Today was the best day...

...a coworker gave me a ride home because the two-mile walk to metro involved scaling snowbanks like Mario. (Pro tip: piling snow from the roads onto sidewalks is not the answer, municipal overlords.) During the drive, a conversation about our favorite mashup albums took an unexpected turn when coworker mentioned that there were "conspiracy theories on the Internet" about how two members of One Direction were secretly dating, and that "teenage girls look for secret signs of this in their songs and videos and write slash fiction about it."

"It's a creative outlet," I said.

To which Coworker replied, "Oh yeah, it's great. In fact, there's even this thing called 'Yuletide' where literally thousands of people get together from all over the Internet and make lists of books and shows--big stuff like Harry Potter to the most random niche movie you can think of--and stuff they like, and then they all write stories for each other..." and continued to give me a largely accurate summary of Yuletide for the next few minutes, during which I ticked off what he had right and what he slightly funhouse-mirrored.

For background, Coworker is an Ivy league-educated PhD who does hard sciences. And he knows about Yuletide and is just tickled by it.

Sometimes, life puts me smack in the center of a joke we can all be in on, and it's great.

これで以上です。

What Am I Reading Wednesday

Okay, let's do this! I have a ridiculous number of books going on right now, but here are the main ones.

幸村殿、艶にて候　-　秋月こお (Yukimura Dono, En nite Sourou - Akizuki Koh) This is the first in a seven-book series by Akizuki Koh, who is one of my favorite authors. She makes me wish I could download Japanese into other people's heads so that they could directly experience why.

This series is historical fiction that begins in 1589 in Japan's Warring States period. The protagonist is Sanada Genjiro Yukimura, the second son of the lord of a small fief in what is present-day Nagano who somehow managed to fend off an attack from powerful warlard Tokugawa Ieyasu (yes, that Tokugawa Ieyasu). Yukimura's sent as a hostage to Uesugi Kagekatsu of the much larger and more powerful Echigo (current-day Niigata) to secure the Uesugi's support to keep Tokugawa from trying again.

Kagekatsu is summoned to Osaka to attend on Kampaku Toyotomi Hideyoshi and takes Yukimura with him. ('Kampaku' is the title for the emperor's chief advisor, but by this point, Hideyoshi basically ruled large parts of Japan). Yukimura's beauty catches the Kampaku's eye, and he tries to take Yukimura on as a wakashu, or male concubine, but Yukimura instead talks him into sending Yukimura as a spy to Choshu (modern-day Kyushu), which was ruled at the time by our friends the Mori clan, to gather information ahead of Hideyoshi's planned invasion. And thus begins our adventure.

Japan has tales of The 10 Sanada Heroes similar to Western tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and we meet most of them in this book: the ninja Sarutobi Sasuke and Kirigakure Saizou, the pirate Nezu Jimpachi, the naval officer Kakei Juuzou, the warrior priests Miyoshi Seikai and Miyoshi Isa, and Yukimura's pages, Unno Rokuro and Anayama Kosuke.

( But, this being Akizuki Koh, it's also BL. )

Akizuki's Yukimura is a really intriguing character. He's a manipulative little shit, but then, the survival of his family depends in part on his being one, and we get little flashes of him here and there that indicate he's far kinder and far, far lonelier than he lets on. Kagekatsu is cocky and self-confident, as you'd have to be to annihilate your adopted brother's family in a dynastic struggle at the age of 21, but also far gentler and more genuine than the other characters.

Sasuke and Saizou both suffer for their untouchable status, but in different ways - Sasuke by trying to completely efface himself in service to Yukimura and Saizou by pretending he doesn't care about anyone or anything but himself. Kosuke was literally raised on a battlefield and starts the book mute and vicious. Rokuro and Juuzou, by contrast, were raised in privilege and theoretically should be bushido masters, but are largely ineffective in real-world situations. And so on.

I blew through over 1300 pages of these things during Blizzard 2016 and will probably finish the rest in short order. Damn, they are good.

これで以上です。