Seeking the MacGuffin

I'm a voracious reader who occasionally surfaces from devouring books long enough to get hooked on a tv show.

[depsidase]

[pirateprincessjess]

I was told that I’d get used to not having a headphone jack. I still want a fucking headphone jack. I hate that phones don’t have them. It’s stupid and awful and I hate it

[beggars-opera]

Everyone in this family is hilarious no notes

[ruffboi-mags]

#OH. JOE HILL IS A REAL DUDE. #I did think Mr. nashville tenesee was doing a funny lol

I am cracking up so hard bc it lowkey implies Mr. Joe Hills (coming at you like he always does from Nashville, Tennessee) might not be a real dude.

[henk-heijmans]

A natural wave is formed on Lake Michigan when the riptide meets the incoming tide and explodes upward, 2014 - by Michael Bernhardt, American

[parkchanwoohoo]

This kid is so fucking good holy shit. I love how into it the audience is, too

[splend-42]

If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.

[hotroadkill]

collection

[ultimomizu]

How my dad decided to tell me that our guests had left the house

[kylieminvogue]

"COLUMBO" S1E5 - "Dead Weight"

[probuccalfat]

staying silly is all i got left like i got no money no prospects i’m a burden to my parents and i’m frightened

[parentheticalaside]

My most old-school internet opinion is bring back chunky scroll bars! I don't want some scroll bar so discreet I can't even find the fucking thing. I want a nice Windows 98-level of obviousness.

[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

[headspace-hotel]

If you design a shampoo bottle that you can't stand upside down so the last of the shampoo will run into the top of the bottle where you can squirt it out, what the hell are you doing?

[leosmiserables]

obsessed with this bookshop in stratford-upon-avon having WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE listed as a ”local author”

[my-dailydreams]

[thememedaddy]

[velartis]

Franz Kafka, 1912

[captainragtag]

if you're calling a recipe a "one pot" recipe, I better not find in there that you want me to remove something from the pot and put it aside. you think I'm letting that slide on a technicality? know your audience

[song-of-the-spheres]

I'm re-reading the Vorkosigan Saga for the first time in a long time (I think it's been maybe 15 years since I read the earlier books) and I remembered how much I liked them, but I forgot how feral they made me. sorry to anyone in my general orbit for the next 12-14 months.

Lois McMaster Bujold really did go: here have space opera shenanigans paired with an exploration of societal upheaval and intergenerational trauma, told from the perspective of a family composed entirely of people who are deeply unhinged. A+, no notes.

[song-of-the-spheres]

I think Tumblr is sleeping on Aral Vorkosigan tbh. fascinating set of life experiences that HAS to fuck one up in new and inventive ways.

witnessed most of his family being murdered at age 11 and two years later his new emperor hands him a blade to help chop up the old emperor who ordered it. obsessed with honor and yet is constantly either flung into situations that force him to override it or lapses in his attempts to strive for it. bisexual and almost certainly weird and repressed about it at first given Barrayar's general cultural milieu, his upbringing, and his first(?) boyfriend turning out to be a sadistic sociopath. kills his first wife's two lovers in impetuous duels and twenty years later confesses this to to the next woman he proposes to within days of meeting her. repeatedly escapes consequences for the times he genuinely fucks up - and he knows this! - and gets ripped to shreds for things he tried to prevent. keeps getting handed increasing levels of political power and he hates it so so much. there are several things wrong with him but crucially I don't think they're the things he thinks.

and we never get his POV directly. 10/10 guy to me, I want to study him under a microscope.

[song-of-the-spheres]

Cordelia kind of wins the award for Most Normal by default, but a) the bar is on the floor, and b) this is also a woman who has, in order: risked her own life to help resolve an attempted military overthrow of an enemy commander that she met like a week ago, left her entire former life behind in part to protect the political secrets of a planet she had one single personal connection to, charged into an occupied city in the middle of a coup for a guerilla raid with THREE people to rescue her kidnapped son, ordered the extremely mentally unwell guy who follows her every order to chop off the head of the guy who did it, and tossed the head in the middle of a conference table to make a point.

I do not think Miles got his impulsive streak from Aral, is what I'm saying.

[song-of-the-spheres]

Often in books, especially with a younger/teenage protagonist, there's an inciting incident, something external that either gets the narrator into trouble or gets them involved with the plot. everything that happens in Warrior's Apprentice is the direct result of Miles just deciding of his own free will and with zero provocation to do the most bonkers shit imaginable. yeah I'm gonna go rescue this random drunk-off-his-ass pilot I've never met who's holding an empty ship hostage so he can keep flying. he has diplomatic immunity now. yeah I'm going to mortgage my family's irradiated land to buy the ship. yeah I'm going to take a cargo run and now the client thinks I run a real mercenary outfit. at no point will I correct him.

this does make sense for him as a character because he has a complex family legacy to live up to AND a girl to impress, however. the entire plot of this book happens solely because of who this ADHD 17-year-old is as a person, and that is kind of beautiful.