Late last year I saw a prompt on tumblr for EvS PTSD fic, and I wrote most of this, and then when I came back to it to write the ending, it took off at an entirely unexpected tangent due to me making the mistake of doing some research about film history. So here it is: Biggles, EvS, trauma and Bond Girls.
Title: Umbrellas Content: trauma, hurt/comfort, Biggles's opinion of James Bond, 1900 words Summary: One of Biggles's dinners with von Stalhein goes a little off-script.
A community dedicated to Conrad Veidt. Whether you are a seasoned fan, a casual fan, someone who has seen everything there is to be seen or who's just starting their journey, this community is for you!
You can post about anything related to Herr Veidt here. Discussions, film reviews, fanworks (fic, art, icons, vids, anything!), recs, meta, picspams, gifs, etc. Discussion of film/culture and society of the 1910s-1940s is also acceptable.
For this month’s kickass woman, we turn our attention to Japan and the legendary life of Queen Himiko, the first recorded ruler of ancient Japan – not only the first female ruler, but the first ruler, period. I’m going to do a little summarizing here, but I’m also going to be very link-heavy. So much legend surrounds Queen Himiko that I am waaay over my head in terms of describing her life, but I do want to give you some links to explore so that you can learn about this fascinating woman.
Once upon a time, before Japan was a country, in the Yayoi (300BC-300AD) and Kofun (250-538AD) periods, there were all these island city-states. Rulers were also religious figures, and female shamans were highly regarded.
The written records of this period come from Chinese historians, who referred to this region as “The Land of Wa”, home of the “Eastern Barbarians.” We also have writings from Korean historians. As summed up in the article “Queen Himiko: Badass Women in Japanese History” by Chelsea Bernard:
During the second half of the 2nd century (ca. 147-190 AD), the lack of a capable leader plunged the Land of Wa into political turmoil and violent upheaval. Finally, in 190 AD the unmarried shamaness was chosen by the people to rule. Installed in a palace with armed guards and watch towers, she was served by “1,000” female attendants while her “brother” acted as a medium of communication, transmitting her instructions and pronouncements to the outside world. After ascending to the throne, she went on to restore order and maintain peace like a boss for the next 50 or 60 years.
Queen Himiko pulled about 100 kingdoms and confederacies and clans together. She sent diplomatic missions to China, which formally recognized her rule. This video explains her role as a verifiable person in written record and archeology. It’s pretty dry but also very detailed.
This video gives a nice quick summary and is entertaining because it a) ties into the game Civilization and b) is narrated by a woman who is being eaten alive by deer – no really!
If you like the video game connection, you’ll enjoy this article from Medium which includes a discussion of her portrayal in Tomb Raider as well as a scholarly look at where exactly she might have lived.
The author, Frankie Webb, concludes:
The real Himiko’s legacy is a reminder of how historical women figures are often forgotten. She doesn’t feature prominently in the history of Japan, and recognition as a ruler didn’t come till the Edo period in the 1600s. It is likely that the Japanese adoption of Buddhism and Confucianism didn’t do much to elevate the status of women. Fortunately, she wasn’t permanently erased. Himiko represents the first notable ancestor of a strong tradition of female religious leaders and political leaders in Japan and serves as a representation of the unnamed women forgotten to history.
Perhaps the coolest thing about Himiko is that she was not unique as a powerful woman in Ancient Japan. Returning to the article by Chelsea Bernard:
In other words, Himiko was not an anomaly. She was merely the first notable ancestor of a strong tradition of female religious leaders (a la miko priestesses in Shinto) and political leaders (a la empresses) in Japanese history. Over time women’s roles may have devolved from active initiators to assistants in both spiritual and secular realms. But Himiko serves as a shining example that symbolically reflects the many other (now anonymous) women who were also leaders in their communities.
Currently, Himiko thrives in pop culture and celebration in Japan, where multiple cities claim to have been her home and celebrate her in festivals. Bernard notes that she pops up in novels, manga, movies, and yes, of course porn. Possibly the oddest use of her name is this:
As a role model the shamaness queen can symbolize female power, innate occult abilities, national origins, and even good eating habits. No kidding, she’s the poster girl for a school campaign that urges students “to chew your food as thoroughly Queen Himiko did” in order to improve digestion and tooth health.
I can’t speak to how historically accurate the claim is that Himiko was good at masticating, but she is a fascinating figure who teaches us about the history of women in power as well as how the written record can lift a figure up or erase it. Please check out Bernard’s article in its entirety, as it is fascinating and entertaining! Here’s one more video that has a bit of an overview and a photo of a statute of the Queen:
I still have intentions of doing some proper rec posts of all the excellent fic that I read during my initial reading dive into the AO3 tags last spring/summer, but - since apparently that's not happening yet, I may as well start reccing as I go.
These are a couple of longer fics that I marked for later on my initial sweep through the archive and finally remembered to go back and read. One season one genfic, one late-season explicit fic in which I'm sure the main pairing will surprise no one.
Tonight, Donnie and Megan decided they needed to light the fire pit. But rather than do a couple things up front (like move the chair(s) outside before going crazy with lighter fluid, and close the windows that were open) they waited until the fire was going.
My whole house smells like lighter fluid and wood smoke. I have a monster headache, and breathing while sitting back in my chair is proving a little trickier than I'd thought it would be. I'm sitting up now, and I've used my inhaler. But the back of my throat is sore now, and my chest hurts, and is it really that difficult to think of someone else before doing something? There's no one in this apartment who isn't aware that I have asthma, plus allergy season has already started for me.
Matthew is still struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide, and he's not the only one who kind of wants out of this life. We're also still struggling with money -- I thought everything got paid, and it didn't, and now my checking account is overdrawn, and I just would like to catch a break. Not even a big break. Just a little one.
But now I need to go scoop out the litterboxes. Joy.
X-posted to Dreamwidth and Livejournal. Read/comment where you prefer.
People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.
Was the agricultural revolution and the explosion of civilizations that came from it an overall good thing for humans or a negative? In other words, would it have been better or worse for people to stay in small tribes?
I'm writing this with a cat on my lap. I have to periodically remind Carter that he can't grab for balance at shirt. There are breasts under there, my dude, and your claws are unwelcome. Really. But I can't bring myself to knock him off my lap. That's partly because I love him, and partly because I know it won't do much good; in a minute or two, he'll be back on my lap. I have found myself repeatedly surprised by finding him back on my lap after dumping him - I don't even notice him coming up to my lap until after he's made himself comfortable and me uncomfortable. Cats. Go figure.
There's 30 fanvids on it (~2 hours of time in total)
Most don't have vidders listed.
I think it might be a mix of VCR and digital vids (there's some with effects and/or fanart included) and I think the tape is from sometime after 2001 (since there's footage of the finale in some vids).
Some (not all) have significant horizontal pink and green lines - I'm wondering if that's from the VHS or the footage in those vids (and/or a result of me initially having the VCR set on LP instead of SP).
I have a DVD-R of it recorded in LP quality and I'm recording one in SP quality.
I'm worried I lost my kindle when I misplaced my red bag in which everything is. Well, not everything, but perhaps my kindle. Or maybe not. My kindle might be under my bed. If it's not under my bed, I'll have to replace it sooner or later. I'm a bit wary of looking and finding out one way or another.
Today was unseasonably warm and sunny, so I took pictures around the yard. The first few are from indoors, then the rest are the house yard. (See the savanna.)
Hey everyone, we have a Fireside this week and then next week we’ll get back to our somewhat silly break discussing the mechanics of warfare in Dune. But I did want to stop to chatter a bit about something that came up in that discussion, which is something about the nature of personalist regimes in both fiction and the real world.
Percy, having a nap on a cat bed on a cat bed. For whatever reason, he will ignore both of these cat beds separately, but when they are on top of teach other, he likes them.
First off, to clarify what I mean, we can understand the governance of polities to be personalist or institutional. Now if ‘the governance of polities’ sounds vague that is because it is: I want to include not only state governments but also the political systems of non-state polities (tribes, etc.) because these too can be personalist or – to a more limited degree – institutional in nature (though arguably a fully institutional system of government is purely a property of states – but of course ‘state/non-state’ is not a binary, but a spectrum from fully consolidated state to extremely fragmented non-state polities, with many points in the middle). So we’re talking about polities, political entities which may or may not be states.
Basically the issue here is that for personalist regimes, both power and the daily function of the political elements of the society are held personally, whereas in institutional regimes, that power is mediated heavily through institutions which are larger than the people in them. By way of example, in both kinds of regimes, you might have a ‘Minister of Security’ who reports to the leader of the country. But whereas in an institutional regime, the minister of security does so because that is the institution (he holds an office and his office reports to the office of the leader), in a personalist regime, the power relationship depends on that minister’s personal relationship to the leader. He reports to the leader not because his office does but because he, personally is connected – by ties of loyalty or patronage or family – to the leader himself.
The governments in Dune are fundamentally personalist in nature. Power is determined by a person’s relationship to the central leader – the Duke Leto Atreides or the Baron Harkonnen or the Emperor Shaddam IV. And that goes both ways: your position in the state is determined by your relationship, such that the Duke’s own personal private doctor, Yueh, is a powerful key political figure despite not overseeing, say, a health ministry. He is close to the Duke, so he is powerful. On the flipside, the Duke’s ability to run his government is fundamentally contingent on his relationship to his immediate retinue, since no man rules alone and since those sub-leaders aren’t really bound to him by institutional offices, but rather by personal loyalty (something that comes up in the book where Leto discusses the extensive propaganda necessary to conjure the aura of bravura he relies on to lock in the loyalty of his lower subordinates).
But what I wanted to muse on was not specifically the personalist governments of Dune but rather the prevalence of personalist systems in fiction more broadly. Speculative fiction in particular is full of such personalist systems (it is one of the great attractions, I suspect, of writing medieval-themed fantasy, that the time period being invoked was one of ubiquitous personalist rule), but equally other forms of fiction often effectively create personalist systems for the purpose of the fiction even out of systems which are institutional in nature.
And it isn’t very hard to understand why: stories are for the most part fundamentally about personal dramas and the characters in them. At the very least, a classic device of storytelling is to take an impersonal, institutional system and then represent it through a character who stands in for the whole institution. Think, for instance, of how in Game of Thrones, the Tycho Nestoris character ends up standing in for the institution of the Iron Bank (repeatedly stressed as an impersonal institution) to give it a single character’s face. Or in Andor how the imperial security bureaucracy is essentially personalized in the characters of Dedra Meero and Leo Partagaz. It’s a way of embodying an institution as a character by representing it as a character. Stories are often more compelling when they are about characters rather than institutions, so the political systems in our stories tend to be personalist ones centered on characters rather than institutional ones.
But of course stories are also a way we train ourselves to think about unfamiliar problems and here things get a bit awkward because while our fictional worlds are composed almost entirely of personalist systems of rule, the real world is a lot more varied. Absolutely there are personalist political systems in the world today, important ones. But one thing that has been demonstrated fairly clearly is that in the long run, institutional political systems are generally quite a lot better at coping with the needs of complex, modern countries – especially for those larger than a city-state. As a result, the largest and most successful countries generally have institutional rather than personalist political systems. Indeed, personalist systems seem strongly associated with stagnation and decline in a fast-moving modern world.
One of the other reasons why personalist regimes are, I suspect, so popular with storytellers, especially as villains, is that they are easy to defeat on a personal scale. If all of the power in the regime is tied up in the personal relationships of the ruler, then defeating or killing the ruler, the Big Bad, offers at least a chance that no one else will be able to take his place and the system will collapse. That’s not historically absurd – we see it play out in succession disputes repeatedly. The death of Cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa (401) instantly results in the collapse of his revolt, despite the fact that large parts of his army were undefeated – they were there to fight for Cyrus (or his money) and with Cyrus gone, there was no reason to stay. Likewise the death of Harold Godwinson at Hastings (1066) marked the end of effective Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion, because that resistance had been predicated on Harold’s claim to the throne. In the Roman Civil Wars, the flight or death of a given Roman general often resulted in the effective collapse of his faction or the mass desertion of his troops (e.g. the surrender of many Roman senators after defeat after Pompey’s flight from defeat at Pharsalus (48) or Antonius’ army’s defection after his flight at Actium (31), in both cases happening while the ’cause’ of the fleeing party was still very much ‘live’).
And that’s a really satisfying story narrative where the hero is able to defeat the enemy utterly by doing a single brave thing on a very human scale – throwing the Ring into Mount Doom sort of stuff. And for personalist regimes, that can actually work – such regimes often do not survive succession when the charismatic leader at the center whose relationships define power dies or flees. This can actually be exacerbated by the fact that many rulers in personalist regimes do not want to have clear successors, since a clear successor might easily become a rival. Thus not, for instance, the many dictators worldwide whose succession plan is just a bunch of question marks (e.g. Putin’s Russia). Anything else would be inviting a coup.
The danger, of course, is applying that same logic to an institutional system. But since the relations of power in an institutional system belong to institutions which are ‘bigger’ than the people who populate them – power belongs to the office, not the man – slaying the Big Bad Leader has very limited effect. It might briefly confuse their leadership system, especially if quite a lot of leaders are lost at once, but institutional logic triggers quite quickly because you’ve killed the leaders but not the institutions. So the institutions quickly go about selecting new leaders, using their existing, codified institutional processes.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that someone did, in fact, bomb an American State of the Union Address, killing most of Congress, the President and the Cabinet. Would the United States simply collapse? Would they be able to impose their own new leader into the vacuum? No, pretty obviously not. Within hours or days, each of the fifty states would be appointing, based on their own processes, replacement representatives, while the ‘designated survivor’ assumed the office of the presidency and quickly appointed new acting cabinet members. Such an act would, at most, buy a week or two’s worth of confusion and panic. Even if you kept striking political leaders (who one assumes would try to render themselves harder to hit) the system would just calmly keep replacing them. Tearing out the institutions in this way would demand blowing up basically every official more senior than Local Dog Catcher before you would actually collapse the institutions.
In practice you could never do that with individual strikes. The only way to tear out the institutions would be through occupation – through putting troops on the ground where they could impose their own systems of control directly on the populace. Of course in many cases that approach might be ruinously costly in both lives and resources, perhaps so costly not even to be contemplated. Which is one of the many reasons it would be important at the outset to distinguish between an institutional regime and a personalist one, to avoid being in a situation where a strike at the ‘Big Bad’ has failed to achieve objectives, leaving a plan trapped between the ground forces it is unable or unwilling to commit and the inability of assassinations and airstrikes to end a conflict once it has been begun.
Ollie, very much asleep on our sofa chair. He likes this spot too (and you get a great picture of his vampire overbite).
On to Recommendations.
Naturally with a major conflict breaking out in the Middle East between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran (and Iran’s regional proxies) on the other, there is quite a lot of discussion. One facet of the war that I expect will be increasingly relevant the longer it goes on are conditions in the Strait of Hormuz. I am not a shipping expert, but Sal Mercogliano is and has been offering daily updates on his channel discussing the implications. Close to a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz and most of that production has no other effective way to reach markets, making a disruption in the Strait – shipping there is currently at almost nothing and there have been multiple attacks on cargo and tanker ships – tremendously important globally as everyone’s economy relies on these sources of energy. As I write this, oil – at $90.80 a barrel – is up almost 50% from where it was mid-February and still rising in price. That is going to have substantial economic impacts if it remains that way.
The war in Iran is naturally a rapidly evolving one and I don’t want to say too much because I am not an area-specialist. I will simply note if you want to keep track of developments that you will generally find more careful and informed discussion in dedicated national security publications likeForeign Affairs, Foreign PolicyandWar on the Rocks as opposed to other news media and especially as opposed to 24 hour cable news; I also pay attention to business press like the news side of the Wall Street Journal. My own view, for what it is worth (I have not been shy in sharing on social media), is that this war is a mistake and potentially quite a severe mistake.
But let us shift to some Classics news. This week’s Pasts Imperfect was grim but necessary reading, a tally of five significant humanities programs (including two classics programs) being shut down, part of a larger wave of closures and department shrinkage across the humanities afflicting both history and classics and of course other disciplines as well. I know most people do not have this front of mind, but it is the case that we are, as a society, actively dismantling the infrastructure that discovers, learns about and teaches us the ancient past, actively inhibiting our ability to draw on those lessons for present or future crises.
That said, while scholarship in our fields is being reduced, it has no stopped entirely and I wanted to note (hat tip Sarah E. Bond who alerted me) that a brand new publication, Beacons and Military Communication from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, eds. M. Ødegaard, S. Brookes, and T. Lemm has just been released online by Brill in an open-access volume you can download for free, funded by UCL and the Research Council of Norway. European research grants increasingly are making open-access publication in some form a condition of funding (and paying for that kind of publication, which is expensive) and I really wish that grant funders in the United States would follow suit. Though, of course, that would require us to actually fund the NEH.
Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I wanted to answer a question I have been asked quite a few times since I noted that I was teaching Latin this academic year, which is some variation of, “if I wanted to teach myself Latin, what should I use to do it?” And the first answer is, ‘it is very hard to teach yourself a language, you should probably take a class.’ But if you truly are determined to try to self-teach yourself Latin, the book to work from is almost certainly (and this recommendation is going to surprise absolutely no one ) F.M. Wheelock and R.A. Lafleur, Wheelock’s Latin, 7th edition (2011). While this is the seventh edition, Wheelock turns seventy this year, which hopefully expresses how tried-and-tested the approach here is. Wheelock is what I would term a ‘grammar first’ textbook (as opposed to ‘reading first’ approaches like the OLC or CLC), which is going to be more appropriate for adult learners (whereas I think the ‘reading first’ approaches are probably better for Middle/High School contexts, but both approaches can work in any context). The ‘grammar first’ approach means that Wheelock does not have a fun little story for you to follow or characters to meet – it has explanations of grammar rules and practice sentences to practice those rules. But the advantage is that it can be wonderfully systematic, moving you logically from each rule to the next. The disadvantage is that in either a self-study or classroom environment, Wheelock demands that you bring 100% of the discipline and motivation necessary to push through the material.
The other great advantage of Wheelock, especially for the independent learner, is that because it has been the dominant English textbook for Latin for, again, seventy years there are an enormous number of resources built for it, that interface directly with the order and method with which Wheelock presents Latin grammar and vocabulary. Of particular note is R.A. LaFleur’s Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes(2010) which is a primary source reader using real Latin inscriptions and texts designed to be used as a workbook moving in parallel with Wheelock. Meanwhile, once one has climbed the steep heights of Wheelock, the series is capped off by its own excellent reader intended for use after the main textbook, Wheelock and LaFleur, Wheelock’s Latin Reader: Selections from Latin Literature (2001). And because Wheelock is so old and so standard, there’s no lack of other resources designed to seamlessly hook into it.
Again, for anyone looking to learn Latin I would firstvery strongly recommend an actual Latin class – learning any language is hard – regardless of what textbook they’re using (I have experience with the OLC, Wheelock and Ecce, I’ve had students come in from the CLC and Lingua Latina, they all work in a classroom setting). But if you really do intend to try to self-teach, I think Wheelock is your best bet.
People often accused her of carrying potions and poisons in the little vials strung along her belt, half hidden by the fall of her foliage. The dryad didn’t usually bother to explain herself to the sort of people who said such things, but it still hurt. She had gone to a lot of trouble, after all, to source antidotes to the poison of the tree that birthed her, just so that she could heal anyone who suffered ill effects after being kind enough to get close to her.
1. It is once again the weekend and I am once again very glad for it. It's felt like a long week.
2. We're getting pizza for dinner tonight. Nothing fancy, just Dominos, but I do like Dominos (especially their pan pizza crust - so cheesy).
3. I'm maybe getting used to the new mouse? At least I don't seem to be getting any wrist pain today. Still unsure if I want to keep it, but I'm going to go to Best Buy this weekend and actually try out some mice in person and see if I can find anything that is a better fit. I actually need to get a new work mouse, too, so if I find something I like better than the Lift, I might just order that for work and swap them so I have the better one at home idk. (Depends on if I can get a full refund from Amazon or if they're only going to give me partial since it's used and not defective.)
1) At the grocery this morning and their clothing displays mirror the seesaw of our weather – puffy coats next to sundresses. It was so warm today than when I came back to drop the groceries off, I had to change into a t-shirt before I went out again, and it was barely 10 AM.
2) Had a nice piece of luck as well. The grocery was running a $10 coupon for $100 or more of purchases. I had to drop my partner off at work this morning because he had an all-day thing, and in the rush forgot to take the grocery list. So as I was putting stuff in the trunk I remembered I'd forgotten his celery. Went back and decided to pick up a few more things since I had the $10 coupon now. Got to the register and realized someone had left that same coupon sitting in the machine when they left! So I got the $10 off and still have my coupon for next week.
It amazes me how people don't bother taking their coupons. It's usually for things they're buying anyway and a free item is not unusual. And this was literally $10 in cash sitting there, when groceries are so expensive! I didn't even know what it was at first, just saw that someone hadn't taken their coupon and figured I'd look to see if it was something I could use.
3) Also on the grocery front, I have recently become addicted to Sumo oranges. Came across them during a sale, and got just one bag because they're pricey. Came back home with 3 the following week.
Oranges have never been my favorite, even though we had incredibly good ones growing in our backyard growing up. These are the closest I've gotten to those. I never end up eating only one.
3) As part of marchmetamatterschallenge, I have been going through my tv_talk comments in case I discussed much about a show (mostly, no). However it was a good reminder about a great many shows I watched which I liked and would recommend, but might not think of if someone asked me.
Some of these were strong throughout, and some long running ones have some weaker seasons but still worth watching. In no particular order, just as they came up on my entries: ( Read more... )
4) One of the things reviewing all these past posts made me aware of is how much more TV I'm watching, but overall with less enjoyment. Every so often I hit a show I would really recommend, but usually they fall into the "ok" category or I just nope out of it a few episodes in.
I think the changes in TV have a lot to do with this. ( Read more... )
Though written before it, this book chronologically follows Wild Seed. It picks up the story in 1970s Los Angeles, where the body-hopping immortal Doro has continued his human breeding program, now focused on creating a race of telepaths who can mind-control ordinary humans into total subjugation. He has high hopes for his daughter/lover Mary to become his most powerful telepath yet, but when her abilities fully mature, she accidentally links herself to several other telepaths, gaining psychic power over them. Now, for the first time in thousands of years, there's a real threat to Doro's control and the continuation of his eugenics project.
spoilery thoughtsAs I think about this book, a thought keeps arising: This book has no good guys. Mary is not a good guy. She's is positioned as the protagonist because she opposes Doro, and in the world of the books Doro is, if not literally the worst person on Earth, at least the person with the most power to do the most harm over the longest period of time. He is a merciless sociopath who will not stop until he is the absolute ruler of humanity. Being a better person than him is a low, low bar.
To be fair, Mary never intended to bring others under her control and she doesn't know how to stop it, and she at least has some conception of using her power to help others, even if only other telepaths. And yes, most telepaths were dying or succumbing to mental breakdowns before she set up a plan to help them. But she has no qualms about enslaving the mutes (non-telepaths) and using them as an underclass to serve her and the Patternists. Some characters voice concerns, but by that time it's basically too late, she's already consolidated her power and there's no going back.
Doro's downfall has the shape of classical tragedy, as his obsession with controlling others spectacularly backfires and rebounds on him. Everything he's been working towards points inevitably to this outcome, as he creates people with stronger and stronger powers while believing he would somehow remain in control of them. But he can't have it both ways. He's made Mary everything she is, and while she lacks his immortality, she has something he doesn't: followers who see her as a savior, who love her because she's made their lives better, not just because they're scared of her.
No reader is ever going to be sad about Doro finally being defeated, but his defeat means the triumph of a society where an enslaved majority serve a privileged minority. The best you can say for it is that power is shared with a sizeable elite rather than concentrated in one absolute despot. It's the victory of the lesser of two evils—emphasis on the evil. (And again, I am reminded of Kindred's chilling examination of "less bad" enslavers in real world history.)
There actually is one good guy in the book, though. Anyanwu (here called Emma) is a tertiary character. Of course, this was written before her character had been fully revealed in Wild Seed; I wonder how much Butler already knew about her? I'm not sure what I would have thought of her if this book were all I knew. This reading order emphasizes that the best Anyanwu could ever do was to fight Doro to a stalemate, and suggests that she could never defeat him in part because she wasn't ruthless enough. Unlike Mary, she wasn't born into his twisted world, and she has a moral code that goes beyond mere self-preservation. No wonder Mary can't stand her. With this book I felt more of a sense of it being backstory to an existing work, setting up for what's to come. Which is exactly what it is—it was written as a prequel to the first-published book in the series. And Wild Seed was in turn a prequel to Mind of My Mind, but I got more of a stand-alone vibe from that one. I still do not actually know what eventually becomes of Doro and Mary's descendants, but I am guessing it doesn't go super great for humanity!
A long and thorough Megatokyo breakdown from an ex-fan. (“I think I hate it better than anyone else.”) The criticisms are well-founded and well-explained, so even though I have some nostalgic fondness for Megatokyo and I’m not on board with every criticism, I liked reading it anyway.
The Skyjacks podcast, an original fantasy actual-play series, was on my “to try” list for a while. Recently, I opened the RSS feed, scrolled to the bottom, downloaded the first few episodes…and was confused to realize that it was (a) picking up from an existing story and (b) set in the Star Wars universe?
Yeah, the same group of players did an extensive Star Wars fangame first, spinning off from a short Star Wars adventure in a different feed, then moved on to their own series and kept adding that to the same feed. It’s a good jumping-on point, though. I’m 11 episodes in and not stopping.
Got caught up with Sporadic Phantoms, which was the last new podcast I mentioned starting. It continues to be very good. There’s a big pivot in season 2, but I think they handled it well. And…the season isn’t finished, so now I’m on a cliffhanger. Fingers crossed they stick the landing.
Also watched season 2 of the Ranma 1/2 reboot. It had a lot more of the madcap Jenga-tower-of-connected-gags pacing that I was missing while watching s1, where the personalities are wildly pinballing off each other and if you look away for 30 seconds you’ll miss something great. My “they couldn’t fully do this in s1 because they were too busy establishing the characters” theory is panning out.
And I did end up rewatching Cosmic Princess Kaguya. Turns out it absolutely rewards a second watch. There’s one character who knows about The Reveal from the start, and the amount of “oh that’s what you meant, I see what you did there” is amazing.
Cat news: Vet checkup for Fiddlesticks the other day.
When she had dental problems last May, they said she was down from 7-ish pounds to 6-ish, and theorized “maybe she’s eating less because it hurts her teeth.” But the current visit said she’s 7-ish pounds…and said that she was already back to 7-ish pounds last July (the visit where she had the bad teeth out).
Wonder if their scale in May was just having problems.
She developed these two Mystery Bumps since the last visit — you can’t really see them, they’re pea-sized at most and have normal fur growing over them, it’s just something you can feel when petting her. Official vet analysis on those is “probably just cysts, could develop problems in the future, but as long as she isn’t messing with them, we won’t mess with them.”
And she’s not messing with them! Doesn’t seem to notice them at all.
Arriving suitably late to the Heated Rivalry party.
I did try to get into it last year- my brain was not braining in the right direction to make that feasible. I suspect a lot of that might have been due to the uncertainty of whether a second season would be happening and I didn't want to get invested in something only to have it brutally yanked away. (I'm still furious that My Lady Jane didn't get a S2).
I had a day off on Tuesday, spent the afternoon noodling around online as I figured if I couldn't get into the show I would at least enjoy the unhinged glory of watching soundbites of the cast interviews and reading and bunch of articles. (Yes I'm aware of Ember and Ice, and yes I will be listening to that too).
One thing led to another and I started watching Heated Rivalry at 7pm thinking I'd do an episode a day.
UM.
By 1am Wednesday I'd watched all the eps, bought the books and was whatsapping (ravurian and gingerpig) tragic messages along the lines of "yes I'm 4 months late, talk to me about HR".
I was also patting myself on the back for having the foresight to 'add to memory' a lot of the DW posts that had been on my circle over the last 4 months clarifying the timeline (thank you mific) and making videos and fic recs.
First rewatch completed today and fully expect to complete another by the end of the weekend or I might dive in to the EmptyNetters reactions which I gather are highly recommended.
All of which is a longwinded way of saying I am down for talking about the show, the delightfully unhinged cast interviews (a gift that keeps on giving), the soundtrack, the books (I'll be finishing Game Changers this weekend), and anything related to the upcoming S2 which I am led to believe starts shooting this summer.
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@SophieQuests heads to Nara, Japan to discover the history of Queen Himiko! civ7 strategygames gamingontiktok japan himiko 
