This is 100% the gay supervillain music video I’ve been waiting for.
I love campy gay villains, but gay villains of this type are amazing too and sorely underrepresented.
…Oh, so by “gay”, you mean. Actually gay.
I don’t usually reblog stuff like this but tbh this is the kind of content I live for.
Happy 10 year anniversary to these two, specifically
(single dropped Dec. 3, 2015, music vid hit youtube Jan 12, 2016)
wood whittled przhevalsky horse
Can I just go crazy over Harriet Vane's character arc through the romance in Gaudy Night?
Harriet had her love life exposed in an extremely public, shameful way. Naturally, she wants to hide from love and avoid being hurt again. Oxford seems to offer her a place where she can live a peaceful, solitary intellectual life unbothered by emotions, safe from all the dangers of the world. Yet she finds that danger can come even to Oxford.
She wants to be an independent woman, yet she also doesn't want to be hurt. These goals cancel each other out. She could marry a man who would protect her from life's dangers--but she'd lose her self-respect.
Peter shows her over and over that he's not going to protect her from life's dangers. Being with him makes life more dangerous. Being with him opens her up to more pain. He's not going to keep her safe. What he is going to do is stand beside her and help her to face the dangers. She can be an individual and be in love--but she has to be willing to be hurt.
By the end of the story, she is. They've both opened up about their inner pain and how they've hurt each other in the past. They don't have to hide in peaceful solitude or fight battles alone. They can face the pain of life together.
Uh, hello, I started reading a murder mystery series and then ten novels & several short stories in it just eviscerates me with an intensely moving romance set in the most real & alive depiction of Oxford I've ever found in fiction? Ow?
Augh and the whole thing is just so gently paced and tender and well-written that it hurts
I'm sorry, I'm still obsessed with how the mystery structure is woven into Harriet and Lord Peter's romance.
Wimsey had his whole "love at first sight" thing, but he also got to spend an entire book investigating a mystery surrounding Harriet. While she was stuck in prison, he got to talk to people who had known her in her former life, got to meet her friends and learn about her background and discover all sorts of details about who she is as a person.
Harriet never got to do that for Peter. She just knew him as an aristocrat, as a detective, and as someone who wanted to marry her. She interacted with people who knew him as one of those three things, and she got to know him in the context of a relationship where she never got to see much beyond the surface.
In Oxford, Harriet gets to dig into Peter's past. He stops asking her to marry him, which finally gives her the chance to ask questions about him. She meets people who knew him before he knew her, who know him in lots of different roles. She gets to see what he's like as an uncle, how he deals with disciplining an irresponsible son of the family. She learns about his work with the Foreign Office. She meets an old college friend who knew him as the silly aristocrat you show off to your friends. She meets someone who knew him as a commanding officer. She even gets to watch him sleep--which is explicitly, with multiple allusions, compared to death--then rummages through his pockets gathering evidence that gives clues about his personality.
She learns what made him fall in love with her. She learns that other people can fall in love with him. All this is evidence that lets her piece together a picture of the history that led him to this moment, and helps her figure out how she feels about him.
He got to investigate her, and her investigation of him puts them on equal-enough footing to marry. The head's not getting in the way of the heart--it opens up the heart, because for them, knowledge leads to love.
Made some nesting wooden owls!
here's thing i wrote up in 2022 and completely forgot about for the past few years:
I appreciate the worth of restricted varieties of English that solely contain frequently utilized words, exemplified by the Simple English Wikipedia and Randall Munroe’s volume Thing Explainer. Pondering these varieties, an additional query materialized to me: what if in lieu of increasing the straightforwardness of the vocabulary, I increased its complexity and unpleasantness?
Consequently arose Abstruse English.
Abstruse English excludes from its vocabulary the 1,000 English lexical items utilized with maximal frequency. Abstruse English permits essential exceptions:
Abstruse English additionally permits numerals ("1,000") and capitalized nomina propria (“Abstruse English”, “Randall Munroe”).
The vocabulary of Abstruse English entirely lacks varieties of the lexical item “to be”. Consequently, the constraints resemble E-Prime, a restricted dialect of English lacking conjugations and contractions of that lexical item.
Abstruse English additionally lacks varieties of “to do”, necessitating atypical negations.
Utilize not Abstruse English; it lacks utility and elegance.
Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
another hilarious example:
my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is
Little dragons on a park bench for today's sketch. Was imagining them like seagulls, crows, pigeons, etc-checking to see if people left any little snacks behind to clean up
-2798
Picturing these critters raiding the park grills for chunks of leftover charcoal.
CHARADE 1963 | dir. Stanley Donen
Do we count this as a passive rickroll?
link to post
A very important addition from Rian Johnson himself
