#But historically revolutions really do fail a lot

[jadagul]

I want to emphasize that I agree with you in, like, 95% of situations, which is why this one feels so weird to me.

You're right that protests don't have, like, magical persuasion power. (And a lot of people implicitly think they do, which leads to major strategic errors, again see all the climate protests.)

Protests can do, basically, two things. One is implicitly threaten [possibly violent] rejection of the system. That's what leads to things like color revolutions, and the reason I have historically been skeptical of protests as a technique in the US context. The US system is pretty good! (The Trump government is very bad but it's bad in large part because it is itself a possibly-violent rejection of the system.)

The other thing protests can do is force attention and focus to an issue. And that can be very valuable, when a bunch of people who aren't paying attention would agree with you.

And like you show the NYT and MSNBC etc, but most people do not read the New York Times. Most people don't follow politics at all. Trump was put over the top by voters who, on November 4th, googled "Is Biden running for reelection?"

The median voter does not follow politics and does not want to follow politics. And on some level, if you try to force them to follow politics they'll resent it; it's not like they're failing to read CNN's website despite their best efforts.

But if you have something that would genuinely upset or piss off that bulk of apathetic disengaged voters, you can benefit from inconveniently forcing it to their attention. This was basically the goal of the actual 60s Civil Rights Movement protests: they created situations where white voters who didn't support segregation but also didn't care that deeply had to think about it, and then conclude that Jim Crow was pretty fucked up and they were against it.

Now this only works if you're really drawing attention to an issue where people will wind up decisively on your side when they look. (And that also requires the protest itself not to alienate them.) But Trump is doing such stupid, catastrophic, offensive things that we probably have that situation. Just need to figure out how to engineer the correct optics for it.

It's kind of weird to me how little in the way of mass protests we're seeing in response to this Trump stuff.

I'm usually skeptical of protests. The modern, uh, left-wing protest culture seems actively calibrated to accomplish nothing other than making its participates feel good.

But this seems like exactly the type of situation where protesting could genuinely accomplish things. Trump is doing things that are (1) bad, (2) unpopular, and (3) illegal. That's the ideal case for protests to make progress!

Like, Trump isn't personally going to care about protests. But the thing they're good for is drawing attention to an issue that people either don't know about or would rather ignore, but where they'll be on your side if they have to actually think about what's going on.

That doesn't apply to most wedge issues, and especially not most of the ones that get the left fifth of society really excited. But "Trump shut down Medicaid" or "Trump handed the Treasury over to private actors who are refusing to spend money on [insert program here]" or "Trump put in a bunch of tariffs and now your groceries and phones are way more expensive" all totally apply.

[fallloverfic]

Finished the second season of Castlevania: Nocturne and loved it! Spoilers below.

Angry boi PROTEC HIS MAN!!!! Just his running to Mizrak, so worried. Even interrupted his revenge. I just love that his serpent form came back T-T And multiple times!!!

The fight scenes were so good!!! Just so many amazing ones!

ALSO WHAT DOES ADRIAN MEAN NOT THE FIRST TIME YOU SAVED MY LIFE???? I AM-!!!!

(So happy they know each other and I think it's hilarious my fic could potentially be a prequel now alkdjalkdjaljdalj)

Everyone cute. Annette and Richter were just awww. Glad Edouard and Annette get to stay together, and Edouard can go home and get his bass player :3

Also so many gorgeous Adrian bits. Truly. Him coming out of the river was so mmmm. Also loved all the magic he got to use XD And the music was fun!

Also loved all the Egyptian stuff. The soul count was a little... (I was like why are you saying just 2 or 3, there's more than that...?), but apparently the # of parts has changed over time (it's not just 4 or 5) and it's you know, vampires during the French Revolution, so sure, whatever. The trip to Duat was fun! And Ammit's form was pretty cool.

Poor Tera. Bye Emmanuel, no one misses you.

Loved that we got some dragon fighting. Also that the dragon didn't die. Was worried. Though I will say, Sekhmet punching it was kind of funny aldkjlaj I felt sort of bad when Juste, Richter, and Maria were all boosting its breath like, "That can't be too comfortable for the dragon..."

Just think it's funny we have animated Robespierre joining forces with the son of Dracula to defend Paris from a crazy Hungarian serial killer noble who believes she's the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian goddess lol

The return of Drolta was really fun. I was sad she was in so relatively little of season 1. This was really great.

For historical things, I appreciate that they referenced how folks in France sold and bought food to watch executions. I also appreciate the reference to the trend of European obsession with eating mummies.

I will be thinking about Mizrox's future. I feel bad I'm mostly happy Olrox survived the season lol I like Mizrak just fine, and I like that Olrox likes him, but my priority is Olrox, not Mizrak, sorry lol Clearly they have some things to work out XD Should be fun (for someone, I hope). Someone else pointed out they never talked about the animal/soul stuff, and it was kind of just... Mizrak getting over it (or side-stepping it) and not apologizing to Olrox about it. And Olrox just... kind of accepting that the guy he's in love with is like this. I think it's funny that after having written You reluctant demon back in 2023, where they do have a conversation about it, I completely forgot it as a thing I wanted to happen lol Cause in my mind the matter is settled. Like the show, quite frankly, feels like neat fanfiction to me at this point (that's not what it is, but that's how my brain works, it's part of why I wasn't as anxious about season 2 releasing as I was for season 3 of the first series releasing). It's great in all the things it does, amazing stuff I never could have thought of, which is far better than a lot of the stuff I did in my fic (and those fight scenes, dang). But yeah, I do agree, they should have talked about it. And they don't. And it's... mm...

Another thing is that Mizrak maybe still has some racism to unpack. There's that line Olrox has about when his people were massacred by the Spanish, and Olrox says, "And our terrifying gods could do nothing to save us." And Mizrak replies, "Perhaps your gods were the problem," and it's like what the fuck Mizrak lol I don't know if it's part of his struggles with his own faith, which is very obviously happening, how if a god exists, they're allowing all this stuff to happen, that Emmanual failed so hard, and believing in a god - which is his issue - is causing so much of his issues (it's making him believe his affection for Olrox is false, that Olrox doesn't have a soul, and/or it's not saving him from what he believes is a wrong attraction, idk). Or, from a semi-logical standpoint, that Olrox's people were attacked because they weren't Christian, and that the Spanish wouldn't have attacked Olrox's people if they were Christian. Or simply that "well it's your fault for not being Christian", I have no idea. It's a weird moment. We have really not moved past the "animal" conversation all that much. Olrox is very, very forgiving. And I am way more forgiving because I forgot I resolved most of this in my fic over a year ago lol I don't know, relationships are messy, I enjoyed what I saw of them. Olrox running to Mizrak's side was a lot and I loved it. The way Olrox is like, "I thought you wanted to know" killed me.

ANYWAY though... it was a good season. Really, I liked it.

[transmutationisms]

hello! im just finishing up my read of structures of scientific revolutions, which has genuinely been very useful and shifted my understanding of science in a way being around people doing scientific research all day really didn't! i don't have a liberal arts education so i would love to get a sense of (a) what else of the philosophy / history of science canon is worth reading in the original (b) standard review papers or introductory textbooks and (c) critiques of the canon. i understand this is a big ask ofc, so feel free to point me to good depts / syllabi from good courses. thanks :)

yessss such a fun question >:) so, the thing that was so great about 'the structure of scientific revolutions', which i'm sure you've picked up on, is that kuhn pushed historians and philosophers of science to challenge the positivist model of science as a linearly progressive search to 'accumulate knowledge'. the idea of a 'paradigm shift' was itself a paradigm shift at the time; it was an early example of a language for talking about radical change in science without giving into the assumption that change necessarily = 'progress' (defined by national interests, mathematisation, and so forth). this is still an approach that's foundational to history and philosophy of science; it's now taken as so axiomatic that few academics even bother to gloss or defend it in monographs (which raises its own issue with public communication, lol).

where kuhn falls apart more (and this was typical for a philosopher of his era, training, and academic milieu) is in the fact that he never developed any kind of rigorous sociological analysis of science (despite alluding to such a thing being necessary) and you probably also noticed that he makes a few major leaps that indicate he's not fully committed to thinking through the relationship between science and politics. so for example, we might ask, can a paradigm shift ever occur for a reason other than a discovered 'anomaly' that the previous paradigm can't account for? for instance, how do political investments in science and scientific theories affect what's accepted as 'normal science' in a kuhnian sense? are there historical or present cases where a paradigm didn't change even though it persistently failed to explain certain empirical observations or data? what about the opposite, where a paradigm did change, but it wasn't necessarily or exclusively because the new paradigm was a 'better' explanation scientifically? how do we determine what makes an explanation 'better', anyway, especially given that kuhn himself was very much invested in moving beyond the naïve realist position? and on the more sociological side, we can raise issues like: say you're a scientist and you legitimately have discovered an 'anomaly'. how do you communicate that to other scientists? what mechanisms of knowledge production and publication enable you to circulate that information and to be taken seriously? what modes of communication must you use and what credentials or interpersonal connections must you have? what factors cause theories and discoveries to be taken more or less seriously, or adopted more or less quickly, besides just their 'scientific utility' (again, assuming we can even define such a thing)?

again, this is not to shit on kuhn, but to point out that both history and philosophy of science have had a lot of avenues to explore since his work. note that there are a few major disciplinary distinctions here, each with many sub-schools of thought. a 'science and technology studies' or STS program tends to be a mix of sociological and philosophical analysis of science, often with an emphasis on 'technoscience' and much less on historical analysis. a philosophy of science department will be anchored more firmly in the philosophical approach, so you'll find a lot of methodological critique, and a lot of scholarship that seeks to tackle current aporias in science using various philosophical frameworks. a history of science program is fundamentally just a sub-discipline of history, and scholarship in this area asks about the development of science over time, how various forms of thinking came into and out of favour, and so forth. often a department will do both history and philosophy of science (HPS). historians of medicine, technology, and mathematics will sometimes (for arcane scholastic reasons varying by field, training, and country) be anchored in departments of medicine / technology / mathematics, rather than with other faculty of histsci / HPS. but, increasingly in the anglosphere you'll see departments that cover history of science, technology, and mathematics (HSTM) together. obviously, all of these distinctions say more about professional qualifications and university bureaucracy than they do about the actual subject matter; in actuality, a good history of science should virtually always include attention to some philosophical and sociological dimensions, and vice versa.

anyway—reading recs:

there are two general reference texts i would recommend here if you just want to get some compilations of major / 'canonical' works in this field. both are edited volumes, so you can skip around in them as much as you want. both are also very limited in focus to, again, a very particular 'western canon' defined largely by trends in anglo academia over the past half-century or so.

philosophy of science: the central issues (1998 [2013], ed. martin curd & j. a. cover). this is an anthology of older readings in philsci. it's a good introduction to many of the methodological questions and problems that the field has grown around; most of these readings have little to no historical grounding and aren't pretending otherwise.

the cambridge history of science (8 vols., 2008–2020, gen. eds. david c. lindberg & ron numbers). no one reads this entire set because it's long as shit. however, each volume has its own temporal / topical focus, and the essays function as a crash-course in historical methodology in addition to whatever value you derive from the case studies in their own right. i like these vols much more than the curd & cover, but if you really want to dig into the philosophical issues and not the histories, curd & cover might be more fun.

besides those, here are some readings in histsci / philsci that i'd recommend if you're interested. for consistency i ordered these by publication date, but bolded a few i would recommend as actual starting points lol. again some of these focus on specific historical cases, but are also useful imo methodologically, regardless of how much you care about the specific topic being discussed.

Robert M. Young. 1969. "Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory." Past & Present 43: 109–145.

David Bloor. 1976 [1991]. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (here is a really useful extract that covers the main points of this text).

Ian Hacking. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steven Shapin. 1988. “Understanding the Merton Thesis.” Isis 79 (4): 594–605.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. 1989. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mario Biagioli. 1993. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruno Latour. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Margaret W. Rossiter. 1993. “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science.” Social Studies of Science 23 (2): 325–41.

Andrew Pickering. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Peter Galison. 1997. “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief.” In The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, 137–60. New York: Routledge.

Crosbie Smith. 1998. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chambers, David Wade, and Richard Gillespie. “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge.” Osiris 15 (2000): 221–40.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. Zone Books, 2002.

Timothy Mitchell. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

James A. Secord. 2003. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Sheila Jasanoff. 2006. “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science.” Osiris 21 (1): 273–92.

Murphy, Michelle. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Duke University Press, 2006.

Kapil Raj. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Galison, Peter. “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science.” Isis 99, no. 1 (2008): 111–24.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2010.

Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2011. “The Muddle of Modernity.” American Historical Review 116 (3): 663–75.

Forman, Paul. “On the Historical Forms of Knowledge Production and Curation: Modernity Entailed Disciplinarity, Postmodernity Entails Antidisciplinarity.” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 56–97.

Ashworth, William J. 2014. "The British Industrial Revolution and the the Ideological Revolution: Science, Neoliberalism, and History." History of Science 52 (2): 178–199.

Mavhunga, Clapperton. 2014. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lynn Nyhart. 2016. “Historiography of the History of Science.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman, 7–22. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

Rana Hogarth. 2017. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Suman Seth. 2018. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Aro Velmet. 2020. Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, its Colonies, and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

i would also say, as a general rule, these books are generally all so well-known that there are very good book reviews and review essays on them, which you can find through jstor / your library's database. these can be invaluable both because your reading list would otherwise just mushroom out forever, and because a good review can help you decide whether you even need / want to sit down with the book itself in the first place. literally zero shame in reading an academic text secondhand via reviews.

[commanderbuffy]

Sapphic Books Reccs

Here is my list of recommended sapphic books! There’s a lot of YA here since that’s a lot of what I read. Everything on this list I have personally read and can recommend. I’m sure there’s a TON out there I haven’t read or ones I have read and have just forgotten!

Contemporary

Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail by Ashley Herring Blake (Adult)

My favorite of Blake’s! Enemies to lovers. SO good.

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake (Adult)

A woman falls for her step-sister’s best friend. Oh, and there’s a kiddo in the mix as well.

The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth (YA)

Two girls promise a summer of fun full of rom-com worthy dates. The only rule, no relationships. Just one summer, nothing more. Sure....

Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick (YA)

Amnesia fic where a girl forgets she ever met her secret girlfriend in their ultra-conservative town.

Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar (YA)

Fake dating between the girl who wants to validate her bisexuality to her friends and the girl who doesn’t mind the popularity boost.

Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen (YA)

Best friends to lovers! A big piece of this is also the friend group involved.

Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli (YA)

Imogen thinks she’s just an Ally. Spoiler alert: she’s not. I loved the way friendship was explored in this. You see some really solid friendships as well as a subtly toxic one (that’s acknowledged as such).

Late to the Party by Kelly Quindlen (YA)

An ode to late bloomers and a journey to self-acceptance. A girl goes to her first party, befriends a gay guy who introduces her to new group of friends and one really cute girl

Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl by Brianna Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum (YA)

Super fun involving a girl asking another girl fo “Queer 101″ lessons. Bi and Autistic rep too!

Perfect on Paper by Sophie Gonzales (YA)

A girl gives anonymous love advice and gets hired by a hot guy to help him get his ex back. Really FANTASTIC bi rep!

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston (Adult)

A sexy time-bendy romance with so much heart

She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen (YA)

My FAVORITE rom-com. I reread it constantly. Fake dating, enemies-to-lovers between the cheer captain and basketball star!!

She Gets the Girl by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick (YA)

Two girl team up to get their crushes to fall for them and start developing feelings for each other along the way.

Six Times We Almost Kissed by Tess Sharpe (YA)

Childhood frenemies forced to move in together for their best friend moms’ sake. Trauma filled and SO SO good.

Some Girls Do by Jennifer Dugan (YA)

A fun rom-com between an out queer athlete and the local beauty pageant queen.

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour (YA)

One of my favorite books of all time. A story about grief and friendship and love. A soft, quiet story.

Who I Was With Her by Nita Tyndall (YA)

A girl’s secret girlfriend dies and she is left to grieve alone until she finds herself turning to her girlfriend’s ex.

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Crier’s War by Nina Varela (YA)

A romance that leads to revolution by between two girls: one human, one Made

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Adult)

This is historical and fantasy! Suffragette witches! Another one of those books I wish I could read again for the first time. Three sisters, one of them has a WLW romance

Thriller/Horror

Hide by Kiersten White (Adult)

A high-stakes hide and seek competition in an abandoned amusement park. One of my all-over favorite books of 2022.

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland (YA)

No wlw romance in this one, but the main character and her sister are both wlw. My absolute favorite book of 2021. What I would pay to read this for the first time again.

The Girls I’ve Been by Tess Sharpe (YA)

The daughter of a con artist is finally allowed to stop running and faking her identity, only to get stuck in a bank heist with her ex-boyfriend and current girlfriend.

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand (YA)

Three girls who shouldn’t have a reason to team up together against an ancient evil. The new girl, the pariah, and the queen bee who’s been helping the evil all along. I have reread this book easy a dozen times.

Throwaway Girls by Andrea Contos (YA)

When a girl goes searching for her missing best friend, she finds a trail of other missing girls and battles with heartbreak after her girlfriend leaves her for California.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power (YA)

Quarantined at her girl’s school after a gruseome Tox breaks out, a girl must find what happened to her best friend who’s gone missing

Historical

Great or Nothing by Joy McCullough, Caroline Tung Richmond, Tess Sharpe, and Jessica Spotswood (YA)

The queer Little Women retelling we all deserve with a SAPPHIC JO! Set in 1942. Beth’s POV still haunts my heart

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (YA)

Two of the major supporting characters are WLW. This becomes more important and on the page in the later books in this series, but this is the first one.

Music from Another World by Robin Talley (YA)

1970s California. Two girls become penpals and bond over music.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Adult)

Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo famously had seven husbands. This is the story of her wife.

[count100]

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Canada to comment on your politics. It sounds horrible from what I've heard, and maybe violent activism is nessisary there.

I can, however, comment on you observations of the US and history. For one, the outsized influence conservatives have in the US isn't so much because of their willingness to be violent as it is a consequence of a system fundamental designed to give them an edge. Reforms have been proposed, and are being enacted in some places, to take that advantage away and it really has had an impact.

As for the violent revolutions you cited, half of them ended in unmitigated disaster. A 50% chance of your revolution killing an enormous portion of the country's population and leading directly into a brutal autocracy is not a great sign, and the circumstances in the US, at least, remind me a lot more of the conditions for failed revolutions than successful ones.

However, you do have the evidence of Nelson Mandella backing you up. He tried a peaceful revolution in South Africa and it just did not work, but once he started blowing up factories it drew more attention and scared major players in the economy, eventually leading to real change.

If you want productive violence, look to his example, but even then he didn't upend everything and start all over. As the op said, any ideology that says the only solution to the world's problems is destroying everything is wrong and probably a cult.

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

[kikuism]

hi mariam!! how about you? any books you're looking forward to reading? ooh, or manga?? any shows or movies that you enjoyed recently? or new tasty meals or baked goods that you've been proud of? 💌 🥐📚

hi jenna! 🤎🤎🤎 ooh let's see

for books, there are a lot on my tbr, but i'm excited for lady macbeth by ava reid! i really love how lyrical her writing is and i always look forward to anything she writes. i'm also tentatively looking forward to the familiar by leigh bardugo — i've only read the six of crows duology and ninth house, but i love a historical setting so i think i might like this one more than ninth house. oh, another book i enjoyed whose sequel i'm eagerly waiting for is the art of prophecy, it's a martial arts fantasy and it's exactlyyyyy what i wanted to read for so long! i needed something to fill in the green bone saga hole left in my heart, and while this isn't exactly a serious epic family saga, it had just the right amount of martial arts and compelling characters to leave me satisfied. it's honestly like if fujimoto wrote a novel. none of these characters were taking themselves too seriously and the writing wasn't taking itself seriously but at the same time there were epic fights scenes and emotional scenes that packed a punch (no pun intended). i really enjoyed it, i loved how funny it was. the fact that the main characters are majority women and one pathetic chosen one warrior is sooooo fujimoto coded. this boy can't do a single thing right and it's up to one of the greatest martial arts legends, an old woman, to take him under her wing and make sure he lives up to the prophecy that's been foretold. included in the cast is the most cringe fail assassin i have ever read in my LIFEEEEE, she's soooo embarrassing when it comes to flirting with other girls it's crazy. she's an insane killer but can't pick up a date to save her life. and who's she trying to flirt with? the other main character, a stoic warrior who's fighting for her people's freedom, she's soooo 🫣 so it was hugely entertaining and i can't wait to get the sequel from the library. i honestly Need to read more fantasy books like this, it's so much fun.

oh, i also finished bel canto last night, and it was.....strange. it's about a mass hostage situation that eventually morphs into something surreal and romantic. yeah, i think romantic is definitely the word bc there is no way this would happen in real life, it was just so impossible to me that these high profile hostages, foreign dignitaries and ceos and whatnot bonding with their captors who want to start a revolution like 😭 in the end they all become a huge family which was equal parts charming and equal parts baffling. so i had to really suspend my disbelief. they were really under house arrest with their captors for 4.5 months, that's crazy. but eventually i stopped asking how they didn't push for negotiations more fiercely and how the police and crowds outside didn't just break in and deal with it and just enjoy the language. i think it's about how people can form impossible bonds in impossible circumstances and so from that aspect it was charming and surreal. i've read 3 books from ann patchett and there's no doubt she writes really beautifully. it's just that after about 100 pages i was like okay....i get it, really. do we really need 200 more pages of this? and the epilogue was stupid i'm sorry...so it was a strange experience.

for manga!! tbh it's been soooo hard for me to get into manga lately, i really think this is because as the years go by it's just harder and harder for me to read on my phone, it's just not a comfortable experience. but then on my laptop, the screen is too big 😭 BUT i did actually start an ongoing manga called firefly wedding, which is about an aristocratic girl with a chronic illness who ends up marrying an assassin for her safety after she's captured. the premise sounded really interesting, so i started reading, and i actually really loved the beginning. the girl really just wants to abide by her duties and marry someone respectable for the sake of her family (she's quite no-nonsense about it, which really reminded me of naomi....) during the course of the story she realizes that because of her condition, she doesn't have much time left, and wouldn't she want to spend it doing what she wants instead of what's expected of her? so what ends up being a marriage of convenience ends up becoming more complex as she starts developing feelings for the assassin. and the assassin, well, he's kind of insane 😭 he's a yandere and like ofc he's written like that, very possessive and toxic, and at times he can be a little too much for me. i really liked their dynamic at the beginning, when they were constantly trying to one-up each other in little sly ways—sooooo good. and obviously someone like him has never known love, so he's always testing her limits to see if she's really committed to him because in truth he also just wants someone to love and be loved in return. and he's really cocky which i really love, which made me really drawn to him....but i liked how she didn't take any shit from him and she made sure he knew it too. i really liked watching their feelings develop.

it's just, when she starts developing feelings in return, and their romance further develops, so does his possessiveness.....'the thought of you with another man is more agonizing than death' ummm 🧐🤔🤨 so like, moments like that made me go oh! is that supposed to be romantic? and i'll admit some parts i was like 'girl he's crazy!!!!! how can you be falling for him???' hgkshfjdj but i get it, he knows nothing of the world of people and relationships and he's learning slowly. he's obviously written like that on purpose, this is the only way he knows how to operate in the world, he doesn't know better. AND something else i really like is that during these scenes, she's visibly unsettled; she makes her discomfort clear to him, so i really appreciate that, and that takes him down several notches. i like how he listens to her that way.

they're slowly shaping each other's worldview, which i like. i like how they both learn from each other; she learns how to take chances, and he learns how to listen to others and take accountability.

plus the manga does this thing where it presents double meanings all the time and i just had to screenshot this moment, it's from a scene where she has to pretend to seduce a client in order to get something valuable from him, and he starts getting physical with her, and the assassin comes to the rescue, and obviously everyone outside can hear that something's going wrong but they won't intervene bc it's a brothel:

'we wouldn't want to be in the way of someone who is trying to make their beloved fall more deeply in love with them' hellooooo?????? i gasped.

she has a scar on her chest from a surgery she had to undergo because of her weak heart, and she's self conscious about it, but then the assassin shows her all of his scars and says there's nothing to worry about, it was really cute.

and then some time later her bodyguard shows up, and he's like 'im gonna take you back home no matter what! i can't believe you've been out here like this for so long' and i was like ohhhhh my god please don't make him an annoying overbearing love interest please please please BUT i was pleasantly surprised!!! he's concerned for her, of course, and he has feelings for her and they've known each other since childhood, but he also ends up coming to respect her wishes and autonomy and hes now cooperating with her and the assassin to make sure she can live out her own life. it's really sweet. i do roll my eyes at the rivalry he and the assassin have though, but i love how they're all working together and they both respect her, it's great. anddddd i'm obvious like this but like the bodyguard more hgjshfhf he's the nice one (and his name his kou!!!) and i've always liked the nice guys instead of the bad ones.

so yeah i'm enjoying this manga quite a bit. plus it takes place in the meiji period which i love. i just wish it was already completed, because it's very hard for me to consistently maintain an interest in ongoing manga bc it only takes a few missed chapters for me to end up abandoning it oops. and it's soooo funny that my main complaint is that the love interest is just too much of a yandere bc that's literally the whole point 😭😭😭 it's exactly what it says on the tin, but i have to share my truth....i'm just not used to it at all so it's a bit much at times. sometimes the scenes that are supposed to be romantic make me go oh 🤔 but i'm excited for him to meet her family.....

the art style is so nice too!!! i really love it

as for anime, i did watch two episodes of the apothecary diaries and i liked it, it didn't hook me, but i plan on continuing it eventually. i think maomao is an interesting protagonist! there's some new anime i want to watch, like windbreaker, it just looks really nice. and i need to catch up with dungeon meshi, i haven't watched the last 3 episodes oops. as for movies, i watched the sound of music recently (everybody clap, i watched an old movie) and i liked it, it was charming! too long, but it was cute and corny. i also watched the classic korean thriller old boy, which was crazyyyyyy....that's all i'm going to say. also watched midsommar, which was.....kind of....mid 😭 sorry. i think my expectations were too high, because hereditary scared the shit out of me. but this was just.....okay. it was too overt for my liking. florence pugh was great though. oh, and for shows, i want to watch shogun, bc i just can't believe it's as good as everyone says it is 😭 idk why, i just have to see it for myself to believe it.

no updates on baking and cooking, it's just been the same old...i'm actually trying to just perfect the basics. i want to make the tastiest eggs and the perfect pizza. lately i've been kneading dough by hand and it's so satisfying and i can actually feel when it's ready instead of relying solely on the mixer, and my pizza has been coming out fluffier and softer so i love that.

i'm also getting back into crochet (it's like an on and off relationship at this point) and i always think i've forgotten but i'm pleased to note that it's muscle memory now. i'm crocheting a basket and tbh i really love crocheting things like that. i don't know if i would wear crocheted clothes but i really love making baskets and bags and whatnot. i just wish this wasn't an expensive hobby.....for this basket i had to buy 4 skeins of yarn and a new hook which ended up costing $50 😭 so i think that's why i just don't do it as often as i want to. however, i really do want to get into tapestry crochet/intarsia, i did it when crocheting my kobo sleeve, but it was messy and i want to make another one and improve my technique, maybe even make some wall hangings.

sorry for this novel length response omg!!! are there any new books you're looking forward to jenna!!

[alpaca-clouds]

So, the French Revolution

Okay, with Castlevania Nocturne coming out, this week's historical rant just has to be about the French revolution, right? Because... It is very funny to me how omnipresent it is in culture, while also... people outside of France know very little about it.

Now, I am German. And we over here were influenced by the French Revolution of course. You know, we had a revolution a bit later, too. And we did the revolution in history class. Twice, in fact. (Due to the German curriculum being kinda weird.)

But at some point I realized that even though we did it in school twice, I... barely knew anything about it. Mostly due to a lot of history around it at least in my time in school being very much Great Man history once again. So we talked about Robspierre and his dudes, we talked about the royalty, we talked about the march on Versailles (somehow leaving out it was a woman's march), and about the storming of the Bastille... But... We left out so much about what was actually happening on a social level in France or even the exact goals of the revolution outside of the good old "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" thingie. And weirdly enough... Our entire class on the end of the revolution was "But it failed". No why. No how. No anything.

And, of course, there also has been this one thing very prevailant in us talking about any of the revolutions. How a certain cheeto colored president would have phrased it: "There were good people on both sides."

And I think this last thing is a bit to present.

While the general idea about the revolution is, that it was kinda good, but also really bad because of all the death and brutality. Which, yeah, kinda is fair. But also... Is a very shallow understanding of what was going on.

What if I was to tell you, that the revolution originally was mostly peaceful?

I know, right? Like, of course there was violence and death, but it was not cruel on the part of the revolutionaries and mostly (partly because most of the clergy supported the revolutionaries) the nobility ended up giving in and tried to play the game in a way that they gave up some privilege, but not all of them. Which ended up with a system in which a lot of people gained political influence... but still about half of the men and all of the women in France had no political power.

And then... No, no guillontine. Not yet. Rather there was a war with Austria and Prussia, which would have happened either way, but there was also a lot of encouragement from the French nobility and royalty for Austria-Prussia to invade France to restore the old order.

And when those invading forces were pushed back... that was the moment when the violence and the "reign of terror" errupted. And the people started calling for bigger change. For a system were possibly EVERYONE could hold political power.

When media tackles the French revolution, it usually fails to deal with all those details. It also basically goes like: "Yeah, typical left-wing infighting," when it comes to the conflict between the revolutionary groups, completely ignoring what that infighting was about (it was about whether polical power should be for all people or just those owning land, also some stuff that we today would call civil rights and some early ideas that later on communism and the like would build upon).

I honestly do feel like we should do better teaching this.

While most people tend to agree that "overthrowing the royalty" was a good thing, a lot of people will go: "But they went too far!" And I gotta ask: "What was too far?" Like, sure, there was a lot of murder... But be aware that this murder was not unsided. And also... This entire thing happened after a lot of people starved to death. Which... Also constitutes murder?

[honouredsnakeprincess]

Well, friendos, you probably didn't expect three notes in the course of an evening, even if the first was kind of nothing! Season 3 Episode 1 has given me a fair few things to say, though!

First, the pettiness and minutiae:

I like the new yorker fellow. Didn't quite catch his name, but I like his accent (is that a new york accent? don't rightly know).

This might be another 'seeing 3d models where none actually existed' incident, but I couldn't help but notice that ECorp was marked as "Evil Corp" when Mr Robot was going through that power plant search engine, which is something it isn't changed to when Elliot isn't present. I don't recall if Mr Robot does this too, but if he doesn't (and part of me suspects he does not) then Elliot might be more aware of things than immediately apparent.

It really seems like the calm relationship between Elliot and Mr Robot has gone away. :( That's pretty sad, I was happy they were getting on better for a while there, but I guess that wasn't set to last given how much of the show's core drama relies on that conflict.

Angela seems to have been largely stripped of her dynamism and pluckiness. Previously she has been a very active character, moving from one plan to the next and constantly adapting, but that seems to have ceased following the surrealism. We'll see where this goes.

Anyways, the main thing I want to talk is politics. Boo! The scary communist is going to be mildly critical of 2017-era American liberalism!

This show really is a product of its time, and I kind of adore it for that! I regard it almost as a work of fantastical historical fiction, even though I was obviously very much alive in 2017. Still, I think sometime in my coverage of late season 1, I expressed some hesitancy towards how the show portrayed revolutionary activity; obviously the actions of a small cadre of individuals will not be sufficient to usher in a revolution, and merely disrupting large financial institutions is unlikely to actually have a substantial destabilizing effect on capital-at-large. I think I expressed some hope that the show would grapple with this.

It seems to have sort of done so, but in a way I'm not sure I agree with entirely? The 5/9 attack did not meaningfully damage capitalism, or even destroy Evil Corp, it just caused what seems to be a depression and some infrastructural failure, and enabled economic meddling by the Scary Chinese. Mostly, it just made the lives of individual people kind of shittier by disrupting financial services and depriving them of their savings, mortgages, etc. The richest characters we meet in season 2 are largely unaffected in their personal holdings and comforts.

In this episode, Elliot decides to take the blames for every stress and strain caused by these events onto his own shoulders in a montage cutting between clips of Donald Trump, Angela Merkel (I think? Might've been her British counterpart, I've a bad habit of failing to differentiate between German Bundeskanzlers and British Prime Ministers and I don't care enough to check at this point), the construction of border walls, and scenes of abject poverty, and this speaks to a view of politics I don't specifically think is sound.

Certainly, economic instability is something that is latched onto by reactionary elements in government, but I think to contextualize this properly we have to situate Mr Robot as a historical text~! I am not a historian of 21st century Americana, nor do I much want to be, but I think I have the broad strokes down.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, from which this show takes a lot of its first season's politics, was fundamentally not a consciously proletarian movement. It was overwhelmingly white office workers, who tend to hold themselves apart from the wider proletariat (even when they ultimately share most of their interests with said class) by virtue of being "management", and lacked a strong political programme. Ultimately, these were liberals protesting against a liberal system that had mistreated them specifically, they were not protesting against the general predations of capital.

Many of the same people who were strongly supportive of the Occupy movement during its height were shocked and appalled when Donald Trump ran for public office, and even more upset when he won the Presidency despite projections that his opponent would easily best him. This was not inherently an unreasonable reaction, the man's a fucking reactionary and there isn't much to like about him or his policy!

The great difficulty is that many of these liberals took to exceptionalizing Trump as a far more significant figure than he actually was, likely due to his almost complete abandonment of euphemism and modesty when going about the horrid business of American governance. Border fascism had long been a bipartisan position (as we can see by recent criticisms of Trump during the 2024 elections not being for calling to build a wall, but for failing to deliver on said promise), but under Trump this took the form of loudly and belligerently calling to "build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it". Similarly, travel restrictions on muslim-majority countries and on people with arabic-sounding names were not new by the time of the Trump administration, but calling such measures a "muslim ban" certainly was!

Essentially, Trump and his broader wave of reactionary politicians, while certainly a step in a rightward direction generally, were more significant in the respect that they raised the volume of what were already mainstream right-wing or bipartisan political beliefs! Courting white nationalists was not new; courting white nationalists as blatantly as this was new and outrageous!

This was scary! This was apocalyptic! Had fascism finally come to roost in its ancestral homeland? The astute commentators noted that in some respects it had lived in America for decades at that point, and still some elements of fascist politics had yet to arrive. At the end of the day, Trump was only a little bit outside of the norm in terms of actual policy, the horrors of "trumpism" were much the same horrors his immediate predecessors had carried out, and would be carried out by his successor in the presidency as well. Still, this shakeup in discourse if not in policy created a certain millenarian feeling in American and broader "Western" politics, a sense of doom that had long been impending but which now affected the specific type of white, "not rich but comfortable" liberal office-workers who had driven the Occupy movement.

So here is Mr Robot, which has spent two seasons criticizing corporate America, and whose viewpoint character must now absolve everyone from Adam Smith to money to the corporate structure and on and on of their guilt in the deterioration of conditions, in order to place the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and resolve that the current crisis must come to an end, and everything must return to some kind of status quo.

Mr Robot does not want to return to the status quo, for his part, but now he is in the company of a woman who has literally been brainwashed, a murderer/former corporate executive, a shady hacker circle with no ethical standing, and subversive foreign elements from China. I don't think he is meant to be right here!

I don't know where this is going, but the more I think about it the more apprehensive I get, frankly. I could be entirely wrong about this, too, and I'm still enjoying the show quite a lot, so I will keep watching in the future.

Angela's monologue at the end of the episode also had a certain millenarian quality to it, even more literally with talk of the birth of a new world and it being ended by the return of light to the city. I wanted to work this in somehow to my commentary on historical and political context, but I forgot how I was going to do that. Good song, too.

[pleas3pretendimnothere]

My mystery pain improved somewhat this month, so I was able to read four books! I'm still behind my 1-book-a-week goal, but whatever! I care more about my body feeling better. And it's too bad none of these books really stood out this month!

The Door In the Moon

By Catherine Fisher - This is the third book in Fisher's Obsidian Mirror series. The previous two books I enjoyed for their fast pacing and colorful characters. I did recommend adventure-enthusiasts read them! However, this third book may have changed my opinion somewhat...

This book feels like filler. By the end, I was asking, "Was an adventure in mid-revolution Paris really necessary?" It all felt a bit like pandering to the dramatic allure of this historical time period. The reader realizes the setting and thinks, "Uh-oh! How will our heroes get out of this one!" At least, I suppose that's what was the intended effect... It didn't pay off for me. Instead, the book shuffles things around in a way that should feel refreshing, but instead disappoints. Side characters whom I care very little for are reintroduced and made pivotal to the plot. Meanwhile, the series' most likeable characters are pushed into the background. This mix-up destroyed Fisher's usual intense pacing! And the big ending...well, it could have easily been the ending to the previous book. Why, why, why? What happened here!?

It's tough to be three books into a series and realize you've just read a worse book. You ask, "Do I still care?" And I think I do. The previous books were strong enough, so I will be finishing the series. I'll give my final verdict then!

Life After Life

By Kate Atkinson - A book opens with a woman assassinating Hitler. You, having freshly opened the scene in your mind, must decide: heroic, or campy? That question haunted my entire read.

The majority of Life is fantastic. Our protagonist Ursula Todd is reliving her own life over and over again. Each time she dies, she relives her life with new instincts, her own intuition linking her to the mistakes of her past failed lives. We as the readers see Ursula make mistakes, and then improve upon them in the next life. We see her at her lowest, and then at her highest. She makes decisions that have positive effects in some ways, and negative effects in others. Consequences riddle each small decision. Atkinson's ability to jump between lives, sometimes in ways that can be quite confusing to the reader, brings a huge amount of fun to this read. The reader constantly asks, "What will she do different? Will her life be better or worse? Do any of her decisions actually matter at all?"

And then you remember she is somehow going to kill Hitler. Huh???

Ultimately, Atkinson made it make sense. I too would kill Hitler if I realized he was the source of all despair in all my multitude of lives! Most importantly, this is emotional, thought-provoking literature. I often found myself reflecting on my own life and the decisions I make every day, how the smallest things might affect me years down the line. And then, I wonder if any of it really matters, or if it will all just end up undone.

I really enjoyed this read, but it is quite long, and the Hitler stuff comes off as quite distracting in this year of 2024. Still, I'd highly recommend you RENT IT!

Akata Witch

By Nnedi Okorafor - A thirteen-year-old American, albino girl of Nigerian parents returns to Nigeria, where she discovers she is part of a secret society of magic-users that spans the globe. It's giving Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, folks. It's a lot of fun.

Okorafor has written a children's novel that brings the readers into the world of African magic. It's tantalizing, it's magical, it's whimsical, and, in a wonderful Riordan-esque way, still quite serious! There are stakes and risk, and our adorable cast of characters must navigate huge responsibilities suddenly placed on their shoulders. And the story, the world, always, always, it's strange, and it's fun! I had a blast reading this.

Not a lot to say about Witch, but it's a delightful, quick and easy read. If you're looking for something light and refreshing like Rick Riordan, definitely RENT IT!

God Emperor of Dune

By Frank Herbert - And now for something completely different. The brilliant new Dune film inspired my return to the books, all of which I'd gobbled up. Dune was incredibly detailed and wise. Dune Messiah was a reflective finale to its predecessor. Children of Dune brought us back into the weird intrigue and horror of Arrakis. And God Emperor...um. Don't read this book....

Wow. This book was bad. I didn't think it possible, but hoo boy! The people weren't kidding when they said "Just read the first three!" This book is a miserable, patronizing slog.

There is virtually no plot. The God Emperor Leto II spends 80% of the book taking guests into his chamber and philosophizing at them. Herbert's writing is astonishingly nuanced and intelligent--to a fault. There's so much nonsense wordplay, that at some point, you just stop trying to understand any of it. You lose interest. You ask, 300 pages in, "Wait, what the hell happened to Siona???" Then, when Duncan cries out in fear of two girls kissing, you ask, "Is Dune bad??"

And the philosophy! Good god, it's dated. Hope you enjoy sexism and homophobia in your worldly discussions! Just know I spent a lot of time laughing. (That's right! Male armies always tend towards homosexuality, which always leads to self-destruction! I so agree, Frank!!)

If you loved Dune like I did, you will not love this book. If you MUST read it, I'd advise a tailored reading experience, where all the pointless nonsense is skipped. That would be a good 70%. Otherwise, SKIP IT!

[draculasstrawhat]

This is going to be long and rambling, but as someone who spent my teens reading about historical extremely-just-and-necessary riots and revolutions, I do find the widespread role play around them, and the lean in to accelerationism… frightening, more than anything.

Like, there’s a lot of talk about how the violent disruption of a revolution would kill vulnerable people, and how revolutions tend to end up targeting (or at least using as collateral) marginalised groups, and all of that is true. And there’s a lot of talk about how plenty of groups are already being targeted, and used as collateral - particularly outside of the global north - and what? Are we just supposed to say that’s acceptable? And that’s very true as well.

But specifically, wanting things to get worse, so that people ‘have to’ rise up and take action? Do you… know what worse means?

Have you read about the mass graves and the torture sites and the mutilations and the disappearances? Have you read survivor testimonies? The Amnesty reports? Have you read about what happened to peaceful protestors and union organisers before things got ‘bad enough’ that people felt it was necessary to take up arms en masse? About what happened to their families, their children? Have you listened what political refugees have said was done to them, and those they organised with?

Do you know what happens if you lose? What happens after it gets “bad enough” and people do rise up, and then they fail? Because most revolutions fail because the revolutionaries don’t have multinational funding, and guns, and bombs, and complicit social media companies?

Worse is every bad thing you’ve ever read about, that makes you feel sick and scared and like something needs to be done to make this stop right now, and yes, it is already happening. In far too many places worldwide, ‘worse’ is already happening, and revolution has not been the inevitable, sweeping consequence. Not because these very real people being oppressed, starved, tortured, killed are less brave, or less virtuous, or less intelligent than you, but because once a totalitarian government has seized control they will do literally anything to maintain it.

God, I want a better world. Of course sometimes I want to flip the table and start it all again without this fucking suffering, but… people have tried. Again and again, people in worse circumstances you have ever imagined have tried, and organised and fought and… failed. Been forced to live through another 20 years of violent oppression, if they got to live at all.

Whatever horrifying thing you’re reading about, watching happen, whatever atrocity has radicalised you… do you think there wasn’t a resistance there? That people aren’t fighting it right now? That no one has tried to organise and stop it? By violent means as well as peaceful ones?

Why do you think your revolution is the one that’s fated to succeed?

I hate the way the world seems to be going. It scares the hell out of me that my children might inherit a country where their only option for change is armed struggle. It horrifies me, daily, that children worldwide already inhabit that reality, and no, I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe it will have to be global revolution.

But I really hope not. I hope it doesn’t have to get that bad, first. Because I feel like anything else is trivialising the very real suffering, and struggle, and death that people have already gone through (and are going through) trying to improve the world, and in circumstances of such horror that most people can’t easily imagine.

[caitylove]

Okay, now that a few days have past and I've had time to emotionally process, I figure I'd debrief a bit on going to Intercon, a LARP convention, last weekend. Overall, I had a blast and even have a few pics.

I played in 4 games over the course of the weekend:

Wicked Hearts-which takes place in Romanov era Russia right before the revolution where I played a folk hero/ royal guard who was in love with one of the princesses but also trying to bring about the revolution. I wasn't feeling my best during this game, due to asthma but I had a blast, even if I didn't start the revolution. Instead, the Princess I was involved with made a political marriage to the Prince of the Fairies, and she, the prince, myself, and the prince's lover all went off the live together in one big happy, polycule 😂😂. That ended up being our solution to keep her from having to marry someone else. lol

Star Senate: Revenge of the Budget which is an intergalactic senate game where you are trying to pass legislation and make deals while the empire's military arm has literal guns aimed at your head to force you to pass a budget. I played the 2,000 year old Speaker of the Senate who was just done with the bullshit and was trying to cause instability in the government using the bills I pass. This game is a comedy and was literal comedy gold. I failed spectacularly at solo causing a civil war, BUT I did successfully get my "Historic Preservation Act" passed to create a museum out of an old, decommissioned Battlestar passed. FRIENDS, I DIDNT CREATE THIS BILL. this was one of the bills that WAS IN MY STARTER packet. So me, a giant BSG fan, was so tickled pink and made it my like solo goal. lol 😂 I really wish I hadn't cut off the bill in my pic, but it was a late night game so I didn't notice till the next day.

Unrest and Unaccountability - which was a Regency era horror larp where I was attending the Queen's Ball and trying to find a marriage match, all the while dealing with shenanigans like slaying Napoleons Undead Army and Killing a creepy Mirror facsimile of myself. Succeeded in literally all my goals of this one, and it was a ton of fun.

Debugged.me-which was a game about Artifical Intelligences in basically a mental health facility to cure their AI disorders. I played a character based off of Dolores from Westworld who had snapped after decades of abuse and murdered her abuser. This game honestly was a giant dud. It had a lot of potential, but the game creator hadn't finished the game and hadn't refined it so it was just a mess. We didn't start until over an hour past start time, so half of the players left. It's a shame, was really looking forward to playing a dark, ai game.

Overall the weekend was fun. If you ever get a chance to go, I 100% say do it. Now check out some of these pics!

[justahappycloud]

@duquesademiel tagged me to share my top 10 books (1) of the year so here they go in no specific order bc i read a lot this year and if i think too much about it i will combust (it's dec 30th, it's illegal to think too much)

but since it's still me, you also get a loose synopsis and we can pretend this is also a book rec list, okay? it's a win-win, i know.

📚 Babel: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

a postcolonial view of steampunk magic England from 1982. revolution and all its ugly but powerful reality. long, but really worth it.

📚 Cenizas de Carnaval by Mariana Travacio

a collection if short stories focused on the fragility of life. read it in august i think but i still think about the stiry of the man and the glue

📚 Under The Whispering Door by T. J. Klune

magic and grief and gay and death and gay and life and GAY. loved it. not as much as the house in the cerulean sea, but really loved it

📚 Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

reading this with sand under my feet and the sound of the ocean was one of my best ideas, ngl. interesting story, not one of my faves, but it was good

📚 A Spoonful of Murder by J. M. Hall

murder solved by retired teachers. 10/10

📚 The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield

the story of the life of marie antoinette and her sister charlotte except they can do magic. what are you waiting for??? go and read it!!

📚 Operación Masacre by Rodolfo Walsh

non-fiction retelling of the events that occurred on july 9th, 1956, when 12 civilians were arrested in Argentina before being illegally executed

📚 Orlando by Virginia Woolf

mock-biography of the famous poet of the 17th (and 18th, and 19th, and 20th) century, Orlando.

📚 The Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl

fairytale retellings with a macabre twist, very focused on friendship and #girlpower [part of a duology]

📚 Nosotros dos en la tormenta by Eduardo Sacheri

historical fiction about two friends from opposing revolutionary units in 1975's Argentina

📚 A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

fantasy historical fiction about two members of the bureaucracy who represent two different worlds (that of magic humans and normal humans) who must work together when the imposition of one world over the other puts all of them at risk. [part of a series]

📚 The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic

invented sports. found family. mafia. gay and ace. it reads like a fanfiction both derogatorily and affectionately, so read at your own risk, but i did read all three books in three days

📚 El Juguete Rabioso by Roberto Arlt

alternatively titled "Silvio Astier Tries To Be The Most Successful Thief Of Buenos Aires And Fails Spectacularly At It (HAPPY ENDING)"

📚 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

not a synopsis bc you know what the book's about but just a note to say that i had this books since my last year of highschool and only now i got to read it, so yay me, tying loose ends from the worst period of my life

📚 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhis

a prequel to jane eyre told from the point of view of bertha mason, previously known as antoinette cosway

📚 A Mercy by Toni Morrison

1680s story about a family of misfits and what happens to this group of slaves when the man who enslaved them dies

open tag bc if you made it this far i want to know what you've read so i can get recs for next year 👀

(1) sol fucked up so you get +10 recs, but you don't have to be insane like me and you can o it the normal way

[tetsunabouquet]

9, 12 and 33 for your 50 followers event if that's not too much. 💙

It's not hun!

9 What's your favorite scene in KNB? Hmm, that's actually a bit of a difficult question but I feel like the scene in which Midorima has those tiny flashbacks about his team in the Shutoku vs Rakuzan game, and realizes what they have came to mean to him is very dear to me.

Not just the character development itself, but the stark contrast it paints between him and Akashi too. Akashi and Midorima have a dynamic that really interests me (and I have a few love triangle fics with these two stored). They were amongst the closest friendship pairs in the GOM, had similar enoug backgrounds and lead the Teiko team together as Captain and Vice Captain. Yet their philosophies couldn't be anymore different when it comes to teamwork, even during their Teiko days. Let's not forget, Midorima was the only one out of the GOM who never wanted to participate in things like quotas and betting and after Akashi's personality switch, he was the only GOM who never skipped out and continued training hard. Midorima always thought winning was important, but he believed in neither high pressure, or slacking. Then, after joining Shutoku and being defeated by Kuroko, he basically is the GOM to follow directly into Kuroko and Kagami's footsteps by finding his own 'shadow' in Takao. Meanwhile, Akashi would toss his teammates aside, would put them under high pressure yet allowed them to slack simultaneously. It feels like such an epic showdown of the differences between them as players and the friends they once were. Midorima was defeated, but he stood up to Akashi and made his point. Not a lot of people would have had the balls to do that.

12, Is there any historical event you'd like to witness?

As a history buff, there are plenty I'd like to witness! One high on my list would be the Revolt of the Batavi. I mentioned growing up on the Dutch countryside as a child, and it was actually the province where the revolt took place so it's a very important historical event to our region. (short summary, the Batavi were a Germanic tribe the Roman Empire had basically overtaken in their quest to conquer North Europe. The Batavi had a revolution against them, it failed but the Batavi had birthed an ideology that said, 'if all of our tribes were to stand together we could defeat the Romans'. And sure enough, this was the starting point of the downfall of the Roman Empire as the other tribes had listened to the Batavi). 33, What's the most recurring theme in your dreams? YA worthy plots surrounding other worlds. I often have dreams surrounding cities I've been, but there are entirely different buildings, streets, etc yet my dreams are consistent as if there's really an alternate universe out there were there's a huge theme park behind the central station of Berlin.

Another very frequent thing that happens in my dreams is the end of the world, where I get eaten by a monster or alien at some point. Sometimes, I even dream to the point where everything has been destroyed, I am dead and the world is beginning anew. Like Ragnarok from Norse Mythology.

Just last night, I had another weird ass dream that involved a magical world with pink trees. I suppose my sub-conscious is really invested in world building LMAO

[erigold13261]

Hi can we hear more about the Failed Rock Revolution AU? It sounds and looks intriguing and amazing!

Oooh yes! I’d love to! Though there is a lot to this AU so I don’t know if I will get to everything. I can give the gist of the AU for the most part and go into details on anything someone might want more info on!

And again, under the cut because it is fairly long. And just a note, this is a darker AU. It’s not as fun or silly as my Swap AU. I don’t think there is anything too drastic to warn about. I do quickly mention a minor character death, abuse of power, deteriorating mental health, but I don’t go into great detail.

I’m mainly going to be focusing on the aftermath of the failed Revolution, but I can go into how things in history changed to make people act differently. Like, for example, the Goolings in this AU had a rougher break-up making Tatiana even more stuck up and hostile to rock, and Neon and his Wife’s relationship is different which kept him from fully going with the cyborgification (he still has plenty of robotic features, but he has his face/head in this AU).

But the main gist of this AU is that 1010 were able to stop the Rock Revolution. Mayday and Zuke sustained some heavy injuries from the fight that left them incapable of playing their instruments anymore, meaning the Revolution kinda died. And since May and Zuke did not fully complete the Revolution like in-game, things are very different for a lot of the characters.

For DJSS, he was stuck in orbit for a bit longer. When he did eventually come back down his head had severe cracking. Other than that actually, he is not affected by the Revolution that much. He was affected more by the past where he was fired from his teaching job instead of quitting, making him much more bitter and hostile to others than the OG DJSS.

For the Sayu Crew, Sayu is not an AI and won’t become one, especially not after people start thinking robots/AIs are dangerous from how 1010 fought B2J. The Crew is also very confused on what they should do, whether to stay with NSR and keep making music that now feels wrong to them or quit and try to figure out what to do with their lives at such a young age with no real backup plan. 

The only other thing that really changed history-wise for the Crew is that Dodo was given cybernetics and can now talk (not that he wanted them, it was forced by his parents) and that Remi has not come out as trans yet and is still seen as a girl using she/her pronouns (at least publicly. With the Crew he is seen as a guy between them).

For Yinu, her piano stays broken. There is no music magic to fix it and so a lot of passion for playing is actually stifled in Yinu. Her job that once brought joy is now becoming bittersweet and exhausting. Mama sustained damage to her spine from the fall (which is actually the same for my OG Mama, I just haven’t shown it much) but she refuses to use a cane (which is NOT like my OG Mama).

Historically, not much is changed for Mama or Yinu’s past. They still lost Papa and moved to Vinyl City to work for NSR around the same time. The only difference really for them is that because the music magic never fixed the piano, and there was no reconciliation between the family and B2J, Mama has become even more protective and overbearing on Yinu. Which just makes Yinu even more upset and wanting freedom and to stop playing the piano.

For 1010 and Neon J, there is a lot that has changed (of course there is, this is me. 1010 all the way lol). Both historically and after the Revolution. They intertwine a lot, but I will try to keep it brief. The doll/kid versions of 1010 were destroyed, meaning they never get those memories of Neon’s Ex-wife and kid, or any peace-time memories before the war. Because of this, they are not as human-acting when MK units (if anything they act more like canon 1010 than my versions of 1010) and Neon is not as attached to them as he is as OG Neon with his 1010. He still loves them, but not in the way as he would if the dolls were able to become the MK units, since to him these are just robots he built to fill an empty void. They were not even given names (I like to think the fanon names are the names Neon picked out for potential kids, so he would not give these “replacements” real names), so instead they are just their colors (White, Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, and Purple).

As you can see, Purple is, or at least WAS, a part of 1010. The reason he is no longer part of 1010 was because Tatiana destroyed him to set an example of what happens when robots become dangerous to the public (she honestly thought Neon would just rebuild him and was trying to set an example so 1010 would behave). Well Purple was lost, and Neon was trying to find a way to quit NSR without abandoning 1010 as NSR owned 1010 at this point in time (this was the same in my OG version, but negotiating with Tatiana got them out of that situation, but this Neon was too scared to attempt that for fear of losing 1010).

At the time of the Revolution, 1010 were all metal (no flowing hair or kinda human-like silicone skin) and just following orders given by Neon (All-kill protocol). Even without their human-like memories they would know not to ACTUALLY hurt B2J too much, just to try and stop them. But as B2J destroyed 1010 and the factory, Blue became desperate to protect his troops, his captain, and NSR. Which led to Blue breaking May’s arm (to the point it later needed to be amputated) and severing a tendon in Zuke’s arm, fracturing his skull, and damaging his spine/legs (he was more hostile to Zuke because of Zuke’s comments on destroying the factory). In the end, it was this act of violence from Blue that put 1010 on the spot for possibly being too dangerous along with questions of what to do with Sayu if she were to become an AI at some point. (there’s probably more with 1010 but I will leave it there for them).

For Eve, she never fought B2J. So her feelings for Zuke were never dealt with. What she did have to face though was the fact that Blue had almost killed Zuke, leading Eve to resent 1010 and start acting very cruel to them. I feel like her mental state was very fragile at this point, causing her to spiral and hurt people around her: Blue, Neon, Remi, even Zuke when she tried to reach out to him since now she had an idea of where he would be. Everyone to her was an enemy at this point and she felt more alone than ever. (She was not in therapy because I have the idea that Eve only started therapy after the Revolution, so since that was stopped, she is not getting the help that she needs.)

Historically, instead of staying with both parents while her parents split, she instead stayed with her mother only and so she was not raised alongside Remi at all. Even though they are half siblings, they are not very close at all. If anything, Eve doesn’t even see him as a sibling while Remi looks up to her, basically putting her on a pedestal and trying to be more like her (even if it is the more negative aspects of Eve that are more apparent in this AU).

For Tatiana, like I said earlier, the Goolings had a much harsher break-up. She is now a lot less caring about those around her. Even when her OG version was cold, she still cared about the city and the people who worked under her, but this version is a lot more callous to the point of pushing her artists more and more. Rock is definitely a thing she detests now, not just dislikes and annoyed with. Even other genres are pushed back, making a lot of the Megastars have to redo their music at times if they stray too close to a particular genre outside of EDM for fear of some kind of retaliation. This could be in the very SEVERE case of 1010 losing a member to her anger, or Mama getting implied threats about Yinu’s future in the music business getting a lot more difficult. It has become a very toxic work environment that puts EDM above everything else.

For the Revolution part of her story. She was happy that B2J was dealt with, but not with the fact that 1010 is now seen as a dangerous tool in the hands of a record label/power company. So she forced Neon to remove all weapons and fighting abilities from 1010 or else she would get someone else to do it. She put restrictions on robots, AIs, holograms, and anything else the public might get spooked by. Meaning that Yinu, DJ, and Eve would all be forced to work overtime very soon after recovering to pick up slack for Sayu and 1010. Leading to just more resentment between all the charters, most of it aimed at 1010 and Neon (the only one not TRULY angry or resentful of 1010/Neon is DJSS). 

Some of the resentment comes from fear of robots now, such as Mama terrified that one of 1010 is going to go haywire and try to hurt Yinu. So she tries to keep them away, yelling at them when they get close or even shoving them away so that Yinu is safe in her eyes. There’s resentment for ACTUALLY hurting a loved one, which is Eve hating 1010 (mainly Blue) for hurting Zuke. She now treats the group, and Neon, with cold hostility, and if she is ever alone with Blue she uses her mind powers on him to show him what Zuke must have felt when Blue was attacking. Then there is the resentment of losing work, which is the Sayu Crew who are now being forced to basically take a pay cut and not be as creative all because 1010 decided to hurt people. 

It’s not just others hating 1010, there is resentment within the group. White hates almost everyone around him (especially Tatiana and Blue), the only exception being Neon J. Blue is full of self loathing, anxiety, and fear of messing up again and leading to the death of the other members of 1010 (along with the fact that Blue is the technical leader of 1010, White is only the leader in the public eye). Red is terrified of everything. He is almost always cowering behind Blue or Yellow when not around fans. Yellow has become an absolute prick, picking on White, Red, and Green. Trying to take back some control in his life on the few people he deems lower than him. And Green is just tired of everything and wants to quit music. He is very depressed and once his weaponry was removed, his ring acted like a force shut-off button, which Yellow and White love to pull and make him shut down. Everyone in this AU has basically become toxic to each other because of the environment, and it seems like no matter what people try to do, things just get worse.

Um, I think that’s all I have for now with Tatiana. No one figures out she is Kul Fyra. She doesn’t blast her head off revealing any crystals. Her fire/spark for rock stays extinguished. There is no talk between her and Kliff. To her, everything goes back to normal except with a few more rules to keep the order. It’s all perfect to her and so she can’t see the terrible environment she is promoting both for her megastars and for the citizens of Vinyl City.

For Kliff, I will be honest, I haven’t thought of him much in this AU. I kinda see him bailing on B2J the second he realizes they were done in by 1010. He probably feels guilty about kinda being the reason robots now have such heavy restrictions on them, but not enough to try and reach out to Neon and reveal himself. He would try to get in contact with Tatiana or B2J at some point. Failing to get to Tatiana but able to get to B2J. There would be an apology at first and then the formation of a new plan to get back at NSR, only for the 2 to just tell him to go away. They can’t do this anymore. Their spirits were broken along with their bodies. Probably leading to Kliff feeling abandoned again, but not as much since he could physically see why the two were giving up rock. Still though, he’d try and start a new revolution somehow, kinda vanishing for now. (I’ll try to think more for him, but for now this is what I got.)

For DK West, he and Zuke had the first two rap battles. So when Zuke ended up disowning West, then going up against 1010 only to get severely hurt, West didn’t know what to do. He was hurt by Zuke but still loved his brother. This ended up with him selling his house, land, and wagon to move to the city and take care of Zuke and May. Trying to find ways to help them pay for medical bills and become accustomed to their new way of life. I don’t think Zuke ever really apologizes to West, but it is a fear in his mind that potentially the last thing he said to his brother was that they weren’t related and that he basically hated him. The two have a very strained relationship, and May is trying to help them figure things out, but it is all just pain and sorrow for the three at the moment. 

That is all the main stuff I have! I could go into more details about specific characters, either histories or how their personalities have changed because of their environment. I really want to draw more for this AU because it is honestly a lot of fun to think of it! I have no idea what to call it other than like “Failed Revolution” or something, so I will go with that for now. I’d love to talk more about this if people want to hear more! :D

[sun-in-retrograde]

Saturn in Pisces Season : My Top 20 Saturn Returns to watch out for

Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo!, The dot com Bubble, AOL - The Internet, as a profitable, mass market thing. Basically.

Ariana Grande

The Anglican Church Ordaining Women Priests - A group of conservative arch-bishops split off a few weeks ago over gay marriage. The Church has been struggling to hold together and this'll be a test

The IBM Simon (The first smart phone) - I feel like smartphones have been the standard tool people have for so long. A lot of this tech, like QR codes etc are having their saturn return. All these technologies were stress tested in the pandemic and we seem to be seeing a new generation of technology emerge.

Dua Lipa - She can be off the wall sometimes and often fun. I'm rooting for her to come out of this strong.

New Labour - Tony Blair's whole scheme of a non-left wing Labour Party is back again with Starmer. Blair was doing it in a world where people were talking seriously about how history and ideological politics may well be over. Starmer is doing it in a world where people are talking seriously about groups they'd like to genocide and whether we need a revolution.

Pokemon - I just think this is a neat franchise.

The Spice Girls - I loved them as a kid, I grew to see them as boring and mainstream and now we appreciate them again as a culture I think.

Jerry Heil - My favourite Ukrainian singer! Before the war she started to want to be seen as more serious and less "singing songs about Ukraine's version of deliveroo while dressed as a hot dog". While a refugee she's been doing her best and most musically interesting work. She failed to win a place in Eurovision for this year, and *now* after all that, she's starting her Saturn return.

Friends - It's a shit TV show. It's been re-evaluated a lot but it's still had a place as just something people watch. I feel this might be set to change.

If you think about it, a Saturn return is basically the time from birth to having to get serious about things. For business and innovation, its about the length of time it takes to go from being a hot new thing to being very very much part of the establishment. For media, it's about the time things take to go from retro to vintage.

Actually, that's the key to this whole thing, isn't it? If you have a piece of media coming up to its Jupiter return its retro, nostalgic, quirkily outdated. See all the YouTube videos about the history of Tumblr. about 12 years ago is a fun gap.

At 29 years, it's not a fun gap. If you learn about things from back then, you have to learn about cultural and historical context. It become academic. It gets serious. Jupiter is fun, Saturn is more serious.

The other day I walked past some kids playing music from the early 90s really loud. They must have been proud of it because they were blaring it out so loud for the whole world to hear and trying to look cool. I accidentally laughed in their faces because the music was... just the most shit boy band garbage of the time. But now, it's vintage and serious, I guess.

I wonder what terrible elements of 2023 culture people will be treating with reverence by 2052

21 May 1993, to 30 June 1993

28 January 1994 - 7 April 1996

[metalicats]

someone reminded me i did 'books i liked in 2023', so here's me doing it again for 2024! (a month in oops) but this time i added commentary i guess

more Wayward Children series: hell yea

Innkeeper Chronicles: fun, i love sentient buildings

A Sorceress Comes to Call (spooky?): TKingfisher never misses, i'm gonna have to buy it when im back somewhere with english bookstores

Priory of the Orange Tree: good but long. the reveal of history and unreliability was interesting, just in seeing how cultures and belief shift over centuries

The Three Body Problem was uncreative and all 'tell don't show', so don't bother unless you want Chinese Cultural Revolution perspectives, which was fairly interesting historically, until the plot came back

Lake of Souls collection: a good fun read of short stories! I don't think you need to know Ann Leckie's main works to enjoy it, and it did finally get me to finish Raven Tower so yay.

The Last Sun: an excellent urban magic world, loved the series (and the first real poly relationship i've liked outside of fanfic??) but TWs for violence and some body horror

Spatterjay series was ...interesting, definitely some interesting world building, but I'm not sure if others would enjoy it because wow theres constant body horror and cannibalism. the following series failed to hold up sadly

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was boring and the writing was cheesy and not well plotted; don't bother unless literally all you want about is gay pining and a woman being randomly the villain, then have fun i guess

hmm that's more books than I thought I would have! Working full time has really sapped my energy, so it felt a lot smaller than that....

anyway, most of these were great! i still definitely love finding new SFF that can do new creative things.

suggest something if you think its similar to these! ill put it on the TBR and get back to you in 12 years or so ^^;