When Lina Khan is president it will be illegal to say "your package has shipped" when a shipping label has been created and nothing yet has happened with your actual package.
Okay I see what you all were talking about when you said wait till you get to Mirror Dance. Omg.
Lord Mark Vorkosigan. What an icon. Mark who was built as a weapon while in captivity and becomes a tool on his very own initiative only needs four to seven people to care about him as a human before he remakes his entire self and becomes a goddamn hero. Mark figures out how to do Internal Family Systems therapy on himself while being tortured horribly for five days. Hobbies include personal finance, scheming, and responding "round is a shape" when Aral and Miles say to get in shape. By the end he's setting up to the the Mycroft to Miles' Sherlock.
Mark suffers so much abuse and makes So Many Bad Decisions with So Many Consequences and only to end up literally writhing on the floor in the Unprecedented Agony of Being Perceived and Loved. (This is the part that broke me… I saw it coming and was like: Oh noooo, this part is gonna break me. And then it did, and it was perfect.)
Also, the entire, pervasive, complete and total Cordelia-ness of this novel whether or not she's in the room or even on the planet. She gives Mark the assignment of figuring out how to be Mark and there we goooo. And even after Miles has died and gone amnesiac, there's Cordelia's voice: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR BABY BROTHER?? This is the thing that gets the memory cascade going! It's Cordelia. And she's got Elena too: "But mostly because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son... Mark... she'll mean you." It's Cordelia All The Way Down and I am HERE for it.
I am also really... happy for Cordelia that Mark is here. Because Mark has Cordelia's number in a way that I'm not sure either Aral or Miles does, as deeply as they do know her and adore her. Until Mark, maybe Gregor is the only other person who can even begin to read her the way she reads everybody else (and Mark clocks that too!) and Gregor is way too busy being emperor to give Cordelia the runaround she deserves.
I'm very excited to see more of Miles and Mark together. And also if there are fun consequences of Elena Bothari-Jesek casually breaking the centuries-old Barrayaran glass ceiling by swearing as an armswoman! And also I wanna meet more of the Koudelka sisters please!
wait i just found out you can be nice to people and be their friend i thought we had to kill them all cause i was raised in a lab to be a living weapon
Just finished Brothers in Arms and AHHHHHHH IT'S SO GOOD. An incomplete (due to So Many Things) and disordered (due to excited flailing) list of things I love about this book:
-- that LMB is the kind of writer who uses words like wight and swive in a sci-fi novel
-- that Himbo Cousin Ivan is the hostage! Himbo Cousin Ivan makes an excellent damsel tied to the railroad tracks. so good.
-- Duv Galeni coping with grief through nigh-superhuman violence (I wanna see him again asap)
-- the fact that one of Miles' most far-fetched lies yet turns out to be an actual far-fetched plot that is occurring
-- the fact that said far-fetched lie throws otherwise perceptive people off the scent of the actual plot (Miles losing at winning again, womp womp)
-- Miles and Mark reading one another for filth over and over again from grand plans to the minutest gestures and both being salty about it for different reasons
-- the part where Miles manically recites all of Richard III to thwart truth drugs (choice of play is on the nose annnd I love it sooo much... also it's a minor miracle that this is Miles' first go with fast penta)
-- Miles' continued preference for tall stronk women (well done, short king.)
-- Elli Quinn's "Gods, I've fallen in love with a man who thinks he's an onion."
-- Elli Quinn's summary refusal of Miles' proposal of marriage
-- Elli Quinn's enthusiastic consent immediately thereafter to be Miles' Bodyguard with Benefits
-- Elli Quinn's saving evvverybody's asses and possibly averting millions of deaths by being extremely competent at what was supposed to be a mundane task, that Miles forgot he even told her to do
-- Elli Quinn's whole deal tbh
-- the fact that even though Cordelia is physically worlds away she is present in this book in a Deep Spiritual Sense: "My mother's theology actually... persons before principles."
-- "Yeah, invisible, like air. If it disappeared you'd hardly miss it. Till the next time you came to inhale." (!!!!!!!!!)
-- "He yields to logic. My mother is one of the few people I know who has almost completely conquered the will to be stupid."
-- "MILES, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR BABY BROTHER??" (I neeeeeeed to see Cordelia and Mark meet! aaaaghghgh)
-- the fact that Commodore Tung spends the entire novel in Brazil eating Mu Shu pork, having amorous adventures, and presumably drinking fancy little drinks with umbrellas in them
Posh Fancy People Name Generator (Debrett's Peerage 1903)
Do you spend a lot of time coming up with silly names for your Jeeves and Wooster fanfic? Do you and your friends get together on weekends to LARP as Oscar Wilde characters? Do you just want to feel grateful that your parents didn't name you Allnutt?
Then have I got the random name generators for you!
Introducing two Debrett’s Peerage (1903) Name Generators, by yours truly!
It will give you a first name, TWO middle names (so posh), and a surname, all taken from actual once-living human beings whose names were recorded in the 1903 edition of Debrett’s Peerage
There’s a posh man version and a fancy lady version
(I also included an optional tick-box to add a title/peerage rank and/or some silly bonus info from me, but you can keep it name-only if you prefer)
here are some of my fave Actual Names that I found. now imagine how much sillier we can make this by putting it all in a blender
please note: lettice is her middle name. her surname is gore. miss lettice gore, you are an icon.
A few notes on logistics:
Names are not weighted and were entered into each category only once, regardless of how common or uncommon they were in 1903. This means you’re as likely to be named Wyndham as you are to be John, because frankly it wouldn’t be fun if every man you generated was named John
However! First name and middle names are separate lists, so your first name could be the same as one of your middle names; alternatively, both of your middle names could be the same because middle names are pulling from the same list. This should enhance the absurdity
The name ‘Napier’ appears in Debrett’s Peerage as a first name, as a middle name, AND as a surname. While it’s statistically unlikely, it is technically possible to generate the name Napier Napier Napier Napier for yourself
Spelling variations (eg, Ann vs Anne) were included as separate names
The generator is continuously being updated with more names, because there’s a whoooole lot of names recorded in Debrett’s Peerage (yes, I am manually reading and entering names from a 2,000+ page document. what of it.)
For the bonus tick-box: the titles are all real, but they may be paired with a different peerage rank than they were in actuality (e.g., if you generate Lord So-and-So, the So-and-So is a real title, but the generator might tack it onto a Earl instead of a Marquess, etc). I didn’t include any royalty, just aristocracy
For the bonus tick-box: most are a straightforward “you are a Countess” but some are me being a bit silly and having fun
For my own Independence Day listening pleasure, I searched for the classic Woody Guthrie song All You Fascists Bound to Lose on the streaming platform I use, took the search results as a playlist, and am now listening to a bunch of fantastic covers.
One, this is a Mood for today and I can feel mental health hit points actively being restored.
And two, this is proving to be an excellent way to find new artists I'm immediately going to vibe with. I will try to add some links at a time when I am not also trying to write my sermon and can take time to find them on free to access places.
Anyway, highly recommend this Enrichment activity to any fellow denizens of the US of A, or really anywhere else where one might need to remember that fascists are indeed bound to lose.
Story of Miles' life that the cleverest possible solution is never ever gonna make Miles not terribly sad. Oh buddy.
Labyrinth
Illyan: I need an exact explanation of where Barrayar's money went on your mission to Capitalist Crimes Planet.
*record scratch* *screen blur*
Miles: Yep, that's me sopping wet in a murder basement--it's not the sexy dungeon cause that costs extra but non-sexy dungeons seem like a skill issue to me--making enthusiastic love to a Giant Woman who is also a genetically engineered Minotaur. Fyi, she is hot and this is excellent. But you're probably wondering how I got into this situation.
Illyan: I am not. Less exact would be okay come to think of it.
Borders of Infinity
Just imagining Elena and Elli surveilling the prison camp like--
Elli: "Uh oh, guy we were supposed to extract doesn't look so good. How do we get Miles out?"
Elena: "Wait, Miles is... doing a very small cult now?"
Elli: "Why is he doing a cult?"
Elena: "... You never heard how the Dendarii Mercenaries started."
the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth… er… sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
So due to other Moby-Dick bookbinding reasons I was remembering this post and then I of course also remembered I have the power to do uh. this.
illustrations (including cover) from the Rockwell Kent edition (1930)
the truly important thing to remember when typesetting a tumblr post is matching the seriousness of the text (you get it) and i think Ishmael would approve and MAYBE just maybe when i finally typeset the whole darn brick i'll pick up the vibes from this post and this typeset and just CONTINUE it in the actual text so thank you @elodieunderglass for this beautiful nonsense
I just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold yesterday and I can honestly say I’ve never read a book that felt like that.
It’s like a combination of the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion layered with the upbeat thrill of a heist movie plus politics intrigue and spy-movie style paranoia, all in a gigantic blizzard swirling around this one little guy. I didn’t know how I would be able to become attached to a character in this series after reading Shards of Honor and Barrayar, because I loved Cordelia so much as a protagonist, but Miles Vorkosigan did the job. Truly the character of all time.
He’s a strategic genius. He can figure out a solution to almost any problem. He’s in love with his childhood best friend and gets shut down repeatedly. He serves as the officiant at her impromptu wedding to a guy he saved through another random act of kindness, and plays out the roles of three different people in it like some kind of vaudeville comedy act. He makes people laugh. He inspires everyone around him to genuine loyalty and trust. He was playmates with the current emperor of his home planet when they were kids and is the heir of an aristocratic family. He refuses to get anything by nepotism and uses his mother’s maiden name when he meets people so they won’t know who he is. On a whim, he decides to help a random stranger and has to lie to do it. He commits to the bit so hard that he ends up faking his way into running a mercenary fleet whose existence was initially a complete lie and stopping a war he had nothing to do with. He has stomach ulcers from how stressed out he is. He refuses to break a promise, even when doing so would allow him to escape the web of lies he’s woven. His house of cards is always one gust of wind from toppling and he’s somehow able to keep it standing by sheer force of character. He will not stop because if he does he’ll have a nervous breakdown.
Genuinely the most fascinating and lovable combination of wet rat energy, goodest boy ever, and rogue with a heart of gold. No one is doing it like him. I’m going to read all seventeen books in this series or however many there are, and then everything else Lois McMaster Bujold has written.
Etiquette Expert: Welcome to Genetic Engineering and Complicated Protocol Planet! The social rules about sex here are soooo complex, but that's never gonna come up because they're too xenophobic to mess with offworlders.
Himbo Cousin Ivan: Bet.
Himbo Cousin Ivan proceeds to get drugged with a floppy dick drug and then, by losing at sex, win at sex so comprehensively that he is flooded with illicit invitations for the duration of the adventure.
Meanwhile our buddy Miles is swooning in unrequited infatuation for 90% of the women he sees and simultaneously playing 4D chess against both murderous adversaries and his own allies, thus averting several different possible interplanetary crises through the power of reckless scheming.
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Really into LMB’s recurring plot line, “the gods answer prayers, and this sucks for the protagonist because they are being used to answer someone else’s prayers”
MILES has added EMPEROR GREGOR to the party. EMPEROR GREGOR can power up MILES' Chaos Goblin attack by using his imperial ability Oh Yeah Who's Gonna Stop Us.
(Ftr that's both "us" and "Us.")
Also liiiving for Elena's new life as a badass merc!
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
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