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Pride & Prejudice (2005), dir. Joe Wright

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- How about I crack your skull open like a robin’s egg?

- You don’t want a look at what’s inside my head, Nina dear.

KAZ BREKKER and NINA ZENIK | SHADOW & BONE S2

SIX OF CROWS | LEIGH BARDUGO

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SPICE WORLD (1997)

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the whole point of life is being deeply moved by art. and bread

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Hiroki Kawanabe, “Deep Thought”, 2023 Acrylic on Paper, 18cm ×13.5cm

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in awe of the donghua for slapping "Jiang Cheng had to give up his dogs as a child so that Wei Wuxian could live with him in Lotus Pier" into the same episode as "Wei Wuxian refuses to give up the Wen dogs Clan Remnants so that he can live with Jiang Cheng in Lotus Pier".

Really hammering that nail home about how Jiang Cheng has repeatedly given up everything he reasonably can for Wei Wuxian, and how Wei Wuxian (with one major exception) simply does not do the same. Wei Wuxian does whatever he thinks is right, and does not evaluate the collateral damage of those choices.

His major exception, his one major sacrifice that's done explicitly for Jiang Cheng, is something that he grapples with for the entire rest of the story and which Jiang Cheng is barred from knowledge of until the end, preventing Jiang Cheng from being able to feel that there's been any kind of reciprocity between them. From his perspective, he has given and given and given while Wei Wuxian has simply done whatever the fuck he wants forever, and the second that interfered with the Jiang Clan he... simply left the Jiang Clan. From his perspective, actively prevented from knowledge that would prove him wrong (which he WANTS, by the way, he WANTS to be wrong), Wei Wuxian has taken and taken and taken, and then fucking left.

Anyway they're both right and they're both wrong and I love their messy complicated relationship and the donghua's choice to put these two scenes back to back was HUGE brained

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BARBIE (2023) Dir. Greta Gerwig

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the thing about the locked tomb series is that i can't stop going down reddit spirals every night until like 3 am and started annotating my ebooks and like this is all an excellent outlet for a brain going to exhausted shit

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thinking about the phrase "kill in sustainable ways." the fact that if you eat meat you should be comfortable with killing. the necessity of Death, Sustainably; the way a creature eats to nourish, and dies to nourish; the way it is kind to let an animal eat well and die quickly; the way you should use every part to make its death as valuable as possible.

thinking about lyctorhood and how john convinced them all it was not murder but a sacred, necessary act. you can see the thought process, you can see the way they reasoned: this will feed, this will heal, this will nourish forever. but a soul is not a body; a soul is not meat. it is not yours to take. it is not yours to feed on.

thinking about campal and their death, sustaining a new life, creating as MUCH new life as is possible from two deaths. and still pyrrha says it is not beautiful. it is not love. because you were there, and now you're gone. you created someone new, and you are still gone.

thinking about gideon. she dies thinking: at least my death will matter. but to harrow, her death is not nearly anywhere as valuable as her life. and who better to know the value of death than a girl whose own power is fueled by it? harrow understands what the lyctors did not, what god cannot. eat me, says gideon, and harrow says no, no, no, you are not mine to swallow. keep your soul, i cannot stomach it. how can we be together when you are silent. how can i call it love if you are nowhere to be found.

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Obsessed with that bit where P— told John to be a bad wizard. That they could write the history books later to say he was good, but what he needed to do now was to scare the shit out of people. What he needed was leverage.

Because that's what he did! That's exactly what he did. He got his leverage, he played the bad wizard, he scared the shit out of everyone. And then after the dust settled, when he was the last man standing, he wrote the history books to say he was good.

And like. The thing that gets me is. After all that, he named her Pyrrha.

They won. It wasn't worth it.

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Strange Names in Nona the Ninth

Nona’s gang of kids, plus the Angel, all appear to have weird names because they are Nona’s transliterations of their names in their native languages into the language of the Nine Houses.

Hot Sauce nodded. Nona guessed again, “Born in the Morning.” “You mean Born in the Morning,” said Hot Sauce. “That’s what I said,” said Nona.

There are seventeen local languages (according to Ianthe) on New Rho. Nona can speak all of them, without really understanding what she’s doing, so she understands the names she hears and the meaning of these names to be synonymous.

Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.

(I think the same thing’s going on with The Building that Troia cell lives in; I think it’s a word in another language that means building and is used as an official name for the building, but I have no guesses as to what that could be.)

I believe Nona is able to do this both because she is Alecto, who plays the role of the Holy Spirit in Tamsyn's Catholic Trinity 2.0, and the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles the gift of tongues during Pentecost, and because she is the soul of Earth. The languages spoken on New Rho presumably came from Earth, so of course she can speak all of them!

This is my attempt to reverse engineer all of these names into House / English.

The Angel / The Messenger

BOE calls Aim "the Messenger" and the children and Nona call her "the Angel.”

We Suffer: “Usually you both meeting up with the Messenger, whom you call the Angel, would have been very bad.”

When the Angel first appears, her name is playing on the meaning of “angel” as a caring and godly being – the reader gets that it would make sense for children who love her to see her as an angel, so this remark flies under on the radar:

The Angel was what they called the nondescript, washed-out, dusty-haired personage who came to teach the Hour of Science. Why they called her the Angel was unclear.

But it is clear why they call her The Angel! It comes from a word with two meanings: the Greek word “angelos” originally meant “messenger” and later took on the meaning of “angel” or “messenger of God,” so all names originating from this word have both of those meanings.

Names originating from “angelos” include Angela (English, Spanish), Aniela (Polish), Aingeal (Irish), Anděla (Czech), Andjela (Serbian), Angèle (French), Angiola (Italian), Anzhela (Russian), and diminutives like Angelina.

The name is intended by BOE to mean Messenger, because of her societal role, but Nona is translating the other meaning of her name, Angel, because that meaning is what makes more sense to her given the way she sees and loves the Angel.

It's also possible that BOE has a more formal version of this name as a title for the Messenger and the children's "the Angel" which Nona hears as distinct from "the Messenger" is a diminutive or less formal version of the same name.

Born in the Morning

This name could be Sabah (Arabic), Akinyi (Luo from Kenya), or Asa (Japanese), all names which mean “morning” and more specifically “born in the morning.”

Honesty

This is a bit more difficult and I’m really not sure about any of these. There are quite a few boys' names meaning “honesty.” There are even more names that mean “honest” or “truthful,” but for strictly the noun “honesty” we have these names:

Pheakdei (Khmer, from Cambodia); Satyam, Onnesha, and Sachh (Hindi); Zaka and Sadaqat (Arabic); and Onestà or Onesto (Italian).

I don’t speak any of these languages, so I can’t comment on which name is most likely, and there are probably also way more possibilities that I missed in my deep dive into 457 baby name websites and dictionary translations!

Edit: I've seen "Frank" suggested a lot as a potential name, but I don't think this is likely, because "Honesty" is a noun, and "Frank" is an adjective. I think if Tamsyn intended the name to be a transliteration of "Frank" she would have used the adjective "Honest," not the noun "Honesty " – she doesn't seem the type to overlook something like that.

Beautiful Ruby

I think this name is probably just two names, in an unknown language, one meaning “beautiful” and one meaning “ruby.”

Unfortunately, there are millions of possibilities here and I can’t find any combination that particularly jumps out. If you have more thoughts on this please let me know!

Hot Sauce

Hot Sauce, of course – as a delightful choice that only serves to confuse the reader more with respect to all of these names – is literally just named Hot Sauce. You CAN put it on rice and you CAN put it on bread!!

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sorry to still be mentally ill over the locked tomb but for all that i keep seeing people emphasise alecto's apocalyptic rage, alecto as an eldritch horror shackled into the body of a barbie doll, etc etc i feel like it cannot be overlooked that Nona Is Still In There. she may not remember it, but alecto is still nona. nona was still alecto. alecto's rage and nona's love come from the same depths. the nona who laughed at pyrrha's stupid jokes and wore goofy t-shirts to make little children laugh and got excited for her birthday is the same nona who broke her hands and feet in a blind bloody screaming rage when she woke up to find herself (once again) in chains. i did not spend 480 pages watching nona love recklessly and wholly and extend that love to every small thing, every person and creature she connected with, loving a life lived with her little found family in borderline poverty in a warzone, to believe that alecto is the monster the lyctors described her to be or to believe that alecto won't still love just as recklessly

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rating ways to advertise the locked tomb

"lesbian necromancers in space": 5/10. technically true, except that gideon isn't a necromancer and for the most part they aren't in space. can also be tonally misleading; implies a fun space opera adventure and fails to mention the impending emotional devastation. that being said it is iconic and (mostly) effective

"murder mystery in a haunted gothic castle": 8/10. MUCH better at capturing the tone and plot of the first book, but still a little off. imagine picking up the book because of this blurb and then watching gideon nav make a mean girls reference in the first 20 pages. the whiplash could kill you

"a locked tomb mystery": 5/10. nondescriptive and a little misleading, but i can't give this any lower than a 5 because the pun is very good. gideon would love this one and that should count for something

"gay goth among us": 10/10. i'm not even going to pretend like this one doesn't nail it. try and argue against this. you can't. captures the murders, the space-y setting, the queer characters, the tone and aesthetic, AND the contemporary humor. chef's kiss

"enemies to lovers 'i hate everyone but you' slow burn": 1/10. true if you squint. the relationship between gideon and harrow would make booktok weep

"catholic homestuck": 9/10. this means nothing and explains everything

this tweet by tamsyn muir:

[Image ID: A tweet by "tamsyn should be writing" @tazmuir: "sure, I edited from 12 o'clock to 4.30, but how much of that time did I spend on the discovery that the basis of my novel is 'what if these two were... teenage girls'", followed by an image of Skeletor and He-Man. /end ID]

10/10. conveys the pop culture savvy of the series, the complex dynamic between the main characters, and the humor of the writing style all at once. also makes me laugh every time i think about it

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has anyone done this yet

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Tamsyn Muir was insane for 'Life is too short and love is too long.' like she really said I'm just going to make Camilla Hect sum up the essence of life and then move on