potofsoup

This year's Hugo nominees were announced early this week. In an unexpected development, I've read four of the Best Novel candidates (having finished the fourth the night before the announcement) and three (!) of the Best Novella candidates, which is more unusual, given how few novellas I read. I'm delighted that renay got nominated for Intergalactic Mixtape for Best Fanzine (all the more impressive for how new it still is!), as well as for The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for Best Related Work. ^_^

But the thing that hit me hardest is that A Girl and Her Fed is up for Best Graphic Story or Comic, having wrapped up its third (and for now, final) act last year. (On Bluesky, K.B. Spangler notes "The work *as a whole* is eligible as it concluded in 2025, but since that is 2000+ strips, we are including the 50+ strips from 2025 in the packet, with a cover page with links to Parts 1 and 2 for reader convenience." She and Ale Presser (who took over the actual art from Spangler a while back) will be attaching this cover to their Hugos submissions packet.

I love AGAHF (and especially the connected Rachel Peng novels, as I've said many times) so much, so this is a real joy.

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Reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud (the aforementioned Hugo nominee that I finished the night before the announcement), and while I enjoyed the back half of it more than the beginning, it still never really got emotional hooks into me, which is required for me to particularly bond with any story. Fascinating worldbuilding, though, and a grimly plausible look at a future society where humanity lives to serve capitalism.

I've also finished reading the Hikaru no Go manga! According to Goodreads, I'd read as far as vol. 19 before (a loooooong time ago). (It's now been long enough since scruloose and I watched the c-drama that I mostly only remember my feelings about it, so I have no real sense of how faithful its plot wound up being by the end.)

Currently reading The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan.

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Watching: As I mentioned last weekend, I asked scruloose if they'd be up for giving Justice in the Dark a shot, if only to give me the excuse to rewatch the first eight episodes before finally moving on to the ones that eventually got released in Japan after not being cleared to air in China. They agreed, and we're now four or five episodes in!

I haven't read any of the new release of Mo Du/Silent Reading yet (partly because I don't read nearly as much as I'd like, but also because I'm getting this series in hard copy, which makes it take even longer for me to get around to reading something >.<), so my memory of the novel from reading the fan translation several years ago is fairly fuzzy, but (as expected) I really, really like the main actors.

The tacked-on sci-fi framing is both bizarre and aggressively pushed, and since Mo Du, unlike Guardian, is a modern setting with no fantasy elements that needed to be given a sci-fit polish to make it passable, I can only assume its main purpose is to put extra distance between the genuinely horrific crimes and reality. (At the very least, I don't remember reading about any other explanation/theory, but it's been ages since I saw much talk about the drama that wasn't largely focused on the relationships/character dynamics--which is not a complaint, since that's totally what I'm here for.)

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Working: This weekend I'm starting my adaptation of the penultimate volume of Yona of the Dawn. I read the translation a couple days ago and am having a lot (A LOT) of feelings. Send strength.