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Jan. 6th, 2026 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoFIC: Capital of Emor (Tempestuous Tours)
Jan. 6th, 2026 01:19 pmduskpetersonMost travellers to the Emorian borderland take the opportunity to visit the capital of Emor, located immediately north of the borderland.
With walls higher and thicker than those of any other city in the Three Lands, Emor's capital looks from the outside to be a garrisoned fort. This appearance is deceptive. Once you pass through the heavily guarded gates, you will find yourself in a bustling city, full of trade and games.
My strong advice is that your first task should be to find a place to stay. The capital's inns are crowded year-round; the more crowded they are, the higher the prices they charge. If it is at all possible, see whether you can find an acquaintance to stay with – though I'm bound to say that the capital's residents are so used to "friends" showing up at their homes without notice that many of them now charge boarding fees almost as high as those charged by the inns.
You could easily spend a year perusing all the sights in Emor. I can only touch on a few of them here.
[Translator's note: The gates to Emor's capital feature in a spiritual vision in Death Mask.]
Miscellaneous holiday and post-holiday scraps
Jan. 5th, 2026 04:06 pmazurelunatic* amusingly, both Aunt Tish and V got me the same slipper-socks for Christmas
* pear + green tea perfume was extremely relevant to Thorn's interests, even straight out of the bottle
* got my pill boxes filled for the coming quarter
- started the desk top cleanup for that a little before Just In Time
- did the morning pills first, which always gives me a little grace period to get the evening pills done the subsequent day
- ran out of my joint supplement after the first five weeks were done, but that did allow me to put the first five weeks away and start using them
- Belovedest picked up the missing pills in a very short turn-around, yay
* NYE cat pilling results: Yellface deigned to swallow, finally, after several very polite arguments in favor of spitting the pill out; Mila was too sharp to be pilled
* watched the festivities up at the Space Needle from the comfort of bed, with Belovedest and Thorn and sparkling cider (Belovedest dipped into the Faygo stash also)
* legs still awful
* did not lose the second set of black teardrop beads for the crochet projects
* made an OTC meds order from the usual supplier (Wellspring Meds) despite the sale having expired
- if your household needs industrial quantities of Imodium and you hate blister packs with a passion, consider this vendor: 200 pills in a nice little safety cap bottle, no peeling or shoving required
Book fortune-telling meme
Jan. 5th, 2026 02:57 pmnanilaantisoppist- Grab the nearest book.
- Turn to page 126
- The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.
The first book nearest me is Metallurgical Assessment of Spacecraft Materials and Parts by Barrie D. Dunn (1996).
The sentence is: "Special fibres giving more options in strength, stiffness, light weight, and endurance against heat have been developed (Klein 1988)."
The chapter containing it discusses composite materials and ways to control their properties. The thing that makes me happiest about that particular sentence is the use of the Oxford comma.
The second book nearest me is The political diaries of a chief whip by Simon Hart (2025).
The sentence is: "It feels like authority is ebbing with every hour."
The chapter containing it is titled "April 2021-January 2022" and I think we probably all remember painfully well the fiasco that was the handling of pandemic restrictions to which this sentence clearly relates.
Cue hollow laughter as I realise the sentence is applicable to both work and home life. Particularly with a teenager and a tweenager incessantly challenging boundaries.
2026 Prediction Meme
Jan. 4th, 2026 11:27 pmbrithistorianNew Year Book Meme, via trobadora:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Turn to page 126
- The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.
Here's mine: The book nearest at hand to me is Japanese Soul Cooking by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. Page 126 was a page of photographs, page 127 was a mini table of contents for a chapter, so the next full page of text is page 128, where the 6th sentence is "The cities and towns on the western side of Japan, like Osaka and Hiroshima, are the okonomiyaki heartland," which is an interesting fact, but I'm not sure how to take is as a fortune!
The Friday Five on a Sunday, and the promise of snow
Jan. 4th, 2026 06:59 pmnanila- Do you mostly drink tap, filtered, or bottled water?
Tap water. I drink bottled water if I forget my refillable bottle, which isn’t very often. - Is it safe/recommended to drink tap water where you live? If not, why?
Yes, it is safe to drink the tap water here. It’s pretty soft water as well. - What does the tap water taste/smell like where you live?
Nothing, which is how it should be! - Do you collect rainwater? If so, what do you use it for?
Yes, we have a water butt in the back garden. We use it to water Keiki’s collection of carnivorous plants all year round, and for the indoor plants in summer. - Do you/have you ever had restrictions on water use where you live? What did you have to change about your lifestyle?
We haven’t had water restrictions here, even when a lot of the rest of the country did last summer. I have lived in places with water restrictions previously (southern California). It taught me to have short showers and/or turn off the water when, say, shampooing or conditioning my hair, which I think are generally good habits anyway. Dishwasher appliances also use less water than hand-washing dishes, which took me a while to accept but once I did, that also reduced my water consumption.
In other news, it has got quite cold here, by UK standards. Scraping off the car in the morning and ice on the roads is what defines "quite cold" here. Those, and the eternal promise of "significant" snowfall. Certainly there has been in a number of places, some of which are a handful of miles from my location, but the photo below shows the extent of the snowfall we have experienced to date!
Book reaction: Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress)
Jan. 3rd, 2026 09:12 ambrithistorianLast month I read Beggars in Spain after sanguinity recommended it in the comments to a post I wrote in which I (once again) objected to the necessity of sleep. I enjoyed it — enough that I'm currently reading the sequel — but I do have one objection to it that I perceive as a major flaw.
The premise of the book, as laid out in the first chapter, is the existence of genetically modified people who don't need to sleep. And we do get that. But we also get these same people having a number of other useful genetic modifications, one of which is that they're effectively immortal[/1]. Plus we also get a society with more or less infinite free energy.
And this is something that I've seen in a lot of science fiction (Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson[/2] do it a lot): The problems of aging and energy are so large that they easily overshadow any other issues you might want to address, so you hand-wave them away so you can look at the other issues. Unfortunately, I don't feel like the issues of aging and energy are waved far enough away in Beggars in Spain, so that the issue of sleeping or not becomes negligible by the time you're about a third of the way into the book. The fact that the genetic modifications that created the sleepless also make them effectively immortal pretty much completely overshadows the issue of them not needing to sleep: When one group of people have an expected lifespan of 75 or so and the other has an expected lifespan of infinity, what does it matter that the second group gets an additional 35% of infinity?
Now it's possible that Kress addresses this issue in the second and third volumes of the series (I'm only about 15 pages into the second book). Or it's possible that she decided that lack of need for sleep wasn't really issue she wanted to address at all. But based on the reason that sent me to the book and the premise presented in the first few chapters of the book, it feels like a flaw in the book.
[/1] In the role-playing community in the 1980s, we called this "limited immortality" — you live forever unless you get killed.
[/2] It felt awkward to write "Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson," but at the same time, I didn't feel at all comfortable that people would know who I meant if I wrote "Heinlein and Robinson," so I've a stylistic decision that Heinlein, Asimov, McCaffrey, et al. don't get to be mononymous in my writing just because they happened be the first (or one of the first) to become famous while having an uncommon (in America, at any rate) surname.
QOTD: On actually doing the thing
Jan. 2nd, 2026 08:48 ambrithistorian“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.” (Kent Beck, software engineer)
I find I do this a lot. I spend time "planning" or "gathering knowledge," often until I lose interest in the thing before ever actually trying to do the thing. While I recognize that this is often an attempt to try to avoid the awkward phase where I'm learning the thing and can't really help doing the thing badly, it's still hard to put that recognition into action. I don't really do new year's resolutions, but I'm trying right now to try to more actively recognize when I'm doing this and take action to stop myself from doing it. So, with that being said, I'm going to take the air-dry clay that I got for Christmas out of its package and go make some awkward looking sculpture!
UPDATE: Twisted + Anahita Most Strong + 2025 round-up + 2026 plans
Jan. 1st, 2026 02:46 pmduskpeterson
FREE ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)
The Motley Crew (The Thousand Nations). When a young man named Dolan flees from the north, he faces danger on all sides. The Northern Army wants him back. The Empire of Emor wants him dead. His native homeland of Koretia may not want him at all. And his only protection is a man with motives that are mysterious and possibly deadly.
New installment:
- Side story | Twisted. No matter how you twist away, you cannot escape fate. But you can determine how you meet it.
BLOG FICTION
Anahita Most Strong (holiday gift story). "Anahita leapt from a hundred times the height of a man and ran powerfully. Strong and bright, tall and beautiful of form, she sent down by day and by night a flow of motherly waters." An ancient Persian tale retold by me from a translation of the Avesta by James Darmesteter.
Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.
New installments:
( Round-up of fiction released in 2025 )
NEWS & UPCOMING FICTION
In reference to my concussion in early November: My head is close to normal again, so I'm able to do late-stage editing once more.
As I already explained to my subscribers, I've decided to drop early access fiction in favor of releasing my stories to all my readers at the same time. Next up on my release schedule is Suspicion of the Guards (The Thousand Nations: The Motley Crew #3).
I've put together my release schedule for 2026, though these days I often have to be nimble on my feet and juggle my schedule to fit what's happening in my life. I can summarize my 2026 schedule by saying that this year I plan to release fiction from Chronicles of the Great Peninsula and Turn-of-the-Century Toughs. Those of you who are readers of the Toughs cycle have been extremely patient with my delay in posting more fic; I appreciate it. I hope to reward your patience.
+++ Misc & Happy 2026!
Jan. 1st, 2026 01:16 pmyuuago![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
crackthewip have started! The goal for this event is to finish a work in progress; posting closes June 30. I really like this event, so I'm glad it's running again. I think I will try to finish the rarepair WIP I started a few days ago. Maybe something else too, if I have time. Though I'm at the point where I'm like, "What do I even have in the WIP folder, anyway?" Going to have to, uh, take a look through that mess and see what's what.+ I made bread for the first time! The recipe I used was Classic White Sandwich Bread by King Arthur Flour. It turned out pretty okay! Not perfect, but like, it's definitely edible bread. Turned out more heavy and dense than my liking, but I am going to assume that's to do with my exceptionally Beginner kneading. The instant yeast came in a package of 3, so I am definitely going to try to make bread 2 more times before deciding whether I enjoy making bread or not. Jury is currently out on that front, but I do feel pretty pleased with myself for actually trying it.
+ The set of Beam Paints watercolours I received the other day is just as nice as I'd hoped it would be! They're very vibrant and pigmented. Because the tin doesn't have a mixing surface, I have to be careful and mix directly on the paper - which is not bad, just a technique that I typically do not use. And just as I expected, the travel brush that came with the set is very, very good - perfect size for the postcard-sized sheets I prefer to work with. I'm so happy I decided to buy it; I mean, yeah, my tubes are nice, but this was a wonderful little treat and the quality is amazing.
+ Livejournal: A reminder to back up your LJ and/or import it to DW if you haven't already. Recent dust-ups in the RU side of LJ have led to speculation about the site's future. There is a thread about it by Rahaeli on Bluesky over here. I think I backed up everything the last time stuff looked shaky, but I'm going to have to check to see if I downloaded fics by my friends who didn't make the import. (I think I did, but where the heck did I save them? Who knows.)
+ I love the start of a new year. It feels so good to put together my annual to-do list and figure out all the new things I want to try, plus the stuff I already enjoy that I want to do more of. Happy 2026!