spark | Reading

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Oddly, I've never read this one before. It made its way into the same bucket as The Wizard of Oz during my childhood: I'd seen the movie, so I didn't need to read it.* (I did read the several dozen Oz books that came after the first one! But not the first one, because I'd seen the movie and that was good enough.**) But with Pride and Prejudice, it was even more pronounced: I hadn't seen "the" movie; I'd seen a good dozen or more of them! And read a bunch of tumblr-meta about the book. And... And...

And the book proved very familiar! I knew all of the beats, and many of the famous passages! But every once in a while there'd be a scene that I couldn't recall having seen in any adaptation--for instance, the one with Miss Bingley trying to annoy Mr Darcy into giving her attention as he writes letters. A delightful scene! That I couldn't recall ever having seen adapted! So there was definitely more nuance and detail on the page than I had osmosed over the decades.

And yet not that much more detail. I think this is the first time that I've ever read the book after seeing a movie adaptation, where I discovered I already knew what was going to happen on pretty much every page.

Still worth reading! Austen's prose is a delight, as always. And of course I was reading specifically for Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is mostly Character Not Appearing in the adaptations anyway. But for a book I'd never read before? It felt eerily like a book I had read before.

Alexandre Dumas (trans. by Anonymous), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846)

Exactly the opposite experience! I knew there was a long imprisonment in the Chateau d'If, and thought I knew that he eventually dug his way out with a teaspoon, but that was it. Everything in here was new to me.

phoenixfalls, who has loved this book since childhood, quizzed me early on as to what I thought the book was about. "Adventure novel," I said. "Lots of swashbuckling and swordfighting and shit."

Spoiler: Unless I have forgotten something, there are exactly zero swordfights in this novel. Also, no swashbuckling to speak of, unless we count the intellectual swashbuckling of masterminding a multiple-decade revenge scheme with an absurd number of moving parts. Very sexy of him, that.

I read this as part of a one-chapter-a-day read-along, and enjoyed that experience very much--well, until I neared the end, and said "fuck that" and read six chapters a day until I finished it. (The read-along is still winding up as we speak.) I will say that even at a chapter a day -- which is a good clip! -- there was a section in the middle when there were Too Many Characters*** to keep track of, and I was fighting for my life to keep sorted who was whose daughter, engaged to whom, and also what everybody's name was now. At one point I had to put it down for two weeks to read another time-sensitive thing, and when I picked it up again, I needed to use SparkNotes to get myself oriented again, I was so lost. How the hell people managed when this was serialized weekly, I have no idea.

Some things I especially liked: ( spoilers ahoy! )

All in all, a very satisfying read. I'm a bit meh about Edmond/Haylee at the end, but there's something appropriate about the Revenge Twins pairing off to figure out what one does after successfully prosecuting one's revenge. I'm a little worried that in all of Edmond's masterminding, he didn't do any retirement planning: this is absolutely a guy who is going to go nuts in six months because he didn't take some woodworking classes before he retired. (I propose that he get Faria's manuscript published, and then go on a lecture tour, promoting and defending it.)

I'm not quite in the place where I want to start right over at the beginning again, but I do very much miss reading a chapter every day at lunch. And I am curious to know what it looks like on a second read, when one knows what Edmond is about.

--

( footnotes )

coffeeandink

oh hey I'll be at Readercon this year. Let me know if you want to hang out!

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stranger Things
Pairings/Characters: Robin Buckley & Mike Wheeler
Rating: Teen
Length: 3,407 words
Creator Link:

ottermo
Theme: Just Like Canon, Canon LGBTQ+ Characters, Gen

Summary: Robin and Mike have a talk.

It's tough when someone you love falls in love with you.

Reccer's Notes: Robinnnnnnnnn. Also Miiiiike. This is such a sweet conversation. These two barely—if ever?—talked in canon, but I feel like if they had, if Mike had asked Robin for help, it would have gone just like this. It's part of a series, but can totally be read alone.

Fanwork Link: the same boat

runpunkrun

Second book in The Captive's War trilogy. Still feels like an Adrian Tchaikovsky knock off, and the characters are nowhere near as memorable or engaging as those in the authors' own Expanse series, but for a follow up to a long, dense book that came out two years ago that I barely remember, this was surprisingly readable. As long as you're reading for world building and plot. It does have that middle book problem where it's mainly just moving people around on the board to get them into place for the third book, but at least it doesn't drag it out.

Contains: genocide, violence, gore; a crop of babies grown in artificial incubators from stolen genetic material; two unwanted surprise erections under almost identical circumstances (being spooned by the erectioneer).

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

siderea

Early Monday morning I went to the emergency department with mild but inexplicable and persistent chest pain and shortness of breath to find out if I was having a heart attack.

Apparently not. I made a point of not going to the closest hospital, but to one I knew from my own patients' experiences takes women's risk of heart attack seriously. I showed up at about 6:30 am and there wasn't a single other person in the waiting room. I had an experience kind of like when a race car has a pit stop, only with a team of people hooking me up to the EKG almost instantly instead of changing tires. They had it completed before Mr. Bostoniensis was done parking the car.

They kept me for a few hours for repeated blood draws and did a chest x-ray. The conclusion the EM doc came to was that he felt it's very unlikely that it was a heart attack, but can't rule out something more chronic and cardiac. X-ray showed my heart is the size it's supposed to be; my lungs seem perfectly fine and there's no evidence of pulmonary anything.

Nevertheless, something is very Not Right in my chest, and I have a follow up appointment with my PCP tomorrow. The discomfort is not severe, but it is persistent and NSAIDs do nothing to it, and that and the attendent anxiety is screwing up my sleep. I keep wanting to press my hand against the sore spot to put pressure on it, but it's right behind my sternum so I can't reach it.

There's a non-zero chance that in 20 hours I'll be in the market for any or all of: cardiologists, vascular surgeons, pulmonologists. If you happen to be a woman or otherwise AFAB in the Boston area who has one or more of those that she likes, feel free to recommend. I have a preference for the BILH system as opposed to MGB, but whatever. Alas, I can only take recommendations from women or people likely to be treated as one, because, fucking hell, it matters.

Irritatingly, my health had been seeing a slight improvement. I'm moving a bit better and tolerating sitting better.

Meanwhile, my personal life has been a huge rollercoaster over the last four months. Mostly good stuff, but... emotionally intense. I had hoped to post about it, but it has proved very difficult to write about. It starts with flabbergastry and then moves through some delicate territory where I've been asked to keep some details private by family and also is a very fast moving target and also involves talking about some intrinsically very difficult to talk about things.

This in turn is in a larger context where I feel less and less comfortable self-disclosing personal details here. As you might or might not have noticed, when I moved two years ago, I took advantage of the occasion to stop talking about where I lived. That's now available only on a need-to-know basis. I'm still in the Greater Boston area. But I think I would rather not be more specific than that.

That's one example. There are others, but I don't feel the need to itemize them.

Unfortunately, this kind of opsec comes with a perhaps surprising downside for me: it absolutely cripples my ability to write. I was, like everybody, struggling with the emotional weight of current events and the downward force it put on concentration and motivation, and there was the ergonomics problem I had last Nov/Dec that stole a lot of my mojo. But on top of those and some other difficulties: my capacity for doing the kind of writing I do here is profoundly tied to a specific kind of social dynamic this kind of reserve frustrates if not completely prevents.

Writing has always felt like lifting heavy things with my mind; doing it without that social context makes everything I try to life about two orders of magnitude more heavy. It's not strictly speaking impossible. But it makes it vastly more difficult and unsustainably stressful – you can smell the motor in the winch start smoking – and is what has been burning me out. Writing this way does not feel like any sort of accomplishment, just something to be grimly endured.

P.S. I feel the need for completeness sake to relate that what I was doing at the moment I noticed, hey, my chest feels funny, was trying to debug an old SPF record. If this takes me out, blame Sender Policy Framework.

sanguinity

Today is the ten year anniversary of "Something Good (Will Come From That)", my retrospective of a hundred years of Holmes and Watson on film:

Watch on Vimeo

(Vid, commentary, FAQ, and timestamps on AO3.)

language_escapes and I spent a year making it, and a very good year it was. She turned down co-author credit, but I maintain this vid never would have happened with out her.

"Something Good" is ten years out of date now; that's especially apparent when I re-read the commentary. It's been good to see how many more versions of Holmes and Watson have come by in the interval. I'm particularly happy to have female and non-white Holmeses coming out of Korea and Japan: both of those were thin on the ground when we made the vid.

At the time, I thought of this vid as my masterwork, and despaired of ever making anything so good again! Mostly at a loss for what to do with myself, I kept on making things, and I'm happy to say there's been plenty of good stuff in the interim. Good stuff, new fandoms, and new fannish friends. There were even a few more vids!

So here's to

language_escapes and all my fannish friends, new and old, and a hundred years (plus ten!) of Holmes and Watson walking arm-in-arm.

malymin posting in

little_details

Not sure how to word this...

I'm looking for information on castles? In particular the keep, which was a residence for the nobility as well as a last line of defense.

Some questions include:

Wikipedia only talks about English, French, Italian, and Spanish castles having keeps. Did castles in northern, central, and eastern Europe not have keeps, or is this just a matter of fewer English-language sources on, for example, German, Danish, and Polish castles?
If you know of any good diagrams or floor plans with labels of castle keeps - both the kind of "generic" cross-section illustrations you see in children's educational books (the larger and more visually detailed the better!) and of specific real-world castles. Preferably castles that actually served as fortifications in addition to residences, rather than castle-esque palaces like Neuschwanstein Castle. It's difficult for me to reconstruct spatial information with text, so visual aids are helpful. It's very hard to find good educational pictures with an image search these days, there's too much AI-generated inaccurate bloat in the results.
Relatedly, photos or illustrations of the castle's interior.
Who (if anyone) resided in the castle, aside from the noble that owned it and their family, and the servants? Also, more information on the duties and types of servants who would have been present in the castle.

I, um, am sorry if this is too broad. ^_^;

runpunkrun posting in

fancake

Poll #34738 round 188 theme poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 77

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Fannish Non-Fiction
20 (26.0%)

In Denial
23 (29.9%)

Unreliable Narrator
34 (44.2%)

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Ilya Rozanov & Scott Hunter (background Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter/Kip Grady)
Rating: Teen
Length: 2426
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: milominderbinder on AO3
Themes: Just like canon, Canon LGBTQ+ characters, Missing scene, Friendship

Summary: "I did. After MLH awards, in June. Oh, I did not tell him about Shane and me. But what he did, it was important. It changed things. For me, at least - maybe for us."

On the night of the MLH awards, Ilya corners Scott Hunter on a quiet balcony.

Reccer's Notes: A nice missing scene that fills out the brief mention in canon. Ilya has a quiet word with Scott Hunter - seems like it would be the start of their friendship. Very much 'just like canon', and with great characterisation.

Fanwork Links: nobody knows (and nobody gives a damn, either way)

cimorene

I was intrigued (though not all that excited) to learn that Christopher Nolan is filming The Odyssey. I always expect to enjoy film portraying ancient history, but I also always expect to be annoyed. I appreciate Nolan's direction, but I'm not a huge fan of his, either.

As readers may remember, I'm not an Odyssey fan, exactly. I only read the Odyssey and the Iliad in Emily Wilson's translations a couple of years ago. I did go through a period of being in Greek Mythology fandom as a child, and hence accumulated a store of trivia about them, but I was young and it never occurred to me at that time that one could read translations of original texts. People just kept giving me different books that basically were retelling the same things from the same sources.

After the Iliad and Odyssey, I also read a bunch of Greek tragedies; I was going to read some Roman tragedies too, because one of the books I bought to get a Wilson translation of a Greek tragedy had some of both, but I didn't actually read any of the Roman ones. I'll probably get around to it at some point.

But I have been thinking I wanted to reread the Iliad and Odyssey already in the last few months, even before news of this adaptation, and then the other day I stumbled upon a video on YouTube where the classicist Mary Beard touted her podcast, Instant Classics, and said they were going to be hosting or... doing?... a reading-the-Odyssey series and talking about it soon, and I thought that sounded neat. Maybe I'll look at some of the older podcast episodes as well.

cimorene

As you may remember, my wife,

waxjism, is currently into Heated Rivalry. She's reblogging the same gifsets twenty times a day and she's reading nothing but Heated Rivalry anymore. It completely displaced her previous fannish interest in 9-1-1, by the way, and she didn't even watch the end of the season of that - which is probably an improvement for her because Heated Rivalry, the show, is well written, meticulously planned, brilliantly acted, and made with extraordinary care to every detail of photography and editing and visual design. In contrast, while 911 is a good time, it's a network prime time soap opera churned out by an underpaid writers' room and a questionably reasonable showrunner. Of course 911, (sociologically) intriguingly, seems to be in the midst of making their male BFFs a canon pairing ( Read more... )

So anyway. Wax is now reading fanfiction for Heated Rivalry, which is a miniseries made out of a romance novel about gay hockey players. Wax and I are veterans of hockey RPF, having both read it and followed NHL hockey for maybe 5-8 years (I started to get fed up with the evil ownership and conservative culture around 2016-18). In hockey RPF the level of hockey knowledge is obviously high and sports fandom was the canon text. But this show's broad appeal has brought in a lot of fans with no knowledge of hockey at all, and as always with a very popular fandom, a critical mass of the ones with no knowledge of hockey also lack any sense that any knowledge about hockey is necessary to writing about professional hockey players. (It would totally be possible to write fic about this show with no knowledge of hockey beyond what is shown onscreen, provided you simply paid attention to what was onscreen and used it; but this would probably require more attention to detail than is plausible in a person who is so enthusiastic that it doesn't occur to them to look up even a Wikipedia article's worth of information on the world and setting of the story they are writing.)

So there's apparently a huge range of mistakes about hockey, and even though this problem is so endemic that Wax is reading mistakes egregious enough to upset her multiple times a day and has been for months, the pain never dulls.

You know what this reminds me of? The last time I was reading for an extended time in the same fandom: I spent about a year intensively reading almost every last scrap (at the time) of Steve/Eddie fic in the Stranger Things fandom after season 4 (Here's my 75 bookmarks, mostly from 2022-2023). Stranger Things is about teenagers in 1980s midwestern America. The fandom appealed overwhelmingly to young people (although the show had a lot of nostalgic appeal for adults as well, they were definitely a minority of writers represented in fic). Also, less predictably, the plurality of the writers seemed to be from the UK (???). Like Heated Rivalry writers who don't know about hockey, these youngsters didn't know about the culture, technology, or slang of 1986 (including the parts that actually were shown onscreen, which again mirrors the Heated Rivalry writers).

After a while I was far more annoyed by ridiculous errors in technology and British dialogue that they didn't bother getting American-picked (it's a small percentage of young fanfic writers who think having a beta reader is worthwhile now; in fact it's quite popular and socially acceptable to post without rereading) than by anything that you could call bad writing in the traditional sense. At some point I got so annoyed with it all that I would have gratefully used a filter that only allowed fic by writers born before 1985 in North America (that's when I knew I needed to stop reading it, probably).

People have to start writing and keep writing to get really good. People have different taste. People have different skills. So there's no point holding it against anyone that they're young, or haven't been writing for that long, or are writing a different kind of fic than the kind you like because they're interested in different things than you.

On the other hand, everybody who doesn't bother to look it up when they don't know what a trade is, or how a cassette player works, or how hockey games are scored, or queer terminology in the 80s, is making a conscious choice they didn't have to make. They could have left it out if they didn't want to look it up and weren't sure! So it's absolutely fair to hold all of those things against them.

Of course, it would be difficult to filter, even theoretically, for writers who look everything up, so the quickest way to this more-relaxing reading experience is a writer who already knows. Hence "writer was alive in the 1980s" and "writer has been a hockey fan for years" would be highly useful filters if they were widely adopted.

(But they would also narrow the pool so much that most people wouldn't want to - be able to? - stick to them very long.)

runpunkrun

The one with the racetracks, and the titular parade.

It took me way too long to get into this because I was too busy going Tran? Bautista?? Florin??? Brittany???? every time a supporting character popped up without an adequate reminder of who they were (like, here I am picturing Florin with the head of a crocodile and nothing the book said either proved or disproved it; imagine reading anything else like that, like, yeah, iirc, Hamlet is a hammerhead shark with robotic legs)(ilu Jamal) but once I stopped caring about that, I had a lot of fun. Just as propulsive as the other books. With a couple of those sneaky big feels that occasionally ambush Carl. And a clever resolution to the eleventh floor.

Contains some actual animal harm, like to actual animals. Plus the usual gore, violence, and conspicuous adherence to a gender binary, including, at one point, the phrase "female boots," like wtf, Dinniman, fucking slap that phrase into Google and put your eyeballs on some ladies footwear and fucking describe it. But even worse is that I think they were probably motorcycle boots and did not need to be gendered at all. Which could be said of a lot of things in this series.

elisem

There were thunderstorms going flickaflick kaBOOMba in the Twin Cities much of the night, so I am awake. Now that doesn't mean awake enough to make a proper post on how things are, but here's the basic stuff:

On May 10, I unexpectedly surfed down a collapsing retaining wall which then yeeted me headfirst into the side of the house. I got a concussion and a double-fractured ankle. And now I'm recuperating.

It was a short retaining wall, which is a great piece of luck, because things could have been so much worse. Even at the height of a couple of feet or so, like it was. There were a lot of important bits of good luck. Those stories are for later, though. For now, I'm just waving at everybody here and saying hi, I'm still here! Some of you have heard already, and have been kind and have helped get me to the ER, the ortho team, the imaging people, and all the rest, and there are not enough words to express this gratitude, but THANK YOU SO MUCH.

And now, probably sleep time. Again. It's remarkable how much sleep a person can need when recuperating from fractures or concussions, or both.

(And I hope you are having a much more pleasantly calm spring/summer yourself!)

boxofdelights

It's Swan Lake, but the swan is a beautiful dog and the lake is a comfy chair
( sleeping dog )

sanguinity

In other, better news: my beta signed off on my revised (revised revised) ending for Langstroth on Bees! Yippee hooray hurrah! \o/

( In which I go on )

We still have the whole damn thing to edit, because it was written over (*checks notes*) twelve years, and I have leveled up as a writer hugely in that time, and... yeah. So we'll see how that goes.

BUT I HAVE OFFICIALLY STUCK THE LANDING. IF WE CAN GET THIS THING EDITED I AM GOOD TO GO. \o/

cimorene

They are constructing a new fire station across the street. The empty houses they demolished to make space were a hazard and an eyesore, so it was lovely to see them gone! On the other hand, they cleared most of the trees on those lots, and we didn't really realize in advance that once they did that the entire north face of our house would be exposed to view down the highway all the way across the roundabout, even though our house is a block away from the highway. The view from all the windows on this side of our house is now full of neon signs, which makes it extremely ugly. I suppose the absence of the empty houses, which were ruining the view in a different way, is probably still worth it, though. And we're enjoying following the progress of the project. The site has been leveled and excavated and filled with gravel and groundcloths and now they're pile-driving.

The first episode of the new season of Interview with the Vampire, which has now had its name changed to The Vampire Lestat to reflect which books they are adapting, is out! We watched it yesterday. People were saying that it had 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is deserved, but still surprising. It was a very good first episode, and a very fun time.

Wax's brothers are planning to help us build a catio for Wax's birthday, and she wants to put it on the balcony, which currently doesn't exist. You might remember that we were in the midst of removing the rotten boards from the steel frame of our balcony nearly two years ago when Snookums died and we had to part with Anubis. Last summer we did not do any work on the balcony, so it is still just the steel frame waiting to be rustproofed. I suppose it's good if this spurs us to finally attaching the new decking to the balcony. On the other hand...

The original wooden front door to the house has been getting worse and worse and now it's so bad that the screws holding the handle fell off because the wood is rotted. Bits (nails from the outside face, splinters of wood around the improperly installed locks from the previous owner) are falling off it.

This is not a weatherproofing or security emergency, because the proper door is between the cold porch and the house - modern, insulated, with a lock. This outer door just needs to open and close and looks cute. But on the other hand, we do want to keep the rain out of the cold porch.

We're gonna have to do something about this door, but we don't really have the skills or the collection of power tools, or enough money to splurge on having it refurbished by professionals. (A couple of years ago before it was this bad, Wax's brother and SIL were here with her mom and stepdad and her stepdad - that is, Wax's brother's wife's stepdad - was like "You should let me fix your door! It really needs it! I know just what to do!!" and we were like "No, haha, it's fine!" because we don't really know him all that well etc. OTOH we translated his doctoral thesis for him and he was able to get several papers out of it, which I also helped him translate (for money though, but he was grateful); maybe that's enough. We should've said yes, because it got WAY WORSE after that. The door presumably needs to have multiple dutchmen, as well as needing to be thoroughly stripped and the outer layer of wooden paneling probably replaced at minimum (totally possible that more pieces of it - like the outer vertical frame piece - will need replaced as well). Even when I was thinking that it could be our main project over Wax's summer vacation this year I was not sanguine about our ability to fix all these things on the door, but if we are actually spending that time on the balcony...? And yet we have to be able to open and close this door... if only by removing the lockbox so it no longer latches. Replacing this door would probably be even harder than fixing it, though, because in 1950 when our house was built they weren't standard sizes, and the house is stucco, which would make any change in the doorframe non-trivial.

I've been struggling for weeks to get together the energy and executive function to bake cookies. I haven't baked cookies for... maybe a year? I keep getting tripped up by the need to take butter out to soften several hours before you start. And today I FINALLY did it! I haven't decided what kind of cookies to make yet though.

cimorene

Sipuli has been getting gradually more comfortable in the yard and she now spends most of her time there exploring. She wants to check everything out, walk out in the street, climb through the barbed wire in the hedge into the woods, sneak into the neighbors' yard, and crawl under the tenants' table while they're sitting at it.

But she still runs away from the tenants' kids, who are in the yard at the same time as her multiple times a week, if they talk to her. Last week a lady walking by in the street asked if she was having a nice time outside and she whipped her head around and cringed down in the grass and tried to slither away. She also panicked and ran and got tangled in a chair when one of the tenants said Pspsps to her a few weeks ago. In her jumpy moments she has wiggled out of her harness twice now. I guess we need to get her a more secure harness.

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Elizabeth Weir, Carson Beckett, Miller, et al
Rating: Gen
Length: 00:03:45
Content Notes: no AO3-type warnings. Rapid cuts, flashing lights esp. at 3 min mark, canon-typical violence.
Creator Links: randommindtime on YouTube, and on AO3. The song's by Tom Odell.
Themes: Just like canon, Action/adventure, Families of choice, Friendship, Teams

Summary: "I guess that's love. I can't pretend. I can't pretend."

Reccer's Notes: This is one of the best of randommindtimes' fanvids, and it's about the intense connection between John and Rodney in canon, through all their dramas, losses and vicissitudes. It doesn't matter if they're very close friends, or lovers - the intensity's the same and both are natural extensions of canon. It's a powerful distillation of the show - one of my favourites, and very much worth watching.

Fanwork Links: Can't Pretend on AO3, and Can't Pretend on YT