Damn that title is a mouthful. One of many things that could have used a lot more work in this game. In VTMB2, you play as the Nomad, an Elder vampire recently awoken with a mysterious mark. For regrettable reasons, the Nomad chooses to go by the laughable name "Phyre" (pronounced "fire") in-game.

I went into this without any familiarity with the first game, which released in 2004, or the tabletop RPG on which the series is based. I first heard about VTMB2 years ago when it was just a flicker in the developers' eyes in Game Informer. It looked very cool! A customizable vampire character to run around Seattle and ally with various factions in a political fight? Sign me up!

Unfortunately the game is a real disappointment. I can't imagine how it must feel for fans of the original game to wait more than 20 years for this.

First, the game sells itself as an RPG, but there's very little of that, either on the combat or the narrative end. Your ability to customize Phyre is very limited--you can choose their gender, change up their hair a little, put some make-up and piercings on them, and change their outfits (the outfits, admittedly, are fun), but otherwise, Phyre is Phyre.

In terms of combat, you unlock the five powers associated with Phyre's clan pretty early in the game; you have the ability to unlock the other clans' powers too, but you can only ever equip four at a time, and none of them upgrade from where they start. Aside from one power I swapped, I kept my Phyre's original Brujah set equipped for the entire game.

You get various popups about how an NPC feels about what Phyre just said or did, but these ultimately have no impact. There are only a couple of late-game decisions that have any influence on the ending, and your relationships don't matter at all.
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youtuberecs is a community where you can rec YouTube videos

marchmetamatterschallenge, a challenge that involves locating and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation and also including some prompts for creating new meta, is running again this year.

allbingo is running a National Crafting Month Bingo Fest through March. There are pre-made cards or you can create your own using the available prompts.

sufficiently_advanced_ex, a fanworks exchange for science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature canons, is open for nominations until March 7th.

worldbuildex, a fic exchange based on world building in canon, is accepting nominations until March 8th, 9PM EDT.

unsent_letters_exchange, an epistolary fic exchange, is open for sign-ups until March 9th, 11:59PM UTC (posts says the 7th, but it was extended due to AO3 outages)

monstersmashexchange, a gift exchange that features monsters, is accepting nominations until March 11th, 8PM Eastern.

bethefirst, a challenge where you write the first fic in a fandom that previously had none, is open for sign-ups. The deadline to submit a fic is April 20th, 11:59PM GMT.

Multifandom Shelter for Abandoned Fics is an event where you can submit your abandoned WIPs if you want someone else to complete them or claim others

fancake's theme of the month is: siblings. Click on the banner below to learn more!

Today is cloudy, chilly, and wet.  It's been raining most of the morning, supposed to clear up midday, then thunderstorms today.  A beautiful day to stay indoors and write!

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and a male house finch.

I put out water for the birds.








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Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "World Cuisine." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for cooks, fusion chefs, immigrant cooks, eaters, farmers, foragers, food scientists, inventors, recipe writers, famous figures in food history, cooks of disadvantaged groups who should have become famous, superheroes, supervillains, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people active in the food world, cooking, gardening, harvesting, foraging, preserving, writing recipes, discovering things, decolonizing diets, building or using kitchen equipment, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, kitchens, restaurants, food trucks or carts, campfires, barbecue sites, laboratories, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, picnics, grocery stores, farmer's markets, roadside fruit stands, U-pick farms, gardens, food forests, other places where people make food, world cuisine, ethnic cuisines, cookbooks, online recipe archives, permaculture, heritage diets, climatarian diet, traditional foodways, culinary archaeology, food sovereignty, drought-resistant crops, trial and error, ethnic spice sets, weird food, fusion food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, new ideas in cuisine, alternate agriculture, lab conditions are not field conditions, ethics of food, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

National Crafting Month Bingo Card 3-1-26

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has to figure out how to feed a diverse, far-flung group of people who sometimes have special dietary needs.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including some aspects of food science.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different diets.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find and prepare enough food to survive, when city libraries are out of reach.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman uses herbs and healing foods to care for her village.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania.  Igor enjoys cooking and has gotten at least one of the werewolves curious about cooking the human way.

Hart's Farm is a community with food used as one of the popular bonding methods.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates in the Caribbean, among other groups and places, leading to a wide variety of foods.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all of whom need to eat.  Primal soups and high-burn soups often have special dietary needs.  Comfort food and healing food are also very popular here.  The Rutledge thread includes Kardal and his food truck Syrian Foods, along with references to Vermont, French, and hippie cuisines.  Pain's Gray, Shiv, and the Finns are all fond of cooking too.

The Wandering features old people who drift back in time, the first of whom lands in Goa, India.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

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And, incidentally, freaked the fuck out of my sister

I did tell her there was a fox!

and on the packaging it says:

"This product is not a toy and is intended for collection or use by individuals aged 14 or above"

They're superhero stickers! 14 and above! What do they think kids are doing, eating them!?

***********************

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Miss Scarlet and the Duke - 3.2 Arabella

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Today I set up a new label for the Sharpie Oil Paint Pen Extra Fine that I bought recently. I also took some other pictures around the yard.

( Walk with me ... )

I’m going to put my reviews of these two together because to me, although they’re very different in tone and in novel structure (and intent), the introduction of Ekaterin and the change in Miles’s life make them two halves of a heterogenous whole. I’m going to skip back and forth a bit.

( First, Komarr )

A Civil Campaign puts us back on Barrayar, with a full cast of characters from previous books.

( A Civil Campaign )

The second book I finished this weekend was Earthlings by Sakyaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Takemori. This book is about Natsuki, a girl who's always felt she doesn't quite belong with humans. This has been book #16 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

I've struggled a lot with what to say about this book, or whether to say anything at all. First, as many other reviews note, the book description does not in any way prepare you for the trigger warnings that may apply, so if you have no-gos for reading, do have a look around for a list before you crack this one open. 

There are a lot of things you could take away from this book. The lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse. The damage of a child having no safe adult to confide in. The pain of feeling alienated from society. The pain caused by strict social expectations that leave no room for individuals to pursue other modes of living. The danger that refusing to allow deviations from the "norm" will lead individuals incapable of conforming to that norm to reject society altogether. The idea that rejecting smaller social rules eventually leads to complete anarchy and amorality. The suffocating impact of the absence of privacy and the extremes to which it may drive people.

It is an exploration of the harm done, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who don't "fit" into the mold of society. How much of it is reality and how much of it is Natsuki's imagination is also up to the reader.

It's also a book about interrogating taboos, which leads to the trigger warning above. Natsuki's choice not to marry or have children is in and of itself, violating a taboo of her culture. Her feeling that violating this taboo does no harm to her or anyone else naturally leads to questioning other taboos, and you can't write a book about questioning taboos and then say "but not that taboo, that's too taboo!" so the book does go some dark places as Natsuki and her companions ask themselves if there's anything rational in refraining from theft, murder, and assault. 

The translation is well done, particularly in dealing with a number of sensitive subjects.

I'm not sure what I ultimately take away from Earthlings. Perhaps how much damage societal rejection has on a person's psyche and the harms that can spawn from that. We are, in the end, social creatures. Feeling from a young age that you don't belong is bound to have detrimental developmental impacts.

This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like. 

If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.

The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else. 

However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.

Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that. 

I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.

But not for the East Coast, not really. So whatever.

it's been too long :(

Come to my post for your choice of place to pre-order!

https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/sylvies-escape

My order has arrived from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds. :D

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My willow cuttings have arrived! :D I will need to unpack them and set them up. My plan is to put some in water, which makes willow water, which can be used to root other things. I shall take cuttings from some dogwoods and other things here to see if this works. I also intend to put some willow cuttings in soil to see how that works. Since willows are pretty much the easiest thing to propagate from cuttings, and I have 3 of each color, I figure at least one of each should survive.

Willow is a keystone plant, supporting many other species. Early blooms feed bees. Birds like to nest in willows. Many species of insects, especially butterfly and moth larvae, feed on them. They also make great craft materials and, as mentioned above, spew out rooting hormones.

( Read more... )

Today is cloudy, cold, and damp. Last night it snowed a bit, then sleeted, and seems to have rained later. Now most of the ice has melted off.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and a male cardinal.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I transplanted snowdrops from the parking lot to the white garden.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I set up a label with the new Sharpie Oil Paint Pen (Extra Fine) and took pictures.

I saw a squirrel in the trees.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- My red curly willow cuttings arrived, as did my order from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds. I have set up two of the willow cuttings in water, one in potting soil. I also took a cutting from the fishpond mulberry tree and one from a red dogwood, which I added to the water cups to see if the willows will help those root too.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen a male cardinal chasing a female, and a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

I am done for the night.