oh! finches

Oliver, he/they

[ohpannoinno]

Alla Horska's Map of Ukraine (1960, 1970)

[martyfive]

nothing to worry about; carry on

[algorithmist]

[triviallytrue]

The rare excellent piece of writing on AI

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

[tiredqueertranarchist]

[philcollinsenjoyer]

saying this in a soft tone but i dislike this presentation of artemis 2 in the least political way possible as a wholesome and uncomplicated win for humanity as a whole like it's not american propagandism of the highest and most vulgar degree

[voicelessv]

"For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

[pathsofart]

The painting is titled "Life (triptych) - Returning" (also known as "Return" or "Повернення" in Ukrainian).

This artwork is the final part of a celebrated triptych by the Ukrainian artist Fedir Krychevsky (also spelled Thodor Krytchevsky). The full triptych, titled "Life" ("Життя" in Ukrainian), consists of three parts: "Love", "Family", and "Return".

Key details about the painting:

Artist: Fedir Krychevsky

Title: Life (triptych) - Returning

Date: Painted between 1925 and 1927

Style: A prominent example of Ukrainian modernism, synthesizing Art Nouveau elements with traditional Ukrainian religious painting

Location: The original is held in the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv

Subject: The "Return" panel allegorically depicts the return of a son from war to his family, symbolizing hope for a new life

[silverfox66]

I adore this recent trend (if that's the right word) of letting an orchestra play classical music on a festival. It's magical to see thousands of festival-goers going absolutely wild on Beethoven. Mosh/circlepits, crowd surfing. It's wonderful to see the orchestra and the audience having the time of their lives.

[tyrannosaurus-rex]

They have to keep it on easy going Beethoven like Ode to Joy here to ensure a more docile response. They cant play In the Hall of the Mountain King cause they were already burning down venues when Grieg dropped that one back in 1875, today there would be a radioactive crater.

[paulnewoman]

Gay USA (1977) dir. Arthur J. Bressan Jr.

[ledbythreads]

The text is from a poem by Black Lesbian poet Pat Parker (pictured) . My copy is from Naming The Waves Contemporary Lesbian Poetry - ed Christian McEwan 1988.

[everydaylouie]

St. Jerome

[guooey]

Patrick Ness, More Than This

[ravenlynclemens]

calvin and hobbes

[rocktopussy]

[pomme-poire-peche]

"You misspelled Weltanschauung" is one of the funniest punchlines I've ever encountered.

[blessedbycoyotes]

[werothegreat]

one of my faves

[dittoexodus]

[crispy-ghee]

There's a book that we had in our house growing up that I was obsessed with as a kid. It was just called "PAKISTAN: PAINTINGS BY LIN YONG AND SU HUA" and it was an art book of 100+ paintings/sketches by two Chinese artists who travelled thru Pakistan in 1978 and 1981, a sort of travelogue of their trip, and to little-kid me, it was some of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I have no idea why we had that book, but I would stare at it for hours, and it made me wish I could draw/paint/do whatever it was that these artists had managed to do.

Anyway, we've moved house a bunch of times and I lost track of the book and haven't seen it for probably two decades now. But I think about it now and again, and had struggled to find it over the years, but I finally, finally got my hands on a copy of my own and i want to cry haha

I was afraid that maybe the art isn't as good as I remembered, being just a kid and all, but I cracked it open and nope, it hits me just the way it used to. Maybe even more now. It's so fucking pretty. Have some random pages:

[crispy-ghee]

Sure! Have some more portraits from the book

[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.

[doctahchang]

my favourite ukrainian artist oleksandr murashko :) need to chomp on his artworks so bad just to be able to work with colour like that

[greelin]

how the hell do people work full time AND work out. and also eat. i feel like a dvd player

[theesteppenwolf]

Somber Agnes and The Serpent

[boppinbobby]

scifi is when there's cubes. the more cubes there are the more scifier it is

[the-grimsqueaker]

Fantasy is when there's orbs. The more orbs there are the more fantasier it is

[lissuin-nin]

cosmic horror is when there's polyhedrons. the more polyhedrons, the more maddening it is.

[sapphicides]

in honor of black history month 2025, i’ve put together a list of books written by black sapphic authors for you to read in the month of february

non-fiction essays/memoirs:

all about love: new visions by bell hooks

black lesbian in white america by anita cornwell

sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde

mouths of rain: an anthology of black lesbian thought by briona simone jones

blues legacies and black feminism by angela davis

does your mama know?: an anthology of black lesbian coming out stories by lisa c. moore

fiction:

the color purple by alice walker

loving her by ann allen shockley

the gilda stories by jewelle gomez

in another place, not here by dionne brand

pomegranate by helen elaine lee

the summer we got free by mia mckenzie

these letters end in tears by musih tedji xaviere

dead in long beach, california by venita blackburn

girl, woman, other by bernadine evaristo

young adult:

escaping mr. rochester by l.l. mckinney

this ravenous fate by hayley dennings

faebound by saraa el-arifa

so let them burn by kamilah cole

where sleeping girls lie by faridah àbíké-íyímídé

adult:

honey girl by morgan rogers

the deep by rivers solomon

sweet vengeance by viano oniomoh

come back (love concealed) by terri ronald

house of hunger by alexis henderson

short stories:

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw

additional info:

-> “why wasn’t this book listed?” probably because it wasn’t black sapphic-centric, the author isn’t a black sapphic themself, or i just simply haven’t heard of it! so feel free to add on if it meets those two criteria

many of these books require trigger warnings, especially some of the older ones that are more likely to feature racial struggles of the time. please do your due diligence and search for tws if you want to read them!

please feel free to add onto this list in the rbs or comments! happy black history month