It's been very damp here over the last week (and before that too). I got a free day off work yesterday because the Snoqualmie river got a lot bigger and the town I work in is currently an island. Not exactly unheard of for that town since the three roads into it all run alongside the river or cross it, but it's the first time it's happened in a few years. Last time was 2019, I think?
Heavy rain is supposed to hit again Sunday and Monday, which is sad, because that's when I'll be doing the Christmas Bird Count. Most years we get snow over in the mountains, not rain, but this year it's still too warm. So we'll be out in the grey and the damp and the mud, and the birds will sensibly stay in the bushes. I suspect it will be a low count year...
The slide is figure 13 (on page 10) from an Introduction to Image Processing (PDF) on the ESA Hubble website; I'm baffled at the idea that the colours were chosen "arbitrarily" given that the same PDF contains (starting on page 8) §1.4 Assigning colours to different filter exposures. It's not a super clear explanation -- I think the WonderDome explainer is distinctly more readable -- but the explanation does exist and is there.
Obviously I immediately had to stop and look all of this up.
(Rest of the talk was interesting! But that point in particular about modern illustration as I say made me go HOLD ON A SEC--)
Anatomy of a Fall I heard a lot of good things about this when it was released and finally got around to watching it. None of its characters are truly sympathetic, so it takes a while for any emotional involvement to start, but everyone and their circumstances are realistic. An interesting study in the complexities of relationships and how easily circumstantial evidence can start to look like guilt, and the difficulty of actually achieving justice. Great acting, when there's not always an easy balance to find, and no characters are inherently right or wrong.
Frankenstein Typical Guillermo del Toro, absolutely beautifully filmed with glorious direction and cinematography and artwork/effects (okay, the wolves are dodgy, but there are limits...) It's been decades since I read the book - I remember the broad outlines, but not the specific details, so I know some of it is book faithful and some of it is added, but I can't track the exact percentages. The overall tone and message is the same, though, and the sadness and frustrations of the story carry through. The creature is doomed by the narrative, no matter how hard he tries, and so in some ways is Frankenstein. Really well done.
My Father's Dragon From the same animation studio that did The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, this film very clearly has the same animation style and mood while not being quite as good as either of those. A young boy and his mother are forced to move from a small town to a grey, industrial city in search of work, their dreams crushed by successive failures. Until the boy meets a talking cat, whose story leads him out to sea and a magical but doomed island and the struggling animals that live there. A story of tragedy and fear and courage, it's entertaining enough for the duration, but not something I'd go back to.
Kneecap Loved it! Brilliant and bitter and funny, it has vibes of Trainspotting with added music and Irish politics. The cast are fantastic, despite being band members first and fictionalised versions of themselves secondarily. The direction with the added emphatic touches of animation is a delight, with some hilarious scenes that had me cracking up. 100% recommend to anyone with a twisted sense of humour or any interest in Ireland.
Just got the first two volumes of Seven Seas’ new PSOH Collector’s Edition. (Here’s my list of the series on bookshop.org, for anyone who wants to buy them in a way that gives a kickback to (a) local bookstores, (b) me, and (c) not Amazon.)
I already had the whole series in the original Tokyopop edition, but wow, the print quality on this new release is such an upgrade. The lineart, the toning, it has so many fine details and subtle gradations that didn’t get to shine nearly this much in the first version.
It’s also a brand-new translation of the text. I’m resisting the urge to do a whole line-by-line comparison — I want to just read and enjoy the stories, without looking back-and-forth between two books on every single page — but I keep getting curious and spot-checking individual lines/panels…
I was expecting the SS translation to feel more fluid and natural overall. Because New and Improved, right? But no, the script goes back-and-forth with which version I think hits better.
Here’s a clear SS win, at least. Our first customer, Angelica, describing what she’s looking for in a pet:
TP: “Well, anyway, one that’s much more expensive and impressive than that bird that conceited Janet has…” SS: “And it has to be way more valuable than stupid Janet’s stupid parakeet!”
—
…So here’s a fascinating detail. Right after Angelica signs her name on the contract, D explains that he’ll take his payment in fruit tarts:
TP: “The kind with the red and green filling, Angelica.” SS: “With plenty of red and green candied angelica, please.”
Candied angelica is an actual dessert topping (though the only pictures I can find are green, not red). Was the original Japanese text making a pun on the character’s name, and the TP translators missed it? Or was there not a pun in the Japanese, and SS added it?
(Angelica has an assistant who addresses her as “Miss Angelica” in TP, but in SS he’s only called her “Miss” at this point, so D doesn’t find out her name until she writes it down.)
—
D introduces Q-chan as a “the winged rabbit” in the first run, and “a Wolpertinger” in the second. I’m guessing the Japanese wrote “wolpertinger” in katakana, and the TP translators had no idea what to make of it? Alternately, maybe the TP translators didn’t trust their readers to look it up.
I thought “winged rabbit” might have been a literal conversion of the German into English…but nope, apparently the German etymology is a total mystery.
—
Angelica reflecting on how far she trusts D:
TP: “A suspicious storekeeper of a suspicious pet shop in Chinatown…with a very suspicious smile!” SS: “The young owner of a sketchy little pet shop, in a shady corner of Chinatown…there’s something about the knowing smile of an Asian person that’s just so suspicious!”
Uhhh. Dying to know whether this was TP smoothing over the character’s racism, or SS dialing it up.
(Is this a case of “one is a literal word-for-word translation, the other is a more accurate expression of how the character is supposed to come across”? And if so, which is which?)
I do like TP’s rhythm of “suspicious this, suspicious that, suspicious other thing” better than SS’ approach of using a different synonym every time.
—
2) Despair
The customer in this one is “Robin Hendrix” in the TP translation, and “Robin Hendricks” in SS.
According to a quick check on MyNameStats.com: the estimated number of people in the US with the surname HENDRICKS is 49,261. For HENDRIX, it’s 39,236. So, the SS transliteration is more popular…but not hugely so.
And I low-key assumed the name was supposed to invoke Jimi Hendrix, given that Robin’s famous alien-prince character always gave me the vibes of “what if a prog rock album was a sci-fi movie.”
—
Leon! Hi, Leon!!
An exchange in the TP version:
D: How rude! We are a business that deals in love and dreams…not toxic or dangerous creatures. Leon (thinking): “Love”? The only thing this guy loves in his own voice!
And the SS version:
D: Dear me! Our humble shop only sells love and dreams. Nothing vicious or venomous! Leon (thinking): Did he seriously say, “love and dreams” with a straight face?
Same annoyance level, but slightly different vibe! TP Leon thinks “this guy is so conceited,” SS Leon thinks “this guy is so corny.”
—
A general thing that’s come up a couple times: SS does a better job of translating sound effects, and other little asides. TP sometimes leaves them untranslated, sometimes just erases them and doesn’t replace them with anything. There’s an example here, where Leon has a little “grr, grr…” that’s only in the SS version.
Another one later in the chapter: Robin gets handed a film script, the SS version has an English title and some credits printed on the cover. TP just left it blank.
—
Another line that’s only explicitly racist in the SS version, this time Leon thinking about D:
TP: That arrogant–! Laughing at me like I’m a moron! Where does he get off–? SS: Dammit! That smartass! Bet he was laughing at me inside the whole time. I can’t stand Asians!
Oof. I really hope SS is the version that’s being more literal, and TP is more accurate to the Author’s Intended Rudeness Level.
(Poor Leon, you have no idea how much you’re going to be thinking grumpy thoughts about D from this day forward…)
—
Robin reflecting on why his pet is better than his fangirls and/or his ex:
TP: And best of all, she can’t live without me. SS: The biggest difference, though…is that your survival depends entirely on me.
So, hey, there’s a case where I think the TP translation clearly hits better.
—
3) Daughter
The SS version gives D a little farewell catchphrase: “Please cherish your new pet, for as long as you both may live.” With slight variations — in issue 3, where the customers are a pair of grieving parents, it’s “…as long as you all may live.”
TP just has him saying “Well then, please take good care of [him/her/it/them].”
I’m guessing this is whatever phrase shows up in a lot of anime/manga character introductions, usually translated as “I’ll be in your care” or “Please take care of me.” I figured that was a bit of a formal, ritualized thing to say — but only on the level that “it’s a pleasure to meet you” or “I appreciate your time” are formal. Not on the level that wedding vows are formal.
It adds some nice texture, and honestly, in this case I kinda don’t care if it’s more or less accurate — I really like the result. D, you fancy ominous weirdo.
(…This means he’s going to pull the pseudo-wedding-vow on Leon at some point, right? Looking forward to it.)
—
Another D-Leon conversation I’m rotating in my head:
TP translation:
D: Welcome–Oh, it’s you, officer. You have good timing. You always come around teatime. Leon: Hey, you’re the weirdo drinking tea all the time. How’s business? D: Hee hee! Brisk as usual, officer.
SS translation:
D: Welcome! Oh, it’s just you. You have a keen nose. You always seem to arrive right at teatime. Leon: More like you decide it’s teatime when I show up. Do you ever do any work? D: Oh, I do enough.
(Is this foreshadowing that D isn’t going to end up throwing around “my dear detective” in SS’ versions of the later chapters? That’ll be a loss.)
—
Another example where the original TP translation seems a little more natural…
TP: Parents raise their children by giving them a part of themselves. Children born from deep and unrestrained affections…are born from their own parents’ blood. SS: The mother sacrifices her flesh so that they may live. But what seems like a mother’s deep love…burdens her children with the sin of matricide from the moment they’re born.
(This is D waxing philosophic about a species of murderous cannibal rabbits. Because that’s just how PSOH rolls.)
—
To Be Continued
This post is so long and I’m only halfway through the first book. Cutting it off here. More to come!
What I’ve Read Persuasion – Jane Austen – I was sick this week and re-watched the 1995 adaptation and, as often happens, lead to me returning to the book. The movie is wonderful, the book is wonderful, I was comforted by the world that Austen builds and writes in. I think this one is growing on me to the point it passes Pride and Prejudice now for me. I just love Anne Elliot, I love Wentworth, I love the whole stupid bunch of all the young people in a flurry of attraction and engagement bouncing off each other like superheated particles.
The Books of Magic – Neil Gaiman – Yeah, that guy. I picked this up because I had come across an article talking about the unacknowledged influences that JK Rowling (yeah, that guy) had on Harry Potter – and the dark haired working class boy with dumb glasses and a magical owl, getting introduced to the secret world of magic by a stranger, seems like it very well might have been in her mind when she started writing Harry Potter. (This series is from 1990). However, this book is largely a retrospective of magic characters in DC Comics thru the lens of a new character, Timothy Hunter, who could be “the greatest magician of his age” as he gets the guided tour from several magical trenchcoat guys from DC’s vault. It feels like themes that have been done before by better people. The charm of the comic-specific retrospective relies on Gaiman’s skill at re-working existing comic characters into the brief cameos they get in the story along with existing myths and legends. My opinion is that Gaiman did this better and more gracefully in Sandman, but, I am inclined to be far less charitable towards him because of his whole fucking shitshow of a personality. I recalled reading this book and thinking it was good – but I realize now that I was thinking of the continuing series that came after this by John Ney Rieber and Peter Gross, and that certain key moments are simply the work of other writers. (Also, I didn’t like the art in this series except for book three, so, there’s that.) I don’t feel like I can entirely rule out my suspicion that Rowling had seen or read this series before she wrote Harry Potter, but I also can’t prove it and I’m not willing to take the law suit. In short, I think it can be skipped unless you are particularly interested in DC Comics magical characters.
What I’m Reading
The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – Static, due for book club next week.
Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – about 70% and while I made a comparison to Michael Crichton last week, I think that was perhaps too generous. I’m not losing interest in this book so much as I get frustrated with the scene-level pacing. Multiple scenes have seemed like they are building up to punchy scientific revelations!Only to have decidedly unurgent exposition pop up in the middle and drag out the scene, taking the delicious tension with them. It ends up taking the steam out of my excitement to have it happen so often. I can’t really give details without spoilers. But, for example, our intrepid scientist who is on a mission to discover the deep sea creatures who killed her sister are real and dangerous, uses her scientific subskill (which has been described before) to discover that her ship’s about to face an immediate threat! And in the middle of that action, the narration of the book picks up on how she’s typing really hard and throws in a flashback to let the reader know that the main character has actually broken the keyboards on several of her laptops this way! Now, that detail is good character work! I like it! It just doesn’t belong in the space between the set up and payoff of her big discovery because it let the tension out of the scene like a balloon – you should have popped that balloon for a big bang, but it’s just farted it all away. I remembered this being a frustration with Mira Grant’s Newflesh book, so I feel like this is a writer/reader mismatch – she’s clearly doing all right for herself in getting her works published! She loves to tell you about how things work. But it keeps interrupting the action, and I’m getting fussed.
A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal -he’ll get a share in her family’s much larger theatre and she’ll get her chance on the stage!
I often find the structures of historical romances less grating to my brain than modern romances – something about the stronger patriarchal structures makes the genre less silly to me. Modern women can simply not get married and have a perfectly fine life – historical women leads have to figure this shit out and fast. (This is like monarchy – makes for a great drama, I’d rather it only appear in fiction.)
Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)
What I’ll Read Next Natural History of Dragons The Hunger Games The Grief of Stones heated rivalry, since the show is all the rage
One of the things I found yesterday, while getting distracted from transcription by regretting not having taken History and Philosophy of Science (or, more accurately, not having shown up to the lectures to just listen), was some tantalising notes on the existence of a four-lecture series entitled Visual Culture in Science and Medicine:
Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.
I've managed to track down a one-hour video (that I've obviously not consumed yet, because audiovisual processing augh). Infuriatingly Kusukawa's book on the topic only covers the sixteenth century, not the full timespan of the lectures, and also it's fifty quid for the PDF. I have located a sample of the thing, consisting of the front matter and the first fifteen pages of the introduction (it cuts off IN MID SENTENCE).
Now daydreaming idly about comparative study of this + Tufte, which I also haven't got around to reading...
Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re wandering weird roads that go to graveyards. Sound fun? Let’s go!
Corpse roads are paths over which one carries a coffin to its final resting place. Like crossroads, corpse roads are physical places with metaphysical properties, according to folklore. Such pathways are found all over the world, but the origin of corpse roads in Great Britain is a little more political than you might expect.
Back in late medieval times, the population was growing, so people were building new churches and their associated graveyards. Some established churches insisted that new outlying churches were under their spiritual (and financial) control. Thus, they had to use the graveyards of the mother church, even though they were sometimes quite a distance away.
So how to get the dearly departed to their final destination? Unless you had money for transportation, you and a few friends had to carry the coffin. Thus, paths sprung up between far flung churches and central cemeteries. These paths were called corpse roads, funeral roads, coffin walks, lych ways (lych or lich is a Germanic word for corpse), and other similar names. Eventually, the outlying churches did break away and make their own cemeteries, so corpse roads ceased to be used, though some are still preserved today as footpaths.
Often, corpse roads were as straight as possible through rough terrain, because, well, coffins are pretty heavy. In fact, sometimes large stones along the way were used as places to rest the dearly deceased for a while. These are called “coffin stones.”
But there may have been other reasons for straight roads and resting stones.
The long and winding road. Not all stories about a corpse road have to be creepy. You could have a family drama that takes place in one scene: the hours-long journey over a corpse road. Let the reader glean the family’s backstory: its loves, arguments, history, and future. All crystalized around the death of someone central to the family, and the difficult march where they share the burden of carrying the coffin.
Item the first: the 1972 Harvard University Press Treatise of Man, translated by Thomas Steele Hall. This translation is quoted by two of the other books I'm working with, Pain: the science of suffering by Patrick Wall (1999), and The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021). It is also an edition that, as I understand it, contains a facsimile of the first French edition (1664, itself a translation of the Latin published in 1662). My French is not up to reading actual seventeenth-century philosophy, but being able to spot-check a couple of paragraphs will be Useful For My Argument.
Item the second: Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1997). This doesn't contain Treatise on Man, but it's the translation of Meditations on First Philosophy that's quoted in The Story of Pain by Joanna Bourke (2014).
Meanwhile the Descartes essay, thus far composed primarily but not solely of quotations from other works, has somehow made it north of 4500 words. I think it might even be starting to make an argument.
I am resisting the urge to try to turn this into a Proper Survey Of Popular Books On Pain, because that sounds like a lot of work that will probably involve reading a bunch of philosophers I find profoundly irritating, and also THIS IS A TOTAL DISTRACTION from the ACTUAL WORK I AM TRYING TO DO. But it's a distraction that is getting me writing, so I'll take it.
This month in 1906 the E.F. Benson story The Bus-Conductor was published in Pall Mall Magazine. It’s one of the earliest appearances of the urban legend Room For One More?
The story goes like this: a traveler is staying the night at a friend’s house. Shortly after midnight, a sound from outside brings them to the window. On the driveway below, the traveler sees a hearse pull up. There is no coffin inside, but instead a group of living people. The hearse driver, a man with a sinister appearance, looks up at the traveler in the window and says, “There’s room for one more.”
Shaken, the traveler returns to bed, and in the morning, dismisses the creepy encounter as a dream. But later that day the traveler goes to board a bus, and finds the driver looks exactly like the hearse-driver from the night before. And he repeats his invitation— “There’s room for one more.”
Terrified, the traveler backs away from the bus, letting it leave without them. A moment later, a truck slams into the bus, killing everyone on board.
Let’s talk about the driver. Who is this creepy dude? Is he a real person who is doomed along with his fellow travelers? Or maybe he’s a psychopomp (I love that word so much), who is there to guide his passengers to the Other Side. Maybe he’s a man under a bad luck curse, who really should not be getting onto crowded elevators, or a murderous bus driver who wants to cause a crash. Maybe the storyteller is the only one who sees him—if so, why are they lucky enough to get a warning?
Some further progress on Florencia Clifford's Feeding Orchids to the Slugs ("Tales from a Zen kitchen"), which I acquired from Oxfam in a moment of weakness primarily for EYB purposes at a point when it was extremely discounted. It is primarily a somewhat disjointed memoir for which I am not the target audience, but hey, Books To Go Back In The Charity Shop Pile but that I wouldn't actually hate reading were exactly the goal, so that's a victory. Mostly. I'm a little over halfway through it, sticking book darts on pages that contain recipes for easier reference when I go back through on the actual indexing pass.
I absolutely needed something that was not going to make me furious and furthermore that was not going to be demanding, and there's a new one in the series, so I have now reread several Scalzi: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades completed, The Lost Colony in progress.
I've also had a very quick flick through the mentions of Descartes in Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain, which is my next Pain Book. She does better than everyone else I've read, but I still think she's misinterpreting Treatise on Man. (Why do I have strongly-held opinions on Descartes now. CAN I NOT.)
smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto, two batches thereof, because I had promised A burrata to go with and then (1) the supermarket was out of it and (2) the opened part-pack of feta wound up doing two days quite comfortably, so the second batch was required For Burrata Purposes.
I have also established that the pistachio croissant strata works very well in one of the loaf tins if you scale it down to 50% quantities because there were only 3 discount croissants at the supermarket (... because you had to wait and watch the person who got there JUST ahead of you taking Most Of Them...), which also conveniently used up the dregs of the cream that I had in the fridge.
Eating. Tagine out the freezer (thank you past Alex). Relatively fresh dried apple. A very plain lunch at Teras in Seydikemer, which was apparently the magic my digestive system needed to settle itself down! And I am very much enjoying my dark chocolate raspberry stars. :)
Breakfast in bed, accompanied by completing my first ever playthrough of the main body of Monument Valley. I think I wound up getting two prompts from A, who also spent a significant chunk of the afternoon attempting to get it working on two different large-format touchscreen devices -- I'd been struggling with the trackpad, and was gratified when A reported that they'd had a go at playing the very first level with a trackpad and it really was kind of wretched. (Made it to approximately halfway through Appendix 1 before deciding I needed to call it for the day...)
'tis The Season for my current Favourite Chocolate (I'm not sure if it's available year-round but the company we get groceries from only carries them during the winter, and I honestly probably enjoy them more because of the Seasonal Availability). I am writing this post with one of them + a mug of warm milk.
The box of meds I dropped in an airport this Monday gone has successfully been picked up! First step in a pass-the-parcel that will hopefully conclude weekend after next...
Got a substantial increase on my highest score in one of the silly clicky games in Flight Rising :)
The View from T'Khut (50669 words) by Laura JV Chapters: 9/9 Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Spock/Nyota Uhura, James T. Kirk/Spock, Sarek & Spock (Star Trek), Spock & Spock Prime, James T. Kirk & Spock Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Spock Prime, James T. Kirk, Nyota Uhura, T'Pau (Star Trek), Sarek (Star Trek), Vulcan Characters (Star Trek), Crew of the Starship Enterprise Additional Tags: Vulcan Culture (Star Trek), Vulcan Mind Melds (Star Trek), Vulcan Language (Star Trek), jj abrams should be ashamed of himself, Vulcan history, Vulcan mythology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, symbiotic red algae Series: Part 1 of The View from T'Khut Summary:
Part I: The Absent World. The planet vanishes, but her people go on.
Part II: An Archaeology of Loss. The world-death left a scar in spacetime, and a void in the heart of the Federation.
Part III: Time and Darkness. In which Ambassador Spock fires unexpected shots.
Previously: uk.bookshop.org were selling a Tor ebook with DRM applied, which I only noticed after I had bought it, because all? Tor ebooks? are DRM-free? at the request of the publisher? Like, Hive applies DRM to them, but given that bookshop.org lets you filter for DRM-free, this... was surprising.
My initial support request for (1) an explanation and (2) any chance of a refund, realise this is totally on me though, ... got me an almost-immediate refund, which I was not expecting, and a very entry-level explanation of What DRM Is, which I sort of was. So I wrote back saying thank you very much, and also, Tor went famously DRM-free in about 2012, and they're definitely supplying this specific ebook to other retailers without DRM applied.
There was A Pause.
A day or two later I received a response from someone with "Senior" in their signature, thanking me for my patience and saying they were Investigating.
A few days after that I noticed that the ebook in question was now marked DRM-free: hurrah! ... but when I bought it, and clicked on the "yes please download my DRM-free ebook" button, nothing happened.
I did not write back in because I have been. preoccupied.
But a few days after that I tried again and this time the download did work! So hurrah for bookshop.org needing me to do much less assertive escalation than I'd been expecting, and also for noticing that something was still broken and Fixing It without me needing to get around to e-mailing in about it.
... the quick part of this note was going to be: I know there were Questions on my first post about Hey They're Doing Ebooks Now, about how you actually filter for DRM-free. As far as I can tell this isn't actually possible from the ebooks landing page, which seems A Pity, BUT when you search for something (which can absolutely be as vague as "science fiction"), the FORMAT dropdown lets you filter for DRM-free ebooks only. Obviously this is Not Ideal, in that one might actually like to browse All DRM-Free Ebooks, but it does exist as an option, where as far as I can tell it doesn't, at all, on e.g. Kobo. Hopefully this knowledge is helpful! And certainly The Above Saga has caused me to think sufficiently positively of them that I'm likely to default to them for my ebooks in future.
Yesterday evening I came home from work to find that someone had spent the day reading my circa 20 year old 230k word series for a very niche fandom, and had left detailed comments on every story in the series. After a tedious and sometimes frustrating day at work, that was just awesome ❤️ Today I am replying to their comments, and getting distracted by going back and reading parts of the stories myself - also awesome!
On this day in 1945, a group of five US Navy Planes known as Flight 19 vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Such accidents unfortunately do happen. So why is Flight 19 so famous? Because after the disappearance, people made up a bunch of stuff about space aliens. No, really.
Flight 19 was led by US Navy Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor. The other aviators were his student pilots for the exercise, and their crews. They took off around 2 pm from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
In 1945, there was no GPS, so pilots found their way by various means, including dead reckoning using elapsed time, compasses, and simply looking out the window. Unfortunately for aviators in the Florida area, there are a lot of little islands down there that look alike.
Lt. Taylor was having a very confusing flight. The training exercise involved flying east to the Bahamas, then north for a while, then southwest to complete the triangle and return to Florida. But when Taylor reached the Bahamas by flying east, he somehow thought he was 200 miles to the southwest, over the Florida Keys. So then he tried to take the flight further east to where he expected the mainland to be. But of course, east from the Bahamas will lead you out to open ocean, and that’s where Flight 19 ended up.
No one knows how Taylor made the bizarre error and why he stuck to his strange belief of being over the Keys in the face of mounting contrary evidence. It’s possible his compass may have been broken, and he may not have had a watch to help with dead reckoning. But when the mainland of Florida did not appear below, he should have believed what his eyes were telling him. In fact, it’s such an inconceivable mistake that writers made up aliens to explain it.
The radio tower, who in 1945 also could not tell exactly where Flight 19 was, tried to guide him, but it didn’t help. Some of the student pilots were heard on the radio urging Taylor to fly west, showing they were not confused about where they were and presumably had working compasses. But no one deserted the group and saved themselves, possibly because that would be going against military discipline.
“The ocean doesn’t look as it should.” This fake quote has a lot of possibilities. One way to go would be to have something Very Seriously Wrong with the ocean: for example, it’s red, it’s boiling, or it’s not the ocean anymore but some strange landscape. Or you could have things gradually get creepy, slowly building dread. For example, what if every once in a while, the waves run backwards, like you’re watching a video rewind? Or if the water looks normal, but it seems thicker, moving more like honey?
Book 1 of the Vampire Haven series has its title! Read excerpts of Have You Ever Been Kissed?in my free author newsletter (MM vampire smut)
Finn and August. A gorgeous, charming vampire looking for his happily-eternally-after falls ridiculously hard for a shy, nerdy human who’s never had a date in his life.
ALT
Finn Sullivan is among the most eligible bachelors in Chicago, with movie-star good looks and a reputation as a talented gentle dom. Secretly, he’s also a vampire looking for the love of his life in the shape of a human who wants a very long-term relationship. Finn realizes almost immediately upon meeting introverted, inexperienced August Amesbury that August could be The One. But Finn’s been disappointed in love before—will sweet, shy August only break his heart once more?
August Amesbury can get his head around the idea of actual vampires congregating in a diner to have lots of sex. And while he has no idea what these (very) friendly strangers mean when they say August is a sub in need of a gentle dom, he’s down for figuring that out. What August can’t believe is that Finn Sullivan, the most beautiful person in the world, could actually be interested in awkward, geeky August. But that could be a problem, because August is pretty sure he’s already falling in love.
Plus! A plot! What will August’s awful cousin Logan do when he finds out August has snagged the trophy lover Logan’s been chasing?
I switched my Fic Updates DW Journal over to “entries are displayed in the journal-specific style” mode, realized for the first time how glitchy it looks on mobile, and spent a good chunk of today fussing with borders/margins/font sizes until I finally felt better about it.
The journal has mostly been “crossposting links from AO3” for a decade now, but in the past couple years I had a resurgence of using it for “behind-the-scenes about the writing” posts (all for Cover of Knight reasons). Finally came around to thinking, you know what, I want them to look customized.
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Sometimes you post a thing and it just hits, huh? I put that art of “Lydia Deetz singing Gravity” on DA, and overnight it became the most popular thing I’ve uploaded there in years.
“DA doesn’t want live-action superheroes, it wants Cartoon Ladies” isn’t exactly news, but still. Watching those numbers zoom upward sure was something.
Fund artists! Think of how many other cool things they could do!
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Speaking of support for artists:
Anyone reading this who makes Clip Studio assets? I have points that need to be spent/gifted before the end of the year, so drop a link to yours (here’s a link to mine, for comparison) and I’ll send you some.
I have over 6,000 Clippy to burn, so please share this around. I’ll give some to everyone who responds, until/unless I run out.
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