#space travelogue

[iznankapress]

What do you do when you get laid off from your space job? Go on a food tour of the universe, of course! In "Eating Alone in the Universe," @pizzawitch presents an inventive mixed-media travelogue, complete with newspaper clippings and made-up menus for each step of her journey through space. Get your copy of Ionosphere and read the full story here!

[blujayonthewing]

aesthetic as fuck

[spilladabalia]

Get James Burke, On The Case

Human League - The Black Hit Of Space

emhead remix, 2023

Connections (James Burke, BBC TV, 1978)

[nasa]

Tiny BurstCube's Tremendous Travelogue

Meet BurstCube! This shoebox-sized satellite is designed to study the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, called gamma-ray bursts. It detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.

BurstCube may be small, but it had a huge journey to get to space.

First, BurstCube was designed and built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Here you can see Julie Cox, an early career engineer, working on BurstCube’s gamma-ray detecting instrument in the Small Satellite Lab at Goddard.

BurstCube is a type of spacecraft called a CubeSat. These tiny missions give early career engineers and scientists the chance to learn about mission development — as well as do cool science!

Then, after assembling the spacecraft, the BurstCube team took it on the road to conduct a bunch of tests to determine how it will operate in space. Here you can see another early career engineer, Kate Gasaway, working on BurstCube at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

She and other members of the team used a special facility there to map BurstCube’s magnetic field. This will help them know where the instrument is pointing when it’s in space.

The next stop was back at Goddard, where the team put BurstCube in a vacuum chamber. You can see engineers Franklin Robinson, Elliot Schwartz, and Colton Cohill lowering the lid here. They changed the temperature inside so it was very hot and then very cold. This mimics the conditions BurstCube will experience in space as it orbits in and out of sunlight.

Then, up on a Goddard rooftop, the team — including early career engineer Justin Clavette — tested BurstCube’s GPS. This so-called open-sky test helps ensure the team can locate the satellite once it’s in orbit.

The next big step in BurstCube’s journey was a flight to Houston! The team packed it up in a special case and took it to the airport. Of course, BurstCube got the window seat!

Once in Texas, the BurstCube team joined their partners at Nanoracks (part of Voyager Space) to get their tiny spacecraft ready for launch. They loaded the satellite into a rectangular frame called a deployer, along with another small satellite called SNoOPI (Signals of Opportunity P-band Investigation). The deployer is used to push spacecraft into orbit from the International Space Station.

From Houston, BurstCube traveled to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where it launched on SpaceX’s 30th commercial resupply servicing mission on March 21, 2024. BurstCube traveled to the station along with some other small satellites, science experiments, as well as a supply of fresh fruit and coffee for the astronauts.

A few days later, the mission docked at the space station, and the astronauts aboard began unloading all the supplies, including BurstCube!

And finally, on April 18, 2024, BurstCube was released into orbit. The team will spend a month getting the satellite ready to search the skies for gamma-ray bursts. Then finally, after a long journey, this tiny satellite can embark on its big mission!

BurstCube wouldn’t be the spacecraft it is today without the input of many early career engineers and scientists. Are you interested in learning more about how you can participate in a mission like this one? There are opportunities for students in middle and high school as well as college!

Keep up on BurstCube’s journey with NASA Universe on X and Facebook. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[scotianostra]

On February 16th 1954 the writer Iain Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife

Banks was a son of a professional ice skater and an Admiralty officer. He spent his early years in North Queensferry and later moved to Gourock because of his father’s work requirement. He received his early education from Gourock and Greenock High Schools and at the young age of eleven, he decided to pursue a career in writing. He penned his first novel, titled The Hungarian Lift-Jet, in his adolescence. He was then enrolled at the University of Stirling where he studied English, philosophy and psychology. During his freshman year, he wrote his second novel, TTR.

Subsequent to attaining his bachelor degree, Banks worked a succession of jobs that allowed him some free time to write. The assortment of employments supported him financially throughout his twenties. He even managed to travel through Europe, North America and Scandinavia during which he was employed as an analyzer for IBM, a technician and a costing clerk in a London law firm. At the age of thirty he finally had his big break as he published his debut novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984, henceforth he embraced full-time writing. It is considered to be one of the most inspiring teenage novels. The instant success of the book restored his confidence as a writer and that’s when he took up science fiction writing.

In 1987, he published his first sci-fi novel, Consider Phlebas which is a space opera. The title is inspired by one of the lines in T.S Eliot’s classic poem, The Waste Land. The novel is set in a fictional interstellar anarchist-socialist utopian society, named the Culture. The focus of the book is the ongoing war between Culture and Idiran Empire which the author manifests through the microcosm conflicts. The protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, unlike other stereotypical heroes is portrayed as a morally ambiguous individual, who appeals to the readers. Additionally, the grand scenery and use of variety of literary devices add up to the extremely well reception of the book. Its sequel, The Player of Games, came out the very next year which paved way for other seven volumes in The Culture series.

Besides the Culture series, Banks wrote several stand-alone novels. Some of them were adapted for television, radio and theatre. BBC television adapted his novel, The Crow Road (1992), and BBC Radio 4 broadcasted Espedair Street. The literary influences on his works include Isaac Asimov, Dan Simmons, Arthur C. Clarke, and M. John Harrison. He was featured in a television documentary, The Strange Worlds of Iain Banks South Bank Show, which discussed his literary writings. In 2003, he published a non-fiction book, Raw Spirit, which is a travelogue of Scotland. Banks last novel, titled The Quarry, appeared posthumously. He also penned a collection of poetry but could not publish it in his lifetime. It is expected to be released in 2015. He was awarded multitude of titles and accolades in honour of his contribution to literature. Some of these accolades include British Science Fiction Association Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Locus Poll Award, Prometheus Award and Hugo Award.

Iain Banks was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the gallbladder and died at the age of 59 in the summer of 2013.

[bobemajses]

Esther, wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus, and her cousin Mordechai saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Susa from the intrigues of the king’s chief commander, Haman, as described in the biblical book of Esther, and is enacted every Purim in all the Jewish communities of the world. Ecbatana, the former capital of the Medes, and in our times Hamadan, was the summer residence of the Persian kings, to which Esther and Mordechai are said to have retired from the court after the death of Ahasuerus. Here they were buried in a common tomb, which is still the most important Jewish pilgrimage site in Iran.

We do not know how the original tomb looked. The modern building was constructed in 1602, in the time of Shah Abbas the Great. It follows with its double inner space, burial chamber, community room, and the dome crowning the tomb, the type of the Shiite pilgrimage sites erected for the emamzâdehs, the descendants of the holy Imams. As the first picture above shows, in the early 19th century it still stood outside of the city, but by the end of the century the local bazaar flowed around it. Thousands of Jews from Iran and other countries visited this place every year, covering a grueling trip to the desert surrounding Hamadan on foot or with caravan. According to contemporary travelogues, one could approach the tomb only with a local, through a maze of doorways and inner courtyards, with the way to the sarcophagi leading through a small rose garden and an ornate gate.

[bethelctpride]

December Book club: I MEANT TO FINISH IT!

Our flashback at the end of the year to all eleven books that you meant to finish and didn't quite get done in time for the monthly! Join the book club discussion channel on Bethel Pride's Discord the last week of the year to take another go at these 11 books!

NONFICTION:

Ace & Proud- anthology of essays on asexuality & AVEN

The Pink Triangle: the Nazi War Against Homosexuals- history. this is an older book but has many first hand accounts that appeared for the first time in English here

Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend- a roundup of classic myths and more contemporary mythmaking

The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games- on the art and aesthetic of games and why GAMES at all

Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America- part travelogue, part biography

FICTION

When the Angels Left the Old Country-Historical. and angel & demon leave the shtetl to find why no one has heard from emmigrants from the village who went to New York

Amatka- scifi. a space colony relies on rigid categories and labelling to keep from falling apart. but what happens when you find you were put in the wrong category?

Like a Love Story- Reza, an Iranian boy, grapples with his homosexuality amid the AIDS crisis in New York City. also covers ActUp's action during that time

Brooms- graphic novel. alternate America in the Depression where only some people are allowed to have magic. Featuring illegal broom racing.

Queer Little Nightmares: an anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry

The Prince & the Coyote- historical fiction about Nezahualcoyotl, precoumbian Mexico's greatest poet. featuring new translations of their work

If you are having trouble finding these titles, our partner Rainy Day Paperback has them all on their website or in person at 81 Greenwood Ave. Bethel CT.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 12/24/2024

pair of portentous tuesdayposts: this one is christmas eve and the next one is new year's eve

trying something new with the reading section, where i list off a bunch of books i bounced off and briefly explain why. let me know if this is interesting, or if it's more interesting when i finish a book i sort of enjoyed and really dissect what didn't work for me like with that annoying evil wizard book a couple weeks ago.

listening

the true champ of the past few weeks has been friends at the table's (an actual play podcast about critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends) horror/weird west season Sangfielle, and i know i have listened to about sixty hours of it bc i have played about sixty hours of stardew valley. i am currently on ep 49, one before the last finale episode, and it feels like it is wrapping up in a very rushed and weird way? maybe i will feel differently after listening to the six coda episodes wrapping up everyones' characters?

the song of the week is fleet foxes’ white winter hymnal, which is morbidly festive without being strictly christmas-y and is not salting the open emotional wound within my chest that is The Holiday Season. album released 2008. christ im old

-

reading

the concept of this gag award is EXTREMELY funny to me. i wish the EFF sent them a little physical trophy. perhaps a challenge coin.

bounced off a lot of stuff. the six larger books and the far top right are all from my absolute favorite thrift store with the worst vibes, who regularly has a 8/$1 media sale bc they actually want to be more of a kitchen goods and home decor thrift store and don't really want to constantly be overflowing with records no one buys. yet here they are.

i really do need to find a good indie used bookstore around here that will take books and give me back slightly more in store credit than in cash. bc i would like to fill some missing chunks of trilogies/fill out the star wars shelves a little more. but every time i have gone to half price books i have had an unpleasant time.

lumberjanes/bravest warrior/adventure time were not making me feel nostalgic and in fact made me quite sad instead (more in a memento mori way than in subject matter) so they're going to a friend's kid

glad i looked up Heartthrob (despite the really good premise of woman haunted by her heart donor) on my library's comic app bc the third one seems to mostly take place in a mental hospital which is really never a vibe i want

GRIFTER has art i don't love and a bland storyline about an ex-marine who is the saddest boy in the world and can also detect literal space aliens living among us. no thank you

tangle's game has a close-call near-sexual assault in the first chapter. no thank you! cool dystopic social credit score premise but no thanks!

gil's all fright diner is about the king of vampires and the duke of werewolves but they're hicks. the narrator hates that they're dumb hicks. did not jive with the authorial voice on this one

i bought Two Tickets to Tangiers in high school bc it looked cool and have only cracked it open now, almost fifteen years later. fifteen year old kay did not yet have the context clues from the cover that it would be a very racist travelogue

i need to stop trying agatha christie. i am never going to like agatha christie

-

watching

somehow i have seen the first tinker bell fairies movie three times this week bc that's all my bestie's toddlers want to watch. a really stupidly stacked cast??? how did all these people have free time in 2008???

-

playing

finished the community center in summer 2 of stardew valley (wildly popular and very intense farming sim) and would have finished it in winter 1 if not for the FUCKING pufferfish. i hate fishing minigames and i especially hate the fishing minigame in stardew so i am excited to leave it the fuck alone for a while.

my cauliflower got stupid mchugelarge?? i do not know why they did that. also a meteor fell on my farm and gave me a bunch of really valuable ore, just like real life meteors.

i do kind of regret picking the beach farm bc so much of my day is spent watering, but i am trying to lean harder into animal products and being more of a fun silly flower farm instead of the intense agriculture i find myself doing. i have the greenhouse, i have a small patch of sprinklerable land, i will simply make sure to buy some of every seed each season and if i really need something i will toss it in the greenhouse.

-

making

people are being very gracious about their mediocre colored pencil portraits. most of my gift budget this year was two flat rate boxes to my siblings. silly little pet portraits are very cost effective if you already have art supplies, nice paper, gumption, and very cheap small frames.

[innbetween]

Question more so for Hannah than Tessa but who knows, maybe podcasts exist in the dnd world.

wanted to know if you had any queer fantasy and/or sci-fi audio drama recommendations. I’ve listened to and loved Welcome To NightVale, Jar Of Rebuke, Absolutely No Adventures, Zoo, The Bright Sessions, and of course, Inn Between. Thanks regardless :]

DO I

Yeah I definitely do. I'm actually one of those cishets myself, so just to be absolutely clear, i'm going to include only shows with at least one main character who's not like. You know. One of me. I'm also looking at your selections and noting a sort of steady pacing, respect for exploration, and character focus, so I'll be leaning toward those.

FANTASY

Dragon's Rest is a sitcom in the vein of ANA and Inn Between--a fantasy inn, a grumpy owner, her hapless hero hopeful busboy, the local lush, a bard who, and I cannot stress this enough, is too dumb to read. It's delightful, honestly.

Eeler's Choice is a strange and beautiful oceanic adventure about magic, siblings, and giant eels. The music slaps also.

Electromancy: imagine if Harry Potter was a) not written by a freakin transphobe, and b) actually asked hard questions about imperialism. Like hey, should we be doing imperialism?

The Kingmaker Histories is hard to describe. I can say "steampunk," and "magic" and "magical politics" and "Collette's got a jewel stuck in her head that explodes people sometimes" but that's not even the half of it.

Sidequesting is like, best friends with ANA. Rion, a brave hero, is given a magic sword for an epic quest...and promptly goes and does literally everything else. It's so nice.

Starfall hey what's up Starfall I love you Starfall, Starfall's about a magic theater troupe and definitely not also about how imperialism is bad, actually. Fel and Leona own my whole heart. Friends.

Sci-Fi

Ask Your Father is one of those shows that hits you in the teeth. When an accident sends an astronaut and his AI bestie way off course, he finds himself lost in space, answering questions from his kids and husband that will absolutely break your heart. I cried. A lot.

Gastronaut is near-future sci-fi about a bougie foodie who goes on a journey to discover the food of the Asian diaspora throughout the solar system. And things go...very bad. This show loves food so much and it loves the characters even more.

Midnight Burger is...everything. How do you even describe it. It's hard sci-fi dressed up in a found family package and served with fries. Or maybe beans and rice, if Gloria's cooking. It is a deeply cynical show that nevertheless insists that the universe is worth fighting for, with everything you've got.

The Pasithea Powder is explicitly written for people who like a gritty, uncomfortable, messy romance. Like, did you like Stucky fanfic? So do the writers and it's amazing. The tagline is that a retired fighter pilot/war hero and a disgraced scientist/war criminal used to be best friends. They still might be, if the other one will pick up the phone.

Second Star to the Left is about colonization and xenobiology and the kinds of connections you can make light years away from each other. It's about rules and when it's okay to break them. It's beautiful.

Startripper!! is also very ANA and Inn Between--an accountant decides to ditch his day job, buy the far-future equivalent of a Millennium Falcon replica, and travel the universe for the rest of his life. It's so fun.

The Strange Case of the Starship Iris is like, if Firefly had real Asians in it. It's about a group of space smugglers turned galaxy heroes, and it's absolutely incredible.

Travelling Light is another travelogue, but this one features a person doing archival work for their community and meeting amazing people and hearing amazing stories while they do it. It's so gentle and wonderful.

World Gone Wrong is a chat podcast between two separated roommates who are trying to make sense of the end of the world. Like what do you do with that extra hour in the day now? Is my community going to lose its mind because some of the trees look like women? How can I throw a poetry jam that's inclusive for my werewolf friends? It's so well crafted and well acted. I think about it every day.

Wow this ended up long. There's a few to get you started!

[markrosewater]

Let's say that you have a plane that you don't think could mechanically support an entire set for whatever reason, but it does have a positive fan response. You now have the option of fitting it into a travelogue set aside more established planes. Is there space to plant seeds (worldbuilding, legendary creatures, etc) that you could then use for the backdrop of a future set if the reaction from the general public winds up positive, or are travelogue sets too crowded for that?

If we sample something and the players adore it, it definitely increases the chance of us setting a whole expansion there.

[artheresy]

The legacy of a craftsman

The amount of space that Blade and Yingxing takes up in my brain is feeling increasingly concerning. I can't stop thinking about them...

Like now that it's finally not just a leak, has anyone else read Baiheng's Travelogues about the Xianzhou Zhuming? Featuring Baby Yingxing??

Literally the second one devastates me emotionally I can't even explain it. Yingxing being so discouraged by the masters on the Zhuming who are long life species degrading him to the point he, a child, talks about how he'll probably never live to see his parents be avenged after what the Borisin did???

THAT HURTS

And God I can't even,

GOD if I could properly put into words the fact that Yingxing is a craftsman being so important to his character and identity and how Hoyoverse making a point to specify the injuries that occurred to his hands in whatever gray transition period happened between Yingxing and Blade that made him unable to craft weapons again is such a tragic visual to completely severe the two identities, that is ALL you would hear from me ever.

Because see the thing about Yingxing being a craftsman is that all stems from a goal in his past. As a child his home planet was taken over and turned into a weapons nursery, his parents were slaughtered, it became his goal as a child to create technology and weapons for the Cloud Knights to fight terrifying monsters like the Borisin. And that goal ended up defining the rest of his life, going on to become the Legendary Furnace Master on the Xianzhoh Luofu. That ended up becoming part of his legacy with the HCQ. It's clear how heavily important that part of his identity is defining not just his time in the HCQ but his time on the Zhuming, and everything that occurred to him as a child to lead him to that exact goal. His whole past.

And for Hoyoverse to specify how Blade's hands have been hurt to the point of no longer being dexterous, to the point of no longer being able to forge a weapon ever again, as those injuries cannot be healed by whatever Abundance shit he has going on since they likely happened before he became immortal(?). It just... it is devastating. It's something used as a way to severely separate the two of them so people realize they are two different identities on top of Blade already making it clear he sees Yingxing as dead. The way that they went about his hands... it's not merely that he relinquished that identity, which would be him no longer making weapons out of choice. It is that he can't connect to that identity anymore, the change he went through was far too severe. Thus he cannot make weapons anymore, he has been stripped of any ability to.

I'll make like a better post explaining this later, but I believe the use of Yingxing status as a craftsman and Blade's inability after he was revived TO craft anything is fundamentally used as a tie to the separate of identity between them and it's so well used and so tragically used.

Because again, it is not that he lost Yingxing's passion for it or decided on a different path. It is a wall that separates him from being able to do what Yingxing did in the past just as he is unable to connect to the identity his body held before death.

[uwmspeccoll]

Spotlight: Joanne Kyger

I found this book while looking through the stacks for something completely different and noticed the illustration on the cover and decided to investigate further. Sadly the cover has a big ol' call number sticker smack-dab over the title, but the book is Trip Out and Fall Back by California native beat/Black Mountain/New York School/uncategorizable poet Joanne Kyger. It was published in 1974 by Arif Press in Berkeley, California and features drawings by American artist and curator Gordon Baldwin, who was part of the same community as Kyger in Bolinas, California.

The book is a "notebook-like poetic travelogue composed of social, geographic, temporal, and spiritual movements" following a cross-country journey from California to Brooklyn. The poems are big and small at once, capturing moments and movements under the sprawling skies of the United States. Kyger, who practiced Buddhism, said the following of her own work in a 2005 artist's statement:

"The shape of the day, the words of the moment, what's happening around me in the world of interior and exterior space—these are my writing concerns. Living in a semi-rural environment the cast of characters in my poems are often the quail, deer, raccoons, coyote bush, oaks, the ocean, the weather, and a few treasured friends. All are equally valid in the environment of place. Some talk more than others. My attention to writing is a daily practice, which then builds an accumulative narrative of chronology. Which ends up as the story of one's life. An historical sense of 'self,' breathing and experiencing what is common to every human—the local, the ordinary, the non-motivated sense of just 'being.' One is also aware of the accumulations of lineage of all those writing persons who have come before and to whom one owes the inheritance of this written moment."

View more Spotlight posts.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[ftl-faster-than-life]

if barry were to get his own flash book or even a duo book with hal like superbat's world's finest what kind of stuff would you want to see in it? any interesting ideas? personally I would love barry to explore the multiverse even a buddy cop multiverse adventure with hal sounds fun.

My pet idea is for Barry, Hal and Iris to head off into space, with the boys doing their thing--Barry hasn't gotten a chance to dismantle an alien dictatorship in a while--and Iris playing 'war correspondent' in space, with a bit of travelogue thrown in. And occasionally pulling the boys out of a sticky situation. I think it'd be fun. Hal definitely lets Iris ride on the back of the motorcycle construct while Barry gets stuck in the sidecar. Every once in a while he takes mercy on Barry and makes it a hamster ball.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #21 – Danubia by Simon Winder

I picked this up because I’ve been trying to read one history book a month, and I happened to scroll past a viral tumblr post with a quote from its introduction as I was figuring out which book that would be for April. Helpfully, there was no one ahead of me waiting for it in the library. A one-paragraph quotation and the book’s cover aside, I went it basically entirely blind. The book took a bit of adjusting to.

The book is a history of Central Europe through the lens of the Habsburg Dynasty, and it is a history of the Habsburg Dynasty through Winder’s extensive travelogue visiting every historical city and museum exhibit in the Danube basin. A roughly chronological sequence of events is followed (common and sometimes extensive tangents and diversions notwithstanding), but nearly every new section is introduced with an anecdote of visiting some town, castle or church that was relevant to the events about to be discussed, and a contemplation of its aesthetic significance to the modern traveller.

Meandering aside, the book does a good job of covering the broad sweep of a millennium of history and hits all the high points you expect it to (Charles V, Rudolph’s Prague, the 30 Years War, 1848, 1866, 1914, etc). The basic dynastic and political history is broken up and intermixed with a surprising amount of time dedicated to the cultural products of each era, which one does very much get the sense are what really fascinates Winder. The painters, composers and architects features get space that’s determined less by their general modern fame or contemporary significance and more because they happened to capture the author’s interest. I certainly came out of this with far more opinions about Vienna’s classical music output across the ages than I expected.

Winder’s voice is strong to the point of overpowering throughout. Which is quite deliberate I’m sure – this is a breezy read full of cute trivia, not a monograph – but even still, it sometimes gets a bit much. Instead of an academic lecture the effect is similar to listening to a guy whose perhaps not quite as insightful or interesting as he thinks he is hold forth over drinks in what only barely qualifies as a conversation. The effect is usually quite charming! But it does wear on you. It also makes getting particularly caught up on the precise accuracy of every bit of trivia feel kind of beside the point.

Winder is also a middle-class guy from southern England, which I might feel bad about saying ‘and you can tell’ if he didn’t bring it up himself quite so much. Anyway, knowing this makes the whole pitch of the book as ‘a walk through the age and region where all the slaving and massacres and depopulation and brutality we associate with Over There happened in Europe too” make so incredibly more sense. Even if it perhaps still shows an ever-so-slightly naive view of what preodern history also looked like in Western Europe.

Still, a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the sheer brutality of early modern religious warfare, both between the Ottomans and various Christian princes and coalitions, and between different sects of Christians. Winder thankfully has no taste at all for grand battles or heroic violence, and devotes as little wordcount to the various epoch-defining wars as he can get away with. He’s more interested in the consequences of them, the brutal and brutalizing violence that led to the depopulation and resettlement of what became the Hapsburg empire several times over across its history.

Which leads into the book’s other main theme. Winder is very much not a fan of nationalism, especially of the kind that made the region’s 20th century such an apocalypse. The book views it as an absurd horror in general, and even moreso in a region where every city and ‘national homeland’ was hopelessly intermixed, and every land continually resettled. The last chapters make the point that the ‘nationality’ of much of the population was, if not arbitrary, then certainly contingent, with massive amounts of assimiliation across national and ethnic lines happening quite late into the 19th century (and before that, historical nationality being more happenstance of language and religion that any primordial cultural essence). It is only as the Habsburg’s legitimizing mythology fell apart that nationalism became the only vital organizing force in the empire, and the grounds on which battle lines were drawn and spoils competed over.

The book does portray the whole latter 19th century as a dialectic between increasingly absurd and ineffectual but (and so) increasingly benign Hapsburg rule to the rising and inevitably exclusionary and vicious nationalisms that would tear it apart. The closest thing to the political left that makes a sustained appearance is Napoleon. Which is somewhat excusable in terms of what the post-Habsburg political situation did end up looking like, I suppose, but given the size and significance of the SDAPO it’s a bit of a gap. One more way the author shines through, I suppose.

The tragic epilogue is of course that Europe now is full of (more-or-less, if you squint) neat and semi-homogenus nation-states. Not because of any peaceful triumph of liberal nationalism and self-determination, but rather one outburst after another of apocalyptic violence, of emptied cities and gore-soaked fields. The book was written before both the current invasion of Ukraine and the most recent war in Gaza, but had either been ongoing they probably would have gotten referenced as further examples of the bloody logic of nation-building (Winder have basically categorized Zionism as the Jewish iteration of the general outburst of homeland-conquering nationalisms in later Austria-Hungary, with the Palestinians in the same unfortunate position as the inconveniently-non-Romanian Magyars in Transylvania.)

Anyway, overall a fairly charming read, and Winder’s steadfast belief that the only real justification for the Habsburg Dynasty is all the weird art they paid for is very endearing. But more entertaining than enlightening, I suppose? And if I hadn’t read it in small daily chunks Winder’s voice would have worn on me until I wanted to reach through the pages and pour a drink on him halfway through the second tangent about his family vacation in Paris.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

A former Rookie contributor and creator of the popular blog Effing Dykes investigates the disappearance of America’s lesbian bars by visiting the last few in existence. Lesbian bars have always been treasured safe spaces for their customers, providing not only a good time but a shelter from societal alienation and outright persecution. In 1987, there were 206 of them in America. Today, only a couple dozen remain. How and why did this happen? What has been lost—or possibly gained—by such a decline? What transpires when marginalized communities become more accepted and mainstream? In Moby Dyke, Krista Burton attempts to answer these questions firsthand, venturing on an epic cross-country pilgrimage to the last few remaining dyke bars. Her pilgrimage includes taking in her first drag show since the onset of the pandemic at The Back Door in Bloomington, Indiana; competing in dildo races at Houston’s Pearl Bar; and, despite her deep-seated hatred of karaoke, joining a group serenade at Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge and enjoying the dreaded pastime for the first time in her life. While Burton sets out on the excursion to assess the current state of lesbian bars, she also winds up examining her own personal journey, from coming out to her Mormon parents to recently marrying her husband, a trans man whose presence on the trip underscores the important conversation about who precisely is welcome in certain queer spaces—and how they and their occupants continue to evolve. Moby Dyke is an insightful and hilarious travelogue that celebrates the kind of community that can only be found in windowless rooms soundtracked by Britney Spears-heavy playlists and illuminated by overhead holiday lights no matter the time of year.

[esteemed-excellency]

RE: Hiram's lodgings

Lore drop under the cut for everyone who's curious about the Townhouse, this is your chance to snoop around

Hiram coordinates all his affairs from his sanctum at the Brass Embassy and the Bazaar. He officially works for the Foreign Office, meeting diplomats in Wilmot's End, at the Palace, and overzee. He supervises his shady businesses from the Cabinet Noir in Balmoral, and he uses the Rooms above a Gambling Den as a secondary meeting location.

He keeps all his research notes and scientific papers at the university and at the Embassy sanctum, with backup texts in Parabola. There's backups of backups scattered around different lodgings like the Rooms above a Bookshop and a recently acquired Sanguine Château, in case of emergency. He keeps track of every single document and duplicate copy in his possession, never storing all his belongings in one place.

The Townhouse is the only lodging with an aesthetical purpose, other than functional: he needs a place to keep all the items he collected over the years, but almost everything is expendable in case of emergency. All the most important documents and personal items are in his rooms on the second floor, the only place he truly considers home.

The house staff is employed exclusively to look after the house and the guests, and even if the majority of them comes from a shady background they don't do any criminal work. Since Hiram is often out they can do whatever they want, as long as the house and the guests are looked after. The Second Floor is the only part of the house not accessible to guests, and if someone gets too curious the fingerkings can have everyone who gets too close to the mirrors.

Including foyers, bathrooms, facilities, balconies, corridors, store spaces, and other rooms I forgot to account for, the Townhouse consists of:

Basement: kitchen, pantry, scullery, store room, servants' dining room, cellar, vault. Other than the main stairwell, a servants staircase connects the basement to all the other floors. The vault holds some liqueurs, too expensive to be simply kept in the cellar, spirits (the alcoholic kind), spirits (the non-alcoholic kind), and whatever Hiram is smuggling around town on a daily basis. An old additional stairwell connects the basement to the attic but nobody knows about it, and if anyone discovers it they don't remember it for long. Hiram burned all the floor plans years ago (don't worry about it for now).

Ground Floor: porch, entrance hall, parlour, dining room, main library (literature, gothic novels, classics, poetry, theatre, art)

First Floor: drawing room, guest rooms + dressing rooms, budoir/fumoir (depending on the guests), second library (travelogues, naval tales, maps, globes, scientific treatises, penny dreadfuls).

Second Floor: Hiram's rooms + dressing room, private study, private library (law books, trade almanacs, hyper specific scientific treatises, proscribed material of various kinds). The main corridor is full of mirrors, and it's the only floor with mirrors big enough to allow entrance to Parabola. They're always covered when Hiram is at home. The curtains are almost always drawn in every room and the light is dimmer than in the rest of the house. A secret compartment in a bureau desk holds Hiram's infernal contract and an old stash of letters.

??? Room: (ok you can worry about it now) accessible only via mirror. It should be connected to the secret staircase but the door is always locked from the inside, and the outside is walled up and covered by another wall section, the staircase is just beside it. There's no windows. The room holds the Shrine to St Joshua, a weapon rack, a small vault with the Leasehold on all of London, some fragments of the Tragedy Procedures, a bottle of Brandy, and a few other items. The mirror is always covered. A pickaxe guarantees an emergency exit.

Third floor: servants' quarters and offices. Few of them can stand Hiram playing music at ungodly hours and they take turns sleeping at the townhouse. They all have their own lodgings and accomodations.

Attic: the main stairwell ends at the third floor, and the attic is only accessible via the servants staircase. The butler and some urchins are aware of the additional secret staircase, but the butler can't be bothered with it, and the urchins don't like to forget what they were doing every time they go down the stairs. There's no fun in sending someone to steal biscuits from the basement if they forget to bring them back upstairs.

Other than the house staff, the polycule, some urchins, and Hiram himself, the (semi)permanent residents include:

A Hungover Terrier, often out and about with the bohemians.

The Midnight Matriarch: you can pet her in your dreams if you fall asleep in the guest rooms.

A Lamp-Cat: the best bioluminescent bedlight. You can pet it but it will sit on your lap. If you try to sleep it will sit on the bed. Or on you. Pros: very cute. Cons: very humid.

A Bat with Attitude, permanet resident in the attic.

Two Raven Advisors. One white, one black. One always tells the truth, one always lies. Or so they say.

Sugarplum (Hiram's)

Sugarplum (Captain Dargor's)

Sugarplum (Giorgione's)