#mystery author

[irondadfics]

Hi, do you perhaps know the author of the fic "sailing back to ithaca" ? it has fantastic writing style and i want to read more from the author. thanks for your help

I’m not sure who the author is myself. Anyone else know? Here’s the fic if anyone is interested:

sailing back to ithaca by orphan_account

Tony lies still, propped up on a slab of stone and cable, but his eyes are open, nearly alert and watching Peter intently. Peter is staring at the arc reactor, mesmerized by how its lively thrum overlays with the sound of torrents of blood rushing around inside his head. The white-blue. Tony’s good palm rests over Peter’s knuckles with a featherlike press. (Endgame AU. Peter wrestles the Infinity Stones from Tony. Both of them survive, but the aftermath still isn't easy.)

[rjdavies]

Celebrating Black History Month: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

On a mission … celebrating Black History Month with amazing and inspirational Black Women for the rest of the month and continuing into March to celebrate not only inspirational Black Women but International Woman’s Day.

Born September 15, 1977 (45 years old) Enugu Nigeria

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, her father was a professor there and her mother was the first female Registrar there.  she graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science. She also has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. 

She has written several books and has appeared on TedTalks

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED Talk

She is best known for her themes of politics, culture, race and gender. Her novel, short stories, and plays have all received both public and critical acclaim. She warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. 

R. J. Davies

A Riveting Jacked-In Dreamy Mind-Bender

RJ Davies - Science Fiction Author, Maddox Files, Novels

[ibboard]

We've had an option on "AI narrator" for ages. Before it became trendy to call everything "AI" then it was called "text to speech". Personally, I find it less creepy than GenAI in art and writing because it's just reading a script rather than trying to be "creative".

That's not to say that I want to hear it. Or that I think people should be using it instead of paying real flesh-and-blood narrators for their audio books. No level of text-to-speech is going to come close to the understanding, nuance and character of Tony Robinson reading the Discworld novels! But it's the kind of thing that you could embed into a Kindle-like product as an accessibility tool (run locally, on books you purchased).

But also UGH, it's awful that the rabbit hole seems to go SO DEEP. And there's puff pieces celebrating that some publisher is churning out slop. I hope this bubble bursts soon as people realise how crap all of this content is and how quality has gone downhill.

Please read this. It is deeply, DEEPLY freakish.

[Robin, a librarian] received a message from a patron of her library system that there was something wrong with an audiobook they had borrowed. The patron reported that during a quiet part of the audio, there seemed to be a tiny portion of another recording inserted into the silence. It happened more than a few times and the patron also provided a timestamp, because this patron is very awesome. Robin says that this isn’t unusual, and the process is pretty routine:  “It’s usually just a corrupted file transfer or something. And we contact the publisher and let them know, or let OverDrive know, and it gets re-uploaded.” So then what happened?  Robin: “So I went to look up the specific book to see who the publisher was. Mostly because I wanted to know. We would contact OverDrive about the error, and they would fix, or talk to the publisher directly.” Digital files get corrupted often enough, so this isn’t alarming. But then, Robin and her coworkers noticed the name of the narrator: “Scarlett Synthesized Voice.”

And that's just the beginning of it. Who is "author" Blake Pierce, and how do they have more than seven hundred books??

[circuitmouse]

Adrian McKinty

[mglorraine]

[banfus]

Hey Friends! I'm having a book signing and reception in Napa, CA at Copperfield's Books! Come and hang out, I'd love to meet you! Next Friday, 9/29, 11-2 You can get on my email list for more info and calendar: banfus@gmail.com

I hope to see you there!

[larissareinhart]

20 CARATS and the rest of the Twisty Tales & Cozy Crimes are leaving Prolific Works at the end of September! Get 20 CARATS and 59 other cozy mystery novellas free until then!

Otherwise, look for 20 CARATS in your favorite bookstore in ebook and paperback on October 1!

[fromthedeskofcripslock]

This really ought to top every “Best Opening Lines,” list. The 21st century reading public is sleeping on Dorothy L Sayers.

(Have His Carcase 1932)

[veronicaleighauthor]

[brandyschillace]

FOUNTAIN PENS!

Found a jewelry box at antique store… perfect for my pens and inks. Not all of which are pictured. Obviously.

[reallyunluckyrunaway]

Please SOMEBODY make it happen!!!!

[scribz-ag24]

Fanart for some scenes of one of my favourite fics in the fandom, Together We'll Be Heroes, by @ofstormsandfire!!

I've already recommended it several times but istg this author's pmd fics maintain me alive, they're an absolute wonder! Go check them out ^^

[rjdavies]

Celebrating Black History Month: Mary Jackson

On a mission … celebrating Black History Month with amazing and inspirational Black Women for the rest of the month and continuing into March to celebrate not only inspirational Black Women but International Woman’s Day

Born April 9, 1921 in Hampton, Virginia and died February 11, 2005 (at age 83). In 1958, she was the first African American female engineer to work at NASA, she was a mathematician and aerospace engineer. 

She was known as a “Human Computer” at NACA with her math and science skills. She served a vital role in the development of the space programs as well as helped other women and minorities advance their careers. 

Mary Jackson also served for more than 30 years as a Girl Scout leader, in the 1970s she helped African American children in her community and created a miniature wind tunnel for testing airplanes. She worked as an aerospace engineer for 20+ year, much of her work centered on the airflow around aircraft. She was denied management level positions and in 1979 she left engineering and took a demotion to become a manager of the women’s program at NASA where she sought to improve the opportunities for all women in the organization. 

R. J. Davies

A Riveting Jacked-In Dreamy Mind-Bender

RJ Davies - Science Fiction Author, Maddox Files, Novels

[renshengs]

hmm i do think that danmei and dangai (censored danmei cdrama adaptations) being many non-chinese fandom people's first impression of chinese media has given them some misconceptions about mainstream chinese media, and it shows in a way that i find very frustrating when seeing discussions about cdramas on here. dangai dramas aside, even if government censorship didn't exist, the chances of your favorite cdrama gay ship becoming canon is about as high as the chances of any of those iconic homoerotic male friendships in a western TV show becoming canon. which is to say: extremely low.

what i think is that internationally huge danmei fandoms like mdzs and tgcf and drama adaptations like cql and shl have really fucked with people's conceptualization of danmei, in that they're using it as this reference point when analyzing relationships in all other forms of cn media, including cdramas and chinese games, which then manifests into people making very bold, very dubious claims about "queercoding" because 2 characters from a random cdrama reminds them of the one or two danmeis they'd encountered that shaped their entire perception of chinese media. basically it's this meme:

many people here need to understand that cdramas and chinese films are obviously mainstream forms of fictional media in china, just like how the mcu or the doctor who franchise is mainstream in the US and UK, or like shonen is mainstream in japan. not to burst your bubble of happy ignorance, but homoromantic relationships such as qingming/boya from the ying yang master are—for lack of a better term—fujobait. they are fujobait. bromances, because those sell well and everyone knows it. popular ships like bakudeku were not actually made canon in mha because shonen is mainstream, and in most industries geared toward maximizing capital, having full-on gay people front and center is considered a monetarily risky move. which sucks, of course, but china is absolutely no different. i promise you that if the govt removed their censorship laws for TV broadcasts, your favorite gay ship from mysterious lotus casebook or the blood of youth or fangs of fortune still wouldn't be canon. they might be allowed a bit more intimacy due to the lack of restrictive filtering, but they are not going to be sucking face for the same reason that gojo and geto from jjk didn't suck face.

danmei is still widely considered niche and risky in china, and if you haven't seen the recent news, authors are still getting arrested for writing it. assuming that chinese fiction, mainstream chinese fiction in particular, operate like dangais where the two guys with the most gay tension would be made explicitly canon were the censors to be lifted, is frankly pretty ridiculous. dangai dramas are adapted from danmeis, which are stories centered on a gay romance and narratively depend on the two guys falling in love. non-dangai dramas are very much... not that, hence why people shouldn't watch them expecting a censored danmei and then forcing assumptions of "my ship would be canon if only it weren't for censorship" on them.

it's very clear when someone who knows absolutely nothing about the actual situation with danmei and queer existence and mainstream TV censorship in china is trying to push their, if i put it crudely, "boss baby meme" perspective onto cmedia. fandom is all about poking at interactions between your favorite characters and giggling and speculating, but i think lots of fandom people (many of them safe in the pockets of their more progressive areas) view govt censorship as this big abstract dam that, if broken, would result in the canonization of all their favorite ships, which is not only an incredibly naive belief but also one that shows how much they view TV censorship as more of a personal inconvenience that's preventing their favorite ships from kissing on screen instead of the looming, deep-rooted issue depriving mainland chinese people of creative freedom it actually is. with cmedia fandoms there's a specific widely popularized "they're so gay omg how did censorship not notice" gag when there's any perceived homoromantic undertones in a story that's both rather insensitive and also ignorant, and many dangai and cdrama fandoms in particular (donghua fans too, link click shippers i'm looking directly at you) could really use some more education and sensitivity regarding this.

i've been in danmei & cdrama fandom spaces for years and post-pandemic this kind of nonsense has definitely gotten worse, especially when you compare shipping discussions here to shipping discussions in cn fandoms. here every 2 seconds someone makes an off-color censorship joke about tgcf donghua and over on douyin they are straight up commenting under the nezha sequel announcement post if there's going to be an oubing kissing scene. granted i obviously cannot see or know everything going on in cn fandom spaces because they are incomprehensibly enormous, but in all the spaces i've been in i've never seen a single censorship joke from anyone. why do people here absolutely insist on making them?

anyway. fandom be normal about chinese media challenge!

[s-h-a-s-e]

a cup of Mabel Juice might just fix me

[mglorraine]