Apple Pie and Gunsmoke

Cancer. Astrology fiend and aspirational spiritualist. Degree in English and French. Film/TV lover.

[ororomunroedontpullout]

“Women don’t have rights in Iran, they are homophobic in Iran!”

A black woman’s dying body was used to incubate a fetus because the state said so and the Supreme Court, regurgitating debunked talking points, ruled that trans kids could be denied gender affirming care that is proven to save lives. Does that justify a foreign power bombing New Jersey indiscriminately? Like some of y’all don’t give a fuck about LGBTQ Iranians or women in that country because I never saw a people get free through just having their shit blown up

[helenvaughans]

[importantandunavoidable]

i love watching an extremely famous tv show 6-60 years after its peak popularity and being like "whoa this is pretty good. has anyone heard about this"

[willgrahamscock]

why would you ever outsource fun to chatgpt? are you stupid? you can make mediocre shit by yourself too.

[willgrahamscock]

you're missing out on all the crazy euphoric moments where you execute an idea flawlessly, sending it to your friends and feeling the genuine happiness at their reactions to something you made authentically. you're robbing yourself of something beautiful.

and I get it, writers block, artists block, depression can really be terrible, but once you break out of it (and you will) it will feel like climbing Mount Everest.

[willgrahamscock]

peace and love on planet earth! you are saving the environment AND you’re cool!

[nixiecat]

[girl who would like to take a break from being a person voice] yeah no I'm just a little tired today

[homunculus-argument]

Saw a post about how halal and kosher meat will likely be the only reliably safe options in the US because their safety and cleanliness standards aren't dictated by what's the barest legal minimum that government food safety regulations demand.

So you're like 5 years away from "ever notice how the musulmans and jews never get sick from bad meat? clearly this is proof that they are poisoning us" right now.

[creature-wizard]

For those of you who don't know, Jewish people had fewer fatalities during the Black Death because they practiced better hygiene than Christians. In response, a number of Christians began to speculate and assert that Jews were actually spreading the disease by poisoning wells, which led to violence committed against Jews. The Wikipedia page on the persecution of Jews during the Black Death has more information on this. If you see this old conspiracy theory pop up in a new form like this, do not fall for it.

[physicsgoblin]

Everyone finds that one random unposed snapshot of their mother from 30 years ago where she is literally the most beautiful woman you've ever seen in your life

[oldhsposts]

[earlgraytay]

It's kind of incredible just how much the Country House Murder Mystery genre is, at its roots, a reaction to WWI and the social change that sprang from it.

[lilietsblog]

go on

[earlgraytay]

So I've been healing up from surgery, meaning I've been catching up on my TBR pile, and my three great loves are a) middle grade anything, b) SF/F with good worldbuilding and characterization, c) murder mysteries without too much grit or grime.

In the pursuit of c), I've been playing Ace Attorney, but I've also been reading whatever Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers I can grab off Project Gutenberg. Since it's exclusively the ones in the public domain, it's their oldest stuff- pre 1924.

And the thing about all of these 20s murder mysteries is that they're incredibly haunted by The Great War, in the same way that most mysteries from the 2000s are haunted by the War on Terror or many mysteries coming out now are Haunted by COVID.

Lord Peter Wimsey has screaming dissociative PTSD flashbacks from the trenches. In Murder on the Links, Poirot is a displaced person- Belgium isn't a safe place to be an aging police inspector at the moment- the narrator has been discharged with an injury, and one of the main suspects is working as an army nurse.

And like... you can pull a couple threads through here. But if we're talking about the stereotypical Country House Murder Mystery- the two big ones are a) the end of the Old Order, and b) you always find the body and know the cause of death.

A) is pretty obvious- the death of a patriarch (or matriarch) is a microcosm of the slow decline of the British nobility. It's a way to give the sense of "Everything Your Worldview Depended On Has Fallen Apart" a face. Every dirty secret we don't speak of has come to light, all at once; every lie that supported The Way Things Are is revealed for what it really is. (Dulce et decorum est, anyone?) The local lord is dead, and no one is going to replace him. The world has irrevocably changed.

B) is something that @bespokeminutiae pointed out to me when I mentioned this- in a country house murder mystery, you always know where the body is, and you always know what happened to it. In a world where a lot of people lost loved ones in some far off place, without getting to see the body or say goodbye? That's a hugely comforting fantasy.

(Incidentally, this is why Knives Out is the best Country House Murder Mystery of the past 25 years- it understands that some themes are inherent to the genre and says something new that still engages with those themes.)

[soleminisanction]

Ooooo, this conversation continues very interestingly with the Japanese literary equivalent -- honkaku-ha (本格派), the "orthodox school" of "classical whodunnits," which by definition followed the rules of detective fiction codified in the west by the Golden Age writers and gained prominence just before, during and after World War 2.

I say during and after because that's when Edogawa Ranpo was active, by far the most famous and prominent Japanese mystery writer of the era. Ranpo started in the 1920s and wrote well into the 50s. He's best known in the west for his recurring detective character, Kogoro Akechi, who's basically the Japanese Sherlock Holmes -- complete with being mostly an urban character who lives and works in and around Tokyo.

Though I'm personally more familiar with Yokomizo Seishi and his Kousuke Kindaichi mysteries, which started in the aftermath of the war and hew very close to the Country House Murder Mysteries, with the twist that said country houses tend to be former samurai estates on tiny isolated islands or in rural mountain villages. Kindaichi himself is also a detective much more in the vein of Dame Agatha, being a young war vet with some odd ticks that make people underestimate him (he has a stutter and always looks frumpy because he scratches his head really hard when he's thinking) but nonetheless solving his cases with keen observation and patient deduction.

And in the same way, you can feel the haunting presence of the war and the dissolution of old social orders. In place of declining British nobility, you have the crumbling remnants of samurai families. There's a nine-year timeskip between Kindaichi's first and second novels, during which he gets drafted and winds up in a POW camp; he stumbles into like the next three cases just trying to bring his dead war buddies' last messages back to their families. And there's this looming specter of westernization, what it means for the old traditions, which should be preserved and if it might not be better to let some of them die.

One thing honkaku-ha introduced to the mix that sets them apart from the western tradition is a tone and aesthetic taken from Japanese horror. Where western mysteries can be familiar and almost comforting enough to earn the label 'cozy,' honkaku-ha are often stark and cold, with murders defined by their violence or grotesque stagings and the stories themselves seeped in elements of supernatural or erotic overtones (Edogawa in particular had a fascinating friendship with an anthropologist known for his research on the history of homosexuality in Japan). The two best-known Kindaichi novels, The Inugami Curse and Village of the Eight Graves, toe the line between classical whodunnits and gothic horror.

It's a very interesting contrast, given that this (honkaku-ha) is very much a genre that's always been in part about opening a line of conversation with the western tradition, to see how the threads of influence get carried over.

[why-bless-your-heart]

Today I cried a little bit because I remembered that when Beethoven conducted his ninth symphony for the first time he got a standing ovation and one of the sopranos had to turn him around to see the audience. 

[why-bless-your-heart]

I have never recovered from this illustration by Scott Cameron for Barbara Nichol’s “Beethoven Lives Upstairs.”

[malglories]

😭😭😭

[aisforarthur]

[morganbritton132]

Need a 911 fic where Buck hits his head and is disoriented and confused when he wakes up. He thinks him and Eddie are dating.

Not because he has an amnesia or anything, but because Ravi was the one helping jog his memory and nothing Ravi knows about the 118 is right.

[joysmercer]

op your tags 😭

[aetherograph]

No new autism registry, HHS says, walking back NIH director's claim

The federal health department is not creating a new registry of Americans with autism, an HHS official said Thursday.

From Ursula Vernon: Screaming at these people works. They’re fundamentally wimps, we just have to actually DO the screaming instead of preemptively admitting defeat.

I am talking about my fellow Americans, not the Democrats. We actually need to scream, gang, not just complain that Schumer isn’t.

In other words:

[doubleloner]

tag your traumatized man comfort character

[thebiscuiteternal]

just saw that the supreme court voted nine-zip to uphold the court order to "facilitate the return of" kilmar garcia back to the states. do you have any idea how bad you gotta fuck up to get these nine people in particular to all agree you fucked up???

[this-dude-over-here]

in light of Trump's inauguration speech declaring multiple national emergencies that require him to take god-knows-what executive actions immediately, I'd like to remember this chapter of "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder:

[emziess]

Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael "Robby" Rabinavitch The Pitt, 7:00 A.M