A scattering of December thoughts, aka a grab bag of things I meant to post about over the past few weeks and never got around to until now:

► Earlier in the month, I tried out Spirit of the North, and ended up DNF-ing it near the end of the third chapter. ( a few more details beneath the cut )

Honestly, though, the complete lack of regret I feel about the thought of never touching this game again tells me that I made the right choice. I feel like this is a game that will fade from my memory fairly quickly—the only reason I felt the urge to write up any of my thoughts on it at all is because this was a game on my 10 in 2025 list, and I had an unofficial goal of writing some kind of wrap-up for each of the games I played from that list. Otherwise, this would have been one of those games that I tried out, dropped, and never thought about again.

► Apparently, my Rose of Segunda replay had some fairly decent timing—because we got a Thorns of War update announcing a firm release date for Frederique’s route!!! (Specifically: 18 January 2026 is the release date.) I am very excited, but also a little appalled with myself that I still haven’t played any of Thorns of War yet. Especially since I did want to play at least a few of the routes (e.g., Loveless, Sofia) before playing Frederique's, and it’s going to be hard to resist.

Also, there is some very cute Frederique/Iolanthe fanart at the link <3 Hand kisses!!

► This month, I kept stumbling across licensing announcements that I somehow hadn’t realized happened. For instance, apparently the novel version of Love Between Fairy and Devil has not only been licensed in English, but has also already been fully released?

But the big one that surprised me was finding out that not only has Trash of the Count’s Family (under the title Lout of the Count’s Family), but they’re already six volumes into the series, with a seventh volume in preorders??? I’m so behind! Funnily enough, I was actually thinking about this novel only a few days before I found out that it'd already been licensed, reminiscing about how much I’d liked it and wanting to reread and catch up.

► We’ve had a rather unseasonably warm December, but temperatures have finally dropped, and we got our first snow—on Christmas! It started snowing on Christmas Eve, and I’ve very thrilled about having had a white Christmas. In general, it was an especially lovely Christmas for me, even though we didn’t actually do anything different than usual. The food, the time spent with my family, the general atmosphere… idk, everything somehow hit just right, and I very much treasured it.

► Today's topic is the (delightfully?) vague Unapologetic Fangirl For. Is it referring to authors? Series? Genres? Tropes? Who knows!

However, I do know the first two things that popped into my mind: 1) Jane Austen, and 2) the Harry Potter series. Which... do not have much in common, outside the fact that I feel ridiculously protective over both. I do think that Jane Austen's novels are technically much better written than Harry Potter, but I adore both, and both give me that same, knee-jerk "Blasphemy!" reaction whenever I hear about someone who doesn't like them.

► Today, I got the (hopefully) last of my Christmas shopping done! ♥ I probably overspent on my mom, but she deserves it, so I'm not going to worry about it. Unfortunately, between that and my getting caught up in reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis for the first time, that meant that I neither played more of Dragon Age: Awakening nor did I work on Yuletide treats. We'll see how tomorrow goes.