All the way back in 2022, I posted about a candy company I had recently discovered called Misaky Tokyo. They specialized in kohakutou, a traditional Japanese candy that looks like gems and geodes. Basically fancy rock candy. And I was enamored with them. I loved the lux branding, the idea of beautiful treats meant for special occasions that were more than just candy. Not only did the candy feel special, but the brand felt special since it was a minority, LGBTQIA+, woman-owned business that was constantly making a difference by donating to charities such as the LA LGBTQ Center and the AAPI community.
Misaky Tokyo was classy, cool, fun, and authentic. And they were generous! They gifted me two of their delicious boxes after my first review of them. I ended up buying more boxes from them shortly after, but that gesture of kindness really stuck with me.
I was sad when they took a break for a while, but I always hoped they’d come back after a well deserved rest. In an unexpected turn of events, Misaky Tokyo is closing the door on this chapter, after the owner’s battle with cancer.
As said in the video, they had a final sale to close out Misaky Tokyo for good. Of course, I had to get in on this, and bought their Complete Farewell Set, which came with one 5-gem box and two 3-gem boxes, so eleven gems total. I am so glad I get to experience them one last time, as they sold out of these very quickly, and I have never found kohakutou that is as stunning and delicious as Misaky’s.
So let’s take one last look at Misaky Tokyo’s lovely candy together, and wish them well in their new chapter.
The two 3-piece boxes had the exact same gems in it, so I ended up gifting one to my cousin and she thought it was so cute!
The 5-piece set ended up having those same pieces in it, plus two other flavors:
So, not a ton of diversity in this set, but it makes sense since it was their last run and they were probably just trying to focus their efforts on giving people their last hurrah and not focusing on broadening their flavor horizons. Regardless, I’m so glad I got to enjoy Misaky Tokyo and even share them one last time! I truly wish them the best moving forward and will really miss their lovely kohakutou.
Did you ever get the chance to try them? Do you have any other kohakutou businesses you recommend? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Math can sometimes get in the way of a good story, but author James L. Cambias didn’t let pesky physics stop him from majorly transforming Venus. Blast off in his Big Idea to see how he managed to make Venus habitable, albeit not for humans, in his new novel, The Ishtar Deception.
JAMES L. CAMBIAS:
For this guest post, I thought I’d walk readers through the mental process of one of my own Big Ideas from my new book. The Ishtar Deception is the latest in my “Billion Worlds” series of books and stories set at the end of the Tenth Millennium. In that era, the Solar System is a vast “Dyson Swarm” of space habitats and solar collectors, soaking up most of the energy emitted by the Sun. On the scale devised by the Russian SETI researcher Nikolai Kardashev, the civilization of the Billion Worlds is a Type II. About a quadrillion biological beings live in the Solar System, and a larger number of intelligent machines.
It’s a big setting, and it means I can tell a wide variety of stories. The first Billion Worlds book, The Godel Operation, was a picaresque adventure bouncing around from the ring around Uranus to a space habitat near Jupiter and finally to Mars. The Scarab Mission was a kind of “haunted house in space” set aboard a space habitat depopulated by some mysterious disaster. The third, The Miranda Conspiracy, was a political thriller inside the Uranian moon Miranda.
For The Ishtar Deception I decided to take readers into the inner Solar System. I’ve made references in past works to the fact that Mercury doesn’t exist any more in the year 10,000, so I couldn’t send my characters there. Instead, I decided on Venus. My super-spy character Sabbath Okada would be assigned to a mission on Venus, and that in turn gave me my title, since Ishtar is a prominent surface feature on that world.
I had made vague references to Venus being terraformed in the distant future, but when I finally looked at the effort involved I realized there’d be no way to get the job done in a mere eight thousand years. Transforming Venus would take too long.
And that made me wonder why anybody would bother to do it at all. If you live in, say, the year 6000, and have some unimaginable amount of energy (by our primitive standards) to play with, what’s the most useful thing you can do? If you apply it to trying to make Venus into a habitable world like Earth you’ll use all of it up to make some tiny incremental change.
To reduce Venus’s atmosphere to something bearable you would have to physically remove something like fifty billion megatons of carbon dioxide from Venus. If you could somehow lift a hundred tons a second (never mind where you’re putting it) that would take fifteen thousand years of constant effort. Meanwhile you’re going to need to move a hundred times as much hydrogen to Venus if you want to support a biosphere. And let’s not even talk about the nine-month rotation. I have no idea how to fix that.
Or you can use the same amount of effort to build a few million more cozy space habitats to add to the Billion Worlds circling the Sun. Much more efficient. It’s a no-brainer, really.
But . . . that would leave my novel with Venus as it really is. An incredibly massive atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with a surface pressure equivalent to the ocean bottom a kilometer down on Earth, a temperature of 470 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead and tin), winds blowing 300 kilometers per hour, and oh by the way there’s a significant amount of sulfuric acid in that dense atmosphere. Humans would only survive such conditions in massive submarine-like vehicles and structures, and even machines would have trouble with heat and corrosion.
Sure, you can maybe live in balloons floating in Venus’s upper atmosphere, where the temperature and pressure are not too different from what it’s like on Earth, so all you need to do is make some oxygen to breathe. But, again, it’s hard to see how a balloon city on Venus would be better than a space habitat. And all the while, there’s a whole planet’s worth of matter — metals, silicon, sulfur, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, and other treasures — just out of reach down there under that hellish atmosphere.
You can’t “bio-terraform” it, as Carl Sagan once suggested, by introducing blue-green algae and letting the plants do for Venus what they did for Earth. There’s just too damned much atmosphere! If your plants were perfectly efficient and broke down all of Venus’s carbon dioxide to oxygen, well then you’ve got a planet with an atmosphere of nearly pure oxygen at about 60 times Earth’s surface pressure. As one of the characters in my book notes, it’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t burn under those conditions.
So I decided that my future civilization would just take a simpler, cheaper, faster approach. Forget about turning Venus into a world with oceans and forests, let’s just make it something that isn’t instantly lethal to both biological and electronic intelligences.
The result: “cryoforming.” All you do is build a big sunshade and park it at the L1 point between Venus and the Sun, blocking all the sunlight from reaching the planet entirely. The sunshade will, naturally, harvest all that energy so whatever else you’re doing on or around Venus will have plenty of power. And then you wait a few centuries for Venus to radiate away all the heat contained in that massive atmosphere and the upper part of the crust.
First the sulfuric acid rains out, puddling on the ground and collecting in little lakes. As Venus gets cooler the acid becomes a waxy solid. Then the carbon dioxide starts to crystallize, falling as dry ice snow. At first it melts on hitting the warm ground, of course, but eventually it sticks, and then accumulates. Without an energy differential the winds calm down, from hundreds of kilometers per hour to something more like what we see on Earth.
And overhead, an observer on the surface can see something that hasn’t happened on Venus in billions of years: the stars come out.
I figure my future civilization would stabilize the temperature a few degrees below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. Say, 50 or 60 degrees Celsius below zero. That gives you a planet with an atmosphere of pretty much pure nitrogen (with a few trace noble gases), and a surface pressure of roughly four times Earth sea level pressure.
Nice? It depends on what you are. If you’re a human, or some other biological being, you still need breathing gear and heated clothing to go outside. You probably want to live at a lower pressure so all your cities will be built of diamond blocks and graphene like high-tech sea bases, and it’s still dark all the time.
But if you’re a machine intelligence the new Venus has gone from hellish to something close to paradise! The air is dry and has no corrosive oxygen in it, yet it’s still dense and can provide superb cooling for your various energy-using systems. You and tens of billions of other machines can get to work digging up that crust with no pesky biosphere to worry about.
So my far-future Venus becomes one of the resource treasure-houses of the Solar System. And as any cursory glance at history will reveal, that’s going to create plenty of opportunities for conflict. The Great Powers of the Tenth Millennium — the Lunar Republic, the Trojan Empire, and my main character’s bosses in Deimos — will fight each other for a piece of the Venusian pie.
I don’t really have space to go into some of the other details — like the giant wheels in orbit that serve as space elevators, or the culture and sports and politics of Ishtar. And I’m certainly not going to spill any secrets about the plot. To get clearance for that you have to buy the book.
Just a warning: in a novel called The Ishtar Deception, it’s a good idea not to trust anyone.
The Ishtar Deception: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website
I am not currently in California anymore, but I felt rather inclined to share this photo I took from the second story of the oh-so-lovely hotel my grandma, mom, and I were in. Our first two nights in Cali were spent in the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, and the second two nights were at a much more modest location in Chula Vista.
I have much to say about my splendid time in California, but I cannot even begin to tell y’all how behind I am on content. Remember how it took me roughly two months to get around to covering my Denver trip? Well, I’ve done a lot of stuff since then, and boy oh boy do I have quite the backlog right now. I’m honestly not sure if I should even bother going in chronological order anymore, though it might irk me too much not to.
Please hang in there while I slowly work my way through all my exciting endeavors and even some more miscellaneous things, and enjoy the view in the meantime.
-AMS
I have gotten out of the habit of commenting on the news of the day here, mostly because, as I have said before, when it comes to the current governance of our country, there’s only so many times I can yell “it’s because they’re fascists, what did you expect” before I bore even myself, and also, frankly, the time I have to babysit comment threads these days is minimal. I’m not entirely sure how I managed it back in the day because it feels like I barely have time to keep up with my actual paid duties at the moment, and I keep piling additional responsibilities onto my plate.
Nevertheless, I think I want to get back to it a bit here, partly because it’s not like I don’t have thoughts on various news stories as they happen, and partly because it’s good for keeping up regular posting here. So I think at least a couple times a week I’m going to post a “Various & Sundry” post, catching up with my thoughts on events when those thoughts are longer than a post on Threads or Bluesky would allow, but not long enough for their own full-fledged post. They will usually cover three to five items, including but not necessarily limited to current events. Sometimes I’ll also plop in something I think is amusing or has otherwise caught my eye.
In the past for things like this I would try to avoid dropping in stuff I’d already commented on elsewhere, but this time around I think I’m going to be a little more lax about that, one, because I know that not everyone who visits here follows me on Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon, so that material will be new to those folks in any event, and two, because often even if I’ve commented about the story elsewhere, what I’ve done there is mostly have been quippy, and here I might have something else to say about it.
Also, three, I’m lazy, and four, inasmuch as this site acts as my own institutional memory, if I post something about it here it constitutes an official record. I mean, all the posts I ever placed on the former Twitter are now entirely lost to time, since I have gone in and purged my entire timeline there. This site, however, endures. So there it is. Welcome historians and biographers of the future! This is me, in typed form!
For these posts and as (nearly) always, I will be leaving the comments open but please do me the favor of remembering the comment policy here. Please be polite to others, especially when you disagree, and avoid making me come in and Malleting your post. There is a special subclass of commenter here who especially likes to take any point and use it as a jumping off point for some other thing they want to jam into the discussion and/or likes to use particularly elevated terms or positions just to get a reaction. I am not about that these days, folks, even if I generally agree with your positions. I’m tired, y’all, and the Mallet will have a hair trigger. Please comment accordingly. Thank you in advance for not being a pain in my ass.
With that as preamble, here are today’s various & sundry topics:
60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley fired from CBS News: This was not exactly unexpected, since in a staff meeting with his new boss Nick Bilton he expressed, shall we say, unvarnished opinions about Bilton and CBS News head Bari Weiss, and apparently declined to apologize to either them after the fact. One does not do that, especially to status-anxious posers like Bilton and Weiss, without expecting repercussions. Weiss and Bilton may in fact be incompetent (that’s obvious in the case of Weiss, and a reasonable supposition about Bilton, who has almost no relevant experience for the job he now holds), but they are still the bosses. Pelley knew he was setting his career at CBS one fire the moment he opened his mouth.
Also, he’s not wrong. His departure email came with receipts about how and when he and 60 Minutes were pressured or outright made to compromise their journalistic integrity since Weiss has been in charge, and a follow-up statement flat out called Weiss a liar regarding the manner in which his firing was handled. Weiss and Bilton have to know that in this sort of “they said. he said” situation, Pelley has integrity on his side, and they do… not. It’s also clear that whatever 60 Minutes might be after this, it will probably not be what it was, and it will probably be worse. And that, indeed, that has been the plan from the start.
“AI” use starts getting really expensive: Turns out there really is no such thing as a free lunch, as the various “AI” providers are changing how their services are metered, from “per request” to how many tokens one burns through with those requests. Tokens aren’t cheap! Users are burning through their monthly allotment of them in a day, apparently largely because coders and others were using them for somewhat frivolously. One particularly salacious (but possibly sensationalized) story had an anonymous company burning through half a billion dollars of “AI” use in a single month. I’d want to see some actual reporting on that, including the company’s name, before I lend that report full credence, but out in the real world, prices are still going up, enough so that using “AI” is now more expensive than paying the humans companies are laying off to pay for the “AI.”
And if you’re wondering why, if that’s so, companies are still apparently so avid to replace humans with “AI,” well, one answer is the corporate class of tech just fuckin’ hates workers, and would rather give their money to each other in tech circle-jerk than to actual humans who might foolishly spend that money on things like, you know, food and rent and children. Another reason is that the other corporate folks who don’t actively hate their workers were sold a bill of goods, where they were made to believe an ineffective tool could streamline their costs (mostly by firing workers), only to find out after those human workers were let go that the actual costs of that ineffective tool were hidden from them. Now they’re stuck.
No, I don’t particularly have a warm, fuzzy feeling for tech execs at the moment.
Which brings us to our third thing today, from humorist Eleanor Morton. Find the lie.
— JS
by J.D. Henning
Look at your keyboard. If you’re on a phone, pull it up for a sec. You’re probably looking at a QWERTY layout. Even with the unlimited theoretical possibilities of a touchscreen, this is what the vast majority of English users see.
But it’s crap. And we’ve known it’s crap for more than a century.
This all became painfully personal to me in the winter of 2021 when my hands went on strike. As a film editor and screenwriter, my life revolves around my computer. Samurai had their swords, and I have my keyboard. But my hands burned like fire, and my most trusted tool turned out to be the culprit. Repetitive stress injuries are no fun at all. And the horrible part is that a QWERTY keyboard is essentially made to encourage RSIs.
How We Got Here
At their advent in the 1870s, keyboards were ingeniously designed boxes of buttons and levers with actual physical bits of metal slamming against actual physical paper, imprinting ink every time a writer (for the sake of this example, you) hit a key. Problem was, if you really got on a roll—your Dracula/Moby-Dick mashup started to get really juicy—you might jam the typewriter. One lever would interrupt another, and Dracula could not look deeply into the White Whale’s eyes until your machine was serviced.
Unacceptable.
The industrious designers at Remington & Sons—yes, the rootin’ tootin’ gunmakers—rearranged the keyboard to lessen the likelihood of a jam. This also slowed down your typing speed. So, they intentionally put letters in spots bad for you and good for the machine, because slowly sucking the blood of a whale is better than not sucking it at all. Mr. Remington’s keyboard layout quickly became the standard. And, because we, as humans, don’t like to learn new things, the QWERTY layout stayed in use even when all the mechanical reasons for the QWERTY format disappeared. Hence, your iPhone defaults to it even now, despite making no ergonomic sense at all. We have, by the way, known of its fatiguing nature since the 1910s.
I needed something else for my writing. Something that was made to give priority to the human doing the typing rather than the factory making the tool. Something that wouldn’t make my hands feel like burning charcoal briquettes. Enter stenography.
Stenotype Fights Back
The stenotype machine came about not long after the typewriter, and was, itself, an evolution of shorthand. Heard of Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, or George Bernard Shaw? They all used shorthand. The invention of a machine further standardized the shorthand system, and the advent of electronic stenotype simplified the process even further. Hobbyists have since come along and created free programs to allow anyone to stenotype on their computers.
So, why doesn’t everyone use it?
Remember how I threw shade at the whole human race for not wanting to learn new things? Several paragraphs later, that’s still true. And it goes in spades for stenography.
How Stenography Works
Stenotype is fundamentally different from a typical keyboard. At its root, it’s phonetic. The 23 keys roughly correspond to the sounds in our English language. A word like ‘though’ only needs the phonetic sounds TH and the long O sound. Thus, “though” becomes “THOE.” Add in that these letters are all pressed at the same time and are ergonomically clustered together, and suddenly, my hands have stopped talking about unionizing.
Of course, the complexity of stenotype rises quickly, as there are plenty of homophones and other weird quirks of the English language. This is where another critical element of machine stenography comes in. It’s basically an enormous list of shortcuts, called outlines. The phonetic base exists for many words, but for all the many, many exceptions to these rules, you have outlines.
Outlines work for phrases as well as words. If, for example, there is a phrase that comes up all the time in your current project, such as “Alucrad gazed at the white whale, trembling with delight,” you could add an outline for the whole thing. Maybe A*GD. If your hands are as finicky as mine, the ergonomic benefits pile up quite quickly: You’re hitting four rather than 56 keys, and the ones you are pressing don’t require your hands to contort to press them. It’s also much faster, both for this phrase and as a whole.
How fast? It varies based on experience, but to qualify as a stenotype court reporter, you need to get to 225 words per minute. And just think: Court reporters do this all day, every day. If ever there was a job serious about ergonomics, it would be this one.
Is Stenography for You?
The process of learning steno is probably closest to learning to play a musical instrument. This is another way of saying that it is difficult, though how difficult will depend on the person. Is it worth it for the average writer? Probably not, especially if a good old QWERTY keyboard is working fine for you. Learning to stenotype would be like deciding to learn the guitar if you want to master music composition. Will it be helpful? Probably. Is it strictly necessary? No.
It can, though, be a lifesaver for someone with RSI or other hand mobility issues.
The basics of learning stenography are the same as most skills: practice, persistence, and patience. I followed a free guide (available here) and worked my way through it over two years. That’s a long time, but my wife and I also had two children during that time. Unless you plan on popping out progeny at the same rate, your timeframe will likely differ from mine.
I can now steno quickly enough for day-to-day work (I’m stenotyping right now). For my next big writing project, I plan to mostly stenotype. I’m still slower at this than QWERTY, but I want to write for a lifetime. And an ergonomic, sustainable writing method is, like that great white whale, a goal certainly worth pursuing.
Editor’s note: To learn more about stenography, see How Steno Works At 200 WPM.
Explore more articles from Writing by Other Means
J.D. Henning is a writer and filmmaker. Best known for writing and executive producing Portal Runner, a New York Times recommended sci-fi film, J.D. also recently took home the prize at the 2025 Worldcon film festival for his short film Superior Subject. J.D. can’t escape an incessant need to write in genre, whether it be spies, spaceships, or zombies. He’s the father of two young children. He, his wife, kids, and cat can be found cross-country skiing in his home state of Montana (well…maybe not the cat). You can learn more about his work at henningworks.com.
The post A 23-Button Stenography Keyboard: All Gain, Zero Pain appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.
Two paths diverge in a wood… and what happens when, in fact, you can travel both? In her debut novel Sublimation, author Isabel J. Kim looks at what happens when the road less taken is never not taken, and how a question in school set her on a new path.
ISABEL J. KIM:
I am going to tell you a story that I have never publicly told before. It is about the ignoble origins of Sublimation. And for context, Sublimation is a speculative fiction novel set in a universe where when you cross a border with the intention to leave, you split into two people. Literally.
Sublimation is about other things, too—the artificial nature of borders, the way in which human beings impose their technological will on natural processes, control and, freedom and the unhappy marriage of big tech and government and how it is hard to talk to people when you don’t know what you want—but the crux of it is: Sublimation is a story about being confronted by a life you didn’t lead.
When I was seventeen, I was taking a world history class and we were talking about immigration, because that’s what you do in a world history class in the United States of America. And the teacher asked us the question: why do people immigrate to America?
One of the other students—who was, in my teenage self’s words, “a white preppy blonde chick” and in my current self’s words, “literally just some guy”—raised her hand with perfect confidence and said “For a better life!” She spoke with such clear, myopic certainty that I was suddenly furious, because there are a lot of reasons that people go places and stay places and “a better life” is so reductive as to be meaningless, and also, some of us move because our dads get jobs, okay? You’ve lived here your entire life, and I’ve lived in four different cities in two different countries, so why are you raising your hand with such confidence?
The punchline, of course, is that I was born in New Jersey, and also had never technically immigrated anywhere. Also, it’s not like I raised my hand to talk about my experiences of being an expat in my country of ethnic origin.
Back then, I never liked talking about how I felt about being from places, because my international childhood was hard to explain. It was an experience that was fairly benign, mostly enriching, and only strange in retrospect. The only lingering weirdness was that I felt like a foreigner everywhere I went. I was an American kid in Korea, I was a Korean kid in America, and explaining how that felt would require me to make you live an entire life walking in my shoes. When you’re seventeen, that’s hard.
A few years (read: seven years) later I was back in Korea for a vacation, and I was surprised at how quickly the country had changed while I had been gone. I started thinking about how all the differences would have seemed totally organic had I lived there my entire life. This got me ruminating about the version of me that never moved back to the states, which led me to the idea of instancing—leaving a double behind when you cross a border. One person who goes, another who stays.
And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor made flesh, an idea through which I could viscerally shove the experience of being a foreigner into the reader’s brain. And I was thinking about my classmate from high school, and how I wanted to make people like her understand how it felt, to be perpetually from somewhere else.
So, I started writing a story (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self”) about how it felt to be from somewhere else, and how it felt to be a foreigner, and how you might feel if you were the one who got to leave, and conversely, how it might feel to be the one who had to stay.
Then, a strange thing happened. The more I expanded the aforementioned short story, the more I realized that the feeling of alienation was universal—everyone feels like a stranger sometimes, everyone wonders about what could have happened had they made different choices, everyone has a road not traveled.
The more I wrote, the more I saw the story I was writing as not really about my own individual experience, but as a way for the reader to sift through their own experiences through the lens of the story I was giving them. The narrative became a sort of window for the reader, or a magnifying glass.
And I felt that even more intensely when I talked with people about Sublimation across the various drafts. The more conversations I had, the stronger my feeling was that at the end of the day, we’re more similar than not. If you look far back enough, we’re all from somewhere else. And we’re all traveling into the future together.
And the future, like the past, is a foreign country, from which we can never return.
So that’s what Sublimation is about. And maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t raise my hand in world history class; if I had, I might not have written this novel.
Sublimation: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop.org
EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.
ecstatic
Awww, doesn’t it look like they’re cuddling? They are not, about a tenth of a second later they were rolling about in a full-blown tussle, as they are wont to do. Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun; Smudge actually enjoys his wrestling time with Saja, and vice versa. But it does make for some fun moments:
To begin the month of June, Smudge offers up the rare but valuable TussleMlem
— The Scamperbeasts (@scamperbeasts.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T11:22:48.639Z, with an assist from Saja
Sugar and Spice, I will note again, want none of this sort of nonsense. It is far below either of their dignities. Which is, perhaps, their loss.
— JS
May has been a very busy month! I think all of my months are going to be busy forever!
Birthday Weekend
My birthday was the first Saturday of May, and instead of having a single party I just did a bunch of different things and invited whoever was free to come along.
( It was a nice birthday weekend! )
Things I Read That I Liked
This month I read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie and I really loved it! It's high fantasy, told from the point of view of a god talking to the assistant to the universe equivalent of a prince. So it was kind of in both first and second point of view, and it spans a millennia, but keeps coming back to focus on the present moment. It's kind of a murder mystery, kind of political drama, so I highly recommend it if you like standalone fantasy of that nature. The secondary protagonist is a trans man, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the story. I only mention it because I know it's a draw for some people.
Bloodywood: System of a Brown Tour
I only went to one concert this month, tragically, but it was a REALLY incredible one! Like, might be top 5 of the year level incredible?? I listened to their newest album on my brother's recommendation and enjoyed it, so I was excited to see the show and they absolutely blew me away. Their stage presence and command of the crowd was really impressive, and the music hits so hard live!
New Music Zone
There was a LOT of new music this month, so much so that I nearly entirely missed the studio release of Permission by Taemin, which is one of the songs he did at Coachella. I don't really know what his label was thinking not releasing it immediately and then following it with the album? I guess maybe the SHINee comeback is delaying it? Still, feels like a huge missed opportunity to me. The song is great and deserves to be a title track.
Shownu x Hyungwon released their newest unit album, and it's perfectly fine, but the highlight is definitely Hyungwon's solo song No Air. It has been ON REPEAT for me, I am absolutely obsessed with it. It's a perfect follow up to Wildfire. Full Hyungwon solo album WHEN? I've been staying away from tour spoilers, but I hope he does this as his solo number in the US tour, because I am prepared to melt into the floor and disappear forever. I still think about his 2022 tour performance of Wildfire regularly. I think it changed who I am as a person seeing it live.
I also listened to Kim Petras's new album (which is really good, feels very OG Clarity era Kim in a good way) and Aespa's new album (which is Okay but definitely better than the last one and I will probably see them when they come to town).
The big news, obviously, is the latest XLOV comeback! They did it again, girls and gays!!
They have once again given us a Pride bop and a great music video to go with it! XLOV is really so next level to me. This choreo is truly made for Rui (like every choreo, BUT STILL). The Hyun/Haru harmony is everything. Wumuti's vision truly brings it to you every ball. Every song on this mini album is a banger, there are zero skips. I think it might be their strongest and most cohesive project yet. My favorite song is Back 2 Back. That's been on a loop opposite No Air, just those two songs over and over and over again. Hyun's voice is just so beautiful and it really, really shines on that track. It's been so exciting watching these four grow over the last year and a half. My bias is truly whoever I happen to be looking at in the moment.
I'll try to do a six month 2026 goals update sometime this month, but honestly, my June is already looking even busier than May, so I dunno!! How does anyone keep up with anything??
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cassiope25 and mific for all their May recs! We had 6 recs this past month.Our June reccers are:
cassiope25: Rodney McKaygoddess47: Jack O'Neillmific: TeylaReccers, you all have access and can start posting at any time. Remember that you have committed yourself to reccing at least two fics over the course of the month, although of course we will be happy with more. Feel free to use the copy-and-paste template from the reccer's FAQ for your convenience.
If you wanted to volunteer for this month and didn't have a chance to sign up, drop a comment here and I'll happily add you to the list.
flirtyRobby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)
The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.
Rec Category: Genfic
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Sam Carter, Evan Lorne, Radek Zelenka
Categories: Gen
Words: 9458
Warnings: the author chose not to warn - see below, but no actual AO3 warnings apply
Author on DW:
fiercelydreamedAuthor's Website: fiercelydreamed on AO3
Link: Who's Left and Who's Leaving locked to AO3, and on Wayback
Why This Must Be Read: I love this story, told from John's POV. It has remarkably few hits on AO3 for such a good fic, beautifully written, because this is
fiercelydreamed. It's futurefic, set in year seven of the expedition, about a dystopian change coming for the Atlantis expedition, and how our protagonists deal with that. They don't know exactly what's planned by the higher-ups on Earth, but they don't want to get sent back to Earth if the expedition is terminated, or, worse, to be forced to become part of a militarized Atlantis base. So they make a plan to one by one fake their deaths across two years and disappear into Pegasus. John (only aware of a few names on their list) is close to the last, and even though he knows the plan, he inevitably fears that some of the very believable deaths might have been real. Their security's tight so he has no way to be reassured. The story's a tough read in places as for John it's a series of losses and funerals, until he can't stand it any longer and makes his own plans. When it's finally his turn it's a leap into the dark, not knowing if anyone will meet him. Intense, powerful, poignant, and a gripping read.( snippet of the fic under here )
Rec Category: Genfic
Characters: John Sheppard & Rodney McKay
Categories: Gen
Words: 19,048 (both fics)
Warnings: no AO3 warnings apply
Author on DW: n/a
Author's Website: rageprufrock on AO3
Links: There are two stories in the series: Share and Shift (locked to AO3)
Backups on Wayback: Share and Shift.
And Twilight podficced Share.
Why This Must Be Read: These are fairly well known but might be a little overlooked, being genfic. They feature Rodney and John's friendship between The Return parts 1 and 2. The writing's extremely good and the stories are bitter-sweet, filled with homesickness for Atlantis, Teyla and Ronon, and Pegasus life in general. I don't find the series too sad myself, as I know their separation from Atlantis and from each other will soon be resolved when they steal the jumper and take back their city from the replicators. Knowing that, it's easy to enjoy the writing and characterisation, which is some of Pru's best SGA work. Share is from Rodney's POV, and Shift is from John's. Very much recommended.
( snippet of the fic under here )
Artist:
magnavox_23 Character/Pairing: Jack O'Neill
Rating: G
(click to embiggen)
2x22 Out of Mind
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