Sense and Education

ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.

[senseandeducation]

I just helped save Tinker Bell on #NewPeterWendy! An awesome #PeterPan #WebSeries, watch it now! New episodes today http://thndr.it/1JPA5mV

[mamalazzer]

The Avengers as a Western

Steve is the Sheriff. Clint is his deputy. Tony is the Blacksmith. Natasha runs the Saloon. Bruce is the physician with a split personality and Thor gets into a hell of a lot of tavern brawls.

Together, however, they manage to bring order to the once corrupt town of Triskelion.

[senseandeducation]

Mayor Fury's got his hands full.

[trekgate]

[thetrekkiehasthephonebox]

And that’s the story of how Nichelle Nichols stuck with Star Trek after the first season.

[nyhistory]

January 24,1890: After months of public attention and anticipation, Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, arrives in New York, completing her round-the-world trip in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, beating the pace set in Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in 80 Days.

McLoughlin Bros., Round the World with Nellie Bly [board game], 1890. New-York Historical Society, The Liman Collection, 2000.44.

[beatonna]

Am ace-reporter Nellie Bly board game?  Did I travel back to 1890, and it’s my birthday?

[senseandeducation]

yes yes yes yes yes

[uispeccoll]

Boys and girls alike get into the kitchen to make Long John Silver’s pirate sandwich in this 1950s classic from The Szathmary Culinary Collection.  

Betty Crocker’s Cook book for boys and girls. Illus. by Gloria Kamen.  New York, General Mills, Inc. c1957

See it in the catalog.  Stop by and take a look!

See all of our posts with gifs.

[senseandeducation]

Long John Silver Sandwich!!!!

I love vintage children's cookbooks so much.

[hellaretheothers]

Literature Meme

[6] Prose writers

         [5/6] Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was an English-American playwright and author. She is best known for her children’s stories, in particular Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-6), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911). During the serialization of Little Lord Fauntloroy in St. Nicholas magazine, readers looked forward to new installments. The fashions in the book became popular with velvet Lord Fauntleroy suits being sold, as well as other Fauntleroy merchandise such as velvet collars, playing cards, and chocolates. During a period when sentimental fiction was the norm, and in the United States the “rags to riches” story popular, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a hit; although over the years The Secret Garden has retained the popularity Little Lord Fauntleroy has lost. Her most eminent novels have been adapted into TV and cinema many times.

[sarahreesbrennan]

I have long wished someone would give me moneys to write the scandalous sequel to Little Lord Fauntleroy, Little Lord Gone Wild, in which Cedric goes to Oxford or Cambridge and immediately goes on a GAMBLING TEAR. A Little Princess is genius and The Secret Garden is one of my very favourite books. 

http://sarahreesbrennan.com/extras/childrens-books-fantasy-gothics-happy-endings/

Also that’s not all she wrote!

She wrote the adult novel The Shuttle, in which young American heiress and minx with moxie Betty arrives to an English manor in search of her sister who she suspects is being ill-treated. Finding her sister abused and her nephew disabled and the estate and its tenants in desperate straits all due to the depredations of her wicked and depraved brother-in-law, Betty is like ‘Estate management is a GO! Rehabilitating sister by night and seeing to the roof tiles by day! No abuse on Betty’s watch!’ And there is nearby a proud impoverished yet haughty lord, but they can never be together due to his pride and Betty’s prejudice against the Americans, but then PLAGUE FALLS UPON THE LORD’S ESTATE and of course he takes the tenants into his manor and nurses them but when he falls ill and the bells announcing the lord’s death ring across the moor what is Betty to do? Features also: brother-in-law (!) creepin’ on Betty (!!) on the deserted moor (!!!)

The Shuttle: 

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/506/506-h/506-h.htm

(Free and legal, my friends.)

Not to mention her rather forgotten children’s novel, the Lost Prince. I don’t have time to tell you guys the story of the Lost Prince. My friends have told me that they’ve timed that story, and with actions, it takes almost two hours.

(There’s a character called the Rat and he’s a dreamboat!!!!)

[senseandeducation]

The Lost Prince is THE ACTUAL BEST

Because of how the (thrilling & exciting) version that is currently in print is actually ABRIDGED to take out ALL THE BUDDHISM that Super Patriot Papa Lorestan is going to use to save his Eastern European nation and make it into a city on a hill and a light unto the world FOR BUDDHISM

In my next life, big plans to become a literary sleuth and get the original version back in print and learn all the things about FHB's encounters with and use of Eastern religions.  Because OMG.

[molassesadventures]

Three strong…women? People? Okay, individuals. 

[senseandeducation]

OMG <333

[matterofawesome]

leslielikesthings:

Not that I don’t love the hate-turns-to-love or friendship-turns-to-love or angst-fest-turns-to-love of Austen’s other stories, but it is rather delightfully refreshing to have a hero and heroine who just really LIKE each other through the whole story. _____

I read somewhere once that Northanger Abbey is considered by some to be the less profound of Austen’s novels, maybe due to the fact that she might have written it as read-out-loud material to share with her family. Even so, I like it as much as I like Pride and Prejudice (my favorite one still remains Emma, though) maybe because Catherine and Tilney are so easy to like and you know they like each other practically all through the story (okay, not ALL through the strory but you know what I mean), and that’s quite refreshing indeed! Sometimes I think addapting NA to vlog format would have worked a bit better than Emma, mainly because of the source material’s tone.

[scribblinaway]

I’m pretty sure Lauren Willig wrote a short story (which I have not read because it was published in a larger anthology I didn’t feel like buying even though I own everything else she has published) where this girl Cate is on a “ghost hunters” type show being filmed in Northanger Abbey and I feel like that would be an interesting concept for a vlog JUST SAYIN’.  

[matterofawesome]

That would be soooo awesome! “Catherine Moreland, Ghost Hunter: A Vlog”

[scribblinaway]

And Henry Tilney doesn’t believe in ghosts but he comes along with her anyway because *someone* needs to hold the camera as she runs through the old dark houses…

[matterofawesome]

YES! Can someone make this happen, pleeeeeease?

[clavisa]

I nominate Shipwrecked. Seems like their kind of thing. 

[senseandeducation]

"The Confessions of Catherine Moreland, Twihard" was a thing I really wanted for a while.  I would also watch the ghosthunters one.

[vvendybird]

While watching today’s Emma Approved, I felt like Emma was being very Glinda/Galinda-esque, but then I remembered that Glinda’s makeover of Elphaba was inspired by Clueless, which is an adaptation of Emma, of which Emma Approved is also an adaptation. 

[lbdeffteedubs]

Turtles all the way down.

[senseandeducation]

wait what

[belovedcreation]

Emma Approved AU: Emma is Domino [[inspired by senseandeducation’s post]]

After the success in Sanditon, the town of Highbury partners with Pemberley Digital for a full-scale use of the Domino technology. However, Highbury hasn’t been told about the new and improved Editing Match-Maker Algorithm With Over-Optimized Dominoing Heuristics Of Underdeveloped Social Etiquette  or E.M.M.A.W.O.O.D.H.O.U.S.E for short. When the citizens of Highbury use their new app to communicate with one another, E.M.M.A. is listening in. It isn’t long before she begins to interfere in their daily life, re-routing calls and sending pre-edited clips between pairs that E.M.M.A. has calculated as “optimal for mating”. IT wiz Alex Knightley eventually steps in and corrects E.M.M.A.’s mistakes and teaches her how humans really fall in love — unexpectedly.

[senseandeducation]

Everything I ever dreamed of. 

[ralphannem]

From Emma’s latest post:

Celebrate the timelessness of love

The greatest love stories ever told can be found in the written word.  Sometimes we relate to them, and sometimes we forget that our own stories are just as profound and meaningful.  Do you know which famous love stories or characters remind you of the soon-to-be-married couple?  Let them know you think their love is inspiring with a personalized classic novel.  Simply choose a book, exchange the names of the characters with the names of the couple, and get a professional printed copy to add to their library.  Haven’t we all dreamed of living out a classic novel? Now here’s their chance.

I followed the link, and this was one of the books that was available to be personalized:

[lies]

Turtles Emmas all the way down.

[senseandeducation]

Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.

[senseandeducation]

The "Emma Is Domino" Story

Emma Is Domino was a theory lbdeffteedubs and I spun out of this episode of WTS when Gigi starts noticing the "glitch" in Domino that hones in on romantic tension.  I really wanted them to just run with the meta in-joke that this completely improbable "self-editing video call app" was becoming a sentient A.I. with a love story obsession.

This turned into having PD roll out the post-beta version as Editing Match-Maker Algorithm With Over-Optimized Dominoing Heuristics Of Underdeveloped Social Ettiquette, or E.M.M.A.W.O.O.D.H.O.U.S.E for short.  We talked about all this way before Emma Approved was even announced, and I had a whole headcanon going about how the next series was going to be a touching saga of the E.M.M.A. software trying haplessly to create true love among the citizens of Highbury, who really just wanted to make a goddamn phone call.  Like if OK Cupid had a helpful know-it-all robot at the controls who actively tried to get people to hook up instead of letting them muddle through with only the awkward they create on their own.  (Real life nightmare.  EXCELLENT YouTube.)

E.M.M.A. was going to have an avatar who narrated videos, Gigi-style, in a perky computer voice, and she was going to infiltrate the digital lives of Highburians to orchestrate all kinds of misrouted calls, heavily edited texts, misrouted pianos ordered from Amazon, etc. etc. etc. while trying to understand the foibles of human love.

We also had a whole scenario that combined Domino's Pizza with LBD and a dash of the Hunger Games.  Big data video call surveillance combined with romantic-drama-seeking AI's, basically, that's like my perfect dystopian/utopian media future. 

So.  That is the story of Emma Is Domino. 

[neither-saint-nor-sinner]

Talking about how I'd write things. If I wrote things.

/in case you care.

I think if I were updating the “Frank Churchill” bit of Emma, borrowing from Clueless and making the character queer actually makes a lot of sense.

[Cut for self-indulgent discussions about writing.]

Read More

[senseandeducation]

this times 1,000,000.  I'd love to see a contemporary queer Emma for all of the above reasons, plus...I think it picks up on some of the most interesting notes in Emma's character in the original.  Austen's Emma is willing to be flamboyant and even a little outré at times (especially around Frank).  She's a woman who's privileged enough to do mostly what she wants, but still very deeply (more deeply than she wants to admit, at first) concerned with and bound by the constraining expectations that come with her privilege.  She likes the dangerous libertine feeling she gets from flirting with Frank, which she knows is pushing the boundaries of proper behavior.  But she also stays firmly in control of how far her (pretty tame) wild-child experimentation goes.  She decides before she meets Frank that she's never going to be in love enough with him to marry him, and she doesn't waver from that, and she conscientiously chooses not to let their fling go beyond some ballroom gossip.  And then, fascinatingly, after dabbling in the slightly risqué, she makes the most conventional marriage possible.   In an alternate universe, someone with Emma's trifecta of privilege (handsome, clever, rich), could have moved to the big city and become a scandalous high-society heartbreaker, a Lady Caro even, if she'd wanted to go for it.  But she decides to play it safe.  She stays a big fish in her small pond and falls in love with someone who is socially, economically, and intellectually an unimpeachable match for her.*  Her youthful fooling around with Frank** serves to reinforce the virtue of this ultimately Austen-Approved decision.

1815!Emma's guarded exploration of her romantic/sexual interest in Frank is obviously not at all a perfect analogy to a woman exploring her queer identity in 2013.  BUT! I could see a woman like PD's Emma acknowledging that she has queer attractions and indulging them as "experimentation" or whatever - a little bit salacious to some people, maybe, but safely so, with the idea that she would return to the conventional heteronormative fold as a foregone conclusion. 

It's a little hard for me not to see this as problematic, because a heroine who's willing to toy with the boundaries because she's privileged enough to get away with it but then retreats back into the norm for her prescribed happy ending is...my gut instinct is to get judgy about the way that "youthful experimentation by a good girl" is used to marginalize other experiences and reinforce the conventional idea of the "good girl" and her reward.  But I have this same problem with Austen's Emma as well.  It's annoying that Emma only gets away with being such a brat because she's so privileged, but then she gets her conformist happy ending anyway and I kind of can't help rooting for her to get it.  Rereading the book in preparation for Emma Approved got me grappling with this.  If nothing else, it's made me think about the way privilege carries its own kinds of constraints.  Not even constraints like silken fetters, either, where the poor-little-rich-girl is deprived of her agency by her golden cage (not that that can't happen, that's just not Emma's deal) - but the constraints that are actually the result of a person's own agency, deciding to take a more conventional, less queer, less risky path in order to maintain the benefits of their privilege.  And that being okay.

I agree that PD's storytelling does not come close to this level of nuance in dealing with either its source material or its own reading of the characters.***  But thinking about how PD is handling these stories has made ME much more nuanced and critically aware of how these stories - these stories that are the bedrock of Anglophone Western heteronormative romantic conventions - work, and of all the very nuanced things they have to say.

(A lot of that is due much more to the thoughtful and sophisticated PD Hyperanalysis Posse of Tumblr than it is to Pemberley Digital itself, probably.  Thanks, yall.)

*Sure, he's her much-older brother-in-law. But ehhhh nbd.

**I am also still convinced that 1815!Emma had a thing for Harriet you can't tell me different

***I wouldn't be *shocked* if Frank and Jane end up a gay couple in Emma Approved, but I'd be a little surprised, and I don't think they've got the chops to queer Emma herself.  I also still maintain that the REALLY bold choice here would have been for Emma herself to be Domino.

[humansofnewyork]

"What are their superpowers?" "This one can talk any enemy to death. And this one can knock her sister over." ———————— 2 DAYS LEFT: http://amzn.to/10sbtW5

[humansaregreat]

EMILY LOOK

[senseandeducation]

i AM DEAD

[fitocracy]

Another Oldtime Strongwoman: Charmion. Could probably bench press your house, nbd.

[senseandeducation]

The story about having a couple of dudes as part of the act to catch her clothes so that the audience would know to “enjoy” the performance instead of being “scandalized” is fantastic.

Also the hat, let’s talk about the hat.

[senseandeducation]

AND HERE IS THE VIDEO OF CHARMION PERFORMING OHMG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fapVB35E0FQ

[fitocracy]

Another Oldtime Strongwoman: Charmion. Could probably bench press your house, nbd.

[senseandeducation]

The story about having a couple of dudes as part of the act to catch her clothes so that the audience would know to "enjoy" the performance instead of being "scandalized" is fantastic.

Also the hat, let's talk about the hat.

[dendroica]

Were the First Artists Mostly Women?

Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma.

Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female.

"There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time," said Snow, whose research was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. "People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."

Archaeologists have found hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls across the world. Because many of these early paintings also showcase game animals—bison, reindeer, horses, woolly mammoths—many researchers have proposed that they were made by male hunters, perhaps to chronicle their kills or as some kind of “hunting magic” to improve success of an upcoming hunt. The new study suggests otherwise.

"In most hunter-gatherer societies, it’s men that do the killing. But it’s often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are," Snow said. "It wasn’t just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around."

Experts expressed a wide range of opinions about how to interpret Snow’s new data, attesting to the many mysteries still surrounding this early art.

"Hand stencils are a truly ironic category of cave art because they appear to be such a clear and obvious connection between us and the people of the Paleolithic," said archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England. "We think we understand them, yet the more you dig into them you realize how superficial our understanding is."

(Read more at National Geographic)

[lies]

One of the main lessons I took away from taking a bunch of (outside my major, but really interesting to me) archaeology courses in school was the sense that there are a lot of assumptions baked into many archaeological interpretations. That makes a story like this exciting to me, because if confirmed it confronts us with the need to try to set aside our biases if we’re going to see what the data is trying to tell us.