#À ce moment

[lolochaponnay]

Deux hommes dans un bar discute, le premier dit: - T'habites où? - À Paris. - Oh ! Moi aussi je vis à Paris. Mais dans quelle banlieu? - La troisième. - Oh ! Moi aussi je vis dans la troisième. Mais, quelle rue? - Rue Foche. - Oh ! Moi aussi j'habite rue Foche. Mais, quelle numéro. - 582, dans un immeuble. - Oh, moi aussi j'habite dans cet immeuble. Mais, quelle étage? - Le deuxième. - Oh, moi aussi j'habite au deuxième. Mais, quelle porte? - La cinqième. Oh ! Moi aussi j'habite à la cinqième porte." À ce moment, un homme arrive et demande au barman : " alors, tout va bien? - Oh oui, il y a juste les deux jumeau qui son bourré."

[hedgehog-moss]

Do you have any advice on picking books for readers with limited time? I love to read, but in the past couple years I've been dissatisfied with almost everything I've read and I've purposely been trying to pick a variety: obscure, best-sellers, internet-recs, vintage, recents and I can't seem to pick well. I know the key to finding more good things is to read more quantity, but I've only got so much free time and can only read so fast.

Oh I feel you! There was a whole period of my life when I was desperately trying to find some alchemical formula to ensure that most of the books I read are good-to-great rather than okay-to-good. I had this scientific process where I tried to log a lot of details about the books I read and then look at the numbers year after year to find a common denominator. Is it a matter of reading more, or is it reading more older books vs. recent ones, male vs. female authors, books from my to-read list vs. impulsive reads, books recommended by friends vs. books I find myself? etc. etc. I made line graphs.

In the end the only factor that seemed to correlate with how many good books I read in a year was the number of unfinished reads, so the one piece of advice I have is to not hesitate to give up on a book you're not enjoying. I read multiple books at a time so it's easy to see if there's one that I keep neglecting in favour of the others; and I get most of my books for free or very cheap (from my local library, or OpenLibrary or Zlibrary, or secondhand bookshops where they're like 50cts apiece, or swapping books with friends), the ones I buy new are mostly books I've already read & enjoyed, so I don't have qualms about giving up 20 pages in if I'm not feeling it.

Other than that, I've kind of made my peace with the fact that finding a good book is a mysterious serendipitous process and most of the books I read will be just okay, plus a few bad ones and some great ones.

That said if most books you read end up being unsatisfying rather than at least okay, maybe you're not sure what you're looking for? It helps to identify what you want from a book at a particular time (fun escapism, learning more about a given topic, immersion in a specific atmosphere and if so, which one...) I tend to start a new read with a precise idea of what it would take for this book to be satisfying, e.g. "rn I feel like reading about someone's quiet daily life, maybe a diary or letters, set in a place or context I don't know much about, without turmoil or tragedy" or "a story set in the 17/1800s with flowery prose, interesting female characters, focused on intricate social shenanigans rather than romance or adventure" etc, so it allows me to narrow things down and eliminate potential reads where too many criteria are missing.

And I like to read a few 1-star goodreads reviews—some prefer to focus on 3-star reviews which are more balanced; personally I figure, if the people who hated this book the most cite reasons for disliking it that aren’t dealbreakers for me, that’s a good sign. And if the worst reviews cite stuff I'm actually looking for right now ("too long, too many digressions, long-winded prose, too quiet / not enough action", etc) then it’s a book that comes recommended both by 5-star and 1-star reviewers :)

[rollinginthedeep-swan]

NASTYA ZHIDKOVA, The emperor

Pour @chaoticvanth, j'espère qu'ils te plairont, merci pour la découverte du FC !

Inspiration : L'artiste Yoann Lossel

Quote : Aurora, Running with the wolves.

[girafeduvexin]

Question random aux gens avec un tdah et/ou trouble autistique, est-ce que vous vous considérez handicapé.e ?

Je parle pas de la reconnaissance officielle de l'État de ton handicap, je sais qu'avec un TDAH je pourrais potentiellement y avoir droit, mais vraiment dans votre vision de vous-même.

(Moi oui, mais j'ai été diag adulte et j'ai mis quelques mois à l'accepter, d'où ma question)

Expliquez pourquoi dans les tags !

[asmoonlightthroughthepines]

[gay-impressionist]

🤡

[soeurdelune]

avatars (400 x 640): shalom harlow (2000s) + dieselpunk & bioshock, signés lune/soeurdelune

[queer-omens-in-the-archives]

kira moi ? serieusement ^^ haha on me l avait pas sortie celle la depuis loooongtemps :) demande a mes potes si je suis kira tu vas voir les reponses que tu vas te prendre XD rien que la semaine passee j ai tuer 5000 criminels donc chuuuuut ferme la near de merde car oui toi tu m as tout l air d un bon near de merde car souvent vous etes frustrer de ne pas TUER :) ses agreable de se faire un criminel ou un mec corrompu avec le death note hein? tu peux pas repondre car tu ne sais pas ce que c ou alors tu le sais mais tu as du taper dans ta barre de recherche "death note how to use" ou "œil de la mort" pour comprendre ce que c etait mdddrrr !! c est grave quoiquil en soit.... pour revenir a moi, je pense que je suis le mec le plus kira de ma bande de 11 meilleurs amis pas psk j ai eu le plus de morts a mon actif mais psk j ai eu les plus horrible criminel que mes amis :D ses pas moi qui le dit, ses eux qui commente sous mes photos insta "trop dark le shinigami que tu as donner le death note hier dans la foret notamment!" donc apres si tu veux que sa parte plus loi sa peut partir vraiment loi j habite dans la banlieue de tokyo sa te parle teru mikami ? ses juste un cousin donc OKLM hahaha on verra si tu parles encore le near de merde mdddrrr pk insulter qd on est soi meme near tu me feras toujour marrer!!

[trashlord-watson]

je me remets toujours pas du moment "fou du bus" auquel j'ai eu le droit hier

vraiment le mec m'a fixé de face et a deadass marché vers moi pour me demander "t'es un mec ou une meuf" genre mon frère ??? à ton grand âge ????

[shakeskp]

Moi hier soir : non mais je m'y attendais, c'est pas une surprise j'étais préparée psychologiquement

Moi ce matin : Et donc j'ai dormi 3h cette nuit sinon ça va hein

[gerceval]

salut je poste pas hyper souvent en ce moment mais c'est un super samedi matin pour vous rappeler qu'arthur a pensé au moins une fois à karadoc pendant le sexe

[leleaulait]

Faudrais qu'on m'explique, plus je fais des soins du visage, plus j'en prend bien soin avec des bonnes crèmes et des nettoyant parfait pour ma peau et plus j'ai de l'acné 🤨. Mon visage est parfait quand je le lave juste avec de l'eau sans savon sous la douche et que je mets la crème la plus basique (mixa), comment c'est possible ? Ça veut dire quoi, que je doit garder ma routine de crasseuse ?

[hedgehog-moss]

You are my hero for using the phrase 'perfidious Albion' in your tags. What is the French obsession with Alexandrine meter?

:) Well it's just that for a very long time France considered the 12-syllable verse known as the alexandrine to be the pinnacle of versification. For your poetry or play to be considered high literature it had to be in alexandrines (I was recently reading an English jstor article about translations of Shakespeare in the early 19th century and it went “[French translator] prefers to translate in verse, which means, of course, in alexandrines.” Of course!) We've moved on now and they’re out of style, but we’re still secretly fond of them I think. We were held hostage by alexandrines for so long a lot of French people still have a Stockholm-syndrome preference for their specific flow over other kinds of poetic metre.

They left a strong legacy in our language too—a lot of French sayings / proverbs are alexandrine verses because they’re excerpts from classical theatre and poetry (e.g. “A vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire” from Corneille; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” from La Fontaine; “Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture” from Racine; “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop” from Destouches, “Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage” from Boileau...)

The alexandrine had a long golden age, from the Classicists to the Parnassians (mid-17th to late 19th century)—the Romantics in between were advocating for a kind of “free verse” but it still meant alexandrines and pretty rigid ones at that! (Victor Hugo’s “J’ai disloqué ce grand niais d’alexandrin” was subversive—but it’s still an alexandrine.) Their verse was only considered rebellious because it ignored some of the many rules that went into a perfect classical alexandrine (e.g. no overflow, 4 rests per line, rhyme purity must be respected when it comes to mute consonants, no liaison between the last word of an alexandrine and the first word of the next, the hemistiches of two successive alexandrines mustn’t rhyme, no prepositions or other tool words at the end of a hemistich, etc. etc.)

Then in the 19th century we liberated ourselves from the tyranny of the alexandrine after Verlaine shot them dead (insert Rimbaud joke) by doing things like placing the caesura on the 3rd syllable of a 5-syllable word (“WTF”—Racine) or ending an alexandrine in the middle of a word and treating the first half of the truncated word like a legit rhyme, which made all the Classicists roll over in their grave.

I really like alexandrines personally! I admit they can sound plodding after a while especially with classical rhymes, but they have such a soothing flow. I also love that they are often French at its Frenchest. By which I mean, there are some gorgeous alexandrines that are genuinely the French language at its best and most graceful, and then you have those that can’t help but highlight how absurd our syntax can get.

My favourite types of alexandrines are the ones with a diaeresis in each hemistich because saying them normally feels like walking down the street, while saying them as an alexandrine feels like doing a figure skating routine (e.g. in Racine, “La nation chérie a violé sa foi”); the ones with an AB-BA structure (“Et le fuyant sans cesse incessamment le suit”), the ones with a ternary structure (“Je suis le ténébreux, le veuf, l’inconsolé”, “Je renonce à la Grèce, à Sparte, à ton empire”) and the ones where 1 word sprawls over an entire hemistich (“Voluptueusement dans cette paix profonde...”).

The worst alexandrines imo are the ones that force you to acknowledge how many tiny grammatical bricks are involved in the building of a French sentence. Orally we tend to squish them together so we can forget about them but the merciless alexandrine will demand that you mortify yourself pronouncing all of them, e.g. “O nuit, qu’est-ce que c’est que ces guerriers livides ?” (thank you Victor Hugo for this ignominy) (<- here’s an alexandrine), or “Si ce que je te dis ne se dit pas ainsi”... “Ce que je te (...) ne se” is a horrible succession of words by poetical standards but wait I’ve got worse!

Tu m’as pris mon trésor et t’étonnes tout bas De ce que je ne te le redemande pas

“De ce que je ne te le”—see? French at its Frenchest.

[clementine-circaetis]

A mate

©Clémentine Circaetis

[motsimages]

Je me mets à écouter une version radio-théatralisé des nouvelles de Maupassant et je me retrouve à écouter un petit moment de fétichisme érotique avec une nourrice et un monsieur qui l'aide se soulager. Ah le 19ème siécle et ses petites surprises litéraires.

[flashbic]

Écrire un OS qui se passe après la fic que j'ai pas fini d'écrire, tout va bien