pearls-gone-wild

[pearls-gone-wild]

I have wondered this since both second books (Barrayar, which is second chronologically, and The Warrior's Apprentice, which is second in publication order) both of which make a Big Stinking Deal about how Cordelia and Aral's firstborn son is supposed to be named Piotr Miles, but then isn't because of the whole soltoxin damage thing.

I'm just going to assume that Kareen, while studying the Vorbarra family tree as a young royal fiancee, looks at the endless repetitions, like the world's worst intergenerational song that never ends, just said, "NOPE" and this is the one time that Serg being a predatory asshole to everyone including Dad-Emperor Ezar actually works out for her (and Gregor).

Ezar - Serg - Gregor

Wasn't it supposed to be

Ezar - Serg - Ezar?

Or does royalty have different rules?

[pearls-gone-wild]

Reblogging so I can save it for my 8 yr old who

loves writing

writes really well

is really upset that she keeps starting stories, but never finishing them

like that was her big meltdown last night

yes I'm mining Tumblr for parenting aid

when you're a parent, you'll consume a universe of sand to bring your child a tiny grain of truth, the kind you can stick to other truths and build a life with

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

[pearls-gone-wild]

OMG thank you thank you for finding a thread back to the Kew Gardens Krynoid situation! I've been waiting so long for a clue...

Also love the intra-referencing. In one of the opening paragraphs of the first book, Peter talks about how he's about to do just about the dumbest thing ever, aside from standing on top of a tower building about to go down and holy shit that happens in book 4. Ben Aaronovitch, what kind of end game are you working towards here?!?

ive recently relistened to all the RoL books TWICE and caught up on the comics and novellas

I know most of the comics suck but I have to say I do like Monday, Monday. Nightingale and Molly end up looking after the twins! (who look like they are about 3 years not 3 months but whatever) They have bee onesies! There are flashbacks to Nightingale's school days but I thought it fitted in quite well and worked with what he says in Amongst our Weapons. The story was fun and either i've been desensitised to the art or its vastly improved (i do not remember being revoluted by any of the panels at the minimum)

More or less binging all the books and comics did make me notice how often they reference each other thought the chronology vs publication order is wacky. One thing that is repeatably brought up though it Kew Gardens which is not specified in anything and iirc Peter mentions the incident in book 2, and by the later books he says he's talked to a tree. So big mystery that I half think is just a running gag and won't be answered. BUT in Masquerades of Spring, Gussie says he enchanted a tree in Kew Gardens to sing but that it would only be noticed by other practitioner. SO I think Peter rang into Gussie's tree, somehow activated it and knowing Peter he probably set it on fire.

[pearls-gone-wild]

I see your reading of Memory and raise you the sense that the entire plot of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and everything Ivan has to manage is so Simon Ilyan gets to have some minimally-empire-endangering fun.

Now i can't claim to know this, but what it FEELS LIKE is the entire convoluted plot of Memory and everything that Miles agonizes over happens so that Simon Ilyan gets to live like a human being at last

[pearls-gone-wild]

We moved into our house about ten years ago. We did all the responsible homeowner things, including installing smoke/CO detectors.

These things have an ~10 year lifetime.

Our lives have become a hellscape of

bip

bip

bip

bip

I fully expect one of us to go full Tell-Tale Heart before this year is out.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Fun fact: That is exactly how Alexandre Dumas originally wrote The Count of Monte Cristo.

Dumas originally started the book with young Albert de Morcerf wandering around Europe*, getting rescued from his Young Privileged Dude hijinks by a mysterious nobleman, who turns out to be Mom's ex that Dad put in prison.

Then Dumas's friend/alpha reader says, "Alex, why'd you leave out the origin story?"

So Dumas goes back and writes how Edmund Dantes is betrayed, and how he becomes rich and superpowered through luck and revenge. This adds another 50% to the length of the novel, but everyone loves it because now the readers are in on the secret, and get to ride along with the Count's vengeful omniscience.

* If you read the novel and wonder why the book cuts from Dantes's melodramatic revenge declaration to incredibly slow 19th century travelogue, that's because this is where the book originally started. Like Dracula, TCoMC originally started with 50 pages of subpar lodgings before getting into actual plot.

Just once I would like to watch a TCoMC adaptation that does not follow the events of the book chronologically but instead introduces the Count first and then gradually reveals all his different aliases and his involvement in the misfortunes of the families before finally revealing his true identity and motive like a super-long episode of CSI: Monte Cristo.

[pearls-gone-wild]

No Oscar for being the best teacher (and believe me, I've known teachers who deserve one)

No Fields Medal for being the doctor who makes sure their patients don't need advanced surgery (but surgeons who perform it get paid a lot)

No publicity or cash prizes for being that competent person who makes everyone's lives easier, more efficient, because you know stuff and are there to help (in fact you're easily laid off because your value is hard to quantify by anyone who hasn't directly worked with you)

No honors for being a good mentor

I'm not saying that these are necessarily prizes and honors and awards we should hand out. I just think we should all give our aspirations some real consideration. What's actually worth the effort?

The really fucked thing about this world is what we hand out prizes for. There's no Nobel Prize for being a good parent. There's no Turing Award for being a good spouse. You're just allowed to keep doing it, and given intermitten oxytocin hits.

[pearls-gone-wild]

sometimes your distress does indicate you should stop and respect your limitations. at other times it's more of a baby aquatic mammal being introduced to water for the first time thing. Too bad the difference is so hard to tell.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Put this together with the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist and one can only conclude that somewhere in the Great North, there reigns a breakfast kingpin of great power, and that waffles are next.

Butter continues to be a hot commodity in Guelph, Ont.

At least seven large-scale thefts have been reported over a 10-month period, including two hauls in just the last month.

On Oct. 12, at around 7:45 p.m., two men entered a store on Speedvale Avenue East.

“They placed a number of items in a cart – including three cases of butter with a value of $936 – and left out a receiving door,” the Guelph Police Service said in a news release.

Full article

Kind of obsessed with this...seven large scale butter heists?? What is happening in Guelph?? I have to know why but I don't want these guys to get caught

[pearls-gone-wild]

oh I see you've been on Boston Zillow lately

[pearls-gone-wild]

the mood of the 21st century

At my air gate, will have contact with yall for a little while yet

I got my pocket trek

And bones has come in with the mood of the century

An absolute mood Ty @dduane

[pearls-gone-wild]

FINALLY my library got the digital audiobook of The Masquerades of Spring.

(guess who was first in line because of the "put me on the hold list if my library ever buys this" feature on Libby)

I imagine this it was written because Ben Aaronovitch was hanging out with his BFF and after a few beers, this happened:

BA: You know, I've always wanted to write Bertie Wooster as a gay wizard, but Peter Grant is the wrong period.

BFF: Yeah, London trust fund dumbass isn't quite as charming these days. But, dude! Nightingale is about the right age to have hung out with Bertie Wooster!

BA: I can't imagine Nightingale hanging out with an idiot who knocks off policemens' hats, even if he does use magic to do it.

BFF: He went to a British boarding school, of course he did.

BA: Huh, true.

BFF: But if you really want to amp up the gay wizard Bertie Wooster, take him to 1920s Harlem, where he can really let loose, jazz and all. Have you ever heard about the drag queen contests of that period?

BA: WHAT.

(twenty minutes of Wikipedia later)

BA: WRITING THIS NOW BYE

[pearls-gone-wild]

I once planned a five-day girls' trip to Newport, RI, just so that all six of us would have a reason to make ourselves bustle gowns. (The staff of The Breakers loved us.)

I see you, and I'm right there with you.

Fellow ADHD multicrafters, do you guys also get the urge to host elaborately themed parties just so you can do food and/or decor for them? Because I definitely do. Like, I don't really want people in my house but I DO want to make a halloween-themed grazing board with matching cocktails, you know? I think I'm just going to have a couple friends over and warn them that I'm going to go catastrophically overboard for no reason, just to vent the creative fury.

[pearls-gone-wild]

It's because they're raised on significantly better media than we were. Kids these days, they know how to critically consume media!

I just introduced my kids to The Wizard of Oz, and they were visibly not impressed. When we got to "Follow the Yellow Brick Road!", my firstborn turns to me and said, "So they're just repeating the same thing over and over again?"

She's ten. But she's also been raised on Lin-Manuel Miranda. She spent the last week so hyperfixated on performing "Guns and Ships" just right that I ended up having to do a close reading with her to help. No wonder she's unimpressed by "Ding dong, the witch is dead".

And everything they read and watch has such layers. Avatar: The Last Airbender. The She-Ra remake. Even Bluey is deeper than your average adult entertainment from twenty years ago (Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3, I'm looking at you).

Anyways, that's why they're smarter than us. I'm quite happy about this. (Though I'll be happier when they remember to shower regularly. They're still kids.)

One of the things you very quickly learn as an adult who's prepared to take kids' opinions on media seriously is that you're never too young to be a pretentious hater. Obviously your average six-year-old possesses neither the vocabulary nor the analytic framework to criticise a film as derivative or failing to commit to its own thematic premise, but sometimes these are very clearly the criticisms they're grasping for!

[pearls-gone-wild]

The really fucked thing about this world is what we hand out prizes for. There's no Nobel Prize for being a good parent. There's no Turing Award for being a good spouse. You're just allowed to keep doing it, and given intermitten oxytocin hits.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Keeping this and looking at it every day

goddddddd i feel so fucking stupid all the time i feel like that meme of the ogre reading joyce

[pearls-gone-wild]

They can all be right triangles if you bisect them from the apex in a line perpendicular to the base.