Le milieu du Middle @counterwiddershins - Tumblr Blog

So after 10+ years on tumblr, I'm finally changing my icon to recommend another French-language comic, "Médée," written by Blandine Le Callet and illustrated by Nancy Peña.

If you like Medea and Greek mythology retellings, I can't recommend it enough. It doesn't make any drastic changes to the original myth, but the writing is very touching and the illustrations are, obviously, gorgeous.

#Tagamemnon #Greek mythology #bande dessinée #Medea #Médée #Nancy Peña #Blandine Le Callet #BD #French #Illustrations

simply-a-dream

“don’t take it personally” how would you like me to take it then? professionally? romantically? academically?

creative-anchorage

suriandtaal

frontmansdefender

wigginsgolf on instagram

baddywronglegs

A friend wondered why he hadn't heard back from a potential client after he emailed them following what he thought was a promising meeting.

Checked the email he'd sent them.

"It was nice to meet you toady."

Ah that'd be it.

#Crying #Please please universe please spare me these today and forever #Unless someone actually knows to reply Amd left no crumbs #Then it's fine <3

wearethekat

December Book Reviews: The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed

I saw this book on the site formerly known as tordotcom's best books of 2024 list and immediately went to check it out from the library because the premise was so enticing. Alefret has been tortured in prison for months for being a key leader in the pacifist movement against his country's endless unwinnable war. Until a general approaches him and makes him an offer—help a spy enter the enemy's city, and Alefret might be able to end the war and its endless violence.

The Siege of Burning Grass was a bitter, brutal novel, and I loved every bit of it. It immediately reminded me not of anything in the SFF canon, but of Alleg's The Question (the account of a journalist who was kidnapped by the French in Algeria and tortured). From the author's bibliography, it looks like her inspiration comes from farther north—she cites multiple nonfiction works on the siege of Leningrad—but you get the idea. Alefret comes from a city which is devastated to the degree that its people are running out of rats to eat. Alefret himself is in equally rough shape. He spends the entire narrative struggling to focus through excruciating pain, as he had a leg blown off by his own side prior to his capture. In an extra surreal twist, the sadistic prison doctor has experimented on him and burdened him with a cage of genetically modified wasps that sting his leg periodically in an attempt to regrow the limb.

Ultimately, this isn't a book about spies, or about anyone winning the war. It's about Alefret's grim, stubborn conviction that violence is wrong, pitted against the unrelenting machine of war, which follows him around in the form of his fanatically doctrinal prison guard, Qhudur. In a world where both sides explicitly despise him as a freak and a monster for his size and deformities, where there are no good actions, what is the right choice for Alefret to make? Mohamed doesn't offer too many answers, but she asks some excellent questions along the way.

Highly recommended if you're looking for a SFF book about war, but not an easy or a light read.

sacredwhores

Akira Kurosawa - High and Low (1963)

apesoformythoughts

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

— P.G. Wodehouse