#trigonometry was NOT fun

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson, Catching Up

The Musgrave Ritual part 1 and 2: The fun bits

- Sometime in the decade between Study in Scarlet (1880-1881) and the frame story for The Musgrave Ritual, Holmes’ household habits have changed. During Study, he’s trying very hard to be the ideal roommate, now he keeps his correspondence stabbed to the mantel and has shot some new decorations into their wall. Based on the fact that The Sign of The Four, which we may or may not skip, was published in 1890, Watson and Holmes are (probably) not living together full time at the time of this story’s publication. Most likely Watson wrote this story several years before it’s publication in The Strand (probable: this was the eighteenth Holmes short story published, and The Strand had only started publishing them in 1891). - On the other hand, a change in Holmes’ household habits and Watson moving in briefly to help could correlate with a rough time for Holmes in his canonical battles with depression and drugs. I’ll likely have more conclusions about this possible event as we analyze all the other cases published during this period. 

- The framing device for Gloria Scott and the framing device for Musgrave are both Holmes and Watson kicking around the (disastrous) living room on a winter evening. Possibly the two tales were related to Watson within a very short period, one where Watson needed some ready fodder for his monthly submission to The Strand.  - Holmes lived near the British Museum when he was first trying to start a career. No conclusions here, I just think it’s a good idea if you’re going to impulsively study anything that seems relevant.  - Musgrave is yet another classmate with a limited social circle. Not as lonely as Victor Trevor, but seen as a bit stuck up (or shy: Holmes is seeing the best in his old classmates) during their school days. He’s doing all right socially (and economically via the family’s fortune) right now but he still approaches Holmes when things start to look a little scandalous within his household. - Musgrave’s first reaction to seeing somebody wandering the house at night, as an insomniac in a house with about twelve other people living in it, is to think “It must be a burglar!” and grab an antique axe. You really have to wonder what he would have done if it was one of the maids making a cup of tea or a footman borrowing a book instead of his butler snooping in a locked cabinet of family documents.  - Snooping through your employer’s documents in the middle of the night isn’t great but employment for servants during this period was pretty precarious. Because of letters of recommendation and servants at a country house generally being local people with very few other grand country houses nearby to apply for jobs at, you could definitely have your livelihood destroyed over a minor mistake or misunderstanding with your employer. Even if, like Musgrave and Brunton, you’ve watched your current employer grow up.

- On the other hand, Victorian nobility appears to have understood that human beings get sick and should generally recover instead of going to work during that time. I can’t quite tell if Rachel Howells is supposed to have been ill for the whole month after Brunton jilted her, and “brain fever” covers a lot of potential diagnoses (depression? Anxiety? Unrelated illness that happens to coincide and isn’t immediately obvious as something else?) - Generally speaking I’m not going to get into the internal racism / classism notes on people coming from formerly independent countries within the United Kingdom, especially when compared with an English Lord. I don’t have the expertise or the time. Just note that Rachel Howells having an “excitable Welsh Temperament” is supposed to be a clue. - The Musgrave Ritual scavenger Hunt Guide. I have always loved this scavenger hunt guide and I used to attempt to make similar ones and try to force my neighbors to solve them. It did not go well, overall, and I might have been bad at it.   - Victorians, lacking chemical analysis for their historical papers, (at least, chemical analysis that wouldn’t destroy the whole thing) dated them by spelling trends. - Hurlstone Manor does not appear to be a real place. (West Sussex, however, is.) The oldest homes in West Sussex that I can google appear to date to the Elizabethan era (1558-1603), some time before the reign of King Charles from 1625 to 1649. Obviously if “Musgrave’s” name was altered to prevent embarrassment, the name of his family’s seat would be as well.  - This story tricked me, at age twelve, into thinking that trigonometry would be fun.

[teachyouhowtodothesponge]

And now, some good ol' Wally content before the update! So excited!

[guarddogbutch]

i need to be someone's gross older sister. i need to be a pervy girlfailure older sister who makes you sit on her lap and stares at your tits.

[flowanon]

Math-related school projects are always so out-of-pocket istg 😭

Lore dump for anybody who’s interested because I love these guys:

This is Swift, local pathetic crackhead burglar. He has approximately 37 mental illnesses and is banned from most public spaces. 👍

His name is actually “Soot,” but he goes by “Swift” for the same reasons Eugene goes by “Flynn Rider.”He’s meant to be a literal play on the phrase "cat burglar," but, much like Kathleen Kennedy, he thoroughly sucks at his job. Yes, all of his gadgets are cat-toy themed and magically manifest from behind his back. I believe his personality is best summed up by “sass with a side of class." The lamp he's carrying does have lore significance ("Local Unemployed Crackhead Releases A Bubbly Ancient Genie That For Some Reason Talks Like A Victorian Child" (her name is Foxtail btw)), but I'm not too sure where I want to take it as of yet. :]

Also, the giraffe is Gerald. He’s just some guy don’t worry about him.

As a bonus, here’s the first drawing I ever did of Swift. It’s definitely not the best, but still fun to look back on:

[hrokkall]

The universe heard you had coursework and decided that everything cool and exciting needed to happen right now (mood)

- 🥊

HEAD IN MY HANDS

[hungwy]

one of those nights where i wish i had the foundations to learn about difficult math things but i never even got past fully learning dealing with fractions and percents

[blissfali]

brother iam going to bomb this math placement test straight into the ground. im talking another 40 semesters of college just to make up the math i need for my major and by then ill have already killed everyone

[mothric]

You're right that if you did just find the sum of all the little dx bits you would just get x, but if you imagine a graph y=f(x), and you want to find the area underneath that line, you split it into lots of little rectangles of width dx then add them together. It's the sum of every y value along that line multiplied by dx. -Sooty

hello sooty my cool friend sooty

I wish I could nod and say "oh I see!" but alas, the introduction of graphs and the letter y has only deepened my confusion. I think I might sort of understand what I'm meant to be visualizing if I squint really hard? but I haven't been in any sort of math class for 10 years and my exposure to a math class with graphs (precalculus) was even longer ago, so it's not your fault lol. I appreciate the attempt to help!

[shadowsandstarlight]

Nobody warned me that this high school physics course involved fucking nuclear and quantum physics

[kirafanxx69420]

why did i take humanities as my strand, literally 5 different social science/political classes when my favorite subject is Math

genmath my beloved oh my god i love math

[fallow-grove]

Hello fallow do you like traimgles

yes i do, they are the Danger Shape!!!!

[woahajimes]

i think tumblr was the first to show me i was not made for HL Lang&Lit

[crescentmp3]

nevermind. physics is my friend actually

[supercantaloupe]

also i think it would be a lot easier for me to care about my french hw if it was like. analyze this chapter of some book or whatever. instead of. pretend you're applying to a job

[an-organized-confusion]

Neurotypes run a wide spectrum and just thinking about how Gymrat!Roman experiences his dyscalculia.

He is okay with basic addition and subtraction mentally or scratching it on paper. Things start to get confusing with multiplication/division... don’t get him started on exponents or roots. He’s gonna nope out of the room whenever algebra+ get talked about.

And him being hopeless with most things tech don’t help (Remus got all those kindsa smarts), so using calculators probs gives him some anxiety about if he did the operations right 99% of the time.

BUT. He can learn schemas using math in very specific concepts but if he has to apply them in other contexts, their rigidity becomes apparent. (Co-conspirator suggests he can be good with finances. And I think I’d add, if he has to learn how to use a computer system like at his telemarketer job? He has to learn everything from ground up and struggles to transfer those skills into similar systems.)

Roman really struggled in school because of all this (and is one of the reasons why his uncle treated him so poorly).

[i-want-ur-yard]

I swear to god if I have to look at one (1) singular more equation I will quit school forever and fuck off into the sunset never to be seen again