trobadora: (Discworld: Hogfather)
([personal profile] trobadora Oct. 20th, 2025 01:52 am)
Dear Yulewriter,

thank you so much for writing a story for me!

I've requested and received all of these fandoms before - some for many, many years - and I love them all. Two of them are related to my current main fandom (Guardian) through the main actors, so I might mention them more on DW, but please don't think that means I want my other requests any less! Regardless of what we matched on, rest assured that you really can't go wrong here. Just the existence of new fic for any of these fandoms and characters will make me incredibly happy.

My AO3 account is [archiveofourown.org profile] Trobadora, and it's set to welcome treats.

Everything important is in the requests themselves, but if you'd like even more info, general likes etc., here you go:

General Preferences

Likes & Dislikes/DNWs )

Fandoms and characters

Jump directly to:绅探 | Detective L (TV): Luo Fei & Huo Wensi )

L'Oréal 'Time Engraver' Commercials: The Time Engraver, Worldbuilding )

Nantucket trilogy - S.M. Stirling: Kashtiliash & Raupasha )

Ring of Swords - Eleanor Arnason: Ettin Gwarha & Sanders Nicholas )

Starfire series - Various Authors: Zhaarnak'diaano | Zhaarnak'telmasa & Raymond Prescott )

长公主在上 | Eldest Princess On Top: Li Yunzhen & Gu Xuanqing )

1632 series - Various Authors: John Chandler Simpson )

Ahem. Lengthy as always. But I hope you'll find something inspiring in here, and most of all, that you'll have fun writing! :)
trobadora: (Moriarty - OMG)
([personal profile] trobadora Oct. 17th, 2025 04:01 pm)
I'm sure everyone but me has already seen this, but I have to share it anyway - this is amazing!



Background info
isis: starry sky (space)
([personal profile] isis Oct. 15th, 2025 04:40 pm)
Hiya! It's been a while! I blame Yuletide. (The preparatory work is a Lot, even with all the comods and tagmods who do an amazing job of putting things together. So, make me feel like it was worthwhile: go sign up! 😁)

But I have been consuming media!

What I recently finished reading:

Chaos Vector and Catalyst Gate, the second and third books in the space-opera Protectorate series by Megan E. O'Keefe. I enjoyed the series overall, though I feel like O'Keefe slowed things down and lost momentum after the sequence of clever twists from the first book. The actual story behind the story turned out to be less novel and captivating than I was expecting, and although a few of the reveals were "a-HA!" great, some parts just felt as though the worldbuilding was being done on the fly, and the plot built around to justify it.

The writing occasionally felt a little fanficcy to me, like, "let's express found family sentiment here! Let's throw in an obstacle that turns out not to be one!" but overall it was easy to read and fairly entertaining.

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, which like the first book of the previous series is a reread so I can read the rest of the books in the series. This one I first read in 2014, and as with the Protectorate books, I am stunned at how much I completely don't remember at all. Here's my review from 2014:
A whole lot of elements in this book hit my buttons perfectly. There is the alternate-history/near-future aspect, which centers on the interesting idea that the EU has not just fallen apart but splintered into dozens of tiny pocket states (and I have to say, there was a strange resonance to reading the bit about Scotland's explosive parting from the UK only a month after the real-world vote failed). There is the largely Eastern European setting, the Estonian and Polish and Hungarian characters, which read delightfully exotic to this American (though I wonder how it will read to my European friends!). The writing is strong, never getting in the way of the story but frequently delighting me with clever phrases and evocative images, exactly the style I love reading. And I adored the idea at the heart of the eventual reveal.

But...there were problems. The pacing was a little odd, slow to get going, with scenes (or parts of scenes) that did not obviously contribute to the story. Some, granted, played a part later. But it didn't feel tight to me; yet at the same time, there were all these questions that were answered in oblique ways, or left hanging such that clearly the reader was supposed to connect invisible dots, which made me feel a bit too stupid for the clever author - not as bad as Ken MacLeod's books make me feel (and there were bits of this that were reminiscent of his The Execution Channel, but along those lines. And the cool reveal I mentioned above comes practically at the end of the book - but when I hit it, I felt, that is what I want the book to be about! Not all this preparation stuff! And there wasn't enough about the cool part!
I mostly still agree with this, though I now think the pacing works better for me, maybe because I missed some details before or failed to understand how a later section made use of information from an earlier one. Also - there was an offhand bit of building up the undergirdings of this near-future world, the why of Europe having splintered into micro-polities, involving a pandemic of the "Xian flu" which "had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the spread of the disease..." and I was, holy shit, this was published in 2014. (This fictional pandemic was 10-20x more deadly than Covid-19, which was certainly bad enough.) Other contributors to European disunity were "Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers – and, of course, GWOT, the ongoing Global War On Terror," and about there I started thinking damn, if it wasn't for the Great Uniter (of everyone else against him) this would be playing out right now...and maybe it will play out here, as the states attempt to sort themselves by political party.

I guess the point is, I enjoyed reading this both as an escape and also as a a warning. On to the second book, which according to my notes I read in 2016 and liked even more (because it was mostly about the cool thing at the end of the first book)!

What I recently finished watching:

Two episodes of Resident Alien which was too cringe for me. I liked the concept, in theory? But the execution was excruciating.

Foundation S3, which - well, another way that civilizations crumble, I guess. I enjoyed it, particularly watching the various Cleons diverge from their assigned paths, but alas the problem with a generation-spanning epic is that the characters you liked in a previous season are (mostly) long dead now. Probably my favorite part was Bayta (and Toran, I guess) who felt very much like Star Wars characters to me.

What I'm still playing but not for much longer:

I'm about to start the endgame sequence (at least, that's what the quest screen tells me) of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Time to kill those pesky gods!
I just discovered that you can make the perfect peppermint hot chocolate with Ritter Sport Peppermint. (I expect After Eight mints or similar would work too.) It turned out super delicious, so I need to share the joy!

Proportions: 250ml milk / 25g Ritter Sport Peppermint.

Just put the chocolate into the milk and heat in the microwave in short bursts, stirring thorougly in between, until it's entirely melted. (It pays to use a glass and not a porcelain mug, so you can see whether it's fully incorporated. *g*) Add a little sweetener to taste. YUM. :D
Woohoo, [community profile] guardian_wishlist revealed this morning with over 60 new Guardian & related works!

There is so much fantastic new stuff, and I haven't had time to properly look at much yet, but I need to share the three fantastic gifts I got:

So so many thanks to all of you, and everyone else who is part of this fest! You are all amazing! ♥ ♥ ♥
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