Random thoughts on various things I’ve been reading. (Mostly manga, so you, dear reader, should probably close this post and move on.)

Ai no Kotoba (愛のことば) by INUI Ayu

A collection of yuri stories, mostly centering around adults, frequently explicit. Usually more mature stories would be interesting and these are all nice, but none really resonated with me.

Kogawa Masumi tanpenshuu (小川ますみ 短編集) by KOGAWA Masumi

A collection of stories, some yuri, mostly students, sometimes explicit. Nothing stood out too much, the art in 腹の底が焼けるほどの愛をくれ was nice, and I did find the title of 苺ちゃんの一会 quite amusing. (It reads Ichigo-chan no ichie, which is a sort of pun on the stock phrase ichigo ichie).

Koi shita watashi wa (恋した私は) by TAKEDA Ayano

A short story by the author of Hibike! Euphonium that can be found in a new collection called 貴女。　百合小説アンソロジー (roughly maybe “My Dear: Yuri Novel Anthology”).

Quite the unexpected ending, though clearly hinted at in hindsight. I liked this one!

Possible spoilers

Now, Hibike is infamous for being yuribait, and I was apprehensive about that going in. There was definitely an “unrequited love” angle going on that you might call bait…but overall I think readers will be satisifed!

Romance code (ロマンスコード) by nmi

A manga oneshot included in Comic Yuri Hime, 2024 September. A bit of an unexpected twist spiced up this seemingly typical I-made-myself-an-android-lover story.

Cast teihen joushi ni tsukimatowareteiru (カースト底辺女子に付きまとわれている) by SHIMAZAKI Mujirushi

A manga oneshot posted on the author’s Twitter. Shimazaki-sensei hasn’t been drawing his own series for a while now, so it’s nice to see the occasional doodle from him.

“Good ideas don’t need bayonets” (Adam Mastroianni)

At Experimental History.

This is how most of the world’s problems work. There is no manager to speak to, no master switch that can turn the bad thing off, no Committee on Problems who could decide to discontinue this particular snafu. You cannot vote to abolish traffic or petition to end hunger—or, you can, but it won’t do anything other than give you the warm glow of appearing to solve a problem without actually solving it.

That’s what I’m always aching for in every conversation about the future of science, or indeed, the future of anything. What are you going to do? Dream about utopia, complain that we don’t live in one, and then go back to doing the same things you’ve always done?

Warriors 3 (Anthology)

An anthology of stories about “warriors” with Robin Hobb headlining. Many are historical, and there’s quite the mix here.

These were interesting, though none were especially enough to make my shortlist:

• The Triumph (Robin Hobb): two Roman friends stuck in Carthaginian territory, one as a slave and one as a political prisoner, reflect on how they got there.
• Clean Slate (Lawrence Block): a rather horrific story about revenge murders for sexual abuse.
• The Girls fom Avenger (Carrie Vaughn): a little WW2 era detective story where a woman pilot tries to figure out how one of her former classmates got into a crash.