Janaina Medeiros
Cosmic Funnies
shark vs the universe
YOU ARE THE REASON
JBB: An Artblog!
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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taylor price
titsay
#extradirty
One Nice Bug Per Day
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oozey mess
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Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane
sheepfilms
RMH
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@ireneselina
seeing people say "this trope has been done to death" as if that's ever stopped anyone from eating bread. BREAD HAS BEEN DONE TO DEATH FOR LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND WE STILL WANT MORE BREAD. write your chosen one AU. write your coffee shop meet-cute. write your 47th iteration of "there was only one bed" because guess what??? we're still hungry.
The Batman (2022) dir. Matt Reeves
David Burke as Dr Watson in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Rest in Peace Dear David Burke 💙
One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.
By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.
His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.
RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.
~*~
To read a longer and moving tribute, please check out the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere website: https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2026/05/david-burke-first-watson-of-granada-era.html. The tribute includes a link to the interview that the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast conducted with David and his wife a few years ago.
evil is still here
Hot Dogs, They Ate
Art by Brandon Bird
filter on ao3 that only shows fic by women in their 40s who has a degree and works an office job and probably leaves authors notes that are like “sorry for the wait on the chapter guys! i had to give birth to my third kid😂”
we've all become the erotica writing secretary from 10 Things i Hate About You.
gif by @joliecomer
I am proud to be the Allison Janney of fandom thanks
Me reading another Agatha Christie novel: I wonder what will happen in THIS one 👀
Agatha Christie: A murder
Me: Ooooh 👀👀👀
Murder She Wrote, S06E04
The ability to feel mixed emotions is a sign of maturity. If people can blend contradictory emotions together, such as happiness with guilt, or anger with love, it shows they can encompass life's emotional complexity. Experienced together, opposing feelings tame each other. Once people develop the ability to feel different emotions at the same time, the world ripens into something richer and deeper. Instead of having a single, intense, one-dimensional emotional reaction, they can experience several different feelings that reflect the nuances of the situation. However, the reactions of emotionally immature people tend to be black-and-white, with no gray areas. This rules out ambivalence, dilemmas, and other emotionally complicated experiences.
-from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Spelling mistakes? I guarantee neither of us saw those at 3:00 AM Monday Morning.
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.
go on
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.)
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.
