Xena + Gravity + new podfic!

So I and my former-blind-date K watched Xena yesterday. K really loves that show and wanted me to love it too, and yes, I enjoyed it a lot! (For frayadjacent: we ended up watching Callisto, Return of Callisto, Destiny, The Debt 1 and 2, and The Bitter Suite. That last one ended up being a little too spaced out for me, though. *g*) I checked AO3 for fic, and really? There's only 182 Xena/Gabrielle fics on there? I mean, I knew femslash is less popular overall, but...damn, that's really not a lot. Would take fic recs.

Tonight I went to the movies with my dad, and we watched Gravity, which I enjoyed. I'm glad I watched it on a big screen, and I think it was the first movie I've ever seen that actually gained something from the 3D format (not that I've seen many 3D movies, but I didn't think it worked for Avengers, for example). Anyway, gorgeous visuals, and it really had me in suspense.

Oh hey, and I've recorded a podfic! I haven't made any for months due to various RL factors, but akamine_chan and I signed up for the lightning round of pod-together, and despite both of us being really busy we managed to collaborate on a Watership Down podfic, which you can listen to here: El-ahrairah and the Starstone. I've never collaborated with Aka before and I was very happy to do it with this story. ♥ Also, I am SO VERY HAPPY that podficcing is possible in my new place after all! Apparently the Zoom mike is more directional than I thought, because it doesn't pick up the cars at all. \o/ I'm also grateful to remopodmo for helping me break through my podblock.

Recently read books

The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
This is a poetry collection about the wives of famous men (the Devil's wife, Freud's wife, King Midas' wife, etc) that exeterlinden has requested for Yuletide in previous years. I liked it a lot! Some poems are funny, some serious, etc, and a lot of them take historical characters and put them in modern settings. And I like the language, too--it's striking and often colloquial. Might seek out more by this poet!

In conjunction with this, I also read two books by Liv Strömqvist, who does really funny and thoughtful feminist/leftist comics (in Swedish, unfortunately for you English-speakers). Anyway, one of them is called Einstein's Wife and is also partly about the wives of famous men (wow, I had no idea Einstein was such a monumental jerk to his ex-wife).

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany
I've never read Delany before and clearly that was an oversight. I was really impressed with the depth of the worldbuilding in this--he has this way of giving you details in such a way that it feels like the details are just part of a huge and complex and diverse background that lies outside your field of vision. And you're just thrown into it and left to figure out, for example, the use of prounouns for yourself (I really like what he does with pronouns, btw). That said, I kind of wanted more...warmth, maybe? Like, there's a big loving family in this, for example, but I never really felt that love. Although I really liked the thoughtfulness behind the non-traditional construction of that family, and the way it included aliens. Also, the book posits that you can calculate a number (with many decimals) for how closely a person you have never met matches your sexual tastes, which, no, I don't believe that's possible in general. Or at least my sexuality does not work that way. But I think partly what he's trying to do with this and other things is to divorce sex and romance and family from each other? The last hundred pages took me some time to get through, so I can't say it was exactly a page-turner, but it's a dense and thinky and interesting book, anyway.

Hmm, what else. I can recommend this charming short fantasy story by Jo Walton. I can also recommend keerawa's recent due South/Highlander short story, which just nails characterization of Fraser and Kowalski and Welsh.