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[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

Does anybody want to hear about my 70s larp I'm gradually roping other people into

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

We take days (preplanned to have nothing important on) where we are allowed NO WiFi no phones no pc. And we dress as 70s as we're able, go to bookshops, the record shop, then home to watch a vhs, or read, or listen to a cassette. To be fair I have a big analóg collection and an alarm clock and, to be clear, we don't exactly own 70s wardrobes but half the fun is in the creativity. We don't go 'tehe groovy man' but we avoid modern topics. Its fun trying to immerse ourselves as best we can, always adding new details when we get some new tapes from the era or, eventually when we get the money, do some temporary decor. We also went to a roller disco

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

For the record we aren't entirely beholden to JUST 70s tech, as we are not millionaires, maybe someday when I'm not just a barista, but it has to at least be smartphone-less, wifi-less, and pc-less. We blur over to the 80s on occasion, to me part of historical fashion is recognizing that things overlap!

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

You can do this anytime with any era you like. However. I propose 7th/7th as international 70s larp day :3

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

A lot of people in the comments wanting to engage w this so I made a community BC I love spreading my brain worms

70s LARP on 7/7/26 • Community on Tumblr

70s recreation enthusiasts inspo and sharing

[notyournecromancer]

i’ve just pulled out 44 sapphic books from my bookshelves so i can make a petty point that the whole “there just aren’t any well written sapphic books!” argument is bollocks. i’m making a video of them all, but in the meantime:

sapphic book recs:

- rosewater, liv little

- tipping the velvet, sarah waters

- milk fed, melissa broder

- she who became the sun, shelley parker-chan

- briefly a delicious life, nell stevens

- gentlest of wild things, sarah underwood

- the naked light, bridget collins

- the safe keep, yael van der wouden

- the original, nell stevens

- the tarot reader of versailles, anya bergman

- sargassa,, sophie burnham

- a line you have traced, roisin dunnett

- the lighthouse at the edge of the world, j r dawson

- sunburn, chloe michelle howarth

- ordinary saints, niamh ni mhaoileoin

- lessons in magic and disaster, charlie jane anders

- when devils sing, xan kaur

- accidental darlings, crystal jeans

- heap earth upon it, chloe michelle howarth

- hijab butch blues, lamya h

- that green eyed girl, julie owen moylan

- the devil she knows, alexandria bellefleur

- sweet bitter song, rosie hewlett

- nevada, imogen binnie

- delilah green doesn’t care, ashley herron blake

- iris kelly doesn’t doesn’t date, ashley herron blake

- vile lady villains, danai christopoulou

- neon roses, rachel dawson

- in the dream house, carmen maria machado

- bury our bones in the midnight soil, v e schwab

- the maiden and her monster, maddie martinez

- lady’s knight, amie kaufman & meagen spooner

- hanmajang luck, makana yamamoto

- daughters of olympus, hannah lynn

- other peoples clothes, calla henken

- interesting facts about space, emily austin

- the isle in the silver sea, tasha suri

- an education in malice, s t gibson

- the palace of eros, caro de robertis

- a love story for bewildered girls, emma morgan

- a dark and drowning tide, allison saft

- the incandescent, emily tesh

- six wild crowns, holly race

- the locked tomb series, tamsyn muir

[sunfl0w3rmoon]

adding on bc I love sapphic books!!!!

- almost life, kiran millwood hargrave

- libertad, bessie flores zalvidar

- just another epic love poem, parisa akhbari

- no body no crime, tess sharpe

- atmosphere, taylor jenkins reid

- flirting lessons, jasmine guillory

- the river has roots, amal el-mohtar

- this is how you lose the time war, amal el-mohtar & max gladstone

- every step she takes, alison cochrun

- here we go again, alison cochrun

- kiss her once for me, alison cochrun

- forget me not, alyson derrick

- hot summer, elle everhart

- imogen, obviously, becky albertalli

- she gets the girl, rachael lippincott & alyson derrick

[whumpster-dumpster]

o7

[flamingwell]

I want to highly recommend two tools for helping you with this very sad situation, which you must use before it happens.

The first is this wonderful script that will automatically add key information (that you choose) like author, title, summary, etc to your bookmark notes so you at least know what got deleted.

The second is this incredible bulk downloader for AO3. Input any AO3 page (such as your bookmarks page) and tell it what format you want to download in and it will just.... DOWNLOAD IT ALL!! I run it every few months so that I have all my bookmarks downloaded in my preferred EPUB format. That way I know I always have my favorites downloaded in case they ever get deleted.

With the combination of these two, I can look in my bookmarks, see what was deleted, and easily find it in my downloads. It's such a relief to have my own fic library is all my favs!

[akasanata]

Let me add my life saver, an absolute wonderful add-on, ao3 saver:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ao3-saver/

It automatically saves evey fic you visit so you have a backup if the fic is ever erased. No more mysterious bookmarks lost forever.

Also if you go to the page of an erased fic, it not only gives you the option to check on ao3 saver in case you have it saved, but also in archive.org in case someone ever did a backup there.

[redheadbouquet]

“What’s on display most often in Sex and the City is a kind of same-sex eroticism whose job is to perform the sensitive caring labor necessary for keeping the dream of the heterosexual good life intact. The phone calls, the late nights, the affectionate nicknames—they pour themselves into each other’s lives. When Charlotte’s boyfriend asks her to play seventeenth-century backgammon, the girls hold an impromptu salon on anal sex in the back of a moving taxi. When Carrie’s indefatigable neighbors start screwing across the alley, the whole sex-starved gang comes over to watch, sucking on candy. This is lesbianism as heterosexuality’s fixer, rushing from one crisis to the next like Michael Clayton in Michael Clayton or Ray Donovan in Ray Donovan, disappearing evidence and bribing exes with breezy professionalism. It’s a curious thing that heterosexuality, in a show that purports to be taking it into the twenty-first century, doesn’t actually work without 24/7 technical support. It is a curiouser thing that, thanks in part to Sex and the City itself, teams of women across America are convinced to provide this technical support for free. Maybe there’s some kind of feedback loop at work here: heterosexuality forbids you from being a dyke, then makes you gay for your girlfriends. I’m hardly convinced that any of our protagonists actually like men; what they do seem to like is liking men, because empirically speaking, liking men translates, almost all of the time, into being with women: touching their hair, rubbing their shoulders, sharing their feelings.”

— Sex and the City: Andrea, July 24 « Post45

[letterful]

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

[letterful]

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

[cobaltzosia]

Why do you dislike the 2005 Pride and Prejudice so much? I thought it was a pretty good movie?

Okay, here’s the thing. Like, it is a “pretty good movie” - it’s visually gorgeous and the soundtrack is stunning and yeah, okay, from many angles it can be considered a great movie. 

But it’s not Jane Austen. 

Let me explain: the thing about Pride and Prejudice is that it is fundamentally a social commentary expressed through a comedy of manners. So much of Austen is about claustrophobia and people rubbing each other the wrong way in these tiny social circles because travelling was so much more effort. But in order to make his film so beautiful, Joe Wright completely disregarded this. 

For example, possibly my biggest pet peeve about this movie is Darcy’s first proposal scene. In no way shape or form did that need to take place in a thunderstorm. That pathetic fallacy is completely unnecessary and actually detracts from the drama of that scene. The whole point is that they’re in this tiny room together with these emotions running high but they can’t raise their voices, they can’t get away from each other because of the social rules they’re still bound to. 

What’s brilliant about the BBC version is that it captures that perfectly. Jennifer Ehles does such a good job of this seething rage beginning to get the better of her so that when she finally says “you are the last man in the world I could ever marry” she brings herself up short because she knows she’s gone too far, she’s been too rude. Elizabeth may be witty and ahead of her time but she remains a product of her time and she wouldn’t get all up in Darcy’s face about it. 

I don’t dislike Keira Knightly as an actress, I’ve enjoyed her performances in many things but she was not right for this role at all. (Though the thing about film acting is that it’s so dependent on the director and the editing that hey, maybe under different circumstances she could have done a good job, but I’m unsure). She played Elizabeth as a modern woman in a Regency Era setting, and that just doesn’t work. She’s too loud, too physical for the kind of environment that Pride and Prejudice takes place in. 

But while her performance is too big and too unrestrained, things that should have been big were too small. Again, Tom Hollander is an actor I like very much, but his Collins was all earnest and small. He barely made my flesh crawl at all, which he really should. (And when you look at David Bamber, he’s flawlessly slimy, and hilarious to boot). One of Austen’s strengths is this wonderful melding of big and small - her principal characters are stuck in these tiny communities with these huge supporting characters that only increase the sense of claustrophobia. 

One thing I will say for the 2005 version is that Jane and Bingley were lovely. Though I will never understand how that one thing was so perfectly Austen while everything else was trying to be a Bronte novel. 

WHICH IS ENTIRELY THE THING. Joe Wright tried to play Pride and Prejudice as if it were written by Emily Bronte. Like that scene with Darcy walking through the fucking mist in the morning to confess his love to Lizzy again - that’s just wrong. And I know what you’re about to say: “if you’re complaining about that, why aren’t you complaining about Colin Firth’s wet shirt in the BBC version?” Well I’ll tell you: because it was played right. When Lizzy and Darcy come across each other in that scene it is painfully awkward because it would be. Darcy asks if her parents are well about three times and Lizzy can barely make eye contact. It might not be in the book but, were it to have been, that’s how it would have gone down. Instead, Joe Wright gave us this… whatever it was with dramatic whispering and hand kissing. 

(Don’t even get me started on that “Mrs Darcy” scene, which luckily wasn’t in the UK version because everyone knew we’d hate it as a nation)

And the thing is, this style might have worked for a different Austen novel: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion are all novels that are in dialogue with the Romantic ideology of the time, and maybe Joe Wright’s style would have worked with them, but it doesn’t with Pride and Prejudice. 

So that was really long, sorry. 

TL:DR - it is by many standards a “good movie” much like Game of Thrones is by many standards a “good show”. The cinematography is good, the score is good, the acting is good (because poor characterisation and bad acting aren’t always the same), but it completely misses the point of the original text upon which it is based. 

[wavelette]

no, yes, I’m glad you tagged me in this because I exactly agree

on the one hand, I really do love the sexual tension period drama with sweeping lovely scenery and moving heart-string piano music (aka, exactly what you’re saying, he filmed a P&P adaptation as a Bronte film, because all of that is what Jane Eyre should be), and it does actually work as a film. it’s sweet and poignant and enjoyable, and I would have fond memories of it if only it weren’t based on that book.

on the other hand, it’s quite possible the worst adaptation qua adaptation I’ve ever seen. Austen is, first and foremost, an ironist, and one whose irony shines so beautifully because of the incredibly formal society she inhabits. she takes formal statements that people make in social interactions, contrasts that with what the reader immediately can tell to be the opposite, and yet still managed to take a larger, more forgiving look at human folly than anyone else (we can think mrs bennet is ridiculous and get annoyed at reading her monologues and still love her as the caring parent she is). she is quite possibly the only author I’ve ever read who understands that the vast amount of human experience is awkwardness, and that our consciousness of self doesn’t depart when we experience the highs and lows of intense feeling. this movies forgets that immediately.

also, it commits to me the most unforgivable sin an Austen adaptation can–it’s not funny. 

it’s strange: seeing that adaptation for the first time, I realized what Pride and Prejudice is to most of our culture–the progenitor of the romantic comedy. while it is a romance, and while it is a comedy, P&P essentially makes a grand statement about the intersection of human morality and goodness (in that what it is to have a “good” marriage in Austen’s opinion is based on her own ideal of rational love, the kind of love you choose every day based on mutual respect and affection and gratitude, and that a good marriage can, and does, in fact make its members better people). it is not a sexual tension driven story where they pretend to hate each other because they love each other–this is a trope retroactively applied to P&P because so many works inspired by this one have used that trope. and so the proposal scene, with the sweeping rain and the heaving chests, and lizzie looking at darcy’s lips–yes, it’s a bad adaptation. the director doesn’t seem to realize that darcy has actually insulted literally every aspect of lizzie’s life to a degree that she almost cannot speak. this is not romantic. it’s funny as hell (against his better judgment, he wants to marry her! I’m laughing just thinking about it) but it’s the opposite of romantic.

to be super pretentious about this–they took a book about the intersection of the intellect and desire and made it all about desire. what makes Austen Austen is that she wants to find true happiness and goodness in that intersection; what makes this terrible is that they reduce a love based on choice to one based on simple attraction. 

[fageleh]

hobbies should not take up this much space. there ought to be a hobby pocket dimension, where I am able to store everything I need in a breadbox that weighs no more than my cat.

[monacellipress]

Jellyfish mosaic tile piece, Havana, Cuba. From Great Houses of Havana.

[sonacava]

her mausoleum 🪦🌟

[areyoudoingthis]

the importance of being earnest gdrive link for anyone who missed it or wants to watch it again ✨

[gpuzzle]

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of feeling bonita

[parkchanwoohoo]

Realizing that I am not employing enough of my free will to become a nuisance at work

[raine-of-auroria]

Me watching this:

[cowboybarbaryn]

I’m not letting this rot in the tags

[cactusspatz]

Laurence vs happiness

Recently, I was re-reading His Majesty’s Dragon right after Blood of Tyrants and I was struck by how much Laurence smiles in the first book. So, being me, and having shiny new digital searchable copies of the series, I did some checking.

I searched for the word strings ‘smile’, ‘laugh’, and ‘grin’ (which included any variations thereof) in relation to Laurence and got a generally accurate idea of his mood throughout the series:

His Majesty’s Dragon: smiles 14, grins 2, laughs 6

Throne of Jade: smiles 5, grins 1, laughs 3

Black Powder War: smiles 1, grins 1, laughs 0

Empire of Ivory: smiles 0, grins 0, laughs 0

Victory of Eagles: smiles 0, grins 0, laughs 0

Tongues of Serpents: smiles 0, grins 0, laughs 0

Crucible of Gold: smiles 0, grins 0, laughs 0

Blood of Tyrants: smiles 0, grins 0, laughs 0.5

League of Dragons: 1.5 smiles , 0 grins, 1.5 laughs 

(.5 = when Laurence ‘almost’ does the thing)

This makes Temeraire’s surprise at Laurence laughing “quite out loud” in LOD that one time EXTRA HEARTBREAKING, GOOD WORK NAOMI NOVIK.

[hisiheyah]

Just received my copy of Golden Age, in which I had the honor of having one of my pieces included! Thank you @naominovik for making this happen, and for giving us another chance to step into Temeraire’s world. I can’t wait to read it!

[tanoraqui]

oh ho ho, so you think now, Will Laurence. So you think now.

[tanoraqui]

I’m pretty sure “it’s warm and you’re 100% comfortable sleeping there” is the approximate definition of “hearth and home”?

That took literally 10 pages.

[laurelhach]

temeraire wishes the butterflies weren’t so very small, they are very lovely