#Thousands Islands

[landscapeyoungkakit]

Thousands Islands, Thousands Lakes, Thousands Bridges, Canada.

[lustingfood]

Pastrami Reuben (x)

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne's editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book's writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo's national origin and precisely which empire he's pissed off at are left unspecified.

Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne's editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren't 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.

Now here's the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo's accent is frustrated by Nemo's vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.

(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo's national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he'll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)

The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo's skin as a potential clue. In light of the book's publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn't decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island's retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.

[illustratus]

The Thousand Islands, St. Lawrence River by Andrew W. Melrose

[the-golden-vanity]

You're gonna need a bigger boat bookshelf.

[toyastales]

Reuben Sandwich

[rapidhighway]

i dont really care for gijinkas but its so late im delirious but i felt like drawing have this

[cartoonybus]

i feel like part of the reason dwampy didn't want to make dakavendish a thing is because they're two characters they put a bit of themselves into (tho not the extent doof has a lot of aspects of dan's personality) and thus felt weird about making them a romantic couple. which i get!

but maybe they shouldn't have written them so gayly then

[miamaimania]

"Just Room Enough" - Aerial view of a solitary cabin nestled on a minuscule island, embraced by the vast blue waters of the Thousand Islands.

[give-grian-rights]

the average person doesnt even know that wikipedia has had a several years long ban on ANY articles even referencing a fifteen year old web series. to the extent that mentioning it under actors pages to include their work on there is considered vandalism

for seemingly no reason ?

[e-vasong]

i understand that the lestat-daniel interview is going to take the form of a music documentary. and that is probably the best option. but i cannot stress funny it would be if they did youtube vlogs instead. i think daniel should post cunty little "on the road" and "backstage" videos where he interviews lestat. lestat barely answers the questions and instead talks directly to the camera, sharing thinly veiled messages for louis. daniel occasionally makes not-so-thinly veiled bitchy comments toward armand. everyone thinks lestat and daniel are talking to each other. theyre convinced that both the book and the vlog are part of some elaborate roleplay. they get cancelled for making their clearly sexual blood kink so public. and, most importantly, there is an obscene amount of RPF written about it. within a year there are like 20,000 fics about them. theres fanart on twitter. louis thinks that this is HILARIOUS and regularly asks daniel how his husband is in the bedroom. armand is completely oblivious until someone sends him a link to a Cosmopolitan article titled "Sex, Blood, and Rock 'n' Roll: the Love Story that Took the World by Storm" at which point he promptly shatters whatever glass he's holding (and everything else in his house) and tries to buy daniel a private island, which in turn sends the shippers into a frenzy, because now danstat has an attempted homewrecker???? they are so real guys omg

[backpackingspace]

Hey hey do you think Athena almost went to go visit odysseus out of habit because she was bored and wanted someone to mess with, because she found a new move that would be perfect for him, because she had to witness some absolute idiocy and if she has to suffer odysseus does too and maybe after she wants he'll make some dumb joke that'll make her find the whole thing funny, because she misses him and didn't realize how lonely she was until she didn't have his friendship, because she cannot sleep at night and cannot stop replaying their last conversation over and over and over how as he screamed at her he had tears in his eyes and she---

[greenerteacups]

What do you think of jkr as a writer? I for one has always felt like she didn’t treat her female characters well. It felt strange, being critical of her when she was god queen of the earth, and also being 10

I think most of the problems in her books can be chalked up to genre hopping. Books 1-3 are perfectly good and serviceable children's books — great children's books, even! They have compelling, relatable characters and juicy mystery plots. They have problems, sure, but for the first three books someone's ever written — especially someone with little or no background in creative writing — they're really fucking good. So: there's her flowers.

The last four books pivot sharply into much more emotionally complicated and sociopolitically loaded territory, because they're describing a war. And it's hard to write children's books about war. I would venture you can't really do it, at least without dramatically misrepresenting what war is! And so Rowling makes the executive decision somewhere during the writing of Book 4 that she's not going to flinch away from that, she's going to go for dramatic realism, and she kills Cedric Diggory to let us know. People had died in Harry Potter before, of course — Quirrell gets sent to the fucking shadow realm, for example. But children haven't. (It also gives parents who are reading these books with their children a warning shot: shit is about to get significantly more real, think twice before you buy the next one of these for your 10-year-old.) After that, Rowling starts leaning much more into dramatic realism, and the fast-paced mystery-novel plotting of the first few books is replaced by a slow, simmering political conflict that unfurls over the course of about a million words.

The problem — besides the fact that she's picking one of the hardest things to write about, like, in all of literature, war is really insanely complicated and emotionally intense and hard to portray well — is that she's now trying to use characters, plot points, and technologies she developed for a children's series to enact a sprawling war drama among teenagers and adults. So Hermione, who was a reasonably precocious snobby eleven-year-old, becomes this sort of encyclopedic all-knowing savant of the wizarding world, who somehow remains functional and mostly even-headed despite her identity being the chief target of a prolifically murderous terrorist group. Draco Malfoy, a schoolyard bully whose primary tools included 1. namecalling and 2. telling teacher, JOINS said terrorist group (and admittedly does react reasonably, i.e., has a total crashout and takes to sobbing in a girls' bathroom whenever he gets a free minute). Dumbledore, who starts out as "whimsical friendly winky-wink trustworthy grandfather type", ends up being Magical Winston Churchill in a violent game of spycraft and espionage, eventually revealing he's only been keeping Harry at all these seven years because he wants to KILL him! And like, maybe really good technical writing could smooth out these transitions and make the first-order dramatic choices seem more natural, but Rowling is like, a Fine Writer, technically speaking. meaning she's reasonably consistent in characterization, her plotting is well-paced and believable, she has a clear authorial voice, and her prose is readable. personally, that's not enough to get me to buy into some of the changes that happen in the later books, and because she stuffs these things so full with new elements every installment, a lot of stuff ends up getting glossed over.

And like, I still love the books. I think they're wonderful, and they taught me how to read. but i can say that and also say that Rowling probably did herself a disservice by trying to write four giant war novels as sequels to her first three mystery children's books.

[q-uzi]

just a little bit of spray paint stuff (just a little)

[feeshies]

Another 20K Leagues meme

[hometownheatwave]

what if we were nakamas? jk… unless?