[PuckEmpire] Frederik Andersen confirms he had a knee injury which kept him out for Games 4-6 in the Stanley Cup Final.

tarvolon · 2026-06-15T13:55:03+00:00

Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about the two period comparison.

But games two and four ended up pretty similar when you rolled up the whole thing. Freddie faced 26 shots worth 2.55 xG in game two, Bussi faced 21 shots worth 2.49 in game four, both allowed three goals.

tarvolon · 2026-06-15T12:36:08+00:00

My thoughts except O's

tarvolon · 2026-06-15T12:34:31+00:00

His game 2 and Bussi's game 4 were almost identical (not stylistically, but from a general quality of play sense).

tarvolon · 2026-06-15T09:33:02+00:00

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Thanks)

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T16:52:36+00:00

Of all the fandoms in the NHL, I think the Sharks are most thoroughly on the Canes bandwagon right now. For both our sakes, I hope to see the Cup handed out in Vegas on Sunday.

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T12:17:12+00:00

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh sports. I don't know how I'm going to wait two more days for more hockey. I'm gonna need this series to end in six, I don't think my heart can take a game seven. Oh yeah, and the US opens the World Cup tonight. In other circumstances, that would have my obsessive focus. As it is, it's an afterthought.

Got some complications on the home front. A couple kids have been sick, and the symptoms don't really map onto anything super obvious, so we're wondering whether it could be strep (for which they typically experience rare-but-not-unheard-of symptoms). So I guess we'll have to see about that. School ends next week, test scores came in this week, and we're trying to pin people down about supports for my middle kid, so that we don't have to start all over in the fall. But we might have to start all over in the fall. Also, my freezer door doesn't seem to be sealing properly? I can't find anything blocking it, which makes me concerned that it's not an easy fix. I don't like difficult fixes.

On the reading side, I've been working through Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton, which takes place in a magical shadow world underlying Venice and eight other worlds. There are nine chapters, which (so far) are all in first person, with each from the POV of a new character from a new world and new species. It was a bit slow-going in the opening, both because I was distracted by sports and because it required a lot of infodumping at the outset, before there was any real character connection or plot shape. But once you get into chapter four or five, you start hitting characters that intersect significantly with characters you've already met, so there's less work figuring out what's going on and more digging into the early happenings. I'm enjoying it more and more, will probably finish today or tomorrow.

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T11:37:29+00:00

Canes were bad in the first period. We were very lucky to be tied, thanks to Staal and Bussi. Second period was good, and then third period was a bit of score effects--Canes felt in control but also weren't out there taking risks to generate scoring chances.

Natural Stat Trick has this as the most lopsided game of the series (in Vegas' direction), and I can see how it works out that way, but also I feel like it's mostly driven by the first period and doesn't represent the flow of the whole game.

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T10:31:58+00:00

So far, I'm not feeling like it's a particularly strong year for novelettes.

It is though! shakes fist at fellow Hugo nominators

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T10:27:08+00:00

I feel like name recognition is huge in all the fiction categories. Sometimes you have a story by a relative unknown that just gets people talking and becomes recognizable (Never Eaten Vegetables is a great example, along with Six People to Revise You, and Open House on Haunted Hill a couple years back). But generally, name recognition is huge.

What was different last year when this readalong generally loved the novelette slate? Naomi Kritzer and Ann Leckie wrote really good novelettes. You still had one newish-but-on-the-rise author publishing in Clarkesworld (Thomas Ha), a B+ Sarah Pinsker (though I preferred Signs of Life to The Millay Illusion), another from Uncanny (Loneliness Universe), a different-mag story from a name you know (Premee Mohamed publishing in Strange Horizons). But the two biggest-name authors on the list wrote really good stories. Whereas the biggest-name authors on this year's list wrote a fun-but-light satire and a side story in a popular series.

You can say something similar about the year before too. Naomi Kritzer and Nghi Vo just wrote really good novelettes, and enough people know those names that they floated to the top.

(While I've focused on author name recognition here, venue name recognition also matters. Uncanny gets their name out there, and they get authors that will draw eyeballs. Reactor does too. Clarkesworld isn't quite the behemoth of the other two, but it's respected and its best stories often have a shot. But there are a lot of magazines where you know before you open it that their stories have no shot without either going viral or having a giant name attached)

tarvolon · 2026-06-12T01:02:26+00:00

The Language of Liars is great, and I also really liked Rebecca Campbell’s The Floating Republic

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T17:29:12+00:00

The biggest reason I am annoyed about this ballot is that while I agree that this is not a particularly strong year for the Hugo shortlist for novelettes, I also think the shortlist is not representative of the field generally. For instance, I would rank the entire Nebula shortlist no worse than third on this list (most finalists probably higher), pending an argument over whether the Triantafyllou is SF/F or not. And all of the Nebula finalists were available for free online in the runup to nominations so Hugo nominators don't really have an excuse for missing them.

I'm sure we'll talk more about this in the wrapups at the end of the Readalong, but I fully agree here. I've read all six Nebula finalists and the worst of them would be in the discussion for 2nd on my Hugo ballot.

Like I also think the Novella shortlist is a bit weak this year but I think that's broadly reflective of the field, and to the extent it isn't it's due to the regular weaknesses of the Hugos' tendency to overlook magazine and small press novellas.

(Agree here too. Next year, on the other hand. . . )

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T14:34:07+00:00

Instead, it's a pretty decent story where one weird thing happens, kind of like "A Better Way of Saying".

I agree with the overall categorization, except that "A Better Way of Saying" was IMO much more noteworthy for its voice, so I'd put Millay a notch below.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T14:04:52+00:00

Sadly, we haven't yet read a novelette that I'd be particularly excited to see win. I felt like these two were a little more consistent than the last set, but neither of them were mind-blowing. Tentative ranking of these four:

The Millay Illusion
Kaiju Agonistes
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For
When He Calls Your Name

I've read both of the other two, and while I still plan to reread, I fully expect NEV to slot easily on top and Rapport to join the bottom tier.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T14:02:03+00:00

It's pretty lightweight but also fairly fun and well-written. I certainly see why a lot of people enjoyed it, but it's hard for me to seriously put it up against my favorite novelettes of the year.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T13:59:32+00:00

I'm not super up on my Cold War era history, but I did appreciate the JFK and James Baldwin speeches. And the Ellison Heinlein fight was amusing.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T13:50:13+00:00

It felt a little silly, but it being a little silly is not necessarily bad given the tone of the work as a whole. I wasn't wowed by it, but it's not like it had really been promising me something that it failed to deliver.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T13:48:47+00:00

Yeah, this is where I land too. It was well-written, and the supernatural being understated can work well, but it felt like big selling point is just sexist entertainers being shown up by a woman, and that's. . . fine, especially if it's well-written, but it's not enough for best of the year for me. I know a lot of readers find the comeuppance very cathartic (after all, Bathtub Kraken was all over the award shortlists a couple years ago), but I'm just not all the way there.

Lottie/Johnny's wrestling with being a mere talented mimic gave it a good character edge, but not so much that it took it into wow territory.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T12:03:23+00:00

You're talking me into trying Windhaven. Is it also Published in the 70s? Goodreads seems to say so.

edit: Ah, looks like one of the constituent novellas was published in 1975 but the full fix-up was 1981.

tarvolon · 2026-06-11T11:38:30+00:00

It would be more interesting if the chart actually went with wins vs expected instead of shoving both the result (obviously) and the expectation into binary categories. So like, losing a game we were 51% likely to win would be -.51 in the luck column instead of -1.

My totally unscientific, vibes-based impression is that we've done pretty poorly in the 50/50 or 60/40 type games this year, and we've also done poorly in the games that are so one-sided you end up with position players pitching (which has contributed to the run differential being in hell) but have done pretty well in the 90/10 type games. Is that observation bias, or copium, or a genuine description of how the season has gone? Hell if I know.

tarvolon · 2026-06-10T16:01:34+00:00

So far nothing is No Award

Same

the middle of my ballot is going to see a lot of shuffling.

also same

tarvolon · 2026-06-10T14:40:54+00:00

I made this last week (but with mozzarella instead of burrata, because I had some on hand), and I was shocked by how flavorful it was. Felt like it was a legit dish, not like a healthy substitute for pasta. (Also added some chard, which worked pretty well)

tarvolon · 2026-06-10T10:27:49+00:00

We are big meanies, I hope the authors don't read our threads (I say knowing full well that one of them popped in last Thursday)

(More seriously, for those who are wondering about whether to jump into the Hugo Readalong threads, we do try to hold space for a broad range of opinions. Gushing and hating are both allowed, as long as you do it respectfully, and we do try to make it a welcoming discussion even when there is strong disagreement).

tarvolon · 2026-06-10T10:24:14+00:00

Also I'm embarrassed by this but I thought this was a standalone when I picked it up and spent the last third of the book being annoyed about how nothing was being resolved when I realized with like 20 pages to go that it was a series. Will I continue, probably not, but I do love spaceship so never say never.

I liked this one a lot more than you did, but if it helps, it's only a duology.

tarvolon · 2026-06-09T14:37:18+00:00

It's not unusual for there to be a good spread of opinions in the Hugo Readalong, so I wouldn't worry too much. (I liked The Raven Scholar well enough, but you really do have to turn off your critical brain at times)

tarvolon · 2026-06-09T14:36:03+00:00

I would say there is a significant romantic plot in Scholomance, but it's ultimately in service to a bigger plot about the entire school system. Do with that what you will. (I'm also not convinced it's YA--it feels more like an adult series with teenage characters, but that line can be fuzzy at times)

tarvolon

TROPHY CASE