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Vasilisa and Baba Yaga

Guys, a new game based on the Russian fairy tale Vasilisa the Beautiful has recently been released.

It's an adventure with gorgeous visuals and great music. Just look at this:

The story is basicaly retelling of the fairy tale "Vasilisa The Beautiful", so if you haven't read it yet, this game is a great way to familiarise yourself with the tale.

The gameplay is a little bit clunky, but it's still a great experiance for an evening, try it.

You can find the game in Steam: Vasilisa and Baba Yaga

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did Kafka actually say "fuck this baka life" in his diaries or was that just a mistranslation please i have to know this

Of course he said it, look

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in my dream last night i owned a yellow horse and his name was “butter dog”

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Brett Bigbee (American, 1954) - Wanting Nothing (Ground Cover) (2019-2022)

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Eli McMullen (American, 1992) - Summer's End (2024)

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now all the ladys on the floor start eroding ! *a harsh wind envelopes the club*

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Do you think there are fruits that are kept secret

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Husband by Cheryl Boyce Taylor

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Pierogi pillows

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lead actress was like “oh my goddd you’re so CUTE sometimes I just want to pinch your cheeks” and for some reason my response was “hell yeah go for it baby!” but just as she reached for them I suddenly inflated them like a bullfrog and she screamed

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reading the collected letters of shirley jackson and this is from a letter to her agent while she was working on the haunting of hill house

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its probably for the best that humans dont have wings. imagine trying to act nonplussed and your shirt starts lifting off of your back because your stupid bird brain is telling you its time to threat display or get away

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October 28, 2022, 7:11 P.M.

For whatever reason I enjoy thinking about Diana Wynne Jones' writing as a whole and picking out unexpected or resonant trends. For example, some things that comes up often is:

She'll fabricate a world (right down to its cosmology), fill it with memorable characters, set one or two short novels in it... and then never touch it again. On to the next one. Rinse and repeat for her entire career.

The concept of multiple/parallel universes appear half a dozen times in different novels/sequences, but always in completely different ways. The multiple worlds of Chrestomanci function very, very differently from the multiple worlds of The Homeward Bounders, which themselves function so different from the Ayewards/Naywards of Deep Secret, or the walls between the worlds in Dark Lord of Derkholm. More importantly, all these approaches to multiverse explicitly contradict each other. There is no larger DWJ multiverse; there is no way to coherently combine any of them, much less all of them. I love her for this. Every book is its own project. Franchising be damned.

With one exception (which is the Dalemark quartet, oddly enough), none of these worlds are sealed-off secondary worlds. Our own Earth appears in all of them, though usually from the 'wrong' end of the telescope. Meaning, it's stuff like reading Charmed Life and assuming you're reading a magical secondary world fantasy for most of the book... up until the point when Janet is pulled into the story due to Gwendolyn's spell. The reader instantly understands that Janet is from our own world, from the 1970s when the book was written. She never makes it home, either. She never sees her parents again. She's a supporting character who becomes permanently stuck in the world of Chrestomanci, as a casualty of Gwendolyn's spells.

It is interesting, though, how there are almost no sealed-off secondary worlds in DWJ's oeuvre.

There are lots of neat things to say about how DWJ did this, and why she'd do it, and the implications in the storytelling. But tonight I'm thinking mostly about how it can be a moment, narratively, that makes you halt and have to recontextualize all these things you thought you knew (or were assuming) about the nature of the story.

In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Urras is obviously the metaphorical capitalistic stand-in planet for our own Earth... up until a moment right near the end, where we realize our own Earth exists in this novel too and is an ecological wasteland due to unchecked climate change.

Urras may be the distorted-mirror, uber-capitalist version of our own world. But it's also a planet with a functional ecosystem. It's a planet where society is careful about maintaining that ecosystem. We're not going to be Urras, says Le Guin. We'll be lucky if we become Urras. To become Urras means we wised up in time to not go extinct.

And suddenly, little subtle moments in the worldbuilding around both Anarres and Urras—their shared attention to their own ecology—come into a different light. All because our own, devastated Earth turns out to be present in the novel too.

And in Howl's Moving Castle, Howl is a magician who fits into the fairy tale landscape of Ingary as naturally as anyone else—until the chapter when he has to go home to retrieve a lost spell, and you realize home is in another world, aka home is our world, aka Howl is fucking Welsh and found his way into Ingary by pure accident. And Ben Sullivan, Ingary's missing royal magician, is no native of Ingary either.

To Sophie, it just means that both magicians travelled to Ingary from the same enigmatic foreign land, which is as strange to her as any spell.

To us readers, it means "oh my god he's Welsh too? Just how much is Wales secretly connected to Ingary? Next thing you'll tell me Ben Sullivan's a rugby player as well—"

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i am still and will forever be in absolute pieces about the difference between the first line in the first* manuscript draft of charmed life and the first line in the published editions. LOOK at this:

first line of charmed life, from the first manuscript draft:

Cat ^Chant did not like his sister Gwendolen particularly.

first line of charmed life in all published editions:

Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen.

i mean!!! its so simple and so obvious but so essential. in the published book, cat never states outright that he dislikes gwendolen, and that is SUCH a clue for the reader, because gwendolen is the worst, and so you are sitting there going: am i missing something?? why does cat not absolutely loathe his awful sister?? but if you are writing this story from scratch, you have to get the obvious out there from the get go: cat doesnt like his sister, and why? because nobody likes his sister. nobody likes gwendolen. because she's the worst.

now, you can't keep that line in revisions, obviously. you have to say something else, because the whole point is that cat doesn't know how awful gwendolen is. but it's a really good concept for an opening line, because you have to set up their dynamic first thing. so what can you say that cat feels about gwendolen? well, he... he doesn't like her. but she is all that he has, and in his eyes, she's competent and, well, admirable. plus you want to add their birth order, so you add elder. and you remove those little hedge words, "did not like," "particularly": those are such weak words to use in the first line. but, that hedging weakness is very accurate to gwendolen-influenced cat, so she's got that element of his character down immediately. and cat wouldn't say "hate" or "dislike" after all, and would add "particularly" to soften the blow. so while it's accurate characterization, it's just not a very good first line. so to be clear, that first draft line isn't a failure at all. it still serves to frame cat's character, even if it states the unstated, and it gets the novel's most important dynamic front and center.

*: first available. there were no earlier ms drafts in the archive, this is the only handwritten draft, and it seemed like a first draft literarily. if there's been research stating otherwise since 2015, which is when i last did a formal check-in on dwj chrestomanci scholarship, lmk.

^: a ^ in my notes always referred to text added later. so, dwj added "Chant" in after she wrote out the sentence. i might have a picture of this? i need to check my manuscript copies. anyway, it's so true that cat chant sounds better in a first line than just cat. plus, if you have "Cat" as a name as the very first word of a sentence, that C is definitely going to be capitalized, so adding his last name makes it clear that this is a person's name. plus plus, chant is, of course, a surname of all time, and thus perfect to introduce Immediately.

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a brief anecdote about Grace Paley, from Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch