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A graphic on a blue background. Top text reads On Being a Neurodiverse Creator, a Duck Prints Press Panel. Sunday, January 11 | 10 a.m. ET. The middle is an image of a brain with arms and legs and a simplified straining face as it lifts a heavy set of weights. Bottom text reads join patreon.com/duckprintspress for exclusive access.

Every month, creators with Duck Prints Press come together to hold a literary convention-style panel on a topic chosen by our Patrons or selected by the panelists themselves. Our January panel? This Saturday, January 11 at 10 a.m. Eastern (converter) we’re having a get-together with five authors – Sebastian Marie, Puck Malamud, Alex Bauer, Tris Lawrence, and Lucy K. R. – about being a neurodiverse creator!

Description: As an umbrella term for a wide range of ways a brain can work, the word “neurodiverse” has become one way of grouping people with conditions ranging from autism and ADHD, to dyslexia and dysgraphia, to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. For creators, having these conditions can have advantages – such as changing how we see and interact with the world, helping us to unique points of view and frameworks, and supporting our work process – and they can also have disadvantages – such as interfering with ability to focus, causing mood swings that can make creativity tough, and making developing and maintaining creative habits difficult. In this panel, we’ll talk about our own neurodivergence, the ways we find our neurodivergence strengthens us as creators, the challenges that our neurodivergence introduces and how we’ve navigated those challenges, and the value we’ve found in forming communities with other neurodiverse people, touching on the extent to which we find the “neurotypical” and “neurodiverse” frameworks useful and relevant.

If you’re already a Patron, I hope you’ll join us! And if you’re not, become one today at the $7/month level or higher and get access to this panel, recordings of our past panels, and lots of other awesome benefits!

mount_oregano

The 30th annual Parsec Short Story Contest is open for submissions until March 31, 2026. This year’s theme is “metamorphosis.” Entries should be unpublished and be no more than 3,500 words. The contest is open to writers who have not met the eligibility requirements for SFWA full membership. No entry fee. Full contest rules and information are here.

The winners will be chosen by a team of three judges. I’m one of them. What will I be looking for? A good story, well told, of course. I’ve judged other contests, and I’ve seen a number of otherwise excellent stories that drop the ball at the end. The manuscript reaches “the end” a paragraph or two before the story does, failing to complete the emotional arc of the characters. Just saying. Good luck!

My flash fiction piece “The Souvenir You Most Want” won second place in the 2002 Parsec Contest, which had the theme “Met by Moonlight.” Read it here.

My short story “Think Kindly on Our Fossils” appears in the 2007 Triangulation: End of Time anthology, published by PARSEC Ink. You can purchase it here.

alightbuthappypen

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tinny

Heated Rivalry dominated December:

TV finished

Heated Rivalry! It was so good! It's on HBO Max and Crave. I really liked the first two episodes, there was a ton of sex, and other people much more eloquently explained why that's not a bad thing: the sex is the plot!
I hated ep three, depriving me of the main pairing I love, but I see how it's necessary as context for later episodes. Since I knew that going in, I waited until I was ready for it and just treated it like a different show. That worked for me. I loved the last three episodes again, there was a ton of romance. *A lot* of thought went into the show, and it's all intentional, and that's such a change from the things I usually watch where I rant at the writing all the time. Here, there's almost nothing to rant at. Plus, it's pretty much exactly what I'm most looking for in a tv show: m/m sex and m/m romance. \o/ I will probably read some of the books this year, and likely write up a review for the show if I find the time.

For now, let me direct you to

* my friend

machinistm's heated rivalry tag
* the heated rivalry comm

gamechangerhr
* the hockey podcast "What Chaos!" reacting to every single episode with genuine enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us7Pok5nDRc

TV new (ongoing)

Love on the Turquoise Land (17/32) - a modern fantasy/horror cdrama with Dilraba Dilmurat as a mystical sword fighter. I started watching for her, and by now probably would still be watching even if she wasn't on it. It's ... not good, exactly, but I love it anyway? I got over halfway through it in a few weeks. The horror aspect is not my thing at all, but it was only strong in the first episodes, and after that it started focusing more on vampire rituals and a general good vs evil fight and the horror took a backseat. I'm happy with that! I am very much enjoying Dilraba's actual voice (yay! she doesn't usually get to dub herself! This is cool!) and seeing her fight monsters. I am ranting at how illogical all the vampire lore is (they're called Earth Fiends but everything screams vampire to me), but fwiw once you disengage your science brain, it's fine. Giving the vastly overpowered FL a damsel-in-distress moment made me grit my teeth, but it did lead to the ML taking care of her for three eps straight, and I am not complaining about that at all. The character interactions are really good! I love the fighting, bantering, h/c, and budding romance between the ML and FL. The central mystery sounds interesting, and even though I don't trust the book author (who also wrote Parallel World) to plot herself out of a wet paper bag, the plot seems to hold together so far. Since Heated Rivalry has finished, this is the show I'm most motivated to watch right now. It's on viki.

our times

Our Times (03/38), a 90s retro "IT students go professional" cdrama with Wu Lei and Hou Minghao. The costumes are amazing (bell bottom jeans and corduroy jackets galore), and I really am enjoying the retroness of it all, especially the way the cut scenes are interspersed with actual old footage from Chinese cities, e.g. the construction of the tower in Shanghai. I immediately imprinted on Wu Lei's character (who is a bit of an arrogant asshole but gets beaten up twice in the first episode woah, see another cap). I only watched three eps so far, but liked those a lot. The only downside is that the show triggers my embarrassment squick (they are so incompetent as computer salesmen omg!), so I have to go through it slowly with many breaks. We'll see. It's on wetv and youtube.

TV continued

Still The Long Ballad (43/48), I don't want it to end. omg why do I love this show so much? I haven't loved a historical cdrama this much since Lost You Forever. Whenever Ashile Sun is on screen I go awwwwww. I'll enjoy the rest of the drama at a slow pace, while it continues to give me life. <3

I haven't dropped A Moment But Forever yet, but also haven't watched a whole ep this month.

TV (dropped)

I got halfway through Love at Night, and once the leads got together, which always makes me happy and is the main reason I watch anything, I immediately lost my motivation to continue, lol. I guess it just wasn't otherwise good enough. I might pick it up again, once I'm done with Turquoise Land? Maybe? I'm not holding my breath, though.

I realized that To My Shore is airing now, a Chinese BL (one of those sneaky international China-Thailand co-productions), and I watched half an ep, but I think it's too dark for me. For whatever reason, they keep picking the non-con ones to produce. *sigh* I prefer my romance consensual.

Extraordinary, a shorty cdrama with 20 15-min episodes about a computer nerd who transmigrates into a playboy in the past and basically transforms his family into the richest family around using his modern knowledge of business and weaponry. There's a cross-dressing FL (who he immediately sees through, lol), but otherwise it's mostly comedy of the type I'm not too fond of, and I dropped it again after a few eps.

Rewatches/Watchalongs

The HPI watchalong finished season 5. Unfortunately, there are no subs (yet) except French ones. We tried auto-translated English ones *once* and then decided that French will have to do. We enjoyed it very much but now it's over. *sob*

We started Nothing But You after that. Now on episode 6 already, we're going through it fast because we don't want to spend a year on it. So far looking good in the *show everyone how good this cdrama is* department. \o/

Still watchalong-ing When A Snail Falls in Love with my other friend, and will move on to Nothing But You after that as well.

js_thrill

Today's song is "Pure Milk" (I see what you did there, John)

Watch on YouTube

This is a weird song. I'm not sure I can explain what makes it weird, after all, if you listened to the last six songs, its not like any of those are "normal" songs. But even by that metric: this song is weird. John is singing in a weird way, the lyrics have this conspiratorial tone (you, the listener are being invited to participate in some crime with the narrator). I definitely like this one among the most of the ones I've encountered so far through the book (second place probably goes to Going to Alaska).

The annotations are mostly about Darnielle liking this song, and his own relationship to not knowing the narrative details that are unstated in the song, and his own lingering curiosity about the answers. I guess The Author is Dead.

Current Music: Pure Milk — The Mountain Goats

philomytha

The Spies of Hartlake Hall, RL Graham
This was a Christmas present that looked very promising, being a WW1 espionage murder mystery with a female sleuth, and therefore with all sorts of interests of mine all lined up. Unfortunately it was only a middling book: the authors never really seemed to know what they were doing, both the mystery aspect and the espionage aspect were a mess, and the period details were a bit of a mixed bag. It started really strongly: an unknown dead body, inside a closet locked from the inside in the heart of naval intelligence, clutching the un-decoded Zimmerman telegram, found by a secretary who is not what she seems - but it was all downhill from there on. Still: spies, WW1, murder mystery, female sleuth (though one of many disappointments with the book is that our female sleuth was instantly sidelined for the real hero who is of course a male counterespionage guy who has a fridged love interest and an unpleasant mother, he has Angst About Women and a Tragic Past instead of any actual characterisation) - I read the whole thing. But it felt like it was the ropy first draft of a much better book.

( fuller review with some spoilers )

james_davis_nicoll

My other group is moving to CoC 3rd edition. That's the one the GM owns. It turns out between the group we own a vast assortment of CoC editions, generally speaking one edition per player, including an original from 1981.

My character, Daniel Soren, has some good stats (Strength, Constitution, Intelligence) and some terrible stats (Dex, Power, and Edu). Unfortunately, in 3E you get Intx5 and Edux15 skill points, so being smart doesn't make up for being a grade school dropout. He does have some decent skills, but very narrowly focused: he's a competent cabbie and a moderately successful pulp writer with ambitions to appear in Weird Tales.

Power governs sanity in CoC so I don't know how long he will last.

prettygoodword

mana (MAH-nah) - n., (Polynesian culture) prestige, moral authority, spec. the power of the elemental forces of nature embodied in an object or person; (gaming) a unit of magical energy.

The concept of mana, and the word itself, is universal across Polynesia, and based on its meaning in other Oceanic languages apparently had a root sense of storm wind. The word was introduced to Europe by missionary and Melanesian ethnographer Robert Henry Codrington in 1891, apparently taking his cue from Maori, and popularized in Mircea Eliade's writings on religion. With that in the cultural background, Larry Niven used mana (iirc explicitly citing it as Maori, but I need to confirm this) as the name for fuel for magic spells in his The Magic Goes Away series of contemporary fantasy stories starting in 1969, and table-top RPGs such as D&D took the concept from there, and of course FRPGs took most of their framework from TTRPGs.

---L.

michifugu

Man, I really don't have any resolution for this year...
feels like I'm just give up to looking forward for the future.
I was so busy IRL and just has zero motivation to do my interest thanks for my executive dysfunction.
I am interested to do snowflake challenge but I think...it's also redundant because I didn't finished it last year so why bother.
and I still haven't writing some review and writing idea that I was planned....
feels like I'm just punishing myself, I wonder if there's a way to help with my dopamine...
anyway, next friday I am going to have a job interview with a role that I never experienced before, hope I can get this one because I am interested working in game-related industry

Current Mood: tired

james_davis_nicoll

astrafoxen on blusky created some visual aids showing Saturnian moon orbits.

They're all great but a detail in this one is worth mentioning.

The odd green squiggle to the right is a visual of Neptune's outer irregular moons, whose orbits around Neptune are large enough to be visible across the solar system. https://www.dreamwidth.org/comments/recent

james_davis_nicoll

A powerful but timid sorcerer is sent to guard a prince as he attends school.

Secrets Of The Silent Witch, volume 1 by Matsuri Isora (Translated by Alice Prowse)

duckprintspress

1. What are you currently reading?

Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault: it's not bad but it's also not really grabbing me, so I'm going really slow. I accepted yesterday that I won't manage to finish it before my current loan expires, so I put a hold on it again so I can continue. I'm about 20% in.
Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi vol. 7 by Ryoko Kui: see below, lol
盗墓笔记 vol. 2 by 南派三叔: since I finished 我和我对家, this is my new Chinese novel read (as picked by the survey I posted on Tumblr!). I'm taking a bit of a different approach with this one, annotating, underlining words I look up, writing definitions and/or pronunciations. Even if I weren't doing that, I definitely feel like I'm understanding this better; the sentences are more structured and the language more standard/less slang. It's written more formally, which matches better with what I've learned through studying. However, the pages are also a LOT longer and more dense with text, so it's sloooooow. It takes about 20 minutes for me to read a single page. Also, I had thought this would correlate to English vol. 2 of Daomu Biji, but it doesn't, it correlates to English vol. 3 which is. A pity. Because that's my least favorite of the DMBJ books I've read. But oh well, what can ya do

2. What have you recently finished reading?

Failed Princess by Ajiichi: modern yuri. Incredibly annoying characters, I'm not gonna continue this one. I'm usually pretty good at differentiating between "the author thinks this" vs "the characters think this" but this truly reads like the author has some unconsidered views on how important appearance is for a girl. Like, it's either the author doesn't get it, which is uncomfortable, or the character is like that, which is unpleasant, and either way I'm done.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime vol. 4 and 5 by Fuse and Taiki Kawakami
Kase-san and Morning Glories (Kase-san and... vol. 1) and Kase-san and Yamada vol. 2 (Kase-san and... vol. 7) by Hiromi Takashima: modern yuri. both of these were better than the first I read in this series (which was vol. 6 of the overall series), I'll keep with it for now.
Yona of the Dawn vol. 20 by Mizuho Kusanagi
Sakamoto Days vol. 17 by Yuto Suzuki
Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi vol. 1 - 6 by Ryoko Kui: this is a reread. I used holiday money I was gifted in the form of Amazon giftcards to buy the full series box set and I've done nothing but reread it ever since, lmao. Bonus, my daughter immediately started watching the anime, lmao. She's such an adorable weeb. (she is 7 years old)

3. What will you read next?

Novels: poor The City We Became, getting bumped again lmao... I picked up my spo of Lout of Count's Family vol. 6 by Yu Ryeo-Han, so that.

Physical Graphic Novels/Manga: I have none from the library, but with the box set of DunMesh at hand, you can safely assume I'll be finishing my reread of that before I do anything else.

Libby Graphic Novels/Manga: none of my loans are due in the next week so it's a bit of a crap shoot, but the ones due soonest are A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow vol. 3 by Makoto Hagino and Fragtime: The Complete Manga Collection by Sato, so. Probably at least those.

rydra_wong

As well as Venezuela, I think you might want to start phoning your representatives and screaming about how very much you do not think the US should invade and occupy Greenland.

I don't know how it's being reported on in the US, but it's looking extremely imminent over here:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/06/trump-greenland-control-us-military
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/france-and-allies-discuss-possible-response-to-donald-trump-us-invasion-of-greenland
https://news.sky.com/story/trump-is-likely-gambling-he-could-get-away-with-greenland-grab-as-nato-needs-us-more-than-he-needs-it-13491116

dancing_serpent posting in

c_ent

I'm sorry to do this, but I need to take a bit of a break for a while. I'm not in a good place right now mentally, and I'm hitting a limit where running this comm has started to feel more like work than fun.

First of all, I will keep doing the weekly chats - those are the least stressful for me, and as long as I'm still watching dramas I'll have something to contribute to them. I'll also keep up with the maintenance, i.e. tracking the comm, creating tags, commenting, etc.

But for now, I'll put a break on running the Wishlist Wednesday and the Quick Rec Wednesday posts. Participation on those has been very low in general, and remember, you're always welcome to post requests or recs directly to the comm!

I might keep up posting the Did You Make a Thing? entries, let's see how I'll feel towards the end of the month. But again, you're always welcome to post your fanworks directly to the comm!

As for the Topic Tuesdays, I don't know yet. They might still happen sometimes, but not necessarily on the regular, second Tuesday of the month. I love them, but they're also the most stressful entries for me. Coming up with topics is hard, even with help from you. Especially so, when I have no experience with or no opinion on a certain topic, and struggle to play host to those discussions. But don't let that deter you. Whenever you want to talk about something, please simply make a separate discussion entry to this comm.

I adore our picspam collections, but they're also the most work intensive entries, so I won't make any promises.

I also won't make any promises or predictions about the time frame of these changes. Who knows? Maybe I'll be perfectly fine again next month and return to the regular schedule. But maybe it will take me a year instead. What I do know is that I'm not done with c-ent in general, there are still plenty of dramas to watch and books to read, and I'm looking forward to doing so!

I'm a bit sad about all of it, but I'd rather take a step back now and still enjoy c-ent, than turn the whole thing sour for me.

And if anyone had interest in hosting one of those formats for now, I'd be fine with that, too. PM me, if you like, or if you feel unsure about it.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: impressed

hagar_972 posting in

purimgifts

Here! There's even a Creator's Choice of Fandom podfic request!

calimac

Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin, 2017)

Chernow is the author whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda. I decided to see what he could do with a thousand pages on U.S. Grant, most of my reading on whom had been quite succinct.

What interests me about Grant is this: after brave and intrepid service as a junior officer in the Mexican War, he was a complete failure in the peacetime army and then in civilian occupations after he resigned his commission. But when the Civil War broke out, and men with military experience were at a premium, no matter how shoddy they might seem, as soon as he reached command level Grant showed instant assuredness and promptly became the most successful general on the Union side, a status he kept to the end despite various setbacks. How did he do this?

My conclusion is that Grant had what might be called moral courage. This is, as Grant discovered the first time he led troops into action, a different thing from personal bravery under fire. It's the courage to lead and order other men into battle, knowing that many will be wounded or killed, and then to do it again the next day. Many of the generals either shied at the idea of exposing their troops to injury or death, or were so appalled at the results when they did that they withdrew and did not press the attack - which only, Grant felt, made the war last longer and become even bloodier.

The problem with this book is that Chernow never discusses where Grant's moral courage came from or how he developed it. The very first time Grant led troops into combat was early on in the Civil War. He was a colonel looking for the camp of some Confederate raiders led by one Col. Harris, and he was extremely nervous about commanding an attack on the enemy, but when he got to the camp he found that the rebels had learned he was coming and vamoosed.

In his memoirs, Grant writes two key sentences: "It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards." Chernow quotes the first of these but not the second. He doesn't address the question of Grant's moral courage at all until he gets to the Overland Campaign of 1864, when Grant for the first time faced an opposing general with as much moral courage and tactical skill as his own, and the results were an impasse leading to grisly slaughter. But Grant carried on, despite the toll, knowing that, if he was to prevail, to withdraw and lick his wounds would be worse. Here Chernow quotes from Grant defining this courage in the way I did above, but he doesn't analyze or discuss it.

The questions that interest Chernow are very different. He is absolutely absorbed by the rumors of Grant's alcoholism. This is probably the book's major theme. Repeatedly Chernow quotes testimony swearing that Grant had been seen falling-down drunk, and repeatedly he insists that other evidence renders these stories extremely doubtful. So were these malicious lies, or what? We never learn.

In the postwar part of the book, a recurrent theme is Grant trying to make up to the Jews for an injudicious order he'd issued early in the war, expelling all Jews from the territory he controlled on the grounds of the actions of some rapacious Jewish merchants. His subsequent regret for this becomes a major theme.

Of course by the end of the war, Grant's sad earlier life had vanished from his personality. Now he was the Army's chief general, then President of the U.S., and he was used to being in command. Chernow depicts Grant as chief peacetime general in the Johnson administration as developing a degree of political savvy he'd never previously had to show, but then he depicts Grant as president and afterwards as politically naive and the constant victim of scoundrels and shysters - something that had happened during the war too, but only as a minor feature. Chernow does not attempt to reconcile the savvy and the naive Grant.

I was also puzzled by some fragmentary material testifying to hints in Grant's earlier life of the greatness he would only display later. There's a story of Gen. Taylor, the army commander in the Mexican War, coming across Lt. Grant taking charge of his men in clearing a waterway, and saying "I wish I had more officers like Grant." Wow, what a testimony. But what is the source? Endnotes reveal it's from a newspaper article published on the occasion of Grant's death 40 years later. Somehow I doubt its veracity. Elsewhere Chernow is sometimes cautious about accepting unverified stories, but not here.

There's a lot of useful and well-researched material in this book, but for all its extent I do not find that this book captures the man.

hagar_972 posting in

purimgifts

Nominate tags here, sign up here!

Click here to sign up as a potential pinch hitter for Purimgifts!

tinny

I was unfortunately not very consistent about writing down things in December. Once I realized on December 6 that I'd already forgotten three things again that I'd failed to note down, my motivation dropped considerably for the next two weeks. Which is why there are now only

( 8 (+2 related) things I learned in December )

passingbuzzards

Recently I spent about two months playing through the Evolution storyline in Fallen London, which I LOVED—easily my favorite writing I’ve seen in the game so far, genius storytelling, really compelling main character, gorgeous atmosphere, the major plot twist totally blew me away—and have been wondering ever since about the two endings that weren’t the one I chose, because that final decision was just so fraught! Anyway, the other night I finally mustered to stick my head into r/fallenlondon to ask whether someone there might be able to share those other endings, and somebody did, and we ended up having a really lovely discussion about them, during which I wrote up some of my core thoughts about the endgame in Irem.

Copying it all here so it’s saved somewhere I’ll actually be able to find it again:

( [BIG MCLARGEHUGE SPOILERS for Evolution, DO NOT click this if you will ever play this game] And maybe the decision you make _does_ shake the foundations of the world, but you make it for petty, human reasons, out of love. )

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lauradi7dw

January 2026

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Page Summary

duckprintspress - Patreon Panel This Sunday: On Being a Neurodiverse Creator
mount_oregano - Short Story Contest at Parsec
alightbuthappypen - 2026 doesn't start until I go back to work
tinny - Fannish December
js_thrill - This Year 365 songs: January 6th
philomytha - Major Sterne would never
james_davis_nicoll - On the matter of new characters
prettygoodword - mana
michifugu - (no subject)
james_davis_nicoll - Cool
james_davis_nicoll - Secrets Of The Silent Witch, volume 1 by Matsuri Isora (Translated by Alice Prowse)
duckprintspress - WWW Wednesday
rydra_wong - PSA to US people
dancing_serpent in c_ent - Announcement - Taking a Step Back
princessofgeeks - Heated Rivalry recs
hagar_972 in purimgifts - Updated list of Podfic Fandoms!
calimac - Grant
hagar_972 in purimgifts - 72 hours left - sign up to Purimgifts now!
tinny - Things learned in December
passingbuzzards - (games) fallen london - evolution

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If you’re already a Patron, I hope you’ll join us! And if you’re not, become one today at the $7/month level or higher and get access to this panel, recordings of our past panels, and lots of other awesome benefits!

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Rewatches/Watchalongs

Admin Post: Announcement - Taking a Step Back

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