violsva: The words "Oh, Sandy!"; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (Oh Sandy)
A one page RPG about avoiding people at a Regency party

It is one of the most anticipated nights of the London Season. You are at a fine ball, surrounded by the wealthy and titled, wearing a gorgeous (and extremely expensive) outfit. Hundreds of candles light the room, and a small orchestra is playing a minuet.

You hate it and you want to leave.

Let us be frank: some gentlepersons simply would not enjoy the glittering spectacle of a grand Society occasion—or at least not every night. This game envisions an unwilling, unimpressed, somewhat grumpy participant at the sort of grand rout one sees in hundreds of Regency romance novels, as many of us who read them must admit we sometimes would be.

It is hot, it is loud, it is unpleasant, and someone has just stepped on your foot. Can you find a single moment of privacy at this event?

You will need: A standard deck of 52 cards and a six-sided die.

Free PDF available here!

This is not actually the game I expected to post first. The first game I wrote was The Haunted Ruin, currently in playtesting, but that is somewhat large and I will be charging for it and playtesting and editing take time. And then I had an idea for something a lot smaller, so I accidentally wrote a one-page RPG to test uploading things to itch.io before the large project. So that worked out well.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I am having a lot of trouble both picking up books to start and concentrating on them while reading. Even reading D&D sourcebooks, which is all my brain really wants to do right now, I sometimes have to read a sentence three times for it to penetrate. This is probably seasonal depression.

Anyway, I have still read some.

Recent: I finished Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft earlier this month, straight through, with no particular reason or plans to work on a horror campaign. Enjoyed it very much.

Finished Packaged Toronto: A Collection of the City's Historic Design, which I got from the spacing store last year and have been reading slowly ever since. Vaguely related to Four Apples but also just my city, yay. I would have liked more detail on most things but that's a constant state.

And in my quest for ever-smaller M/M pairings, I have started reading D&D: Honour Among Thieves fic, and I recommend Counterpoint by Geese_In_Flight if you like plot and ethical conflicts and people not talking about their emotions.

I also read or reread a bunch of short stories: more than half of The Bone Key (great as always, would have finished it if not for library holds), "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (definitely an early 19thC New England gothic story), and Mistakes Were Made by coveredinfeels (awesome. I don't know Dragon Age beyond watching [personal profile] consultingpiskies play a few times, so I can't speak to canonicity, but lots of fun and set in my favourite kind of modern AU).

Current: This is the part where I feel like nothing's happening. I am flipping through various D&D sourcebooks and reading the sequel to Counterpoint, above. Other than that, I have not made much progress with Middlemarch, and I read the first 15% of The Teller of Small Fortunes and I like it, there's no reason for me not to read it, but I haven't got back to it. Maybe because I haven't spent much time on public transit (I wrote that yesterday, but today I was on public transit and the focus still wasn't really there).

Future: I have got The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor out of the library again.

I have a Jeannie Lin novella out from the library, I have various fics lined up, and I am wondering if audiobooks would be more manageable right now. Alternatively I am considering taking March off from expectations.
violsva: A cartoon of a grey cat happily scribbling in a book (writing cat)
I wonder when cats started scratching the furniture.

No, really. Modern upholstery techniques are only a couple of centuries old. Carpets are much older, but also rarer. Most people, as I understand it, covered their floors with mats woven out of rushes or straw (if they covered them with anything). While that does sound like exactly the kind of thing a cat would love to tear up, I feel like if you’re making your floor coverings literally out of grass you’re probably not super concerned about durability?

Presumably there’d be wooden furniture to scratch, but none of my cats have ever bothered with the wooden furniture.

So, when did cats scratching the furniture become an actual problem? Who was the first person to find out that cats like scratching upholstery? (Who was the first cat to find out how awesome it is to tear up the upholstery?)
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
So I was listening to a podcast about an 18th century cookbook, and the host read out some recipes from it and added "These recipes seem lacking on specifics today..." and the two professional chefs I was listening with immediately said, "No, they don't. Those are perfectly normal recipes."

And I said, "For you, because you already know how to cook."

I've read several books on quilting and patchwork in the last year. Florence Hartley's Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859) assumes not only that the reader already knows how to make patchwork, but that patchwork was how she learned to sew in the first place. It includes a few patterns, mostly just by showing you the finished design, and introduces the reader to the concept of album quilts, and has relatively specific instructions for English paper piecing. It gives descriptions of a few individual quilts. But mostly the author just rhapsodizes on the history of patchwork, because of course her audience already knows all about how to do it. On quilting there's even less.

The first full length book solely about quilts was Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them by Marie D. Webster (1915). She's got more space, but when it comes to instructions she mostly just tells you to sew the pieces together. She's more interested in appliqué than patchwork, and she has lots of detail on quilting, but she still assumes that of course you know how to sew and can make your own pattern.

Ruby Short McKim's 101 Patchwork Patterns (1931), now, actually tells you what size to cut, how to sew together, what seam allowance to leave, and usually what order to sew the pieces together. She tells you about bias, she tells you how to deal with triangles and diamonds, she tells you to baste appliqué before final sewing. She gives you actual pattern pieces and tells you how to cut them out.

The first book I read on quilting was The Perfect Patchwork Primer by Beth Gutcheon (1973). It goes through the entire process of designing and making a quilt. It tells you how to calculate fabric quantities. It has a diagram of how to do running stitch. It doesn't assume you already know how to sew, but it does assume you can figure out how to apply general rules to specific patterns.

All Points Patchwork by Diane Gilleland (2015) tells you how to tie a knot in your thread. (She does say this is because lots of people ask her this question.) It doesn't assume you have ever sewn before. It's an excellent book, lots of design inspiration, specific details on how to work with different shapes, etc.: and it has and repeats detailed instructions for everything down to the most basic tasks.

Gilleland's book is not actually representative of most books on quilting these days; it's a general introduction to a specific technique, and doesn't have any individual pattern instructions. Most quilting books don't have the basics, they certainly don't tell you how to operate your sewing machine, but they have extremely specific patterns: use this quantity of these five kinds of fabrics, cut them into these pieces in this way, join these together to make this segment, then those segments to make this one, and so on: an unbelievable level of detail for each individual pattern, that no one who has made more than two quilts would actually need, especially not if they had access to the internet.

I'm not objecting to this trend. It means that anyone can pick up a hobby as an adult, whether or not they have any experience with it or even know anyone else who does it. But I do have a strong personal preference for the middle of this progression; for books that tell you how to do things rather than what to do.

(I recommend all of the specifically named books in this post, though in some cases mostly for historical interest.)
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Blue Beads in the Tundra

Note that the first sentence of this article contains a really major error: the actual "first European item[s] ever to arrive in North America" were on the other site of the continent, in Newfoundland, and at least 400 years older. (The Norse also landed, though did not settle, on the mainland at Labrador.) What the archaeologist quoted actually says is “[t]his was the earliest that indubitably European materials show up in the New World by overland transport.”

It's really neat because we knew the Silk Road facilitated trade between Europe and East Asia (earlier than we'd expected!), and we knew there was cultural movement and interchange around the entire high Arctic region, but we hadn't had hard evidence connecting all of these trade routes together.
violsva: Bucky Barnes from Captain America: Civil War (Bucky)
So we are done! And man, this week just keeps on going, doesn't it. Maybe not for you, I hope yours has been better than mine.

Title: Growing Seasons
Rating: E
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov
Warnings/Enticements: Historical AU, Post-American Civil War, Farming, Domestic Chores, Blizzards, Slow Burn, Sharing a Bed, Angst, PTSD, Polyamory, Past MCD, Past Steve/Bucky, Background Dark Themes, Period Typical Attitudes, Explicit Sexual Content
Summary: “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this,” the stranger said, pulling his scarf down to reveal dark stubble and a surprisingly pretty mouth. “But the storm came up sudden, and I got no idea where the nearest town is. Could you point me in the right direction?”
“You won’t make it in this storm,” said Clint. “Stay until it blows over, it’s no trouble.”
Word Count: 20,294

On AO3
violsva: Bucky Barnes from Captain America: Civil War (Bucky)
So for MFDE I wrote genderswap Clint/Nat mission fic.

And here is the thing I have been working on for forever:

Title: Growing Seasons
Rating: E
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov
Warnings/Enticements: Historical AU, Post-American Civil War, Farming, Domestic Chores, Blizzards, Slow Burn, Sharing a Bed, Angst, PTSD, Polyamory, Past MCD, Past Steve/Bucky, Background Dark Themes, Period Typical Attitudes, Future Explicit Sexual Content
Summary: “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this,” the stranger said, pulling his scarf down to reveal dark stubble and a surprisingly pretty mouth. “But the storm came up sudden, and I got no idea where the nearest town is. Could you point me in the right direction?”
“You won’t make it in this storm,” said Clint. “Stay until it blows over, it’s no trouble.”
Word Count: 2787 this chapter; 20k total

On AO3
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Okay, so I have two Old Guard ficlets up on AO3 now. And thinking about another one is making me wonder about Andromache's past, so here is some wild timeline speculation.

This is not about Amazon culture, sorry. The Greek idea of Amazons is partially based on the fact that their contemporaries in Scythia (north of the Black Sea) did in fact have female warriors (lots of kurgans contemporary with classical Athens have female burials with weapons), and partially the standard misogynist ideas that strong women hate men and besides no normal man would want to live with them anyway, and partially about how imaginary societies that are the opposite of your own are fascinating.

But the comic apparently (I have not finished reading them yet) says she's over 6000 years old.* In which case she would not techinically be a Scythian, though she may have hung out with them for a while. If she's 6000 years old I don't know why she's calling herself Andromache and not, I don't know, WiHrogʷʰen. She's definitely not Greek.

However, AFAICT, while individual cultures moved around and changed, basically the Eurasian steppe was pretty consistently inhabited by various nomadic pastoralists from the domestication of the horse (c. 3500 BCE) until about ... now. They're still there. So she could very easily have spent thousands of years just riding horses and fighting and drinking koumiss.

And honestly I bet Andy spends a lot of time wishing she'd never left. Wild Timeline Speculation )

I have just remembered that I could put this up on AO3; but then I would have to figure out how footnote anchors work and I think I'm too tired for that right now. [Next day: Here it is.]

...If I actually write a fic it will almost definitely be shorter than this. *facepalms*

-----
Footnotes )

Emily Carr

May. 15th, 2020 02:35 pm
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Emily-Carr-Indian-War-Canoe-Alert-Bay-1912-Oil-on-cardboard-65-x-955-cm-The-Montreal-Museum-of

In 1912 Emily Carr had studied painting in San Francisco and England and France. She had exhibited her paintings. She had gone on sketching trips to northern British Columbia and lived with the First Nations people and painted their homes and art. She had gone to the government of British Columbia and proposed that she be employed in documenting the art and lifestyles of the First Nations peoples, which she (like most white people at the time) believed would soon cease to exist.

The government turned her down. The samples of art she had submitted were too "artistic", not realistic enough for a documentary project. However, they didn't hire anyone else to do it either.

Carr had a studio in Vancouver. She had worked for one month teaching art, but her students disliked her and she quit. Her studio did not make enough to support itself. She closed it and moved back to Victoria where her sisters lived. She opened a boarding house.

She didn't paint for 15 years.

That isn't entirely true. It wasn't, actually, fifteen full years before she was "rediscovered" by the Canadian art world. And during those years, she painted some local scenes. There's a self-portrait of her from this time, in which she is painting. She sent some of her work to exhibitions. But that's how she saw it - she had ceased to paint. And that's how it feels, that's how you think of your life. The narrative doesn't always match reality - but the narrative is what's important.

They can't have been entirely joyless years. She came up with nicknames for her boarding house and her lodgers. She worked in other mediums. She took up pottery and dog breeding. She was near her family. Biographies of her skip over this as a "depressing" period of "domestic drudgery", but it was fifteen years of her life.

In the late 1920s, when she was 57, she started to paint again. Canadian artistic tastes had changed, and people came to visit her to see her works, and her paintings were exhibited and sold. She travelled back up north to find source material. She invented new ways of sketching. She became very concerned about the impact of industry on the environment, and put that into her paintings.

She went fifteen years without painting, and then she started painting again.

Above the Gravel Pit by Emily Carr, 1937, oil on canvas
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I actually read this last December and wrote it up then, and then stuff happened, but I suspect many of you may enjoy a distraction.

Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, edited by Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell.

'When Bad Men Conspire, Good Men Must Unite!' )

The Homeless, the Whore, the Drunkard, and the Disorderly )

No Double Standard? )

'It Was Only a Matter of Passion' )

Gender and Work in Lekwammen Families, 1843-1970 )

'To Take an Orphan' )

'A Fit and Proper Person' )

The Miner's Wife )

Sex Fiends or Swish Kids? )

'The Case of the Kissing Nurse' )

Defending Honour, Demanding Respect )
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
This is just for the second post (still open until the end of the month). Recs for fics in the first post (now closed to prompts but still open to fills and comments) are over here.

Still not anything like exhaustive, especially since I am going to be too busy in the next couple of days to wait until then to post. Also, for some of these it may help if you click show thread from start for context.

Still lots of really good fics! )
violsva: Bucky Barnes from Captain America: Civil War (Bucky)
After a working a full time week from Thursday to Monday, I have now caught up with my reading page up to yesterday. They told us December would be really quiet and now they keep giving me last-minute shifts.

But I had the last two days off and Knumpify is back from Mexico and I have seen him. I have also applied for college.

Title: So Foul and Fair a Day
Rating: T
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov, Bucky Barnes, Steve's around here somewhere
Summary: Badly injured on a mission, Clint is rescued by the local laird. But other people are looking for him, and Clint isn’t the only one with secrets.
Warnings/Enticements: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Pre-Slash, Hurt/Comfort, Concussions, Secrets, Spies, Canon-Typical Violent Backstories
Word Count: Probably over 7000
Author's Note: For [tumblr.com profile] mandatoryfunday two months ago.

On AO3
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, by Peter S. Wells

There wasn't much from this that I wanted to quote, until I got to about chapter 9, and then there was loads.

Measurements taken on skeletal remains in cemeteries in southern Germany indicate that the average height for men was about five feet eight inches, for women about five feet four inches, statures well above those of late medieval and early modern times. Measurements taken on skeletons in other regions are comparable. In Denmark, for example, the average height for men was about five feet nine inches--just above those for southwestern Germany--and for women about five feet four inches. These average heights were not achieved again until the twentieth century. Compared with earlier and later populations in the same regions, these average measurements show that most people had adequate nutrition during most of their lives and their living conditions were generally good. (p. 139-140)


A similar conclusion emerges from a grave in a small cemetery at Kunszentmárton, in Hungary, but here we see something more. This man was buried, around 610, with weapons and horse harness gear as well as tools and models for making metal ornaments. In this case, the ornaments were not fibulae but sheet metal relief objects that could be made of gold, silver, or bronze. These ornaments were for decorating horse harness equipment, belt attachments, or sword scabbards. The striking thing about them is that they represent styles that are associated with different regional traditions. If any one of these was found alone in the grave, the man would be linked to the stylistic tradition of the region in which that style was common. These models representing different regional traditions show that this craftsman could make ornaments suiting the fashions of several different groups of people. Apparently, he crafted objects according to the tastes of his customers rather than his own home tradition. (p. 147)


On an important carved stone found at Niederdollendorf, on the Rhine, one side bears a representation believed to be the earliest picture of Christ in the Rhineland (dating to the sixth century). On the other side is an image of a warrior, with sword and canteen, shown combing his hair. (p. 151)
Hair had various magic symbolism, but basically, gender norms are socially constructed.

Before the Industrial Revolution, moving goods by water was vastly cheaper than moving them overland. Estimates suggest that a given quantity of goods costs twenty-five times as much to send by land as by sea. (p. 157)


Unique manufactured objects demonstrate connections over great distances. The bronze Buddha figurine found at the manufacturing and commericial centre at Helgö, in central Sweden, was made during the sixth century in the Swat Valley, in north-western India, some six thousand miles from the spot where archaeologists found it in 1956. (p. 162)
European elites also used Indian garnet, ivory, and seashells.

The animal style [of ornamentation] that emerged in northern Europe has been understood as reflecting "different modes of representation" from those of early Christianity. The proliferation of the animal style at this time may have been in deliberate reaction to the representations that were being created in the late Roman world in the imperial provinces. Whereas Roman representation tended to be narrative--to tell stories--the animal style of ornament was instead symbolic and, it is important to add, difficult for outsiders to read. ... This line of argument would be consistent with the idea that many communities in Europe, especially those north of the old Roman frontier line at the Rhine and Danube, did not begin to seriously adopt the new religion until much later than some of the areas within the Roman lands, and many actively resisted to symbols of the new religion as well as the substance and practices. In resisting, they reached back into earlier times, even to the prehistoric Iron Age, to adapt and recreate iconography that would serve their purposes. (p. 175-176)
Humans: always basically the same.

Also: the practice of tossing coins into fountains (make a wish!) dates back to pre-Roman times in Europe.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Ladies and gentlefans, today we are talking about ancient Greek orthography.

In modern Greek textbooks, the texts look something like this:

The beginning of the Iliad in Greek.
Homer, Iliad, Oxford Classical Text, late 20th century CE

Note the useful features of this text:
- mixed case
- accent and breathing marks
- spacing between words
- punctuation
- paragraph breaks and line breaks in poetry

All of these are very helpful for readers! Especially readers used to modern English orthography. But they are about as modern as the footnotes. This is not how the original (or "original", since this is Homer and he composed orally) text looked.

Sometimes you learn this in class! My Old English textbook has a section on reading manuscripts, with photographs for you to practice on. Sometimes you don't.

Here's a Byzantine manuscript:

Part of a Byzantine Greek book.
Maximus Planudes, Anthologia Gracae, 14th century CE

Most of the features in the modern text above were introduced during the Byzantine empire!
This text has:
- accent marks
- punctuation
- paragraph and line breaks
All of which make things much easier if you're reading a text in an archaic form of your language that no one actually speaks anymore.

But it's mostly in single case, and there are no spaces between words.

Here's a late classical codex:

Part of a 4th century copy of the Greek New Testament.
New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century CE

Note:
- single case
- occasional accents
- no word spacing
- a little punctuation
- paragraph breaks

If you're writing in the vernacular this is all you really need to understand a text.

But this is a giant formal church text most people would never see. And while it is an ancient Greek text, 4th century Christian Greece is not what most people think of when they hear "ancient Greek".

Here's a papyrus fragment:

A fragment of papyrus showing text in Greek.
Callimachus, Aetia, Oxyrhynchus papyri, 2nd century CE

Again:
- single case
- no accents
- no word spacing
- a little punctuation, maybe
- no paragraph breaks

Papyrus is time consuming to make! Parchment is ridiculously expensive! You want to save space. And at this point in time, you're writing in a language everyone understands! You don't need to provide all the extra help a student one or two thousand years later will need!

If you were writing a letter or a legal document, you might write it like this. Or you might write a letter on a wax tablet, and the recipient would erase it, reuse the tablet, and send it back to you with their reply. Informal texts don't survive both because they were written on fragile materials, and because no one thought they were worth preserving, the same way you don't carefully copy down and file your text messages.

But the kind of longfom text your typical ancient citizen would see most often looked more like this:

Part of the Rosetta Stone showing text in Greek.
Rosetta Stone, 196 BCE

This is part of the Rosetta Stone, which was a decree put on display in a temple. Note:
- single case
- no accents
- no word spacing
- no punctuation
- no paragraph breaks

You're carving this into stone! You are not wasting any space on that stone. And you're not putting in any extra marks you don't have to.

This text does have one modern convention that isn't a guarantee, though: the lines all go in the same direction.

Part of the Gortyn law code, showing text in Greek.
Gortyn Code, 5th century BCE

This is the actual law code of Gortyn in 5th century Crete, which was on public display in the agora. It's carved in boustrophedon, which is one of my favourite words. Boustrophedon means "as the ox turns" - that is, the same way you plow a field. The lines alternate which direction they go in: left to right, and then the next line is right to left, and then it switches again. This is most obvious for English speakers if you look at the direction of the epsilons (E, Ǝ).

Why would you do this? Well, it's a long walk to the other end of the stele for both reader and writer, so why not just start the next line where you already are anyway?

What we think of as normal formatting in a text showed up entirely within the last 2000 years. Because none of it is actually necessary! youcanunderstandtextwithoutitevenifyouareusedtohavingitthereitsjustabitharderandconveysfewerconnotationsandshadesofmeaningwhichyoudontneedinalawcodeanyway
violsva: The words HATPIN TIME, over a pearl topped pin; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (hatpin)
My generation has been accused of so much corporate murder that it's nice to read an article about how the Greatest Generation killed hats.
violsva: Clint Barton and Kate Bishop shooting together, covered in bandages, from the end of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (hawkeyes)
Fresh Pict (276 words) by Violsva
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Ancient Britain, Clint Showing Off, Mandatory Fun Day
Summary:

The visiting archer catches Bucky's eye.

violsva: Clint Barton and Kate Bishop shooting together, covered in bandages, from the end of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (hawkeyes)
1. I have one more paragraph to write on this thing. It'll probably happen tomorrow.

I'm looking at the denouement here, and my brain is going "no, you can't stop here, there's all this work to do digging up the conspiracy and figuring out who was working for them!" Which A) would be a lot of writing, B) is not the kind of plot many people find interesting, and C) is contrary to my stated policy on this project. So I'm not writing it.

Unless the sequel shows up, which is isn't going to because I don't actually have the canon knowledge to write it anyway.


2. Putting the (NSFW) link here: This Is What It's Like to Have Sex With Hearing Loss


3. World map shirts! I have no idea what the quality or business is like, I just saw them and I really want one and I can't buy one right now so I am telling you about them instead.


4. Have two quotes from Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden, since I'm not sure if I will end up finishing it before it needs to go back.
Archaeological excavations of cities such as Taraz (in Kazakhstan) and Samarkand show that the designs on the products often catered to the stylistic preferences of the neighbouring nomads as well as the local urban population. For example, seals on gemstones from ancient Samarkand (the archaeological site Afrasiyab) have two different styles: one depicting a bull with wings, reflecting the mythological subject matter preferred by the townsmen, the other a goat in flight with an arrow in his neck, an example of the scenes of the hunt so dear to the nomads. (p 19)

The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial sulture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. ... The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Falqîh, who called them "the Arabs of the Turks." (p 47)

This book is made more difficult by the fact that the maps are all the precise opposite of the one in "The Hunting of the Snark."


5. Pride was two weeks ago and I am still finding random glitter.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
So I don't usually do Reading Wednesday but this week I want to geek out about Runaways.

Also finished in the last week:

Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move by Mary Soderstrom.
As a history of roads this was an interesting summary; however I hoped when I took it out of the library that it would be more of a history of immigration, which is really not what it was trying to do. And I still want that book, although it would be really really long.

Runaways: The Complete Collection, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan et al.

OMG this is amazing.

I have been reading Runaways since December--actually I picked up the first volume of Rainbow Rowell's new series first, which was great but also I am now spoiled for everything. So if that matters to you don't start there.

But the first series--it is actually making me really sad for my younger self that I didn't read it when it first came out because, um, that kid could have used it. But it is so great now. And it has Nico and I love Nico SO MUCH.

Nico Minoru is a sad bisexual Japanese* goth witch and she is trying so hard. And not exactly succeeding. And all I want is for her to be happy and she is really really bad at being happy. Like, even if her life was not exploding she would ... not be good at it. And I love her so much.

Here she is when her best friend comes back from space:
Karolina Dean, covered in rainbows, hugs and reassures Nico Minoru.

And then:
Nico finds out that Xavin and Karolina are still dating despite their planets blowing up.

Always great when your space girlfriend comes back from space and you missed her so much and you're so happy and ... then it turns out she also brought her actual girlfriend. Who is ... not you. Because you fucked it up. Right. Awkward. (Also, this panel contains three queer women, two of whom are women of colour (though technically Xavin in the centre is genderfluid). Just casually. Talking about plot.)

Vaughan paces things brilliantly--in among the supervillain fights are little quiet moments of characters talking about religion, or mourning ... everything, or going shopping, or having nightmares about turning into their parents. And I love the story structures and the antagonists, and in this volume he does something that authors very rarely do when talking about the internet (especially in 2006) and remembers that people use the internet to make friends.

I watched the first episode of the Hulu series over Christmas and it was pretty cool, but I'm bad at getting motivation to watch TV shows even when I actually have easy access to them, so I haven't seen the rest of it.

Currently Reading:

Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden.
This is pretty textbooky but I wanted a general introduction so that's a good start. Also when I showed it to Pixies the first time she read the title as "Central USA" and now I'm thinking about the Mongol conquest of the central United States.


*I noticed reading Silk** last year that I had been really feeling the lack of Asian characters without even noticing it. This isn't about representation for me--I'm not Asian--but maybe representation of my environment: I grew up in north Toronto and therefore contexts full of white people feel fundamentally wrong to me. In my head there should be lots of Asian people around, because that's just what the world is supposed to look like--my high school was probably about 75% Asian--and the contrast between that and most Western media, or the actual small midwestern city I am living in right now, is very weird.

**Incidentally, I'm still annoyed that after 4+ years on Tumblr I found out about Silk--and Runaways, for that matter--by randomly browsing at the library. If Tumblr isn't going to tell me about awesome Asian spider-girls then why was I even on Tumblr?
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
According to Herodotus, the distance [from Sardis to Susa on Darius the Great's Royal Road] could be covered in less than fifteen days, when the system of post horses was used. The road was divided into sections that could be covered in a day by a man on horseback. At each station, a rider would hand off his dispatch to a fresh rider and horse: "No mortal thing travels faster than these Persian couriers," Herodotus writes. ...

The Persian relay system appears to have been faster than any other until the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan's couriers carried messages from his headquarters near the Yellow River in China to the western side of the Black Sea, a distance of more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles.) Khan's system was somewhat different from the Persian one: each of the great Mongol leader's riders was responsible for the message he carried, and so one courier travelled the whole distance, strapping himself to his mounts so he would not fall off. (At the same time on the other side of the world, it should be noted, the Incas who did not have fast, load-bearing animals, were using fleet human runners to carry messages, as well as perishable items like fish, hundreds of kilometres in the Andes and its foothills.)
-- Mary Soderstrom, Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move
violsva: Mulan squinting at a bowl of food (morning Mulan)
Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.

May 2025

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