#slimak

[hedgehog-moss]

Inspired by your last ask! What are the best French books you’ve read that have no English translation yet? I read Play Boy and Qui a tué mon père (really loved the latter) last year and it feels so fun to read something that other Americans can’t access yet

I'm too nervous to make any list of the Best XYZ Books because I don't want to raise your expectations too high! But okay, here's my No English Translation-themed list of books I've enjoyed in recent years. I tried to make it eclectic in terms of genre as I don't know what you prefer :)

Biographies

• Le dernier inventeur, Héloïse Guay de Bellissen: I just love prehistory and unusual narrators so I enjoyed this one; it's about the kids who discovered the cave of Lascaux, and some of the narration is written from the perspective of the cave <3 I posted a little excerpt here (in English).

• Ces femmes du Grand Siècle, Juliette Benzoni: Just a fun collection of portraits of notable noblewomen during the reign of Louis XIV, I really liked it. For people who like the 17th century. I think it was Emil Cioran who said his favourite historical periods were the Stone Age and the 17th century but tragically the age of salons led to the Reign of Terror and Prehistory led to History.

• La Comtesse Greffulhe, Laure Hillerin: I've mentioned this one before, it's about the fascinating Belle Époque French socialite who was (among other things) the inspiration for Proust's Duchess of Guermantes. I initially picked it up because I will read anything that's even vaguely about Proust but it was also a nice aperçu of the Belle Époque which I didn't know much about.

• Nous les filles, Marie Rouanet: I've also recommended this one before but it's such a sweet little viennoiserie of a book. The author talks about her 1950s childhood in a town in the South of France in the most detailed, colourful, earnest way—she mentions everything, describes all the daft little games children invent like she wants ageless aliens to grasp the concept of human childhood, it's great.

I'll add Trésors d'enfance by Christian SIgnol and La Maison by Madeleine Chapsal which are slightly less great but also sweet short nostalgic books about childhood that I enjoyed.

Fantasy

• Mers mortes, Aurélie Wellenstein: I read this one last year and I found the characters a bit underwhelming / underexplored but I always enjoy SFF books that do interesting things with oceans (like Solaris with its sentient ocean-planet), so I liked the atmosphere here, with the characters trying to navigate a ghost ship in ghost seas...

• Janua Vera, Jean-Philippe Jaworski: Not much to say about it other than they're short stories set in a mediaeval fantasy world and no part of this description is usually my cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this read!

Essays / literary criticism / philosophy

• Eloge du temps perdu, Frank Lanot: I thought this was going to be about idleness, as the title suggests, and I love books about idleness. But it's actually a collection of short essays about (French) literature and some of them made me appreciate new things about authors and books I thought I knew by heart, so I enjoyed it

• Le Pont flottant des rêves, Corinne Atlan: Poetic musings about translation <3 that's all

• Sisyphe est une femme, Geneviève Brisac: Reflections about the works of female writers (Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, etc) that systematically made me want to go read the author in question, even when I'd already read & disliked said author. That's how you know it's good literary criticism

Let's add L'Esprit de solitude by Jacqueline Kelen which as the title suggests, ponders the notion of solitude, and Le Roman du monde by Henri Peña-Ruiz which was so lovely to read in terms of literary style I don't even care what it was about (it's philosophy of foundational myths & stories) (probably difficult to read if you're not fully fluent in French though)

Did not fit in the above categories:

• Entre deux mondes by Olivier Norek—it's been translated in half a dozen languages, I was surprised to find no English translation! It's a crime novel and a pretty bleak read on account of the setting (the Calais migrant camp) but I'd recommend it

• Saga, Tonino Benacquista: Also seems to have been translated in a whole bunch of languages but not English? :( I read it ages ago but I remember it as a really fun read. It's a group of loser screenwriters who get hired to write a TV series, their budget is 15 francs and a stale croissant and it's going to air at 4am so they can do whatever they want seeing as no one will watch it. So they start writing this intentionally ridiculous unhinged show, and of course it acquires Devoted Fans

Books that I didn't think existed in English translation but they do! but you can still read them in French if you want

• Scrabble: A Chadian Childhood, Michaël Ferrier: What it says on the tin! It's a short and well-written account of the author's childhood in Chad just before the civil war. I read it a few days ago and it was a good read, but then again I just love bittersweet stories of childhood

• On the Line, Joseph Ponthus: A short diary-like account of the author's assembly line work in a fish factory. I liked the contrast between the robotic aspect of the job and the poetic nature of the text; how the author used free verse / repetition / scansion to give a very immediate sense of the monotony and rhythm of his work (I don't know if it's good in English)

• The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis: The memoir of a gay man growing up in a poor industrial town in Northern France—pretty brutal but really good

• And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran: Yet another memoir sorry, I love people's lives! Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight as a child, and was in the Resistance during WWII despite being blind. It's a great story, both for the historical aspects and for the descriptions of how the author experiences his blindness

• The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Emmanuel Carrère: an account of the Jean-Claude Romand case—a French man who murdered his whole family to avoid being discovered as a fraud, after spending his entire adult life pretending to be a doctor working at the WHO and fooling everyone he knew. Just morbidly fascinating, if you like true crime stuff

[quab00]

hellooooo!! *bap*

woa >w<

haiiiiiii

[averydeadshootingstar]

quick fact check you are actually very cool and awesome

DHWJGTRKWB THANK YOU :D

you're very cool and awesome too here take a bouquet: 💐

[conjectureand-gloom]

gm alex! how is your day so far?

good morning!!!! (it’s currently nearly 7pm here lmaooo)

my day wasn’t great to be totally honest, unfortunately, but it ended up being a bit better :)

how’s your day going? :)) <33

[cosmicnyan]

:o cat?

im so feline

[wiggles-mcgee]

hugs?

Sure thing!! *hugs you*

Feel free to stop by if you ever need a hug again :)

[myrmica]

despite my best efforts i still feel awfully agitated when i have a day where i don't get anything done (on my own creative projects. other types of work don't really register as accomplishing anything, doesn't matter if i was busy doing other stuff or feeling under the weather or resting etc) and it's very related to the "if i don't feel passionate about something i may as well not be alive rn" thing. not being focused towards something inspires such a feeling of dread. it isn't about productivity the way it appears on the surface i have untangled the root causes but not yet bested them

[acewithobsessions]

water reminder!

TY I JUST REALIZED MY THROAT WAS SORE

[le-velo-pour-dru]

happy birthday! :3

Thank youuuuuuuuuuuu!! 😁🫶❤️

[haneys]

SHOCKING NEWS: leaving to hang out with your friends while you feel weird will result in you still feeling weird when you get there and being detached from them and what's happening. More At 7!!!

[danieleneandermancini]

SEQUENZIATO IL DNA DELL' "ULTIMO DEI NEANDERTHAL"

SEQUANZIATO IL DNA DI UNO DEGLI ULTIMI NEANDERTHAL Una nuova analisi del DNA su uno degli ultimi Uomini di Neanderthal ad aver camminato sul pianeta indica che faceva parte di un gruppo umano rimasto probabilmente isolato per gran parte della propria esistenza. Scoperto nel 2015 all'ingresso del rifugio roccioso delle Grotte...

[biglisbonnews]

Archery May Have Originated in Europe 40,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought The earliest modern humans in Europe mastered bow-and-arrow technology 54,000 years ago. https://www.inverse.com/science/origins-of-bow-and-arrow-technology

[conjectureand-gloom]

hi hi hii alex! i saw that you are having a bad day and need distractions, you might want to check out this post :p

other than that, do you like hugs? :o

omg hey finn!!!!! how are you?

yea, i kinda had. a lot going on today.

thank you so much for giving me that link!!! that’s actually really helpful for me rn <3

yes! i love hugs

[circusinarun]

HOLY FUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKK! >:DDDDDDDDDDF

Experimentation

//CW: Bright Colors

Been feeling unmotivated in what I wanted to draw so I decided to switch gears and draw @circusinarun and some of their ocs (a bit of rambling as usual)

original ver.

alt. ver.

Renders of Kobi's persona

Doing more experimenting with my rendering. I found my halftone brushes after losing them somehow & decided to try and use them. The top one was the original, but it wasn't as intense as I wanted it to be, so I messed around with filters and stuff

& draft

Moving onto sketches; I started using a no pressure pen to work on my sketches for my renders (and found it really frustrating) so I tried it with just sketching on their own & found it easier. So it might become my doodling pen lol

I saw your sona in a star poncho & I am a sucker for anything space themed, so I drew it

First character is Mx. Slimax, little slinky slug, very cute. They're smaller than how I drew them here, but I thought it'd be fun to make em bigger

Didn't have much to go one for the other character, just did a headshot since I got no ideas

rock.

Then these two I might be the only one, but looking at the ref, they just reminded me of Alphys & Undyne- They are also my least inspired I've made out of the characters

I do have more sketch pages, but I am resting my hands, & they're the ones I'm looking to most forward to actually

[spacejellycreates]

Welcome Relief

Spock comforts an autistic reader during a meltdown. Very sweet and self indulgent, but you already know what to expect from me lmao

Tag list (Let me know if you would like to be added or removed!):

@fraudfrogz @wiggles-mcgee @nothoughtsgayboy @dobry-slimak @biblically-accurate-chaos

@emilytheghostwitch @shortergaything @bhawk-goose @thegeniusidiotnstickmerchant3728

[wiggles-mcgee]

Thank you so much for the tag! I'm in love with the art style of this and the fact some of the clothes actually match ones I have in my wardrobe perfectly!!! Mooties come try this, I'd love to see you (no pressure tags, also free for anyone else to rb)

@etherealspacejelly @frogofalltime @parasite-2 @luna-kenta @amethyst-aster @pockenlite @livereater002 @longsleeveleper @angelfangs-666 @tacopimball @xxxdonexxx @blackberrywidow @blu3birdprince @a-chaotic-business @myconidwitch @luna-kenta

Picrew chain >:)

Have this @whosectype @winterleaf098 @cupid-shortcake @fizz-wizz-dizz @cups-and-pentacles 💜👀