pj1228

If you'd like to answer the fkficfest '26 pre-game poll and have not yet, you have one more day.

Presently, we have 13 responses, 7 intending to write this year. I'm leaning toward the "Each community member may submit 1 prompt, and those prompts become the pool" option, which has 6 supporters; it's a new angle in our search for the perfect community prompt-game method, which I feel we haven't yet found; also, I hope it's a low-effort method. (I still have fondness for the single-prompt FKFic-L challenge approach, but it's not suited to today.) Unsurprisingly, the farthest-out date option offered appears to have the most support; I'll dig into that more when the poll closes.

If you have suggestions, questions, or strong opinions, please let me know, there or here. Thanks!

I did spend my Presidents Day holiday finishing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (~475 hours, says my Switch 2 app). There was no story left to be mined anywhere -- though of course there are still Koroks, Kilton Medals, treasure chests -- so I made a story production of the endgame for my Link. ( Read more... )

It's without doubt a game I feel I wish could go on and on, though it's also right and proper for a story to have an end and thereby a shape and a point, and I wouldn't want that any other way. I think BOTW really is as good as everyone says.

Yet I chose to make my next game Skyward Sword, the first in the story timeline, instead of BOTW's sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. The story should get to breathe in my imagination, I feel. I have a couple of fanfics I would like to try to write.

I watch Masterpiece on PBS Passport streaming these days, not over the airwaves, but I still watch on Sunday nights, wrapping up the weekend as I have since at least Downton Abbey. Last night, I watched the finale of season 6 of All Creatures Great and Small (set at the first Christmas after WWII), which was a solid and satisfying, if busy, episode, and also the premiere of season 15 of Call the Midwife (set in 1971), which was also busy, but neither solid nor satisfying.

(On broadcast, Call the Midwife won't premiere until March 22 in North America. Come, support PBS and watch a month early!)

I love historical fiction, but I do need it to get the history mostly right. We all make mistakes sometimes! It's so easy to fall for an urban legend historical fallacy! But. This show has an entire staff, any of whom could have used even just Wikipedia at any point to spot-check this particular item and learn that it's not only false, but a deliberate slander/sarcasm against what the episode was trying ineptly to celebrate and ended up trivializing. Not every historical fiction show can be The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for citations, but I remember when Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman would sometimes end on a screen with a simple text paragraph about the real history of whatever the episode was depicting. Movies depicting real historical people do that regularly. And some novels. Maybe all historical fiction should try that, just to prompt someone to double-check.

Call the Midwife was so exceedingly excellent in its earliest days, when it was still directly based on the memoirs of the real Jennifer Worth. The farther it gets from that -- now in season 15! -- the more often it trips. ( Spoilers for what this episode messed up )