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Although what's fun about my current reading project is, I'm giving Rosie Azrael feedback on their series of unpublished sci-fi/fantasy/military/dystopia novels. Won't say much about the content, obviously, but Rosie is an excellent writer! It's a very fun setting, and hope they're able to publish eventually, so you can all read, too!

Oh, I did also get into a tabletop board/card game this year, called Unmatched. They use a variety of characters (including a lot of public domain characters from old literature and myth!) and design unique decks for each. So Robin Hood has a hit-and-run style to represent mugging the rich; Hamlet alternates between overdrawing resources or self-damaging to hit harder, in reference to his indecisive and self-destructive behavior; the Velociraptor pack from Jurassic Park deals more damage when they surround their target like the "Clever Girls" they are. It's a straightforward enough rule system that my baby boomer parents learned to play pretty easily, and the games don't take a whole afternoon to get through. I may have gone a little overboard on purchasing sets this year, but some of them were going out of print, and I didn't want to miss the chance!

Oh, and I just got blood test results back, which say that whatever the lump I found is, it's apparently not a tumor! Yay?

—doctorlit, wishing for a bit more fiction time, and a bit more sleep time

It's quite nice here, if you ignore the fact that the Mycenaeans are going to be along in about thirty years to burn it all down. I just finished drawing a dolphin:

The dolphin is also a world map; there are ridiculous layers to this particular burst of geekery.

I also have a first draft of what I think is a very cute hobbity-elfy story; there's kinslayings and everything, it's very fluffy and charming.

On a real-life front autumn here has been quite lovely; there's a tree nearby (sycamore I think) which dropped all its leaves at once in a giant heap of yellow and red that covers the grass, the pavement, and half the road. I looked down while walking through it and made myself dizzy, my brain couldn't process what I was seeing except as a flat pattern at indeterminate distance.

Oh, and the cat (who is an indoor cat) keeps trying to escape through the front door. He regrets it when he manages, but somehow he can't bring himself to stop.

hS

Once I realized she was being more "friendly" than just friendly, I avoided sitting down for the rest of my stay, so she couldn't sit next to me again. My biggest concern was if her also-drinking boyfriend noticed what was happening, and started a scene. But towards the end, she started trying to get a crowd of us to guess what Harry Potter tattoo she wanted. She said it was the single quote most associated with the series, but none of us were getting in (including me, with the sober brain). She got frustrated that I, of all people, wasn't getting it, and came over and whispered (very close) in my ear, "It's the thing with Snape and Lily," and I realized she was referring to "Always." (It's an important and wonderful scene, but not the first "signature phrase" that comes to mind for HP!) She walked away after that, and her boyfriend came over and said, "You've got to help me out, what is it?" So I explained the scene to him, so he could "guess" correctly once he tracked her down. Which hopefully at least communicated to him that I wasn't trying to "steal yo girl," and that I wanted them to stay together as a couple? I may be assigning this particular moment too much significance in my head, but it was really the only opportunity I had to do anything about the situation . . .

Eventually, when I felt I had "socialized enough," I made my exit, hours before the party was scheduled to end. I gave the coworker who threw the party a (normal) goodbye hug, and then the particular young lady I've been talking about (who's also a friend and former coworker) a goodbye hug, but this hug ended with her trailing her hand down my chest . . . and then I drove home. So yeah, it was awkward, it was not my kind of scene, but I survived? I'm questioning if I want to go to the party-throwing coworker's usual New Year's party this December, though, since the former coworker will likely be there, and be drunk again . . .

(Not to make it sound like the entire party was a negative experience, I did enjoy listening to the karaoke singers. The twenty-five-year-old who was hitting on me does have a good singing voice!)

—doctorlit wingmanning by quoting children's literature is oddly on brand, though

I just realized that I haven't checked the Board in far too long, let alone posted anything. So, I'm fixing that! What have y'all been doing? Games, writing, real life shenanigans, I'm curious about it all. I've been kind of trapped in a bubble for a while between preparing for a school program and getting a foot of snow dumped on me last week but I've been toying with some drabbles for the film District 9. I've also gotten back into the game Warframe, which has been a bit of a time sink.

So yeah, that's been my life for a while. What's going on in yours?

There are probably EDM remixes of their songs, though.

--Ls

That sort of party is my worst nightmare. I can think of situations to be in that I would hate more, but crowded + sensory overload + no boundaries is kind of a perfect Venn diagram of "things that put Neshomeh on edge," and I never got the impression that you're less introverted than I am. {X D

~Neshomeh

Oh man, it actually feels like we’ve moved into Deathly Hallows early, with the Dementor fog and general attacks against Muggles. But that makes sense, since both years open on “Tom” taking control of the government. It also has me agreeing with an uncomfortable amount of things coming out of Petunia Dursley’s mouth, which feels rather odd, but the lady is right; Gaunt should face accountability for his crimes, and Purityworld child marriages are gross and weird. (Also, I didn’t catch the foreshadowing behind “if I ever see that man down here in Little Whinging” until a second glance-through, but wow, is it striking now!) And it really is lovely to read Harry getting along with Dudley, and even with Petunia somewhat, even while they remain recognizably themselves. Dudley really needed a positive male role model to show him how to have normal conversations with women, too, because he’s sounding a little on the incel side at a few points in this chapter . . . Not too fond of him calling Rose “chavvy” either, after looking it up!

I was getting ready to ask if Charmaine is meant to be that waitress character who only appeared in the films, but that got answered when she was shown inside Treats. Which leads us into . . . the party sequence. Oh, Lily, the party was painful to read. Last month, I was at a Halloween party with a bunch of drunk twenty-somethings, and it was soooo awkward, and reading the party scene took me straight back there. Pre-bonding potion Charmaine was even acting towards Harry in a very similar manner to the way one of those twenty-somethings was acting towards me . . . Though to Charmaine’s credit, she didn’t have an existing boyfriend in the room with Harry . . . ANYWAY during the McDonald’s conversation, I totally identified Piers’ description of the “drug” as a potion (though I misidentified the color and effect as Felix Felicis at the time, whoops!), and let me tell you, the idea of magic potions getting slipped to Muggle partygoers, when Muggle doctors have no idea how to treat the effects, is actually a pretty horrifying concept! I’m honestly surprised Gaunt isn’t having the Ministry deal with the problem more considering it threatens to expose the Wizarding World on a wide, public scale. Then again, the original Voldemort eventually wanted to subjugate Muggle civilization, so maybe Gaunt just doesn’t care if Muggles find out at this point? I’m really curious to see where this plotline goes, and to find out if these potion/drugs are being planted by well-meaning party wizards, or if it’s actually a Gaunt plot to sow more chaos across the Muggle UK.

Harry sure has an interesting idea of “laying low,” doesn’t he? “Mom hid me at my cousin’s house to keep Gaunt from finding out where I am; guess I’ll use the owl mail 20 times and then post the address all over the most heavily used transport system on the island.” I’m shocked it took Gaunt until the Trace on underage magic to find Harry, quite frankly! But that leads to me needing to discuss how Aunt Petunia ran over the most powerful wizard in the world with her sensible middle-class car, hello? Lily, you can’t do this to me, Lily, I can’t breathe if I’m laughing that hard, Lily! I love everything about it, from the deed being done by Petunia, of all characters, to Gaunt having so little interest in Muggle technology that it didn’t even dawn on him to not stand behind a running vehicle, to him getting knocked the f out by blunt force trauma, for all the good his magical power did him. And of course, the icing, the frosting, the cherry on top: his unconscious body getting stuffed in the f-ing cupboard under the stairs. Which technically has no particular meaning in this timeline, but we know. We know

Thank you, Lily. This was an amazing and enjoyable chapter!

I think there’s a word missing from this sentence:
. . . considering how they had been responsible installing the despotic Madam Umbridge . . .
Also, I think “lighting-in-a-bottle” was meant to be “lightning?” Unless this a variation on the phrase I haven’t encountered before.

—doctorlit appreciates that he’s become good enough friends with his twenty-something coworkers to be invited to their parties, but their parties aren’t really doctorlit parties. Listening to the karaoke was fun, though.

This chapter brought to you by Skins house parties and everything your school's anti-drug PSAs warned you about.

BL7 warning, sort of, for a scene right after everyone at the party sings Happy Birthday to Harry. Also additional warnings for: teenage dirtbag antics, underage drinking, underage drug use (only potions and potion ingredients), accidental love potion dosing, references to underage sex, drug overdoses, references to IRL crimes and terrorist attacks (the 1996 Manchester bombing, the Dunblane Massacre, the kidnapping of Sabine Dardenne, and the Atlanta Olympics bombings), and car-related injuries.

If you read the tags, then you'll see that actual magical snogging is going to be involved :P

Actually, Bellatrix lost her arm to Gaunt's fire spell back in the Atrium. Narcissa was trying to stabilise her until Gaunt showed up to fix what he broke, and Gaunt decided to, yes, more or less transmute Peter's magic and life force into Bellatrix's Winter Soldier arm. So, haha, yes, that Winter Soldier thing was on purpose!

Severina is exaggerating a tiny bit for the sake of her cover. She was the one who told Hermione that the Order was trying to bring her back in line after she discovered Regulus' secrets, and thus shoved her right into publishing the expose. So yes, Hermione going off the rails was entirely Hermione, but Severina did hasten along her turning on the Order.

It certainly is going to be a hell of four a year!

Actually, she still calls 'Guya "my liege" at the end 😂

I’m not really one to read or comment on romance stories, but I do appreciate that this story shows how Momoka has largely shed her self-imposed role as the “family servant,” and consciously sees herself as Kaguya’s equal now. I’m glad things turned out this way!

—doctorlit, exchanging soft touches and warm breaths with a bowl of pasta

Decided to try to write more this November, and while I'm still nowhere close to keeping NaNoWriMo-level pace, I did manage to finish a couple of stories that've been collecting dust for an absurd amount of time. (The mission here, for example, was originally meant to be published in early 2022. Suffice to say procrastination happened.)

The mission is a strange one, as for once I could barely rely on fic narration. It's a mission to an old, awfully drawn Pokemon comic I made when I was like 10, but I've wanted to tackle something I wrote since I first got Permission. It's about 14k words, and perhaps not a very development-heavy mission, but it was nice to finish.

The Interlude is a Years Hence piece, because I also wanted to try my hand at one of those at some point (especially since I have a 'Years Prior' already published, so it feels like an inevitablility at this point, haha). Funnily enough, this one is also pretty old, but much shorter at about 4k words.

As usual, feel free to contact me through either email or the Discord, if there's interest.

It's literally just 'Guya and Momo hugging. Warning though that this little short piece is extremely sappy (as evident in the title).

It can be found here.

Oooooh dear. This year’s title is “the Maiden’s Kiss.” Now I’m going to spend most of the year wondering if that’s in reference to an actual magical kiss between Harry and Draco, or if there’s some twist, or metaphor, or—or something else sneaky going on . . .

Wow, we are right out the gate with that “purge” that got teased at the end of last year! Pettigrew, Avery and Karkoaroff aren’t going to be missed—heck, I was almost jubilant to see Avery go, despite the tone of the scene; bye bye, creeper—but it’s interesting to see the metal arm that was Pettigrew’s in canon has become Bellatrix’s in this timeline. I think the implication is that Bellatrix tried to execute Peter, but Peter fought back and managed to cut off Bella’s arm? And then, while Narcissa was using the Bond to keep Bella from bleeding out, Gaunt did whatever weird sacrifice ritual and removed Peter’s arm and used it in some way to produce the metal one for Bella? (And if Bella is Gaunt’s second-in-command, won the fight, and got a metal arm, does make her the Winner Soldier god I’m sorryyyyyyy) Also, I love how Gaunt refers to Peter’s body as a “new form.” A bit of Voldemort’s weird obsession over death leaking in, I think!

Hm. When Severina says she was manipulating Hermione, does that mean just verbal manipulation, or was she actually using a potion on Hermione? I’m only asking because Hermione went so far off the rails last year, but of course that also could just be a natural response to the torture . . . Either way, I appreciated Severina using her “token spell” to execute Karkaroff! But most of all, I love that Narcissa is already starting to drift towards her "feeling Harry's heartbeat in the Forbidden Forest" moment, as she starts to see that Pureblood Supremacy, and her family's safety, aren't necessarily compatible!

It's going to be a hell of a year! or four

—doctorlit is saving his Maiden’s Kiss for when the right book comes along

Here's hoping we all get to do it again in 2028.

I thought Adam Conover had a constructive take in his "Why I'm not worried" video. Not linking because I'm on mobile, but in a nutshell: Worry is an emotion of helplessness; it's for people who aren't actively working for the world we want. All of us can choose to be involved with issues we care about. We will still have work to do no matter who wins the election; this will just determine how hard it will be.

I'll add: Don't ever let anyone shame you for not doing "enough" for a cause. Activism and/or resistance takes many forms, and whatever you can personally do is worthy. If just continuing to survive is all you can do, that is worthy. Choosing gratitude over bitterness is worthy. Choosing hope over despair is worthy. Choosing compassion over fear is worthy. In these challenging times, these choice are difficult, and they are powerful, and no one can ever take that power away from you.

~Neshomeh, remembering that the pity of one small Hobbit may rule the fate of many.

My mom was volunteer working the polls today and thank god she came home safely.