#Birling day

[elektricangel]

I see you, John Finnemore 🥃 🚖 ✈️

[politelymenacing]

I don't want to say I'm the best sibling in my family, but no-one else got dad a gift for today, so....

[placetnemagistra]

Just need to shout derangedly about the Cabin Pressure / JSFP allusions in Good Omens 2, please add your own!!

Yellow Bentley — yellow car

Aziraphale as the incompetent detective / newspaperman with a Clue — the Birling Day episode where Arthur & Martin incompetently investigate Douglas’s theft of the Tallisker

Crowley ordering a large Tallisker — also Birling Day

A number of JSFP sketches where people who are total opposites are thrown together for long periods of time (eg the wildlife cameraman who doesn’t like snow leopards and the gay leopard Professor who absolutely adores them) or are bickering/unlikely but devoted spouses (the train driver and the train manager; the “Don’t Know Much About History” song sketch) - it’s a whole dynamic!! It has prepared him for this assignment!! (As has the practice of people being irrelevantly but cheeringly gay)

[virgoscringe]

a portrait of the lovely Finch from a story @birlwrites is working on!! thank u for comming + trusting me with ur girl Birl i love her so deeply i hope she wins forever 💗💗💗

a closeup added bc Finch has the cutest face and i loveee how the lil heart brooch turned out heheh

(comms are still open! mwah!!)

[jeaninesfavouriteserum]

i am currently kinsidering sheila birling. tumblr please help me how do i know and why am i like this

[birlwrites]

i'm having to do a lot of stopping and revising and rewriting as i work on this part, which is good because it means i am rlly improving some of my technical skills and making the story much more impactful, but also bad because slow 😡

[ship-of-skitties]

kieran pokemon is so eric birling core

[can-of-w0rmz]

My English teacher’s been off for a long while so we’ve had a good load of substitute teachers, and one of them is teaching us An Inspector Calls and can I just say, is so much less dry than my actual English teacher. I’ll be real, classic lit nerd though I may be, I don’t like that play. Honestly can’t really stand it. But we’re leading a hate campaign against Gerald Croft now? Hell yeah I’ll write an essay for you on him let’s get this bitch! You give me those quotes and references on why he’s a dick I barely paid attention to his character but it’s drama now and I have personal beef with him let’s go

[lemongrablothbrok]

Random ass headcanon that From Eroica With Love and Cabin Pressure take place in the same universe. Don't ask me why; it makes sense in my brain somehow.

[jbk405]

This is actually something really fascinating about reading The Priory of the Orange Tree and A Day of Fallen Night.  Samantha Shannon uses archaic, outdated, or hyper-specific terminology that is not in everyday use in modern English.  The text is absolutely filled with nouns and verbs that I am completely unfamiliar with, and I frequently look them up to get the full understanding.

For example, I looked it up and “hirple” means ‘to walk with a limp’, so it’s a variation of hobble.  I’m pretty sure a ‘birling’ is a structure where they store or chop wood.

But they’re all real words.  Sometimes based on old Norse and other Germanic influences on English.  It seems like she’s basing the writing on “What if real-world languages had evolved just slightly differently” and some words that fell out of use in real-life are common, and other words that are common are absent.

You can pick up most of the meanings via context, or look them up like I did.

I need Samantha Shannon to know that these five words in this order are spectacular

[ID: text from a day of fallen night, reading, “Wulf hirpled towards a birling,” /end ID]

thank you so much to @maileesque for the ID :)

[wide-mindeddreamer]

gadies and lentlemen, goys and birls, it’s time for round five of Unhinged Shirts I Would Give Greta Van Fleet!

Josh:

Jake:

Sam:

Danny:

as always I do this for The Giggles ™ have a wonderful day

[cabinpressurechallenge]

Alright, I had hoped to have this together sooner, but I'm busy! I just got my airframe cert :)

Without further ado! 2024 prompts:

November 29th: Abu Dhabi

prompts: ice / light

discussion: Who is your favourite character?

30th: Boston

prompts: home / hurricane

discussion: What’s your favourite Arthur moment?

December 1st: Cremona

prompts: nuts / loss

discussion: What’s your favourite Douglas moment?

2nd: Douz

prompts: big / red

discussion: What’s your favourite Carolyn moment?

3rd: Edinburgh

prompts: maps / uphill

discussion: What’s your favourite Martin moment?

4th: Fitton

prompts: rain / heart

discussion: What’s your favourite episode?

5th: Gdansk

prompts: salt / wind

discussion: What’s your favourite word game?

6th: Helsinki

prompts: gift / present

discussion: Which is your favourite series?

7th: Ipswich

prompts: pool / fool

discussion: Who’s your favourite minor character?

8th: Johannesburg

prompts: shade / brave

discussion: Who is your favourite friendship?

9th: Kuala Lumpur

prompts: service / nervous

discussion: What’s your favourite ship?

10th: Limerick

prompts: sunset / room

discussion: What’s your favourite MJN family moment?

11th: Molokai

prompts: cracker / speed

discussion: What scene makes you laugh the most?

12th: Newcastle

prompts: games / wrong

discussion: What’s your favourite Herc moment?

13th: Ottery St Mary

prompts: river / piano

discussion: What’s a scene you know by heart?

14th: Paris

prompts: glass / discover

discussion: Which Birling Day is your favourite?

15th: Qikiqtarjuaq

prompts: facts / volume

discussion: How did you get into Cabin Pressure? 

16th: Rotterdam 

prompts: honey / whistle

discussion: What are your favourite Cabin Pressure fics?

17th: St Petersburg

prompts: names / fly

discussion: What’s a scene that makes you cry?

18th: Timbuktu

prompts: colours / repeat

discussion: What’s your favourite piece of CP fanart?

19th: Uskerty

prompts: drinks / tree

discussion: Do you like anything else by John Finnemore?

20th: Vaduz

prompts: dragons / badge

discussion: What’s your favourite Theresa moment?

21st: Wokingham

prompts: puzzles / coffee

discussion: If you could change something about CP what would it be?

22nd: Xinzhou

prompts: waiting / breath

discussion: What would your dream CP revival episode be?

23rd: Yverdon les Bains

prompts: underwater / swim

discussion: Which part of CP do you find most relatable?

24th: Zurich

prompts: gold / rainbow

discussion: What does CP mean to you?

[bimboficationblues]

the tumblr leninist "clique" (which is looser and less consciously organized than people on her make out) does have its fair share of developmentalism and i understand if that makes you wary, but a lot of them are from the global south where developmentalism as problematic as it is for the class struggle as you alluded to, is a consideration that weighs more heavily on the psyche for reasons i wish you white global north leftists would empathize with more and a lot of them are some of the loudest advocates for more nuanced understandings of the global south on this site. it sucks because you're all genuinely smart people but the shading and vaguing is a very "tumblr" thing to do and not a very comradely thing to do. which i guess is fine. it's just tumblr after all but i can't help but feel like people can do better even if the material stakes are low

was it comradely for (a certain Leninist in this cluster) to organize protracted smear campaigns calling communists she disagreed with pedophiles

I hear what you’re saying re the developmentalism piece, likewise for the value of offering more thoughtful perspectives on the global south (indeed, I’m friends or mutuals with some of the people you are referring to). but like, my issue with the clique is not even necessarily that they hold positions I don’t agree with or think are detrimental to class struggle - that’s part of it, but at the end of the day it’s all just posting, and I’m a big-tent birl. rather, I think a group of very specific people (like, 5-10 names) are smug incurious assholes who got their political education through memes/aesthetics/rhetoric, and make it a bunch of other people’s problem by being self-assured, loud, and wrong. it’s personality more than politics, though the former will manifest in the latter (hence my original complaints).

And well, I feel that being vague is generally more constructive than getting into an online squabble every time I see those specific people say something annoying. though you are probably right that it’s not more constructive than simply remaining silent and rolling my eyes. such is the tempting curse of the blogger. sorry.

[o-uncle-newt]

ONE: it creates traditions

Despite not being a Christmas-celebrator myself, I'm really glad that the final episode of this show aired as a Christmas special, because it's equally timely to talk about Molokai.

I wrote extensively about Molokai last year, and my main takeaway is that it celebrates ritual in a way that's really important. And I was thinking about it, and so many of the themes that I elevated in previous posts I've done this year are related to this as well. It's important to how funny the show is, how heartwarming the show is, how good the show is for mental health... so many different things.

I recommend reading the above post for a full breakdown, but what I raised about Molokai was that it's basically about the importance of creating and/or participating in rituals and traditions, things that mark your life and add pizzazz to it. Martin, living a depressing life on his own in an attic, has no reason to like Christmas when it's just another dull day, but enjoys it when he's exposed to and participates in ritual. Arthur, it turns out, creates ritual all the time, whether invoking existing traditions re Christmas or creating rituals around things like Birling Day.

I argue, pushing that further, that CABIN PRESSURE is about creating a kind of comforting ritual, tradition, what have you. Don't get me wrong- the comedy is often sharp and creative, there's story and character development over time... but it's not so much that the shape of the show is familiar as that the expectations are. This is going to be funny, this is going to have interesting people, this is going to let those interesting people be comically nasty to each other but also let them have real relatable emotions, and at the end of the episode GERTI will fly again.

There's also the repetitive element of features like games, particular character mannerisms, etc. One of my favorite sitcoms, the 60s spy spoof Get Smart, was written with the main character, Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) given many catchphrases, and the actor who played him actively encouraged the writers to create more because having those kinds of repetitive and funny elements is a good hook and a comforting element to viewers. They ended up being some of the most iconic parts of the show, not just because the lines are funny but because of the way they're said by Max/Adams and the way the character who says them is written. Plenty of Get Smart fans can be caught saying "missed it by that much" or "sorry about that Chief" or, my favorite that I say all the time, "he should have used his powers for niceness instead of evil."

The characters of Cabin Pressure don't have catchphrases in the same way- or rather, it's limited to things like "brilliant" and "yellow car"- but it contains so many different elements that listeners can count on in an episode. If the whiskey is stolen, obviously Douglas did it and the question (which will be answered creatively) is how. If this is a situation where Douglas can save the day, he will- and if he doesn't, then there will be a satisfying reason why. People won't recognize Martin as captain- and if they do then that's a sign that something is off kilter. JF creates the boundaries of the world that we step into and then plays within and around them in incredibly innovative ways. It's such a good formula for keeping things interesting and comforting.

And here's where I go to praise JF as the creator- because he ended up taking on an interesting form of commitment to create ritual in our own lives, maybe because he saw how much we'd already done it ourselves. Thanks to the show, already as of S4 people were taking traveling lemons to different locations, playing Yellow Car by Arthurian rules... and then, he started posting a variation on Get Dressed Ye Merry Gentlemen every year, and as a decidedly non-Christmas person it's basically the only thing about the holiday that I look forward to. (Incidentally- one of the things that made me want to post about this is my curiosity what he'll do this year when he's no longer on Twitter...)

But the biggest ritual-creating thing he did, of course, is do 26 episodes of Cabin Fever. He posted the episodes on a regular schedule (and warned us in advance when he started spacing them out), he gave us games to try and puzzles to solve, and he gave us something to look forward to that would add some fun and shape to our lives in a time that could be both shapeless and stressful. I myself was still recovering from my very early bout of COVID, isolated in my room, bored and miserable and not at full breathing capacity and still only getting over the feeling that I could have potentially died, when Cabin Fever arrived and gave me something to look forward to. It created ritual, which created meaning, which was one of the most thoughtful things someone could have done for me around then.

So, a tribute to Cabin Pressure, a tribute to the wonderful John Finnemore, a tribute to the idea that we can take our own action and join with others to create ritual that gives us meaning and comfort... and a tribute to all of you who have been doing/following along with Cabin Pressure advent in various forms. This too is a form of ritual, community, and tradition that I look forward to continuing to participate in- as part of a really cool fandom.

In the meanwhile, happy tenth freaking anniversary, Merry Christmas to all the Christmas people, almost-Happy Chanukah to all the (fellow) Chanukah people, and just generally wishing a beautiful year full of things that give your life shape and meaning.

[paperbulletsoftheforebrain]

Look, could it be a complete coincidence that the whiskey Crowley orders is the same brand of whiskey that Douglas Richardson steals from MJN on Birling Day?!

Sure. I guess.

But if so, it’s still is a fun connection to notice when you’re watching something co-written by John Finnemore.

[an-theduckin]

The first three is due in 3 days while the last two is due in 4 days btw. Also please bully me into doing my work please I don't wanna get a detention for missed hw cuz Im lazy