
-The Perilous Gard (Pope, reread)

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