#using the UK cover because that's the copy I have

[emilyofthegreenwood]

"Not For the Faint of Heart" by Lex Croucher

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024 || Read and reviewed in August 2024

Lex Croucher’s “Not For the Faint of Heart” is another book for the short, but growing list of sapphic Robin Hood novels. It’s interesting that this is the first entry where our main queer characters are not Robin and Marian themselves, but original characters who interact and exist within the Robin Hood universe, which makes it somewhat easier to explore the Robin Hood story setting without worrying as much about centuries of lore. The author describes this as a “historical fantasy romcom”, which is exactly how I’d describe it.

This book follows Mariel (Robin Hood’s granddaughter) and a healer named Clem who gets swept along in an adventure with the current iteration of the Merry Men. Robin is retired and gone from Sherwood, and leadership has fallen to his son-in-law who runs the outlaws more like a militia, focused on violently protecting their territory rather than helping the local community. In this confusing era of Sherwood Forest outlaws, Mariel, Clem, and their small company of quick-witted, queer outlaws slowly shifts the mission and priorities back to its roots. And they're all hilarious, too.

For any reader who wants to go on an adventure with a queer found family through Sherwood Forest, cracking (knowingly anachronistic) jokes and counting squirrels, this is the book to read! For sure! I had a great reading experience most of the time, despite some personal issues that I had with it. 

Coming into any Robin Hood book, I come fully equipped and over-informed, along with my deeply personal preconceived ideas. With books like “Not For the Faint of Heart”, I knew that it was important to set as many of those aside as I could and enjoy it for what it is intended to be. In this case, a queer adventure romcom. 

And I did enjoy it! But I have some qualms, too. It won’t affect the reading experience for the majority of people, but I found it disappointing that Marian was given such short shrift, with only a few one-off lines to let readers know that she existed. For a character who has an origin story of cross-dressing, running to the forest, and getting into sword fights, she seems well-suited to be more involved than she was in a sapphic Robin Hood novel.* (See below the “read more” for a spoiler related to this comment.) 

Although I was cruelly deprived of seeing Marian as a grandma, Robin as a grandpa was the sweetest thing, and I have no complaints. My favorite thing about this book is undeniably grandpa Robin, who does have an impact on his granddaughter and is a kind and supportive figure in her young life, and someone that she clearly looks up to and respects. I loved that.

Some fun easter eggs I enjoyed: 

The book opens with Clem making a bycocket for a fox

They use a horn (one time) as the predetermined signal for help, and it’s actually hilarious. “We have purchased a particularly horrible horn. You’ll know it when you hear it.”

I identify as a lesbian, and I’m writing this in my Robin Hood Corner™, so I am the target audience for this book in many ways. I enjoyed reading this! I read a good 60% of it in one sitting. It’s hard to say no to a bunch of queer characters adventuring through Sherwood Forest making Robin Hood puns and jokes. But even though I enjoyed reading this, “Not For the Faint of Heart” is not my perfect sapphic Robin Hood book and it made me consider what I’m really looking for when I search out and read books like this. What is it that I want? Can I actually find that in a sapphic Robin Hood novel? 

Here’s what I landed on: I’m not sure that I can find the perfect sapphic Robin Hood story for me, but! I don’t need to feel personally represented by characters on-page in a Robin Hood story because my personal identity is already so wrapped up in Robin Hood. I’m already there, whether or not my specific sexual and romantic identity is included. Even if this isn’t the perfect fit for me, it's delightful to know that sapphics and other queer folks get to read books like this where they can find a niche for themselves in the wide world of Robin Hood stories. The story of Robin Hood is for everyone.

Robin Hood Shelf: for more Robin Hood book reviews

*Minor spoiler below the cut!

In the distant past of this book, Robin and Marian amicably end their relationship so that Robin and Will Scarlet can get married, with Marian’s complete encouragement and support. With my aforementioned deeply personal preconceived ideas, I feel kind of weird about Robin and Marian being with anyone other than each other. But okay! That’s fine. I can appreciate the heart of this. Unfortunately, rather than allow Marian to stick around as a capable outlaw and a good friend, she dies without explanation and has little to no impact on the Merry Men or her granddaughter. Sigh. Marian has a habit of dying off-page in Robin Hood novels, and I was disappointed to see that continued here. 

In the end, none of that matters to the average reader. I mean, I learned this information in a grand total of four brief lines across the whole book, so it could be very easy for the average reader to skip right over this. It’s just that I have a shelf of Marian books and a Marian spreadsheet, so I care more than most about this.

[sgiandubh]

Good morning to you...as always, this person is very indignant and enraged.

https://www.tumblr.com/maximumwobblerbanditdonut/748583730081333248/the-unexpected-guests?source=share

Dear (returning) Mythomaniac Anon,

Sorry for the delay and see below why. Well, then: how was that, at their end of the rope, across the street?

I know, I am quoting BIF (that petty, nasty, condescending woman), their Main Intellectual Luminary (LOL for years), but see how easy it is to boomerang anything?

And I will even suit myself and quote her some more, lookie here:

I am not even sorry. Karma is a bitch, like that and it seems to have backfired badly on BIF's comadre, 'Max'. You see, I can immediately tell when people who have NO idea about what LAW really is, start talking about it. They will always be oh so damn literal and oh so damn mechanical in their 'reasonings'. I mean, if law were to be read as is, why would we even bother going to law school, right? Why not have AI sort it out, literally and mechanically, too (and boy does 'Max' sound like an android when she starts droning her maximum wobbling bullshit)? You see, in law, it's never enough to copy/paste something, because this is about people, money and interests, being those individual or collective. Timelines are important (and indispensable in any legal approach), but never enough: what makes the difference is always the particular context and the interpretation of facts - that is, by the way, called jurisprudence, when it becomes a legally binding precedent (not our modest case, here), in common law system countries (the UK, the US) or a complementary source of law, like in Roman/Civil law systems, such as the French and Romanian ones, which I know best. There is a technical distinction between those two concepts (legally binding precedent and complementary source of law) and I once passed a whole year written exam in Public French Law with honors, picking this exact topic, but I won't bother you with it, Anon. In a nutshell, tread carefully when you open that droning mouth and leave no stone unturned, if possible. Otherwise, you'd make a fool out of yourself, with bullshit like this:

There is no Midhope Distillery Company Ltd, you fool. There once was the Midhope Castle Distillery Ltd, as I have abundantly shown in not one, but two posts. It did not 'change its name' in 2023, it was dissolved by voluntary write-off (third time might be a charm, across the street, maybe the coin would drop?). And one more time, for you Mordor people in the back: there is no way to know who the shareholders of a given company are, based on the Company House records, nor the amount of their participation. This is confidential information, as shown also in the Planning Proposal - once more, I repost the screenshot:

' The Business Plan, submitted (...) under Private and Confidential cover, provides background information on the applicant'. Including, but not limited to, the existing investors/shareholders - it is essential to show the local authorities your business project is not a whim or a dream.

She also writes confidently stuff like:

That is simply not true. As I have also shown in my last post, Outlander is explicitly mentioned in both the first and the revised Planning Proposals, as a strong argument for the entire business project. It may serve to remember that one of the elements justifying it was to provide the 20k seasonal visitors of the Midhope Castle Grounds an opportunity to access the (vastly) improved interior of the castle, along with a whisky related experience/discovery activity, accommodation and high-end dining opportunity. Again, I repost the screenshot, because those people are mendacious by nature and it is perhaps the only way to show them some facts (not useless factoids):

That being said, we can speculate and deduct a simple correlation between a company actively looking for investors to support their now vastly revised, ten-year project and an actor-cum-entrepreneur who might be interested/already involved in that project. Unless he'd make a formal announcement himself, at some point in time, there is no way to confirm. 'Max' should perhaps learn to water down her confident tone, sometimes, especially when it is obvious she did not look at the documents herself, used only Google in the arrogant and foolish hope 'those tinhat shippers are stupid' and has 0 (zero) legal expertise.

This whole thing might be pending approval, but let's not forget the first Planning Statement was approved back in 2020 (which is a good starting point), that they have secured a business partnership with the owner of the land, Lord Hope (the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow) and that as far as I could read during those past two days, all the reports seem ok, at least up until this point in time. I see no reason why they wouldn't meet and talk about it: on which planet is that such a big deal and on which planet could that be construed as 'conflict of interest' (another one of 'Max's' arguments), given the organic link between OL and Midhope, since 2013?

I also have made a hasty mistake, in my previous post, when dealing with Ken Robertson's participation to the project. He continued to be involved, as my penned timeline shows, in both Hopetoun Estate Distillery Ltd and Hopetoun Estate Whiskies Ltd, as a Director, continuously from May 2017 until their dissolution, in December 2022. Again, it's all on the timeline - see what I just did, here? LOL for a century and a half.

And for Marple's 'Sorry' clip, I have the perfect reply. Especially the chorus, of course - ignore the rest, it's about some Seventies playboy, quite an Alternate Universe from hers:

I will stop now, Anon. With the MPC Gala just round the corner, all the eyes will be on that one. This drama will probably draw to a fizzled denouement, as they always do, in this fandom. But I will follow that business project and report from time to time. I bet the farm we'll have news, rather sooner than later.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sphinxmumps Linkdump

On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

Welcome to my 20th Linkdump, in which I declare link bankruptcy and discharge my link-debts by telling you about all the open tabs I didn't get a chance to cover in this week's newsletters. Here's the previous 19 installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Starting off this week with a gorgeous book that is also one of my favorite books: Beehive's special slipcased edition of Dante's Inferno, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with new illustrations by UK linocut artist Sophy Hollington:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-inferno

I've loved Inferno since middle-school, when I read the John Ciardi translation, principally because I'd just read Niven and Pournelle's weird (and politically odious) (but cracking) sf novel of the same name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel)

But also because Ciardi wrote "About Crows," one of my all-time favorite bits of doggerel, a poem that pierced my soul when I was 12 and continues to do so now that I'm 52, for completely opposite reasons (now there's a poem with staying power!):

https://spirituallythinking.blogspot.com/2011/10/about-crows-by-john-ciardi.html

Beehive has a well-deserved rep for making absolutely beautiful new editions of great public domain books, each with new illustrations and intros, all in matching livery to make a bookshelf look classy af. I have several of them and I've just ordered my copy of Inferno. How could I not? So looking forward to this, along with its intro by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky and essay by Dante scholar Kristina Olson.

The Beehive editions show us how a rich public domain can be the soil from which new and inspiring creative works sprout. Any honest assessment of a creator's work must include the fact that creativity is a collective act, both inspired by and inspiring to other creators, past, present and future.

One of the distressing aspects of the debate over the exploitative grift of AI is that it's provoked a wave of copyright maximalism among otherwise thoughtful artists, despite the fact that a new copyright that lets you control model training will do nothing to prevent your boss from forcing you to sign over that right in your contracts, training an AI on your work, and then using the model as a pretext to erode your wages or fire your ass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Same goes for some privacy advocates, whose imaginations were cramped by the fact that the only regulation we enforce on the internet is copyright, causing them to forget that privacy rights can exist separate from the nonsensical prospect of "owning" facts about your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

We should address AI's labor questions with labor rights, and we should address AI's privacy questions with privacy rights. You can tell that these are the approaches that would actually work for the public because our bosses hate these approaches and instead insist that the answer is just giving us more virtual property that we can sell to them, because they know they'll have a buyer's market that will let them scoop up all these rights at bargain prices and use the resulting hoards to torment, immiserate and pauperize us.

Take Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool created by eugenicists and white nationalists in order to help giant corporations and militarized, unaccountable cops hunt us by our faces:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

Clearview scraped billions of images of our faces and shoveled them into their model. This led to a class action suit in Illinois, which boasts America's best biometric privacy law, under which Clearview owes tens of billions of dollars in statutory damages. Now, Clearview has offered a settlement that illustrates neatly the problem with making privacy into property that you can sell instead of a right that can't be violated: they're going to offer Illinoisians a small share of the company's stock:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/clearview_ai_reaches_creative_settlement/

To call this perverse is to go a grave injustice to good, hardworking perverts. The sums involved will be infinitesimal, and the only way to make those sums really count is for everyone in Illinois to root for Clearview to commit more grotesque privacy invasions of the rest of us to make its creepy, terrible product more valuable.

Worse still: by crafting a bespoke, one-off, forgiveness-oriented regulation specifically for Clearview, we ensure that it will continue, but that it will also never be disciplined by competitors. That is, rather than banning this kind of facial recognition tech, we grant them a monopoly over it, allowing them to charge all the traffic will bear.

We're in an extraordinary moment for both labor and privacy rights. Two of Biden's most powerful agency heads, Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra have made unprecedented use of their powers to create new national privacy regulations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

In so doing, they're bypassing Congressional deadlock. Congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history to newspaper reporters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

Congress hasn't given us a single law protecting American consumers from the digital era's all-out assault on our privacy. But between the agencies, state legislatures, and a growing coalition of groups demanding action on privacy, a new federal privacy law seems all but assured:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

When that happens, we're going to have to decide what to do about products created through mass-scale privacy violations, like Clearview AI – but also all of OpenAI's products, Google's AI, Facebook's AI, Microsoft's AI, and so on. Do we offer them a deal like the one Clearview's angling for in Illinois, fining them an affordable sum and grandfathering in the products they built by violating our rights?

Doing so would give these companies a permanent advantage, and the ongoing use of their products would continue to violate billions of peoples' privacy, billions of times per day. It would ensure that there was no market for privacy-preserving competitors thus enshrining privacy invasion as a permanent aspect of our technology and lives.

There's an alternative: "model disgorgement." "Disgorgement" is the legal term for forcing someone to cough up something they've stolen (for example, forcing an embezzler to give back the money). "Model disgorgement" can be a legal requirement to destroy models created illegally:

https://iapp.org/news/a/explaining-model-disgorgement

It's grounded in the idea that there's no known way to unscramble the AI eggs: once you train a model on data that shouldn't be in it, you can't untrain the model to get the private data out of it again. Model disgorgement doesn't insist that offending models be destroyed, but it shifts the burden of figuring out how to unscramble the AI omelet to the AI companies. If they can't figure out how to get the ill-gotten data out of the model, then they have to start over.

This framework aligns everyone's incentives. Unlike the Clearview approach – move fast, break things, attain an unassailable, permanent monopoly thanks to a grandfather exception – model disgorgement makes AI companies act with extreme care, because getting it wrong means going back to square one.

This is the kind of hard-nosed, public-interest-oriented rulemaking we're seeing from Biden's best anti-corporate enforcers. After decades kid-glove treatment that allowed companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Wells Fargo and Exxon commit ghastly crimes and then crime again another day, Biden's corporate cops are no longer treating the survival of massive, structurally important corporate criminals as a necessity.

It's been so long since anyone in the US government treated the corporate death penalty as a serious proposition that it can be hard to believe it's even happening, but boy is it happening. The DOJ Antitrust Division is seeking to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and they are tipped to win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And that's one of the major suits against Google that Big G is losing. Another suit, jointly brought by the feds and dozens of state AGs, is just about to start, despite Google's failed attempt to get the suit dismissed:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-loses-bid-end-us-antitrust-case-over-digital-advertising-2024-06-14/

I'm a huge fan of the Biden antitrust enforcers, but that doesn't make me a huge fan of Biden. Even before Biden's disgraceful collaboration in genocide, I had plenty of reasons – old and new – to distrust him and deplore his politics. I'm not the only leftist who's struggling with the dilemma posed by the worst part of Biden's record in light of the coming election.

You've doubtless read the arguments (or rather, "arguments," since they all generate a lot more heat than light and I doubt whether any of them will convince anyone). But this week, Anand Giridharadas republished his 2020 interview with Noam Chomsky about Biden and electoral politics, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind:

https://the.ink/p/free-noam-chomsky-life-voting-biden-the-left

Chomsky contrasts the left position on politics with the liberal position. For leftists, Chomsky says, "real politics" are a matter of "constant activism." It's not a "laser-like focus on the quadrennial extravaganza" of national elections, after which you "go home and let your superiors take over."

For leftists, politics means working all the time, "and every once in a while there's an event called an election." This should command "10 or 15 minutes" of your attention before you get back to the real work.

This makes the voting decision more obvious and less fraught for Chomsky. There's "never been a greater difference" between the candidates, so leftists should go take 15 minutes, "push the lever, and go back to work."

Chomsky attributed the good parts of Biden's 2020 platform to being "hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and other." That's the real work, that hammering. That's "real politics."

For Chomsky, voting for Biden isn't support for Biden. It's "support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics."

Chomsky tells us that the self-described "masters of the universe" understand that something has changed: "the peasants are coming with their pitchforks." They have all kinds of euphemisms for this ("reputational risks") but the core here is a winner-take-all battle for the future of the planet and the species. That's why the even the "sensible" ultra-rich threw in for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and why they're backing him even harder in 2024:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckvvlv3lewxo

Chomsky tells us not to bother trying to figure out Biden's personality. Instead, we should focus on "how things get done." Biden won't do what's necessary to end genocide and preserve our habitable planet out of conviction, but he may do so out of necessity. Indeed, it doesn't matter how he feels about anything – what matters is what we can make him do.

Chomksy himself is in his 90s and his health is reportedly in terminal decline, so this is probably the only word we'll get from him on this issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/1aj56hj/updates_on_noams_health_from_his_longtime_mit/

The link between concentrated wealth, concentrated power, and the existential risks to our species and civilization is obvious – to me, at least. Any time a tiny minority holds unaccountable power, they will end up using it to harm everyone except themselves. I'm not the first one to take note of this – it used to be a commonplace in American politics.

Back in 1936, FDR gave a speech at the DNC, accepting their nomination for president. Unlike FDR's election night speech ("I welcome their hatred"), this speech has been largely forgotten, but it's a banger:

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/acceptance-speech-at-the-democratic-national-convention-1936/

In that speech, Roosevelt brought a new term into our political parlance: "economic royalists." He described the American plutocracy as the spiritual descendants of the hereditary nobility that Americans had overthrown in 1776. The English aristocracy "governed without the consent of the governed" and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power":

Roosevelt said that these new royalists conquered the nation's economy and then set out to seize its politics, backing candidates that would create "a new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction…an industrial dictatorship."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, this has strong parallels to today's world, where "Silicon Valley, Big Oil, and Wall Street come together to back a transactional presidential candidate who promises them specific favors, after reducing their corporate taxes by 40 percent the last time he was president":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-14-speech-fdr-would-give/

Roosevelt, of course, went on to win by a landslide, wiping out the Republicans despite the endless financial support of the ruling class.

The thing is, FDR's policies didn't originate with him. He came from the uppermost of the American upper crust, after all, and famously refused to define the "New Deal" even as he campaigned on it. The "New Deal" became whatever activists in the Democratic Party's left could force him to do, and while it was bold and transformative, it wasn't nearly enough.

The compromise FDR brokered within the Democratic Party froze out Black Americans to a terrible degree. Writing for the Institute for Local Self Reliance, Ron Knox and Susan Holmberg reveal the long shadow cast by that unforgivable compromise:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/045dcde7333243df9b7f4ed8147979cd

They describe how redlining – the formalization of anti-Black racism in New Deal housing policy – led to the ruin of Toledo's once-thriving Dorr Street neighborhood, a "Black Wall Street" where a Black middle class lived and thrived. New Deal policies starved the neighborhood of funds, then ripped it in two with a freeway, sacrificing it and the people who lived in it.

But the story of Dorr Street isn't over. As Knox and Holmberg write, the people of Dorr Street never gave up on their community, and today, there's an awful lot of Chomsky's "constant activism" that is painstakingly bringing the community back, inch by aching inch. The community is locked in a guerrilla war against the same forces that the Biden antitrust enforcers are fighting on the open field of battle. The work that activists do to drag Democratic Party policies to the left is critical to making reparations for the sins of the New Deal – and for realizing its promise for everybody.

In my lifetime, there's never been a Democratic Party that represented my values. The first Democratic President of my life, Carter, kicked off Reaganomics by beginning the dismantling of America's antitrust enforcement, in the mistaken belief that acting like a Republican would get Democrats to vote for him again. He failed and delivered Reagan, whose Reaganomics were the official policy of every Democrat since, from Clinton ("end welfare as we know it") to Obama ("foam the runways for the banks").

In other words, I don't give a damn about Biden, but I am entirely consumed with what we can force his administration to do, and there are lots of areas where I like our chances.

For example: getting Biden's IRS to go after the super-rich, ending the impunity for elite tax evasion that Spencer Woodman pitilessly dissects in this week's superb investigation for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:

https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2024/06/how-the-irs-went-soft-on-billionaires-and-corporate-tax-cheats/

Ending elite tax cheating will make them poorer, and that will make them weaker, because their power comes from money alone (they don't wield power because their want to make us all better off!).

Or getting Biden's enforcers to continue their fight against the monopolists who've spiked the prices of our groceries even as they transformed shopping into a panopticon, so that their business is increasingly about selling our data to other giant corporations, with selling food to us as an afterthought:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

For forty years, since the Carter administration, we've been told that our only power comes from our role as "consumers." That's a word that always conjures up one of my favorite William Gibson quotes, from 2003's Idoru:

Something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

The normie, corporate wing of the Democratic Party sees us that way. They decry any action against concentrated corporate power as "anti-consumer" and insist that using the law to fight against corporate power is a waste of our time:

https://www.thesling.org/sorry-matt-yglesias-hipster-antitrust-does-not-mean-the-abandonment-of-consumers-but-it-does-mean-new-ways-to-protect-workers-2/

But after giving it some careful thought, I'm with Chomsky on this, not Yglesias. The election is something we have to pay some attention to as activists, but only "10 or 15 minutes." Yeah, "push the lever," but then "go back to work." I don't care what Biden wants to do. I care what we can make him do.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/15/disarrangement/#credo-in-un-dio-crudel

Image: Jim's Photo World (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimsphotoworld/5360343644/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[kimberleyjean]

What did Adam change? (Part 1)

To follow up on my recent reblog about the baby swap, I'm going to take a closer look at Adam where we leave him at the end of S1. Because, by the end of S1, Adam had changed quite a few things... and I'm going to use both the TV show and the book to provide evidence.

To become the Young's real son, I don't think Adam really needed to change all that much. He just says the words to Satan, Satan disappears, and that should be it, right? But no, because Adam goes much further, and I think he does it because he can.

Because Adam has opinions, you see. Opinions on how the world should be and what he wants to happen. Except, unlike Agnes, who needs to write a prophecy and then wait 300 years for her descendant to enact it, Adam can just make it so.

The Other Two Babies

I originally thought about putting all the things Adam changes into a single post, but instead I'm going to make this a short series of posts, because he changes a fair bit. Let's start with where we left off with the baby swap, crack open a copy of the book and discuss the changes for Warlock and Greasy first.

Warlock

Here's some excerpts of Warlock flying home from Megiddo to America (my bolds for emphasis):

It was Sunday afternoon. High over England a 747 droned westwards. In the first-class cabin a boy called Warlock put down his comic and stared out of the window.

...

And now he was going back to the States. There had been some sort of problem with tickets or flights or airport destination-boards or something. It was weird; he was pretty sure his father had meant to go back to England. Warlock liked England. It was a nice country to be an American in.

...

And Warlock flew on to America. He deserved something (after all, you never forget the first friends you ever had, even if you were all a few hours old at the time) and the power that was controlling the fate of all mankind at that precise time was thinking: Well, he's going to America, isn't he? Don't see how you could have anythin' better than going to America. They've got thirty-nine flavors of ice cream there. Maybe even more.

So it's Adam who has sent Warlock back to America, despite Warlock wanting (even, expecting) to be on his way to England. And he's controlling the fate of all mankind.

Greasy

Likewise, he has changes for Greasy Johnson too (the discarded baby who grows up to win prizes for his tropical fish).

The plane was at that point passing right above the Lower Tadfield bedroom of Greasy Johnson, who was aimlessly leafing through a photography magazine that he'd bought merely because it had a rather good picture of a tropical fish on the cover. A few pages below Greasy's listless finger was a spread on American football, and how it was really catching on in Europe. Which was odd… because when the magazine had been printed, those pages had been about photography in desert conditions. It was about to change his life.

Adam is deciding here how to alter Warlock and Greasy's paths. Warlock wants to be back in the UK, but Adam thinks America is better, while Greasy's magazine is changed to American football, which I guess is implying he's going to become an American footballer.

Now, not everyone may be aware, but these parts weren't in the first release of the novel. It only came about later, in the American edition. Apparently the changes were in response to prompting from the American editor, but they got "carried away" making those changes (source).

Season 3 (warning: speculation)

So, do you think this could be relevant for S3? For me personally, the fact that these bits were added later makes me wonder if this was helping to set up for a potential sequel. It's certainly poetic - just like the baby swap that originally involved all three, we are now implying a potential adolescent swap of Greasy, who is interested in American football, and Warlock, who is interested to return to the U.K.

If you've read at all about the hypothetical plot of the proposed written sequel, you'll know that it involved a trip to America, ostensibly to look for a lost Jesus. So, if the next book was originally meant to be about going and finding someone (Jesus?) in America, then Greasy or Warlock could make sense. It would be a switcheroo all over again if Warlock had left for the UK and Greasy for America.

Another alternative is that all three could end up converging in America, since Warlock already lives there and both Adam and Greasy have interests in going there. But if that's the intention, why mention that Warlock wants to be back "home" in the U.K.?

So, those are my possible takes on how this passage can be interpreted. I know there are some theories that either Greasy or Warlock may be the Second Coming. I've also seen a theory now that Adam himself could be a contender (both spawn of Satan and spawn of God - it'd certainly be interesting!). I'm not placing bets on any of these outcomes just yet.

In addition to this passage in the book, we also see some interesting changes made by Adam which are featured more prominently in the show - one's that have implications for the ineffable husbands.

Part 2 coming soon!

Thanks as always to everyone at the @ineffable-detective-agency (including @noneorother, @embracing-the-ineffable, @lookingatacupoftea, @251-dmr, @somehow-a-human, @maufungi, @havemyheartaziraphale, @theastrophysicistnextdoor, @dunkthebiscuit, @komorezuki, & @ghstptats).

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hi Elanor, we met briefly on the taping of your husband's fringe show and you were super nice, no good deed etc. I'm pretty sure I've seen you post about lecturing at a uni.

I've been thinking about heading back to uni for a master's, with the possibility of a career shift into academia after, but I'm somewhat wary of the lack of job security with fixed term contracts and such, and just generally unsure how one goes about getting a job teaching at uni. Most people I know in academia are primarily interested in research, with the idea of lecturing being mostly incidental, I'm almost the other way around.

How did you get started in your field, and how much of that do you think applies to new entrants today? Did you have to/get to make a choice between research and lecturing? Any insight you might have, or a starting point for further research would be greatly appreciated.

Hello again! It was lovely meeting you!

Sure, yes, so, my path in began as an HPL - an hourly paid lecturer. A colleague on my old degree course was signed off work with stress, so another old lecturer of mine was asking if any graduates wanted to do a bit of lecturing to cover him. It coincided with my job losing its main funding and so going to part time hours, so it worked.

It started as one module for one semester. Which became the module for the year, then two and a half the following year, then four the next two years. And then, under UK law, if you hold an HPL contract with the same institution for four years, they have to give you a proper contract, so now I'm on a permanent four days a week with full lecturer status.

And then if you do it that way round i.e. become a lecturer before holding a teaching qualification, the uni will pay to put you through a PCET - I'm due to finish my PCET in May this year.

HPL work... Well. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. HPLs are the lecturing equivalent of hospital cleaning staff - absolutely vital and chronically overlooked and underpaid. It's a zero hours position, so you get paid only for the time you spend actually delivering the lectures, at a rate (IIRC it was about £33 per hour?) that assumes one hour's prep for every two hours lecture. Needless to say, prepping a two hour lecture takes longer than an hour. You also don't get paid for the marking you do, and you receive basically no guidance on how to actually teach - best case scenario is that they can give you copies of the lecture slides used by previous academics in the role, which you can use as a guide or amend to your liking. And the final topping on the shit cake is that HPL contracts run for a semester at a time, so they very much fall into the 'precarious employment' bracket.

But, as I say, you can very quickly make yourself indispensable, and then after four years they have to give you a contract. Or, you just do it to mine it for the experience for a CV. I've known people who did HPL work for two unis at once while studying a PCET and then walked into a proper position in a third elsewhere.

Because the other root is to get a Masters, get a PCET (as part of which you need to do a placement anyway), and then apply for lecturer roles. Again, advantages and disadvantages - these days, lecturer roles are hotly contested. But it's very possible, I know many who have done it.

So! Regarding the other part of your question!

Some universities are more teaching focused, others are more research focused, some are a bit of both. If you know that the main thing you want to do is the teaching part, then you want to give priority to the universities that are more teaching focused themselves. These are usually the non-Russell Group prestigious ones, particularly the ones with a slightly more local student body. Anything with a qualifier like 'Metropolitan' after its name, either now or in the recent past, is a good idea - in Wales, for example, UWTSD includes the old Swansea Met, USW includes the old Cardiff Met, etc. Those are more teaching focused institutions (and therefore better at serving non traditional students, too, especially disabled ones), so in career terms, those are handy to shoot for.

(Also, those can have high turnovers of research academics by contrast. So it's usually relatively easy to get HPL work from them to plug employment gaps.)

Anyway - that's me. Good luck if you do decide to try it! Let me know if you have any other questions

[thisbluespirit]

How To Find Your (British Actor) Blorbo On The Radio: A Brief Guide

(Disclaimer: British, because the main tool I'm using is the BBC's Genome.)

If you want more of your fave actor, or you love full-cast drama podcasts/audios (and audiobooks/NF content too) here's a guide on how to get your hands on BBC Radio broadcasts.

The BBC have a great free resource called Genome, which has all the Radio Times listings from 1922 to the present day (plus some of the actual articles), and it's searchable. Up until its arrival, it was really hard to do that, so \o/

Not all actors do radio and not everything you find will be obtainable, but it's always worth a try! It's especially likely for actor-blorbos who do other audio work, or theatre (theatre tends not to pay so well, and radio is a handy extra thing that can be more easily slotted in between performances than TV/film.)

Go to Genome, and put your blorbo's name into the search box:

Press search, which will bring back a bunch of results from both radio and TV listings from 1922 up to the current year:

2. Filter down to "radio only" on the sidebar to avoid scrolling through all the TV. At the top of the page you can change the display order to First broadcast (or Availability, if you want it only to bring things currently available to stream on the BBC website), among other options.

I can also cut down on extraneous results by selecting a date range that only covers when my guy was active.

I scroll down until I find something that looks interesting, in this case a proper audio drama, called The Hornblower Story. It's from 1980 and is an adaptation of a well known book. The details give me enough info to search the wider internet, and see if I get lucky...

3. Search the internet and listen to your blorbo act in radio drama!

There are several ways to obtain radio drama online. If you use streaming sites like Audible and Spotify, it may be there, although usually only if it's had a commercial release.

The BBC still broadcast old programmes on the radio, so it might be currently available on their website to stream - and unlike TV, you can listen to BBC Radio anywhere in the world! (If you are in the UK, you can also download and use the BBC Sounds app.) The Genome will usually provide a link for you to go straight there, if that's the case.

However, obviously, most BBC Radio from past decades is not available commercially or being broadcast by the BBC now and some doesn't exist in the archives, or was never recorded (as with TV), but as methods of recording audio at home have been widely available since the 1950s and 60s, there are loads of off-air recordings of radio made by listeners/collectors, and some have freely shared their copies online. Some are in closed forums etc., but three good sites to try first are YouTube, RadioEchoes & the Internet Archive.

I usually start with a Google search - e.g. '"Title" radio' or radio bbc and if that doesn't give me anything add on first "Radio Echoes" and then "Internet archive" to the search.

And I'm in luck! Radio Echoes appear to have the adaptation I'm after. I need to check the broadcast dates to see if they match up & then I can stream or download for free - and hear my blorbo play a stern Admiral for 5 minutes or less, hurrah!

Clicking on the links takes you to a screen where you can press play to stream or right click on the play bar to download the mp3 file to your device. (Click the "Save audio as..." option).

These are archive off-air recordings, so the quality can vary, especially for older programmes.

4. Rinse and repeat with each new likely Genome discovery.

If you find a copy of what you're looking for on the Internet Archive instead, you'll get up a page with a play bar (like the one above), with episodes listed plus details (to varying degrees) below. If you want to stream, just click play and enjoy. If you want to download it, then click on the MP3 files line on the right-hand sidebar, which will then give you an "X no of files" button to click and you can download them to keep.

(You can download all the files, but I usually cut straight to the chase and just nab the MP3s.)

Sometimes the BBC have released a commercial audiobook. In those cases, if you already use audio/music streaming subscription sites like Audible or Spotify, you should be able to find it there.

If you don't, or you want to buy a download, I've found the best option (weirdly!) (for UK users, at any rate) is to get the audiobook up at Penguin Books, which links to various paid subscription streaming and download options, so you can find the best one for you (and you know it's been recced by a hopefully reputable source.)

Last year, I wanted to buy Vivat Rex, the BBC's landmark dramatisation of all the English history plays rolled into one giant starry-cast Jacobean audio serial, and successfully used this route. (I'm very old by internet terms and still like listening via MP3 files on my MP3 player, as long as it survives.)

Pretty much the only affordable download option I've found so far I got courtesy of Penguin's links to Hive. (But this may be a UK only option.)

If what you're looking for seems likely to exist even if you can't find it by any of these methods - keep trying! New things are being added daily to all these websites, and the BBC cycle round old shows all the time.

And if you want to go deeper, there are closed forums etc. for radio enthusiasts where you need to make an account, but you may then be able to torrent or download an even wider variety of things.

Of course, whether or not your blorbo has been in anything good or any radio at all will depend on them, but I hope this guide will help enable you to find out!

YouTube, Radio Echoes, the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio all have radio from other countries too. So while the BBC Genome can't help you with anywhere outside the UK, the other links here can be good places to look around and browse for things you might be interested in.

You can of course use the same methods to search for things like a favourite author, or particular plays, to see if the BBC have done any radio adaptations - BBC Radio have done heaps of things that have never been adapted on screen, so it's always worth a look for anything you'd be into.

Radio Echoes is browsable as well as searchable, and while Internet Archive is a bit less so, there are some excellent collections you can look through, like the Saturday Night Theatre collection, and the BBC Radio Shows listings.

[crystalverse-project]

hello, welcome to my mcyt blog, except it's only about one youtuber and it's not about the youtuber but only the character

this post is about the graphic novel trayaurus and the enchanted crystal. or to be more specific the fact i've found and bought two foreign language versions just to compare them both because i think translations are cool and interesting and i have autism and nobody's documented this and i have autism and the next thousand reasons consist of i have autism

trayaurus y el diamante encantado (spanish)

trayaurus et le cristal enchanté (french)

so i didn't even know this book got translated at all until a few months ago. and i managed to find both of these on amazon for reasonable prices, except the french one came with a broken spine and the only remaining spanish one is now demanding several hundred pounds for the only one left last time i checked.

i don't have a way of getting scans of this for preservation, so my phone camera's going to have to do. i also don't have an english copy anymore but i do have pictures of the pages to cross reference. this is what happens when you have a special interest guys you start cross referencing three versions of the same book at the same when you only know one language. (i haven't translated it all yet so i was looking at visual differences right now)

NOTE: all uses of "english" version refer to the original uk release. i've seen us releases that are so different they could be a different blogpost

back covers

for some reason the spanish copy is a lot less thick as the french and english ones? they all have the same pages so idk why that is. i can't remember which is the original way this spine faced, but everything is the same except the publisher logos.

according to copyright info the spanish version released in 2018, french 2017. i don't want to go past the picture limit so i'll just say there was an error on the spanish version where it said original title, it was written 'trayaurus and the enchanted cristal'. in the book the crystal is specifcally a diamond in spanish

in the introduction all the character names are white outlined with black in french, this wasn't a thing in english

the sound effects were translated in spanish and left english in french

various other text translations, in spanish one part was just blank

the two most interesting changes/errors:

the sign for trayaurus' office is translated in french but in spanish it's in english but in a different squished font? i'm not sure why they'd change that, i had to go get the pictures i took of the english one just to check i wasn't going insane

and here's a silly error i noticed on one page...in the french version the speech bubbles just went randomly off course

soon i'm going to try translate all the text to see if it's accurate/different, what i can make out now is pretty much the same.

we've found two other translations of this book, but for...political reasons i don't feel comfortable talking about them. if things were different in the world i would absolutely, because one of them is possibly bootleg and the other one has a flipped reading style so the whole book is the other way around. we HAVE found a full version of one but i don't want to offend or alienate anyone, so i won't talk about them.

i could, however, make more blog posts about the book, because it's inspired me so much. just not in a completely positive way. the story and characters i of course LOVED in the book, it's dantdm, favourite series in the whole world, my comfort series. the illustrations in the book though...um

i also found it being sold on a japanese site, but it wasn't translated. but i did see some of the tube heroes figures being sold on yahoo auctions in japan. i would try get a closer look but it's blocked in the uk and i don't have a vpn... ;-;

BONUS, ON THE TOPIC OF TRANSLATIONS:

before you ask, no, this is not ai generated, or a fandub.

there was this canadian kids show called "gaming show in my parents' garage" which was just stuff about kids playing video games and getting guest appearances, dan was in a few episodes!! but also it was dubbed and broadcast in central europe on a channel called megamax, this is a clip of the romanian dub. the guy doing dan's voice i found out is called alexandru rusu, and he does a lot of romanian dubbing for other shows. for just a few examples, he did the narration on this same show, cyborg on teen titans, geoff in total drama, the bus dude in fireman sam and the narrator in thomas the tank engine in the seasons where it wasn't cgi

[mariacallous]

In the summer of 2022, when Liz Truss was about to become prime minister, I noticed that she was an admirer of Rick Perlstein, one of the great historians of modern America. 

Aspiring politicians like to tell the media about their favourite writers, even if they barely look at a book from one year to the next. It gives them a touch of class.

But there was no doubt in this case that Truss was sincere, and knew Perlstein’s work intimately.

She told journalists from the Times that she read “anything” Perlstein wrote. An interviewer from the Atlantic magazine saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf, the third of his four-volume series on the rise of the radical right in the United States between 1960 and 1980, and said it was just the kind of book you’d expect her to read.

Then there was a weird moment in an interview with the Spectator when  an anonymous spokeswoman for the Truss campaign, who sounded very like Truss herself, explained that her rival Rishi Sunak was failing to win over Tory members because he refused to pander to their prejudices. 

“If people think there is an imaginary river,” the source said, “you don’t tell them there isn’t, you build them an imaginary bridge.”

You can find that quote at the beginning of the Perlstein history of the US right in the mid-1970s that was on Liz Truss’s bookcase.  And it is highly revealing. Perlstein picked it from a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in the late 1950s. The Soviet leader told the then US vice-president that politicians must create their own reality by pandering to the fear in their supporters’ minds. 

“If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there,” Khrushchev said, “you don’t tell them there’s no river out there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.”

Truss, or someone close to her was saying that Tories did not want to face facts. They wanted their fantasies confirmed, which is exactly what she did — at enormous cost to the country.

I contacted Perlstein and asked what he thought of having the UK’s next prime minister as a fan.

Let me put it like this: he may have been her favourite historian, but she was not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. He found her astonishingly stupid.

”Liz. Can’t. Read,” he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites would crash the economy.

As they went on to do.

Truss’s notion that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves had been developed in the 1970s. The new wealth of the already wealthy was meant to boost the economy and tax base and trickle down to the rest of society.

In the fourth volume of his series, Perlstein covered the grifters who sold the idea of self-funding tax cuts and explained how dubious they were.

And yet here, 50-years on, was his devoted reader Liz Truss reading his history as a guidebook rather than a warning.

Why do terrible ideas refuse to die?

You could say in this case that Truss was so stupid she did not understand the past. This was Perlstein’s point.

Then there’s greed. If you want to proselytise for tax cuts for the rich, you will never be short of a paying audience, as the Tufton Street think tanks well know.

Finally, there’s deceit. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe that they will raise money for public services. The enterprise of pretending tax cuts are self-financing is a con designed to weaken state provision.

All three played their part in the voodoo economics of US conservatism and the disastrous reign of Liz Truss.

Here’s how…

Neo-liberalism was forged in the 1970s as the post-war Keynesian or New Deal consensus fell apart.

One of the new ideas that emerged was trickle-down economics.  Until then, the traditional conservative argument was that you needed to reduce spending or increase growth if you wanted to reduce taxes.

This was the case that Rishi Sunak put in his failed attempt to defeat Truss in the 2022 leadership contest.

But in the mid-1970s hucksters and ideologues maintained that there was no need to cut spending. The growth tax cuts inspired would more than cover the cost.

The Laffer curve suggested that there was a point where tax rises were counterproductive. People would turn down work if the state took too much of their income, although where that point was is always disputed.

Getting into these practical arguments misses the point, however. There was an exuberant eruption of voodoo economics in the mid-1970s, which had no concern for technical accuracy.

Perlstein put it to me like this

“[With] conventional Keynesian – ‘liberal’ – solutions failing, all sorts of intellectual entrepreneurs on the right came forth with their solutions to the problem, as I narrate in Reaganland, a volume Liz claims to have read. [Of the] many solutions on the table, the one that prevailed was the one that all the actually half-way qualified experts on the right knew was nothing but a fairy tale on a par with Jack in the Beanstalk. [It was] devised by a dude whose only economic training, in his own description, came from learning to count cards at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. I wish I were making this up, but I am not.”

Perlstein was referring to Jude Wanniski, a journalist who did indeed coin the term “supply-side economics” in the 1970s after a spell working in Las Vegas. He attracted the attention of Reagan, Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes with his promise that the Laffer curve guaranteed that, if conservative politicians cut taxes, the economy would boom.

As Perlstein notes, Wanniski’s first piece promoting the idea in a 1975 issue of the Conservative journal Public Interest “lacked almost everything that made economic arguments convincing to other economists”. There were only four footnotes. No data. No formal models. Economists thought supply-side economics was a joke. It would take decades to recoup the money lost in tax cuts to wealthy people, they argued.

Milton Friedman, who was hardly a socialist, said the inflation that unfunded tax cuts would produce meant that supply-side economics was merely a “proposal to change the form of taxes” rather than lower them.  They would generate price and interest rates rises as indeed happened during the Truss debacle.

Alan Greenspan, who once again was a man of the right, who hung out with Ayn Rand no less, nevertheless said he knew of no one who believed that Arthur Laffer’s curve would magically turn tax cuts into increased government revenues.

And so it has proved again and again. Ronald Reagan’s administration provided the classic example. It cut taxes but the promised surge in tax revenues did not happen. All that happened was the national debt increased.

David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget admitted that "none of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," as the experiment played out. He rapidly came to the conclusion that the administration needed to cut spending to balance the books. But as he said in his The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed Conservative politicians preferred large deficits and an increasing national debt to cutting programmes their constituents liked.

Under Reagan, Bush and Trump they were happy to keep cutting. One of the features of US politics is that the national debt is as likely to rise under right-wing as left-wing governments,

Obviously, arguing that cutting the wealthy’s taxes was virtuous in itself pleased the wealthy.  It pleased Republican party donors in the 1970s, and it pleased the Tory donors who poured money into Liz Truss’s campaign in 2022.

But there is more to it than that.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal in 1976, Wanniski said the problem with the old right with its insistence on saving money was that it wanted to be Scrooge when it should be Santa Claus. 

It should deliver tax cuts, forget about the national debt, and sit back as a grateful citizenry showed their gratitude at polling stations. Left-wingers wanted to give taxpayer-funded goodies to their supporters. Very well, right-wingers should want to give tax cuts to theirs.

In the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the editor of Public Interest, was explicit that politics must trump economics. The political advantage tax cuts would provide to the Republicans was so historically imperative they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget.

“The neo-Conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums,’ he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.”

We are now in a moment like the 1970s. Taxes keep rising and Conservatives and indeed the rest of us have yet to come to terms with the cost of an ageing society. As anger grows, I doubt that Truss will be the last Tory to try to magic away reality and build an invisible bridge to a fantastical future.

[alwek]

I have 100 9/11 memes in my collection, and so here is my

Top 10 9/11 Memes From My Folder

From Worst Of The Best To Best Of The Best

~~~~~~~~~~

10) Conkeldurr

I like this edit a lot. It's decently cut, it's a funny idea executed cleanly, it envokes the image of a kaiju causing 9/11 and I think that's interesting. It's almost like he's crushing the twin towers with his fists, or he's about to use them as weapons in a fight.

~~~~~~~~~~

9) The Coup

Album covers/images that go hard. This was originally going to be the cover of the album, and it was chosen PRIOR to 9/11. The cover was greenlit in June 2001, and only some retail copies with the cover were printed on September 11th, which is a funny coincidence. I want one of the Exploding Towers prints so bad.

~~~~~~~~~~

8) The Two Towers

The joke that wrote itself. It just makes so much sense! And this edit is so clean, too. Just and absolutely fantastic Two Towers meme. THIS is how they could have beat Sauron.

~~~~~~~~~~

7) Mama Mia

This is the meme that started it all for me. I quote this all the time, and laugh whenever I think about it. The thumbs down reactions, the dryness of the responce "thousands of people died" the killer comback that is "Mama Mia." It just hits me in all the right spots. It's got subtlety, it's got a good edit, it's got an original joke, I love it.

~~~~~~~~~~

6) USA vs UK

I like this one for its subtlety. You look at this and think, "It's just a chess board." But look and look a little closer you see some pieces are missing. A little closer, you notice that the players are the USA and the UK. And what pieces are missing? On the UK side, the queen. On the US side? The towers. It's trusts itself, and it trusts you to understand it.

~~~~~~~~~~

5) Garfield Did It

This COULD be a completely innocuous Garfield comic of him getting in trouble. But introce the context of "but what if 9/11?" It immediately makes this a top tier 9/11 meme. Who else but Garfield to orchestrate such a thing? What a classic Garfield antic.

~~~~~~~~~~

4) Subway Ad

I love this one a lot. This is one of the cleanest edits I've ever seen, and the fact that it looks like real ad is really boosting the capabilities of this meme. You could potentially trick someone into thinking this is a real ad, and I think that's beautiful.

~~~~~~~~~~

3) Jenga Sales

Another really good subtle one. Environmental story telling at its absolute finest. Jenga sales dropped drastically after 9/11, and the graph of that on its own is just so fucking funny.

~~~~~~~~~~

2) Data Is Right, Do it

This one is perfect. Data would absolutely say this, and there's very real potential for star fleet to end up in this situation. Captain Kirk would do it, too. He'd spend the whole time trying not to, but because of those antics, he would lock himself into having to use The Enterprise to do 9/11. This meme could be cannon, and that's awesome.

~~~~~~~~~~

1) When Life Depends On It, You Use Asbestos

I can't imagine something aging worse than this ad. The Twin Towers were PACKED with asbestos. Yeah this may not be a meme but how fucking funny is this? The towers going down was probably an extremely good thing considering this. You could spin it that Isis or whoever was trying to save america by stopping the asbestos. "Use asbestos, save lives" that's such a tag line to have for something that causes cancer, I love this image so much.

~~~~~~~~~~

Send me 9/11 memes

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Isn't the "Meghan is such a foodie" thing from her Cory days? I remember reading (in Revenge by TBower) that it really annoyed Cory when she started doing that. People who knew her said she took all the talking points from his personality as a professional, avant garde celeb chef and made it her own. Even his signature recipes.

Then back in her Trever days, she went in and on about the craft of movie making and being an insider. Allegedly Trever is a really out going personality, loves to network and is quite slick/glib. People have also said he is super confident, laid back, know-it-all type who is good at his work. So she took that from his personality, learnt the ropes of networking and enterpreneurship from him and launch Tig.

From Jessica, she learnt the ropes of high-end, trust fund baby lifestyle. Used all get contacts and social accumen of knowing the right people, getting in the right circles and curating an 'instagram aspirational' lifestyle (at least superficially) and became a wannabe lifestyle guru.

I won't say she somehow glommed onto Catherine and took pieces of her personality to make her own. I think all of her past cosplays and successful grifting made her believe that she was a better copy of the people she was copying. She measured her success by the print and media coverage she got and from what she made people believe she was. So, she thought being a better Catherine than Catherine herself was easy. And she got mad when she couldn't hack it.

And she couldn't have it because she couldn't control the media coverage. Her PR was limited in face of how much people saw her live, in action at various events. Especially the events she didn't think we're important.

Behind closed doors she could convince Harry that she was a better royal than born royals because he is just dumb that way. If you criticised the people he doesn't like he will love you and that's what she did. But also, the biggest factor in her failure is garty himself.

Had he not been the way he is - with his own issues and grievances and entitlement and resentments and nasty reptilian nature- then she would have successfully become the best royal to ever royal. She would have stayed in the BRF, did her Hollywood thing, been half in/out, made money merching and the brf would have just covered it up for her.

I do think she hadn't counted on Harry having his own 'Hollywood Harry' dreams.

I don't think Harry had Hollywood dreams. His dream appears to have been "British aristo in the US," where literally everything he had in the UK, he had in the US. He had no interest in Hollywood other than using them as replacements for the British aristo circuit he left behind in London. And if you look at everything he's done here in the US, that's pretty much what he's done. Minus the military uniform, Diana-like worship, and Cambridge-like popularity.

Whereas Meghan's dream was legitimately the Hollywood dream - writing, producing, acting like George Clooney or influencing like Gwyneth Paltrow or grifting like the Kardashians. She didn't want the life she had in the UK back here in the US. She wanted the life she had in Canada but with UK finances and here in the US.

And neither was willing to budge on what they wanted. That's the core root (or rot, I suppose) of why they're always failing. There's no compromise about what they want or what they're going to do.

(Contrast that with William and Kate, who have a shared plan built on compromise.)

[vampiresdontbelonginfairytales]

In two minds as to whether to post this because I HOPE I'm going to do a comic arc of it.

But since I'm currently incredibly slow to do comics and also because I spent the last three days solid on it... Here it is.

But I guess if you'd rather see it in comic form and care about spoilers then don't read it?

EDIT: I wrote a follow up scene and then I wrote a follow up scene to the follow up scene and... Long story short, or rather, short story long, it's a book manuscript now. I've got 18k words so far

No book spoilers though! (The current book is coming along very well but isn't quite ready). << EDIT: this refers to a different book that is close to a final draft

----

“Um... I d-don’t have a l-lot, but...” Victor held out the canvas bag. The three of them had agreed to do a book swap, or rather, a manga swap. Lucinda had been bringing books to Fairyland for Will, as books were somewhat hard to come by, and she had offered to bring him books too. Victor, having no idea what books he wanted, not being savvy on the selection of Earth books available, and not daring to do such a bold, daring thing as taking a friend up on an offer, hadn’t asked for any yet. Hettie was positively itching to get her hands on Lucinda’s manga – “As the Otherworlds’ first magical girl, it is positively my duty!” – and Victor had some manga too. Only a few volumes... The yokai peddlers only had a small selection that passed inspection by his mother.

Lucinda sat cross-legged on the floor after taking the bag, and had plonked two of her own on the rug. They were in one of the guest parlours, little drawing rooms that were previously for nobles to sit and relax in, but were in the process of being turned into bedrooms and common rooms for the expected magical school students. This one needed very little doing at it, and had become their hangout area. There were comfy couches and a little table and trolley for drinks and snacks. Victor had brought them some tea – books weren’t the only thing he’d picked up from his brief visit home – and it was rapidly cooling as the girls were far too excited by the manga to worry about little things like staying hydrated.

“Oooh this is really rare!” Lucinda picked up one of the more battered copies with a pair of girls on the cover; one with bright pink hair, the other with an equally striking shade of purple. “It never came out in the UK at all, and in the US it was this limited run tied in to the anime they decided to air at like, 5am on a Saturday morning, so it never got a big following and never got reprinted in English. I swear sometimes they WANT shows to fail.”

“I... didn’t understand most of what you said. Sorry, it’s what?” Hettie looked up from where she was already a good chunk into volume 1 of something called Sailor Moon. “I understood ‘rare’ and then you might as well have said ‘and the hoop-de-doo sqoodled the squaddle’.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Lucinda stayed quiet for a minute before rephrasing. “They only printed a small number of these in English because the television show version of it wasn’t popular. And it was never printed in my country at all.”

“Ah.” Hettie sighed wistfully. “Oh to have print runs available. We just get whatever the yokai peddlers have with them. It’s pretty erratic. You’re lucky if you can get more than four or five volumes of a set. Sometimes they have really big sets of one thing, but they’re so expensive.”

“I guess I am pretty lucky to be able to find as much as I can,” Lucinda reflected. “They even have manga in the library.”

“You have to stop, you’re making me far too jealous!” Hettie held a hand out dramatically.

“Um,” Victor interjected. “They have m-manga in the library here, too.”

“They do?!” both girls chorused.

“A lot of it is um... e-embarrassing...” Victor had a very low tolerance for what Hettie had informed him was called ‘fanservice’ but some of the stuff he’d seen must be the sort of service where someone takes a bullet for you and then takes your would-be assassin out with them while apologising that they won’t be able to get your supper ready on time for once as they are unfortunately dying, rather inconsiderately, without two weeks’ notice.

Hettie and Lucinda looked at each other.

“I’m not about to be put off by a bit of embarrassment, are you?” Hettie asked.

“Not a chance.” Lucinda hesitated. “Well, okay. Some chance. But.” They both turned to Victor.

“Lead the way?” Hettie suggested. “Or you can just give us rough directions if you prefer.”

“I’ll c-come with you.” Victor was not about to lose out on time with Lucinda over a few drawings, no matter how embarrassing they were.

“H-here it is...” Victor waved vaguely at the two aisles.

After a few minutes of pulling out volumes at random – and hastily putting some of them back – the girls were a little deflated.

“Are they all in Japanese?” Lucinda asked. “I’m trying to learn but I can just about say what my name is, greet people and count to one hundred. I can read maybe five kanji and some katakana.”

Victor frowned. “Yes? I think. B-but...”

Hettie sighed. “That’s really too bad. Perhaps we could ask your snow woman friend to translate?”

“I don’t want to ask her to do her job for free...” Lucinda replied.

“Um.” Victor pulled the nearest volume out a little, checked it, and pulled it all the way out. He flipped to what in a Western comic would be the back. “Did you check the front? There’s a lot of translation notes and things.”

Lucinda held up a finger. “I did not.” She pulled out another manga and instead of turning to the middle she checked front and back. “Oh. It’s not the type of translation I’m used to, but this’ll work.” She put the random volume back and started searching for the first one of the series.

“It’s silly, really. I should have realised the large yokai population here would have donated something to the library,” Hettie chided herself. “I can’t believe I never looked before. There must be several doors to Japan here.”

Lucinda looked up suddenly. “I. Wow. I never thought of that. Do you think so?”

“It stands to reason?” Hettie theorised. “The queen must know a door, at least.”

“I can’t believe all this time and I never... Do you want to go to Japan?”

“What, now?” Hettie asked. “Right now?”

“It should be possible, right?” Lucinda said, eyes shining. “Although...” Her face fell. She bit the end of her thumb as she thought. “I guess it will take a long time to get into the map room, and I’m kinda broke still...” She glanced over at Victor making him jump. “It’s kinda crowded in the cities, from what I know... That wouldn’t be good... But I don’t know if it would be harder in a small place, we’d be too conspicuous...” She slouched. “I guess we can’t after all... I got myself worked up for nothing.”

“You should go to Okazaki!” came a voice from the other side of the bookcase. There were footsteps, and Will leaned into view around the end of the aisle. “It’s a city, so it’s got all the stuff you’re probably looking for, but it’s really quiet. As long as you don’t go during commuter times, you’ll practically have the pavements to yourself.”

“Okazaki?” Lucinda repeated. “Where’s that?”

“It’s near Nagoya. Aichi Prefecture.”

“I’m sorry to say that doesn't mean anything to me,” Lucinda admitted, rubbing the back of her head. “We’d still need a door map though, and, well, a bunch of stuff. I don’t have any yen, for a start.”

Will waved a hand . “You don’t need to worry about any of that,” he said. “Wait here.”

The three of them exchanged a look. Lucinda and Hettie browsed the manga while they waited, pulling out the odd volume and looking back and forth between the translations and the pages. It was pretty difficult. They weren’t intended to be read in the aisle. Victor had borrowed a few of them and you needed a desk to spread them out on.

It wasn’t long before Will returned, holding an envelope and a piece of white paper, with a much folded look about it. Paper, not parchment.

“Here you go!” He beamed. “Just make sure you go when it’s not right before or after school, and you should be fine.” Lucinda unfolded the paper and all three of them peered at it.

“Door locations?” Hettie asked.

“I came via Okazaki to Fairyland,” Will explained. “I needed to make sure I had an escape route if something went wrong, but the doors you want are this one and this one.” He pointed at the one in the top right and the middle bottom. “Oh, and here.” He presented Lucinda with the envelope, holding the shortest end with a thumb on each corner.

Lucinda opened it. She gasped. “Does that say... ten thousand? Ten thousand yen?! And what’s this?” A large feather slid out with the bank note.

“It’s a feather. You’ll need it to get back here, so don’t lose it.” He pulled out a pencil from a pocket. “I’ll just make you some notes. You need to write the kanji for ‘gate’ in the air to open the return door.” He wrote the kanji next to the door. “It’s pretty easy. Oh and if you do lose the feather or something, THIS door here leads back to Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s quite a walk, to the door and from the door, like, maybe a full day of walking, but if you can’t get back here it’s the best option. I’ll give you my parents’ address. My mom is an Otherworlder, she can help you get home.” He scribbled the address on the back. “Oh and if things are bad in Okazaki for some reason... You can’t get the door to work or any other trouble, you go here.” He drew a star on the map. “Ask for Asakura Miho. She's the local Otherworlder concierge.”

“This... This is a lot of money isn’t it?” Lucinda asked.

“Not loads.” Will shook his head. “Only about £40.”

“Only?” Lucinda spluttered. “I can’t take this!”

“Sure you can!” Will grinned. “Look, you’ve brought me at least that amount in retail value of books, if not in second hand value. I was wondering how best to repay you for it.”

“But... ... I mean...” Lucinda hesitated. She stared long and hard at the note. Finally she said, “If it’s really okay... You’re sure it’s okay?”

“Positive.”

“Okay... Uh...” She looked round at the other two. “Who’s ready to go to Japan, I guess?”

The three of them made their way to the entry door. It was in the Northern Quarter of the capital; a gathering place for yokai.

“It should be... here!” Lucinda pushed on a patch of air and a slit appeared; a slice of blue sky and a rice paddy hung in the air, contrasting heavily with the brown walls of the tavern behind it. Lucinda let it close. Then she checked her phone. “It’s... about 9:10 in the morning. Will said avoid commuter times.” She bit her lip. “I think we should wait a bit longer to be safe.” She drummed her fingers on her arm. “I feel like I’ve forgotten something...”

“You waiting for the Okazaki door, kids?” a voice addressed them from above.

They looked up to see a yokai woman leaning out of the second story window. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips pouting.

“Yes?” Lucinda replied. “We were told to wait until the morning commute was over. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. It’s just... You’re going... like that?”

The parental tone and question was familiar to Victor as of late - his mother did not appreciate his change in wardrobe from the expected vampire evening dress to the everyday fairy tunics. The three of them looked down at themselves then at each other.

“Oh. Oh, I see what you mean,” Lucinda admitted. “We look like we’re going to a convention.” Lucinda had come straight from work and was in her prince outfit, Hettie was wearing one of her tea gowns and Victor was in a blue tunic and pants, tied at the ankle. “Not good for blending in.”

“L-let’s go change?” Victor suggested. “There’s p-plenty of time.”

“I’m not sure I have anything suitable...” Hettie said.

“D-don’t worry, Molly showed me where the clothes a-are for the f-fools, w-we can find something in there.”

“I think I still have some stuff from when I stayed here before,” Lucinda said. “I’ll check my old room while you do that.”

There were a few trunks of spare clothes in the servants’ quarters, mainly intended for fools but really for anyone who wanted them. Fairyland worked on a bartering system, so labour in the palace was exchanged for food, accommodation or occasionally other goods.

“Does this suit me? I think it’s a little big but beggars can’t be choosers...” She had found a wine red jumper; it was a solid colour with long sleeves that hung over the edge of her fingers. She pulled them back over her wrists, using a ribbon on the edges to tighten them.

Victor nodded. “I-it looks very nice. W-will these trousers fit you, d-do you think?” Hettie had also found a blue skirt, but it was a glaring mismatch, in both style and colour.

“Trousers?” Hettie took them uncertainly. “I, I really don’t know, I’ve never worn any before.”

“M-Miss Lucinda is often wearing them, e-even when she isn’t dressed for work,” Victor pointed out.

“Yes, must be nice not to have to worry about changing to come here,” Hettie observed. “Then again, I didn’t have to change when I visited her house. We pretended I worked for Rent-A-Legend too, which come to think of it, I actually did.”

“I’m a l-little jealous that y-you got to see Miss Lucinda’s house,” Victor admitted. He stopped short of asking what her room was like. That felt like spying, somehow.

“It was fun, Earth technology is incredible, a magic of its own... though it was incredibly nerve wracking... I had to keep Lucinda’s identity secret from her parents.” Hettie took the trousers and he turned away so she could change. “I doubt it will be as difficult out and about in a town setting.”

“W-were her parents nice?” Victor asked.

“I only spoke briefly to her mother to introduce myself, but she seemed nice,” Hettie replied. “You can turn around now. How do I look?”

“L-like you’re from Earth,” Victor replied. There were less options for him. Most of the clothing was dresses, or way too big for him. Maybe he would have to make do with his old clothes. He understood they were very old fashioned on Earth, but without his cravat and cape, he would at least look like an Earthling, if a slightly overdressed one.

“Any luck?” Hettie asked.

“No. I’ll h-have to wear my old clothes.” Victor pouted. “I sh-should get some Earth clothes s-sometime. B-but I d-don’t know how I’m going to. They’re s-so expensive a-and the peddlers never h-have anything my size.”

“Perhaps you can ask Lucinda for help?” Hettie suggested.

Victor shook his head. “I c-couldn’t do that.”

Hettie tilted her head to one side. “Whyever not?”

“I j-just... H-help how?”

“So you just automatically answered ‘I can’t’ without even thinking about it?”

“W-well, it j-just seems too imposing t-to ask for help,” Victor tried. “... What do you mean?”

“She literally lives there?” Hettie pointed out. “She offered to bring you books? It shouldn’t be that big a step up to help find some clothes. Maybe she knows some place you can get some cheap? Or she can ask Sara? You really won’t know unless you ask her.”

“B-but clothes are s-so c-complicated!” he protested.

“I don’t think they’re as complicated on Earth,” Hettie said. “Like I say, you won’t know if you don’t ask. Besides, Lucinda is your friend. I wish I could prove it to you that asking her for help isn’t a big deal.”

“N-no, i-it seems like t-too much...” He shook his head.

“Victor...” Her brow furrowed slightly, and Victor steeled himself for a lecture. She stared at him for a long moment before giving a short sigh. “Well, I for one plan to ask Sara where she gets her Earth clothes, so if find out anything useful I shall pass it along. I’m ready, so shall I wait for you here or at the gate?”

“Th-the gate,” Victor answered, relieved. “Please apologise t-to Miss Lucinda for me.”

When he had changed into his old things, he found one of the glassless windows that lined the upper corridors and launched himself out of it, becoming a bat in mid-air. He didn’t much like being a bat, but it would be faster than walking down and he didn’t want to make Lucinda wait any longer than he already had. He made a mental note to learn a new animal transformation spell as soon as possible. He had learned how to become a bat at about age seven, normally a little early for even a vampire to start learning magic, but the death of his father at the hands of a mob when he was six had made his mother keen to get him learning escape spells as soon as possible. He could also turn into mist. That wasn’t much fun either. The only real upside was that you were pretty much impossible to kill. Stay that way too long though, and you’d find your mind starting to dissipate too. It was like being in a dream. You had to force yourself awake again.

“H-here I am!” Victor said, turning back a little way above the ground and landing on his feet. “S-sorry for making you w-wait.”

“We’ve got plenty of time,” Lucinda reassured him. “And it’s definitely not commuting time now.”

“I was just telling Lucinda how difficult it was finding Earthling clothes for you,” Hettie said. “She says you can probably have a look in Okazaki.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what second-hand clothes they have in Japan,” Lucinda remarked, smiling at him. “I’m not expecting to find a shop full of kimonos or anything but there’s got to be some cool stuff, right?”

“O-oh. Um, r-right. Yes.” Victor shot his cousin A Look, but she just made a half shrug and a smirk that said ‘See?’.

It was impossible to be mad that she was correct about just asking, or as it seemed, just mentioning, and he spent the walk back to the Northern Quarter wondering what sort of clothes they would have and how they fit without a tailor. He was aware that they didn’t usually have tailors any more. They bought things ‘off the rack’. Maybe they bought everything a size too big and sewed it to fit themselves?

When they got to the door, they found the yokai woman from the tavern waiting there. She had it open the tiniest possible amount, sticking a fingernail in it to keep it from closing. She looked round as they approached.

“Much better.” She nodded approvingly. “I’m just waiting for my partner Mitsuki to get back with supplies. You go ahead... if you’re ready?”

“I think we are.” Lucinda hesitated. “Um. Do you have any other advice?” she asked as she tentatively put a hand on the door. “It’s our first time in Japan.”

“Don’t talk loudly in public, the doors SLIDE, do NOT cross the street when it’s red, you’re expected to pack your own shopping bags at the supermarket AWAY from the cashier, get a little hand towel each for public bathrooms - I recommend Daiso for that – don’t hand money to anyone directly, it’s bad luck, that’s what the little trays are for, oh and I hope you kids like mayonnaise because we put mayonnaise on everything.” The woman thought for a moment longer. “You know a return door, right? From your lack of luggage, I assume this is a day trip?”

Lucinda nodded. “We have a few options.”

“You got a feather?”

“Yes, we have a feather,” Lucinda reassured her.

“And you know the rules for going to and from Earth? It’s not like the other Otherworlds, you know that, right?”

“I’m from Earth, yes,” Lucinda replied.

“Oh. You’re more prepared than you looked.”

“I was just a bit overexcited and I tend to forget what I’m wearing,” Lucinda admitted.

“Off you go then,” the woman said. “Have fun. Try some dango.”

“I will. Thank you.”

Lucinda had just put her hand flat on the door when Hettie piped up suddenly;

“I completely forgot! I have a thing with Lolotte today!”

“You do?”

“Yes, I shall have to go immediately,” she announced. “Don’t want to be late.”

“Oh.” Lucinda took her hand off the door and turned round. “Oh, that’s too bad. We can go another day, then? Lolotte can always come with us?”

“No, no, I won’t hear of it!” Hettie protested, bodily turning Lucinda back to the door. “You and Victor go ahead! You went to the trouble of getting changed and everything. You can go and find all the fun places and show me next time. You’ll have more money between you, too.”

“I guess but... are you really sure? I do want to go but-“

“Then go.” She gave them both a bright smile. “You’ll be more inconspicuous without me, anyway. Much better for a first visit. Can’t be too careful.”

“But-“

“Must dash! See you later!” She gave them a little wave before turning into a panther and bounding away.

“Well... I guess we’re going then.” Lucinda scratched her head before smiling apologetically at the yokai woman. “If that’s okay? With just me?” She addressed this to Victor. Who almost didn’t hear her over the internal screaming.

“Th-that’s fine,” he replied, a little shocked to find he meant it.

Yes, he reassured himself. Fine. He was alone with Lucinda. Not a problem. It had ended horribly the last time, but fine. So it was his first visit to Earth. And not a ‘Western’ culture like he was used to at home. So he didn’t speak the local language. So what if he couldn’t use magic there. So what if there were humans all over the place?

“Okay. Just stick close to me and if it’s too busy we’ll turn back, all right?” Lucinda offered. “Will said it would be quiet, so I guess we’ll just see. I’m... a little bit scared, but at least I won’t be alone. I mean, I’ll still go alone, if you change your mind. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve been doing this for two years. I’ve been to scarier places than Japan, that’s for sure. The crime rate’s supposed to be really low. And there’s zero dragons.”

Victor considered this. They were stood in what was a foreign country to both of them right now. In Fairyland it was allowed to eat people who didn’t have a resident’s permit and there were at least two species of flower that killed you if you looked at them funny. And while he’d managed to shake off most of what he’d realised were his mother’s prejudices about humans, he was still nervous around strangers. To be fair, he was also nervous around any type of people, most animals, quite a lot of plants and the occasional rock. But objectively Japan was not scary.

“I-I’ll tell you i-if it’s too much,” he said. Oddly, it helped to know Lucinda was also a little scared. And that he was helping. He’d never helped someone else to not be scared before.

“Let’s go then.”

The yokai woman opened the door, looked around quickly, and tilted her head to indicate that they should indeed go. As they stepped through, a tanuki slipped past them the other way. They turned in surprise to see the tanuki take a human form, peering at them curiously as the door closed.

“Just some otaku kids-” they heard before the sound was cut off.

Victor looked around. He’d thought they were in the countryside but the rice paddy they’d seen through the door was next to a building... A few buildings. There was a row of houses behind them. A narrow, concrete road was painted with white stripes to serve as the pavement edge and some letters he couldn’t read.

“Oh. Uh. Wow. We’re actually really here.” Lucinda looked around at the scenery, shading her eyes from the sun. Though, the sun was nothing compared to her smile. She beamed at the scenery like it was a long lost treasure. She bounced on her heels with her hands clenched. “What should we do first? Oof, it is warm.” It really was very warm, much like Fairyland. His shirt probably wasn’t the most appropriate for the heat, but at least it would protect his skin from the sun. “Glad I put on sun cream already for Fairyland.” Lucinda fanned herself with a hand. “Do you need sun cream?”

“Sun cream?” Victor asked.

“To protect you from sunburn? Do fairies have a potion for that instead, maybe?”

“I d-did... b-but this morning.” It was late afternoon in Fairyland.

“We’d better get some then.” She tutted to herself. “I am not, in fact, well prepared at all.” He expected her to be annoyed, but she laughed. Still with a smile a mile wide she continued, “We need to break this note anyway. What did she say... Mini hand towel...for bathrooms... Ah, where did she say would be good for that?”

“D-Daiso,” Victor said.

“Great. Thanks!” Lucinda pulled out her phone. She’d brought a small bag. It was a croqueted tote; pale green with a white flower. It went well with her outfit; a pink frilly top and long white skirt. “Let’s see... Daiso...” She tapped her foot for a minute while she waited for something. Her smile finally turned to a frown. “Data is HOW MUCH per megabyte?! Someone’s having a laugh. All the way to the bank.” She shrugged and her smile returned. “Ah well. Not like I use my data for much since I’ve no signal half the time. Ooh, there’s a Daiso really close! Basically straight up this road! This way.”

“A m-map on your phone?” Victor queried.

“Yeah, it connects to a thingy in space or something,” Lucinda explained. “Oh, if you need to translate something, it can do that too. Not WELL, but enough that we should get by.”

“H-how is your phone N-NOT magic, again?” Victor asked, staring at it. It could show pictures, moving images, play music, he’d seen her use it to do maths and he knew there was a library in there too. Multiple libraries, from what he could gather. And yet Earthlings would be amazed he could turn into a bat.

“Honestly can’t argue,” Lucinda admitted.

As they walked, he thought again about the bat thing. “Um, M-Miss Lucinda, if you could turn into a-any animal, what w-would you choose?”

“Good question.” Lucinda stopped as she thought. Someone on a bike rode past them. Victor didn’t have time to react. They were already long gone even as he registered the intrusion. As he looked behind him to see where they went, he realised the jester had been right; the street was deserted. It was a tiny side road, that he could see, but this was much better than he had hoped. “I don’t know.” Lucinda’s reply startled him out of his observations.

“You don’t?”

“I’m not sure I’d want to turn into an animal at all,” she said. As he drew breath to question her further, she gasped, “Oh look, it’s right there! Right across the road!”

“O-oh. Th-that’s what she meant by ‘d-don’t cross when it’s red’,” Victor observed.

“Yeah. We call that the ‘green man’ in the UK. Interesting cultural difference,”-she held up a finger-“here they say ‘it’s blue’ instead of green.”

“The G-Green Man?” Victor raised an eyebrow. “L-like the forest spirit?”

“Oh. Oh yeah. I... think I’ve heard of that. Not the same guy, from what I know. Incidentally... It’s blue.” As they crossed she added, “And where I’d say ‘your face has gone white’ they say ‘your face is dark blue’.”

“Interesting... Wh-where did you l-learn that?”

“I’m not sure.” Lucinda cupped her chin. “Probably from manga translation notes or possibly from a research rabbit hole on the internet.”

They stopped at the edge of a large concrete area in front of the store. It had a few cars on it, with lines indicating where they should stop. He’d never seen a car before, but was vaguely aware they could kill you or explode. Luckily there were only two, and both were on the same side of the car area. They could see quite well into the store via the glass panelling all along the front. It wasn’t busy. There were four or five people in there he could see, all spread out.

“Do you want to come in with me or wait here?” Lucinda asked.

“I’ll... I’ll c-come in,” he decided, steeling himself. Even though they were at a BIG crossroads, bigger than any he’d ever seen, it was still almost devoid of people. Despite the size, it was still quieter than the Dark Capital’s streets. Logically, it was silly not to go in.

“Okay.” Lucinda led the way. He froze momentarily when the doors opened BY THEMSELVES at which Lucinda didn’t so much as blink. More Earthling ‘science’. “Oh no,” she almost whispered. He stopped again. “Everything. Is so. CUTE.”

“I-is that bad?” Victor’s voice quavered. Cute was not a quality he had hitherto associated with the phrase “oh no”.

“It is bad,” Lucinda replied solemnly, “because I want to buy it all.”

He relaxed somewhat. “What were we l-looking for again? H-hand towels?”

“Oh. Yes.” Lucinda snapped her fingers. “And sun cream. I’ll look up the word for sun cream while I remember.”

Heart pounding, Victor followed her along the shelves. He barely noticed the goods at first, instead keeping a surreptitious eye on the other customers and the shopkeepers. But he gradually came to the realisation... they weren’t paying him any attention at all. The shopkeepers would glance in his direction, smile and say a greeting. But then carry on with their work. He was completely unremarkable, apparently. It was liberating.

After a little while of browsing around the shelves which contained the wildest assortment of goods Victor could never have imagined existed, Lucinda stopped and took a very deliberate breath.

“Okay I have to make a rule for myself here,” she said. “This is the first shop we’ve been in and there is already so much cool stuff. I have to wait until we’ve had a proper look around. Comic Con rules.” She thought for a moment. “Um. Not that I’ll stop you from buying stuff you want.” She paused again. “I know Hettie said to spend the money on ourselves but I think we should save her some of it anyway. Let’s say... 2000 yen each? And we’ll try to save the rest. I know Will said we can just spend it but... I just wouldn’t feel right.”

“Y-you really d-don’t need to worry about me,” Victor protested.

“Don’t be silly,” she chided. “At the very least you need some food and drink. Speaking of, I know I said I’d wait to buy things but I have spotted some sweets I DEFINITELY want. They’re technically food. And is that an ice cream freezer I can see?”

“Ice cream w-would be nice,” he admitted. It was far too hot to say no to something as nice, luxurious and above all cold, as ice cream.

“Lemme just...” Lucinda checked something on her phone again and made a low whistle. “Wow, okay that is cheap. Is this a Japanese pound store??” They couldn’t read everything but the flavours were obvious enough and some were also written in English.

“I-I’ll have the earl g-grey one,” he said. “I-if you’re really sure.”

“Good choice. I’m super tempted by that one too but I think I’ll try the ice cream mochi.” She took one of each out of the cold box and looked around. “Oh. Self-checkout. I have never been so glad to see one before. I was working myself up about having to talk to the cashier for nothing.” She approached some boxes with words displayed on a screen. It was almost like a big version of her phone, he noticed. “Oh and there’s an English option, even.”

“Wh-what does ‘w-working yourself up’ mean?” he asked.

“That I was making myself really stressed,” Lucinda replied.

“You w-were stressed??” He hadn’t noticed.

“Yeah, to be honest I was dawdling a bit because I was stressing about having to talk to the cashier,” she admitted. “Sorry. I’ll try not to. I’m going to have to talk to at least one cashier today I’m sure.”

“D-don’t apologise...”

They took their ice creams just outside and ate them right away. There were a couple of big boxes out here too, that also looked like the cold boxes he’d seen inside. They had rows and rows of... something?

“Oh right, I forgot to get a drink.” Lucinda eyed the nearest one. “Is that... tea? COLD milk tea? That’s ... different. Though I suppose you get iced tea without milk AND iced coffee however. I’m gonna try it. We have change now.” She selected an option. Something clanged in a compartment below the rows of drinks and she reached through a flap and took out a can. “Hey, this is hot?! What the heck??” She studied the rows again. “Oh. OH. This one with the red must be hot and... the blue ones are cold? How the heck do they do that??” So there WAS some Earthling science she was baffled by. She turned from the machine and wiggled the can at him. “Want one? They’re pretty cheap.”

“Y-yes please.” While he still felt he was imposing, she was right that he couldn’t go all day without anything to eat or drink. Technically he had had lunch... back in Fairyland, some hours ago. And he was thirsty.

“This is very sweet,” Lucinda remarked, after taking a swig. “I think I like it.”

Victor tried his. “Y-yes, very.” He couldn’t decide if he liked it or not. Sweet things were a luxury at home, and carefully rationed, as he mustn’t damage his teeth. Come to think of it... she had said drinks were okay, and it WAS important. “C-can I also um, g-get some water?”

“Sure.” She double-checked something on her phone before making a selection. “Yep. Should be water.”

“Th-thank you.” Once he’d finished the tea and ice cream, he took a good few mouthfuls of water, swishing it around a bit. Seeing Lucinda looking at him curiously he said. “U-um. For-” He opened his mouth a little and pointed to his fangs.

“Oh. Yeah. Too much sugar would really mess you up, huh?” She tapped her own teeth thoughtfully. “I’ll keep that in mind. Want me to carry that?” She indicated the water bottle.

“Um. Please. Th-thank you.” Was Hettie right? Was it really this easy?

“We should look for where we can buy clothes next, I guess. Oh and sun cream. Here’s the sun cream.” She handed over a small bottle. “Uh-”-she lunged forward and grabbed his arm-“-you don’t drink it. You rub it on your skin. Just where the skin is showing.”

He lowered the bottle, feeling his face colour and wordlessly opened the top, looking down to avoid her gaze. He squeezed some out and rubbed it on his face.

“You need a mirror?” Lucinda tapped her phone and turned it to face him. He jumped, seeing his face on the screen. “There’s a camera on it,” she explained. “Two cameras, actually.”

“Is there anything it doesn’t do?” he said, mystified, forgetting his embarrassment.

“Lots of things but admittedly none I can think of right now,” Lucinda replied. “Right. Clothes,” she said when he’d finished. “There’s a place right up the street. Book-Off? Sounds like a weird name to pick if you sell clothes.”

It was a straight walk up the very big street. It was so big there were trees and sculpted bushes between the pavement and the road, as well as a line specifically for the bicycles. Yet there were still hardly any pedestrians. The occasional bike whizzed past. They still made him jump, but he was finding himself less bothered about any of the humans around. It helped that this place was like nothing he’d ever seen. Some of the buildings were huge. Not just big, like his grandmother’s mansion, but wide AND tall. Incredibly tall. Fairyland trees tall. Maybe taller.

“This is... a supermarket?” Lucinda frowned. “Where is the clothing place?”

“I-is it up there?” Victor pointed to a strange, moving metal stairway.

“Well spotted.” She moved towards it and looked up. “Looks like there’s more floors too. Shall we go up?”

Victor nodded. He watched her as she stepped onto the moving stairs, then copied her. There was a handrail to hold; it moved at the same rate as the stairs. Earthlings had thought of everything. His fingers stiffened on the rail as they neared the top – how did you get off? What if he didn’t do it right? Lucinda merely stepped off at the top. He wobbled a little and half-jumped off, as his toe bumped the metal barrier at the top. He straightened up immediately and spun around, backing away. When they didn’t explode, stop or otherwise herald disaster, he turned away and looked around. The floor below had been filled with food from what little he saw, but this one was full of clothes, tableware and a lot of stuff he could only categorise as ‘Earth things’. There was a floor above them that seemed to be full of books. Lucinda noticed it too.

“First we’ll look on this floor, then we’ll go up and look at the manga and DVDs and stuff then we’ll go get some dinner from the supermarket,” Lucinda suggested. “Sound good?”

Victor gave a nod. “I d-don’t r-really mind what we do.” He really didn’t. This was a good place for his first ever Earth visit, he realised; everything was as fascinating to Lucinda as it was to him.

“Wow, there really are kimonos here!” she pointed to a section full of robes and wraps. “Or maybe they’re yukata. I’m not confident I can tell. Ooh and are those bowls and things? I am definitely getting a bowl or a cup or something.”

They browsed for a while. Victor tried to keep Lucinda in his eye line, but it was difficult as the clothes were organised by type. He didn’t want to bother her, but became quickly apparent that he needed some help.

“U-um... H-how do I know i-if the clothes will fit?” he asked.

She put a finger to her lips for a minute. “I never thought of that. Clothing sizes are different in different countries, so I guess I’m not sure what size fits me, either. Um... If I can figure out what size you are in UK sizes, I can probably convert it to a Japanese size.” She got out her phone again. “You’re roughly my size, and I’m a size twelve, sometimes a ten, probably need to go with a twelve or maybe even a fourteen to be safe. It’s easier to make a garment smaller than it is to make it bigger.” She tapped on her phone for another minute, her face a mask of concentration. “We’re looking for size 11 or 13, or just M for medium. You find it on the clothing tag, here.” She pulled up a little white label on the neckline of a nearby shirt. “Do you want me to help you look, or...?”

“N-no,” he said quickly. “I-I should be able t-to look by myself now.” He didn’t want to take up more of Lucinda’s time than necessary.

“Okay.” She gave him a thumbs up. “You want me to give you your share of the money or you want us to go to the counter together when you’re done on this floor? I wouldn’t say I speak Japanese, but I can at least count and I have my phone if it gets more complicated.”

“T-together, please,” he said, cursing inwardly that he’d be holding her up after all.

He browsed the clothing as quickly as he could manage. He had no idea what he was looking for, exactly. He stiffened up every time someone else appeared in the aisle, far more on edge now Lucinda wasn’t with him. He tried to focus. Think. What did he actually need. The plain, black trousers he was wearing were fine apparently, but his white shirt was too formal. A shirt, then. He should try to find a casual shirt.

He was absorbed in the task when he noticed a boy a little further down the aisle, about his own age. He hadn’t seen him approach.

‘Don’t panic,’ he thought to himself. ‘He won’t even look at you.’

The boy looked at him. And Victor had been looking at the boy. He’d seen him looking! Victor seized up. The boy’s eyes flicked to Victor’s hair. He’d forgotten about his hair. It was short and black, but with a thick, white streak in his fringe and around the nape of his neck up to his ears. In the Otherworlds, it was now a known sign of vampirism.

The boy gave him a smile. “It’s very cool!” he said in a thick accent, fingers brushing his own bangs.

“Th-thank you?” Victor replied.

The boy smiled a little wider. Then he looked away, and continued browsing.

Victor hurriedly looked away too, feeling his face redden. It would probably look bad to run away. He fought his every instinct, forcing each and every nerve to stay rooted to the spot. After a few heart pounding minutes that felt like hours, the boy left the aisle. Victor sagged in relief before nearly launching himself into the air when he felt someone come up behind him.

“I found this super cute dress, but there’s no way it’ll fit me,” Lucinda lamented. “It’s so unfair. I think I’ll get it for Erlina, though. Think Hettie would like this cup?”

Getting his breathing back under control, Victor nodded mutely. It was a pretty cup. It was pale blue with pink flowers. Lucinda was also carrying a bowl with a similar design, a spoon shaped like a mermaid and two pieces of clothing. One was the aforementioned dress, the other was a mauve and beige shirt with some writing on it.

“I'm shamelessly breaking my 'look around first' rule. How's it going?" She lowered her voice. “Hey, did you see that guy who was just here? He looked so cool!”

Victor tried hard to remember what the boy had actually looked like. Black, short hair, but with blond tips, and he was wearing a sleeveless black shirt and ripped jeans. He’d been wearing studded bracelets, a mixture of black and bright neon colours. “H-he spoke to me,” Victor said. “H-he said my hair w-was cool.”

“I just realised that in an Earth context, your hair looks like a fashion statement,” Lucinda observed. “I bet it would dye bright colours really easily, too.”

“Y-you can dye h-hair bright colours?” Victor asked.

“Yeah. Or pastel. Blonde. Whatever, really.” Lucinda took in his empty hands. “No luck?”

“N-not really,” he admitted.

“Do you want some help?” she asked. “If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can look too.”

“I’d l-like a shirt,” he said. “D-do you think m-maybe... s-something like that boy was wearing? But, n-not black. A-and with sleeves?”

“Gotcha.”

In the end they left with a n orangey-brown hoody-like shirt with colourful gashes in the sleeves, and some soundtrack CDs from the third floor, which Lucinda nearly fainted at, and which she’d talked about at length in a squeaky, high pitched voice that he’d probably have been able to hear better as a bat. Then they’d walked around the huge food market on the ground floor, picked out some dinner – technically supper – and now they were sat on some benches a street or two away eating some dango. It was sweet rice paste formed into balls, covered in a sweet, brown syrup. He had opted for a colourful version with no syrup; the balls were white, pink and green.

“These are so good,” Lucinda waved an empty skewer in the air. “Why don’t they make these in England? I wonder if I can make them myself...”

“These a-are also very nice,” Victor said. He yawned. It was getting pretty late in Fairyland.

“You know, I realised I only gave you half an answer before, and then I never heard your answer,” she said suddenly. “You asked me what animal I’d want to be,” she clarified, seeing his confusion.

“I-I asked because I d-don’t know,” he said.

Now it was her turn to look baffled. “What do you mean?”

“I d-don’t like being a bat,” he admitted, wrinkling his nose. “I w-want to learn a d-different spell, but I d-don’t have any ideas.”

“I imagine it is kind of a pain,” she sympathised. “Especially in the day. But I don’t know that much about bats. They’re cute and misunderstood, they have echo location, and that’s it, that’s all I know.”

“I l-like bats,” he pointed out, “I j-just don’t want to b-be one.”

“An owl, maybe?” Lucinda suggested. “Wait, no, same problem, nocturnal... Umm... Flying squirrel? Though, I guess you’d prefer something that can actually fly, not just glide... Hmm.”

“Wh-what about you, though?”

“Me? I’m happy staying the shape I am.” She leaned a hand on her cheek. “I wish I was a bit prettier... I guess who doesn’t...”

“Y-you’re pretty!” he protested.

“O-oh? Thanks.” She hunched her shoulders and smiled awkwardly. “I mean, it’s not like I think I’m ugly it’s just...” She dropped her shoulders again and looked away. “I don’t get to feel pretty a lot? I’m a prince for my job and my school uniform isn’t exactly flattering... So that’s at least 90% of the time I’m not dressed how I want. I suppose I’m done with high school really soon so that’s goodbye to the uniform at least.”

“D-do you not l-like working as a prince?” Victor asked.

“It’s not that,” Lucinda replied. “It’s just... tiring to pretend you’re a gender you’re not? I mean I don’t have to do a lot - Otherworlders just see the outfit and think ‘That’s a boy’. It’s both really useful and incredibly irritating at the same time. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.”

“I th-think I understand,” Victor replied. “I-I w-want new c-clothes because I d-don’t want people to l-look at me and just s-see ‘vampire’.”

“Do you... is it hard on you, being a vampire?” she asked.

“I d-don’t know, i-it’s inconvenient,” he replied, “b-but i-it’s n-not that I’m a vampire, i-it’s that I didn’t kn-know I was allowed to be a-anything else.”

“Yeah, it’s ... a whole thing, finding out something like that.” She flung a hand out in front of her. “It’s like, ‘You mean THIS was an option this whole time?!’ and it’s both annoying and great.” She laughed. “It’s better late than never though, right?”

He smiled to himself. “Y-yes...”

Lucinda rubbed her eyes. “Speaking of late... it’s something like 4am back home, and it's pretty late in Fairyland too.” She yawned. “I know we’ve only really been to two shops and a supermarket, but maybe we should head back? It’s up to you though. I can easily stay up longer.”

“W-we should head back,” Victor agreed. He was tired, and he was starting to suspect it wasn’t just the time since he’d last slept.

They got up, put their rubbish in the correct bin – there were several – and starting walking back. They’d been walking for just a few minutes when they were blindsided by a car. Lucinda jumped back. She hadn’t seen the crossing light - which was red - or the vehicle. There was a tiny side road with a wall blocking the view of anything but the main street. You couldn’t see the side street until you were practically on it.

“G-gomen nasai!” she said, bowing an apology. The driver didn’t look impressed; they were frowning hard. Lucinda shuffled back a good way from the road edge.

Victor, who had taken off as a bat in his panic, clung to the wall. It took Lucinda a minute to understand what had happened and spot him. She held a hand over her heart and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Are you okay?” she asked. They were now on opposite sides of the little road, but she didn’t try to cross.

“I-I think so,” he replied. “Th-that w-was close.”

“Yeah, I didn’t see that road AT ALL.” Lucinda made a face at the crossing light. She looked all around them and down the offending side street again. “It’s clear. No-one’s looking.”

“R-right.” He climbed around the corner anyway, just in case. And then...

“Do you want me to help block you from view?” she offered.

“Um.” He hung there for a minute. “Um... M-Miss Lucinda...”

“Yeah?”

“I c-can’t change back.” His voice sounded as small as he was.

She frowned and finally crossed the road, standing on the corner of the main street. “What was that?”

“I... I c-can’t change back.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“N-no. N-not... to me.”

Her expression changed to match his own growing horror. “Lamprey...” Eyes wide, she bit her knuckles while she thought. “Did they ever... Couldn’t the fairies fix it? Or a witch?”

“It d-doesn’t w-work,” he answered, struggling to keep a grip on the stone as his whole body was trembling. “Th-they t-tried, b-but you end up w-with a regular h-human who still n-needs blood. B-but with a body th-that c-can’t handle it. I-it w-was worse a-and he w-would have died f-from n-no blood.” His grip slipped and he slid a few inches down the wall.

“Um. Do you want to...?” Lucinda held out a hand. He hesitated, before climbing on. She held her arms together a little away from her torso. “You know, one of the reasons I couldn’t answer you before about the animal thing... When I was turned into a raven that one time, it was really freaky how everyone else was suddenly a giant. So um, let me know if I’m being scary.”

“I-I’m u-used to it...” He glanced up at her before looking quickly back down. Her face was a mask of concentration.

“Didn’t Lamprey fall asleep as a bat or stay too long as a bat or something?” she asked. “I don’t remember the details but I know that he couldn’t turn back because he didn’t have enough magic. And he couldn’t drink enough blood to get enough magic to ever turn back because bats are too small.”

“Y-yes, that’s wh-what happened,” Victor confirmed.

“So... Um, so...” she began hesitantly, “since you only just turned into a bat, wouldn’t it work if you... drank blood, like, right now?”

“M-maybe, b-but... I c-can’t j-just... Who would...” Realisation dawned and he glanced up again.

“You could... drink... mine?” her voice cracked. “Wow, those words really just came out of my mouth. But there’s not a lot of options.”

“B-but-” Oh good. Now he had two different kinds of nightmare scenario to deal with at once, AND memories of The Incident were flooding back. His claws reflexively tensed, and he remembered that was flesh he was gripping, and forced himself to just flop. “B-but-” he tried again.

“I don’t think we’ve got time to argue,” Lucinda pointed out. “It’s at least thirty minutes walk to the return door, then a few hours from the return door to the palace.” She made sure no-one was looking, then ducked into the narrow side road, heading uphill. “Just need to find somewhere less exposed...”

“B-but-” He had absolutely no arguments to counter with.

“Look,” she continued as she powerwalked up the street, “I know I said don’t ask me for blood, and you didn’t, I offered. And, yeah, I’m uncomfortable and slightly terrified but you were literally just talking about how you don’t like being a bat and if I don’t do something you might be stuck as a bat forever and I’m a prince and rescuing people is my job and it doesn’t matter if I’m on Earth or I’m not getting paid, because you don’t get to choose who needs rescuing-”

“I d-don’t-”

“-so we’re both just going to have to speedrun facing our demons. Here should do.” She stopped in another side street, and leaned against a wall breathing hard. “Look, it’s not like that time with the potion. Just. Just go ahead? I promise it’s fine.” She hesitated. “Well all right, not fine, but as fine as I’m going to get. And we might have taken too long already.”

Unable to answer with any suitable words, Victor turned his attention to Lucinda’s arm. This was going to be a lot harder as a bat. And it was going to hurt. Human skin offered zero resistance to vampire fangs, but bat teeth weren’t anywhere near as sharp. He wasn’t even a vampire bat. Still, they weren’t herbivore teeth. He tentatively nipped near a vein. He felt Lucinda wince; she didn’t say anything, but she gave him a thumbs up with her other hand. He tried again, hearing a hiss from Lucinda, but he’d drawn blood. And still the inconvenience of being a bat wasn’t over, because he couldn’t cover the wound and suck. Bats lapped. He tried to avoid the actual cut, merely licking at the trickle of blood. He’d have to try and drink as much as he could stand; constantly stopping and failing to transform would only drain even more magic and draw this ordeal out. Determined not to look at Lucinda until he was done and frankly, possibly never again, ever, he focused on the blood. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t drink any more – he was a pretty small bat – and without thinking, tried to transform. The two of them toppled over, the sudden weight of a human on the girl’s arms not being conducive to good balance, and they ended up in a heap on the floor.

“It worked!” Lucinda beamed at him before extracting her arms from under him and pushing herself away.

Victor’s body was screaming at him. He was bruised and aching from the fall, he’d been up for nearly twenty four hours now and above all, he was thirsty. “C-can I-” He bit the question back.

Lucinda rubbed her wrist near the cut. “Do you... n-need more...?”

He gave a single nod.

Lucinda held out the still dripping arm shakily. “Well, I’m... already bleeding s-so...”

Victor shook his head furiously.

Lucinda started laughing.

He looked up in alarm.

She pushed herself up off her knees and into a sitting position, still laughing. “We are the worst two people for this activity.”

“Wh-why are you laughing?”

“I dunno, just, there couldn’t be any two worse people to have been put into this situation,” she remarked. “Well... maybe Sara,” she admitted after a moment’s thought. “Probably, no, definitely Sara.”

“A-are you okay...?”

“Doesn’t matter.” She shook her head. “Erlina fainted from not having enough magic in Bad Schwartz and that’s an area that actually has magic. Earth has barely any. I wouldn’t be able to carry you back to the door if you collapse, and if we tried and failed, you’d collapse in public, in a country where I don’t speak the language, and neither of us has a passport. Pretty sure that’s illegal, now that I think about it. So.” She held out her arm again, steadily this time.

“I c-can’t argue...” he whined, slumping back against the wall. Eventually he dragged himself back up and to where she was sat. He gingerly took her arm and put his mouth to the cut. It was inadequate, so he used his fangs. At least this way wasn’t painful.

“You know, this isn’t anything like any of the nightmare scenarios I had in my head,” she said. “I thought it would hurt, for one thing.” She rifled in her bag one handed and pulled out her phone. “Still okay for time.”

Despite what she said, he could feel she was tense through her arm. She held it rigid, while she kept a lookout for people and cars.

Eventually he let go and just let himself breathe.

“I should probably get a plaster or a bandage for this,” she began, looking at her arm. “Oh... It’s actually not bleeding that much. It’s stopped already?”

“Vampire bites h-heal v-very fast.”

“I’m gonna get some cute plasters anyway,” she said, standing up a little shakily and dusting herself off. “I’m always getting scrapes from my prince work and um, I... don’t want people to see the bite mark. But mainly I want to buy cute stuff. Is that okay? It’s on the way back. That Daiso place.”

“Y-you could tell me y-you want t-to tour the whole city by foot a-and I’d agree.”

“Is there anything you want?”

“I w-want to s-sleep for s-seven hundred y-years,” he replied. “A-and some more of th-that tea.”

They returned to the store and got more sweets and drinks, and a few interesting gizmos. It was now the wee hours of the morning in Fairyland, and it was disheartening to know that they had a few hours to walk before they got to the palace and more importantly, their bedrooms.

When they stepped through the door to Fairyland, they found a carriage waiting there.

“There you are!” Tyrian exclaimed with relief. “I thought something might have happened, so I came to wait for you. Will told me this was the return door he gave you.”

“We weren’t gone that long, were we?” Lucinda asked.

“I... suppose not, but it was getting dark and you weren’t back, and I know its not dark there yet, but I don’t know, it’s Victor’s first trip to Earth and everything,” he rambled. “Not that I don’t trust you Lucy!” he backpedalled. “So ah, was everything all right? No emergencies?”

“N-none at all,” replied Victor.

“Completely uneventful,” Lucinda reported.

“Very good then,” Tyrian said, opening the carriage door. “Get in.”

“You have no idea how glad we are that we don’t have to walk back,” Lucinda told him as she climbed inside. She settled herself into the opposite corner, on the same side as Tyrian.

Victor lay full length on the other seat, facing the ceiling.

“So, what did you get up to?” Tyrian asked brightly.

“N-no questions, please,” Victor protested.

“Agreed. No questions, only sleep,” Lucinda added, closing her eyes and getting as comfortable as possible.

“Hmm.” He peered at them both in turn before settling back himself. “Very well, as you wish,” he acquiesced.

They were asleep before they even reached the edge of the forest.

----

I have so much stuff to do right now but this INSISTED on being written.

Oh and... Lucinda is wrong about there being zero dragons. Just fyi.

[panelshowsource]

could you make a post about all the books from comedians you own/have ordered and which are your favorites I want to buy all of them but don't know where to start ++++++++ would love to know if you know of a way to order a signed copy of David's book if I don't live in the UK

you know, in a stroke of what may be relevant information, i'm actually an editorial director by day and even used to be a literary agent here in nyc — none of which is obvious on account of my billion rushed typos and...just...general existence :) (i promise i'm supremely carefully handed in my editing!!! and have a lot of resources, at my job hahahahaha oh god maybe i shouldn't have mentioned this!!!) — but i'm really no book critic and have no idea how my tastes stack up against what a lot of you are looking for. i'm happy to share some of my general, poorly articulated internet thoughts but it may be more worth checking out goodreads or talking with others who have more experience with autobiographies (which a majority of these types of books are)!

to begin with a disclaimer, one of my friends texted me recently, "why do you only watch sad movies?" i love sad films, sad music, i love to cry, catharsis, sentimentality which is always a little self-indulgent. it's a bit ironic, because this is a comedy blog and you guys know me as someone who loves to find things to laugh about and i fill my life with so much silliness through his huge, life-long hobby, but, all the same, that is only one side of me, i guess. i'm saying this now because you're about to hear me talk briefly about a few somewhat-to-incredibly sad books and be like "oh i didn't know this what i was getting into" 😅

books i do recommend:

just ignore him by alan davies — this isn't a book review but i am self-conscious about just how i describe this book, because it's so sensitive and i carry a lot of respect for alan. at the time of publication, alan actually didn't want any of the press to know and/or discuss the most tragic elements of the book, so readers wouldn't be influenced in any direction before confronting it themselves. (it's okay to talk about now of course, and anyone should know there are major trigger warnings for death, child abuse, sexual abuse, and pedophilia.) it is a sad book about his earliest years: the complexities and nuances of male power and manipulation, of unimaginable loneliness, of a lost child. alan said it wasn't cathartic to write—that is was indeed very painful—but the vulnerability, the commitment to shirking himself of the painful silence he endured for most of his life, is exceptionally moving. alan's writing can be quite thorough, even flowery, in creating vivid places and images, so so much of the heaviness feels piercing and even disturbing. if you read other comedians' books, a decent majority of them are written in the style of standup or, say, a ted talk — with performance in mind, specific structures and beats that mimic how they'd tell these stories on stage. i would argue this is quite different to that, that while the writing is in a style and structure that benefits being read aloud this is a very different alan to alan the performer. and, very honestly, i'm really not an audiobook person, not to mention listening is a wholly different experience to reading — but the audiobook for this is phenomenal: alan narrates and, while of course it's his story so he'll tell it best, he is a very gentle, thoughtful storyteller. this will be you by chapter 4:

moab is my washpot + fry chronicles by stephen fry — the first and second of his three autobiographies covering some of the most sensational times (stephen is willing to admit) of his childhood and teen years + his rise to fame through the cambridge footlights. these are good reads for 1) stephen fry fans duh and 2) people who can enjoy the inspiration of auden, waugh, wilde, wodehouse, quintessential english writers who inform the foundation of stephen's relationship with literature and appreciation. stephen is painfully honest — and often sorry for it, apologising for what he perceives to be his shortcomings — and you can't help but feel, even early on in the first book, that his view of his own world is somehow even more subjective than everyone else's views of their own worlds. maybe it's because he's so judgmental, maybe it's his oscillating mental health, maybe it's the shocking thrust with which he was confronted with the wideness of the world...i'm not sure, but stephen's life through stephen's eyes is so very stephen-y. i think that's why we love him‚ though i can see some people loathing the less admirable sides of him, which he does show, so don't read this if you want to maintain some image of him that helps you cope or keeps you perfectly entertained. if you're not british, the fry chronicles is an especially good read to scratch some of your anglophilic interests (lotsss of namedropping and backstage chat)!

delicacy: a memoir about cake and death by katy wix — one of my recent faves and another book that isn't thoroughly funny. told in 21 vignettes either centered around or vaguely related to cake, katy talks about her school life, grief and loss, self-esteem and body image, misogyny — in ways that are just...matter of fact...opposed to lessons learned or things she's working on through therapy. she's accepted a lot, but she's also afflicted by a lot to this day; she's capably honest about where her reality stands. for this reason, it can be a bleak and certainly very raw read. i listened to the audiobook for this one, which was nice, but i much recommend the actual written book as the vignettes are in different formats (short story prose, letters, email exchanges) that often anchor time and place, intention, even the little peeks of light of comedy. katy's writing is very lovely, both my heart and mind were touched.

back story by david mitchell — a mildly vulnerable, moderately insightful, and quite humorous exploration of david's up-and-coming years. i really appreciate the premise — due a bad back and sciatica, he begins taking very long walks every day, and these walks trigger memories and anecdotes as he passes certain places — that really doesn't come off as a gimmick. it's a very easy read (or listen) and what i'd consider an uncomplicated, unproblematic bio, but it would be difficult to enjoy if you're only a casual fan of david mitchell or only like him in his most recent dad years, as it was written in his peep show heyday and is so much about those years of his life, his relationship with robert webb, etc. a good intro-to-the-genre book and the very first britcom book i read way back in 2010!

i also really enjoy graham norton's books — especially for the goss, but he's a great writer and his debut fiction novel got quite good reviews! — and tim key's books of poetry, though you really need to be a fan of tim key to read tim key :')

books i do not recommend:

before & laughter by jimmy carr — this book is much less of an autobiography (details are scant and anecdotes are few; it's cute when he refers to karoline as "my girl") and much more a collection of 1) jimmy's interpretation of contemporary comedy and what it means to be a comedian, and 2) how that journey, and his evolving attitudes, shaped him + became advice he would offer to others. this is why he calls the book adjacent to self help & motivational speaking. i don't think it teaches you anything new about him — literally or as a writer — so i don't recommend reading it, though the audiobook (where he's truly performing the writing like a ted talk) is an easy listen. a lot of people will not understand that jimmy is overwhelmingly sincere in regards to all of the topics and personal philosophies the jimmy nearing 50 espouses. he's someone with very studied, thorough personal philosophies (if you've seen him on podcasts talking about his life and career then you'll know just what i mean) and he explains them deftly, but they can feel a bit...how should i say this...flat to people who have heard a lot of it before, in hollywood movies or from their own parents or wherever. he didn't write this just for another stream of income — he is passionate about these conversations and that counts for something. overall i already knew a bit about the guy and didn't need this.

my shit life so far by frankie boyle — i have never read one of frankie's fiction novels (crime is really not my thing, so someone needs to let me know if richard osman's book series is a smash because i'm only going to check them out if i'm convinced to), but as a long-time fan of his, knowing how much of a wordsmith he is, and how intentional he is in everything he says, i was surprised by how dull i found this. his shit life was just that — uninteresting, meandering. his anecdotes may have worked better aloud than on paper, but they didn't grab me. you learn a bit about his young adulthood, but like jimmy he's intensely private and i could feel that distance between us even while reading an autobiography. it didn't work for me, super sad about it :(

can everyone please calm down? by mae martin — instead of criticising this book, i'd rather just make a disclaimer or two. if you are already engaged in queer discourses and dialogues, you are not going to learn very much from this book. both the descriptive writing and presentation of research is "accessible" to the point i'd call it more adjacent to YA than adult literature; if you prefer more creative, complicated, and/or signature writing styles, this book is not for you. if you are a big fan of mae martin and would appreciate an overview of their journey on the identity spectrum (going so far as to even rejecting it, in some capacities) in one place, then this may be convenient — but even then, at this point, it's somewhat outdated. imo a well-intention skip.

phil wang and tom allen are two more i think don't convince me with their writing, but i'm still making my ways through a couple of books and could probably talk more about this later!

i have never made this kind of non-fiction bio a priority on my long reading list, so i still have a lot of exploring and catching up to do, but i'm finding that i do prefer the books that explore the events of comedian's past as well as those that walk the reader through experiences in the comedy & tv industries. there are a lot of books about mental health and identity, which may be more of what many of you are looking for (sara pascoe, fern brady, jon richardson, and more).

okaY PHEW SORRY i always type too much 😒

first, as for david mitchell's new book, you can order it signed from waterstones as they ship to the usa — and it's currently half off!!!!! if you want to buy it unsigned from a usa retailer amazon is cheapest and target & bookshop are the cheapest non-amazon options :) an audiobook is coming out as well, so i do believe i will be able to add that to googledrive before too long, but no guarantees on a good time frame!

you can go here to download any of the ebooks & audiobooks i have on my googledrive!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Julian Borger and Lorenzo Tondo at The Guardian:

The UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership, in a move that signalled Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage amid global alarm over the war in Gaza and the extent of the humanitarian crisis in the strip. The assembly voted by 143 to nine, with 25 abstentions, for a resolution called on the UN security council to bestow full membership to the state of Palestine, while enhancing its current mission with a range of new rights and privileges, in addition to what it is allowed in its current observer status. The highly charged gesture drew an immediate rebuke from Israel. Its envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, delivered a fiery denunciation of the resolution and its backers before the vote. “Today, I will hold up a mirror for you,” Erdan said, taking out the small paper shredder in which he shredding a small copy of the cover of the UN charter. He told the assembly: “You are shredding the UN charter with your own hands. Yes, yes, that’s what you’re doing. Shredding the UN charter. Shame on you.”

The Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, pointed out the vote was being held at a time when Rafah, the southernmost town that is last haven for many Gazans, faced attack from Israeli forces. “As we speak, 1.4 million Palestinians in Rafah wonder if they will survive the day and wonder where to go next. There is nowhere left to go,” Mansour said. “I have stood hundreds of times before at this podium, often in tragic circumstances, but none comparable to the ones my people endured today … never for a more significant vote than the one about to take place, a historic one.” Friday’s resolution was carefully tailored over the past few days, diluting its language so as not to trigger a cut-off of US funding under a 1990 law. It does not make Palestine a full member, or give it voting rights in the assembly, or the right to stand for membership of the security council, but the vote was a resounding expression of world opinion in favour of Palestinian statehood, galvanised by the continuing bloodshed and famine caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.

Even before the vote in the assembly on Friday morning, Israel and a group of leading Republicans urged US funding be cut anyway because of the new privileges the resolution granted to the Palestinian mission. The US mission to the UN, which voted against the resolution, warned that it would also use its veto again if the question of Palestinian membership returned to the security council for another vote. “Efforts to advance this resolution do not change the reality that the Palestinian Authority does not currently meet the criteria for UN membership under the UN charter,” the mission’s spokesperson, Nathan Evans, said. “Additionally, the draft resolution does not alter the status of the Palestinians as a “non-member state observer mission”. The other nations which voted against the resolution were Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea. The UK abstained.

According to the resolution, the Palestinian mission will now have to right to sit in the general assembly among other states in alphabetical order, rather than in its current observer seat at the back of the chamber. Palestinian diplomats will have the right to introduce proposals and amendments, they can be elected to official posts in the full chamber and on committees, and will have the right to speak on Middle Eastern matters, as well as the right to make statements on behalf of groups of nations in the assembly. But the resolution also makes plain that “the state of Palestine, in its capacity as an observer state, does not have the right to vote in the general assembly or to put forward its candidature to United Nations organs.”

The UN General Assembly voted 143-9 with 25 abstentions in favor of backing a bid to make the State of Palestine its 194th member and to grant more privileges as an observer state.

Further, the UNGA recommends that the UN Security Council reconsider the matter to grant the State of Palestine full membership. The US is likely to veto it.

Sadly, the US (along with 8 other countries such as Israel, Czech Republic, and Argentina) voted no in order to protect Israel Apartheid interests.

[endcant]

tw for mentioning transmisogyny and suicidal ideation, but this is mostly a long uninteresting wall of text about my evening of browsing the dying internet

fascinated by this twitter scam thing using bought profiles all pretending to be twoc from the UK. i know this sounds like just completely run of the mill dead internet shit. everything is scammers and bots and no real people. but i’m interested and it’s my blog so whatever.

i got dmed by a profile (pretty unassuming hello message but i have no mutual connections so i was like ok time to see if there’s any likelihood this person would actually have any business messaging me) and noticed a clone in her followers. identical profile except for the name.

here’s the bio: ✨ one day your entire life will flash in front of your eyes; make sure it is worth watching. ✨ | 23 | UK (unfortunately) | cat 🐈 lady | she/her ⚧️ |

that’s a pretty specific description for two different women to have

i was like ok time to look up this description. unfortunately all major sites are trash now, so the IDENTICAL DESCRIPTIONS turned up no useful results, but searching just the first part of the url linked in each of their identical bios turned up more twitter profiles. (not sharing that url yet for reasons youll see later)

all were accounts set up in the 2010s with random retweets, seemingly left to sit since 2018, but they were activated on election day to retweet like 1 woke post a day.

what disturbs me is that all of them have a pinned tweet that’s some variation on the sentiment of “idk why conservatives think being gay is a choice i’ve been suicidal my whole life”. this is the non-identical part of the accounts, the pin expressing internalized transmisogyny and homophobia to the degree of suicidal ideation. either someone is using a completely non-moderated AI for this, they’re copying tweets made by real LGBT people, or they’re coming up with their own suicidal lgbt people posts.

the one post on the internet about it is a reddit post that says in the google result that it’s an “amazon scam” and it was deleted, so the content of the post is not visible. but ppl in the comments shared screenshots of other accounts like this that have been deleted, though the accounts in this post were activated and dming people 6 months ago rather than in the election. before the election their pinned posts were about how lucky lgbt kids are these days to receive so much love and support. one comment posted DMs and the bot/scammer was asking for $10 to help with rent.

ultimately the actual actions are not unusual at all. lazy scammers making identical accounts to dm from, relying on the brokenness of most search sites (including the built in search on twitter) to cover their tracks.

however, the interest to me comes from the fact that all of them link to a seemingly possibly real blog owned by a cis white male professional in the UK who i found on linkedin. i’m wondering if the scammers link to his blog because it’s not obviously connected to a specific personality and because the url for it seems nebulously woke. but all of it could be fake, right?

in which case, i’m amazed by the idea that a person set up a fake DEI blog, published a book on amazon linking to it, and linked it to a (his?) linkedin account belonging to an imaginary DEI trainer with the same name as the book author. and then they set up a bunch of at first envious and now weirdly self-hating twitter accts to get money from sympathetic people. i would consider this to be a low effort AI grift if the blog didn’t have posts from the 2010s as well that have innocuous writing. i remember waves of regular markov chain text bot generated fake content back then, and that was certainly not this. but even as a low effort AI grift to sell a low effort DEI book on amazon it’s just an absolutely insane set of tactics. anyway, why not make the fake linkedin account match the literally identical twitter accounts?

but the most interesting scenario in my mind is that this scam is completely unrelated to this guy and they just chose his blog to make it seem like their dozens of identical suicidal woke OCs were writers for a real site with a woke sounding name. and it’s entirely possible this guy is a real DEI worker who did real trainings for the real NHS thru the 2010s and he is selling his real book on his real expertise thru amazon. and his real actual DEI training blog is being linked to again and again by scammers who like to spend a good amount of time roleplaying as suicidal twoc from the UK. in which case, holy shit, i wonder if he knows.

anyway i’m gonna message him on linkedin.

[drdemonprince]

do they test out different covers or something with different country's readers? I'm so curious about why the covers are different

The covers are different because different companies hold the US and UK rights, respectively. Any other foreign release or translation rights would also be handled by completely different companies local to those countries, each of them making their own independent decisions about the cover, the title, and the copy edit. The UK edition has significant legal edits because it is so easy to be sued for defamation there, for example.

I have no idea why the UK edition has the changes that it does, they don't tell me anything. The teal accent does match the sweatshirt in my author photo though, which I really like.

[anonymoushouseplantfan]

I’m in the UK. 24 hours later, how is the US media covering the revelations in Spare ?

Well, there's this, for one.

Most of the US shows have reported on The Guardian "leak," which I think says a lot about that leak. Someone was sending out press releases from her Hotmail account. The leak, of course, focused on the fight.

The one that has been going around was CNN's Don Lemon calling the memoir "gauche." Meghan's bots were criticizing the segment on Twitter so I guess that made a mark.

CBS covered it pretty neutrally. They called it "disappointing" and promote the Anderson Cooper interview. It's basically promo for them because they own 60 minutes.

CBS Morning was also 60 minutes promo with anchors questioning the motivation. I guess the interview will address that. Roya Nikkah talks about his long-standing resentments and the likelihood of a reconciliation summit. She expects a "recollections may vary" type of reaction.

Good Morning America also based their coverage on the Guardian leak (surprise!). This one is basically promo for the Stranahan interview. It has the "archnemesis" segment of the interview.

NBC actually got their hands on a Spanish copy, which is interesting. They don't mention the Guardian leak, which leads me to believe that they weren't part of the Sussex PR drive. They mention the Nazi uniform, losing his virginity, and drug use, which the other outlets did not.

NBC Today did mention the Guardian leak. NBC didn't have the book in time for the morning show yesterday. The correspondent says this is a nightmare for King Charles.

Edited: Another Today segment just dropped.

Fox News was very negative. They covered most of the content, not just the fight. They note that ITV, where Harry is doing his interview, is part of the royal rota that he supposedly hates.

Megyn Kelly covered it for her Sirius XM show. She had Tom Bowers on and was very negative.

I think the most noticeable aspect of the US coverage is how much it follows what we presume was the Sussex pr strategy--focusing on the Guardian leak and the upcoming interviews. It really illustrates how easy it is to guide the US coverage. All you have to do is give some exclusives.

The more cringe details that were published in the UK and overseas, were featured in smaller outlets like The Cut and Slate. The Cut is the only outlet, so far, to mention the "baby brain" comment.

Slate focused on the comments about Will.

Reuters, a news service, also did a list of revelations. Interesting that not many outlets have picked up on this and used the info.

Associated Press, the other big news service, focused on the fight.

Edit: I should have mentioned that Page Six, from the NYPost has been relentlessly publishing every single little snippet. There's just too many to count. They've covered EVERYTHING.

And People Magazine has also covered most of the drama, including the "baby brain" comment. They've skipped most of the genitalia stories because they're classy like that.