Wimsey Quote Database

Jul. 2nd, 2025 08:22 pm
beatrice_otter: Me in red--face not shown (Default)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter
The hardest thing about writing Peter Wimsey fanfic is the quotes. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of their era (and the literature that was considered classic/important in that era), and quote it often.

Today I posted on the Gaud Squad Discord that it would be awesome if we had a searchable database of the literature and poetry that they knew or could reasonably be expected to know, searchable by keyword and theme, so that one could look things up easily. And that I would be willing to do the data entry, but had not the technical skills to set it up.
supertailz responded by setting up a Notion instance and is noodling around with the technical aspects of it, so it looks like this is happening!

The easy part is getting the literature that Peter and Harriet quote added--all I have to do is read through the books (no hardship there!) and source the quotations. Although I know there are some annotated versions floating around, and if anyone has a copy of the annotations, that would be lovely.

The hard part is getting the right mix of things that Peter and Harriet would have known. Because what is considered "classic literature" changes over time. Some things rise in acclaim, some things fall out of favor. What would be really handy is a curriculum for Eton ca. 1900 and for Oxford ca. 1910, but so far I haven't found anything. Does anybody know how to search "what literary works were considered classics in 1920"? Or have a good list of where to start?

LEP 2.7.

Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:23 pm
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
[personal profile] yvannairie

I should remember, that every time I feel like my blorbo is being sidelined by the fandom in favour of a more photogenic ship, I am not alone. After all, Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897.

Sunshine Challenge - Day 1

Jul. 2nd, 2025 12:31 pm
evandar: (Itachi)
[personal profile] evandar
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-1.png

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.


Read more... )
chomiji: An image of a classic spiral galaxy (galaxy)
[personal profile] chomiji

The Earth is ruled by the authoritarian Mandate, which like all such governments is constantly alert for threats to its stability. This extends to its scientific research: although the Mandate has explored space and discovered a number of exoplanets (a few of which have some form of life), it still insists that scientific discoveries must support the philosophy of the Mandate, which holds that human beings are the pinnacle of creation and that other life forms must all be in the process of striving to achieve that same state of being.

Ecologist and xeno-ecologist Arton Daghdev chafes against both these mental manacles and the Mandate in general. Some time before the story opens, he becomes part of a cell of would-be revolutionaries. After discovery of his improper views and rebellious actions, he is sentenced to what is meant to be a short life assisting research on the planet Imno 27g, casually known as Kiln for the strange clusters of pottery buildings scattered over its surface.

Life as a prisoner on Kiln within the research enclave is brutal in all the ways any such prison can be, when the prisoners are nothing but human-shaped machinery to accomplish the goals of their jailers. The Mandate's leadership has absolute control over who among their prisoners lives or dies, and if anyone should harbor the intent to escape, the environment outside the base is all too lively. The death rate among the workers is appalling, but new shipments of convicted crooks and malcontents arrive all the time, so it hardly matters.

None of the weird aliens seem to be builders of the sort needed to create the clusters of mysterious structures or indeed intelligent in any way beyond, perhaps, the level of social insects on Earth. Yet somehow the small, dysfunctional cadre of scientists on Kiln must serve up the desired tidbits of discovery to keep their commandant happy with them: evidence that there once were intelligent humanoids on Kiln.

Cut for more, including some spoilers )

I am an emotional person, and I want to like at least some of the characters about whom I'm reading. Daghdev is prickly, snarky, and fatalistic — but then, he has cause. He's also an unreliable narrator who only reveals to the reader what he wants, when he wants. The situation is really excruciating: people with a deep dislike of body horror might want to avoid this book. And there is not, in fact, a happy ending (at least not IMO).

On the other hand, this is very well written. For me, it moved along at a fantastic clip, and when I went back to check some particulars for this write-up, I found myself reading far more than I had intended because the story caught me up again. Some of the scientific ideas reminded me of other works (Sue Burke's Semiosis surfaced in my thoughts a couple of time), and sometimes I was reminded of something more elusive, a source that I can't recall. Does anyone else who has already read this have thoughts on the book's likely ancestors?

From my viewpoint, this was one of the most "science fictional" of this year's finalists. I think it might be my first choice in the vote.

lebateleur: Ukiyo-e image of Japanese woman reading (TWIB)
[personal profile] lebateleur
...with June's falling on this weekend. It was grand. There were four of us at final count; we sat down to read at 11:30 and didn't stop until 6:15 pm. The only time anyone spoke was when one of us got up to get more tea and asked if anyone else wanted any, too. I love that I can do this, and that I know multiple people who are also happy to spend their weekends doing this. (And it's even better now because having those other people with me means that when I sit down to read a book, I actually read the book, instead of pushing through a page or two and then picking up my phone "for just a minute" and doomscrolling updates about things I have no ability to affect for hours on end.)

I finished Kara Cooney's When Women Ruled the World, which was an incredibly frustrating book and Maggie O'Farrel's Hamnet, which was an incredibly good one (but which left me as melancholy as if I had doomscrolled the news for hours on end).

Afterwards we popped over to Near BBQ and introduced one of the SSRers to one of the employees, a Geek BBQ alum whom we hadn't seen in ages and with whom it was great to catch up. Then we walked SSRer A to the metro, with a short interlude to kill 30+ lanternfly nymphs on the way.Read more... )

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

これで以上です。

(no subject)

Jun. 29th, 2025 07:05 pm
teaotter: (Default)
[personal profile] teaotter
I got TWO utterly lovely stories for [community profile] femgiftboxes! Both of them were for my original fiction prompt: Woman who reads in public/the monster who keeps men from interrupting her reading

Shared Time, by [personal profile] anagrrl

She waits, and she keeps herself to herself, tightly contained, as the time draws nearer.

And then she arrives. The Reader.


*flails* This was SO GOOD. A really very alien point of view character and just so much of what I love about books, all wrapped up together.


Ends and Beginnings, by [personal profile] kalloway

There was a wisp of shadow and a pressure around Allie's ankles as she stood at the tiny counter of her tiny kitchen, having just chopped vegetables to go with the rice in the little cooker she'd only just remembered to turn on.

*flails more* This one is cozy and mysterious and warm and still has that utter love of books and reading that draws me right in. SO GOOD.

I'm so glad my prompt resonated and got me such good stories!
beatrice_otter: WWII soldier holding a mug with the caption "How about a nice cup of RESEARCH?" (Research)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter

I read a lot of MASH fic recently, and while most of it was very good, there were also a ton of inaccuracies about what mid-century America was like. I'm not an expert, but at the same time, I did listen to my parents and grandparents when they talked about what life was like when they were younger. And also, I know what's changed within my lifetime (born in 1982), and quite a lot of things people today take for granted are actually new within my lifetime, and thus not around prior to the 1980s. Now, this is fanfic, and if you don't care about historical accuracy in your fic, that is a fine and valid choice and I salute you. If, however, you do want to at least try to avoid major gaffes, here are things I've noticed that people get wrong a lot: 

 

Women's rights: Ms. )

 

Travel )

 

 

Money and Credit )Alcohol )

 

 

Childcare )

 

Phone Calls )

 

Progressive Ideas )

 

The Ad Council )

 

Entertainment )

 

Police )

These are just a few of the things that have changed in the last fifty years. And, of course, I'm only one person and might have got things wrong. Let me know if you see things I missed
 

Rebloggable on tumblr
extrapenguin: Woman in pre-Tang Dynasty official's garb reads officially. (xia dong reads)
[personal profile] extrapenguin
I recently got Pertti Nieminen's compilation of translations Veden hohde, vuorten värit, with a bunch of translations from the Book of Poetry (詩經 Shi Jing) onwards, and have been slowly making my way through it. (Out of print, so I got it via antikvaari.fi and ended up paying more for postage than the actual book lol. Joys of living abroad.) This was for the most part an exercise in seeing whether Chinese poetry works better translated into Finnish than into English, given that all three poetic traditions have different defaults of what is considered poetic. Anyway, the short answer is "yes". I picked a few poems I liked from the Shi Jing to illustrate the differences. The text itself is available on ctext, along with out of copyright 1800s translations by James Legge, to which I shall compare.

(My largest annoyance with the book so far: the transliteration chosen is, uh, not pinyin, so I'm here like "who tf is Su T'ung-po" whenever a name comes up. My copy already has a random inscription on the front so I might add a pinyin gloss to the authors' names with pencil at some point.)

intenseish poetry discussion )

I might do some similar comparisons of the Tang poets and then, later on, other sections – I think there must be enough famous Ming poets that one of them has also been translated into English, and at the very least I can talk about Mao Zedong's stuff for the Republic/People's Republic section.

LEP 29.6.

Jun. 29th, 2025 04:07 pm
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
[personal profile] yvannairie

Tbh something I think about a lot the more I casually watch streamers (my problem is that I am always either asleep or at work when all the Big Name Yankees/Canadians are online) is that we all know that a lot of Youtubers and streamers functionally owe their career to the pandemic. A lot of streamers started because they lost their jobs or were transitioned into WFH, and there was nowhere to go and be during the quarantine, and a lot of people who previously hadn't cared about streaming started watching more of it for the hangout aspect of it, because the chats and communities of these streamers provided a third space and a social hangout, also because the audience had nowhere to be during quarantine.

But what I'm really curious about is how the streamer boom changed the general media consumption habits of the people who got deep into streamers. I know that after 2022 the streamer/Youtube market had a bit of a bubble burst, and now in 2025 we're seeing the long-term fallout from online video no longer being as lucrative and selling adspace no longer having the big payouts it did before. Like, regardless of the pie getting smaller, streaming is definitely way more popular in 2024-25 than it was in 2018-19. A lot of people who used to watch tv and streaming services casually have simply stopped, the blame being laid in the feet of streaming services for becoming worse products, but I'm curious what percentage of those people get their entertainment from the kind of live performances streamers provide instead.

LEP 26.6.

Jun. 26th, 2025 10:41 pm
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
[personal profile] yvannairie

I have a scratch in the coating of my glasses right in the middle of my vision

:(

cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!

This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )

I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...

Hugo Novels Write-Up Poll

Jun. 24th, 2025 10:33 pm
chomiji: Doa from Blade of the Immortal can read! Who knew? (Doa - books)
[personal profile] chomiji

I've now read all the finalist novels for the 2025 Hugo Awards. The trouble is, I read some of these books when they first came out last year. Still. I'm happy to share my impressions if people are interested.

Poll #33287 cho's Hugo Novels 2025 Write-Up
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15


Which of the 2025 finalists are you most interested in having me write up?

View Answers

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
9 (60.0%)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
4 (26.7%)

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4 (26.7%)

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
6 (40.0%)

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
5 (33.3%)

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
5 (33.3%)

Sometimes life is wonderful.

Jun. 24th, 2025 06:32 pm
lebateleur: A picture of a leaping arhat. (Arhat)
[personal profile] lebateleur
Life has been A Lot this year due to work things, home things, health things, and ::gestures vaguely at the world:: things.

But sometimes it can also be absolutely lovely. A few days ago I ordered some CDs--including one from one of my all time favorite groups--from the website of a trad musician and left a quick comment in the delivery instructions box to the effect of Hey, if you ever have you guys's fourth CD back in stock, please let me know.

I hit "purchase", watched the transaction go through, and went about my evening.

A day later, an email with the musician's name in the "sender" field popped up in my inbox during an extremely trying afternoon. Surely not, I thought.

But guys. Guys. It was. It was a real, an-actual-human-sat-down-and-wrote-this email from the actual musician expressing surprise and pleasure that someone had bought these CDs, giving some updates about the group (including that one of the members had passed away two years ago--a fact I'd already known, but hearing it directly from this person who was his bandmate and friend...😭😭), and musing about the music the group had made together. The email contained both proper punctuation and grammar and proper emoji usage. The email also contained a proof of shipping photo of the packaged CDs in which the slightly messy interior of this person's car is visible. The whole thing is about as far away from social media influencer presentation as you can get and I cannot express how delightful I find this.

I replied saying that I'd been really sad to hear of the group member's passing and how much I absolutely loved their albums. He sent a second email thanking me again, adding that the group had never felt successful (PS: 😱) and that it really meant something whenever someone said they enjoyed their music.

And, just. It would be hard to overstate how 🤩🤩🤩 I am over this entire situation. I have been listening to this group for 27 years and this individual's other projects for almost as long. This group has had a HUGE influence on my own playing, stylistically and in terms of repertoire. Two of their CDs are in my in my top 25 most-played albums of all time. On top of that, this person is widely regarded as one of the best players of his instrument, in this genre, in the world. And it turns he is also a genuine and down-to-earth human being. I would never in a million years have imagined I would have any kind of interaction with him, let alone that he would act like I'm the one doing him a favor by appreciating the art he has helped put out into the world.

Seriously. This has made my week and will quite possibly be one of the high points of this entire year. So yeah. Sometimes life is wonderful.

これで以上です。

A post from the rain

Jun. 22nd, 2025 09:29 pm
bunn: (Default)
[personal profile] bunn
Goodness, it's been almost two months! I have been reading here and I've even started the odd post, then a cat landed on my keyboard or something and...

Anyway, here I am. What shall I put in a post?

The Shop continues reasonably busy, though less so than last year: it's the first year since it started that turnover is distinctly down on the previous year. Unsurprising given everything that's happening in the world, but a bit concerning on the micro-personal level. 

Here are some things I've done:
Read more... )

Just Married 2025

Jun. 21st, 2025 09:56 pm
desertvixen: (Default)
[personal profile] desertvixen

 

My general preferences are here.

 

DNW: unrequested mundane AU | female characters in fridges | non-con | violent dub-con | graphic violence | gore | graphic sexual violence | cruelty/death to animals | cruelty/death to children | requested character death | unrelieved grimdark | bigotry by the good guys | first or second POV | reader fic | ABO | soulbonds | wildly OOC in a non-cracky way

SMUT DNW: creampies | the word “cunt” | anal | hate each other out of bed | underage | incest

MAYBE: no-harm dubcon (sex pollen or “fertility artifact”) | period typical attitudes | infidelity | power dynamic

Shower the treats like rice!

 

I love weddings.  You cannot be too fluffy or have too many details, or get into too-ridiculous or too-complicated situations.  You want to go way over the top, I am your girl.

 

These are a few of my very favorite tags:

Wedding Reception - Unmarried Couple Fantasize About Their Future While At Friend's Wedding  - YES  I love it!  The whole, that could be us factor!  Also here for frank discussions of we are not having X at our wedding sort of stuff

Wedding Reception - Catching the Bouquet – Yes it’s old-fashioned and silly and I love it.  I especially love conspiracies to make sure someone specific gets it.

Wedding Ceremony - The Wedding Day Disaster You Laugh About in the Future  - So my first husband had to bribe a friend to overnight the ring because he left it on the kitchen counter (LDR).  It seemed huge at the time.  I’m open to ideas as long as they can still get married and aren’t too unhappy!

Proposal - While Watching Happy Friends Get Married – YES, although here maybe looking for that moment of I should ask, because it’s rude to propose at someone else’s wedding.  Or a private proposal that doesn’t detract.

Wedding - Something Old New Borrowed and Blue – I love this.  I could read a thousand variations on it, because what I love is seeing what’s important to the characters.

Wedding - That One Perfect Photograph at Your Wedding – That one moment you remember forever.

Anniversary - 1st Year – I love this opportunity to look forward and look back and be in love!

Wedding - Family Heirlooms Passed Down For Wedding – This can be tied to old/borrowed/new/blue but I love that little connection to the past or a loved one you miss.

Dimension Travel - Getting Together After Meeting The AU Married Couple Version of Themselves – I love the meeting AND the realization and the getting together.

Wedding Reception - Best Man and Maid of Honor Get Together – It’s a classic, especially if the bride and groom are trying to throw them together.

Bachelor(ette) Party – Hijinks & Shenanigans – Also a classic, as long as the hijinks do not involve infidelity. 

 

Let The Bells Ring! )

 

Hugo novels

Jun. 20th, 2025 09:31 am
cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
I have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).

In the reverse order of how much I liked them:

The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.

[personal profile] ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.


Major spoilers
I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.

I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?

The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...

I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)

All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!

Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.

Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.

Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay
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