A Song in the Trees

Today, I celebrated Public Domain Day by uploading a few newly public-domain photos to Wikimedia Commons. Happy 2026!

I played a lot of video games I enjoyed this year:

• "The Roottrees are Dead" is a fun web-simulation puzzle game


• Oblivion (remastered) is very pretty even when disabling stuff to get better performance, improves on some problems in the original, and maintains that broken Oblivion charm


• "The Crimson Diamond", despite my issues with the ending sequence, was a great throwback adventure game


• I put a lot of hours into inventing farming and building community in "Roots of Pacha"


• I played "Expelled!" in one sitting (does get a bit tedious to replay the day toward the end), but the MC is so much fun in how unapologetically ambitious and ruthless she is


• Still haven't finished FFVII Rebirth, but there are so many games in the game!


• Just started playing the stat-building game "The Royal Alchemist", and while it's not perfect (easy gameplay, lots of typos), I'm enjoyed the royal intrigue and reputation-building mechanics


• And of course, I've been playing and modding Morrowind between writing way too many words of fanfic about it

Unfortunately, I had relatively bad luck in picking books I enjoyed this year. I DNF'd more than usual; the worsening editing standards in publishing are not helping, but I also happened to pick some that seemed interesting but ended up being a slog that I dropped or skimmed through after a certain point. After we started moving, I also did not do a lot of Japanese reading or watching, which I want to focus on more this year.

In skating, I finally received my new boots, which hopefully should fit better. I did a dance lift for the first time and passed a dance test, my upright spins are now much better, we fixed my bad-leg spiral, and my edge work is also improving. We even got me a baby Salchow that my coach immediately said I was doing wrong lmao. Onward and upward.

My partner and I bought a house, which was a pretty big deal. Moving was not at all fun, but we do enjoy being away from our landlord. There is still a lot to work on; however, we have managed some improvements already like replacing the furnace with a heat pump, and Z wants to learn more about plumbing and carpentry so he can do more on his own. I found out that the library system has thermal imaging cameras available, so I have one on hold to help find out where else we can improve our sealing.

Been keeping busy! My boss and I have been grinding away at a paper revision for our big project of the last few years. I spent a week and a half being very frustrated with the code to fine-tune one of our models in response to a reviewer comment... and it made no significant difference in the results in the end. Ah, well, it turns out like that sometimes. Also I learned that even our most technical person barely knows how to Git, so I now feel less bad that I can hardly muddle through anything more complicated than a basic commit.

In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)

Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.

During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.

And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.

Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.

I hope everyone's new year is off to a good start! Z and I began ours with medical appointments that had good news (Z received an actual diagnosis for his painful hands and a steroid injection, fingers crossed; I was told that my eye condition was improving even if I can't tell yet), a baby shower for Z's sibling (I stayed at home and enjoyed being the sole object of our cat's affections), and airing out the main room of our house in below-freezing weather (landlord decided to re-seal the floors and re-paint the walls while we were gone; it looks nice, at least!). Overall going decently so far, I think!

While I don't have any detailed Japanese learning goals for this year, I looked at my time tracking from last year, and as I expected, with the big dip during summer, I didn't spend as much time working on it as I had the year before. However, one of my goals was to proportionally spend more time reading and listening rather than e.g. studying flashcards, and that definitely happened, so I'm pleased about that. The last thing I watched in Japanese last year was the new Mononoke film - the Japanese subs definitely helped, but I was surprised at how well I was able to understand it given the historical context and all the visuals going on, even though I usually think of listening as my weaker skill.

I finished reading the Captive Prince series through the library and quite enjoyed it. IMO the high point was in book two, which had a very nice enemies-to-lovers dynamic, although I didn't mind the slavefic part of book one (which I remembering seeing some fuss about at some point), and I also really enjoyed their relationship during the first part of book three. Damen also remained an enjoyable POV character to me; Laurent grew on me as Damen gets to see more of his true nature and it throws past events into more perspective, but I liked Damen's straightforward, honorable by his definition (with that changing over the series) nature more. The ending was a letdown and abrupt; I see there's a short story set afterward, so I might pick that up. However, the action scenes improved in the later two books, although I confess I rolled my eyes at the scene when Laurent first gets to show off his swordplay and the description is basically 'his swordplay was smart and schemey, just like he was'. The one thing that really dragged it down for me was the poor quality of the editing - I would have given it a pass if I was reading a self-published version, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay full big publishing house ebook prices for such poor SPaG editing, even leaving alone the stylistic aspects that bothered me.

Next on the reading list, I have two nonfiction ARCs I need to finish and review. I am struggling with Frankenstein now that I'm back to the Dr. Frankenstein section, but I'm far enough in that I don't want to DNF. I saw that Phoebe Judge did a reading of it, and I like her voice; not usually an audiobook person, but I think I'll give hers a try.

The OTW board got around to replying to a message I sent in July 2023. It was about as helpful as most of their replies to questions were at the last board meeting, i.e. they told me nothing. Do not recommend bothering. When I was filing that away, I also noticed that no action has been taken on any tickets I've sent in about AO3 works this year, dating back to January. They're not high priority items but also shouldn't be huge time sinks to deal with, so I'm a little concerned.

Anyway, in more fun things:
AMBER GLENN GPF CHAMP. 💜 I cannot wait to see her in Boston. My mom, who is far less into FS than I am, must have seen the video somewhere, because she texted me the same thing last night.

The Morrowind fic is still at the 'denial' stage of the slow burn. I sure did learn some things reading up on toxic plants and volcanic minerals for the last chapter and have also sure done some squinting at the blurry 2002 clothing textures. Half tempted to try to make a hi-res texture replacer of my own for them, because the AI upscaled ones sometimes get weird results from things like folds or laces.

I DNF In the Shelter of the Pines, the 18th-century Japanese biography of a politician. I think I have a high tolerance for historical rich people antics, but by the time I was maybe a third of the way through, I just could not continue to read about everyone endlessly fawning over this guy. Gobs of silk and delicacies and swords and books were exchanged at this shogun's visit and another priest was impressed by his Buddhist learning and hey look, time to exchange nauseatingly expensive gifts again! I have instead started reading Frankenstein, which I never happened to read, and to be honest, I almost DNF that as well. Then I got to the part where we head another level deep into the embedded narrative and hear from Frankenstein's creation, which has so far been the most interesting part for me.

I didn't get much reading done over the summer, but in my quest to get through my physical stockpile, I read the first book in the Colors manhwa trilogy by Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Earth. I liked it enough that got the other two volumes from the library, and I tried to read them outside in the evenings, though the mosquitos chased me off most days. It's a series set in rural early 20th century or so Korea, following a widowed mother and her daughter, Ehwa. The series is about puberty, romance, and sexuality; Ehwa grows up, falls in love, and starts exploring the idea of sex with little to explicitly guide her, and the mother starts a lonely romance with a traveling merchant who she rarely sees.

The art is very pretty, with delicate lines and many panels where the characters quietly walk through a detailed landscape. The pacing/continuity was sometimes a bit odd - there were a couple of scenes where characters switch track and suddenly forget about something they were worrying about, and there was also how Ehwa's eventual husband flees the village after burning down his abusive master's property and narrowly escapes being beaten, but then he returns a few months later with zero anxieties. There are also a lot of metaphors involving flowers and butterflies (where butterflies = men), which I didn't mind, but when I was poking through some reviews of the series, I noticed a lot of people seemed to find them overbearing. (And also didn't like the gender essentialism, which is fair enough, but it didn't seem out of line with the time and place of the setting.) It was one of those works where I enjoyed it but could see why others didn't, but I also wondered how much of that dislike was because of differences with the time/place of the setting and how Korean readers reacted to it.

I also recently bought and read Venus in the Blind Spot, a compilation of Junji Ito works. I'm on the fence about whether to keep it or put in the Little Free Library; I really liked a couple of the stories (it includes the infamous The Enigma of Amigara Fault), and I thought a couple of others were okay, but to be honest, I think a lot of his horror just doesn't work for me. The book also had some printing issues, which was disappointing considering it's a large format hardcover and not a cheap paperback manga volume.

In English, I am also reading The Secret Lives of Color from the library, which is nonfiction about colors and pigment that is 100% aimed at me, haha. I picked it up after watching this video that reads one of the chapters (with permission) about the ancient color of minium and then tries to recreate it. I am also getting back into Japanese practice with some oneshot manga and continuing series I was reading before the summer 💪

In Japanese, I finished:

• 2 short stories


• 2 books (read half of one of them the year before, though)


• 1 short story collection


• 2 children's books

plus a decent amount of manga, and half of another older-children's book. Onward and upward!

In English, I read books in translation from Romanian, Tibetan, Yiddish, and Japanese.

The most disappointing book I read last year (though not my least favorite) was the Kyoshi duology. I thought the first one was a pretty decent YA novel, albeit with some writing issues - I remember lots of head-hopping in particular, and the bending descriptions in the battle scenes were sometimes hard for me to follow - and, okay, this is petty but the description of how her makeup worked showed a complete lack of research into traditional Japanese theater makeup, and that really annoyed me. (Maybe it works for traditional Chinese theater makeup, a topic on which I haven't been able to find much in English, but I would guess they probably didn't have everlasting greasepaint, either.) Overall, I liked that that I could see how Kyoshi got from there to her depiction in the show and that she had a queer romance. I also thought the idea of the Avatar being chosen wrong was an amazing premise, though for a good chunk of the book I wondered if they'd wasted it until Yun came back at the end in a chilling scene.

The second one, while it had reduced head-hopping, felt like there was too much of Kyoshi flailing about how she's a bad Avatar while things happen, which was a disappointing turn. One thing I noticed in the fight scenes that I think contributed was a kind of... 'kabuki rule' happening, where it seemed like Kyoshi was just standing around while her opponent did things and didn't react until the author was done describing the cool thing that her opponent was doing. The romance took a back seat and didn't get a lot of development outside of a boring 'oh no are we breaking up? :'(' bit. I also didn't really buy Yun's sudden murder rampage that had absolutely no spirit interference, surely not, by the way we were totally teaching him to kill people and never mentioned it so that totally helps explain it. There were still some interesting aspects to his writing, and the scene where paintings start flowing down the walls because he's bending the pigments in them was the best in the book and stunning imagery, but I felt like it wasn't the most interesting direction they could have taken his character. Not sure if I want to check out the Yangchen books now unless I see a strong rec for them.

My favorite book I read in English was Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe by Phil Plait, which is kind of like one of those nonfiction books where the author can't stop telling you about the beautiful locations they visited for their research, but it's places around the solar system and universe. The formatting of the ebook bugged me a little, but the content was lovely and interesting, and great imagination fuel for thinking of what someone on an alien world might see. If I had let myself, I could have zipped through it in one go. I also very much enjoyed Sarashina Diary, the edited-for-others diary of a woman in Heian Japan who loves fiction while her older self keeps admonishing herself for enjoying something considered frivolous instead of taking a hint and dedicating herself to Buddhism. The beginning also has some beautiful travel observations.

In Japanese, my favorite read was probably「女の子がいる場所は」, a oneshot manga by Yamaji Ebine. It's a series of vignettes about five girls from various countries running into gender roles and limitations, often about education, and illustrates feminist ideas within a great storytelling framework. The art style is very black and white in a way that serves the story. The one I thought had the most striking art was the one of a girl who is annoyed when her elderly aunt's friend stays with them and keeps saying that things like books and school are for boys, until she learns that the older woman is completely illiterate, which led to her being in a terrible accident because she couldn't read a sign saying that the road she was taking was unsafe. The girl imagines how the world could be confusing and even scary for someone who can't read, and how the joy of reading a book was stolen from her, ending with a shot of the woman hanging up white cloths to dry as books fly around her, as blank and unreadable for her as the cloths.

My reading-related resolution is to try to reduce my tsundoku. So in English, no buying books and minimize borrowings from the library this year, and in Japanese, buying at most one volume for each volume I've already read (I will try to keep it to less than that). I also have a few already-read physical manga volumes in Japanese that I don't plan to keep but don't really know what to do with... I've heard Book-Off gives you almost nothing, and I don't live incredibly close to any of their US stores anyway. Might offer them online somewhere for free and see if anyone wants them. (I mean, if anyone reading this might want some free Japanese reading material, I can let you know what I have!)

🌱:

• Pulled more weeds and repotted the eggplants and tomatoes! They're starting to take off now that the weather is warming up. All the seedlings mostly live outside now except when it gets cold enough at night.


• Daikon are a little bit nibbled-on (not from rabbits) but growing well. There are also at least two carrot sprouts; not sure what percentage of the rest is grass or carrot yet!


• Gave lemongrass a re-try since the one sprout that survived never grew (and then died off a few days later). So far the new ones seem to be doing better. I also tried planting new garlic chives since I'm down to one plant, but no sprouts yet.


• Now that it's nice out, it's very pleasant to sit outside in the evenings and read something.

📚:

• I tried reading The Little Prince since what I'd osmosed made it sound right up my alley and I've heard so many good things about it. Nope; hated it. I dropped it a quarter of the way through. Sorry, I abhor the positioning of creativity and art against math and sciences, and I'm also not here for the idea that adults don't want to hear about flowers and birds, only numbers, even if it's meant to be metaphorical.


• I finished The Life of Milarepa, a Tibetan (at least somewhat fictionalized) biography of a man who goes from great evil to enlightenment during the course of a single lifetime. I... hate to say this, but I can't recommend it unless you are already deeply knowledgeable about Tibetan Buddhism or otherwise have a determined interest in the subject matter.
  
  • The book is in a weird place where it's defining very basic Buddhist concepts like samsara but skips defining many of the more advanced ones. Frankly, some of the definitions that it does contain are unhelpful - not to mention none of them are footnoted. I quickly gave up looking for most definitions because so many of the Tibetan Buddhist phrases, which are thrown at you one after the other in the introductory chapter, weren't defined. If this translation was intended to be readable by a non-specialist audience, most of whom will know even less about Buddhism or Tibet than even I do, I think a Tale of Genji footnote-heavy approach would have been much better.
  
  
  • Because it is a work written for a particular religious sect, a lot of the imagery is not really comprehensible to someone like me, and it goes on at least one dry tangent detailing what work such-and-such disciple of the great Milarepa went on to do.
  
  
  • I did quite enjoy the parts that were more story-like, but they were written distantly at times, so the emotional weight of a traditional story was lacking. In particular, there were many incidents of someone 'receiving the oral teachings' and never details on what basically any of the teachings are - though I wouldn't be surprised if those were sect secrets or something. I did feel super bad for Milarepa in the section where he decides to turn his life around and devote himself to the Buddha, because for a while there, the tale becomes a litany of physical and emotional abuse that ends up being justified as clearing his karma faster. This isn't even 21st-century-American-me's view, the wife of his lama calls the treatment abuse and is constantly trying to help Milarepa because she feels terrible for him. It goes on to the point where he nearly attempts suicide - but because he finally receives the teachings, it's all fine and dandy and his lama is great and amazing, and going through all that made up for his murdering people, yaaay 🥰
  
  
  • The imagery at the very end around Milarepa's funeral was absolutely gorgeous, though.
  
  
  • I also enjoyed reading something in a Tibetan setting, so I'll have to see if I can find something that is a little easier for someone like me who doesn't have a deep religious background.
  
  
• In paper, I've now started on a collection of Henry James stories that I picked up from the same place as Milarepa. I found The Romance of Certain Old Clothes okay, but the ending didn't quite work for me; it wasn't drawn out enough for any sense of creeping dread, but wasn't quick enough for a twist, and it was pretty obvious what was likely to happen. The Last of the Valerii didn't interest me much at all, and even the horror aspect was boring. I wonder if it would have been more horrifying if I was the kind of person who thought that pagan religions were Bad and Evil, but as it is, there's a guy having an overdramatic reaction to a statue he's drawn in by that may or may not contain a little bit of goddess. I was more creeped out by the narrator going on about what the guy's 'Italian blood' meant.


• In electronic reading, I'm about two-thirds of the way through Tsilke the Wild. Not the most exciting story, but I do like Tsilke and the descriptions of the beautiful forest she lives in. The translation's grammar issues and bad paragraph formatting keep putting me off, but it's a free translation and I've seen much worse.


• ...I feel like I'm complaining a lot about these, hah. At least I'm not reading dense philosophical papers like Z is right now.

💬:

• After too many phone calls, it sounds like the ENT's office doesn't think I need to come back for a follow-up, which I'm glad about.


• My new vocal exercises are more interesting than the last set. They're supposed to teach me how to speak in the 'most efficient' manner to lessen the pressure on my vocal cords.

🏃‍♂️:
Z and I went on a short hike a few days ago. Unfortunately, I had issues with my shoes (ended up going barefoot for a bit when we hit a road), but the scenery more than made up for it. We spotted some beavers and blue herons as we walked along a lake surrounded by evergreen forest; there were little purple flowers out along the path, and the ferns are starting to unfurl. At the end of the route, we climbed up to a restored fire tower - nerve-wracking to climb (I kept imagining it collapsing beneath us) - but beautiful view from the top. While we were up there, a flock of geese took off from the lake and flew right along the treetops beneath us, all honking at top volume.

I'll do my end-of-year writing meme in another post, but overall life things:

• I started my new job :)


• I had to wrestle with insurance for months on end :(


• I moved, which is now :) but was pretty :( through the process


• I got my arm fixed and another medical thing taken care of :)


• I went to Skate America :)

Overall, it was a good year for me. I do wish I had done more Japanese and more original writing, and I really wish I had been able to get back to skating earlier. Goals for this year, I guess.

A bit about the books I read:
I had a 50/50 ratio of nonfiction to fiction and also a perfect split in male vs female authors. My average rating on GR was noticeably down this year, which tracks with how I felt about the book-books I finished. Unfortunately, I think that was mostly due to the fiction books, as many of them ended up disappointing me. I found The Luzhin Defense boring after Luzhin grows up, I hated Wings by Julie Gonzalez so much for becoming a very obvious (even to me) Christian metaphor about how you just need to belieeeeve with a lazy ending that I am trying to figure out what to do with the book since I can't throw hardcovers in the recycling, and I was sad to be disappointed in Milky Way Railroad. Part of it may have been the translation, and I felt like I might have enjoyed it more if I had encountered it in a literature class, but as it was, it felt like either I was missing some important context or that it was a children's nonsense story but not as fun as Alice in Wonderland, and I definitely felt its being incomplete. I liked the imagery, but that was it.

My favorite book of the year was The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris, though I also enormously enjoyed Dying Words by Nicholas Evans despite it being a little confused about its audience. My favorite fiction was The Changelings/Torikaebaya Monogatari, which I was glad to be able to obtain through ILL, and Despoilers of the Golden Empire, a scifi short story that's probably more fun if, like me, you know the twist before you begin. I also still have a lot of thoughts I need to get down about John Curry's biography.

Some of the games I played for the first time last year:
A bunch of itch.io games, either free or from the Ukraine bundle, many of which I enjoyed in the moment but most of which were not very memorable. The exception was Fit For a King, a game where you are a monarch who needs to find enough money to outspend your rival at a party, even if you have to go peering through every hidden passage and digging up graves to find it. Or have more fun talking to every person in the kingdom and changing the laws so you can marry everyone or everything. I think I spent an entire afternoon on it, and I had a blast.

Bury Me My Love was memorable for being a game that I enjoyed for its charming art and good writing before I found out it has an intentionally awful design choice that the devs claim is necessary because it is a Very Serious Game. That is, it has a bunch of endings it wants you to see, but as soon as you reach one, which I did about an hour in, you have to restart from the beginning with no way to speed up or skip text. While I would usually give a serious game some leeway on mechanics, 'you can't skip any text or rewind from an ending like in every other visual novel because Real Migrants don't get second chances :) but also we have twenty endings for you to experience! :)' just undermines the aim of their game.

Strange Horticulture was a game that should have been my jam, and I did enjoy playing it. But the gameplay mechanics and writing both fell a bit short for me. I loved the plant descriptions and the approach to quests, but I did not love having to manually label every plant as I discovered what it was. The map was so large that it was difficult to find things on it and yet ended up being mostly empty. None of the recurring characters were given enough depth to make them interesting to me; I think a smaller cast might have served it better. It's still a good game, just not one I'd rec enthusiastically.

The Red Strings Club was a cool, short cyberpunk game with lovely pixel art and an interesting mix of minigames, which I had previously played as they were also released separately. As you craft different cyborg implants to improve people's lives or try to extract information from people by mixing them drinks to activate different emotions, the game also asks you to ponder philosophical questions about human happiness, freedom, and technology. Would society be better if we went beyond antidepressants to something that meant we never felt pain or sadness? Should we use mind-control technology to stop rapes? Suicides? Racism? And even if so, is a giant megacorp the one to trust with that technology? Well, it's a cyperpunk game, so certainly not. (There is one instance of a trans person being deadnamed that I raised an eyebrow at, but I would note that one of the devs is trans and their inclusion of that moment was very deliberate.) I would recommend this, or any of Deconstructeam's free short games on itch.io as well.

Who's Lila is a game I looked at because it has a distinct 1-bit art style (like Obra Dinn) and picked up because it also has a unique gameplay mechanic: the main character struggles to express emotions, and when you converse with others, you have to manually manipulate his face into different expressions to control how he replies. It starts off seeming like a murder mystery, but it quickly goes off those rails into something much stranger. I managed to get by far one of the most confusing endings on my first go-through by missing a door in the art, but I kept going. I liked the themes about identity, although I'm not a fan of tarot motifs and that's also heavily featured. It's a game that made me want to hunt down every ending to figure out what was going on but resisted one final interpretation. I do think that it was too repetitive in parts (three endings are essentially the same except you take one action differently), although save-scumming helps a bit there. If you use saves well and are a fast reader, it's a shorter game than advertised - I did everything in under five hours - but those five hours stuck with me.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was hands-down my game of the year. While I do have some issues with the writing (should probably give that its own post sometime), it has gorgeous art, fun worldbuilding with its alien ecology, nails the 'just one more month' routine of raising sims, has the best gender system a game can have, and doesn't shy away from throwing some complexities into its utopian solarpunk world. I've played it at least four full times and gotten all the major endings. Most of the other child characters have very good development as they grow up, and the best of the romance scenes are amazing and drew me back to reread them multiple times. I also appreciate how easy it is to save scum, haha.

My Child Lebensborn was a game I played almost entirely on the last day of the year. It's another Serious Game, but unlike the above example, it uses its raising sim mechanics to complement the main theme of the game very well. You're the poor but happy adoptive parent of a child in 1950s Norway - a child who is half-German and born during the occupation, and nobody in town is happy about having a child of the enemy around. They go through some absolutely horrible experiences, and even if you're the best parent you can be, you can't stop it all from happening, because the abusers in town have locked onto a target that's entirely socially acceptable. The writing is very sensitive to the child and parent, and even those in town (who are themselves dealing with the trauma of WWII and taking it out in the worst way), and hits the emotional beats excellently, along with using interaction as a way to create emotional involvement in the player. I see the developers have a sequel in the works that's less about the historical backdrop of the Lebensborn children in Norway and more about helping the child cope with and heal from their experiences, and I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

Read: I finished The Luzhin Defense by Nabokov. Past the first third of the book, I found it dull, on top of the issue of it lacking paragraph breaks. The very ending was more exciting than the middle, but I never did find it satisfying that Luzhin is simply driven mad by chess.

Reading: In English, I snagged What If? 2 electronically from the library, although it's crashed Firefox at least five times now :( But if you enjoy Randall's kind of writing like I do, it's a fun read, and it's nice to have something I can read in short bursts between other things at the moment. The [citation needed] joke is a bit overdone, though.

In 日本語, still at those skating boys. The protagonist (struggling on his way to Japanese Nationals) and the World Champion (who he trained with as a child but is distantly friendly with now) have chosen the SAME MUSIC to skate to, gasp. The protagonist knows that he can't really be angry, but it suits him better for his last season, dammit! Rival Skater will surely continue skating after this one! I'm enjoying myself with this.

In other reading-related news, I trimmed my to-be-read list! I think I tossed off around 10% of it that I was either no longer interested in or had no idea why I had ever put that book on there.

Read: I put The Facemaker on hold at the library after reading an interview with the author. I got it yesterday and finished it today, which tells you how engaging I found it.

It's a biography of the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies and his work during WWI, during which he performed facial reconstructions for injured soldiers and in the process, invented and advanced plastic surgery techniques. (After the war, he did both cosmetic and reconstructive work, and he also performed the first phalloplasty for a trans man.) There is also a hefty dose of context on other plastic surgeons working on facial reconstruction at the time, those making facial masks for injured soldiers, relevant advances in medicine such as blood transfusion and anesthesia, the general horror of the advances in warfare and how they lead to so many facial injuries, and what happened with some of the soldiers he treated. I thought it was just the right amount of context to fill out the book without distracting from the main story.

The author did a very good job with the storytelling - I was almost driven to tears at one point in the prologue. It was also compassionate towards the patients and addressed how some aspects of their treatment may have reinforced the idea that facial disfigurement == horrific and unseeable (such as how there were no mirrors in the wards, a measure meant to keep them from being dispirited about their appearance while still going through many surgeries). She talks about how the men were often treated when they went out in public and how losing a limb was something that could be celebrated as a sign of bravery, but coming home missing your jaw was too horrific to be talked about. While there are a few photos of the reconstructive process, she only included those of soldiers who were able to finish their surgeries, and since they're presented in sequence and sequestered at the back of the book, it didn't feel like gawking.

The only thing I didn't enjoy about the book was that a few of the surgical techniques, like the whole thing about pedicles that gets discussed quite a lot, were a bit confusing, even after hitting up Google. I would have appreciated clear diagrams demonstrating how they worked.

Reading: Still working on スケートボイズ, though I'm trying to catch back up on Japanese after the move so I haven't touched it this week.

Reading next: I see the author also has a book on Lister! I'll be checking it out. But first, I will once again be grabbing Jonathon Stroud's new book off of Kobo Japan because for some reason it's 2022 and we're still releasing books months and months apart in different countries.