#Ed Lyon

[paul-archibald]

Superstitions

Composers and performing artists can often be superstitious about dealing with the trials and tribulations of performing and composing. From ‘touch wood’ or avoiding walking under a ladder or crossing fingers or feeling concerned about getting out of bed on Friday the 13th. Many of these superstitions can feel very real to those affected by them. In this edition of In Conversation we look at how…

[ulrichgebert]

Zu Edison Denisovs absurder, melancholischer Jazzundnochvielmehr-Oper nach Boris Vians L'écume des jours gibt es hier (damals noch "in echt") schon weise Worte. Grade besonders passend zur allgemeinen Stimmung.

[bowtiesarecool11]

Mock the Week 16.02: Unlikely things to hear on a nature show (1/2)

[alex-lea-holder]

What is "private browsing"??? 🤣🤣🤣

[alfvaen]

Summer's ended, not for the first time. I guess I can see that it was not as ridiculously hot and smoky as some of the other recent summers around here, but still not great. Also ended is another month, which means it's time for me to ramble about books and stuff.

Possible spoilers for Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science In The Capital" series, Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, C.L. Polk's Kingston Cycle, and, for the last time for a while, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen, completed September 4

Here I come at last to the end of my latest Vorkosigan Saga reread. And my first reread of this book at all. It came out after I reached the end of the series in my reread blog in 2015, which was probably the last time I did a full reread of the series up to that point. I did read a number of books in the series to my sons when they got old enough, but I was unable to persuade them to go much past A Civil Campaign with my lukewarm assessments of the later books.

My primary impression of my first read of the series is that nothing happens. Which I'm sure is not a fair assessment, but, basically, it does not reach the level of excitement of any of the previous books in the series whatsoever. I kept catching what I thought where clues about where the plot was really going to go when it picked up, and then every single time it turned out to be a false alarm and the plot continued to not pick up. It's a fairly gentle book, and I found that excruciatingly annoying.

Sure, we return to Cordelia, we return to Sergyar, we revisit some of the landmarks (literally) from Shards of Honour. See, the surprise ending of Cryoburn (which I am now spoiling for you all) is the death of Aral Vorkosigan, and all that we get to deal with it is five drabbles (100-word snippets from the point of view of Miles, Cordelia, Ivan, Gregor and Mark). For this book, it's three years later, and Cordelia, now sole Vicereine of Sergyar, is contemplating changing her life in two ways: by resigning as Vicereine…and starting some embryos of new children of hers and Aral's from his frozen seed.

We also get to really meet Admiral Oliver Jole, who's in charge of the fleet around Sergyar. Previously I only remember him as one of Aral's staff officers back in The Vor Game. And it is gradually revealed (perhaps a spoiler, but I don't really care) that that whole time, he was Aral's lover. In fact, Aral, Cordelia and Jole were a secret throuple. It makes a kind of sense, since, by Cordelia's assessment, Aral is bisexual but more attracted to men, particularly military men. He probably wants to be monogamous, to be a good Barrayaran, but Cordelia's from Beta Colony and they have far fewer sexual hangups, so she wouldn't care, and so he gets to have his same-sex relationship as well.

Cordelia tells Jole that out of her frozen eggs, some of them weren't viable, but they can do a thing where they can remove the nucleus and replace it with genetic material from another cell. Including a sperm cell. So she offers him the chance to create his own embryos with his and Aral's DNA. Which he accepts. And so now they're both gestating some children in uterine replicators…and then they end up starting their own affair. It sounded like they had had their own sexual encounters before, but only with Aral also participating; now they're trying a relationship with just the two of them, sub rosa at first.

About halfway through the book, we get Miles and his family coming to visit, which is nice to see (though it still doesn't lead to anything exciting happening), including all six of their kids. Miles is in the loop on his mother's plans for new children, but not about Jole.

There's also a few subplots--Jole's assistant who ends up dating a ghem-lord from the Cetagandan embassy, plans to build a new facility so they can relocate the capital away from its current too-close-to-a-volcano location that keep going awry, and bored teenagers getting into trouble (which provides one of the few moments of tension). One explosion near the end which provides one of the others.

When I think of similarly low-excitement stories from elsewhere in the saga, I mostly end up with novellas--"Winterfair Gifts", perhaps, which is maybe principally a romance; "The Mountains of Mourning", which was a mystery, and still had attempted horse-murder and firebombing, and infanticide, so it packs way more of a punch; and "The Flowers of Vashnoi", which still has a little drama in it. This one is attempting to be an entire novel and it feels like it doesn't have enough steam. It also kind of reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu, which I recall being equally dull for large chunks of it, and even that had some excitement at the end. This one just feels like waving a languid goodbye.

Goodbye, Vorkosigan Saga. We'll always have Memory. We'll probably never get to see stories with Miles's children (or Cordelia and Jole's children, or Ivan's or Gregor's) growing up, outside of fanfic. Lois isn't being mean to the characters any more, they can have their happily ever after.

Jenn Lyons: The Ruin of Kings, completed September 11

It was time to try a new author again, a female author. But considering the last two books were SF and urban fantasy, probably not one of those, which was a bit of a quandary because many of the one I was interested in were one of those. But I browsed the epic fantasy books on my shelf and decided to go with Jenn Lyons. I've heard good things about it, and my wife recommended it (and has read the whole series), so I guess. It seems thick, but it's actually not even 600 pages in the copy I've got, and I'm not worried about long books putting me behind on my Goodreads challenge any more anyway. (Since I changed my goal from 100 to 90, then added those two short humorous library books, I've been consistently ahead. I might be able to fit in a Neal Stephenson before the end of the year.)

The book is oddly structured. In the first part, our main character, Kihrin, is in jail and being watched over a being named Talon who seems to have absorbed the memories of a lot of other people. They pass back and forth a "recording stone" and tell Kihrin's story at different points (Kihrin started later than Talon thought he should so she takes it upon herself to fill in the backstory). This happens over alternating chapters (labelled with who's doing the telling), fairly short, Kihrin's in first person and Talon's in third, and often from different POVs. Oh, and this is also being annotated by a different character that we don't even meet until half to two-thirds of the way through the book, who puts in footnotes that I'm not sure even add much value.

I'm not entirely sure it all works. There's the disorientation of the rapid timeline shifts, the confusion of when the further-forward timeline mentions something that hasn't happened in the backstory timeline, the fact that due to body-swapping magic I started to lose track of who was who and who was whose child/parent and who was dead and who was alive… Sometimes information was dropped that seemed irrelevant, and so I didn't retain it, until it turned out that hey, that god was going to be an actual character and things that happened centuries ago are actually relevant. It feels like a book I'm going to have to reread, and not because "it was just that good" but because there's so much that I missed the first time through. (For instance, it's got icons at the beginnings of chapters, which I missed about 95% of on my way through, even after I first noticed them.) I also belatedly noticed the family tree at the back, which might have been helpful earlier (or perhaps spoilery), and it's confusingly annotated because of the body-swap thing mentioned above. And yeah, a lot of godlike characters with weird relationships to each other and Kihrin. (I do actually kind of like Talon, who is an interesting and dangerously amoral character mostly being used a tool by others.) Plus a significant item which seemed to just randomly appear to the main character during the climax? That could have been done better with a little bit of foreshadowing and/or lampshading to explain why it was more than just a horrendous coincidence.

It reminded me in bits of other series. The backstory structure reminded me a little bit of the Kingkiller Chronicles, some of the characters and worldbuilding reminded me of the Eli Monpress series, and the mostly nasty noble characters made me think of Pierce Brown's Red Rising. I will doubtless continue reading the series, but it hasn't fully won me over.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, completed September 15

I definitely wanted a palate-cleanser after the Jenn Lyons, something that wasn't fantasy. And maybe not even speculative fiction at all. And, because of my schedule, with a male author. And Huckleberry Finn has been sitting there for a while…and sometimes even gets some discussion on Tumblr, mostly to do with people claiming it's a bad book because Huck uses the n-word, and other people rebutting that that's part of the whole point, having it examine Huck's learned racism, or something. So it's still being talked about, is the thing, more often than, say, Madame Bovary.

As you may have gathered, the vast majority of my reading is science fiction or fantasy, and very little of it is what anyone might call "literature". (My wife and I had a disagreement recently about whether or not Sherlock Holmes stories count as "literature". I think that they're detective stories and thus still kind of genre, like the Dick Francis books are thrillers. But it's a fine distinction.) I read very little mainstream until I was in university, when I decided to branch out a bit. I actually liked Thomas Hardy's The Return of The Native, so I went out and read some more on my own initiative (mostly I liked them except for Jude The Obscure), and I also liked Dickens and Twain and Victor Hugo, and to some extent George Eliot and Jane Austen. But most of it just doesn't scratch that itch and give me what I want in a read.

I am already somewhat familiar with the Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn milieu. Which is to say, I had a tape of the soundtrack of a Tom Sawyer musical when I was a kid (lost decades ago, I couldn't even hum any of the songs, but I remember the bit about the fence whitewashing and the confrontation with "Inj*n Joe" at the end), and I had the Classic Comics version of Huckleberry Finn so in theory I know basically how it goes. I read the actual Twain version of Tom Sawyer a few years ago, but I haven't read this one yet.

So, is it the greatest American novel ever written? Chyeah, right. I mean, it was fine, I guess. It had its moments. It was very episodic as they went down the river (and, as was lampshaded in the text, why would you head south down the river, apart from the obvious answer of "it's hard to go upstream", when you're trying to help a runaway slave get to free states)? It was entertaining in parts, when Huck was coming up with regular off-the-cuff entire fictional backstories. Constant use of the n-word, which I was expecting, though perhaps not quite that much. But it's first-person POV so I guess it's just Huck's vernacular. Still, I can see that it would be off-putting.

The most annoying parts of the book, I'd say, were the parts actually involving Tom Sawyer. Tom apparently has a mental disorder where he reads a lot of bad books and absorbs their clichés and then insists that all of the clichés have to be present every time or else you're not doing it right. We see it near the beginning of the book where he's trying to set up the local boys as bandits or something (though grudgingly he admits that it's all really pretend), but it also dominates the last quarter of the book. Due to outlandish coincidence, Huck is staying with Tom's uncle and aunt who think that he's Tom, and when Tom actually shows up he has to pretend to be his own brother Sid. But Jim has also been captured as a runaway slave and Huck wants to free him. And Tom insists that Jim has to do all of the prisoner clichés and make the actual rescue 1000% harder, to the point of having to spend days digging a tunnel, warning the household in anonymous notes, getting a grindstone for him to scratch messages on (which they have to actually let Jim out to help them do), giving him random animal companions, and I was not there for it. It was trying to be funny but mostly it just came across as stupid.

And the reason Jim got captured in the first place was because of these two con artists they'd been traveling with, who were generally referred to as "the duke" and "the king" because of their respective claims to alleged nobility. They are nasty pieces of work (well, not so bad as Huck's actually-abusive father that he fakes his own death to get away from in the early part of the book, but highly distasteful) that at least do manage to get themselves tarred and feathered by the end, but I didn't enjoy most of the time we spent with them. So if we take the other third of the book without them or Tom Sawyer, it was pretty enjoyable. The rest of the time it was mostly just tolerable.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Sixty Days And Counting, completed September 21

After the laugh-fest that was Huckleberry Finn, I didn't want something too light-hearted, and I was still feeling a little off fantasy, so I went through my male-author books looking for something else, like maybe some science fiction. It had been more than a year (my usual "long-enough" criterion for continuing in a series) since I read the last book in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science In The Capital" series, so I thought it might be a good choice.

I'm not always the biggest Kim Stanley Robinson fan. His Orange County trilogy was middling, and while I did enjoy the Green Mars trilogy, some parts were a bit of a slog. But, to my surprise, this series has been pretty readable. It focuses on a group of people in and around the National Science Foundation in what is presumably a near-future or, by this time, possibly-alternate-near-past. (The books were published during the second Bush administration.) We have the Quibler family--Charlie and Anna, and their kids Nick and Joe, and then we have Frank Vanderwal. Frank starts out in San Diego but comes to Washington to work for the NSF, Anna also works there, and Charlie was an assistant for Senator Phil Chase. In the first book, Forty Signs of Rain, there's a big rainstorm and the capital floods; in the second, Fifty Degrees Below, there's a very cold winter and the Gulf Stream starts shutting down. Because the series is primarily about climate change.

Frank seems to have the most interesting plotlines--he meets a mysterious woman mamed Caroline during the flood, whose husband seems to be into some shady dealings such as election tampering, and they have an affair, and during the second book he starts sleeping rough in his van and in a treehouse in a local park; he may also have gotten a brain injury that affects his decision-making processes. Meanwhile, Senator Phil Chase ends up running for president (spoilers: he wins) and somehow manages to commit to trying to deal with climate problems (which is how you can tell this is actually science fiction).

There's also a subplot about a group of climate refugees from a fictionalized place called Khembalung in alternate-Tibet, who were displaced onto islands in the Indian Ocean which are now disappearing as ocean levels rise. Charlie deals with parenting young Joe (who some Khembali suspect might be a reincarnation of a Dalai Lama-type figure) while his job for Phil Chase becomes more important.

I guess the nature of the plot (and the fact that it's supposed to be mostly realistic) means that, without a large timeskip to the future, we can't have a strong resolution that ties up all the climate loose ends. We deal with the Caroline plot, and there is progress made on the climate problems, but the rest mostly seems to just…end at a point. Plus there are plenty of scenes which are just there for theme or atmosphere or something (did we really need to see so much of Charlie and Frank hiking the Sierra Nevada with some of Charlie's friends?) It didn't gel for me, and it's gotten to the point where it feels like alternate history more than extrapolation. I'm sure it won't be the last Kim Stanley Robinson I read, but I liked the other books in the series better.

Terry Pratchett: A Hat Full of Sky, completed September 24

Reread time again, and now that I've finished the Vorkosigan reread, what's next? Well, some of the series I've been rereading have been longer ones, but I couldn't settle on another one of those. I kept thinking of shorter series to reread instead. And when I did the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series in four trilogies, I found it was nice to stick my interstitial rereads one at a time in the middle of the series rather than put them all at the end, and that's also what I did during the Vorkosigan reread. So this time I am going to be doing three shorter series rereads, and my four interstitial rereads before and after each one.

Among the "interstitials" is my slower Discworld series reread. I elected not to reread the whole thing all at once, because that's like 40 books, that would have taken too long, so instead I've been doing one book per other series reread. In fact, I started the reread before I got into doing all the series rereads, apparently, way back in like 2005, before Unseen Academicals was even out, which explains how I've managed to get this far into the series at this pace. One or two a year, and it kind of adds up. (In the interim I did read a lot of the series to my daughter as well, from Mort through to where we bogged down and abandoned The Fifth Elephant) My wife, who had fallen behind in the Discworld series apart from Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching books, elected to read the books she'd missed just fast enough to stay ahead of me. (And now that I'm actually reached the Tiffany Aching rereads she may end up pulling even further ahead.)

When I first read The Wee Free Men I had no idea that there would be more Tiffany Aching books (and I don't know if Terry Pratchett did, either). I don't recall that it made a huge impression on me at the time, then. It was definitely aimed at younger readers, with a young protagonist and the Nac Mac Feegles for comic relief (and tiny but sort-of-adult reinforcements), and I, at the time, was not a younger reader. But I did like later books featuring Tiffany, and so this is the one where things do start to pick up a bit.

Now she's no longer trying to do everything on her own, she's being taken into the witching apprenticeship track, such as it is, which is a bit of an adjustment. And this ain't no Harry Potter. This is more like, say, the first part of A Wizard of Earthsea, before Ged goes to the wizard's college on Roke and is still studying with Ogion on Gont. Or maybe Tehanu, which I haven't read nearly as much and don't remember as clearly. But we also have a spooky creature, like Ged's shadow, for Tiffany to confront.

Apparently when I first read this I was kind of meh on it, since I only gave it three stars on Goodreads, but this time around I liked it better, and I'll bump it up to four. The Nac Mac Feegle scenes no longer strike me as gratuitous comedic pandering, and the book does a good job of showing Granny Weatherwax's power as a witch, as well as Tiffany's burgeoning powers. (And one has to wonder if Lois McMaster Bujold read this before "Penric's Demon" or if it's just a coincidence.)

C.L. Polk: Soulstar, completed September 28

"Female diversity" slot time again. (Anyone else getting tired of hearing me call it that? The more I repeat it the worse it sounds. How about "non-white non-male"?) Last time around I snuck in another Michelle Sagara, and perhaps I should be trying one of the new authors I have piling up for this slot, but I did kind of want to finish this C.L. Polk series first. She(/they) is a person of colour from the Calgary area, though I've never managed to see her in person.

This book is the third in the Kingston Cycle, set in a kind of analog of Britain, where they use magic to keep huge storms from devastating them. The only trouble is, having magic is illegal unless you're part of the existing group of magic families, who guard their prerogatives jealously, and illegal witches are locked up (to secretly power the weather magic). The first two books concern two siblings, Miles and Grace, from one of these families, one of whom was hiding his identity after undergoing experiences likely to get him locked away, and the other trying to use her political power for good ends. For the third book, though, we switch to an unrelated side character, Robin Thorpe, who was one of these hidden witches, but the political landscape has now changed and they can come out of hiding--and need to, to save their country. Robin is heavily involved with an anti-monarchist group who wants a full democracy in the country; with all the upheaval, is it the right or wrong time to move forward?

The books also have romance subplots, which are…well, let's just say none of them are heterosexual. In this one, Robin is reunited with her nonbinary spouse who has been a captive for decades, so it's a renewal of relationship rather than a new relationship, but still with a romance feel to it.

There were times in the book where I was just seething at some of the horrible things the (generally rich and arrogant) antagonists were able to get away with, but in the end they got their come-uppances. It's a kind of a short book, actually, and at the end I did feel like I wouldn't have minded more of some plot threads, but overall it did feel like a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy. We also have Polk's The Midnight Bargain and clearly that will have to go on my shelf.

I also read a few more comics from April 1994 on Marvel Unlimited (and a handful of back issues, now that they've started putting those in again), and then I started reading the Ed Yong book An Immense World that I believe I got for my birthday a couple of months ago. It's about the senses that various animals and other living beings use to experience the world. My progress has been kind of fitful, depending on how my fiction book reading progresses in a day and whether I feel like just doing puzzles or games or something, but I can often manage a few pages near the end of the day.

[hope-ur-ok]

Surprise Song Master post ~ European Leg

5/9 Paris, FR: Paris + LOML

5/10 Paris, FR: Is It Over Now?/OOTW + My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

5/11 Paris, FR: Hey Stephen + Maroon

5/12 Paris, FR: The Alchemy / Treacherous + Begin Again / Paris

5/17 Stockholm, SE: I Think He Knows / Gorgeous + Peter

5/18 Stockholm, SE: Guilty As Sin? + Say Don't Go / Welcome to New York / Clean

5/19 Stockholm, SE: Message In A Bottle / How You Get The Girl / New Romantics + How Did It End?

5/24 Lisbon, PT: Come Back... Be Here / The Way I Loved You / The Other Side of the Door + Fresh Out the Slammer / High Infidelity

5/25 Lisbon, PT: The Tortured Poets Department / Now That We Don't Talk + You're On Your Own Kid / Long Live

5/29 Madrid, ES: Sparks Fly / I Can Fix Him (No Really Can) + I Look In People's Windows / Snow On the Beach

5/30 Madrid, ES: Our Song / Jump Then Fall + King of My Heart

6/2 Lyon, FR: The Prophecy / Long Story Short + Fifteen / You're On Your Own Kid

6/3 Lyon, FR: Glitch / Everything Has Changed + Chloe Or Sam Or Sophia Or Marcus

6/7 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: Would've Could've Should've / I Know Places + 'Tis the Damn Season / Daylight

6/8 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: The Bolter / Getaway Car + All of the Girls You Loved Before / Crazier

6/9 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: It's Nice To Have A Friend / Dorothea + Haunted / Exile

6/13 Liverpool, England UK: I Can See You / Mine + Cornelia Street / Maroon

6/14 Liverpool, England UK: This Is What You Came For / Gold Rush + The Great War / You're Losing Me

6/15 Liverpool, England UK: Carolina / No Body No Crime + The Manuscript / Red

6/18 Cardiff, Wales UK: I Forgot That You Existed / This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things + I Hate It Here / The Lakes

6/21 London, England UK: Hits Different / Death By A Thousand Cuts + The Black Dog / Come Back Be Here / Maroon

6/22 London, England UK: thanK you aIMee / Mean + Castles Crumbling w/ Hayley Williams

6/23 London, England UK: Us w/ Gracie Abrams + Out Of The Woods / Is It Over Now? / Clean

6/28 Dublin, IE: State of Grace / You're On Your Own Kid + Sweet Nothing / Hoax

6/29 Dublin, IE: The Albatross / Dancing With Our Hands Tied + This Love / Ours

6/30 Dublin, IE: Clara Bow / The Lucky One + You’re On Your Own Kid

7/4 Amsterdam, NL: Guilty as Sin? / Untouchable + The Archer / Question...?

7/5 Amsterdam, NL: imgonnagetyouback / Dress + You Are In Love / Cowboy Like Me

7/6 Amsterdam, NL: Sweeter than fiction / Holy Ground + Mary's Song / So High School / Everything Has Changed

7/9 Zürich, CH: Right Where You Left Me / All You Had To Do Was Stay + Last Kiss / Sad Beautiful Tragic

7/10 Zürich, CH: Closure / A Perfectly Good Heart + Robin / Never Grow Up

7/13 Milan, IT: The 1 / Wonderland + I Almost Do / The Moment I Knew

7/14 Milan, IT: Mr. Perfectly Fine / Red + Getaway Car / Out Of The Woods

7/17 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Superstar / Invisible String + "Slut!" / False God

7/18 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Speak Now / Hey Stephen + This Is Me Trying / Labyrinth

7/19 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Paper Rings / Stay Stay Stay + It's Time To Go / Better Man

7/23 Hamburg, DE: Teardrops On My Guitar / The Last Time + We Were Happy / Happiness

7/24 Hamburg, DE: The Last Great American Dynasty / Run + Nothing New / Dear Reader

7/27 Munich, DE: Fresh Out The Slammer / You Are In Love + Ivy / Call It What You Want

7/28 Munich, DE: I Don't Wanna Live Forever / Imgonnagetyouback + LOML / Don't You

8/1 Warsaw, PL: Mirrorball / Clara Bow + Suburban Legends / New Years Day

8/2 Warsaw, PL: I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) / I Can See You + Red / Maroon

8/3 Warsaw, PL: Today Was A Fairytale / I Think He Knows + The Black Dog / Exile

8/15 London, England UK: Everything Has Changed / End Game / Thinking Out Loud w/Ed Sheeran + King Of My Heart / The Alchemy

8/16 London, England UK: London Boy + Dear John / Sad Beautiful Tragic

8/17 London, England UK: I Did Something Bad + My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys / Coney Island

8/19 London, England UK: Long Live / Change + The Archer / You're On Your Own Kid

8/20 London, England UK: Death By A Thousand Cut / Getaway Car w/Jack Antonoff + So Long, London

[my-midlife-crisis]

THE EPSTEIN LIST

Look at number 77

Ghislaine Maxwell

Virginia Lee Roberts Giuffre [Epstein victim]

Prince Andrew of England

James Michael Austrich

Philip Barden

REDACTED

Cate Blanchett

David Boies

Laura Boothe

Evelyn Boulet

Rebecca Boylan

Joshua Bunner

Naomi Campbell

Carolyn Casey

Paul Cassell

Sharon Churcher

Bill Clinton

David Copperfield

Alexandra Cousteau

Cameron Diaz

Leonardo DiCaprio

Alan Dershowitz

Dr. Mona Devanesan

REDACTED

Bradley Edwards

Amanda Ellison

Cimberly Espinosa

Jeffrey Epstein

Annie Farmer

Marie Farmer

Alexandra Fekkai

Crystal Figueroa

Anthony Figueroa

Louis Freeh

Eric Gany

Meg Garvin

Sheridan Gibson-Butte

Robert Giuffre

Al Gore

Ross Gow

Fred Graff

Philip Guderyon

REDACTED

Shannon Harrison

Stephen Hawking

Victoria Hazel

Brittany Henderson

Brett Jaffe

Michael Jackson

Carol Roberts Kess

Dr. Karen Kutikoff

Peter Listerman

George Lucas

Tony Lyons

Bob Meister

Jamie A. Melanson

Lynn Miller

Marvin Minsky

REDACTED

David Mullen

Joe Pagano

Mary Paluga

J. Stanley Pottinger

Joseph Recarey

Michael Reiter

Jason Richards

Bill Richardson

Sky Roberts

Scott Rothstein

Forest Sawyer

Doug Schoetlle

Kevin Spacey

Cecilia Stein

Mark Tafoya

Brent Tindall

Kevin Thompson

Donald Trump

Ed Tuttle

Emma Vaghan

Kimberly Vaughan-Edwards

Cresenda Valdes

Anthony Valladares

Maritza Vazquez

Vicky Ward

Jarred Weisfeld

Courtney Wild

Bruce Willis

Daniel Wilson

Kathy Alexander

Miles Alexander

[first-frost-fallen-snow]

Charlie hiccuped, lifting their head to look up at him. They were clutching a plush that had ripped almost in half, trying to keep the stuffing from falling out. They looked up from their knees, squinting at Ed through tears.

As soon as they fully recognized hum, they scrambled over. Immediately tackling Ed's shins in a tight hug, dropping their plush in the rush to get to him. They gripped onto him, sniffling and shutting their eyes as tight as they could.

( console ) : one muse finds the other sobbing uncontrollably 

Mackey was nowhere to be found, yet his child, Charlie, was heaving sobs just outside of Ed's office. It was impossible to tell how they got there, or even why they were there. Unfortunately for poor Ed, he was the only responsible adult nearby.

@first-frost-fallen-snow

The day had been quiet. Suspiciously so. No arguments or drama with the rest of the development team, and no Mackey barging into his office with whatever fire he needed to put out. No attacks on the Encom server. For once Ed had a productive morning and managed to accomplish his his project goals on time. He'd been so productive, he forgot about lunch until 2:30 in the afternoon.

Of course something had to go catastrophically wrong as soon as Ed let his guard down. He'd just returned from the deli around the block, lunch in hand, when he found the Mackey's child outside his door.

"Charlie?" Ed asked dumbfounded. "What's wrong?"

[gooperts-gunk]

i saw someone on twitter writing qsmp names in korean and im trying so hard not to be bothered i know they have good intentions but it was just so wrong in parts so instead here's how qsmp names would be written in korean BY THE SOUND not how they're written. note that i am not korean nor on the korean side of qsmptwt but as a casual kpoppie it's a rite of passage to learn hangul and try to learn korean at one point therefore though i am not a trusted source i do know the basics of the phonetics LUL

alphabetical order & categorized!

get ready for me to infodump on mouth sounds

update from the morning after this post: fixed/optimized some!!!

english speaking creators:

badboyhalo: 밷보이헤이로 (baed-bo-i-he-i-ro/lo) i infer it'd be easier to just call him 헤이로 out of every part of him name please let's halo-truth bbh. the 헤이 slurs into the "hey/hei" sound, very little accentuation on the just one part, it works as one!!

dantdm: 단티디엠 or 댄티디엠 (dan-ti-di-em, daen-ti-di-em) i've heard both pronunciations for the name dan, it's a matter of preference here! EDIT: also possibly 댼 instead which is also daen but like, not really? but also they're really similar? and i don't know how to hear the difference but there is one and nevermind don't worry about it man

fit: 피트 (pi-teu) directly would be 핕 but that's just a tricky one it's bound to have a soft ㅡ sound following

foolish: 푸리쓰 or 푸리쌰? (pu-ri/li-sseu, pu-ri/li-ssya) THIS ONE IS TRICKY if it does go 쌰 it's be a soft one, but more likely 쓰 EDIT: IS IT 풀리쎠 (peul-ri-ssyeo) ?!?!?!? IM STILL ON THIS FOOLISH IS SO TOUGH TO PUT INTO HANGUL IM NOT GONNA BE OVER IT

ironmouse: 아이욘마우스 or 아이룐마우스 (a-i-yon-ma-u-seu, a-i-ryon/lyon-ma-u-seu) this one feels tit for tat, same same, just a minor difference in accentuating the r in iron or not! EDIT: could also be 아이런 (a-i-reon) or 아이론 (a-i-ron) !!!

jaiden: 제이든 (je-i-deun) no notes very easy and straightforward one

lenay: 르네이 (reu/leu-ne-i) same with jaiden's!

nihachu / niki: 니하추 or 니아추, 니키 (ni-ha-chu, ni-a-chu, ni-ki) another same same thing with ni-HA or ni-A, just depends on accentuation or not! the 추 may possibly be said as 츄 instead, but im unsure of which

philza: 피르쟈, 피르 (pi-reu/leu-jya, pi-reu/leu) no notes, straightforward! as you will come to notice, f's usually translate to ㅍ's, and z's usually translate to ㅈ's!

quackity: 콰키티 (kua/kwa-ki-ti) no notes! i heard like months back that quackity's korean fandom endearingly calls him 키티 i think?? fun fact i remembered :)

slimecicle / charlie: 스라임씨컬, 챨이 (seu-ra/la-im-ssi-keol/keor, chyal/chyar-i) wow okay so how do you write charlie in korean because i KNOW there's no way it's 챠르리 (chya-reu-ri) my tongue is tripping over the 르리, it has to be 챨이, or 챠리, or 챨리 right??? okay the more i think the more 챨리 (chyal-li) sounds right ok everyone go home i think it's 챨리 LUL

tinakitten / tina: 티나키던, 티나 (ti-na-ki-deon, ti-na) no notes! straightforward!

tubbo: 터뽀 (teo-bbo) no notes! but also i feel like there's other ways to write it that im just not convinced are correct LUL

wilbur soot: 윌버 쑽 (wil/wir-beo ssut) no notes!

spanish speaking creators:

carre: 카레 (ka-re) no notes!

elmariana: 에르마리아나 or 엘마리아나 (e-reu/leu-ma-ri/li-a-na, el-ma-ri-a-na) the reason why i included 에르 alongside 엘 is because it ends up sounding like "ed", the L/R sound in korean is in that same range and when said fast or cut abruptly like 엘, it sounds like a D, if not for context :) so 엘 COULD work! but it'd be hard to recognize it as an L/R sound without some extra space made for the sound. this is also relevant for elquackity!

german: 헤르만 or 헬만 (he-reu/leu-man, her/hel-man) same thing as last note applies here! it'd sound like HED-man more than HER-man but, still, could work!

luzu, arin: 루쥬 or 루주, 아린 (ru/lu-jyu, ru/lu-ju, a-rin/lin) no notes! i see luzu more said with the 쥬 sound instinctively but it's one of those either or i think EDIT: if it were the spain pronunciation i think it'd be 루튜 (lu-tyu) or 루뜌 (lu-ddyu) ??? the thhh sound doesn't exist in korean but this is the closest it gets i think

maximus, maxo: 맠수머스, 맠서 (mak-su-meo-seu, mak-seo) okay at this point my brain is mush and im sure there's a better way to write this but it's a tricky one. the 맠 could also be 막 (mag) but im unsure where in the mouth the difference is between 맠 and 막, because hangul is very mouth oriented, it's allll about tongue placement, and i am SO not on that X_X EDIT: i change my mind it's 막 for maximus but 맠서 is fine i think idk how to explain is just is. also alternate pronunciationfor maximus: 막씨머스 (mag-ssi-meo-seu)

missa sinfonia: 미싸 씬퍼냐 (mi-ssa ssin-peo-nya) yeah that seems about right (my brain is melting everything is hangul) no notes! EDIT: ok but IS it possibly 미사 (mi-sa)??? im doubting myself here

polispol, pol: 폴에쓰폴, 폴 (pol-e-sseu-pol, pol) no notes!

rivers: 리버스 (ri/li-beo-seu) no notes!

roier: 로이예 or 로이옐 (ro/lo-i-ye, ro/lo-i-yer/yel) this is one of those scenarios where an abrupt L/R sound works just fine! don't know how to explain it! but it just works!

rubius: 루비어스 (ru-bi-eo-seu) no notes!

spreen: 스프린 (seu-peu-rin) no notes!

vegetta: 베헷따 (be-het-dda) okay i don't know how to explain but tonalities of how you say vegetta in spanish make me think 베 and that the tta would be equal to the sharpness of 따 stick with me here i've been doing hangul names for so long now i can't see the end of the horizon EDIT: for some reason im changing my mind it might be 페헷따 (pe-het-dda)

willyrex, willy: 위리렉스, 위리 (wi-ri-reg-seu, wi-ri) okay again idk how to explain but the reason why ㄱ and not ㅋ is because it just feels like it instinctively, like that's a deep ㄱ abrubt stop, not a high ㅋ abrupt stop. im losing my marbles

portuguese speaking creators:

bagi: 바지 (ba-ji) no notes!

cellbit: 셀비트 (sel-bi-teu) guys this is getting hard. yes it's somehow sel and not se-leu. yes it's bi-teu and somehow not bit. if it were bit it'd be missing the aftermath TCH sound and i think it sounds good with it. the sel has space to breathe and isn't abrupt. stay with me. we're almost done EDIT: fellow hangul enjoyer anon in ask box said 셀빛 (sel-bich/bit) or 셀비츠 (sel-bi-cheu) if with the accent, i like these, ur getting put on the fridge with the best magnets. 빛 is a fun one because it sounds pretty much the same to 빝 or 빗, all end in the same stop of the tongue going to the roof of the mouth, but 빛 in particular means "light" and i think that's nice :)

felps: 펠릅스 (pel-reub-seu) holy moly i didn't expect this to be a tongue twister but i think i nailed it

mike: 마이크 or 마이키 (ma-i-keu, ma-i-ki) i've heard mike being called mikey so i included it for fun because there's been so much hardship. so so much. we're in this together.

pac: 팩 or 패크 (paeg, pae-keu) paeg and not paek because it's just a more throat based sound to say pac idk man. pae-keu is a hypothetical im losing it man i don't know anything anymore EDIT: okay i change my mind it's definitely 패크 over 팩 im so loopy from hyperfocus overload man EDIT EDIT: i can also see 팍 (pak) being used though that isn't how it sounds for us, i can see someone saying it that way in korean if they were to read it before hearing it and then go from there

french speaking creators:

antoine daniel: 안투완 단옐 (an-tu-wan dan-yel) in french the a's are long so 단 over 댄 is a guaranteed. the yel could be accentuated more but you get the point by now

aypierre: when french accent, 아이피에히, when english accent, 에이피에어 (a-i-pi-e-hi, e-i-pi-e-eo) (thank u anon for contributing 피에어 that makes much more sense)

baghera jones: one way is 바게라 전스 the other is 바길라 전스 (ba-ge-ra jeon-seu, ba-gil/gir-ra jeon-seu) a baGERa or bagEARa dilemma.....

etoiles: 에투왈 (e-tu-wal/war) no notes!

kameto: 카메토 (ka-me-to) no notes!

THERE!!!! IT'S DONE!!!! this was hard but i feel like i got most right. and when im wrong let's just say this was just hangul practice and not serious right guys, just practice round, right??? we don't take me so serious, right??? just stick fight with totem??? if you know korean especially the phonetics better than me which is NOT a high bar at all, you can step over that bar EASY, tell me a better way to write these thank u! smile :)

bonus round coming at you live from the morning after!!! some others that i thought "yeah let's include you"

im gonna be working on this on and off all day i think so don't be scared if someone isn't here chances are brain is doing something else but will add it later :)

cucurucho: 쿠쿠루쵸 (ku-ku-ru/lu-chyo) no notes!

walter bob: 월터 법 (weol/weor-teo beob) could also be 봅 (bob)

chayanne: 챠얀 (chya-yan) or 차얀 (cha-yan) no notes!

tallulah: 타룰라 (ta-lul-la) no notes!

ramon: 라몬 (ra-mon) or if you're pac you say 하몬 (ha-mon) heehee :)

dapper: 답퍼 (dab-peo) or possibly 답뻐 (dab-bbeo) but im not so sure about that one

leo / leonardo / leonarda: if you speak english it's 리오 (li-o) if you speak spanish it's 레오 (le-o), then add on 날도 (nar/nal-do) or 날다 (nar/nal-da) :)

richarlyson / richas: 리찰리손, 리차스 (ri-chal/char-li-son, ri-cha-seu) no notes!

pomme: 펌 (peom) or 폼 (pom) both work here!

trump: 트람프 or 트럼프, to make it trumpet change the 프 to 펫 (pet/ped)

tilin: 티린 (ti-lin/rin) no notes!

juanaflippa: 환나프리파 (hwan/huan-na-peu-li-pa)

bobby: 법비 (beob-bi) or 봅비 (bob-bi) both work here!

empanada: 엠파나다 (em-pa-na-da) no notes!

pepito: 페피토 (pe-pi-to) no notes!

sunny(sideup): 선니사읻엎 (seon-ni-sa-id-eop) this one works nicely because the 읻 bleeds into the 엎 and sounds like it's one full iddeop :) this one is an ending in ㅍ not ㅂ moment but i don't know how to explain why

[nigrit]

I've got a little list…

Here’s something to get your teeth into over the weekend.

I recently found this “Liste des hommes sûrs aiant de la tête et du cuer” in Albert Mathiez’s collection of articles and speeches, Autour de Robespierre (1957, reissued in deluxe edition 1976, Eds Famot), between pp.64-65.

Now the funny thing is that apart from Max’s lousy spelling, few people seem to have seen this list, which is currently missing from the Archives (although it is credited here as from the B & AN), and is not published in the Courtois collection of the Robespierre papers that fell into his hands after 9 Thermidor. Almost certainly he wished to spare a few blushes to some of the freshly blooded Thermidorians!

So a couple of mysteries to solve here.

1/ When was the document written?

I’m guessing not before December 1793, as there’s no Marat, Danton or Desmoulins but Fouché & Carrier are on it.

However, assuming there was no need to list “sound men” if they were already in positions of power, why list Moyse Bayle and PFJ Le Bas who were appointed to the Committee of General Security (Aug & Sept? 1793)?

I’m also assuming that reports of the crimes in Lyon and Nantes, which led to the recall of Fouché and Carrier (sent “en mission” in the summer of 1793), would not have reached Paris/the CPS until Jan/Feb 1794?

I think all the names listed are Convention deputies from the Mountain but happy to be corrected

2/ What does L.R. no.23 mean? “Liste (de) Robespierre”?

Was it written by Max or added later by a clerk? Does this mean there are at least 22 other lists waiting to be discovered?! Has anyone seen the originals of the ones in Courtois? Do they also have L.R. (x)?

3/Why does he refer to his own brother as Robespierre jeune?! Perhaps because the list was intended to be passed on to someone, but then why would it be found in Robespierre’s papers?

Thoughts?

[jewfrogs]

i was really curious about the statue (labeled as aphroditos, 4th century C.E.) from this post:

this specific slightly edited image is from “the only happy couple: hermaphrodites and gender” by aileen ajootian (p. 222) in naked truths: women, sexuality, and gender in classical art and archaeology (1997; eds. ann olga koloski-ostrow & claire l. lyons), where it’s captioned only as “Hermaphrodite statuette, Rome art market.”

the photograph is credited as DAI, Rome, Inst. Neg. 35.1956. luckily the deutsches archäologisches institut’s collection is easy to search online; the photo is in their arachne database as Bestand-D-DAI-ROM-35.1956.JPG:

this photo was taken in 1935 by johannes felbermeyer, a german photographer who focused on archaeological photography, documenting tens of thousands of works of art, mostly greek and roman.

there is no more information that i can find as to who specifically this statue is of (it’s difficult to confidently label works like this as aphroditos vs. hermaphroditus vs. a human figure), when this is from, what’s happened to it in the 90 years since, or where it is now. we can only hope she’s whole and happy, somewhere.

[mask131]

William Morris' works (2)

My very first contact with William Morris was through a recent, complete translation/edition of his work "The Well at the World's End". It had a preface by Anne Besson talking about the book, its author, and why it is at the root of the fantasy genre. Here are some highlights from it.

Morris' return to the stage is part of a movement wishing to return to the sources of fantasy. Now that the "big names" of fantasy (Besson mentions Tolkien, Rowling and Martin) have been explored fully and brought to life by many, there is a new interest and curiosity for the ones outside of them. The classical pioneers that are yet still ignored today, like George McDonald or Charles Kinglsey. The other British authors of the early 20th century that Tolkien overshadowed: Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Hope Mirrlees, even T.H. White. And the parallel fecundity of the American pulp fiction - everybody knows of it Robert Howard for creating Conan, but now is the return of the others - Harold Lamb, Clark Ashton Smith, Abraham Merritt...

According to Anne Besson, William Morris is one of the greatest and most beautiful creators of the "unjustly neglected" literary monuments of early fantasy - and she considers his "The Well at the World's End" to be his masterpiece. Yet Morris is a very unique case, because he was first and foremost a material and visual artist. He was a drawer, a designer, a printer, and this is a part of his career that is still recognized to this day - often people only mention his crafts work, without a single word about the novels he wrote. Even in Encyclopedias of the fantasy, Morris' name often doesn't get a specific article, and is just a mention in either more general talks about the Preraphaelites, or an evocation in the articles of the authors he inspired (Tolkien, Howard, Eddings). This is the dual heritage of Morris - the great authors he inspired, and his carreer as the "Jack of All Arts" [a title Lyon Sprague de Camp gave him in 1974].

William Morris is first and foremost a part of the Confrery of the Preraphaelites, a group which deeply marked the art of England at the end of the 19th century. They had an hyper-realist technique mixed with a proud escapism when it came to selection their subjects ; this made them stand at odds to the abstractions and "progress" of the "modern" engaged art of the time, and as a result they were for a very long time neglected from the History of the Arts, deemed as being just "kitsch". But today, in England and France they have been fully rehabilitated.

William Morris stands proudly alongside the leader of the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his great friend Edward Burne-Jones. They share common aspirations and inspirations, mixing the Primitives of the first Italian Renaissance (of which they recreated the realistic depictions of nature) and the Gothic (of which they admired the "spiritual purity") - the result were idealized Middle-Ages, "made of faith, heroism and purity" (words from Julia Drobinsky. But Morris is more unique as he is, first and foremost, a craftsman, a designer, a decorator - he was the one who inspired the movement "Arts & Craft". He doesn't just dream of a "golden age", he tries to make it real.

Morris designed beautiful items in the hope of raising the aesthetic level of the Victorian productions. He wanted England to find back its traditional, demanding crafts, so that the alliance of the beautiful and the useful could produce, among the creators and the users, the satisfaction of a "work well done". He is mainly famous for his creation of an intertwined-flowers decorative motif which covered a lot of furniture cloth and wallpapers. He also created a printing house dedicated to recreating medieval-like books, not just using vellum or specific inks, but also special fonts and marginalia - between 1891 and 1898 his Kelmscott Press published 54 books, 17 of which were his own creations.

Morris as such echoes our modern concern of fighting against mass-production and standardization, to have more personal, artistic productions, blurring the line between craftsman and designer, offering fluid artistic collaborations. Morris and Co.'s traditional floral motifs were for a very long time associated with "cosy British interiors" but are now all over the world. Morris himself lived by his aesthetic agenda, surrounding himself with his visual and ideological choices - first in his Red House in the South of London (he had a part in its construction), then at Kelmscott Manor, an idyllic countryside retreat near the Thames co-owned with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lot of rumors and criticism was aimed towards the two men's relationships to one woman - Jane, who was the wife of Morris but the muse of Rossetti. Yet, these "loose morals" denounced at the time were in line with the Preraphaelites' protest against the normalized violence of the Victorian society, a protest that was mainly expressed through an exaltation of a proudly sensual feminity... In The Well at the World's End, this is found in the character of the Lady of Abundance, a third seductive fairy, a third jealousy-inducing witch, a third pagan goddess...

William Morris didn't just print beautiful books, theorized books in his crafting ideology, or collected medieval manuscripts - he also wrote many, many texts. His complete works, gathered by his daughter May, form 24 volumes (plus four volumes of corresponance, plus a hundred of articles and political conferences). And he did all that before dying at 62 years old. To give a few highlights, he started in the 1850s, under the influence of Thomas Malory's La Morte d'Arthur. He published medieval-inspired novellas in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (notably "The Hollow Land"), and he even decided to have an Arthurian dialogue with Lord Alfred Tennyson, the greatest poet of his time, by publishing in 1858 "The Defense of Guinevere".

Morris' works were a succession and mix of translations, adaptations and re-creations. A good example of this is his work on the Volsung Saga, the great myth of Sigurd that was the source of inspiration for Wagner's operas. Morris first learned Old Norse from an Iceland man named Eirikr Magnusson (who was the key person for the diffusion of Norse culture in the Oxonian circles). He then co-wrote an "archaic" translation: Völsunga Saga - The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, 1870. Five years later, he offered a vast epic versified rewrite: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, 1876. He was very proud of this book.

He also translated various French medieval romances (notably "Ami et Amile" in 1896's Four French romances), and the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (in 1895). But it is much more relevant to point out how close he was to the Greco-Latin tradition. Outside of a long poem dedicated to Jason (The Life and Death of Jason, 1867), he published a translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1875-76), and one of Homer's Odyssey (1887-88).

Finally, his enormous compilation of 24 narrative poems called "The Earthly Paradise" (3 volumes, 1868-70) was the encounter of his two ancient inspirations : Vikings of the North enter a heavenly otherworld where Ionians survived, and with whom they exchange stories - all to offer a beautiful metaphor on the role of the "transmission of culture".

His writing of "romances" is only a late stage of his production. The Well at the World's End was only published in 1896, the same year as Morris' death - even though it had been written some years earlier. It forms a greater whole alongside "The Story of the Glittering Plain" (1891), "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894), "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897) and "The Sundering Flood" (1897, posthumous work). It is a late but logical development as Amanda Hodgson noted: before that, Morris' work oscillated between the "historical temptations" and the political utopias turned to the future. On one side his historical novel "The House of the Wolflings" in 1880, defending the Northern aristocracies against the Roman invasions ; on the other side his "A Dream of John Ball" about the Middle-Ages confronting the Industial Revolution, or his "News from Nowhere".

These romances, beyond showing the tiredness of the end of a life dedicated to an unflinching political engagement, allow Morris to unite these contrasting aspirations. Their "lightness" and their happy endings glorify the ability of individuals and communities to transform. Through escapist stories, Morris captures the same hope he tries to offers to the people of his time. It is the meaning of the fourth part of "The Well", dedicated to a return to the homeland, during which the hero and his beloved go back through the same places they crossed before and see their evolutions.

It seems every aspect of Morris' life lead to these romances. They feed on his nature as a scholar in literary and languages, they feed from his passion for Arthurian romances and Medieval chansons de geste ; they are born from his interests for myths, epics, fairytales and folklore. But they are also very visual productions. Sober yet strongly evocative descriptions through an insistance on color and light ; the use of typical hyperbola and a stylistic unity ; the "chromatic exuberance" through the union of "absolute colors" (yellow, gold, green, blue, scarlet) in a limited palette reminding of the Medieval illuminations... Morris wrote his texts like he painted his images. The very plots, with their constant duality and doubles and counter-points, reminds of the ornamental motifs of the Morris Company.

In the end the "birth of the fantasy" Morris is credited with is no more than the fusion of magnified Middle-Ages with socialist visions of another world more just and more beautiful. Poetic and politically engaged, these romances, through their initiation processes and their rich symbolism, offer questions about self-fulfilment, the formation of a couple, the need to be inserted in a collectivity - while also promoting the values that are loyalty, perseverance, care for desires, and the importance of the community.

Did William Morris invent fantasy? At least this is how he is perceived...

Originally, outside of the publication of Morris' completed works by May Morris, they were very hard to access, only available to the best experts of English literature, until Lin Carter offered them a second life in the USA, in the collection "Ballantine Adult Fantasy". We are in the huge wave caused by the success of "The Lord of the Rings" (its pocket-edition of the revised version in 1965). Ballantine Adult Fantasy, the first fantasy collection ever, was created to fulfill the needs of a Tolkien fan, by ambitiously reprinting all of the "classics". Lord Dunsany, George McDonald, George Meredith and... William Morris. In five years four of his books were re-published, starting with "The Wood" in 1969, and "The Well" in two volumes in 1970. Lin Carter is also a very fascinating name when it comes to the fantasy world, very divisive. On the "light side", Carter is remember as a scholar and lover of fantasy who maintained and enhanced the genre ; on the "dark side", Carter is recalled as a mediocre author and a shady editor, hated by fans of Tolkien and Robert Howard for shaping and exploiting a twisted version of their works...

It is under the pen of Carter that Morris' romances earned their title of "origins of fantasy". Carter presented them as such: "From the world of the "Wood" and the world of the "Well" descend all of the later worlds of fantastic literature, Poictesme, and Oz and Tormance, Barsoom and Narnia and Zothique, Gormenghast and Zimiamvia and Middle-Earth. When he sketched out the map of those imagined realms which lie between Upmeads and Utterbol, William Morris blazed the first trail into the unexplored universe of fantasy".

But Ballantine's Morris can be seen as almost a betrayal of the original spirit... It implies a new genealogy, a new target-audience, and a new interpretation. His romances are not part of a complete architectural unit. The American audience split them away from the rest of Morris work, differentiate the author from the artist. Yet, it was widely recognized at the time that the first English fantasy and artistic theories were closely linked... George MacDonald, the author of "Phantastes" and "The Princess and the goblin" was a friend of John Ruskin, an influent art theorician, whose texts were for Morris (just like for Proust) a massive revelation... Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most famous of the Preraphaelites, belonged to a family of artists: his sister, Christina Rossetti, was a figure-head of a darker Victorian fantasy, with her poems (Goblin Market) or her Lewis Carroll-like fairytales (Speaking Likenesses).

The reason so many of these early names rarely reached us is because of the huge meteorite that crashed on the "fantasy land" - named Tolkien. A meteorite that changed forever the "fantastic ecosystem" - after him, all fantasy works shall be compared to Tolkien and no one else. It is unfair, but it is so. Anne Besson highlights how her work edition for writing this preface was a 2003's publication by the Inkling Books which claimed would "give back Morris to the people" and yet systematically and heavily referred to him as "the author who influenced Tokien". The editor, Michael W. Perry, seemed to strongly imply that the only reason Morris' Well deserved to be read, was because of its association with Tolkien. The first lines are: "On the lines of Morris's romances, two books that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wood beyond the world and The Well at the world's end, by William Morris". Tolkien's full name comes before Morris' own full name! And the introduction, titled "William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien" is entirely about what Tolkien found in Morris for his own works... And the dedication is "For the fans of Tolkien who are wishing for books like the Lord of the Rings".

Despite everybody linking Morris to Tolkien, his influence is more relevant in th case of C.S. Lewis, who was very enthusiastic about the author and wrote a beautiful presentation of him in his 1939's "Rehabilitations". Tolkien's inspiration was there, though lesser and smaller... He mostly took broad elements (a hieratic style, a Medieval Northern Europe setting, a discreet ambiant magic) and punctual details (the malevolent Gandolf and the Silverfax horse of Morris predate Tolkien's Gandalf and Shadowfax). Tolkien did write that the Dead Marshes were more directly influenced by Morris' romances. And to this list of influences can be added two more things. One, the importance of the "return" of the characters - the story doesn't end with the quest, the characters have to go home. Two, the image of the dead tree brought back to life - brought back to life by the heroes' return, by the return of a vital harmony, of a just government. For Tolkien it is Gondor's White Tree, for Morris it is the Dry Tree, the opposite of both the Well with its waters of life and of the arms of Upmeads, a fruit-bearing apple-tree by a river.

To read "retrospectively" Morris as just another fantasy author, or as in the line of posterior creations, is thus for Anne Besson a big mistake, because Morris, who wrote at the very dawn of a new genre, is very "original" in his work compared to what is expected of a fantasy today, and what might seem in the context of modern fantasy as "naive" or "blinded" was very fresh, very troubling, very "primordial" in the light of the end of a life-time of social fighting alongside the poor and the victims of misery an injustice.

And it is not because Morris' work is great, or a classic, or very influential on modern works, that it means it is easy to read today. While the text feels simple, fresh, fluid, it is a false sense that is quickly broken down by how unfamiliar modern audiances will be with the content of the book. The book has a very ambivalent "moral system", where it is hard to discern what is good an what is evil - exemplified by the troubling relationship between religion and magic in this fictional universe. It is a work done in a style purposefully archaic, avoiding Latin-derived words to search for a purely English language paying homage to its Nordic roots. It is also a work with the traditional "flatness" of the medieval romances and illustrations: everybody happens on the same plane, there is no pause, no acme, everybody speaks the same way, and the same episodes return over and over again.

However as C.S. Lewis wrote, while Morris' style is very artificial, it shall be praised for being very simple, very obvious, very clear, "more so than any "natural" style could be". It is a form of stylistic sobriety that invites to see beyond the words. Morris' stories don't have a "set", a "stage" or a "decorum", they have a geography. Morris makes sure the reader can "breathe the air" of the mountains they read about. Morris started there this ideal that all fantasy authors seeks to reach, the same ideal that Tolkien popularized - but when Tolkien talks of the "tales of Faërie", he seems to be echoing and evoking the texts of William Morris. Simple, fundamental stories filled with light, that invite to look at things like everyday colors and rediscover them, and that get rid of banality and familiarity to literally "possess" the reader.

Anne Besson concludes by claiming Morris IS the Well which all the 1930s-onward fantasy authors drank from, as well as the more distant source of the flow of "new fantasy" of the 70s.

[vaelynez]

So we’ve established that Lyon’s an animal nerd. That’s basically canon. You can’t tell me he doesn’t know how to identify birds and spout off fun facts on a whim.

HOWEVER. A few weeks into an ecology course (whooo….gen eds. I am not a science girly) I’ve decided he’d live for that shit. Like trees can communicate about diseases so the other trees can protect themselves from it? Wild. He’d live for that shit. He’s a giant nerd.

[storkmuffin]

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Ateez’s European Concerts Set New Records And Dominate Boxscores

ByJeff Benjamin

 Senior Contributor.  Jeff Benjamin is a New York-based writer covering global pop music.Follow Author

MILAN, ITALY - JANUARY 20: Hongjoong, Seonghwa, Yunho, Yeosang, San, Mingi, Wooyoung and Jongho of ... MoreGetty Images

In a triumphant display of ATEEZ’s global appeal and live-performance prowess, the eight-member boy band has shown the impact of the European leg of their Towards the Light: Will to Power world tour on this year’s live-music landscape to selling over 180,000 tickets through the 14-date stretch.

In the February 2025 Boxscore Report from Billboard, the powerhouse KQ Entertainment boy band emerged as the only K-pop act to rank among the chart’s Top 30 tours. With just eight shows reported, ATEEZ grossed an impressive $17.9 million and drew 117,000 concertgoers to earn the band the sixth largest tours of the last month.

In particular, the performance at La Défense Arena in Paris, France, set a historic milestone. As the first K-pop group to headline in Europe’s largest arena, the chart-toppers set a new standard in the scene while wowing French fans. Billboard reports that the Paris show alone grossed $4.3 million with 29,200 fans in attendance, ranking as February’s 20th biggest tour boxscore.

Equally impressive were their shows in Berlin, Germany at Uber Arena. Over two nights, the band pulled in a combined gross of $4 million from 24,500 attendees, marking the Berlin dates as the 25th largest boxscore for the month, per Billboard Boxscore.

AEG Presents acted as promoter for the massive shows.Earlier this month, KQ Entertainment and AEG announced a strategic, multi-year partnership to oversee the production of all ATEEZ tours worldwide while expanding promotional opportunities. In the announcement, a press release noted that the critically acclaimed stars drew over 200,000 attendees in the 2024 North American leg of the Towards the Light: Will to Power world tour, sold over 180,000 tickets across Europe, and held the first-ever K-pop concerts at large venues like Zurich, Switzerland’s Hallenstadion arena and the LDLC Arena in Lyon, France.

AEG Presents even clinched the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Top Promoter chart for February 2025, no doubt in large part thanks to the drawing power of ATEEZ’s shows as well as major tours from other partners like Tyler, the Creator, and Ed Sheeran.

Moreover, ATEEZ’s momentum extended to Pollstar’s LIVE75 chart, which ranks active tours worldwide by the average number of tickets sold for shows performed over the last 30 days. The band maintained a strong presence over two consecutive weeks in February.

For the week of February 17, 2025, ATEEZ sold an average of 10,138 tickets — ranking alongside global heavyweights like the Eagles, Andrea Bocelli, and Justin Timberlake. The following week, they upped the ante with an average of 11,142 tickets sold, even surpassing Timberlake’s average ticket sales for the week.

A New Day for European K-Pop Concerts

As ATEEZ expands the boundaries of K-pop with their must-see live shows, the guys simultaneously bolster an increasingly lively live market for Korean artists in Europe.

As noted on Korea.net’s recent feature K-Pop concerts in Europe: a promising future despite challenges in the past, ATEEZ and peers like Taemin, Tomorrow X Together, P1Harmony, and Kiss of Life are making this year one for the record books. Even with the continent’s history of bad luck with canceled or postponed shows and festivals that ultimately came off more like scams than professional productions, hefty and successful tours like ATEEZ’s recent European leg signal a promising trajectory for the future.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

[kairaloi]

AITA for involving the whole city in my petty revenge plot?

For the last five years, I (26F) have been fighting to defend my country against the neighboring empire. I’ve tried to keep my gender under wraps (literally) because the camp was mostly men, and I just don’t want the trouble. But the problem is that my father was the general leading this section of the army. He’s seen me on the battlefield. He’s acknowledged what I did to win certain battles. He’s SEEN me use my bloodline ability, which is THE SAME as HIS. But even though I’ve been his aide for the last two years and saved his life five times, he had the AUDACITY to ask me to investigate where his daughter went.

When I was eleven, my mother k****ed herself. Father immediately packed me up and sent me to live with my aunt. As soon as his carriage was out of sight, she started abusing me. Dragging me by my hair, hitting me… she threw hot coals in my face and burned me pretty badly the first night I was there. I didn’t think the scars were bad enough to make me entirely unrecognizable to my family. But I guess they did. Or my father and twin brother are just incredibly stupid.

But the war is over, and Father returned to the capital to get Felix and me. When Aunt Karen said I’d run away, Father ordered me to find his daughter. He looked me dead in the eyes and told me to investigate what had happened to his daughter.

I tried to resolve it peacefully by resigning after I destroyed Aunt Karen by exposing everything she’d done in the last twenty years. But Father won’t let me go. He still calls me “Sir Mortuary” even though I attended the celebration ball in a dress, revealing that I’ve been a woman this whole time. Even though I’ve started dating the four most powerful men in the country. Even though Felix climbed out of his drunken stupor and finally recognized me. Everyone ELSE has figured it out. Why hasn't my father?!

Am I the a-hole for involving the whole city in my petty revenge against my father? Because I want to embarrass him. I want the truth to hit him like an avalanche. I want him to be so MORTIFIED by his stupidity that he retreats to some remote cave in our duchy and never shows his face again.

[abr]

DEGRADO. Una conoscente è recentemente rientrata da Lyon costretta a cambiare università, città resa invivibile e spaventosa per lei dopo aver subito pedinamenti e molestie sotto casa da "risorse".

I più mentalmente inerti diranno: bisognerebbe proibire il porto di coltelli - spoiler: è già proibito, i degradati se ne fregano.

Prossimamente sui nostri schermi.

Chissà cosa ci vuole per riuscire a unire i puntini e connettere il DEGRADO con l'esistenza di UN SOLO AVAMPOSTO che fa da argine e parafulmine, mentre dovremmo seguirne l'esempio tutti dappertutto, spiaze costa ma o così o cosà.

Spoiler: non è una questione etnica, ricordo che il 10% della popolazione del cd. "stato sionista" è araba musulmana perfettamente integrata e combattente contro il degrado corrotto palestofante, che come da noi rappresenta una aggressione straniera ed estranea.