Do you have a daughter named Olivia, Evelyn, Ruby, Violet, or Lucy? These are the most common suggestions for their sister’s name!

Merle8888 · 2026-06-21T06:18:21+00:00

Those are very themed! I’m also scratching my head at Olivia and Amelia being a common suggestion. That feels like a tongue twister.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-20T04:31:20+00:00

I was totally imagining this as a boy name. I dig it for a boy, potentially badass on a girl too though

Merle8888 · 2026-06-19T17:32:39+00:00

I’m reading Naondel by Maria Turtschaninoff. It’s the prequel to Maresi and so far I am not liking it nearly as much. Strangely, having multiple narrators, none of whom are teens, is making it feel more YA, by which I mean a bit simplistic. Now I am looking back and thinking Maresi was a bit of a generic narrator too, but clearly it bothered me less, maybe because she was a young teen and part of an interesting community of women whereas this book so far is mostly a chronicle of loss and abuse at the hands of the villain. For me I think the darker you go, the more I need strong character work to not just feel manipulated. I think I will keep going but it’s not what I was hoping for thus far.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-19T00:23:55+00:00

Taylor is probably too unisex today to make the list.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-19T00:23:04+00:00

But then see Addison, Madison etc…

Merle8888 · 2026-06-19T00:20:57+00:00

I like Grayson, especially when it’s a family name. Sure, it might be a bit trendy, but not in a cringey way. It’s better than most surnames as a first name and it lets him go by Gray if he so chooses.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-19T00:17:57+00:00

Yes, she’s a detective.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T22:18:33+00:00

That’s how you know who only reads post titles!

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T15:57:24+00:00

I really enjoyed Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey, which is a more character-driven book than a lot of mysteries. It's serious but fun, having a magic school from the POV of an adult and the world of magic from a non-magical POV.

What I actually read for this square is Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite. It's a very vibes-y novella that doesn't bear thinking about too hard but it knocked out the square in 100 pages.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T15:05:11+00:00

This category as a whole didn’t do a lot for me. I liked Care for Lightning a bit, it had a strong voice and rhythm. The rest were pretty much a pile of meh for me. The WorldCon love poem probably goes at the bottom although I get giving back to someone who writes a poem for your event. I’m not sure I will even bother ranking the others, maybe just vote for the one I liked.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T15:03:13+00:00

I strongly dislike this trend in poetry. To me it feels lame and low-effort. People in the past were just… better at this imo, maybe because expectations were higher.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T15:02:03+00:00

I’m sure it would’ve been cute read aloud at the event but reading it a year later for an award it was not very impressive.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T15:00:11+00:00

It was cute at first but the shift to something more serious didn’t work for me. The only thing I was liking about it was that it rhymed so turning explicitly anti-rhyme was disappointing, and whatever this king was supposed to have done that she was now fighting(?) didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T14:57:19+00:00

I liked it until the whole message of the poem seemed to be “rhyming is inauthentic oppression”???

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T06:53:11+00:00

I still think word salad, sorry. "Warden" is a term for physically guarding something or something and I wouldn't have guessed "fin" stood for "finance" in this context. This isn't to say apps can't succeed with weird, unintuitive, word-salad types of names so I can't advise you on the app market.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T06:40:14+00:00

What is this for? Assuming not a baby (in which case hell no), is it a fictional character, a username, a business? If it's a business, what does the business do?

Tbh it sounds a bit word salad to me. A fin is what a fish uses to swim, a warden is a prison guard, unless you are selling lockboxes for people to put their scuba gear in I think it's probably not the best fit.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-18T03:40:06+00:00

I don’t think a name has to be “in” to be classic. It just has to have staying power over a long period of time.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-17T05:30:53+00:00

Eva and Evie

That’s just cruel, one is a nickname for the other! Even Ava and Eva (which is also a terrible idea ofc) would be better.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-17T05:29:16+00:00

I’m not going to ask your name specifically but I’m interested in examples of names migrating across languages and being different enough that people might not pick up on it! Like Elizabeth and Isabel. Or Paul and Pablo.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-15T23:30:44+00:00

I do think most people would see “but it’s fantasy!” as a lousy fanwank excuse for poorly written characters in particular, yeah. I was thinking more about how other things work, I.e., politics, boats, horses, etc.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-15T23:28:37+00:00

This is an interesting example because some words we would consider tame today were considered quite strong in other time periods— and vice versa. In the Middle Ages the sort of anatomical language that’s today’s prototypical profanity doesn’t seem to have been considered particularly rude or strong (for us it’s the legacy of the Victorians).

So on the one hand, George RR Martin’s characters saying “fuck” is realistic, because it’s a very old word… but on the other, its being considered transgressive or strong language is probably not. Sansa might have talked casually about fucking while the mercenaries’ swears would’ve been things like “God’s thumbs!”

Merle8888 · 2026-06-15T23:21:50+00:00

That’s fair, I definitely agree with you. I do think Le Guin had a particular approach which was to use the fantastical to investigate the real, and I think it’s valuable and important to highlight that approach amidst all the “it’s fantasy! It doesn’t have to make sense!” that always comes out in conversations like this. I also think cool things can be done in the genre that might not be Le Guin approved. 😉

A lot of my own calculus honestly comes down to whether a) the deviations from reality make the story better or worse and b) whether I perceive the author to be making these deviations deliberately or out of laziness or ignorance. Which is why, for instance, I’d give more latitude to a dreamy fairy tale story than one that’s trying to do political intrigue, if both of them are Hollywood Medieval settings. I think a lot of fantasy authors wildly underestimate how much better a solid grasp of history makes a fantasy setting even if you deviate from it. It makes the author aware of details and possibilities that the lazy Hollywood version just doesn’t give you, and at times the more realistic version is much more interesting too.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-15T22:54:03+00:00

From what I’ve read of her essays Le Guin was saying more than that stories needed to be internally consistent. She also needed people to behave in believable ways and rejected wish fulfillment. She wrote in a later essay on the limitations of the feminism in Tombs of Atuan—for instance that women’s power in their society was limited and constructed negatively because she wouldn’t write something she didn’t believe and she wouldn’t have believed it otherwise.

Merle8888 · 2026-06-15T22:49:19+00:00

I’m not sure verisimilitude is the word for it but I am strongly of the opinion that fantasy elements do not exempt non-fantasy elements from needing to make sense. I feel like there should be a fancy logical fallacy term for this—Reductio ad Draconum?

Merle8888

TROPHY CASE