#horatio lyle

[lorientours]

Man just reread The Obsidian Dagger by Catherine Webb and I know it’s a children’s book with an online fandom of probably like 5 active ppl but the chemistry btw Lyle / Feng Darin? Absolutely insane. Can’t believe I forgot about 1 weird spy who follows Lyle n Co around for a while and feeds his dog ginger biscuits. He really was doing it all. The greater good moral compass vs Lyle’s more rigid morality *chefs kiss* .

[uovoc]

"Lin Zi drifted between worlds, enjoying every second of confusion she sowed in her wake" I've had Lin for 2 pages and I love her already this lady-shaped being is living the ideal life of human tourism

[beastlyanachronism]

Top 5 Ask Game

Top 5 Things you think are Criminally Underrated!

I was tagged by @wolfiejimi for this interesting theme, which really gave me pause for thought. I’ll list my Underrated Things here, and then stick the explanations under the cut.

1. PubCrawler (if you’re a scientist then trust me, you NEED this!)

2. The Horatio Lyle books by Catherine Webb

3. Litolff’s Scherzo

4. The Sheffield Banker, a.k.a. The Case of the Man who was Wanted, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche

5. And All is Said, a really short Star Trek TOS fic

1. PubCrawler is an online service that checks for new scientific publications every day. Basically, you give it your email address and tell it what combinations of keywords you’re interested in. If anything is published on PubMed or GenBank with those keywords, you get a notification by email. It’s extremely simple to use and to fine-tune, and it’s just so handy! Yet very few people seem to know about it. (Gmail tends to think the emails look dodgy, but that’s just because PubCrawler is a very simple not-for-profit automated service set up by a group of academics in Dublin.)

2. The Horatio Lyle books by Catherine Webb

I adored these when I was about 14. A series of four books aimed at young teenagers. 

Horatio Lyle is a Victorian scientist-inventor-detective who does NOT believe in magic, which is unfortunate because evil people with magic powers are trying to take over the world. He accidentally sort-of-adopts two children: a “reformed” (oh yeah?) pickpocket named Tess, and the refined and repressed son of an earl, Thomas. This trio has to save the day using science (mostly of the explosive sort). There are cameo appearances from real-life Victorians.

OK, they’re a bit madcap. The plots are unbelievable and sometimes a little hard to follow. BUT. The writing is astonishing. It’s very funny, but also amazingly poetic at times, especially in the second (and best) book, The Obsidian Dagger. The descriptive passages have a Dylan Thomas feel and they read like a love-letter to the London of 1864.

3. Litolff’s Scherzo

Now I’m not a connoisseur of classical music, but this piece belongs with those other famous pieces that everyone just knows, even if they don’t know the name of them. But hardly anybody knows of this one, and I’ve never even heard it in an ad!

It’s basically a one-hit wonder from the 19th century. It’s the most liquid and upbeat piano piece EVER. It’s as if you took a sunlit stream babbling through a sunny meadow, and distilled it into music. It’s how you feel when you’re inspired. Give it a listen. My favourite version is here.

4. The Sheffield Banker, a.k.a. The Case of the Man who was Wanted

This Sherlock Holmes story was found among Conan Doyle’s documents after his death and was at first thought to be an unpublished story by Doyle himself. It then turned out to be the work of a man called Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Doyle with the view of a collaboration.

I came across it in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Penguin Books]. If you read up on it, everyone dismisses it as a mediocre pastiche that doesn’t live up to the canon.

Well, I consider it canon. It’s more enjoyable than several of ACD’s stories. In fact, it has the best Holmes-Lestrade interactions of any SH story I’ve read.

Lestrade starts off as self-assured as usual:

Lestrade gave me a wink for which I would dearly have liked to have knocked him down, for I could see that he disbelieved my friend.

but of course he winds up baffled. There is a delightful moment when he shows up at 221B and explains that the man he was supposed to capture seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Lestrade’s face [...] bore a look of the most hopeless bewilderment I ever saw, and I fancy my own must have pretty well matched it, but Holmes threw himself back in his easy chair, with his long thin legs stuck straight out in front of him, his whole frame literally shaking with silent laughter. "What conclusion have you come to?" he gasped at length. "What steps do you propose to take next?"

"I've no idea. Who could know what to do? The whole thing is impossible, perfectly impossible; it's an insoluble mystery. I came to you to see if you could, by any chance, suggest some entirely fresh line of inquiry upon which I might begin to work."

"Well," said Holmes, cocking his eye mischievously at the bewildered Lestrade, "I can give you Booth's present address, if it will be of any use to you?"

"His what!" cried Lestrade.

And then of course Holmes solves the case, and there is a heart-warming moment:

Lestrade rose. "Mr. Holmes, you're a brick," he said, with more real feeling than I have ever seen him show before.

The whole story is Holmes at his sassiest and snarkiest. I mean what more could you want? It’s available online here.

5. And All is Said, by ivory_leigh

This is the most underrated Star Trek fic that I’m aware of. It only has a kudos of 83 on AO3, and yet it manages to summarise the whole mcspirk relationship... in just 434 words!

"Underrated things” is a great topic for this sort of ask game, so if anyone else would like to list their underrated things, consider yourself tagged! Maybe @educatedinyellow​ and @stormphoenix​, if you’re interested? Also @wolfiejimi​ maybe you’d like to do this one yourself too?

[uovoc]

One of the most delightful things about Doomsday Machine is that none of the main cast is NormalTM but all of them think that they are the sane one and the others are deeply bizarre weirdos. The second most delightful thing is that any of them can be either the straight man or the funny man depending on who they're with

[uovoc]

Lin Zi and Horatio Lyle is a wonderful combination. Horatio has a very strong internal moral compass and will not hesitate to deploy acids, explosives, and voltage to uphold what's right. Lin's internal compass is oriented along axes of charm-strange and she does whatever the fuck she wants and humans and tseiqin can eat her entire ass. They are both insane in different ways that make them each other's insane person.

[flo-nelja]

usedempyrealthunder:

looks at your top two tropes. NOW I KNOW WHY YOU SHIP LIN/HORATIO

[good guys and bad guys working together / erotic mind control]

Also

human/non-human

science-coded character/magic-coded character

I was doomed okay? ;-)

[flo-nelja]

Horatio Lyle!

The first character I first fell in love with: Horatio himself, I guess. Or maybe Tess? She was onscreen first?The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: ThomasThe character everyone else loves that I don’t: I’m not sure. I like Feng Darin but I don’t love him like some friends in fandomThe character I love that everyone else hates: I think poor Mercy Chaste was unfairly writtenThe character I used to love but don’t any longer: I can’t see. Oh, cheating: I don’t like their version of Karl Marx at all, but I like the real one.The character I would totally smooch: Lin Zi OMGThe character I’d want to be like: HoratioThe character I’d slap: People I dislike are Not Safe For Slapping in this work, usually. A pairing that I love: Horatio/Lin ! A pairing that I despise: Not sure. I don’t like the idea of Horatio/Thomas that much.

[flo-nelja]

Imagine Horatio discovering tumblr Zodiac posts

Well, of course he moans it’s nonsense. But like anyone he can’t help looking at his sign. And he’s satisfied because it doesn’t work at all. Except sometimes it works and he makes stats to prove that it works exactly as well as random choice.

The sometimes makes him the remark it’s not astrology, it’s an aastrology parody. He grudgingly replies that astrology nerds are so irrational that it’s hard to make the difference. But he’s more at peace now.