Mir > Recent Status Updates

Chivalry: only for people you could beat up. Plus something about horses.

I'd forgotten about Rayonism.
I don't recall if I knew previously that it was inspired by the invention of Xrays and was intended to emulate their ability to show the insides of objects.

This just started and already it is hilarious.

...we did not receive any answers, or at the best curt refusals from the owners of the twenty pictures by Whistler... they were all so bitterly at loggerheads with the artist that none of them was willing to lend us his pictures in order to help him! writes Josef Engelhart.

Beckmann annotating Blavatsky... interesting.

"I always thought of a sadist as a much older man, with a mustache, riding a horse, with no shirt on."

(The character has learned this word from romance novels.)

Rumpled Still: Skin, Hair, and Scalp

Heh

This seemed really strong. Dark, atmospheric, solid writing. I just got to the "explanation" section and suddenly get the low average ratings because this doesn't make sense. But, I will read on and see where it goes.

Did not see this coming!

A thrilling escape!

I love this image, the dozen hummingbirds circling a woman's head like a crown or halo.

I don't get why so many authors are determined to write historical fiction when they're too lazy to research the era.

...sometimes the lesson is a lie, and a cunningly lef-protecting one at that, for to question it requires self-exposure and loss of face, and who would want that?

Don't look a gift magic shop in the mouth.

Wouldn't these necromantic experiments go a lot faster if they left the patterns in place and just switched out the dead subjects? Not that I'm an expert or anything...

From now on when I read those werewolf books with over-the-top roaring and snarling and uncontrolled emotions/fights I am going to mutter to myself, "Drama lycan."

Foreign wives who go mad and are locked away™.

Talking to oneself was a poor characteristic in a secret agent

An ideographic perspective, which acknowledges the existence of biological and physical limits on symbolic constructions, can nevertheless provide us with an appreciation of the role that rhetoric plays in the creation of power relations in scientific texts and contexts. For example, in the domain of medicine and public health, how communities define a social problem influences the way practitioners think...

In a Human gathering, adults wouldn't think twice about dropping a conversation the moment a child needed something, even if it was simply attention. But here...

Um, author, you clearly had extremely indulgent and attentive parents.
Which makes sense, given how nice all the characters are!

...the power of rhetoric to undermine traditional faiths in fundational knowledge...

Timely!

"Darkling Thrush," wow! I do not think I had actually read this, despite the fame of the title.

hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,
a burnished, breathing wreck that didn't hurt at all.

From Amy Clampitt's "The Kingfisher" which may take the prize for mentioning the most birds without having anything to do with birds.

"The Kittiwake"

by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

With blistered heels and bones that ache,
Marching through pitchy ways and blind,
The miry track is hard to make;
Yet, ever hovering in my mind,
Above red crags a kittiwake
Hangs motionless against the wind—

[cont.]

hope is the hardest
love we carry.
--Jane Hirshfield

Until the early 70s rhetoric and science tended to be assumed as clearly separate, with science existing independently of the vagaries of politics, power, and human invention.

I am a little puzzled by Lo's inability to be placating or tactful or even comprehend that other people dissemble to avoid fights. Particularly as woman of color who words customer service, this kind of seems like a basic survival skill that she would at least understand if not be skilled at? Like, maybe just pretend to go along with the person who has the power to kill you?

apologetic tales attempt to reconfigure the history of genetics and evolutionary biology as the linear progression of science away from the politics of eugenics ... they give the impression that it is only the misunderstanding of technological knowledge that creates social hazards.

I used to cry over this mastodon tableau as a child.

"Do you think [Yurari] learned her lesson?"

What lesson is that? Don't be rude to stalker incel boys, they may do something vengeful to you?

I like this series, but it is all too often very obvious that the author is a not-very-woke straight man.