silveredeye

It's the Independence Day of my country again. (It is also the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine.)

I've done the "looking at a flag at 7:32 when I could sleep in instead" thing that is my favorite of the Independence Day traditions, so now it's time for my second favorite, the yearly patriotismposting.

I've linked my favorite music these past years. This year I thought about poetry. Therefore:
"the quiet sonnet" by Julius Juurmaa, one of my favorite poems, translated by yours truly
six poems by Marie Under, one of my country's poetry titans of the 20th century, according to the comments translated by W Matthews

(It somehow feels very appropriate that the latter post has both "Ecstasy", which is even hornier in the original*, and "Christmas Greetings 1941", which is heartbreaking. The duality of the 20th century.)

(* please imagine being a teenager in high school, where the literature classes cover the country's lit in roughly chronological order. A lot of the local poetry so far has been variations of "nature is pretty great", "Jesus is also pretty great" and "liberty would be pretty great, if we had any". Then Marie Under comes in with a steel chair of "I have sex and it's great". A lasting impression, that.)

an aside

I also... keep thinking about the way patriotism feels so different in English and my native language. I tend to float in sort of left-leaning contexts in Anglophone internet, and those are often allergic to nationalism for very obvious reasons. Which aren't even wrong. And yet, it means that in English I worry about sounding like one of those worrisome nationalists when I'm talking about patriotism.

To quote Orwell, "By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power."

This definition of patriotism is what I feel about my country and my language and my way of life. I think they're pretty great (even if could probably be improved, such is the nature of anything). I don't think they're reserved to some closed in-group that one must be born in. I also don't think everyone should think they're pretty great exactly the way I do.

Happy birthday, country. You're imperfect, but my favorite.

The Candy Hearts collection opened this weekend and I come bearing recs. First, my gift:

Vienna Blood Waltz (734 words)
Fandom: Invisible Inc. (Video Game)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Brian Decker/Maria "Internationale" Valdés
Characters: Brian Decker, Maria "Internationale" Valdés
Additional Tags: Arranged Marriage, Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Flirting, Enemies to ???
Summary:

The moves to this dance are more complicated than Decker's used to.

The author went with my arranged marriage prompt, resulting in some absolutely delightful enemies-to-??? fiancés flirting. I love them and I love this.

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Then, a smattering of fics I liked, ordered by length:

Dancing & Desire (The Goblin Emperor, Csethiro/Maia, Teen, 700 words)
Maia and Csethiro's first kiss, ft dancing lessons and Csethiro speaking her mind. Just a wonderful Valentine's chocolate of a fic.

I Just Texted to Say (Heated Rivalry, Scott/Kip, Gen, 1.5k)
Texts between Scott and Kip from their breakup to the Big Damn Kiss. Impeccable character voices, a really fun take on their dynamic.

Humans Need Chess Periods (The Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot&Ratthi, Gen, 1.9k)
Things I did not know I needed: Murderbot playing board games with Ratthi (recovering from concussion) and being good at chess.

Adrift (The Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot&Ratthi, Gen, 2k)
Murderbot and Ratthi are stranded in a small shuttle for several days. Beautiful dynamic, sort of really understated emotional h/c.

Missing the Point (FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense - Luke Burns, herpetology students, Gen, 2.2k)
The herpetology students have very different questions about the snake fight portion of their thesis defense. Pitch-perfect academic emails, adorable concept, made me laugh several times.

paradise (Original Work, Female Elf Noble/Her Male Drow Hostage-Secretary, Teen, 2.5k)
The original ship tag is "Male Drow Used To Being A Disappointment/His Female Captor Who Thinks He's Pretty Great". Moderately gnarly cultural conflict, lovely subdued developing relationship, vivid worldbuilding.

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours (Homestuck, Equius♦Nepeta, Teen, 3.1k)
Humanstuck, still moirails (and also childhood friends). Really lovely warm take on the concept.

how do you speak with your tongue pressed so tight to your teeth? (Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy & Riza & Olivier, Teen, 4.2k)
Riza shows up with injured Roy at Briggs, Olivier thinks a lot about this impressively competent adjutant. Fantastic character voices and character dynamics.

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I have two fics in the collection, one even more obvious than the other. :D

requested by flowersforgraves

In the category of "daily logic puzzle games": Clues By Sam. Has a fun mechanic where the puzzles get more difficult throughout the week.

In the category of "games I picked up after a long pause": A House of Many Doors.

I first got into it in 2020, but back then it had a game-breaking problem when playing on Linux. In 2025 I randomly discovered that the bug had been fixed, downloaded the game again and went a little bit insane about it for like a month.

It's very similar to Sunless Sea when it comes to the mechanics and the basic idea: you're the captain of a vehicle in a mostly-lightless world, trying to fix your crew's problems, do some trade and not get eaten by everything that goes bump in the dark. The world is a gonzo mosaic of people and objects that the titular House has at some point stolen from a myriad worlds. The tone is slightly darker than that of Sunless Sea (my track record of saying "what the fuck was that" approximately once per quest continued unabated). There is an overarching plot woven deftly into the smaller quests. (I kept the text file equivalent of a red string conspiracy board for a while, thinking that surely the patterns I was spotting couldn't mean what I thought they meant. They did.)

I still can't believe it's mostly created by one person (art, music and eventual bugfixing were done by others, but the writing and programming was all by one guy).

In the category of "games I first played in 2025": Invisible Inc.

I've seen it described as "that one moment in a heist movie when: the game" and it truly is. A small subversive spy agency in a ruthless cyberpunk world has just been almost wiped out and it's your job to get them back from the brink. This means running infiltration missions against the big corps, trying to gather whatever resources you can (and muttering "I know, Central", when the NPC director of the agency makes arch comments about your performance). The art is fantastic, the overall vibe is impeccable, the characters are... not entirely unlike Blaseball's in that you can extrapolate so much from the game mechanics and three sentences. :D

(There's also the fantastic dynamic between Central the spy boss, Monst3r the freelance tech merchant (and Central's old friend) and Incognita (the agency's AI). The specific parts that make me chew drywall are endgame spoilers, but jfc, they're a lot.)

requested by hoarmurath

...the writing block for original writing and only original writing seems to be still going, unfortunately, and so far 2026 has not brought any new insights into dislodging it.

Honestly, maybe I should try fannish Original Work? I wouldn't call fanfic a different genre than original writing, but it is an extremely different process in my head, and Original Work in the AO3 sense definitely goes with fanfic rather than original writing.

(I keep trying to put the difference into words and the best my brain spits out is "different posture -.-". Which, going by my 2020 talking meme post on writing would point towards different *style*, but like. I don't think that's quite it. It's not about the obvious fact of fanfic using premade characters and world either. There's something, specifically, about the different mental posture when holding the story in my head.

How come the hobby that's literally about putting things in words is absolutely the worst to word when talking about it? :D No sense here, only tactile metaphors.)

(I know you asked about "feelings" and got "thoughts" instead but the feelings are something along the lines of "bluh bluh complicated" and I did not feel like untangling that mess on main.)

Was supposed to be posted on the 5th, bad time management on my part happened.

garonne  asked:

I would like to know how you choose the books you read/where you find book recs. Especially for non-English-language books. (I guess one obvious answer for English-language books is "dreamwidth"? :D )

My first instinctive answer was "I kind of stumble across them...", which is extremely useless. :D

Dreamwidth is indeed one of the places I get book recs. I'm pretty sure I subscribed to several people in my friendslist for their book reviews at first (muccamukk , queenlua , shipperslist , superborb ), way back when. But I also sometimes lurk journals without necessarily subscribing to them, especially when a username comes up in several friends' subscribe lists, and also get book titles from these.

Twitter used to be pretty good for it, back when it was good. I picked several SFF books up because suddenly half the crowd I kept abreast with was raving about them. But it was also good for sort of stumbling over new authors whose tweets, then short stories, then novels I read (I think this is how I found both Arkady Martine and Seth Dickinson as authors). I haven't felt this same ease of stumbling over new authors on Bluesky, but maybe I'm just older and less easily impressed now.

I think the Guardian may be another one? Its international site is one of the two news sites I check when I'm procrastinating at work and they have book reviews, book excerpts cunningly disguised as Long Reads, lists of books on some topic etc often enough to regularly pique my interest.

For specifically Estonian-language recs I really do stumble across them. Mostly at the library, sometimes because of family.

My city library is reasonably well-stocked and has several branches that are like, really easy to visit for me. I very rarely know exactly what I want when I go in to return my loans and get new ones, so I usually just sort of idly browse my way through most of the literature section. It does result in me taking stuff home, reading a couple of chapters and then deciding I don't like it enough to continue, but like. It's a library book. That's fine.

My partner's mother has a subscription to Loomingu Raamatukogu, which is an extremely long-running book series publishing mostly classics/modern classics/litfic as slim low-cost paperbacks. They move fast (40 books per year), which means they're also super wide-ranging. I'm not certain I could complete a Read Around the World challenge with *only* LR books, but I also wouldn't bet against it. This speed also means that every once in a while my partner's mother drops a small stack of her LR books on us and says we can read them or donate them or whatever. I absolutely don't read them all, but sometimes I do and find stuff I probably wouldn't have otherwise.

(Also my brother sometimes drops translated popular astronomy books on me and goes "this was fun". I do the same to him, of course.)

As to how I choose between the books that I have in my vicinity... 100% up to chance, whimsy, whether I'm tired enough that I'm on no-brain-needed romance diet or conversely on yet another astronomy/archeogenetics/other niche interest bender, etc.

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. favorite game(s) of 2025 (flowersforgraves)
21.
22.
23.
24.
25. Favorite handicraft (all fiber arts etc) pattern of 2025 (hoarmurath)
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

(technically I only read one of them in June, but all of them are queer)

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Via several people on my reading page.

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

My method: I sorted my fics by title and went through the list, picking either the title or the fic I loved best for that letter. While trying to give a reasonable spread of fandoms, because Blaseball may account for a fifth of my fics and some of the ones that didn't make this list have absolutely banger titles (according to me, which is what matters here)... but I have written for 50-something fandoms altogether.

A — all your demons and desires and dark sides (Blaseball, Peanutiel Duffy/Gerund Pantheocide, 20k, rated E)
B — both of us in tarnished armor (Last Exit - Max Gladstone, Ish Colby/Ramón Espina, 1.7k, rated T)
C — a clean slate (a palimpsest) (The Raven Cycle, Adam Parrish, logic puzzle)
D — don't say it's love (Solstice - Moacube Visual Novel, Galen/Kasiya, 3k, rated E)
E — Expert Advice (Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy Mustang & Maria Ross, 600w, rated G)
F — Fortitude (Blaseball, Ayanna Dumpington & Famous Owens, 1.3k, rated T)
G — The Ghost of Avid Horizon (Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, The Repentant Devil/The Fatalistic Signalman/Sky-Captain, 11k, rated T)
H — he can't find your eyes or heart (The Masquerade - Seth Dickinson, Cairdine Farrier/Cosgrad Torrinde, 800w, rated T)
I — In Another Life, You and I (Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet/Charlotte Lucas, 1k, rated G)
J — je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps (The Old Guard, Andy/Booker, 1.7k, rated M)
K —
L — The Last Light (Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, Thomas Heart/Brian Lee, 1.8k, rated T)
M — Making Mirrors (MCU, Heimdall/Thor, 2.5k, rated T)
N — No Going Home (with names like ours) (Guns of the Dawn - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emily Marshwic/Cristan Northway, 1.5k, rated T)
O — out of the grieflands (The Untamed, Jiang Cheng/Lan Xichen, 800w, rated T)
P — the price you pay (Blaseball, Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Comfort Septemberish, 1.7k, rated T)
Q — Quiet (The Locked Tomb and Piranesi, Camilla Hect, 200w, rated G)
R — The Road North (Agent Stoker, Caliban/Stoker, 1.1k, rated T)
S — Shelter (Zero Hours (episode 2 - World Enough), Buckland & Shaw, 900w, rated G)
T — this bare and iron heart (The Mandalorian, Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth, 3.1k, rated E)
U — Unfolding (EOS 10, Ryan Dalias/David Maddox, 5.3k, rated M)
V —
W — what blooms in the water (Sunless Sea, The Lady in Lilac, 300w, rated G)
X —
Y — you will play that ghost again (Nirvana in Fire, Lin Shu/Mu Nihuang, 1.2k, rated G)
Z —

22/26, out of 120 works. Not bad, I think.

I'm not terribly surprised by having no titles starting with K, V, X or Z - they're kind of rareish in English. In addition, J, Q and Y are the only letters I've only used for starting a title once.

( Fire Weather )

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( Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years )

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Witness for the Dead, The Grief of Stones and The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison. Fantasy.

The third one was coming out, so I reread the previous two to prepare for it.

( The Cemeteries of Amalo )