#ch; i. fraser

[inmydrcams]

Isobel Fraser is in her mid 20s just out of a terrible and rather public cheating scandal that ended her engagement to an Henry Gordon who was caught having multiple affairs. She a Member of the Scottish Parliament who throughly believes in Scottish independence and has made it one of her big causes. She also has very close ties to France, having lived with her grandmother there and studied at an international school there until she was 18.

Before she was also Carolina of Mar, When Carolina was 14 her own father rode with all lords in 1715, fighting for the Old Pretender and losing the battle against the English lords. That left Carolina as the clan chief with a set of uncles to support her. It’s a fine line to walk between trying not to anger the English and holding the clan together while still preserving the Highlands. Eventually, however, she loses her life in 1745.

Marie de Guise. In the 1600s she was a member of french court sent there by her family as a lady in waiting to the queen. The purpose would be to be their eyes and ears and search out information that would be useful to them and maybe even influence policy. The whole idea is very harsh on Marie who, after watching someone die of poisoning in front of her, ends up retreating to a nunnery to live out the rest of her years free from the court machinations.

[southernisled]

and another one for paz !! @faiirytalcs​ 

Hans smirked as he saw her unmistakable blonde hair float like a halo around her head, quickening his pace to get closer. Pacifica had to be some kind of enchantress because he was addicted & that really wasn’t like him to be, especially for a girl he’d only met recently. “So she survived her blind date anyway” he teased as a greeting, having seen her with some guy at the House of Mouse on his own date. Apparently Mabel had decided Paz & Hans were not to be. “Damn Paz, If I had of known you wanted company on Valentines I could have just came over.”

[xradiant]

"You know this could get us killed, don't you?" @handywolfman

"I think everything we do could get us killed." He answered simply, regarding the other closely. He had done so much during this war that should have left him a corpse in one of those Redcoat prisons. He had very nearly died under the hands of Black Jack Randall. "But when it means something this big - why not take the chance?"

[broodparasitism]

Actually thinking about Jackie and Shauna and how they felt lacking is making me again wonder about Grace and Violet and…have I done enough! Have I given their former friendship enough substance! Can I do so without a dual narrative! Is it even not just a question of if I haven’t got what I know about them implied on page, but do I actually know enough?

[transparentdreamruins]

"You've heard of Red Jamie Fraser, I expect?" [...] "the Highlander prisoners treat him as their chief. Consequently, if any matters arise involving the prisoners...he acts as their spokesman." [...] "Seumas, Mac an fhear dhuibh, they call him, or just Mac Dubh..." ~Voyager, ch. 8

[samsheughan]

WIP Wednesday

I think I should be doing this so that I keep myself accountable for writing on a regular basis. It is my dream, after all, to become a full time published author 😊

Exceprt from Sutures Ch. 9: Rumors, Part 2 [SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN'T READ CH 8]

Alice put on what Jamie could only describe as a “thinking face.” After a few seconds, she answered, “oh aye! He kept saying something about horrible headaches and gripping pains in the belly. He would be sitting at the supper table and seem to struggle with holding a fork, as if he’d never been civilized before!” Jamie was watching both Alice as she talked, and Claire as she listened. He watched Claire’s face change with some kind of revelation the more Alice went on about Obediah’s last days on earth. “What could all this mean?” Alice finished with a heartbreaking sob, and Jamie fished a wee square out of his pocket to hand to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose before trying to give it back to him. He waved a hand in refusal, indicating that she was welcome to keep it.

No pressure tags for exposure: @walkinginland, @islayandlochs, @ladyjane-lj, @bat-cat-reader, @gotham-ruaidh, @theawkwardterrier, @christiwhitson, @frasers-of-my-heart and anyone else who wants to participate or reblog to spread the word :D i love you guys <3

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[rezzereff]

📣ASK BLOG TIME!! SHALL I START?

RE-VERSA - My AU

Rules:

1. If you want to ask as anonym; DM me & request to hide your name ( for some reasons )

2. NSFW also allowed, but I will post with censor ( full will be on twt - Re_J70) ( NO PEDO/INCEST )

3. Only 1 question per Person.

4. You can also ask my OC - Reid, bc why not? :D

5. Languages to ask ( or langs. I use to post )

🇬🇧/🇷🇺/🇯🇵

SOME INFO ABT MY BbiealAU:

1. Null, Playtime and Principal are family

Null ( I prefer to call him Filename2 ) - first child, adopted, Principal found Null in his early childhood, crying and sniffing. And decided to look after him, Principal named that child - Fraser ( like Filename2 )

Playtime - After Null dissappeared, Principal tried to escape his depression and adopted a little girl in the orphanage.

Principal became a father in his 20 y.o.

2. IMA SUSALDI FAN YOOOO

Susan and Baldi were File's childhood best friends.

Andrew ( their son ) is also exists in my AU

3. Gotta Sweep is not Null's BFF, he's just a friend who he met when Null was in 7th grade.

4. For now Null finally found that Principal isnhis father, now he works as ( Informatics teacher ( НУ КАРОЧ УЧИТЕЛЬ ИНФОРМАТИКИ, Я УСТАЛА ПРЯТАТЬ ТО, ЧТО Я РУССКОЯЗЫЧНЫЙ ЖИТЕЛЬ СНГ ) )

Ch.'s ages:

Baldi - 38 ( 3 June 1986 )

Principal - 42 ( 16 May 1982 )

Gotta sweep - 47 ( 19 March 1977 )

Null ( Filename2 ) - 25 ( 7 February 1999 )

Playtime - 12 ( 24 March 2012 )

Bully - 16 ( 10 June 2008 )

Dr. Reflex - 39 ( 29 December 1985 )

Player - 13 ( 10 February 2011 )

WAITING FOR YOUR QUESTIONS!!! >w<

[flyinghome-againstthewind]

Beside the Seaside: Ch 12

Chapter 12

The sun rose on the morning of Claire and Jamie’s wedding completely shrouded by dark gray clouds that warned of rain.

“Dinna fash yerself if it does rain, lass,” Claire heard Ellen Fraser speak up from behind her, “it’s good luck if it does.” Claire was not usually one for silly superstitions, but the first thought that came to mind was that on the day she married Frank, it had been a beautifully sunny day…

“I’m not worried,” she promised, turning from the window in her room — the last day that it could be considered as such. “It’s not as though a little rain will make much of a difference anyhow; it’s a short drive to the registrar office in town.” She hoped she said the words without any hint of dismay. They couldn’t get married in a church on account of her divorce, and while that hadn’t really mattered to Claire, she knew Jamie’s faith was deeply important to him. And she wondered, not for the first time, what Jamie’s mother must’ve thought of all this; in the short time that she’d known the woman, Ellen Fraser had proved exceptionally hard to read. That’s where Jamie gets it from, she thought.

The door to Claire’s room opened then, and Faith swung it shut promptly behind her, appearing a little out of breath. “I didnae let anyone see me,” she said in a rush.

“What?”

“It’s bad luck,” Faith explained.

Read the rest on ao3

[yeli-renrong]

The letters and their values: A-E

<a>: Almost always a low vowel, with the exception of certain English-derived alphabets: in Saanich, <A> writes the [ɛ] allophone of /e/ <Á> that occurs adjacent to postvelars, and in the orthographic tradition initiated by the North American missionary Jotham Meeker (1804-1855), designed around the constraints of standard type for newspapers and bearing substantial influence from English (perhaps owing to Meeker's lack of formal education), <a> writes either /a/ or /e/ depending on language - consider, for example, the Shawnee form Sieiwinoweakwa /sajaːwanoːwijeːkwe/, with <a e i> /e i a/. (Vowel length was unwritten.) Meeker's alphabets are no longer used.

Some derivatives of <a> exist, most notably <æ>, an a-e ligature that came to be used in Germanic languages for /æ/, and in Ossetian for schwa, which the Swedish linguist Anders Sjögren heard as a type of e and compared to Finnish ä. This ligature developed in parallel into 'e caudata', an e with a bottom curl as a remnant of <a>, which later developed into <ę>; this usage is now extinct. A reversed <a>, <ɐ>, has common use in phonetic alphabets, presumably owing to ease of printing; in addition to IPA and the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (where rotation has systematic meaning), William Price used it in his Cornish alphabet for 'A in all, small, &c.', and the Fraser script - a descendant of Latin, but not a form of it - uses <ꓯ> for /ɛ/.

<b>: Almost always a lenis labial plosive; an exception is one of the three competing alphabets for Mapudungun, where it writes /l̪/. Occasionally a tone letter, as in the Romanized Popular Alphabet for Hmong - pob /pó/. Frequently repurposed in the Meeker orthographies: /ju/ or /joː/ in Unami (note that Deseret and Shavian, de novo orthographies for English, both define a character for English /juː/), and /θ/ in Shawnee, as in the name of Meeker's newspaper, Siwinowe Kesibwi /saːwanoːwi kiːsaʔθwa/.

<c>: In Latin, /k/, which was palatalized before front vowels in the Romance languages, producing alternations like <ca ce> /ka tʃe/. Adopted for /ts/ in most of the languages of Central and Eastern Europe, in a usage codified at least by De orthographia bohemica, a work standardizing Czech orthography, traditionally attributed to Jan Hus. /tʃ/ in Sanskrit romanization as a compromise between English <ch> and Sanskrit's four-way stop contrast, and in Malay as a compromise between English-influenced <ch> and Dutch-influenced <tj>; similarly, /ʃ/ in some North African languages, probably as a simplification of French <ch> /ʃ/. /k/ in Vietnamese (before nonfront vowels; otherwise /k/ <k>) and Saanich (in all positions, but /k/ is rare) by the influence of Portuguese and English respectively. /e/ and /ə/ in Meeker's orthography for Unami; it was left over because Meeker used <h> for /tʃ/. (This is paralleled, but certainly not inspired, by Benjamin Franklin's earlier use of derivatives of <h> for all of /ʌ ð θ ʃ/.)

Etruscan and Old Latin had three letters for the velar plosives, <c k q>, depending on the following vowel; these usages are preserved in the names of the letters, originally /ke ka ku/. In Latin, <c> displaced <k> (which came to be primarily used in, and even as an abbreviation for, the word kalendae and derivatives; English ought to spell it kalendar), but with the common use of <k> in modern non-Romance orthographies other than English (which preserves a general preference for <c> over <k> where permissible) <c> came to be seen as a repurposable 'free letter' with no particular attachment to any sound value, hence its use for /ð/ in Fijian, /|/ (a dental click) in Sandawe, Hadza, and the Nguni languages.

Sometimes <c> derives its value from its resemblance to another character, as with /ʕ/ in Somali from <ʕ>, /dʒ/ in Turkish from <ج>, and /ɔ/ in Natqgu from <ɔ>.

<ç> originated as a form of <z> - z -> ʒ -> Ꝣ -> ç - but is now treated as <;c> with a diacritic, the cedilla, which was extracted and attached to <s> to form the Turkish letter <ş>.

<d>: Generally a lenis coronal plosive; sometimes used for /θ/ or /ð/, esp. in languages without a voicing contrast in plosives. Alexandre de Rhodes used <d>, by analogy to Portuguese, for the Middle Vietnamese dental approximant /ð̞/ that developed from *t by lenition after a preinitial (e.g. dái 'scrotum' ~ Thavung ktaal3) and from Proto-Vietic *j; this sound later shifted to /z/ in the north and /j/ in the south.

<e>: Generally /e/, /ə/, or (as in many Western European languages and Malay) both. /ɣ/ in Aklanon, as in the tongue-twister /ro kaɣamaj nagakuɣuɣaput sa kaɣahaʔ/ Ro kaeamay nagakueoeaput sa kaeaha. (from p. 22 of the Peace Corps manual). /i/ in the Meeker orthographies by influence from English; Saanich, however, has <E> /ə/.

From <e> the letter <ɛ> was derived. I'm not sure what its history is; the first occurrence I'm aware of is in Isaac Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet, where it was used for a long vowel /iː/ as in <ɛl> 'eel', replacing an earlier barred I.

(The original phonotypic alphabet was unicameral, with six basic vowels, e a ah au o oo written I ⵎ Λ O U and a letter like a capital ꭐ without the middle dot, and an 'obscure vowel' written with a reversed ⵎ. To this was added vowel length, written with a middle line, and the three diphthong letters Ɯ (e-oo), ⚻ (ah-e), and ȣ (au-oo); CHOICE, or au-e, was written with the digraph <ƟƗ>. This scheme was quickly abandoned, and the 1847 version was bicameral and contained <ɛ>.)

This phonotypic <ɛ> is probably the source of the Deseret letter <𐐩> /ej/ - which, however, was originally written backwards: the 1854 handout presented to the Board of Regents of the Deseret University has <3𐐣> 'aim', but it was reversed a year later. (The Mormon hierarchy almost adopted Pitman's phonotype as the basis for their planned orthographic reform, but decided against it at the last minute.)

An 1879 proposal for an Albanian alphabet used <ɛ e> for /e ə/, presumably from Greek and French respectively (also <r p> /ɾ r/), and Otto Jespersen used <ɛ> for the mid front vowel [e̞] in his 1890 phonetic alphabet. It was later adopted for its current use in IPA and many African alphabets. Due to its resemblance to Arabic <ع>, it's also used in some Berber Latin alphabets for the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/.

[ladyviolethummingbird]

The Gloaming - Chapter 6 preview 🏰

Ch 6: Madame Beauchamp

Feeling at a loose end after supper that evening Jamie made his way to the library. As Joe had promised, the library at Wolverton Hall was indeed an extensive one and having finished re-reading his favourite book Robinson Crusoe, Jamie was looking for something new to discover. Access to reading materials at the workhouse had been quite limited (even more so at the blacksmith’s) and he relished being able to wander the shelves and choose from vast numbers of books on a myriad of different topics. He ran a finger along the leather-bound spines as he considered his options before pulling out Candide by Voltaire and began thumbing through.

“I didn’t know you spoke French, Mr Fraser?”

The tips of his ears pinking, Jamie whirled around to see Lady Randall standing not two feet away. If she was annoyed to find someone interrupting the solitude of her library she didn’t show it. In fact, she looked decidedly pleased to see him. Eyes sparkling in the lamplight, she motioned to the book in his hands with a smile.

“I confess my French isn’t much. I’ve been trying to teach myself but when one has to stop every fourth word to look it up its meaning in the dictionary I’m afraid it’s rather slow going”

Jamie was silent a moment, unused to this convivial tone from her. It was completely unexpected, but certainly not unwelcome.

“My father taught me, I think he’d planned for me to attend university in France one day”

“Your father was French?”

With a tone of of mock-outrage at the suggestion, Jamie explained that his father Brian had been Scots through-and-through but that he - like Jamie, was something of a polyglot. In addition to French and English, they also spoke Gàidhlig in his childhood home.

“Well I shall know who to come to next time I find a passage en français I can’t make heads nor tails of then”

She smiled again, revealing straight white teeth. As he took her in, Jamie swallowed, trying not to let his surprise show too much. Gone was the closed-off stance of their first meeting, replaced with a welcoming expression that he suddenly realised he’d been craving for weeks. Dare he push his luck and attempt to continue their conversation? Reasoning he might not get this chance again, he decided to press on.

Catch up on chapters 1-5 here

[inmydrcams]

I’m combing through my old mary blog cause I’m like 90% sure I had a post with the reincarnation verses but tumblr sucks and I can’t find it…

[bethanydelleman]

Northanger Abbey Readthrough Ch 26

It is no wonder that Henry and Eleanor are excellent at reading true intentions amid a sea of obfuscating speech, General Tilney has been their training. And again, no wonder Henry loves the plain spoken and honest Catherine! A whole paragraph of pretending that he will show up at random leaves us with the exact knowledge that General Tilney will visit Woodston Wednesday at about 12:45 p.m. He also expects a perfect dinner, of which Henry is well aware but Catherine thinks isn't important. Leading to this excellent speech from Henry:

“Why! How can you ask the question? Because no time is to be lost in frightening my old housekeeper out of her wits, because I must go and prepare a dinner for you, to be sure.”

Poor housekeeper! I wonder how often the General scares her out of her wits.

But the inexplicability of the General’s conduct dwelt much on her thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood? Who but Henry could have been aware of what his father was at?

Catherine, I'm with you. The General sucks, please just say what you mean when you talk, people.

Catherine has done the unimaginable, she's gotten used to the Abbey, "the abbey in itself was no more to her now than any other house" something she couldn't believe about the Tilney siblings a while back!

Catherine viewing Woodston and Elizabeth viewing Pemberley, both girls trying not to praise the house too much so they won't be judged:

Catherine’s mind was too full, as she entered the house, for her either to observe or to say a great deal; and, till called on by the general for her opinion of it, she had very little idea of the room in which she was sitting. Upon looking round it then, she perceived in a moment that it was the most comfortable room in the world; but she was too guarded to say so, and the coldness of her praise disappointed him.

With a glance she saw that he had lost none of his recent civility; and, to imitate his politeness, she began as they met to admire the beauty of the place; but she had not got beyond the words “delightful,” and “charming,” when some unlucky recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of Pemberley from her might be mischievously construed. Her colour changed, and she said no more. -Pride & Prejudice

I think those are the only two novels where the heroine views the heroes house, we have the Sotherton scene in Mansfield Park but that's a totally different vibe. Anyway, Catherine is fully aware that she hopes this house will someday be shared with herself and she's trying to hold her excitement back.

And then Catherine gets to play with a little of puppies! Best outing ever!

Anyway, back to the beginning of the chapter, Catherine again wants to get her nose into something that isn't her business, the possible engagement between Frederick and Isabella. Henry tells her not to worry about it, and I think he's pretty sure that his brother and Isabella aren't engaged so it won't matter. Besides, Henry is well aware that his father would never approve Isabella, jilter or no.

The paragraph about the Lady Frasers not being in the country makes me suspect that General Tilney only visits the upper crust in his neighbourhood, which would explain some of Eleanor's loneliness and isolation. All the "friends" he mentions are either nobility or he takes the time to mention that they are rich. He's the worst.

Henry, with the friends of his solitude, a large Newfoundland puppy and two or three terriers, was ready to receive and make much of them.

Have I mentioned that he is the perfect man? He even has dogs!

first into a smaller apartment, belonging peculiarly to the master of the house, and made unusually tidy on the occasion unlike Henry's room at the Abbey which is... littered with GUNS!!! (I will never get over that)

So, improvements.

having reached the ornamental part of the premises, consisting of a walk round two sides of a meadow, on which Henry’s genius had begun to act about half a year ago, she was sufficiently recovered to think it prettier than any pleasure-ground she had ever been in before, though there was not a shrub in it higher than the green bench in the corner.

Mansfield Park really gets into improvements, mostly in a negative light, and another Henry (Crawford) talks about doing extensive renovations to another parsonage (Edmund's). General Tilney's suggestion that a cottage be torn down to improve a view when someone is probably living there seems a bit chilling, but I don't think Henry is being shown in a unfavourable light. After all, even though he only lives at Woodston half of his time, we know he's involved in the parish and attending meetings. Also, the General is using the improvements to give heavy hints to Catherine.

The problem with improvements in Mansfield Park seems to be their superficial nature. Edmund wants himself and his house to be loved despite their flaws and perceived deficiencies, Rushworth wants his house improved but seems to be a largely absentee landlord, Henry Crawford improved his gardens but neglects his tenants.

Sense & Sensibility has John Dashwood improving his house as well, something that Elinor is clearly disgusted by, I think because he's erasing significant history for fashion. Emma admires Knightley's house which is in the old English style and not very improved in Emma. (That's another heroine touring a house, but she's seen it before, so again not the same vibe).

Anyway, Catherine is left holding out hope that she will return to Woodston some day soon, hopefully as Mrs. Tilney!

[sergeifyodorov]

leafs puppy bowl notes

matty knives obviously a step above the rest -- didn't look like he was trying too hard and was still consistently one of the best on the ice. of course this makes sense considering he has Scored On Andrei Vasilevskiy, but good to see!

easton cowan getting picked in the first round is making more and more sense every day... he has so much LIFE and ENERGY and LOVE and E N E R G Y... A Motor as the old scout saying goes. lookin forward 2 seeing him develop

fraser minten my beloved !! worked well w knies. all three of them did great on the pk also

ryan tverberg underrated king imho

baby goalie denis hildeby slayed. hope he tears it up!

all in all the leafs have some decent future nhlers amid their admittedly not otherwise fantastic prospect pool -- to be expected when you've made the playoffs for the past seven years. easton cowan YOU are a future leafs cup ch

sorry i can't say that out loud even as a joke

[fangirlinglikeabus]

catching up on wildfell weekly and i think my feelings on the assault remain...complicated

to be fair it does seem lawrence is deliberately provoking gilbert to some extent:

I gave the briefest possible answers to his queries and observations, and fell back. He fell back too, and asked if my horse was lame. I replied with a look, at which he placidly smiled.

equally gilbert does seem to be waiting for an excuse to give vent to his anger:

waiting for some more tangible cause of offence, before I opened the floodgates of my soul and poured out the dammed-up fury that was foaming and swelling within.

and i think that part of the reason this scene is disturbing to a lot of people (including me) is because of the extremity of lawrence’s reaction to being hit:

He said no more; for, impelled by some fiend at my elbow, I had seized my whip by the small end, and—swift and sudden as a flash of lightning—brought the other down upon his head. It was not without a feeling of savage satisfaction that I beheld the instant, deadly pallor that overspread his face, and the few red drops that trickled down his forehead, while he reeled a moment in his saddle, and then fell backward to the ground. The pony, surprised to be so strangely relieved of its burden, started and capered, and kicked a little, and then made use of its freedom to go and crop the grass of the hedge-bank: while its master lay as still and silent as a corpse. Had I killed him? An icy hand seemed to grasp my heart and check its pulsation, as I bent over him, gazing with breathless intensity upon the ghastly, upturned face. But no; he moved his eyelids and uttered a slight groan.

like yeah he probably should’ve known better than to keep chatting to a guy who was obviously pissed off at him (especially since according to gilbert he usually picks up VERY easily on coldness) but he also probably wasn’t expecting such a violent blow (nor, i suspect, are most people reading this book for the first time!). and i know that gilbert believes he’s defending helen’s honour but he still hasn’t like...had a conversation with her about it all even though she said she would explain things, so i find it very hard to sympathise with him once he reaches this point because it seems like he’s making decisions about and for helen without consulting her. like i’m sorry but maybe find more healthy outlets for your anger than assaulting someone my dude, even if you think he deserves it. stevie davies notes:

the preposterous violence characterising Markham’s behaviour and language to his imagined rival is analogous to the violence staple to Wuthering Heights, and the source of the objection taken by reviewers to Wildfell Hall's narrator as one who ‘would serve as the ruffian of any other novelist’ (E. P. Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’, American Review 66, October 1848, in CH, p. 262), to whose ‘brutal temper’ Charles Kingsley objected (‘Recent Novels’, Fraser’s Magazine 39, April 1849, in CH, p. 272).

at least he brings lawrence’s pony back for him…?

i would like to point out though that there’s a reasonable level of distance in how gilbert describes himself here:

With execrations not loud but deep I left him to live or die as he could, well satisfied that I had done my duty in attempting to save him—but forgetting how I had erred in bringing him into such a condition, and how insultingly my after-services had been offered

i doubt the gilbert of middle age would behave in such a way, which i think is one of the benefits of the epistolary format as it’s used in this novel: it’s a sort of assurance that he’s improved from this really quite brutal moment

[whatwouldvalerydo]

Rebel year - ch 2/6 - Rumour mill

Gareth has a new mission, or a few, as he waits for the gears to be set in motion, discovering who the mysterious Ruby Taurus is. As he dives deep in the rumor mill, he is stunned about the number of things people know, or don't.

Characters mentioned in passing belong to: @kc-and-co @lifeofkaze @the-al-chemist @usernoneexistent

Characters Ominis, Poppy and Sebastian belong to the HPHL fandom.

As soon as he received the message from Jin, Gareth meet him one early morning in the Great Hall right before breakfast started. Suppressing a yawn, the young royal stretched as he made his way towards the Ravenclaw table “You look fresh as daisies. At what hour did you wake up?”

Checking the page number, Jin closed the book, placing it on his lap “I did not sleep.” Lifting his hand, he stopped the question before it was even addressed, instead focusing his attention on the letter he produced from his pocket “As requested my young friend.”

“Brilliant.” He said snatching it as he sat next to him “As least this will ensure Quidditch will be back.”

Cackling lightly, Jin shook his head “I do hope you have more than a false letter planed. Headmaster Black will call it off before the first broom lifts off the pitch.”

Leaning in, Gareth smirked “And here is where you are wrong. My dear, darling papa is an avid fan on the sport and a rather generous donator to the school. One word and he will force the hand in favor of my wishes. I am after all the last heir.”

“A tragic loss…” Jin spoke softy, however was abruptly interrupted by Gareth.

“Do not even say it, I do not require pity.”

Wiggling his nose lightly, Jin inhaled slowly through his nose “Death is a tragedy, a great loss. There is no shame in sadness, believe me, I know a thing or two about grief, I am after all older than you.”

Lilting his head, Gareth cocked a brow “We are in the same year. I do not recall you failing one. Did you join later?”

“Never mind. So now what?”

Slapping his hand against the table, Gareth looked around as some students started making their way to breakfast, two girls passing them, giggling as they waved, Gareth rolling his eyes, while Jin immediately looked at the floor “I hears some rumors about this new fifth year, Ruby Taurus. Who is she?”

Turning around to prepare some tea, Gareth poured himself a cup of coffee, Jin shaking his head at the habit “You are far too young to be drinking coffee.” Sniffing the air, he frowned “Or smoking for that matter, honestly, you only get a good set of lungs.” Seeing how his advice was ignored, he indulged him “The rumor mill is deep that is certain and quite abundant. You never know what is true or false, however I hear she dabbles in dark arts and this ancient magic that is a secret and somehow not. That is all I know.” Glancing at a table, he shuddered “Perhaps I am not the right person to actually be of help in this particular situation. Far better would be miss Fraser and Hexley. Might also get them off my back for a while.”

“You need to learn to speak to girls.” Gareth snickered as he searched for the girls with this eyes.

“All in due time.” opening the book back up, he sipped his tea “All in due time.”

Catching the aforementioned ladies after breakfast, Gareth greeted them both, not dogging any corners as he asked about Ruby.

Ethel looked at Selene, searching her mind “Isn’t the new transfer student a guy?”

Selene frowned slightly as she lifted her brows also trying to remember “No, no. Ruby is the one with the outlandish hair color, you know.”

“Oh right, I remember, her. The one that flies on a broomstick backwards but still managed to beat Imelda.” The girls laughing while Gareth watched them confused.

“No, not that one, Ruby is the one that doesn’t sleep in the common room, but in the forest. Rumor has it she’s a fairy.” Selene informed, only for Ethel to step in again.

“Was that not Leila?”

“Right, apologies my friend, it is far too early. Ruby is the one that the Sorting hat put in Gryffindor but she requested to be transferred to Slytherin because she has a crush on Sebastian Sallow.”

“Exactly. What she sees in him I cannot fathom.”

Clicking his tongue after looking left and right between the girls chatting, Gareth politely excused himself. None of what they said made sense, but then again rumors were hardly a solid ground.

So he continued his search asking students left and right, taking notes all that varied from. Winona was adamant about this one “Ruby? No that’s not hear real name.”, another swore “I hear she sneaks into the kitchens late at night in order to juggle house elves.” to a girl batting her eye lashes at him, swearing Ruby had a wooden eye and that she had personally seen in.

He went as far as to ask Sebastian on a break about her, however he knew nothing of the girl mentioned. His friend Ominis Gaunt was not so civil “Do I look like a know every student inside of this school? Find her yourself Farr and let me finish my homework.”

Poppy swore that Ruby was a nice girl on the outside, but she had heard that she can talk to Puffskeins and that she had a plan to call upon them to infiltrate the Prefect Bathroom for some reason after asking Gareth is he wanted to help her feed the animals.

Close to dinner time, he circled the word “who” on his parchment multiple times since many had not even heard of her. His favorite one that almost made him laugh was that she was actually a long distant relative of professor Binns, or his daughter somehow, he even forgot the logic behind it, Gareth thinking she must have been very boring if that was the case. But he was on a mission and he knew Sallow infiltrated the library with someone and since he had to wait on other things, this was his latest favorite past time.

Seeing Angela walking down the hall with a package in her hand, he offered to help carry it, just to try his luck “Ruby? I heard about her but I don’t know much. I hear she can’t walk in a straight line and is very clumsy, always bumping into people.”

“Perhaps she is short sighted.” He offered his thoughts casually.

Shrugging her shoulders, she smiled “I don’t know, perhaps. Though I heard some mean girls saying she does it for attention and that she dates guys only to break their hearts. Currently the bets are on Weasley.”

Making a face, Gareth almost gagged “I am certain professor Weasley is not interested in a student.”

Gasping, she slapped his shoulder “Garreth Weasley, not our professor.”

“Who?”

Sighing, she took the package from him “Thank you for the help but I’m not able to help you more. If I hear anything else I’ll let you know alright?”

Nodding, Gareth headed to the pitch to hand back the broom to Oliver, who was surprised to actually find it back in one piece and polished even “Care to tell me what you did now?”

“No, I prefer to keep up the suspense. Do not fret, you will know soon enough. I will even wink at you from across the table when it happens.” Deciding to try his luck since he had nothing to lose and also some time to lose as they were making their way to the Great Hall, he also asked him about Ruby.

“Can’t say I know about her, why? Do you fancy her?”

Scoffing, Gareth smirked “Please, I am not like you.” Looking at him offended, Gareth only rolled his eyes “You are trying too hard. Maybe I can teach you a thing or two.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“A bet then. I bet you that by the end of the year, I can get more ladies than you. You do not have to answer now, just make sure you do not choke on your food this evening. Enjoy your meal Oliver.” He said taking a seat next to a girl at the Slytherin table, leaning in to whisper something in her ear, the girl laughing as she blushed.

Once back in the common room, Gareth checked his notes. Fairies? Vampires even? What was or who was Ruby? However there was a name that continued to be mouthed alongside hers. Someone just as deep in the rumor mill, someone standing close to the windows, pale hair covering her features.

Approaching, he spoke “Good evening miss Hellebore, might I have a word?”