#but also the whole book is great already

[pilferingapples]

eee ok this is an EXCITING bit so bear with me if I ramble a little

Historical Context A: The Napoleonic Era was huge for Hugo's generation of French writers. Like...what WWI was for the Jazz Age, you know? They'd all grown up with this image of the Emperor, this larger than life figure, and then POP he was gone--but he left a really massive legacy effect, not just on the macro level of new alliances, national borders, etc, but in the daily life of every French person, thanks to the Napoleonic Code (the effective legal system for AGES) , major changes that he had set up in society, etc.

which all leads to :

Literary Point A: one of the big themes going on in Les Mis is that it's time to move on from the concept of the Great Man of History and focus on regular people. That history is and should be made now by just people, that Jean Valjean is as important as Napoleon. So as you read the Waterloo section, look for the way Hugo talks about why Napoleon loses-- the emphasis on weather , on the way Napoleon treats his conscripted peasant guide, on how the effect he's having on history is out of favor with God.

Making this argument , Hugo still grants Napoleon and the French a LOT of glory, here. Saying "only GOD could stop Napoleon" is pretty complimentary, after all! And there's plenty of praise for individual leaders in the French army. Which brings us to...

Historical Context B: When Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he was in exile, an opponent of the current ruler of France , Napoleon.

...well , Napoleon III, Louis Bonaparte.

which leads to

Literary Point B: Hugo and his publisher were both sincerely concerned that Les Miserables might get banned in France, or be so heavily censored that it would effectively be banned. This had already happened with some earlier work he'd written in exile!

And Les Miserables is, frankly , a call to revolution , of one sort or another. It's extremely pro-socialism and pro-republic, and France was operating with neither system at the time. It is super political and Hugo's politics were Not Welcome with the people currently running the country.

But! the Waterloo section of Les Mis was really super positive about France and Napoleon's army, even while denouncing Napoleon as incompatible with Progress. Hugo actually pushed for the Waterloo section to be released if anyone wanted a preview , saying :

“If we give quotes, insist on Waterloo, bring out (focus on) what the book has of the national (cause/identity), what stirs the French fibers(/soul), make Persigny ashamed to stop a book in which justice is finally done to Ney, grandfather of his wife, make the seizure impossible by saying it is the battle of Waterloo won by France, etc…”

( more of that letter, and more on those background politics, here!)

As I say at that link, I don't think Waterloo is just chaff for the censors; Hugo didn't say anything he didn't mean to say. But the way he said it was always , of necessity, with consideration of his chances of publishing legally. (Hugo wasn't new to this. Writers in 19C France were always working around censors from one government or the other. It's a fun thing to think about when considering Why X Said It That Way! ) Waterloo is very relevant to that!

And, just for fun, Purely Literary Point C :

Les Mis looooves its parallels and antitheses. That's Hugo's stylistic jam. Les Mis reflects on itself and outwards in endless fractals. So Waterloo is this big grand last stand marking the end of an era... and then one of the major sequences in the narrative's present is a big grand last stand marking not an ending, but hopefully the beginning of a beginning. To be direct: keep an eye on the details in Waterloo, they will echo and counter-echo in surprising ways on the barricade.

(Also you can check out this fantastic post about it! it really helped me understand the emotional core of this section way back when)

(and all this said.... skip Waterloo entirely if you need to. The most immediately relevant chapter is the last one, with the post-battle looting. You can come back and read it later, with the rest of the book fresh for making connections, and it will still be good! But all this makes the whole digression a lot more interesting for me now. )

so part 2 is called Cosette

why the fuck am I reading about Napoleon for ages

[beatx-mavie-archangelx]

there should've been at least a full view of Fíli's body in the funeral scene

"Fíli you didn't deserve any of this" we all say in unison

[fictionadventurer]

So many types of books that have strong summertime associations that I spend all my time cycling through cravings for certain genres or books.

Within the last month, I have wanted to read/reread:

Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery

The Electrical Menagerie by Mollie E. Reeder

Valiant by Sarah McGuire

Retellings in general (especially Cinderella retellings)

Golden Age mysteries, especially Josephine Tey and Agatha Christie

The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart

Books set in locations that are not America or England, especially warm climates

Books set in wintery/cold weather settings

Science fiction/space opera

Superhero stories

Civil War history/Presidential history

D.E. Stevenson books (and other mid-tier vintage light fiction)

Wilkie Collins books

Graphic novels

And I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting

[fluentisonus]

I think I mentioned this before in my post a little while ago abt valjean not talking, but reading the barricade section just now & he talks so little. I think the only things he says the entire time is to ask for a gun to shoot down the mattress and to ask for javert & then say he's shot him -- people talk to him plenty but he never replies. and this taken with the fact that it's such a long section without his pov at all it I feel like really shows how much of a sort of. social/communicative wall I guess? he can & does put up sometimes, and how impenetrable & unreadable (& in marius' case disconcerting) it comes across. like even we as readers who know him really well are not getting much from this at all about what he's thinking or feeling or planning, he's incredibly hard to read without that element of internality

[tharelofthewoodlandrealm]

there's this guy on Instagram making tree nets called "Charlie's webs" and i can't help but think how much they would fit the Silvan elves. like, having the trees around their homes full of net spirals and bridges and platforms to hang out on and walk from house to house and climb to the treetops for some stargazing. plus, they're bouncy so the elflings would love it

[i-cast-zone-of-truth]

ok so i Did Say that Lois does not get queers because of Bel Thorne. But she DID ALSO make a five-god pantheon in which one of the gods presides over disasters, the overlooked, the unchampioned, and the gays. this god is called the Bastard. could not possibly be better

[notmoreflippingelves]

[enterstellars]

been reaaaaaally struggling with the whole disabled thing as of late

[wonder-worker]

After the exile and attainder of her husband, Henry Holland, duke of Exeter, [Anne of York] acquired the bulk of his inheritance in 1462 with custody over her daughter and heiress, Anne Holland. The decision to make Anne femme sole was legalised in parliament. It was a testament to Edward’s willingness to bend the law for his family as the family ignored the rightful claim of the Holland family descendants such as Ralph, Lord Neville. Although it was enrolled as a royal grant, the original bill suggests it was in fact made at the duchess’s request as it bears the king’s sign manual, a note of the commons’ consent, and the royal response ‘le roy le voet’.

Alexander R. Brondarbit, Power Brockers and the Yorkist State, 1461-1485

[bmpmp3]

kotarou maghni ai thank GOD i literally sighed an audible sigh of relief

[jakeperalta]

got advertised a book that's described as "a modern retelling of when harry met sally" and I just feel like there should be at least a 50 year gap between the source material and the retelling

[supercantaloupe]

genuinely except for maybe a passing interest in seeing camelot (which is closing too soon for me to do anything about anyway) i haven't wanted to actually Go To New York to see smth on broadway since the music man. i am going to do everything in my power however to go see this cabaret tho

[vonlipvig]

german update, i ended up using quizlet for building my vocabulary review units because when i went to create an account there i found out i already had an account AND i already had built some vocabulary review units. thank you past jules.

[highladyluck]

The Dungeon Meshi renaissance is making me want to share the resources that taught me how to cook.

Don’t forget, you can check out cookbooks from the library!

Smitten Kitchen: The rare recipe blog where the blog part is genuinely good & engaging, but more important: this is a home cook who writes for home cooks. If Deb recommends you do something with an extra step, it’s because it’s worth it. Her recipes are reliable & have descriptive instructions that walk you through processes. Her three cookbooks are mostly recipes not already on the site, & there are treasures in each of them.

Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden: This is a great guide to seasonal produce & vegetable-forward cooking, and in addition to introducing me to new-to-me vegetables (and how to select them) it quietly taught me a number of things like ‘how to make a tasty and interesting puréed soup of any root veggie’ and ‘how to make grain salads’ and ‘how to make condiments’.

Grains for Every Season: Rethinking Our Way With Grains by Joshua McFadden: in addition to infodumping in grains, this codifies some of the formulas I picked up unconsciously just by cooking a lot from the previous book. I get a lot of mileage out of the grain bowl mix-and-match formulas (he’s not lying, you can do a citrus vinaigrette and a ranch dressing dupe made with yogurt, onion powder, and garlic powder IN THE SAME DISH and it’s great.)

SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT by Samin Nosrat: An education in cooking theory & specific techniques. I came to it late but I think it would be a good intro book for people who like to front-load on theory. It taught me how to roast a whole chicken and now I can just, like, do that.

I Dream Of Dinner (so you don’t have to) by Ali Slagle: Ok, look, an important part of learning to cook & cooking regularly is getting kinda burned out and just wanting someone else to tell you what to make. These dinners work well as written and are also great tweakable bases you can use as a starting place.

If you have books or other resources that taught you to cook or that you find indispensable, add ‘em on a reblog.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[littleapocalypsekitten]

Oh, fuck, that's happened to other people? Alright, so a friend of mine with which I co-created a Legend of Zelda fanfiction showed me a YOUTUBE of a couple of guys analysing and complaining about our fic. I got the blame for it, because, while we both did the ideas for it, I wrote it out and it's under my name on Fanfiction dot net. The Great Desert - if anyone is interested. (I just waded through...so much cringe. My old fanfictions...ugh...) Anyway, I wrote a deeply imperfect fanfiction once upon a time. And, apparently a channel for Bronies of all people picked up on it, even though it wasn't MLP-related. (The fanfiction is Zelda, specifically, The Legend of Zelda as a magical western). So, this youtube review had this pair of guys talking about how the fic started out strong, but then they disagreed with some of our choices in the story to incorporate science fiction elements and an ending I rushed because I was getting tired of working on the fic and wanted to wrap it up according to the previous AOL roleplay logs between me and my friend I was working from. (Oh, yeah, this was Back in the Day). These guys concluded "SHADSIE! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!!!" because they were so upset about the sci-fi elements and the ending. My friend was annoyed at not being mentioned at all, even though I credited her on the work. She suspects that the Brony-boys left her name out of it because she'd become well-known in the MLP fandom by that time... But, yeah, they'd put our fic up on Good Reads and were criticising it like it was an actual original novella or something. I got a LOT of reviews on the damn thing after that that were very accusatory - You know, going over the problems I already knew existed in the fic and the sci-fi stuff which I do not think are problematic and enjoy having around. Very "What were you THINKING?!!!" reviews by randos as if I owed them something for a FREE fanfic posted on the Internet that they read of their own accord. Many of these happened right after that Youtube video was posted. It got to where I posted for some time, a disclaimer on my Fanfiction dot net profile (although I think I removed it eventually) that people coming to my page for The Great Desert should know that I understand the fic has some pacing problems and that no, I do not plan to change them because I've moved on to writing other things and that my library is vast, the fic was written years ago and my style has changed. Also, furthermore "What I was thinking!!!!" was "I was having fun writing a story with my friend." So, yes, I am absolutely familiar with Entitled Fan Phenomena. It is best ignored.