Stranger Things Season Four

Stranger Things Season Four. Whoops, I've had this tab open for awhile, as I discovered when I went to post something else. The needle continues to swing between entertaining and annoying, and this season the balance may have tipped; too many plot threads I wasn't into. Kind of think they should have ended it last season. Although I like it more now that I've started reading it as itself an RPG - thinking about which characters are PCs vs NPCs, and thinking about the narrative from a standpoint of player engagement/satisfaction rather than single-author storytelling, makes so many choices make more sense. We'll probably still watch the last season eventually at some point?

F/February

F/F February continues with two more novels. A Scatter of Light, Malinda Lo, 2022, is a companion novel to Last Night at the Telegraph Club, set over 50 years later in 2013. I liked this a lot, and not just because we get a very nice update about Lily and Kath; I liked the romance and the stuff about art and the stuff about aging relatives and grief. It's been a long time since I reread A Ring of Endless Light but it might be a little bit in dialogue with that, or maybe that was just a coincidence.

Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, 2014, has been on my to-read list for ages - since 2019, apparently, steadily creeping up in priority the more times someone recced it to me or it came up somewhere. My note said "fantasy Regencyish lesbian", which pretty much sums it up, but I will elaborate that it's a Ruritanian romance, taking place in Alpennia, a country located somewhere in the Alps between France, Germany, and Switzerland, it is low-magic fantasy but not quite no-magic, and would probably appeal to fans of Kushner's Swordspoint books. Exactly my sort of thing, in other words, as people keep telling me, and, yup, they were right, and I look forward to reading the rest of them (this is the first of several). (And perhaps I will ruminate a bit about whether there could be anything interesting to be explored in the idea of Alpennia coexisting with Orsinia or Gallacia...)