#and this woman is a historian!! she has a phd!!

[magstorrn]

about to leave a scathing review for a historical fiction book on goodreads (felt so strongly about it i made an account for the first time) then chickening out once i realised i'd put down my full name and i dont want to offend the author TOO much in case we end up working in the same field as historians

[evaglass]

Adding More Backstory to Tang Shen

I wish 2012 had told us more about Tang Shen. Not much was told except that she was born in Fukuoka, was 1/4th Chinese, and was a woman both Splinter and Shredder were in love with.

Also, there's a line Shen says at one point, which involves her saying, "I can take care of myself; I've always have." Giving the idea, she grew up in tough circumstances. We never hear anything about her parents, if she was orphaned or not. We know her grandparents were present in her life, and I looked up information about the city of Fukuoka, which is stated to be a fairly safe place. I wish that line was explored more, but it just feels like the writers put it there for some brief moment of angst.

There was also a bit of writing inconsistencies. In season one, episode 26, there are these lines of dialogue I got from the episode's transcript when Splinter and Shredder are fighting

But then, in season 3, in the Tale of the Yokai episode, there's this scene

Yeahh, I believe I found a way to explain this in my rewrite of 2012, but for now, I want to talk about my rewrite of Shen.

I was thinking of making Shen a Taiwanese woman of 100% Chinese descent. She was really close to her father, but unfortunately, he died when she was still a child.

Shen's mother raised her and Shen's younger sister as a single mother with the help of Shen's older brother, who stepped up to provide for his family after their father died.

Shen was a very studious and hardworking young lady, but also a little bit rebellious as she was very set on the choices she made for herself, whether her mother approved or not.

She got accepted to Cambridge University, where she majored in history and minored in linguistics, as she had a passion for history like her father, and wanted to become a historian.

After she graduated from her undergraduate program, she entered her PhD. program for history, where in the last few years of said program, she worked part-time on her dissertation while also working as an English teacher in Japan.

During her time in Japan, she met Shredder and Splinter. Shen met Shredder first; they became friends, and soon both developed feelings for each other. When Shen tried to make a move, Shredder rejected it, as he wanted to focus on the future of the Hamato Clan and gain the approval of his adoptive father, Hamato Yuuta; he also wanted to respect her dream of becoming a historian, and not distract her from it. Shen was embarrassed but respected his decision and agreed just to be friends.

Shen and Splinter don't get together until a little bit later. Actually, when they first met, they didn't like each other at all as their first impression of each other wasn't great. However, they, of course, do come to respect each other after Splinter helped Shen when her car broke down at the side of the road. Shen and Splinter later become friends and then develop feelings for each other, which surprised both of them, especially Shen, as Splinter was someone she did not expect.

I like to think that as they spent more time together, Shen felt more comfortable talking about her passion and also introduced Splinter about the history of the Renaissance Painters.

She does graduate from her PhD. program, but also accidentally gets pregnant because the portrait Splinter has looked like a wedding photo.

I also thought about how Shen was able to find out about how brutal the war between the Hamato and Foot Clan before Splinter does, seeing how it involved the never-ending cycle of revenge. Finding that out, Tang Shen never wanted her daughter to get involved with ninjitsu.

Look at the way Shen looks at her baby daughter; she would've done anything for her.

She wanted Karai to have a normal life, and that's staying in my rewrite, but I also want to explain why she would push Splinter to leave ninjitsu to go to New York with her to raise their daughter; the history between both clans would play a big part with that, as well as her love for Splinter, but also Shen would still be traumatized from losing her father at a young age, and didn't want her daughter growing up without her father.

But unfortunately, Shen dies. I'm keeping Shen's death the same way it happened in the show, but yeah, that was my rewrite. Let me know what you guys think.

[venettus]

⟡ — IS THAT TIPPI SAINT-JAMES I JUST SAW WALKING AROUND KILMER’S COVE? I HEARD THEY’RE A RESIDENT WHO’S BEEN HERE FOR FIVE YEARS. IT SLIPPED MY MIND, SINCE THEY JUST TEND TO HANG OUT AT THE CLIFFS . AT FACE VALUE, THEY’RE SAID TO BE DEVOUT AND GENTLE, BUT I DON’T KNOW… SOME PEOPLE HAVE SAID THEY CAN BE QUITE STUBBORN AND ESCAPIST. JUST DON’T GET ON THEIR BAD SIDE, I GUESS! DON’T TELL THEM I TOLD YOU THIS, BUT I’VE HEARD THEY DO BELIEVE IN ALL THE GHOST STORIES AROUND TOWN. WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR THEM!

BIRTH NAME  tippi elizabeth saint-james.   KNOWN AS  tips, much to her chagrin.   AGE  thirty. BIRTHDATE   feb 2nd.   GENDER + PRONOUNS  cis woman + she/her.     ZODIAC CHART aquarius sun OCCUPATION marine biologist & paleontologist, currently curator of tanya b. heady museum of natural history LANGUAGES english, spanish, latin

HEIGHT  5′ 5″ .   HAIR  blonde,  styled in soft, voluminous curls that frame her face  EYE COLOR  green.   HOMETOWN  nantucket, massachusetts ACCENT a local accent of eastern new england english.   SCENT  mixture of honeysuckle, sicilian lemon and sea notes LIVING ARRANGEMENTS  tba, living with her fiance PETS a white ragdoll that most resembles a ball of snow, named shelby CHARACTER INSPIRATION kya clarke ( where the crawdads sing ),  danielle flinders ( submergence ), hedy lamarr ( for just how smart she was ) + marilyn monroe ( for her impeccable style )

an only child of two esteemed professors, a chemist, and a historian, weaned on science and the beauty of logic. an only child easily grows into a lonesome girl, especially on an island such as nantucket, which is no wider in length than the length of a dreamer's wish.

much of her childhood, she spent alone, raising herself in the family backyard, which was abutted on a body of water, whilst her parents traveled to and fro the mainland, too busy with work to truly and fully commit to their daughter.

say what you wish, as one always does, but it's the only sort of life that tippi has ever known. down by the water, where there are strong currents and shifting sands, she teaches herself how to swim and follow the riptide, and the first love that she finds, she finds with her magical touch, in the shape of seashells and conches — but here's the thing, everything is magic, except to the magician.

under her father's magnifying glass imported from england, she finds the first traces of an old life, but if only that were enough. she ought to know more and she ought to know the best.

at nineteen, she uproots herself in hopes of attending stanford, taking part in a dual degree program, which for she sacrifices and gives every inch and pound of herself. four years later, at only twenty-three, she begins her pursuit of her master's degree, and it's an odyssey that culminates at twenty-five, when she sinks her pearly teeth deep into the idea of a doctorate.

in need of something new, something better and entirely bored of california, she stumbles upon kilmer cove on her way back home, and the rest, as they say, is rust and seashells.

tippi's been a resident of kilmer cove for over five years now, and four of them, she spent working on her phd. she finally earned it last year, when she also got her promotion and became the curator of tanya b. heady museum of natural history. before that, she was one of many researchers working at the museum.

she has also published two books. one about the earliest known vertebrates and one children's book which is devoted and dedicated to the most notable extinct sea creatures. she sketched them herself of course.

she's currently working on her third book, though its theme and content are unknown to the public just yet — she's rather preoccupied with heading the museum and also planning her wedding.

loves an icy bath, you can catch her swimming always, regardless of the season and the weather.

known for her incredible personal sophistication and magnetism filled with warmth, though it's hard to get to know her beyond the surface. it's not you, it's the years she dedicated to science.

surprisingly a believer, but in a way that a scientist is. there's something that exists between people that just can't be so easily explained.

usually looks like she stepped out of a different era, since her style is greatly inspired by marilyn. that is, when she isn't knees-deep in mud.

her cat shelby is five and a half years old and tippi got her in hopes of avoiding further loneliness in kilmer cover, but that turned out quite differently in the end.

[ritualove]

Walking through the picturesque streets of Cardinal Hill, you find Leslie Ashe, the 29 year old Curator at The Hidden Archives originally from Ballarat, Australia. Living alongside them in such a small town, you know that they're sincere and peculiar, but what you might not know is that they are a human, and that they’re hiding something… ― Elizabeth Debicki, Bisexual, woman, and she/her

-Content Warning: Pregnancy struggles, implied miscarriage

Ashe, Leslie - Notes:

Full name: Dr. Leslie Faye Ashe

Gender: Woman

Pronouns: She/Her

Age: 29

Birthday: February 9th, 1961

Zodiac: Aquarius

Sexuality: Bisexual

Magic: Human

Occupation: Curator at The Hidden Archives

Ashe, Leslie - File A

Leslie was born on the 9th of February, 1961. Her birth was in direct opposition to all forms of divination, augury, prophecy, sortilege and professional medical opinion. Despite all aforementioned forewarning though, Leslie breathed. 

Leslie was the little miracle of the family punished by hardship, a rainbow baby after years of hopeless pregnancies. These years had the effect of making her traditionally secular parents turn their attention to the various forms of fortune telling that are known, which proved to be less than helpful for their hopes. 

Leslie had practically every day of her life predicted for her in advance, it varied from what type of prediction, from astrology to kau cim, but she always had some type of semblance for how everything would go. These methods were taught to her parents by Leslie's maternal aunt, a lady that has always been referred to as a witch by her parents.

Homeschooled through her youth, and as an only child, Leslie is often considered less-than-adequately socialised. Despite the stereotypes of a child with the same upbringing, her parent’s unconventional methods has led to Leslie not being completely insufferable, not perfectly sufferable, just not insufferable. 

Leslie’s father worked as a dentist, and was the main breadwinner. This allowed for Leslie’s mother to work as a historian, a much more interesting job in her eyes. When Leslie was 9, the open-air museum Sovereign Hill opened, and her mother was one of the original curators and reenactor.

Due to this, Leslie spent a lot of time there. She worked as a reenactor occasionally, but she actually spent most of her time helping archive the extremely large amounts of files that needed to be archived. This is where she found her true passion for history.

In between working, she spent a significant portion of her time with her aunt. The woman was definitely a witch, and taught Leslie most of what she knew. To her aunt’s dismay however, Leslie was a human. She didn’t allow it to put a wedge in between them though. Leslie was particularly interested in forms of prophecy and divination, having had her fortune regularly read from her birth.

After finishing her highschool equivalent early, Leslie delved deep into university studies, being able to complete a PhD in both astronomy and historical studies. While studying, she worked at the Victoria State Library, and later the National Library of Australia, working as an archiver. She had grown a knack for reading navigational documents and star charts. 

Cardinal Hill caught Leslie’s attention after the departure of the last curator of The Hidden Archives. She knew that Cardinal Hill had a rich witch history, and the archives there would prove to be of great interest to her.

At 27 she applied for the job, and after it was quickly accepted she made the trip to the states. She has been living there since.

Ashe, Leslie - File B: Character Description

Leslie is not very good socially. She is far from anxious, and loves a good conversation, but she may not be very good at it. 

Most of her work at the archives relate to some type of prophecy, and that leads to her often confusing what has and hasn’t yet happened. 

She almost always does some sort of fortune telling every night, or every morning. It doesn't impact her decision making much, but it will definitely change how she reacts to events. This aspect of her does lead to a large amount of clutter with varying items required to find said fortunes. She has at six crystal balls, a drawer full of pendulums, and tarot decks beyond countability

She insists that her title is Doctor.

While she is a human, she is well aware of witches, and participates in whatever form of witch culture she can. It’s not easy for her to find the hidden stores and magazines, being unable to use magic to find them, but she’s worked out a pretty nifty system of sniffing out the magical places around town.

[justforbooks]

With her book The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, who has died aged 94, attracted a wide readership and inspired future historians. It came out of working as a historical consultant on a film of the same name released the previous year, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, and directed by Daniel Vigne.

Martin Guerre, a peasant farmer in the 16th-century Pyrenees, left his wife Bertrande to go on a journey, only to have his marital role usurped by an impostor who “returned” pretending to be him. After some years of cohabitation, Bertrande denounced the impostor, her testimony seemingly confirmed by the return of the real Martin Guerre. The impostor was duly tried and executed.

The film-makers’ questions about period detail and behaviour intrigued Davis. But other aspects of the movie genre troubled her, so she went back to the archives and wrote up her own compact account of 120 pages.

A gripping narrative and a lesson in method, Davis’s book raised questions about the reliability of evidence and the motives and worldviews of peasant men and women from a faraway place and time. It is an example of a microhistory, where historians turn away from the big canvas of kings, queens and battles to understand ordinary lives, often through a highly localised case study.

The Return of Martin Guerre was one of a series of works including Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), Fiction in the Archives (1987), Women on the Margins (1995) and The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (2000). Davis’s trademark was the longer essay or biographical study, often focused on marginal or misunderstood personalities, all spiced with a sharp attention to issues of religion, gender, sex, class, money and power. Historical records for her were never dull: she once described them as “a magic thread that links me to people long since dead and with situations that have crumbled to dust”.

Born in Detroit, Natalie was the daughter of Helen (nee Lamport) and Julian Zemon, a textile trader, both children of east European Jewish immigrants to the US. While studying at Smith College, Massachusetts, at the age of 19 she fell in love with Chandler Davis, a brilliant mathematician and socialist activist; they married in 1948 and went on to have a son and two daughters. Her first degree, from Smith (1949), was followed by a master’s at Radcliffe College (1950).

Her life with Davis was productive and fulfilling but also complicated her early career, as his principled stances against McCarthy-era restrictions on political expression led to both him and her being barred from a number of posts, and from travelling abroad. This she needed to do for her doctorate on 16th-century France.

After finally gaining her PhD at Michigan University in 1959, Davis went on to hold positions at Toronto, moved in 1971 to the University of California, Berkeley, where she was appointed professor, and in 1978 to Princeton, retiring in 1996. She became only the second woman to serve as president of the American Historical Association (1987), and the first to serve as Eastman professor at Oxford (1994). In 2012 she was appointed Companion of the Order of Canada, and in the US was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Davis helped establish programmes in women’s studies and taught courses on history and film. Her AHA presidential address, History’s Two Bodies (1988), summed up her thinking about gender in history. It was also the first such address to be printed with illustrations. Her book Slaves on Screen (2002) was one of the first in-depth treatments of this topic by a professional historian.

In her last two books, Davis returned to the exploration of mixed identities. Trickster Travels (2006) was about the 16th-century scholar Leo Africanus, whose complicated Jewish and Muslim roots in North Africa she expertly unpicked. Listening to the Languages of the People (2022) focused on the 19th-century scholar Lazare Sainéan, a Romanian-Jewish folklorist and lexicographer who published one of the world’s first serious studies of Yiddish, but had to abandon his Romanian homeland for Paris in 1901.

At the time of her death, Davis was completing a study of slave families in colonial Suriname: it is hoped this will appear under the announced title of Braided Histories. In this way she continued to explore unconventional topics, going against the grain of Eurocentric history and looking instead at the boundaries of identity and belonging in very different settings.

Visiting many universities and research centres in her retirement, Davis encouraged younger scholars by conveying the potential of history to inspire empathy and hope for change. While at my own institution, the University of Amsterdam, in 2016, she made it her main aim to talk to students rather than to other professors. In 2022-23 she presented her latest work in online seminars, and wrote and corresponded actively until shortly before her death from cancer.

Chandler died in 2022. Natalie is survived by her three children, Aaron, Hannah and Simone; four grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a brother, Stanley.

🔔 Natalie Zemon Davis, historian, born 8 November 1928; died 21 October 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[queenfredegund]

I was reading through your hashtags on your post abt Nantechildis regina and I noticed you said that she had the makings of another powerful regent so I was curious as to what moves she made that PHD historians like yourself have information on that would have left this impression? Love your merovingian posts and can’t wait for more!!! I blame you for thiss!!! 🤭 you have gotten me obsessed with them 😂 especially fredegunde and brunhilde!!!! 😂 sorry this was just way too long 😂 ok bye 😃

Hi! First of all, when I'm speaking about powerful regents, what I intend is a woman who:

acts as a ruling figure for a minor sovereign, either by being his mother or any other motherly-figure;

has made connections with some powerful allies among the ruling elite or can dispose of family members able to back her up;

is known as an active pious founder.

These are some of the many similarities we can observe from the careers of several Merovingian regent women. For example, Brunehilde was the mother of Childebert II, she had connexions with many powerful men, even being the godmother of the daughter of one of them, and she is known for at least three major religious foundations. Those are the roots of her authoritiy for several decades.

Now, regarding Nantechildis, we can observe that:

she acted as Dagobert's main wife for 10 years, including 5 years without delevering a son, and as soon as Dagobert died, she was regarded as his executrix, managing the parting of his treasure equally between his two heirs. She also managed to enthrone her own son, who was only 5yo, and successfully guided him into a tour of the major cities of his regnum like Dagobert had done this 10 years before;

she had connexions with different political figures, and even managed to marry her own niece to one of the most important leader during her regency, which if you ask me, certainly means that she hosted the wedding and acted as a figure of authority for the newlywed couple;

not only did she founded several pious structures with Dagobert, but she also made major donations before and after his death, and honored her late brother with a lavish ceremony and lavish donations in his memory.

All that put together, I sincerely think Nantechildis could have been a major regent herself, if only she didn't die so early in her regency...

And also, I'm so glad to know that I may have got you interested in Frankish women, cause I love them, haha!

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

https://www.tcd.ie/tceh/blogs/vikings.php

Author Tenaya Jorgensen

What happens if when archaeologists excavate a Viking grave, but find no body inside? Are the grave goods found within enough to determine the identity – either sex or gender - of the individual? Perhaps it is time for archaeologists and historians to challenge their assumptions regarding the relationship between artefacts and gender. In order to move forward, we must also look back by re-examining the corpus of existing identifications and the reasons why those identifications were made in the first place.

My PhD dissertation is not about sexuality and gender. I had not intended to take a strong stance on gendered-issues, as my thesis attempts to chart an interdisciplinary macro-history of the Early Viking Age (790-920 AD). As such, there seemed to be little room within my area of study for the finer ruminations required for the discussion of identity politics.

But then I began to catalogue Viking Age Graves across Western Europe, and what I found - well, it bothered me. Of the 64 burial sites in Ireland, only 33 of these sites contained human remains. Of the remaining 31, the cemeteries and single burials were identified solely through grave goods. Similarly, in Scotland, 31 burial sites out of 60 evidenced human remains. The other 29 were, again, identified by Viking Age objects.

Why do we sex and gender Viking graves that contain no bodies?

While it is understandable that graves may be correctly identified through the use of grave goods, I was struck by the confidence with which scholars identified burials as either ‘male,’ or ‘female,’ depending on the assemblage provided.

For example, in the 1940s, Sigurd Grieg compiled Viking Antiquities in Scotland for Haakon Shetelig’s six volume compendium on Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland(1). Although now over eighty years old, Grieg’s work remains the most comprehensive survey available on Viking Age burials in Scotland. Only a few individual corrections have been made, but Grieg’s survey as a whole has not received any extensive updates, and these updates are much needed.

Grieg states that in 1862, “the skeleton of an aged man, interred with a sword and possibly with a shield,’ was excavated at Ardvonrig, on the Isle of Barra, in Scotland. Also discovered were a tortoise brooch, bronze brooch, bronze peninsular brooch, and a needle case, “evidently belonging to a woman’s grave.” The problem is, only one set of human remains was found. Despite the lack of a second body, Grieg stated that the “mound probably contained a double grave for a man and a woman.”(2) His assumptions were based only around the suggestion of weapons within the grave - no other justification was provided.

Fast forward to 1990, when Kate Gordon at the British Museum re-examined the excavated objects. She ultimately determined that the sword was not, in fact, a weapon, but a weaving sword/baton, while the shield was a pair of heckles, which are also textile equipment. Armed with the findings of her reanalysis, Gordon suggests that the individual buried at Ardvonrig, “in absence of osteological sexing, was almost certainly a female.”(3)

However, even Gordon’s reanalysis bothered me, for why must the individual buried on the Isle of Barra have been almost certainly a female? Marianne Moen’s 2019 PhD thesis, Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape, brilliantly examines this question by analysing common practices and separating exceptions from the rule.(4) That is to say, while women are often buried with textile equipment, and men are often buried with weapons, that does not mean that it is always so. This, of course, brings up a further difficult point regarding sex and gender. According to Jennifer Tseng in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, “sex refers to the biological differences between males and females. Gender refers to the continuum of complex psychosocial self-perceptions, attitudes, and expectations people have about members of both sexes.”(5) The former is much more straightforward - if we have a body, that is.

Gendered practices in Viking graves

There can be no conversation about gendering burial practices without mention of the Birka warrior. In 2017, archaeologists confirmed that a burial containing weapons could be positively associated with a female skeleton (Bj.581) through DNA analysis.(6) Response to their publication was swift, and the debate centered around whether the presence of weapons conclusively affirmed that the woman was, in fact, a warrior. The authors, with the addition of Neil Price from Uppsala University, offered a more nuanced take in 2019 when they published, ‘Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581.’ While the first article meant to primarily address the genomic analysis, the latter article took greater care in examining the implications of both Viking Age funerary practices and archaeology, and ‘the ways in which we engender the societies of that time.”(7)

So how do we engender the Viking Age? Our representations of the Viking Age are coloured by societal norms of the 20th and 21st centuries - especially in popular culture and outside the confines of a sometimes rather sterile academic environment. That is to say, male biological sex was often synonymous with a man’s gendered identity, and that the role of a warrior was exclusively associated with men and males. As the authors of ‘Viking warrior women?’ themselves acknowledge, ‘the same interpretation [that the body of the warrior belonged to a man] would undoubtedly have been made had no human bone survived at all.’ While these authors suggest that this automatic conflation between men and swords was a product of its time (i.e., the late 19th century), they fail to acknowledge that these types of genderings are still occurring. Furthermore, we know these associations are still occurring today, because the survey of Ireland’s Viking Graves was only published in 2014, and in this survey, bodiless weapon burials are gendered as male.(8)

If we think twice about suggesting the presence of a male when a sword is discovered, can the truth also be said in reverse? If textile equipment is excavated, such as the baton and heckles found on Isle of Barra, does this mean we must automatically attribute the burial to a woman? While no biologically male burials have currently been identified with textile tools, many of the sites contain bodies of indeterminate sex - or simply no bodies at all. Furthermore, what of burials that contain both textile equipment and weapons, but with remains too insubstantial to be analysed for sexing? Moen states the simple and obvious truth: “we are simply asking the wrong questions. Perhaps less rigidity in expected gender roles may be the answer to how to interpret such apparently transgressive burials.”(9) Perhaps less rigidity in sexing burials is needed as well - for we have no sex without a body, and gendering burials based solely on grave goods can only limit our understanding of the people who lived during the Viking Age.

[jcmarchi]

Everything, everywhere all at once

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/everything-everywhere-all-at-once/

Everything, everywhere all at once

The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human.

When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in physics. A family friend was a physicist, and she attributed her interest in the field to him. But it wasn’t until a trip back to her mother’s home country of Côte d’Ivoire that König learned her penchant for the subject had started much younger. No one in Côte d’Ivoire was surprised she was pursuing physics — they told her she’d been peering upward at the stars since she was a small child, wondering how they all had come together. ­

That wonder never left her. “Everyone looks at the stars. Everyone looks at the moon. Everybody wonders about the universe,” says König. “I’m trying to understand it with math.”

König’s observations have led her to MIT, where in 2021 she continued studying theoretical cosmology as a postdoc with physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth and physicist and historian of science David Kaiser. Now, she is a member of MIT’s 2023-24 Martin Luther King (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program cohort, alongside 11 others. This year, members of the MLK Scholars are researching and teaching diverse subjects including documentary filmmaking, behavioral economics, and writing children’s books.

Once she was set on physics, König finished her undergraduate studies in 2012, double-majoring in mathematics and physics at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

Still compelled by questions about the universe, König narrowed in on cosmology, and graduated with her master’s degree from Pierre and Marie Curie in 2014. The way König describes it, cosmology is like archaeology, just up in space. While astronomers study galaxy formations and mutations — all of the stuff in the universe — cosmologists study everything about the universe, all at once.

“It’s a different scale, a different system,” says König. “Of course, you need to understand stars, galaxies, and how they work, but cosmologists study the universe and its origin and contents as a whole.”

From practice to theory

Throughout her studies, König said, she was often the only woman in the room. She wanted to pursue the theories behind cosmology but wasn’t encouraged to try. “You have to understand that being a woman in this field is super, incredibly difficult,” says König. “I told everyone I wanted to do theory, and they didn’t believe in me. So many people told me not to do it.”

When König had the opportunity to pursue a PhD in observational cosmology in Marseille and Paris, she almost accepted. But she was more drawn to theory. When she was offered a spot with a little more freedom to study cosmology at the University of California at Davis, she took it. Alongside Professor Nemanja Kaloper, König dove into inflation theory, looking all the way back to the universe’s beginning.

It is well-known that the universe is always expanding. Think about inflation as the precursor to that expansion — a quick and dramatic beginning, where the universe grew exponentially fast.

“Inflation is the moment in history that happened right after the beginning of the universe,” says König. “We’re not talking about 1 second, not even a millisecond. We are talking 10 to the negative 32nd seconds.” In other words, it took 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,01 seconds for the universe to go from something minuscule to, well, everything. And today, the universe is only getting bigger.

Only a sliver of the universe’s composition is understandable using current technology — less than 5 percent of the universe is composed of matter we can see. Everything else is dark matter and dark energy.

For decades, cosmologists have been trying to excavate the universe’s mysterious past using photons, the tiny, particle form of light. Since light travels at a fixed speed, light emitted further back in the universe’s history, from objects that are now farther away from us due to the expansion of the universe, takes longer to reach Earth. “If you look at the sun — don’t do it! — but if you did, you’d actually be seeing it eight minutes in the past,” says König. As they carve their way through the universe, photons give cosmologists historical information, acting as messengers across time. But photons can only account for the luminous 4.9 percent of the universe. Everything else is dark.

Since dark matter doesn’t emit or reflect photons like luminous matter, researchers can’t see it. König likens dark matter to an invisible person wearing a tuxedo. She knows something is there because the tuxedo is dancing, swinging its arms and legs around. But she can’t see or study the person inside the suit using the technology at hand. Dark matter has stirred up countless theories, and König is interested in the methods behind those theories. She is asking: How do you study something dark when light particles are necessary for gathering historical information?

According to König and her MIT collaborators — Guth, the forerunner of inflation theory, and Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science — the answer might lie in gravitational waves. König is using her time at MIT to see if she can sidestep light particles entirely by using the ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves are caused by the collision of massive, dense stellar objects such as neutron stars. Gravitational waves also transmit information across the universe, in essence giving us a new sense, like hearing is to seeing. With data from instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and NANOGrav, “not only can we look at it, now we can hear the cosmos, too,” she says.

Black in physics

Last year, König worked on two all-Black research teams with physicists Marcell Howard and Tatsuya Daniel. “We did great work together,” König says, but she points out how their small group was one of the largest all-Black theoretical physics research teams — ever. She emphasizes how they cultivated creativity and mentorship while doing highly technical science, producing two published papers (Elastic Scattering of Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds and An SZ-Like Effect on Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds).

Out of the 69,238 people who have earned doctorates in physics and astronomy since 1981, only 122 of them were Black women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. When König finished her PhD in 2021, she became the first Black student at UC Davis to receive a PhD in physics and the ninth Black woman to ever complete a doctorate in theoretical physics in the United States.

This past October, in a presentation at MIT, König ended with an animated slide depicting a young Black girl sitting in a dark meadow, surrounded by warm lights and rustling grass. The girl was looking up at the stars, her eyes full of wonder. “I had to make this with AI,” says König. “I couldn’t find an image online of a young Black girl looking up at the stars. So, I made one.”

In 2017, König went to Côte d’Ivoire, spending time teaching school children about physics and cosmology. “The room was full,” she says. Adults and students alike came to listen to her. Everyone wanted to learn, and everyone echoed the same questions about the universe as König did when she was younger. But, she says, “the difference between them and me is that I was given a chance to study this. I had access to people explaining how incredible and exciting physics is.”

König sees a stark disconnect between physics in Africa and physics everywhere else. She wants universities around the world to make connections with African universities, building efforts to encourage students of all backgrounds to pursue the field of physics.

König explains that ushering in more Black and African physicists means starting at the beginning and encouraging more undergraduates and young students to enter the field. “There is an enormous amount of talent and brilliance there,” König says. She sees an opportunity to connect with students across Africa, building the bridges needed to help everyone pursue the questions that keep them looking up at the stars.

While König loves her research, she knows theoretical cosmology has far to come to as a discipline. “There is so much room to grow in the field. It’s not all figured out.”

[qqueenofhades]

"The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the "Dark" Ages were anything but. Oxford and BBC historian Janina Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women's names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burned, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated."

Okay this is from the book blurb and I'M MAD THAT THIS IS A POTENTIAL AWARD WINNER. LIKE. HAVE YOU LITERALLY READ NOTHING ELSE ON THE MIDDLE AGES? EVER?? "THE [DARK] MIDDLE AGES ARE SEEN AS A BLOODTHIRSTY OPPRESSION OF WOMEN" AGAIN, ACCORDING TO WHO? THE GAME OF THRONES WRITERS? HAVE YOU TALKED TO ANY MEDIEVAL HISTORIANS?

Also, I just discovered that I answered an ask about this book a while ago. It is here. At the time, I was to say the least, skeptical. I am even more skeptical now. I did have this excellent line, which sums it up:

She’s published a few other books and lectured at top UK universities, so she does have actual credentials. However, and this may be just me, I always get a little bit twitchy when historians with other primary specialties decide to parachute into the “medieval women were oppressed and I should write a book about it” arena [...] Yet again, though, I’m getting a little tired of historians announcing that we don’t know much about medieval women, while standing in front of all the evidence about medieval women that they’re using to sell a book.

(Also, there's a discussion in there about the level of power that a woman has to have in the first place in order to be "written out," and how that doesn't prove what the author thinks it proves. So yes, I would advise also reading that ask for more context.)

As noted: Janina Ramirez does have a terminal degree; however. Her PhD is in the medieval artistic and literary symbolism of birds. She is primarily an art historian. I have nothing against art historians! But it also makes me think that premodern social and gender studies is not her primary field of research and that wading into this complex and delicate subject of interpreting and dealing with medieval texts just to make a simplistic argument about "the Dark Ages erased women hurr hurrr" is.... ill-advised. I have not read this book; frankly, I will not read this book. But why is it that after all the excellent work done by actual specialists in this subject, which have pushed the study and debate on medieval women to fascinating and useful new heights, the book that gets widespread attention/acclaim is the one that regurgitates the most basic stereotypes???

No, this is not entirely the author's fault (if nothing else, it makes you wonder if there is a single actual medievalist on the Cundill History Prize's panel of judges.) She wrote a book that people want to read, covers a timely topic and which has achieved considerable popular success. But this "all of history has always been maliciously revised to take all the women out of it and I am the only person who has ever noticed this" approach is... not my favorite. To say the least. It doesn't contribute to our actual understanding of the past or our own relation to it, and it totally undoes the work of said other gender and social historians, who then have to roll the "see? This award-winning book says the Dark Ages totally erased women and good thing we never do that today in Enlightened Modernity!!!" boulder all the way up the hill from the start. UGH! Maybe this is the fault of the blurb writer, because this is a terrible fucking description for anything aspiring to be a piece of serious history. Maybe it's not. I REPEAT, UGH!

Obviously and as is my standard disclaimer every time this topic arises: yes, there was misogyny, patriarchy, and discrimination in the past. Yes, it systematically and seriously impacted women's lives. But the actual state of the field is doing so much more interesting and useful work here! What about, say, Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (revised 2018), which explores this same subject in a much more nuanced way, examining how medieval women interacted with the mechanisms of social power both successfully and unsuccessfully, rather than just arguing that they were sometimes written out of texts (which itself doesn't actually prove how this was received, because there's a huge gap between the mere existence of texts and their actual application in real life etc etc. /captainholtvoice APPARENTLY THAT'S A TRIGGER FOR ME.) How about Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100-1400: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalism Debate, which explores how women could and did use power and it wasn't something that rested only on their "extraordinary" personal volition but was customarily and regularly available??? Or Relations of Power: Women's Networks in the Middle Ages???

Basically: "hurr hurr the Dark Ages deliberately wrote all Evil Women out of narratives and that therefore means they were forgotten and actually had no agency and all our myths got rewritten until the modern day" is a supremely Bad Take on every level, everyone involved should feel Bad, who the hell picked this book to longlist for a prestigious prize, etc etc., my suffering is eternal. Alas.

.... Femina (one of those popular-history The Past Totally Involved Women Being Erased All The Time!!! books by a lite-history BBC presenter) being longlisted for the Cundill History Prize (a prestigious history-writing prize, obviously) MAKES MY EYE TWITCH REAL BAD.

[firesoulstuff]

For the ask game, 9, 10 (although I could probably guess that one ;)), 23, and 24 with Legends of Tomorrow.

So like this was technically a 911 ask list but both shows are so fun so I'm gonna answer for both if that's cool!

9. Favorite brotp?

911: There are SO many good ones but ultimately I have to give it to Bobby and Michael! They are just the best bros and the fact that committing crimes for each other is not entirely off the table, and Michael did choose Bobby over his own boyfriend at Family Game Night, they win.

LOT: RogueCanary. Sara, Leonard, and Mick are the ultimate trio and it is a SHAME the three of them were ripped apart.

10. Favorite ship?

911: Buddie. Assuming they do get together, these two idiots are one of the best love stories I've ever seen.

LOT: lol, yeah dude, you know it's Captain Canary and I will forever be bitter about Destiny.

23. Character you use to like but now hate?

911: I don't really know if I have one so I'm going to say Jonah? I didn't think he was actually going to turn out to be a psychopath and I felt kind of bad for him at first. Now he's on my Hitlist.

LOT: This is a really hard one because what I REALLY went from liking to hating on Legends is the writing and the TREATMENT of the characters. But, if I have to pick an actual character, I'll say Lita. I loved Lita at first, I had always head-cannoned that Mick probably had a kid out there somewhere. Lita being so no-nonsense and yet still becoming such a daddy's girl was something I really liked. But then the whole thing with the alien-eggs happened. It's one thing for Lita to hold Mick accountable for his actions, but she laid into him SO HARD about the pretending it wasn't happening and the fact that she was pregnant at the same time with a baby that wasn't planned... I just can't buy that wouldn't understand the fear that Mick was feeling. She could've held him accountable with more understanding. And that isn't even to mention that Mick's pregnancy was dangerous as all hell but all she did was snap at him that it was his fault.

24. Character you use to hate but now like?

911: May Grant. The hatred didn't last long, but our intro to her is her screaming at her father that he should keep on living his life in the closet, because his being gay will ruin her social life. Like, I'm sorry, but I was NOT a fan. She grew on me pretty fast though!

LOT: Nate. I do miss him being an actual historian and it being believable that he has a PHD. But at first I did not like him. He was kind of a jerk, just acting like he was ALWAYS the smartest person in the room. And I will NEVER forget the time Amaya went through the trouble to make him donuts from scratch, was frustrated because they were kind of a mess, and his response was "Aw Babe, no one makes donuts in the future, I'll go buy some." Like no. You thank that woman who spent an entire day trying to make you donuts and eat the very-much-still edible dough-shapes that she made. Anyway, I came to like him a lot better when they leaned more into his bromance with Ray, and by the time he was with Zari he was treating women much better.

[goldentournesol]

The Receptionist and the Profiler (One)

Chapter One: Wins and Losses

(Spencer Reid x f!Reader)

Series Masterlist

General Masterlist

If you’d have told high school senior Y/N that she’d be working at the FBI after graduating college, she would have never believed you. Not only did she have zero interest in law enforcement, she also seemed to lack any athletic skills to back her up. She was nothing like her fiancé, who’d had his heart set on joining the bureau since middle school. She and Grant Anderson were friends in high school and ended up getting together during their junior year. Anderson proposed to Y/N during her second year of college. She’d graduated almost two years ago now, but the wedding date was unknown. They’d been dating for four years and engaged for another four years with the wedding nowhere to be seen. He’d been the first and only boy–and man, to ever pay her half a mind. To her, that was good enough. Hell, she’d been with him for eight years, if she’d wanted to leave him, she’d have left long ago. Right?

Imagine her surprise when he’d told her that his new boss, Aaron Hotchner, was looking for a receptionist for the BAU. Fresh out of college, landing a secure job? That was a miracle, and she really did have to thank her fiancé for it. But everyone around her was so cool and she was just…there. Her job was basically to sort through files, organize Hotch’s meetings, among other things like making reservations at the hotels the agents stayed at on their cases. 

The Agents of the BAU.

They were essentially the coolest people she knew.

First comes Agent Gideon, one of the founders of the BAU. His ability to read people scares her sometimes. How can one man’s beady little eyes have the ability to read people like they were some kind of book stowed away on a dusty shelf? A shelf only he can reach.

Then, comes Agent Hotchner, the unit chief. A stoic man with an even more stoic face. He’s a man who, to put it lightly, takes his job very seriously. On more than one occasion has she met his wife, Haley. They made a beautiful couple in her eyes and they’d just had their child, Jack Hotchner. She never knew how a baby’s face could be so wrinkly–yet so cute. Haley and Aaron were high school sweethearts, much like she and Grant. But that seemed to be the only aspect they shared. Despite his suffocatingly hard shell, Aaron was a loving man. That much was obvious. She wondered if Grant had ever looked at her the way Aaron looked at Haley.

Agent Derek Morgan, where to begin? He was tall, dark, and every bit handsome. His charming nature made all the ladies of the sixth (and fifth, and seventh, and eighth and–) floor swoon over him anytime he walked by. He is one of the bravest men she’d ever known. His ability to put himself in the place of the unsub was something she’d only heard stories about–but it gave her chills every time.

Next comes Agent Elle Greenaway, one of the most headstrong women Y/N has ever met. Her bluntness can come across as harsh, but she knew a woman in law enforcement had to stand her ground to be treated with as equal respect as her male counterparts. She admired her strength.

Agent Jennifer Jareau, or as Y/N knew her, JJ, was a kind hearted, compassionate woman who’s way with words absolutely blew Y/N away. The way JJ handled the media with such finesse was simply astonishing. She knew she could never string together the right words like JJ seemed to, up on those podiums, in front of all those nosy reporters. It was mind blowing to watch her in her element.

Penelope Garcia, or otherwise known as literal sunshine embodied in a technical analyst. She was the best at what she did, hacking, searching, filtering. It was a science, and Penelope Garcia made it look easy. She and Y/N had grown close since both of them stayed at the office while the other agents flew around the country, solving cases. They’d often spend endless lunches together in Garcia’s ‘batcave’ as she called it and was practically hellbent on teaching Y/N how to use Photoshop every chance she got.

And last but certainly not least, Dr. Spencer Reid. She’d never met a man with a more brilliant brain. He was known as the resident genius, the expert on well–everything. The man had an eidetic memory and the ability to read 20,000 words per minute. Is that not the most impressive thing on the planet? Nope, he just has to have three PhDs in three of the most complicated fields of study: mathematics, physics, and engineering, achieving all three before reaching 22 years of age. 

He had joined the bureau about a year after Y/N had started there. She could remember their first interaction like it was yesterday. 

He had been in and out of meetings before spotting Y/N at her desk, where she usually stayed during her lunch break, at least for the first year she was there. She was halfway through a cup of mixed berry yogurt when Spencer came up to her desk to ask where the breakroom was. Y/N directed him to the room and followed his gaze to the yogurt container in her hands before he left.

“Did you know that the origins of yogurt are pretty much unknown, although historians agree that there was no mention of it before 5000 BC? It’s thought to have been invented by the Mesopotamians.” He said as he pursed his lips and raised his brows, as if realizing he made a mistake too late.

“No, I didn’t know that! That’s super cool. You must be Dr. Spencer Reid, right?” She said, giving him her full attention, which made him slightly more nervous than he had been previously. He nodded, a shy smile on his face.

“And you’re…” he looked for her name holder, “Y/N Y/L/N.” 

She giggled and the sound activated some kind of blood rushing mechanism right up into his cheeks, “Yup! I’m the BAU’s receptionist slash Agent Hotchner’s assistant, you know, nothing fancy but I like to think I’m pretty good at sorting through files.” She raised a brow and gave him an adorable smile and suddenly Spencer wasn’t so nervous to talk to her. 

She seemed way more interactive and easygoing than just about 98% of the people in the building. He wondered if it was because she wasn’t an agent. Spencer also wondered if gaining a title like ‘Supervisory Special Agent’ would make him cold like the others, but then he remembered he has three doctorates and already introduced himself with the honorific. 

She picked up on his silence, “You know, you have nothing to worry about, I overheard Agent Gideon talking about you landing the job with Agent Morgan.” She nodded her head towards a tall, muscular man, who Spencer gathered must be Morgan. Spencer smiled back at her, her words easing even more of the tension he collected in his shoulders.

“I wouldn’t be so sure, you should see the massive list of exceptions they have to make to let me into the field.” He said with a ghost of a smile on his face. She had to physically repress a laugh. And right then and there, the seed of a beautiful friendship was planted.

Fast forward to two years after that interaction, Spencer and Y/N became pretty much attached at the hip whenever he was actually in the office and not flying around the country catching serial killers. Their desks were quite far from each other, hers right near the glass doors of the BAU and his across the room right near the railing that had Hotch and Gideon’s offices as well as the conference room. It gave them both perfect views of each other, which they used to send each other encouraging smiles throughout the day, maybe a funny face or two. He always had a way of making her smile, she hadn’t felt the fuzzy feeling of friendship in years. Besides Garcia, Spencer was the only person who had made an effort to get to know Y/N. In the past two years, she’d say Spencer knew her better than anyone else, possibly even Anderson, but that was surely because he was a talented genius profiler…

Budget meetings at the FBI were definitely the most boring types of meetings in the world. She had to be there because she was the one making all the reservations at the hotels, but once they began talking about the jet and fuel consumption–Y/N totally spaced out. Spencer enjoyed the meetings, though. It definitely had nothing to do with the fact that Y/N would sometimes space out and let her head fall against his shoulder. The weight of her head brought him inexplicable comfort and joy. He hates it when people come near him, when did it become so endearing to him for her to trust him enough with such a simple gesture? He found himself attending the meetings and sitting next to her whenever he got the chance, hoping that one day, maybe, just maybe she’ll allow her head to rest upon his shoulder again. Perhaps it was pathetic, but he found himself feeling overjoyed at the thought of budget meetings, they became the only thing he’d look forward to. 

He wondered if this was how Anderson felt when she rested her head on his shoulder, but then his knee would start bouncing and he’d practically feel the envious monster growing in the pit of his stomach, so he’d stop. It certainly didn’t make it any easier to stop when it was so easy to look over and find Anderson leaning against her desk and flirting with her. Technically, he has every right to flirt with his fiancée, but that didn’t stop jealousy from coursing through Spencer’s veins violently.

The team had just landed last night, they were coming back from a case revolving around the famous actress, Lila Archer. Apparently, she’d had a stalker. Y/N couldn’t wait to hear the details of the case, she had watched almost all of Lila’s movies. She eagerly awaited Spencer’s arrival. Just then, she heard the ding of the elevator and saw a very sheepish -and flushed- Spencer with a very playful Morgan hot on his tail.

“Morning, pretty girl!” Derek halted his seemingly incessant teasing to greet her as they walked towards her. Spencer was oddly quiet as he tried to pass by, offering her a small, awkward wave instead of his usual smiley ‘good morning!���, but Derek grabbed him by the strap of his messenger bag. He made it his mission to embarrass Spencer as much as humanly possible when he woke up this morning. What Derek didn’t know was that Spencer wanted Y/N to be the absolute last person to know of what happened. Spencer shifted uncomfortably and was positive he was sweating more than he ever had in his 24 years of life.

“Morning, Derek! So, tell me all about it! Did you meet her? Of course, you met her, duh! What was she like? Was she a stuck up diva like her character in Wins and Losses or was she more down to earth?” Y/N questioned curiously with a hint of excitement.

“Oh, I think pretty boy here has all the answers you could ever wish for. After all, it wasn’t me who made out with a hot movie star in her own pool.” Derek laughed, eyes squinting as he clapped Spencer on the shoulder proudly. Neither of the two men caught the way Y/N’s face dropped. Spencer was too focused on looking anywhere but at her and Derek was too triumphant to look anywhere but at Spencer’s -alarmingly- red face. He attempted to clear his throat when the few seconds of stunned silence became much too suffocating. Derek turned back to Y/N just in time to see her collect her jaw from off the desk and morph it into a smile.

“Spencer Reid, you did what?!” She attempted to laugh in order to lighten the mood, hoping the two profilers wouldn’t pick up on her dis-ingenuousness. 

They hadn’t, thankfully.

Spencer’s shy eyes met her curious ones as he tried to imitate Derek’s proud smile,and he could have sworn he saw a sort of unfamiliar heaviness in her gaze, but it disappeared as soon as it came. 

Could it be? Was she feeling jealous? There’s no way, she thought. But what else could be behind the not so subtle burning feeling in her chest? 

“Um, yeah. She kind of pulled me into the pool with her…” he recounted with a small voice, scratching the back of his head nervously.

“And?” Derek said in anticipation, despite already knowing.

“Alright! We kissed a few times, what’s the big deal?” He huffed, turning to look at Derek and resisting the urge to punch him in the face for embarrassing him in front of Y/N.

Garcia suddenly appeared next to them, catching the looks between the two agents and Y/N’s shocked expression, “Oh! Are we talking about boy wonder locking lips with miss Lila Archer in her pool?”

Spencer’s face dropped, “How do you know about that?!” he all but screeched.

“I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.” Garcia wiggled her eyebrows at Spencer before sharing a knowing look with Derek which led to a prompt punch to Derek’s arm from him which then led to an over exaggerated yelp of pain.

“I’ve also got photos!” Garcia said, quickly pulling out her PDA and showing Y/N.

“Garcia! How?!” Spencer exclaimed, but it was too late. Y/N was already scrolling through the photos, laughing.

“Spencer, you sly dog!” She laughed, though the situation awoke an unprecedented, seemingly underlying feeling of envy. Spencer rolled his eyes in embarrassment and stormed off in the direction of his desk, leaving the three of them behind. 

The rest of the day went by smoothly, although Y/N had to keep fighting against the way her chest felt tight every time she remembered those photos. She had a feeling she was never going to watch Wins and Losses ever again.

next chapter

feedback is always appreciated!!

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Oh yeah I can help (still in the half a PhD stage unfortunately but I still know Anne Bonney lore).

There's a lot of misinformation about Bonney out there, and it's mostly because of this one book called A General History of Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson. It was written in 1724 by this British captain and it's both the best and most complete primary account of the golden age of piracy and just so absolutely full of horseshit because Johnson just made shit up all the time to sound cool. His accounts on Bonney are wildly contradicted by other primary documents, like court records and basic timelines, so his writings on Bonney are considered largely fictional by most historians but it has still contributed to the general cultural knowledge around Bonney (same book is the cause of the legend that pirates bury treasure). That guy fueled a lot of speculation because he strongly hinted that she escaped from prison or was bailed out by her "rich" father (we don't know shit about Bonney's background), but honestly both of those are very unlikely.

It's widely believed that Bonney and Read were given a stay of execution because they both claimed to be pregnant - we actually don't know if that's even true because the last court record we have of them is the governor of the town they were tried agreeing to grant the stay if the pregnancies were proven. Read died in prison from illness, some people assume it might've been related to childbirth but again we just don't know.

The only thing we know about Bonney after that is that she wasn't hanged. There's no record and colonial towns were stupid detailed in their record-keeping related to executions, especially of pirates, so we know for a fact she wasn't executed. I'd expect an escape or release of high-profile prisoners (which she and Read were; female pirates were rare, after all) to have made news enough that we'd have record of it now, so for my money she died in prison from illness, just like Read.

Bonney is one of those pirates we know very, very little about. Like, just one step above nothing. We only have evidence of her being operational as a pirate for two months from August-October 1720 (again, the only reason we know her name today is because she was a woman and that stood out). One of the only definitely-true accounts of her is, funnily enough, an account from someone she held captive once during her brief pirate career who was absolutely appalled by how much she swore. She was sentenced to be hanged in Spanish Town in Jamaica in 1720 and after that she just disappears from the record. Beyond that, it's all guesswork!

dont let these people find out about historical anne bonney (please im so serious)

I haven't even found out about the historical Anne Bonny I just know the information from like one plaque on a statue of her that got posted to Tumblr lol. These people who died like bitches 300 years ago mean nothing to me lol.

[mkstrigidae]

Current WIPs and Fic Concepts

I promised I would do this yesterday, and then I forgot!!! (I was very sleep deprived). Anyways, here are a bunch of the WIP premises that I have in my 'unfinished drafts' folder. Most have at least a few pages written for them, but I love them all! ☺️💕

- A Santa Clarita Diet AU (Jonsa) Takes place in sunny southern California, where a shitty dinner at a mediocre restaurant turns into a huge problem for Jon and Sansa when Sansa's heart stops beating. Although she seems fine, Jon is flabbergasted several days later as he watches his wife- who alphabetizes their pantry and refuses to let anyone wear shoes in the house- rip the throat out of one of the sleazy new partners at their law firm, eating half of him before anyone processes what's going on. Hilarity ensues as Sansa's inhibitions and filter disappear, Arya ropes an extremely confused Gendry into helping figure out what the hell is going on just because he moderates the zombie forum on reddit, and Jon tries to deal with the fact that the woman he loves more than anything is now a humanitarian. He really could use a drink. (This one is actually mostly complete, but i need to refine a few things- i really love it. It's as gory and irreverent as the show, so viewer discretion advised, but it's a BLAST to write).

- A Thor/MCU AU (Jonsa, Steve Rogers/Sansa)- Asgardian prince Aegon is banished to Midgard after one too many arrogant decisions, and is promptly hit by a van containing Dr. Sansa Stark, Dr. Barristan Selmy, and Margaery Tyrell- two astrophysicists studying wormholes and Sansa's best friend and pseudo-intern. Marg yells at him, he yells back, Sansa tases him, and Barristan didn't sign up for the kind of heavy lifting that getting a 200+ pound slab of muscle into the back of a van takes. And then Aegon's younger brother, Jon, shows up, in the middle of an identity crisis because, apparently, he's adopted. He wasn't intending to stay, but he's rather drawn to Dr. Stark and her brilliance, and against her better judgement, she starts to trust him, and maybe even like him. This story is in about three parts so far- the first is based on 'Thor' and the second on 'The Avengers' and are fully Jonsa, and the third started as a family bonding story between the Stark kids and Tony (Ned and Tony are second cousins, and Ned was really supportive of Tony in rehab without expecting anything in return), and accidentally turned into a Steve Rogers/Sansa Stark story, which is a pairing i am HERE for. A lot of this one is written, but it needs some fill in before publishing, although it's one of my favorites that i've written to go back and actually read.

- A Star Wars AU (Jonsa) where Sansa and Arya are Alderaanian princesses who are off planet when Alderaan is destroyed- Sansa as a senator and Arya as a pilot, both working for the rebellion, and jon is a smuggler who does not know how all of these people got on his ship and why two princesses are sassing him. His copilot, Tormund (yes he's a wookie), thinks it is hilarious. I started this one just the other day, and it's already thirty pages long, most of them involving Sansa and Arya sassing people. Dany is a leader in the rebellion, Roose Bolton is the emperor, and Barbrey Dustin is a disgruntled former jedi trying to live in peace on a remote planet until another Stark crashes into her life and harangues her into teaching again.

- A witches/magic AU (Jonsa) where the Starks run an apothecary and spellcasting supplies shop. Jon had been completely in the dark about magic before his mother confessed to being born into a family of witches. He finds himself traveling to her hometown, trying to understand her world more clearly, and what it means for him. On the way, he develops something of a crush on the red-headed shop clerk who brews the best headache potions in town. Featuring lots of magical shenanigans, this is one of my favorites in the folder :)

- A 24 hour diner AU (Jonsa) where Jon is a local mob boss, and Sansa works the late shift at Seaworth's diner to buy textbooks for the PhD she's working on in botany. Sansa's running from memories, and Jon has a soft spot for the red-headed waitress who always remembers how he likes his coffee.

- An East of the Sun, West of the Moon AU!!! (Jonsa) This is one of my fav fairy tales, and of course i couldn't resist Jon as a direwolf striking a deal with the starks!

- A Roomates AU (Jonsa)- Arya, Jon, Tormund, and Sam have been renting the same house together off Winterfell's campus for years- but when Sam moves in with his girlfriend, they need one more person on the lease. Sansa, about to relocate to Winterfell for grad school, finds out that her boyfriend has been cheating on her and that her housing plans have fallen through, all on the same day. Needless to say, she's a bit upset when she calls Arya to relay the news. There's a simple solution here, if Arya and Tormund can stop teasing Jon about his crush for five minutes. (any excuse to write tormund and arya roasting jon, tbh).

- A Fae AU (Jonsa)- When Sansa, a baker living in the city, washes her face in an enchanted spring on a camping trip, she gains the sight as a result. Suddenly able to see the fae underworld all around her is disorienting and terrifying. Sansa tries to conceal it- afraid of what might happen if the fae around her know that she can see them- but slips up, and catches the attention of Jon Snow- one of the lords of the unseelie court.

- A nuclear winter wasteland AU (Jonsa)- (?? I don't even know how to describe this premise, haha) where the Starks are living and running the Free Winterfell settlement in Siberia after a worldwide nuclear meltdown. Before the fallout, Sansa was one of the world's preeminent researchers in plant genetics and pathology, and works at the settlement to create newer, disease and radiation resistant crops to distribute for free to other settlements, aiming to break up the monopoly that Lannister Corp has on the market. Jon is a scavenger, searching throughout Siberia for his sister Rhae who disappeared several years previously. When he runs across Arya Starkovna, helping her fight off another band of radiation ravaged scavengers is just instinct- he doesn't think twice about it. In thanks, she brings him to the Winterfell settlement, where her brother Robb offers Jon sanctuary and resources, in exchange for serving as a bodyguard for Sansa when she travels to other settlements. Sansa is not particularly thrilled by this arrangement, but given that multiple parties seem to want her dead, she doesn't have much of a choice but to accept his company.

- A reincarnation AU (Jonsa)- of sorts. Robb is an archaeologist who finds a strange set of runes at a site up north, and immediately calls in Jon Snow- a historian and expert in said ancient language, as well as an old university friend of Robb's. When he arrives though, Robb shows him their most valuable finds- two mysterious ice blocks, with what appear to be perfectly preserved bodies from over a thousand years ago. No one could ever have imagined that either of them were still alive, but when the ice melts, revealing two very alive girls, the entire crew is instantly buried in NDAs, and given an assignment from the Westerosi government to figure out what the hell was going on. Sansa and Arya wake up, extremely confused about the world they live in, trying to adapt and mourning all that they've lost, even as the people around them wear familiar faces.

- Soulmates AU (Jonsa)- (Yes, another one, I love this dumb trope) Trauma surgeon and medical resident Sansa Stark is having a very bad day, and ends up meeting her soulmate during what she thinks is a mugging gone wrong. Fortunately, he’s not the one mugging her, just an intervening bystander, but she ends up slightly shot nonetheless. Sansa’s fretting about bleeding on the upholstery in his car, but Jon is a bit more worried about her injuries than the blood stains. He’s a bit confused when she threatens him if he takes her to a specific hospital, nearly has a nervous breakdown when she insists on doing her own triage, and is very charmed when she insists on ice cream after taking pain meds at the hospital. On Sansa’s part, she’s a little less concerned about being shot, and a bit more concerned about whatever weird first impression she’s making to her soulmate while high as a kite on pain pills. (this one just needs some tweaking to be postable- I'm not sure if it's going to be a oneshot or a series, but i love what I have already)

- A Demon/Archivist AU (Jonsa)- where Sansa works in the university's historical archives in Oldtown, and is learning to restore old texts with her fellow student and friend, Alleras (Trans Sarella is an amazing concept). When Joffrey Baratheon shows up with a pile of old books from his family's library to donate, Sansa is eager to get away from his sleaze, and accidentally takes one of the books home with her in her rush to leave. Unbeknownst to her, it's more than it appears, and when she leaves it open overnight, she accidentally summons forth Jon- an ancient, powerful, and extremely annoyed demon who is under a curse, and now hers to command. As Jon and Sansa try to get used to this new normal, the Lannisters (unaware that Joffrey had donated the tome) try desperately to find the book and it's owner, wanting Jon's power for themselves, and putting Sansa in considerable danger unless she can figure out how to break Jon's curse. Fortunately, she's a pretty good researcher, even if Jon is initially a bit of a grump. (This is based on a total wish-fulfillment mary-sue type premise for something I wrote when I was thirteen, and I revisited it and wanted to see what it would look like if i took it very seriously, and i am really enjoying it so far. It's a love letter to the terrible, heartfelt writing i was doing in middle school that created the foundations for my writing today, and so much fun).

The one that I am MOST excited about though:

- A Pacific Rim AU!!!! (Ned/Cat, Gendrya, Braime, Sansa/Jon Umber)-Twins Sansa and Robb Stark have always been completely in tune with each other, and when your parents are Jaeger pilots and your mother invented the neural handshake, what option is there but the Jaeger academy? Sansa studies to be an engineer, but ends up copiloting the Jaeger 'Winter Wolf' with her twin brother, after they lose Ned Stark to cancer. When Robb is ripped out of the conn-pod and killed by a kaiju while he's still connected to Sansa, she barely manages to kill the creature before stumbling back to shore, traumatized, grieving, and swearing that she'll never pilot again.

Unfortunately, the Kaiju don't stop just because Sansa does, and when the end of the world is imminent, Marshall Catelyn Stark orders both her daughter and former pilot Jaime Lannister (who lost his twin and copilot, Cersei, several years previously) back to Hong Kong for one final stand. Forced to face both her demons and an irate Arya, furious that Sansa had abandoned the rest of them after Robb's death, Sansa and Arya have to figure out how to pilot Winter Wolf together before the apocalypse comes for them all.

Featuring Marshall Catelyn Stark (commander of the Hong Kong Shatterdome, inventor of the neural handshake, former Jaeger pilot, and BAMF), Sansa x Jon Umber (Yes i know it's a rare pair but i've always kind of loved the idea of them, even though we know so little about him), Kaiju parts dealer and smuggler Petyr Baelish, bickering kaiju biologist Dany and theoretical mathematician Jon Snow, LOCCENT officer Theon, lots of snark, lots of angst and heartfelt conversations, and a weird friendship between snarky-grieving-asshole Jaime Lannister and kind-quiet-grieving Sansa Stark, who are the only two people in the world who know what it's like to lose a copilot and a twin in the drift.

Thanks for reading guys!! There are more, but some of them I just don't know how to explain quite yet, haha. I'd love to hear what you guys think about these!

[masquerade-at-home]

2021 Masquerade Awards and Judges

San Diego Comic-Con Category Awards

Graciously awarded by:

Our 2021 Masquerade Judges

Will be selecting a winner for each of the following categories: Best in Show, Judges’ Choice, Best Re-Creation, Best Original Design, Best Workmanship, Most Beautiful, Most Humorous, and Best Group.

All winners receive 2021 Masquerade Winners Medallions and complimentary tickets to San Diego Comic-Con 2022

Frank and Son Award for Most Outstanding Costume

$1,000 Cash Prize

Graciously awarded by:

The Frank & Son Collectible Show, of the City of Industry, California.  Frank and Sons is a giant one-stop show for all things collectible at their bi-weekly mini-cons and has supported fan costuming at our conventions with generous cash prizes for many years.

The David C. Copley Award for Most Innovative Costume

$500 in Amazon Gift Cards

Graciously awarded by:

The UCLA David C. Copley Center for The Study of Costume Design, judged and awarded by Copley Center Director Deborah Nadoolman Landis.

The David C. Copley Center serves UCLA TFT students, the university, the international community of historians, filmmakers and professional costume designers. The Center provides a home for the study of costume design history, genre research, costume illustration as an art form, and the influence of costume design on fashion and popular culture.

Costume Designers Guild Spotlight Award

Costume Design Book, a copy of  CDG Magazine, and a $100 gift card to Mood Fabrics, the largest online fabric store for designers and anyone who sews.

Graciously awarded by:

The Costume Designers Guild IATSE Local 892, representing Hollywood costume designers, assistant costume designers, and costume illustrators working at the highest levels of expertise in motion pictures, TV, commercials, music videos, and new media.

The CDG is part of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.)

Meet Our 2021 Masquerade Judges

Jennifer May Nickel

Is a Costume Designer for Television and Film.  Classically trained in theatre, Jennifer holds an MFA in Costume Design from Carnegie Mellon University and also studied in England at Oxford University (St. Edmund’s College: Myth and Ritual in Theatre). A proud member of the Costume Designers’ Guild Jennifer has won the Elizabeth Schrader Kimberly Costume Design Award, The Cecilia Cohen Award for Excellence in Theatre and The WCDAC Achievement Award

Her Television Costume Design credits include Neflix’s Cabin with Bert Kreischer and Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis, the CW’s Containment, Fox’s What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage, Syfy’s TV movie Miami Magma, the History Channel’s Legend of the Superstition Mountains, TLC’s TV movie The Secret Santa and Nickelodeon’s The Massively Mixed-Up Middle School Mystery.   Jennifer has Costume Designed various CollegeHumor Originals, SMBC Theater’s hit web series Starpocalypse and pilots for E!, Nickelodeon, Relativity TV and CrisisLab.

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Deborah Nadoolman Landis, PhD

Costume designer, historian and endowed chair at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television Landis is the Founding Director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design. Landis received an M.F.A. in costume design from UCLA and a Ph.D. in the history of design from the Royal College of Art, London. Her distinguished career includes Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Trading Places (1983), The Three Amigos (1987), Coming to America (1988), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, and the groundbreaking music video Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983). Now considered ‘classic,’ characters she has designed, like Indiana Jones, have become international cultural icons. Her costume designs are found in the collections of museums including the Smithsonian Museum of American History (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones), the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and most recently, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Coming to America).

A two-term past president of the Costume Designers Guild, Local 892, and a past-Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (2013-2018), Landis sits on the Board of the National Film Preservation Foundation. She is the author of six books including Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, FilmCraft: Costume Design, Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration and the catalogue for her landmark exhibition, Hollywood Costume, which she curated at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2012. The exhibition, a celebration of one hundred years of costume design history while showcasing the designers’ contribution and process, open just three months, with an attendance of more than 265,000 visitors, became the most successful exhibition in the long history of that museum. The show then traveled to Melbourne, Australia, Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles. Landis is the editor-in-chief of the upcoming three-volume Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Film and Television Costume Design (2021).

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Garnet Filo

Is a Costume Designer with more than 40 projects under her belt. Recently she’s Costume Design assisted on several sci-fi series including The Orville and The Mandalorian; further developing her skills by working closely with their Costume Designers. Garnet has always been fascinated by the futuristic and the fantastic and her passion to bring these to life only continues to grow. She is the chairperson for the Costume Designers Guild I.A.T.S.E. local 892 Comic-Con committee.

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Allan Lavigne

Is a self-taught costumer, make-up special effects artist, sculptor, and [MJ1] painter with 40 years’ experience in costume fabrication Formerly a top costume winner for many years at fan conventions around the USA, including many San Diego Comic-Cons, he brings with him great insight from having honed his costume skills as an on-stage contestant himself. Since then, he has gone on to do work for Disney, Lucasfilm, Sony Pictures, and more. In his Bronze Armory studio, in the San Francisco Bay Area, he creates, lectures, and teaches.

His costume work has been exhibited in museums, at film premieres and at numerous conventions.   His current exhibit of screen-accurate motion picture and television costume reproductions “The Batman Armory” is featured at the San Francisco Cartoon Museum, requested by Warner Brothers to promote the new Batman encyclopedia: Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Films and Beyond which Allan was technical advisor for. In a second gallery of the museum, his Wonder Woman costume re-creations accompany the featured exhibit about that character.

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Gigi “Fast Elk” Bannister (formerly Porter)

has been in the film industry for over 35 years as a SFX Artist, Director, Producer, and actor. Better known for her practical special effects and production work, Gigi is experienced on both sides of the camera. She has appeared in over a dozen films and television shows, and is a popular guest at horror conventions, film festivals, workshops, and seminars. For several years she has donated time at San Diego Comic-Cons to assist Masquerade contestants with their special effects make-up needs.

Gigi is credited as a Producer on Don Coscarelli and David Hartman’s “Phantasm V: Ravager” (2016) and Steve King’s “One For the Road” (2011) (Night Shift Anthology). As a character actor, she appeared in “Bloody Bloody Bible Camp” (2011), “Carnies” (2009), in “Small Town Saturday Night” (2009) (with Chris Pine, and John Hawkes), and again in Don Coscarelli’s “Bubba Ho-Tep” (2002) (Bruce Campbell, Reggie Bannister and Ozzie Davis). She has produced and directed on numerous projects including dozens of live events, fundraisers and seminars, six independent feature films, and six shows for television. More information on Gigi can be found on IMDb.

[elizabethan-memes]

Review: Julia Fox’s Jane Boleyn

Yes I finished this book back in January do not @ me

TLDR: a solid if novelish history book making an important contribution to the field, could have been marketed better.

The book has a portrait of Jane Seymour of all people on the cover. I have a sneaky suspicion the cover was designed by a naive intern who typed ‘Tudor Jane’ into Google Images and picked the first one they saw. We don’t have confirmed portraits of Jane or George (and portraits of Katherine Howard are also uncertain) so I really think a portrait of Anne Boleyn is the next best option. Also a book with Anne’s picture on the cover would probably sell better lbr.

Given how much of the book is on the world around Jane, I think “Jane Boleyn and her world” or “The Dangerous World of Jane Boleyn” or something like that might have been a more accurate title. Some people complained about how much of the book was Jane’s surroundings rather than Jane herself. Maybe it did pad the book out a little bit, but I did appreciate the context, and I learned some new things. 

Not a fan of historians writing like novelists, but I appreciated Fox’s attention to detail. She did describe things as ‘wonderful’ (like Jane’s expensive marital bed) which stuck out to me as ‘wonderful’ is a value judgement, and therefore something I’m trained to avoid. It made the style feel rather quaint.

Fox was kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some reviewers complained about how much of the book was speculation: possibly, could have, likely, would have, maybe. Other reviewers complained about Fox presuming too much about Jane’s thoughts and feelings. 

I’m in the latter camp. Nevertheless, I don’t think Fox’s assumptions about Jane’s thoughts and feelings were outlandish or unreasonable. Statistically speaking, Jane is far more likely to be a reasonable person with a functioning conscience and a sense of fun than a voyeuristic narcissistic psychopath. I wonder if a tiny fraction of those complainers have a subconsciously cynical view of women: if you can’t prove a woman had depth and compassion, she must therefore have been shallow and selfish- you can’t begin with the premise that a woman is a rational human being until proved otherwise. I still think Fox should have erred to the side of ‘probably’ when it came to Jane’s feelings. 

The last thirty-ish pages, where Fox talks about Jane’s posthumous reputation, are definitely the strongest and most original. Excellent work for someone without a PhD. Some reviewers argued that these thirty-ish pages should have been an academic article. I do not agree with this opinion, at all.

Picture, if you will, the entire historical community. All of us. All the Tudor nerds. Now subtract the academics. Then the history graduates. Then the history students. 

Let’s be honest: how many of the remaining history enthusiasts read articles? How big a percentage of the amateur history buff community are they, compared with the percentage that reads Alison Weir? If you asked them “What does Jstor sell?” some of them might well answer “Jeans, jorts, and jeggings”.

It’s not entirely the academic community that needs persuading, it’s people who are interested in history but get it from secondary sources, and even then, popular history books. They don’t really go on jstor. It takes ages for information to filter from the academic sphere to popular history and then to ‘common knowledge’. By publishing a book, popular history-style, I think Fox was trying to speed up this slow journey. You could maybe make the argument that the last thirtyish pages should have been published as a cheap mini book, like Mary Beard’s Women and Power. Maybe that would make a bigger impact. But I like having Jane’s whole story, including her family history.

[glamrockmonarch]

The Land That Our Grandchildren Knew (B!Reader x Brian May)

THIS WORK IS PART OF THE ORIGINAL TIMELINE

Requested: NO

Type: SFW, FLUFF ?, ANGST.

Summary: A little glance at life back to normal after Brian and B!Reader get over the cheating scandal.

Warnings: None.

A/N: So this came out of nowhere in my mind. I have struggled with being creative for a while and I just do not know why(?) but here we are! I hope someone out there enjoys reading this one.

*For anyone who does not remember (lol it has been a while): B!Reader (often B!R) is "Brian!Reader", and R!Reader (or R!R) is "Roger!Reader".

“The one thing he did not know was how much I loved him. In a previous life, in a time when things were so much more complicated. When war was splitting us apart and leaving us breathless. Motionless in a world of aggressive turmoil. There was little we could do when everything was amiss. All around us things were blowing up, giving in upon themselves the buildings fell, and the cities died along with their lights and spectacles.

“The love I grew and nurtured for him was the last reminding power of the old Earth, scattered through the cosmos like dust as I searched for him in a ridiculous journey. I did not meet a king in a tiny planet, and I never saw a rose grow on the dry lands of the foreign space countries. We had each other but time made it so that I was here today while he was here yesterday. Today was never ours, today was a promise we believed and ate up and followed with blind eyes until the moment when the sound of truth, deafening and cruel, locked us out of each other’s life. And still, forever, my love for him is true and enduring. Out there, I know he will feel my presence in the air, see me in the clouds, savour me in the smell of rain and grass. He will miss me when the night is cold, and the sound of wind reminds him of my voice… Yes, he will be empty when he hears the silence, the way I will always feel too when I look back at Earth and regret every second spent away from the one who called me Venus.”

The crowd claps and smiles and I see the people in the front look at the books in their hands with expressions of confusion and deep thought. A good reason to write something is to make people wonder, so for B!Reader this one was a success. She had taken so long to finish the manuscript, not that she was being lazy; with the scandal of Brian cheating and the twins taking sides, it was hard to focus on this. This book was not what she intended on writing when she began doing research for it. It started with the Irish War of Independence, she went around Britain meeting historians with much better understanding and knowledge on the topic. It soon turned upside down when the news appeared on every single form of media… Brian’s stunt. She would call it what it was now; he had cheated.

It was hard to get over it. B!Reader took time off with her mother in Scotland, she had taken the kids with her, much to Brian’s displeasure, but he was in no position to complain. When she came back home, she was still defeated by the details. Brian’s lame explanation sounded more like an excuse but even she had to admit that her husband did not have the best track record when it came to women. She was probably the one he had been the most loyal to at that point – even when he had cheated on her once.

So, she tried. They sought professional help. A therapist. First couple’s therapy, and then one-on-one sessions alone. She hated every second of it, which could not have been fun to hear for their therapist. Nothing seemed to be helping, in fact B!Reader talked to a lawyer in secret… but her career was also on the line at that point, and she was desperate for ideas, desperate to reconnect with the only man she ever truly and completely loved. Her manager had the idea, “read some of Brian’s stuff, maybe ask him about his PhD work, maybe he will inspire you and if he doesn’t at least you will have spoken to each other… it’s worth a try”. And so B!R did that, although not in the way her manager had meant. She was stirring her on the direction of reading some of his lyrics not his space dust thesis… Nevertheless, the story began there.

B!R could not understand much, and she wound up spending a lot of time talking about physics and space with her husband. Brian was a patient teacher, she already knew that, but it was now being confirmed to her. He was also happy to be able to go on and on for hours, the topics where his cup of tea, and they had numerous cups of tea too while B!R took notes and began toying with a historical fantasy mix for her next book.

Today she was reading from her favourite chapter in the book. It had been a massive hit; one she could not quite understand. If she was being honest, the book was more like therapy for her than her actual therapy sessions had been. She cried while writing it and poured a lot of emotion into it, which she rarely did. Her writing had always been more …impersonal, presented almost as a sort of biography of fictional characters rather than real moving parts of the imaginary world they were living in.

She had never written such an odd story before, with time skips and a weird space journey concepts implanted in the middle of 1920 Ireland.

“You did great, mum.” A proud Fred wrapped his arm around her middle.

Even though the teen boy was still that, a teenager, he managed to already stand a couple centimetres taller than his own mother.

“Thank you love, did you get anything of that?” She wondered, wrapping her arm around him in the familiar way a mother does.

Arm around his shoulder, soft play of the tender fingers on the dark curls on the back of the head of her “little boy”.

“Nothing at all,” he smiled and shrugged, honesty dripping in shameless glee from his tone. “But that’s the cool part, I don’t think anyone gets it.” The younger of the twins looked at his mother up and down in her bright blue dress. “Except Dad. Was that the point?”

B!Reader looked at her son and inhaled a deep long breath, which she held for a moment. Her brows furrowed and her mouth moved like that of a fish.

“Maybe.” She conceded.

“Hey mum, would you sign my book?” Harry interrupted, bringing along Jazz and a peculiarly uninterested Max.

Harry gave his mother a wide smile and put a copy of her own book in her hands.

“For Harry, please.”

“Dork,” Max rolled his eyes.

He was the only one to admit he had not finished the book yet the previous weekend when Fred mentioned his mother was doing a reading at a local bookstore while they sat by the Taylor’s pool. And he rushed to get through it. Max was not dumb, and he managed to grasp some of the concepts in the complicated plot, although he did not let on to any of his friends.

“Loved the wormhole bits Mrs May.” Max said once Harry had his signed copy reading for Harry with Love. “That dark hole and the speed of dark and light near the end were mind-blowing. I never thought of you as a fantasy writer!”

B!Reader nodded and blushed at the compliments. Max was a lot like Roger in that he did know how to make a girl blush with what appeared to be little effort.

“I am glad you liked it,” she said, a trace of pride in her voice.

“I really wish Darragh and Conor had ended up together,” Jazz voiced from around Harry’s tall lean and awkward teen figure. “They were obviously meant for each other.”

Fred had been in tears when he read the ending of the book. Of course, he would have hoped for his mother’s first queer paring to end together but what that did was echoing life.

“You have to be the eighth person who’s said that to me today.”

R!Reader, Roger and Brian were in a conversation of their own next to the long table B!Reader was about to sit before to meet some fans and sign as many copies of her book as time allowed.

She eyed the silver hair on her husband’s hair, she had been discreet when describing Darragh in her book. A tall, talented, middle-aged, idealist Irish man. A man born in a difficult time. A man who fell in love by mistake, with Conor. A young man described often as immature, who enjoyed a quiet life on board of a spaceship when he got caught up in a black hole and wound up going back hundreds of years and miles into the past. Conor had almost been killed in his attempts of helping his beloved Darragh in fighting what he considered to be hiswar. The battles gave their relationship meaning, although it was never spoken about between them. The adoration was always palpable and present to the last page. Down to the moment when Conor acknowledges that his lover cannot come with him once he finds the way back into his ship, and then it turns into a matter of will. Darragh is revealed to have a similar story, only that… he was left stranded in 1905 with no way back to his ship. “The voice of Venus” was really a metaphor for B!Reader. A complicated one, as her feelings were when she had to love the man who broke her heart. She felt lost the way Conor felt, but she could tell Brian had been lost for a while before the entire ordeal – defeated in the same manner as Darragh. And it was fitting, he was older, he was educated. He should have known better than to play in the physics lab with those dangerous materials. Brian should have known better than to play with that old woman. Conor could have turned his back on Darragh, he knew he was of no help now that he was so invested in the past – now their present. He knew Darragh and himself would never be able to be together if he stayed and they would most likely get killed if they marched on. So B!Reader made them split. She was about to leave Brian when she started writing her book, so it made sense. And when she realised, she did not want to end her marriage, she still wrote it that way because this was the ending she had seen coming for herself before – one she fortunately managed to evade, which still was the ending for many couples.

B!Reader watched the teens as they began discussing the book, Max and Jazz were defending the plot, Fred joined in and the three of them seemed to be getting passionate about proving Harry wrong. The eldest of the group was stubborn about his stance on Conor being right to leave Darragh.

His mother could not help but remember that same stubbornness from the first few weeks after the story broke. Harry had been the one to take it the hardest. When they packed for Scotland, she had to stop him from shattering his project guitar, the yellow guitar he and Brian had been working on for a while. “I don’t want it! I do not want anything from him! He is a liar!” He had yelled, with the side of his face still reddened from a slap he received from Brian. She still could not believe she managed to stay impartial at that moment after the mess that had happened in the kitchen when Harry insulted his father – earning a slap from him.

“It’s alright,” B!Reader placed her arm around the twins’ shoulders. “Conor had to go back anyway. He had a family in the spaceship.”

“What?” Jazz was the first one to open her mouth.

With a laugh, the young writer looked at the confused faces around her. “He could never stay…” She shrugged.

Harry’s expression flashed with a difficult emotion, which both Jazz and his mother noticed.

The short girl flipped her long blonde hair and checked the time on her phone, “no wonder I’m hungry! Who’s coming?” Her blue eyes searched around in an almost innocent manner.

“You got to be joking, we JUST ate.”

Max stepped back from his sister and Fred followed, “sorry, I told dad I’d get lunch with him.”

Blue eyes flipped onto Harry’s figure. B!Reader gave him a squeeze and let go, the sigh he let out being enough of an answer for Jazz to show a large smile, reaching out to grab his hand and pull her to her side. It almost seemed a pass of the baton.

The boy walked taller than Jazz and still, it looked like he was the smaller child. She was sure they had been doing a good job as parents, although that slipdid a number on Harry. The curly haired boy pulled the glass door open and let Jazz go first, only to have her childishly cling on to his arm once they were outside, a smile breaking his serious expression when his young friend told him something – they were too far for B!Reader to make out what Jazz said.

“Where are those two going?” Brian walked up to her.

He had a cardboard cup of coffee in his hand, which he offered to her. With a mumble she took it and had a testing sip – it was too bitter, but it would do. “Nando’s. Probably.” She gave her husband a soft smile.

Brian nodded in silence, a reflective look on his face.

“He needs some time, Bri.” She guessed what he was thinking about.

“It’s been a year,” he said with caution.

“He is getting over it, love.” She took a step closer to Brian and whispered, “he’s picked up the guitar again.” They shared a look before someone called for B!Reader and she left her husband with a peck on the cheek.