ehyde

Despite an assortment of kids and adults sick with a bad cold, I managed to make four pies for pi day: pumpkin chiffon (this has meringue mixed in with the pumpkin mixture to make it fluffier, it's the only pumpkin pie I ever make), cherry (we had frozen cherry pie filling already, so this one was easy), chocolate (it's just pudding in a graham cracker crust), and for the first time, lemon meringue. The lemon meringue turned out pretty good except that the meringue topping shrank and pulled away from the crust, so it ended up like a fluffy island on a yellow lake. Still tasted good!

We've now watched up to episode 36 of Guardian. The ancient past episodes were very fun! I'm a little worried about watching the final few episodes because I know it's not going to end well. I'm in theory still reading Record of the Missing Sect Master but tbh I'm considering dropping it. It's very slow moving and feels like at least half (this is an exaggeration) the content is other characters reacting to the couple-ness of the main couple, which. I guess is a trope that some people like (a lot of people like, judging by some of the fanfic out there) but it is not my thing at all. Also it's doing this thing where it feels like at this point, both the mains are on the same page re. a lot of the hidden information, but the author's still holding it back from the reader just ...because? I think if you want to a dramatic reveal later on some things need to be a mystery to the characters who care about it, too. Anyway. A lot of the mysteries and secret identities and such, which should be right up my alley, feel more artificial here than they have in other books. So I should probably just drop it and read something I'll enjoy, instead.

I did manage to work on some projects, too! I modeled/printed some attachments to help build a sewing frame, as well as an adjustable hole-punching template! I even worked on some actual books too. And I got my assignment for this year's cnovel bookbinding exchange, which. I am going to have so much fun with this.

The kids had a week of school vacation which would've been fun except that Eldest was sick with a nasty stomach bug for the first half. Fortunately she was better by Friday so we still took our planned trip to the science museum -- didn't see a lot of new exhibits but the kids had fun with their favorites and the electricity show was fun as always.

On Wednesday, when eldest was still under the weather, we had a movie day and watched Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind which is the kids' first Miyazaki movie! (they haven't actually watched a ton of movies in general). I picked that out for them because Middle has been VERY enthusiastic about "cute bugs" lately (mainly bees and caterpillars, but also the alien bug monsters from Factorio) and I thought he would enjoy the ohmu and seeing a story about a princess who loved bugs (I was right). Afterwards I found an articulated 3d print model of a ohmu and printed one for everyone.

Speaking of cute bugs, our caterpillar (which hitchhiked inside on Eldest's jacket, and which of course we could not put back outside into the snow) is a cocoon now! In theory it will become a moth.

And speaking of snow, we're supposed to get another ~18 inches tomorrow night. So the kids will almost certainly not be going back to school on Monday after all. This has been far too much snow.

I'm still watching Guardian with my husband; we're up to episode 23 now and still enjoying it a lot, although imo the parts set in Dixing have been some of the weakest. Husband has occasionally been asking me "so did this happen in the book?" and I'm usually like "no, not really" or sometimes "that character doesn't even exist in the book" but here I got to be like "actually, something almost like this scene did happen in the book, and you'll never guess why!" (he guessed). 

I watched the first episode of How Dare You and I really want to keep going, but that will probably have to wait till the kids are back in school. I hear it (...unlike Guardian) is very faithful to the novel, and there are some scenes & characters I'm really looking forward to seeing on screen. It's billed as a comedy and starts out as a comedy but uh. That is a clever ruse, to lure you to your doom (the author did this with You Yao, too). 

I haven't been reading much, except I read ahead in The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart which was fun. I probably would've reread that book so many times had it existed when I was in middle school. And now I'm better prepped for a dramatic read-aloud. I will probably get back to Record of the Missing Sect Master next. 

February is Renegade Bindery's "encourage everyone to make a lot of books and learn new things" month and while I'm not going as all-out as some people, and haven't managed to watch any of the presentations yet, I am doing a bit more bookbinding work than I have in the past few months!

The main project I'm working on is for Fandom Trumps Hate from last year, and I will admit I procrastinated on it because I was honestly intimidated with how much my recipient donated. But I'm now at a point where I think I can safely say I'll finish in the next day or two!

I also finished up my own copy of <i>How Dare You?!</i> being prompted by the drama's release (I bound it for last year's Cnovel bookbinding exchange, and my own copy has been sitting half finished since the summer). I've typeset two small books since the start of the month--first, the script for the <i>War of the Worlds</i> audiodrama, and second, a short Guardian fic that I read and immediately went "this needs to be a tiny book!"  I have been neglecting working on my dad's late Christmas present, which honestly also doesn't need a lot more work, but what it does need is maps and I'm putting that off (it's a binding of my great great grandfather's civil war diary). Another project I'll probably finish up soon is Mo Du, which someone else typeset for last year's exchange, so I've printed and sewn their typeset but haven't made the covers yet. There are a lot of good typesets from past cnovel exchanges, some other I want to bind are Guardian, Lord Seventh, Kaleidoscope of Death, and Purely By Accident. 

(...yes. Bookbinding is very much an "eyes bigger than stomach" hobby. I have a few fanfics typeset and ready to print/bind, too). 

Recently read and would recommend: <i>I, Your Emperor, Have Been Wronged!</i> and I will put the same promo I wrote up on tumblr under the cut

( Read more... )

I didn't keep good track of what I read in 2025, so I might be missing some things here.

• 23 books, about a 50/50 split between cnovels and non-cnovels
• Enjoyed most of them! Looking over my list, there were two that I finished but should have dropped: Evil Weapon's Self-Cultivation (Cyan Wings' so-far only miss for me, it was way too much 'watch this guy be awesome at the expense of everyone else') and Daughter of the Moon Goddess (I think I was not the right audience for this book).
• The winners of the cnovel bracket: Guardian and How Dare You, they're completely different but both of them grabbed me and didn't want to let me go. 
• Winners of the non-cnovels: Spiderlight (Adrian Tchaikovsky) and HMS Surprise (Patrick O'Brian) series. I did not start the Aubrey/Maturin series this year and still don't intend to read them all at once but I'm definitely going to continue, and I'm going to read more by Adrian Tchaikovsky as well. 

I don't really feel a need to read any more than I've been reading, but looking ahead to 2026, I do want to keep better track of my reading. I picked out a notebook for this purpose and have jotted down a few reactions to what I'm reading now (Record of the Missing Sect Master).


As for books I bound in 2025, my favorites are the couple of bamboo-strip-spine sets I made: The Imperial Uncle and Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know. The first was done as an experiment and I liked the result enough to do it again!

Binderary is February's bookbinding-intensive month, run by Renegade Bindery on discord. There are workshops and some people attempt to bind a frankly unhinged number of books.

I bound six during the month, which is a pretty nice increase over my usual pacing! All but one were nonstandard bindings, with less total amount of work, but they were experimental techniques so I think it evens out!


Speaking of bookbinding, I'm also offering a bound fanfic for the Fandom Trumps Hate crafts bazaar! The bidding has gotten intimidatingly high (this is a good thing! but I'm gonna be under so much pressure) but it's open till the 10th!

1. I finished a couple of bookbinding projects! "The Other Mountain" by nirejseki, which was a commission (but a fic I loved regardless), and then I used some of the leftover materials from that and from an older project to make a tiny binding of my own fic "The Disappearance of Madam Wen." (links go to my tumblr for pics of the bindings, and the tumblr posts link to the fics)


2. I've been reading The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and I'm about halfway through! It's the first Jin Yong novel I've read and part of why I picked this over Condor Heroes was everything I'd heard about the baffling name translation choices there. The Smiling, Proud Wanderer is a fan translation so I thought that might be safer but, guess what... It's not super prevalent, and at first it seemed to be based on whether it was important to know the meaning of a name--like, I get that it's important to know that some guy's out there calling himself Invincible! Could've gone in a footnote, but I get it. I do not get why they've translated the name Blue Phoenix.

The other reason I picked up this novel was some comments a while back in cnovels about how WWX had reminded some people of Linghu Chong, and I can see where that's coming from! Not identical characters, but there is a resemblance to be sure (and didn't Xiao Zhan play him in a video game ad once? I should track that down).
 

3. Of course I've decided to pick up a knitting project after it got cold, rather than ahead of time. But I can probably finish before spring! I'm making a balaclava/ski mask to wear while biking, and since I need to wear it under a bike helmet that ruled out any quick knits with chunky yarn. I opted for this pattern but I'm planning to swap out the colorwork for something different--yes I know the intended use case makes the colorwork hardly relevant but I'll be bored if there's nothing going on at all.


4. More bookbinding plans -- I think for most of my projects going forward, at least the ones where I do the typesetting myself, I want to work on binding novel translations rather than fanfic. I'm in the middle of binding Evil As Humans as a series of 80s-style paperbacks, which were begun as part of an exchange but I was only able to get some of the volumes finished for that and I'm still finishing them up. I've also got most of the design done for a Tai Sui binding (inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement, for Reasons), but I'm not sure if I'll dive into that project next or if I'll do something shorter first.


5. Halloween was fun! The kids dressed up as Team Rocket, with the older two as Jessie and James and the youngest as Meowth. Easier costumes than some years, Jessie and James didn't need anything sewn from scratch except for Jessie's skirt. I used Simplicity 9842 for Meowth and compared to animal costumes I've made in the past, this one seems like it was actually designed with the materials in mind -- elastic casings made with applied bias tape instead of directly from the same fake fur as the rest of the costume, for example. In the process of Halloween sewing, I fixed a couple of minor annoyances with my sewing machine, and then mended some pants (frayed/holes in the inner thighs) too. It's nice to be able to say no, I don't need to buy new pants, I can still wear these! (I hate shopping for pants in particular).
 

It's been a while since I posted any bookbinding photos here! I keep feeling like I'm not getting as many projects done as I'd like, but looking back, I've made a pretty decent number this past year. I'm not going to post full writeups or full photosets here, but brief descriptions + one photo each under the cut, and links to their tumblr posts if you'd like to read more details.



For my birthday I got a folding light tent for taking book photos -- I used it on the most recent book. It's a little smaller than I expected so I may eventually take the LED ring from it and build into a larger box. For now, with a little photoshop around the edges it's fine.

Because of a bookbinding project, I read Vorkosigan saga fanfic for the first time (I liked the books but never sought out the fandom) and then roped myself into a partial series reread. I'm having fun but boy does Barrayar hit differently after experiencing both pregnancy and pregnancy loss.

Relatedly I have learned to warp text and I figured out probably not the most efficient way of outlining a block of text (rather than outlining individual letters), but a way of doing it, at least. I had to get the free trial of Affinity Designer 2 to do warped text, but I'm going to see if Inkscape can do it. I don't do enough vector drawing to need a program I have to pay for (and I don't see myself making that many Baen Books style title pages, either).

I'm slowly working my way through Qi Ye by Priest, although I'm not super far along yet. Pretty much all I knew for a long time was "it has some of the same characters as TYK" or possibly even "it's a prequel to TYK" and "people who only watched WOH don't know about Literal Toddler Murderer Zhou Zishu" and well, I bounced off of Word of Honor, and child death is one of my major nopes, so I had this filed away as not interested for a while. But then I learned a bit more about the actual plot of this novel, and saw it recced with a "if you want political intrigue" note (I did; I'd just finished A Memory Called Empire and thoroughly enjoyed it after bouncing off some Hunt For Red October fic that smoothed out the politics too much) and so, after asking for some clarification about the child death thing, I picked it up.

The premise is it's a time travel fix-it, but with a twist: the main character, Jing Beiyuan, experienced not just one life that went badly, but the following five reincarnations as well, reincarnating alongside the same person each time. Instead of jumping at the chance to make things right between them (as you'd expect in a time travel fix it fic) he's...well he's not quite at "man, fuck this guy" but more "I don't have any feelings for you whatsoever." However, he still needs to make sure he ends up on the throne, that's just good sense...and meanwhile there's this new guy who wasn't there in his first life.

Things I like so far: the twist on the genre. The fact that Jing Beiyuan doesn't even try to act like a realistic child. And I just like him a lot in general.
Things I like less: it feels a bit slow paced so far, and I think that's contributing to my own slow pace reading. I'm also kinda sideeyeing Priest's fantasy foreign culture because this is three for three of her books I've read where she's had a culture with a "noble savage" feel to it and while the characters themselves are fine the vibes are. Yeah.

I ended up giving up on Lie Huo Jiao Chou (Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire, by priest). I think a lot of it had to do with the translation quality but ehh... not all of it. It just felt--disjointed? Stuff kept happening, but not the stuff that I cared about, nor the stuff that felt important? Something just wasn't clicking. And to be completely honest the main couple was not doing it for me. Well. Actually their backstory was *excellent* but then--anyway it was frustrating, I wanted to care about the characters and the book a lot more than I actually did. If the other translation (that stopped around ch70) ever picks it up again (or if it turns out they stopped because they're working on the official, or something) then I miiight pick it up again but until then, probably not. It's annoying because this is the second priest novel I read and Tai Sui was so good and I think I just kept--expecting there to be more here than there was. Anyway, I was going to read SPL next, but I decided to take a break and read some other stuff first.

I figured out how to, uh, copy library ebooks, so now there's no due date guilt hanging over me! I browsed their currently available sff and read "Light from Uncommon Stars" by Ryka Aoki, which was engaging and enjoyable, although it felt like it was trying very hard to be Popular on Tumblr in that like, hopepunk way, which could get a little too much at times. The story centers around Katrina, a young violinist who has run away from her transphobic family, and the teacher who takes her in--who has made a deal with hell to offer up the souls of seven students in exchange for her own freedom, and Katrina is the seventh. There are also aliens.

After that I picked back up a different cnovel that I had put down for a while, Mr Melancholy Wants to Live a Peaceful Life, which is a double secret identity story where one half of the married couple is secretly a transmigrator who has defeated thousands of worlds, stolen power from the System, and just wants to have a quiet retirement, and the other half of the couple works for a secret organization that keeps transmigrators from wreaking havoc on their world. There were a lot of things I liked here, and several things I didn't like. Mostly, the one-sided reveal--where one knew the other's identity, but the other didn't know his--lasted way too long. And I honestly wasn't really enjoying the main couple's dynamics, although that greatly improved once they both knew each others' identities (I really really don't like jealousy plots, and there was some of that there). But I did really enjoy the plot (the System, transmigrators, saving not just one but several worlds). There were no female characters. Zero. None at all. Which was strange because I think Cyan Wings can write female characters just fine? idk, it was weird. The first two extras were also weird and fatphobic and added nothing. I realize I'm not doing very much to sell this book but I do want to say that the parts I liked, I liked a lot.

Anyway, now I have promised my sister I will read at least one Dorothy Sayers.