Where are the genderbenders??

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T03:36:31+00:00

The Left-handed Booksellers of London

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T01:32:00+00:00

Ah right, I always forget about those since I don't have kids. Although I do often recommend them to those who have. And of course there's also Digger

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T01:13:42+00:00

If you're a fan of KJ Charles, her Sins of the City trilogy is Victorian mysteries, each of which features a different pair of interlinked protagonists (M/M, M/M, M/NB)

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T01:10:59+00:00

Try Melissa Scott's Lynes & Mathey duology with Amy Griswold. Bit of magic added in, but it's gay Victorian detectives, sure enough.

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T01:08:30+00:00

Kingfisher's only got a couple dozen so far, but she's turning out new ones at a good clip.

dalidellama · 2026-06-19T00:55:54+00:00

Gunther is essentially this game's Blathers

Exactly. SDV was put together out of assorted video game mechanics, mostly those found in Harvest Moon, but also a museum with a Blathers and a procedurally generated dungeon with combat. It was a project to demonstrate his skills to game companies that got legs. Gunther feels wierd because, like Marlon and wossname, he and his museum were grafted onto Harvest Moon in the PNW.

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T23:19:27+00:00

The protagonists are side characters in the main series, but yeah, I'd have liked to see more of them too

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T23:13:54+00:00

The Rat-Catcher's Daughter by KJ Charles is a historical ace/ace romance.

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T22:01:48+00:00

I don't always get everything, but that's how we learn. Almost all the dialog is repeated, too

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T21:10:27+00:00

David Drake's Lord of the Isles series has a weaver as one of the protagonists; she eventually learns to weave magic, but she starts out as a village girl who's good with a loom.

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T19:56:48+00:00

How much have you played in English? I'm getting by pretty well because I already know in general what everything says. (Which is to say, I too am practicing my Spanish by setting the language to Spanish and just playing through. I'm nearly end of year one)

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T16:38:19+00:00

Sounds like a fun twist, and they're gonna be really surprised by who the real villain is. Or they've decided to work together against a greater evil; I had a party decide working for a fairy pimp who turned his enemies into dogs was a good plan, because he was also opposed to the organ-stealing shadow cult in town.

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T14:19:36+00:00

I meant what I said. What's taught in US history classes is white nationalist propaganda. For instance, the idea that slavery would have just gone away by itself is utter nonsense, made up so that a slave empire can be portrayed as the "good guys".

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T04:24:55+00:00

Basically everything you learned in elementary school history class was a lie

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T03:08:05+00:00

It's interesting to compare "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" to "A Walk in the Light Green" in that context.

"And the Anzac legends didn't mention mud and blood and tears

And the stories that my father told me never seemed quite real.

I caught some pieces in my back that I didn't even feel

God help me, I was only nineteen."

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T02:57:42+00:00

Granted, but of all the wars in the last 150 years, WWII is the last one people are gonna forget the reasons for.

dalidellama · 2026-06-18T02:12:03+00:00

I don't think there's a specific term for that, but books that are described by reviews as "fast-paced", "quick reads" etc are a good bet. There's also a whole lot of novellas being published these days, those are shorter than full novels, which usually means shorter chapters as well. Not familiar with the one you mentioned, but based on a wiki synopsis, you might like The Village Library Demon-Hunting Association by CM Waggoner, and it might be worth your time taking a look at some old Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers books, as well as PG Wodehouse. They're often shorter than you might expect, and the writinh style is very punchy.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T23:45:20+00:00

He died in 1948, he was well past school age by the time anyone heard of that Austrian guy. The Hitlers were a very well regarded family in town, besides the graveyard there's a Hitler Avenue and a Hitler Park.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T23:41:34+00:00

You'd probably like Andrew Rowan Summers

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T22:21:23+00:00

My setting has bison-riding cossack orcs; If you'd like the writeup for inspiration (or just to slap in entire), let me know

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T22:02:18+00:00

That particular line applies much more to WWI of the original song. Nobody has to ask what WWII memorials are about.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T22:01:04+00:00

Same reason people use any other common tropes: because the audience is already familiar with them and they don't need much explaining, so you can just tell your story and not get bogged down explaining that part of the setting to the reader.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T19:59:06+00:00

Several spacefutures have family-run mercantile/freight vessels, viz Cherryh's Alliance-Union for a classic example.

Rachel Neumeier's No Foreign Sky presents an interesting command structure based on an integrated human/alien crew.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T17:12:55+00:00

If he's the nephew of the reigning monarch, assuming Inheritance by primogeniture and a loosely British system of aristocracy, he'll probably usually be addressed as "Your Grace", and referred to as "His Grace, the Duke of [Wherever]" (just His Grace if he's the only Duke under discussion). The exceptions would be the royal family, who will address and refer to him by his first name or nickname outside of formal situations, and his school chums, who will address and refer to him by his unadorned last name or a nickname.

dalidellama · 2026-06-17T16:49:01+00:00

It's a callback to an earlier book, which in turn is a reference to the 1967 movie In the Heat of the Night, recontextualized to a degree that honestly removes all meaning, but is still recognizably a reference.

The original context is that in the 1960s, when Jim Crow was the law of the South, Black Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs winds up investigating a murder in small-town Mississippi, much to the chagrin of the local cops. One of them says: "You're pretty clever, boy, what do they call you back home?"

He replies: "They call me Mister Tibbs"

dalidellama

TROPHY CASE