hate when people think the only archetype possible for a male sidekick to a female protagonist is a soft boi and/or himbo. like the implication there is that the only reason a man would ever defer to a woman’s authority is if he was a bumbling idiot. love male supporting characters who are smart and strong and confident and can step up when necessary but still kind and humble enough to let someone else take the lead most of the time
if i woke up as one of the animorph kids 1st thing id do is morph into a centipede justttttt enough to have like 50 legs bc can you imagine the windfall from foot fetish sites??2nd thing id do is panic bc those kids had it ROUGH
670 words written today – I have been having a WEIRD day, which is partially the weather and partially just ???? Also trying to deal with an advising crisis that might end with me having to teach an extremely last minute independent study. (Friends who are still in school, may I gently suggest that if you have any uncertainty that you’ve met graduation requirements and you need to graduate that term because you’ve been accepted to graduate/professional school, need to move, have a job offer, etc., double and triple check that you’ve met those requirements BEFORE THE MIDDLE OF THE SEMESTER, especially if it’s summer semester when there are far fewer options available.) Plus the weather is still doing stuff to my hands, which is not ideal. (I mean, it could be stress, but it’s almost certainly the weather, since this happens a lot in summer.) My ability to actually Do Things has been shot lately, probably because I am pretty burned out, but I still have things I need to do so it is. hmm. unhelpful.
Snippet from Down to the Flood chapter 2.
Coulson looked at Steve, obviously waiting to see if Steve had any questions; when Steve didn’t say anything, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and went back into the elevator.
After the doors had closed behind him and they heard the elevator begin to descend, Natasha said, “There was quite the buzz around here when they found you. I thought Coulson was going to swoon.”
Steve rolled his eyes.
Straight-faced, Natasha asked, “Did he ask you to sign his trading cards yet?”
“Trading cards?” Steve said, startled and a little appalled.
“They’re vintage. He’s very proud.” There was another flash of crooked smile, quickly tucked away like she had gotten used to hiding it. “Coulson’s not that bad, not compared to some of the others, especially the ones who’ve been with the Games for a long time.”
Steve glanced at her, frowning. He knew how the Capitol had treated him and even from the little he had seen, it was obvious that it hadn’t changed much; he could guess how it would treat a beautiful girl. Natasha caught him looking and lifted a shoulder in a shrug.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Fandom: Original (The Lover of Lilith) Characters/Pairings: (Virgin) Mary/Lilith Rating & Warnings: Explicit; since this story is based on the myth of Lilith and the portrayal of Mary in the Bible, religious themes are unavoidable; first time sex and also magical F/F impregnation (not futa). Estimated Fic Length: 6K Notes: This short story is for a submission call. I already have an editor looking at it, but I could use a second pair of eyes. I'm ESL and while some of my Danglish (Danish-English) is intentional, some of it is not, and I could really use some help weeding out the latter. I could also use a more trained smut gaze than my own on the sex parts. I use a deliberately flowery language, but I still want it to read as "proper" smut and could use help there.
Fandom: Original (No Room In the Inn) Characters/Pairings: (Virgin) Mary/Lilith Rating & Warnings: Mature; portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth; coming out-metaphors and a general allegory for LGBT+-people getting thrown out by parental figures. Estimated Fic Length: 1500-ish words Notes: Same as above, minus the submission call and sex parts.
Trying to decide if Thor’s Games should have been before or after Natasha’s – either way he’s older than her (because she won her games at 12), but if his were before hers (it would have to be two years before, because Loki was his district’s tribute the year after) then he would have been in one of Peggy’s Games, and if he was after her then his would have been with another Head Gamemaker. If he’s before, then all of the Misfit Toys except for Steve and Tony would have been in Peggy’s Games, since Natasha’s Games were Peggy’s last year before she retired. There’s also an advantage to his being after, because Natasha’s district and Thor’s district are treated VERY differently for rigging their Reapings, but that can just as easily be the difference between District One (favored by the Capitol) and District Seven (not favored by the Capitol) as between Peggy still maintaining a lot of control and being retired.
I think I got the math on the earlier snippet wrong and Natasha’s Games would have been the 70th, a round number which works better for them being Peggy’s last hurrah… If Thor is before her, he wins the 68th Games; if he’s after, he wins the 71st.
(As I said in a comment – they are not all teenagers! Steve and Natasha are both 17, Tony is probably 18 assuming age of majority is 19 (when district kids age out of reaping), Thor is early 20s, Bruce is in his 30s, and Clint is 40. though some of this might change; right now I have Clint as the 2nd Quarter Quell winner.)
While this seems cute I’m pretty sure it’s stressful to the hamster
Does anyone know more about this?
The hamster does not watch movies, and therefore is unaware that the cardboard and plastic props in his obstacle course are references to well-known cinematic deathtraps.
To answer the question for anyone actually wondering: yes, it IS stressful to the hamster, but it is eustress, or “beneficial stress,” something that is good for it.
Eustress (NOT to be confused with estrus) is and should be a normal part of any captively-kept animal’s life. This is the stress that accompanies novel enrichment devices- new scents, new environmental stimuli (climbing, swimming, hides/dens, etc), new toys, solving puzzles, new cage mates, new experiences etc. Animal mental health benefits greatly from the small amount of stress that comes from figuring out new stuff, especially when accompanied by the reward of figuring it out successfully and/or being rewarded.
This hamster is not in any actual danger at any point in this video, and iirc has been Put Into Situations previously without incident. It is likely on some level aware that there is a treat awaiting it for solving the “room” puzzle to go to the next stage, and solving each puzzle room stimulates its fuzzy little mind into forming new neural connections and giving it a little sippy of brain chemicals as a reward for figuring it out.
You can also tell that eustress has not tipped over into distress! Hamsters are often quite neurotic in captivity when they are distressed or understimulated. They may display repetitive behaviors (trying to scale or pace walls to get out, obsessively running on wheels, circling), hiding all the time, not eating, and even suffer from things like over grooming from self soothing. They may become aggressive (which is where most people run into the “hamsters are terrible pets, they bite!” mindset), or start chewing obsessively at their cage in an attempt to leave. This little guy is openly curious, ears up and actively engaging with its environment, sniffing around. it has a task! it has a goal! It gets into the boat at the end and starts happily shoving treats into its face pouches because it reached the reward! There is no flinching, no squeaking, no squealing, no hiding- no indication at all that it is having a bad time, and you can see multiple points in the video where it’s getting rewarded along the way as well.
In short, the hamster is likely to be having a great time, with an owner who is truly dedicated to novel enrichment for their hammy. Would that all rodent keepers were so involved with their rodents.
It’s kind of incredible just how much the Country House Murder Mystery genre is, at its roots, a reaction to WWI and the social change that sprang from it.
go on
So I’ve been healing up from surgery, meaning I’ve been catching up on my TBR pile, and my three great loves are a) middle grade anything, b) SF/F with good worldbuilding and characterization, c) murder mysteries without too much grit or grime.
In the pursuit of c), I’ve been playing Ace Attorney, but I’ve also been reading whatever Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers I can grab off Project Gutenberg. Since it’s exclusively the ones in the public domain, it’s their oldest stuff- pre 1924.
And the thing about all of these 20s murder mysteries is that they’re incredibly haunted by The Great War, in the same way that most mysteries from the 2000s are haunted by the War on Terror or many mysteries coming out now are Haunted by COVID.
Lord Peter Wimsey has screaming dissociative PTSD flashbacks from the trenches. In Murder on the Links, Poirot is a displaced person- Belgium isn’t a safe place to be an aging police inspector at the moment- the narrator has been discharged with an injury, and one of the main suspects is working as an army nurse.
And like… you can pull a couple threads through here. But if we’re talking about the stereotypical Country House Murder Mystery- the two big ones are a) the end of the Old Order, and b) you always find the body and know the cause of death.
A) is pretty obvious- the death of a patriarch (or matriarch) is a microcosm of the slow decline of the British nobility. It’s a way to give the sense of “Everything Your Worldview Depended On Has Fallen Apart” a face. Every dirty secret we don’t speak of has come to light, all at once; every lie that supported The Way Things Are is revealed for what it really is. (Dulce et decorum est, anyone?) The local lord is dead, and no one is going to replace him. The world has irrevocably changed.
B) is something that @bespokeminutiae pointed out to me when I mentioned this- in a country house murder mystery, you always know where the body is, and you always know what happened to it. In a world where a lot of people lost loved ones in some far off place, without getting to see the body or say goodbye? That’s a hugely comforting fantasy.
(Incidentally, this is why Knives Out is the best Country House Murder Mystery of the past 25 years- it understands that some themes are inherent to the genre and says something new that still engages with those themes.)
Ooooo, this conversation continues very interestingly with the Japanese literary equivalent – honkaku-ha (本格派), the “orthodox school” of “classical whodunnits,” which by definition followed the rules of detective fiction codified in the west by the Golden Age writers and gained prominence just before, during and after World War 2.
I say during and after because that’s when Edogawa Ranpo was active, by far the most famous and prominent Japanese mystery writer of the era. Ranpo started in the 1920s and wrote well into the 50s. He’s best known in the west for his recurring detective character, Kogoro Akechi, who’s basically the Japanese Sherlock Holmes – complete with being mostly an urban character who lives and works in and around Tokyo.
Though I’m personally more familiar with Yokomizo Seishi and his Kousuke Kindaichi mysteries, which started in the aftermath of the war and hew very close to the Country House Murder Mysteries, with the twist that said country houses tend to be former samurai estates on tiny isolated islands or in rural mountain villages. Kindaichi himself is also a detective much more in the vein of Dame Agatha, being a young war vet with some odd ticks that make people underestimate him (he has a stutter and always looks frumpy because he scratches his head really hard when he’s thinking) but nonetheless solving his cases with keen observation and patient deduction.
And in the same way, you can feel the haunting presence of the war and the dissolution of old social orders. In place of declining British nobility, you have the crumbling remnants of samurai families. There’s a nine-year timeskip between Kindaichi’s first and second novels, during which he gets drafted and winds up in a POW camp; he stumbles into like the next three cases just trying to bring his dead war buddies’ last messages back to their families. And there’s this looming specter of westernization, what it means for the old traditions, which should be preserved and if it might not be better to let some of them die.
One thing honkaku-ha introduced to the mix that sets them apart from the western tradition is a tone and aesthetic taken from Japanese horror. Where western mysteries can be familiar and almost comforting enough to earn the label ‘cozy,’ honkaku-ha are often stark and cold, with murders defined by their violence or grotesque stagings and the stories themselves seeped in elements of supernatural or erotic overtones (Edogawa in particular had a fascinating friendship with an anthropologist known for his research on the history of homosexuality in Japan). The two best-known Kindaichi novels, The Inugami Curse and Village of the Eight Graves, toe the line between classical whodunnits and gothic horror.
It’s a very interesting contrast, given that this (honkaku-ha) is very much a genre that’s always been in part about opening a line of conversation with the western tradition, to see how the threads of influence get carried over.
I am forever grateful to an archivist mentor I worked with in grad school for some resume advice she gave me and thought maybe others would also benefit from it.
Keep a Master Resume.
This is not the resume you send out. This is a detailed resume of every job (with dates and location, supervisor and location phone number are a bonus) and as many skills/duties/accomplishments you can possibly think of for each and every one of the jobs and education programs you can think of.
She showed me hers, it was about 25 pages long, and formatted exactly like a regular resume for ease. Every time she would learn a new program/skill, she’d add it. Change in title or duties, add it. Complete something big/special/complicated/new to her/professionally significant, she would add it. This way when she went up for a promotion or raise, she had a detailed record of highlights to pick from to show she deserved it. There was no “when was that? Did I submit that last round of reviews?”
Applying to a new job? Pick and choose items from your Master Resume to plug in to the resume or CV you will be sending based on the job posting. You don’t need to rewrite it, just cut and paste relevant details.
I am applying to a job not exactly my field but with enough skill cross over that I feel I would be a good fit. Being able to build out a resume by cutting and pasting from the Master Resume is saving me so much time and energy. The info is there, I just need to plug it in to the file I send. Since both are already formatted, piece of cake!
“Ernest Ulmer posed for Koch’s “most self-revealing painting”, The Sculptor (1964, oil on canvas, 80” x 59 7/8", Brooklyn Museum). Its original title was Prometheus, the god who stole fire from Mount Olympus. A full-length standing male nude seen from behind, Ulmer towers over the seated Koch and holds a cigarette lighter at hip level, while the artist leans in to get a light. The lighter illuminates Koch’s face and its flame is vividly reflected in his glasses, “a sexually loaded reference to Prometheus’s gift of fire to mankind”.
As punishment for the theft of fire, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and sent an eagle each day to tear out his liver. Koch was an occasional sculptor, and modeled Prometheus and Hercules, a work depicting Hercules wrestling with the eagle to rescue the chained Prometheus. A large version of this appears in the background of The Sculptor, and Ulmer may have posed for the sculpture as well as the painting.“ (source: wikipedia)
you have to stay alive. you’re going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.
I was 22 when I got my first bookstore job, and at the time my entire experience of “old people” was my grandparents, none of whom had been particularly healthy, and none of whom I was close with. To my young eyes, all they did was sit around and be old. That was life after 60.
The owner of the bookstore was this grand old dame of 76 who had been in the business for 40 years. She’d had three kids with a husband who was extremely gay, and as soon as those were old enough, they split up. She read on an epic scale, was an avid follower of the opera, sang in several choirs, and scheduled arts programming for a private club. She had gentleman callers (so they styled themselves) at the store continuously the entire fifteen years I worked there–yah, into her NINETIES. She never took up seriously with any of them, because they couldn’t keep up. She was impeccably dressed and put together every single day of her life, drank regularly, and said they would pry her estrogen supplements out of her cold, dead hands. She had a gang of elderly single lady friends, though, and they went out every night of the week. They knew everything and everyone, collectively. She got her first smart phone in her mid-80s and became extremely Online. I bet she’s on Tumblr now. She is 96.
This blew my mind. Life didn’t have to be over…ever.
We worship youth in our culture. Only the young have futures, and the aged exist to enable the lives of the young. We act as if by the time you hit forty, you’ve had your chance. You are now expected to step aside and scede life to others.
FUCK THAT. I have a lot of life ahead of me. I have places to go and books to read and people to fuck and food to eat and music to dance to and emotions to feel and nazis to punch and stories to tell and hearts to break and ventures to capitalize and empires to conquer. I am going to be doing this for the next fifty years, minimum.
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tawghasatumblr_feed
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nanila posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
awesomeers
