myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
Wow, made it through another ten. I’m kinda surprised I keep it going this long, even with little feedback, and at the same time not at all surprised that I am procrastinating like this.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
Unless you have been living under a rock, you heard about the ship stuck in the Suez Canal - writers and podficcers jumped on that meme, so several entries are just rubbing the bad fortune in. Also, I took a small gander into the Geraskier tag because avoidance.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
Somehow, I didn’t see or find much new fic and was rereading some I recced before. But there were a two I haven’t shared before.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
Getting back into it. In podfic circles, both the Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology XI and the Podfic Big Bang 2021 dropped, which I recommend browsing in general because they are awesome projects. It's sad I managed to not contribute to ALPA a second year in a row, because it's truly amazing.
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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
Which is actually two weeks this week, since I missed last week. Fic reading took me a bit out of my usual waters into Kaiju shipping fic, but more on that later. This weekend I was mostly at home doing a jigsaw and playing some Hades after my wisdom teeth got taken. Onwards!
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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
For the small 3-sentence thing I have been rereading a bit of Dungeon meshi aka Delicious in Dungeon which keeps on being a gift. It's a serialised monthly seinen manga that is part D&D campaign and part slice of life cooking.

The plot in general: an adventuring team loses their team member Falin, a healing focused sorceress, to a Red Dragon. Adventurers can be revived with magic, but they have to hurry back into the dungeon before Falin, who was eaten by the dragon, can be digested. To make the trip right away, they decide to not carry food and instead eat what they can find and kill in the dungeon.

One of the strengths of the story is the world building. Ever chapter is a small puzzle on how to eat a monster. Some of these are obvious, like a basilisk, but ramps up fast. Just some examples from the first to volumes include gardening on top of golems, using traps to fry things in oil or chapters on ghosts and living armour.

These fun stories function as a trojan horse to advocate for sustainable food production, less industrialised farming, nutrition and biodiversity. The stories dig into the mystery of how a dungeon works overall, portraying it as a complex ecosystem where adventurers breaking in are wreaking havoc because they act thoughtless and ignore the consequences.

There are other strong points in the writing, but these are what I wanted to focus on. Check out the series, if you can, or talk to me about it. I haven't even gotten into the characters, haha. Mostly because the food porn is distraction enough.
myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (mantidea)
I was innocently catching up on tabs to find more people to follow on Dreamwidth and checked out some posts where people recced some canons for Snowflake Challenge.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
A shorter week this time, so a bit less on it. The theme this time turned out to be eldritch and horror transformer fic! I didn’t set out with it in mind, but here we are.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (Default)
This week, besides Transformers, I crawled out of mech hell to get caught up a bit with the R76 tag. The tag has run away from me in the few months I wasn’t there and had at least one exchange, so I am not nearly through all of it. Also: I have at least gotten time to listen to my ITPE treats - and yes, they are all getting recced.

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myrdschaem: watercolour art of ginko from mushishi, sitting in plants (hair)
I recently finished the second book in this series, River of Smoke, and thought I should mention it to more people so they can read it too.

The Ibis trilogy is a set of historical novels centering around the opium trade of the British Empire, the introduction of indenture contracts to take countless people from the Indian sub-continent to ship them to other English colonies without a way home and the lead up to the First Opium war. Ghosh fills the setting with many varied characters from different societal positions and put in a lot of pidgin into the dialogue which doesn't come off as cheesy but instead lends more texture to the scenes.

In particular, River of Smoke focuses mostly on the opium trade in China. Again the care taken with research shines true, merchants arguing about whether the blame for addiction of the masses should lay with "the chinese" or is on the English and other traders bringing the imports are often adapted from contemporary sources like news papers. The audacity of some left me bitter and angry, but there are also rebuttals that argue against. Some of it is also familiar in the worst way - whenever the traders start up on the invisible hand of the market being a law of nature.

Despite not pulling punches, the books do give wonderful insights into different characters. A rollercoaster of emotion sometimes where you don't know who to side with. The book gives plenty of examples in story and historical bits follow nicely.

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