So the subplot of Holes is that Kate Barlow deals with the politically-sanctioned execution of her black boyfriend—who unlawfully kissed a white woman who was in love with him!!!—by becoming a serial killer who targets racist/sexist white dudes who harassed her, were rejected, then went after her boyfriend as revenge from the depths of the “friend zone”.

Go off Louis Sachar, let em know!

Don’t forget the main plot was a damning satire of the brokenness and inherent racism of the American justice and prison systems! Louis Sachar does not fuck about

It always fuck me up that older people don’t understand how this story is as essential to most american children as Gone with the Wind or Mary Poppins was.

unironically, this is one of the best books/movies for young people that exists

Kissing Kate Did Nothing Wrong

And the technical writing of Holes is perfect. Like, it’s one of the most technically-perfect books ever written. Basically any plotting or pacing or characterization issue you’re having, read Holes and really study how Sachar did it. THE LIZARDS! THE LIZARDS.

the twisty prophecies! the lizards! the lipstick! the humor! this book doesn’t play. a true classic.

This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.

More pictures HERE

(Fact Source)

I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

According to some websites i found on google and probably not actually the most reliable, in Gozilla Eminem raps an average of 7.5 words per second. The maths you've done above is per line so i dont know how that would translate.

I guess my question is, could Eminem do it and do we think it's worth persuading him to learn old english?

Best question possible. (Also I didn't bother to reference it because i thought i was posting into the ether, but the original post is in reference to the invention of the Beowulf speedrun on THIS post).

So Old English poetry has a fairly standard (though not set) number of syllables per line, which would be a better number to use to compare with the fastest known rappers (I checked around after seeing this and inevitably found a Reddit thread debating this question, but Eminem and Twista seem to be at the top).

In 2012 the Chicago Tribune was still reporting Twista as the holder of the world record (set in 1992), and I get the impression Eminem broke it, but I’m not entering the Eminem vs Twista debate here. What I need is a comparable rate, and Twista’s record is counted by syllable, not word, so his is easier to calculate. (Thank you Twista).

I can’t access the Tribune article, but it’s cited on Wikipedia, so I’m hoping the wiki text isn’t bullshitting:

So not looking at his peak burst as this is a marathon, he’s doing uhhh is this math right? He’s doing 10.87 syllables a second, holy shit.

So Old English poetry is structured in such a way where, while a poet didn’t have to count syllables, they did tend to end up with a fairly standard number of syllables per line (and a lot of alliteration). The beginning of Beowulf looks like this, for example:

You can see how the lines are pretty equal (the gaps in the middle of each line are added by editors because half-lines are important, you don’t have to worry about that) (Actually the lines are also decided by editors and no one agrees but that’s not a scop’s problem 💜).

The first line, for example, is 10 syllables : hwæt we Gardena in geardagum

*a lot of Gs are pronounced like y in OE, so that final word is more like yeh-ar-day-um.

The second has 9, the third 11. I should say I’m not sure about syllable counting in some lines, because vowel pronunciation rules vs stressed syllables rules are beyond me, having literally never been relevant to me until I needed to know how fast Twista (or Eminem) could rap Beowulf. Scops would be ashamed to be seen with me.

But for science’s sake let’s say there’s a range of of 9-13 syllables per line. Some paper I just found that I’m not totally sold on as a source but nevertheless seems to have done some math says the average is 9 syllables a line, roughly, though the range is from 6-18 and the most common single number is 10. Let’s go with that for now.

So, Twista can rap 10.87 syllables a second: more than an average line of Beowulf per second. But the copy of Beowulf we have is, as established, 3,182 lines long. Even just assuming an average of 9 syllables a line, that puts you at approximately 28,638 syllables. However, Twista can go at a rate of 652.36 syllables a minute.

Conclusion: if my math is right (please check my math) and if he could keep that pace up, Twista could rap the entirety of Beowulf in 43 minutes and 54 seconds. Presumably Eminem could do similar.

Thanks great question 👍

Absolutely wild update marathon pace from @lewdhat

Also worth noting further additions and experiments on this branch of the post! Everyone here is using a different approach/art/technique and that’s uh extremely fucking cool.

Don't let the gdq speed runners find this post, otherwise they will inevitably find a glitch in Beowulf where, if you pronounce the name of his sword backwards with an Egyptian accent, you can skip the whole dragon part and save almost 10 minutes over the full epos.

OK this whole thing was already amazing, but as someone who watches BotW/Totk speedruns, this final addition made me fucking bark laugh. XD

The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that it’s an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.

An adaptation of Sherlock Holmes set in a world in which the fictional character/literary juggernaut Sherlock Holmes, and all the subsequent adaptations thereof, still exist.

Sherlock Holmes (pronounced Holl-mess, as he is constantly reminding people) just had the misfortune of having parents who really liked the books, and his attitude towards his fictional counterpart is pretty much the same as that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sherlock runs a Youtube Theory channel called Mysteries Unwrapped with Sherlock Holmes. He has received no less than seven cease and desist letters from the Conan Doyle estate, all of which he has so faded managed to rebuff by pointing out that that's literally his name.

(No he won't change his name. He's Sherlock Holmes the real live human person. Let Sherlock Holmes the non existent fictional character change his name.)

John is Sherlock's flatmate. Sherlock almost refused to live with him once he realised that it would mean staying with a medical student named John, and only gave in once John pointed out that: a) he's a biomedical student, which is completely different from an md, and b) his surname isn't Watson.

It's now been three years, which is long enough for them to have developed a genuine friendship, and for John to have a) started working towards his PhD in biotechnology, and b) for him to start dating somebody with the surname Watson.

Sherlock can feel the narrative closing in.

His Youtube channel is meant to be focused on lost media, fan theories and stuff like that, but he keeps accidentally stumbling upon and then solving genuine crimes.

His brother Mycroft may or may not have chosen that name after he transitions specifically to annoy him.

He doesn't even live in London, but somehow the only flat they could afford was on a street named fucking Baker Street.

Sherlock Holmes and the Unescapable Power of the Narrative.

At my air gate, will have contact with yall for a little while yet

I got my pocket trek

And bones has come in with the mood of the century

An absolute mood Ty @dduane

oh i also brought along case and the dreamer and the worlds of theodore sturgeon for some nice vintage sci-fi to read

book updates time! i read the book over my trip in china and took pics of sections i thought yall would enjoy.

hit J now to skip i got a LOT of these

part one - the moment i realized this book was going to be a rich, rich fuel source of triumvirate fic jump-offs should one be so inclined. ;) dereliction ;) of ;) duty ;), Doctor? ;)c

part two - continuing from previous page - STOP SAYING RIDE, MCCOY, THE MODERN GIRLIES ARE GOING TO DIE OF SUGGESTIVENESS

part three - bones... bones has an ergonomic rocking chair from the 80s??????? wh- sure.

part four - this book is OLDER THAN I AM. this is. this is EXACTLY the description of those little room service robots you can sometimes get in hotels

part five - ft bones calling a klingon ship an ambulance chaser. the mental image is absolutely something fuckin else

part six - hfjgkgjhghjgh great bluffing there bud, very VERY believable. also yes, mccoy and the klingon commander kaiev have a sort of. uh. vibe? idk how to describe it, there's this weird teasing respect thing they have together?

part seven - ft bones sorely wanting to respond to a bureaucratic demand for reports with the suggestion that one might shove a protoplaser up where the sun don't shine. hey, at least he's involved surgical lubricant.

part eight - bones: okay, you know and I know that Spock's normally able home in on kirk like some sort of broody overgrown pigeon, but how do I put it in terms that won't set off his emotional constipation to a degree that makes this conversation untenable

i mean tldr spock says kirk doesn't feel dead so he's obviously not dead, problem solved!

part nine - would it??? would it be a poor day????? okay

part ten - JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK YOU SHERLOCKIAN NERD

part eleven - this is the closest I think I've seen classic tos kirk pull a 'sorry buy me dinner first' thus far. I feel like he must've said the line at SOME point in another novel

part twelve (final part!) - so. so apparently Klingons can get. Arsenic deficiencies???? which was the whole source of like, half this conflict??????

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

Someone over on Discord asked, "I'm morbidly curious: How BAD is A Song of Ice and Fire in terms of the authenticity George claims it to be?"

My reply was straightforward:

The long and the short of it is that ASOIAF is basically a vehicle for GRRM to present both his rape fetish and his Hobbesian view on human nature and has less historical accuracy than Frozen or most other Disney movies.

That's actually a good way to think of it, now that I've said it--he's Family Unfriendly, they're Family Friendly, but both have the same relationship with History: just Pure Aesthetic with no consideration for how the worldbuilding would work.

@azureliongoddess, ha! I can see the confusion, and just in case anyone else is wondering, I'm referring specifically to Thomas Hobbes, English Philosopher who believed that the innate tendency of humanity is that of warlike brutality, with no compassion, kindness, or virtues beyond that of naked force and a desire for power and basically said that, without a strong state to enforce laws, well...

"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

The man lived through the English Civil War, which miiiiight have something to do with his extremely pessimistic views on how humans behave--and it is that same pessimistic outlook that I think infects GRRM. That, given half a chance at power, we'll destroy ourselves in an orgy of violence and brutality in squabbling over it. It's a constant theme of Martin's work--not just in ASOIAF, but in Tuf Voyaging and Wild Cards and more.

The whole idea of "seasons last many years so winter can be a long ways off but when it hits, an entire generation grows up in darkness and cold".... uh.

Let's ignore what it takes to make a planet do that, okay? Wave the Plot Wand and declare you've got the right rotation, distance from star, axial tilt, interference from ancient deities, etc. to make that happen. Fine.

The resulting flora & fauna would not look like earth plants and animals. You would not have "harvest season is 2 months out of every 12" if summer lasts for multiple years; there'd be no push for plants to get their seeds grown and ready to be in the ground in a couple of months. Plants could grow much more slowly - but they'd need a hibernation ability to survive winter, not just "they kinda go dormant for 12-ish weeks."

Animals would be even more affected. Years-long winter means you can't just scrounge for scraps, lose a bit of weight, and wait for spring. More omnivores, fewer herbivores, and a lot more long-term hibernators. Potentially, lots of "herbivore in summer; carnivore in winter" animals.

Potentially, a number of plants and animals that only thrive in winter and manage to go into deep hibernation or seed/egg stages during summer. Hey, they have less competition.

I don't even want to think how bugs would work. The mind boggles.

The resulting human cultures would not look like European middle-ages-ish cultures.

GRRM's cultures are European-esque factions thrown into a fantasy/scifi setting that is impossible to allow those political factions to form. There's endless weird handwaving past things like: why would people call it a "year" when it's been summer for seven of them? What do they use to mark "years" as we understand them?

Why would you even have four recognized seasons? If this were a colony world like Pern, then maybe there's an ancestral recognition of year-cycles with seasons, but if summer has always been 7-10 years long, why would you call that "summer?"

All of human culture - entertainment, travel, political machinations, city infrastructures, language, food, etc etc etc - is affected by Earth's cycles and seasons.

Martin makes a few changes here & there to deal with his extra-long seasons and pastes those into a fantasy-ish European backdrop with no attempt to make things consistent.

(And that is FINE. It's a fantasy story. You're supposed to be able to handwave past a lot of the implausible things - not worry about how widespread writing skills are and who the scribes are if there's no equivalent of a Catholic church with monk archivists; not worry about how they have certain metal tools but no printing press or guns; definitely don't think about the sword technology plz. Readers are allowed to say "hey I'm enjoying the story; it doesn't have to be realistic.") (Look, a whole generation lost their minds for teenagers who could waves sticks around and levitate tables.)

But. The fact that it doesn't need to be realistic to be good writing (...another debate we're shelving for now) does not mean it's "realistic" because the outfits resemble those in historical dramas.

Frozen has more realistic politics for its setting. More authentic technology. A more plausible culture.

Cosigning all of this. I think my favorite pithy takedown of it is, "ASOIAF is an ISO 9000 Standard Medieval Fantasy Setting in a world with cyclical ice ages." Which, well... doesn't work, for the reasons you just outlined.

[image: reply by azureliongoddess: "So I did look it up, but I'd never heard the word 'Hobbesian' before and for half a minute thought you were comparing his worldview to that of Hobbits."]

There is no reconciling the dynastic histories of the setting with the observed behavior of the nobility and those around them.

Like, lets imagine for a second it was even possible for a dynasty to outlast the IRL record holders, the Pandya and Chola dynasties, by a factor of three. Lets pretend that the nominally-monogamous structure of the Catholic-ish Standard Medieval Fantasy Setting would be capable of managing and exceeding the sorts of legitimate-issue birthrates that the explicitly polygamous cultures of the Pandya and Chola did.

The Freys are looked down on for being up-jumped merchants, because they have only been a noble house for... four centuries. Longer than the Romanovs. Its not just the Starks, Lannisters, Arryns, Greyjoys, and Durrandons, the former Royal Houses of Pre-Targaryen Westeros, whom are supposed to be fuck-off ancient. Its every damn family. The Tarbecks, the Boltons, the Harlaws, all of them.

In order for this to be conceivable, there’s got to be a deep cultural taboo about exactly what family has to rule where. In order for me to believe for an instant that the Starks didn’t just eradicate the Boltons two thousand years ago and hand their castle over to some second son’s cadet-dynasty, you need to convince me that doing so was unthinkable. Get-immediately-overthrown-for-angering-the-gods unthinkable. Not actually possible to do.

When they were down to the last Bolton for one reason or another? House Stark was either required to get involved in their enemy’s love-life, or else the Boltons should be extinct.

The primordial-dynasties are unrealistic to begin with, but you can either have it be conceivable to come up with a plausible and canon-compliant headcanon to resolve that or you can have your edgy, super-cool ultra-badasses going all Reality-Ensues on their enemies and wiping entire families without being immediately cut down by their own men. These things cannot coexist.

Normally, I’d probably be willing to drop it as an acceptable break from reality. But this is the setting that’s constantly jerking itself off about how realistic it is.

Literally no one in this thread has actually read the books or even watched the show and have only had details espoused to them third or fourth hand. Pretty much every detail here isn't just wrong, it's presented in the most innacurate bade faith interpretation possible.

No, I read the books, sorry. What details did we get wrong? The amount of historically inaccurate sexual violence? Or something else? If you're calling us all wrong, back it up!

Also read the books and this is all completely accurate, someone is just mad at it being called out.

I feel obligated to make @swindle94 even madder by pointing out that in a world with weather like ASOIAF, humans as we know them wouldn't exist.

Because humans evolved into humans due to the environmental factors on earth. Things like an entire decade of dark, freezing cold? That would literally drive humans-as-we-know-them bugshit before killing them. Being able to keep warm and fed isn't even the issue here--the issue is psychological. Many far-north cultures are observed to be more susceptible to things like depression and skin diseases caused by lack of vitamin D, and that's with only 3-5 months of darkness. Imagine 3-5 years (or more).

Likewise, the entire human reproductive tract just...wouldn't work in that setting. It's estimated that 50% of pregnancies end before the pregnant person even knows they're pregnant--basically the body goes "hm, bad timing" and reabsorbs the zygote or embryo. Things that can cause this include extreme stress both mental and physical, and poor diet. So you take bodies that are struggling and burning a ton of energy to stay warm and mobile and alive during this years-long winter; minds that are trying not to snap under the strain of darkness; and the diet of "whatever we could grow to survive during our summer," and do you know how many pregnancies are going to survive? Not fucking many. Quite a lot of otherwise-fertile people wouldn't even be able to conceive at all.

Let’s not forget that every description of the ongoing House wars repeatedly mentions how the land is being laid waste to, crops destroyed, peasants slaughtered for being in the way, etc.

No society that has to contend with decade-long winters would do that.

Anyway the whole thing is about as ‘realistic’ as Harry Potter once you strip away the gritty surface details. The whole thing with the Houses is just as overly simplistic and set in stone as the fucking Hogwarts Houses. Realistic? Buddy, Tolkein designed realistic societies and he was writing an unabashed high fantasy setting with elves and shit. GRRM needs to get over himself.

Just to throw in my two cents as a sci-fi/fantasy writer:

The problem is not the realism here. The problem is that the speculative elements aren't effectively serving the narrative.

Everyone keeps bringing up Tolkien and that's fine, GRRM was obviously inspired by Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't exactly a paragon of realism, and, with good fantasy, realism isn't necessarily the goal. Sure, Middle Earth has a LOT of detail to it, but Tolkien was mostly just way more intentional with his speculative elements.

I could go on all day about Tolkien's magic and symbolism, but like. The primary ability of the Ring of Power is turning the wearer invisible. It fucking frees you from accountability. It's so simple, it's so elegant, of course it can do that. Isn't that the whole point of being all-powerful? So you don't have to answer to anyone else?

The Ring can do much more than that of course, Lord of the Rings has SO much to say about the nature of power, but that's the first thing the Ring promises you. Freedom from accountability. Everything else Tolkien has to say about power starts from there.

By contrast, the generations-long winters of Game of Thrones just...don't tie into what the rest of the story wants to be about. It's not that they CAN'T tie in, it's that the story seems largely disinterested in actually exploring the implications of having generations-long winters in a feudalist society or even thinking about how to use that particular plot element in an interesting way. I mean, when you get right down to it, the generations-long winter are just this looming inevitable apocalypse scenario that everyone can see coming, and no one's preparing for it because they're too busy squabbling amongst each other. Which, hey, that kinda sounds like the news sometimes. Maybe there's something worth talking about in there somewhere?

But hey, honestly, if you wanted to, you could totally have your generations-long winters and vaguely 15th-century feudalist political drama, too. It's not THAT hard, you just have to come up with a way for people to make food fast enough, some reasons why they still know how to do that after generations of winter, and, like, maybe a way for the main characters to un-fuck the situation so the story doesn't end with all the idiots slowly freezing and starving to death maybe. I mean, I guess you could just go with everyone freezing and starving to death too. That might be someone's idea of a satisfying ending, I don't know your life.

Instead, the generations-long winters are just kinda hovering in the background of a Tolkien-ish generic fantasy setting that also wants to be Gritty and Realistic and Historical and will accomplish this by being vaguely based off of the War of the Roses, and also by having a lot of sexual assault and violence. I guess. Also there are ice zombies. Which serve the same purpose as the generations long winter, in that they are a looming apocalypse scenario no one's addressing in favor of squabbling amongst each other, so really the ice zombies are redundant.

These ideas are cool, they CAN be interesting, but it's mostly a coat of paint. If you integrate them further into the world and take the time to really consider what it means for the people living there and the natural world around them, you can totally turn it into something cool. I just don't think GRRM is all that committed to doing that for you.

Also no one ever tries to claim that Tolkien’s work is “historically accurate”

@scyllas-revenge these tags have passed peer review!

you are SO right for saying this

I'm sorry, but GRRM claims to be better than Tolkien? Tolkein?? The Tolkein?! I.. I cannot even fathom the audacity...

Yeah, it really comes across as him having a serious inferiority complex; he's frequently complained that "Nobody asked Tolkein about Aragorn's tax policies" or other such things.

GRRM had this quote about how people don't consider that just because Aragorn is a good Man doesn't mean he'll make for a good King. Which, sure, in a vacuum is a valid point and an interesting artistic element to explore... but Aragorn is perhaps the worst possible character to use as an example of this???

Like, there's this whole thing where the Gondorians don't give a shit about Aragorn's claim to the throne until after he starts showing leadership and care for the common man, and "The Hands of a King are the hands of a Healer." And just generally Tolkien spends a great deal of care demonstrating Aragorn's bona fides as a Good Leader.

There's a quote from Gimli in The Return of the King (side thing, Gimli is done dirty by the movie adaptation. In the books he's practically an idealized Samurai; a cultured warrior poet. Gimli keeps a meticulous journal of events, and that's the only reason Frodo (who canonically wrote the book) is able to get a sensible timeline for things that happened when he wasn't there.) where they are riding across central Gondor with the Army of the Dead, who strike uncontrollable terror into the hearts of mortals (although even Legolas is unsure if the Dead are actually able to harm the living, physically), and Gimli, warrior poet, comments that he "was held to the road only by the will of Aragorn."

Aragorn is demonstrably a Good Leader, who cares about his men and the people in his charge, and knows how to put their needs ahead of his own. This is made painstakingly clear in the text. Which is all the more noteworthy because, unlike in Martin's writing, for Tolkien these mighty Knights and Kings and Rightful Kings are not the main characters. Frodo, Sam, and by-this-point Gollum/Smeagol are the main characters. The entire plot of the trilogy hinges on Sauron, with his cruel, conqueror's view of reality, getting distracted by these Wizards and Princes and Elves and Generals and Kings moving around that he overlooks the smallest of them all.

No shit Tolkien doesn't go into Aragorn's tax policy, Aragorn is a capital-D Distraction.

A distraction which evidently hoodwinked not only Sauron, but also George R R Martin.

Now, considering that this is the level of incompetence with which Martin approaches basic textual analysis, consider what this means for his own writing.

Tolkien also finished writing Lord of the Rings.

the great thing about medieval literature is that it returns us to a time when men were men and women were women, *insert gritty realism gif here*, featuring such important and eternal gendered characteristics such as

(idly glancing down the list to see if there's anything here I haven't subverted at some point)

...

...

(makes note: NEED MOAR [M] CRYING)

Don't forget my favourite:

(FTM, with F) Being so gay for each other that an angel intervenes to trans your gender

Sorry I absolutely need more details on this, please

If you were after more details on the angel who transes your gender, @crazy-pages - there's three different stories where that happens (as a way to maintain the status quo of man + woman). I'm copy/pasting this from another post so the format's a little weird 😅

(also, sorry about the gendered language. Trying to balance between how medieval people understood things and how we do is hard without changing the meaning of the original texts too much AND without getting super wordy)

Sometimes, I Wonder if I Accidentally Tipped JD Salinger Over the Edge.

This story is true and goes back to 2008 when John Hamilton at Penguin commissioned me to design the book jackets for JD Salinger's entire back catalogue.

Mr. Salinger was alive then, in his early 90s and, by all accounts, a belligerent and grumpy recluse. The chain of command was unusual and went like this. Salinger directed all his feedback via his New York lawyer, who then communicated with his London lawyer, who then communicated with Penguin, who then communicated with me, in my tiny home studio in North London. This process was somewhat intimidating, and went back and forth for weeks. It must have cost him a fucking fortune.

John told me Salinger was a very sensitive and emotional man and had always hated the first book jacket design for 'The Catcher in the Rye', a book which to this day still sells over a million copies a year. He had instructed Penguin to redesign the jackets using lettering only. "No pictures!" Salinger had stated. That's when John thought of me.

I designed three options, and Salinger chose the third — bespoke Inline Roman Capital letterforms with minimal and carefully considered flourishing to add a touch of refined elegance and unify the set. Salinger was shown the designs and signed them off himself, making only one change to the ‘Catcher’ jacket. He wanted the junction on the 'Y' in 'Rye' raised, which he felt made it more legible.

A day later, Salinger died. John said signing off the jackets was probably Salinger's last creative decision.

I sometimes lie in bed at night wondering if the surprise of my stark, graphic and (back then) avant-garde new covers for his life's work tipped the poor fella over the edge as it sunk in. I suspect not, I hope to fuck not, but I want to get it off my chest. Rest in Peace, Mr Salinger. What an intense privilege to be involved in a project of such magnitude.

sry tl;dr

eagerly awaiting the reveal of what political science 101 concept is she going to stop the plot to teach middle schoolers about. we got bread and circuses we got the extended work on thomas hobbes my money is on haymitch starting this book as an objectivist and having to unlearn that in the face of true struggle

REAL

oh it is definitely not im genuine. i am fully aware that the series is on the younger end of YA and so ms. collins meets the audience where they’re at. love and admire her clear commitment to using her books to teach middle schoolers introductory political theory i think that’s something that should really really be accessible to kids.

Low-level Dungeons & Dragons adventure where one of those big goofy skywhale things has died and crash-landed in the middle of town, and what initially appears to be a simple cleanup assignment abruptly takes a combat-heavy turn when the party gets to find out what feeds on skywhalefalls.

I've been thinking about this some more, and also looking through the notes, so here's what I have to add.

With a "normal" whalefall, we're talking about something (a dead whale, to be precise) that lands in an EXTREMELY nutrient-poor environment, the deep ocean. It's not the equivalent of "a truck full of free hamburgers lands from the sky in the middle of your neighbourhood". This is an environment where an important part of the food chain is "marine snow", aka flakes of organic matter (including feces) that drift down from above, and they eat that because it's possible to get nutrients from it. So when a whole-ass (or partial-ass, because it's already been nibbled on from sharks and the like) whale carcass arrives, it is something MAJOR. It starts a whole new localized ecosystem, an oasis of life; those that eat the dead whale, those that eat those that eat the dead whale, and so on. And as the whale is consumed, the creatures there shift, leaving when there's nothing left that they'd eat, arriving when parts of the whale that they DO eat are now exposed, and it continues until the very bones have been devoured.

Whalefalls are fascinating.

But to get back on topic… if we're looking at this as like a WHALEFALL, and not the equivalent of "dropping your fast-food order on the parking lot and now there's seagulls everywhere" (which also has promise but it's substantially less weird), then the town has to count as a "nutrient-poor environment". And since it's a TOWN, which means a settlement where people are able to survive and overall have enough to eat, then the skywhalefall-eaters must eat something other than what can be easily acquired in the area, so they're extremely rare there because there's not enough to support a larger population. Creatures that would only have been seen singly, and are rarely active because they need to conserve energy. Something like the local cryptid.

When you first see it, you try to memorize every detail, because it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience to actually encounter one of them for even a brief glimpse. And then, you see another (its mate?). And another. And another.

As the formerly-cryptids arrive, their presence -- combined with that of the skywhale carcass that's STILL there -- effectively shuts down the town. They don't even need to be hostile or frightening, it's just from sheer numbers, body mass blocking easy transportation. Some people leave, with plans to come back once things are less crazy. More people arrive, to see what weirdness is happening, or to try to harvest from the skywhale or the formerly-cryptids, or to try to make money off of those who are visiting. Normally you'd welcome the influx of visitors and their money, but parts of your infrastructure got squished by a giant dead skywhale, and a good chunk of the rest of the town's infrastructure is currently inaccessible due to formerly-cryptids having a feast.

And then, weirder things arrive. Creatures you'd never even heard of, creatures you'd been sure were just a poet's hallucinations, creatures you're not sure how they even exist. But they're there, and they feed. Some of them on the skywhalefall, some of them on the formerly-cryptids, some of them on others of the weird creatures. A visiting scholar is FASCINATED, and offers you more money than your family has seen in generations, to take samples. Your neighbour responds before you even have time to think it through, and rushes in. The creatures didn't intend to harm your neighbour, that's not the kind of food they desire, but that's faint consolation for one who'd gotten in the way of hungry jaws. You politely decline any further requests from that scholar.

Time passes. The skywhale carcass is unrecognizable from what it had been when it first landed. So is your town. Whole areas have been effectively abandoned, and damaged from the skywhale's original impact, or the frenzy of what has been eating it, or attempts to combat them, or simply lack of upkeep. Temporary dwellings and places of business, at what had been the outskirts of town, are now more built-up and permanent since it became clear that this wasn't going to go away in a few weeks. People have moved away, for more normal settlements. People have moved TO your town, for specialized resources that can be (carefully!) acquired from the skywhale and what eats it. It has become normal to you.

It's the now-resident scholar -- who'd learned a valuable lesson about the use of observation from a DISTANCE -- who notices it first. Certain types of the weird creatures are being seen less and less, then not at all. The creatures start taking up less room, because there's fewer of them. It becomes feasible to go back to some of the buildings that had been abandoned, even if it would be a lot of work to get them back in inhabitable condition again. The formerly-cryptids are now ACTUALLY cryptids again, with only rare sightings of them.

Time passes. The weird creatures are now restricted to only what parts of the skywhale still remain. These ones barely even look like "creatures", more like red flames, dancing on what's recognizably bones but not the bones of any normal animal. It's easy for the area to be fenced off, no hazard to anybody but those who would make direct contact with the not-flames.

Eventually, nothing is left. No bones, none of the weird creatures. Its effects are shown in the altered shape of the town, from where the town had been forced to build around it, and in the town's mascot, a cartoonishly-dead skywhale.

…that got away from me.

"Oh no, this goofy monster virus mutates you into a gnarly beast with an insatiable hunger for human flesh" and then the goofy monster protagonist is able to master their cannibalistic impulses not because they have superhuman willpower or special genes, but because prior to being mutated they were the most repressed human being alive.

You know, before I got bit, everyone told me that werewolves were uncontrollable killing machines. My Nana always said you shouldn't believe everything you hear, of course, but it's not like I was just taking the word of the creepy fortune teller lady at the traveling carnival or something. I've read the peer reviewed articles and the historical documentation. I've done my research.

I mean, it was three weeks after I got bitten by the werewolf that got loose. It's not as if I didn't have time. I understand that the first bite of lycanthropy always takes longer to heal, the slow virus of it crawling from muscle to neuron up to my spinal cord, making itself at home in my nervous system. For me, mostly that meant my field season was unceremoniously over. It's a shame, because I have to teach during the long semesters and therefore can't get time to collect samples and take recordings for my research over the regular school year, but shit happens. Remind me to tell you about what happened to Dimitri's first field season with the voles, one of these days.

Right. The werewolf.

I would have liked to ask the werewolf about the change ahead of time, but. Well. They shot her. Tranquilizers don't work well on werewolves — something about the warping of the opioid receptors, and the less said about ketamine the better — so protocol for an escapee is to aim for the center of mass with lethal ammunition, so that you can minimize the collateral damage. Yikes. No, thanks, I'll lock the bars on the cell that the nice people from the CDC came to install for me like a good little egghead. I'm still using the contents of my skull, thanks, and it's hard to do that if you get spattered across the wall by trigger-happy commando wannabes dying to get to take all their military LARPING gear out for a spin.

Anyway. So I had some time on my hands, waiting for my mangled calf to heal up. There's a vaccination for being a werewolf, but I didn't manage to stumble into town fast enough for it to be effective, so. Well, it's not like I haven't dealt with shit before. You get used to tucking things under your hat, you know? There's no room for weakness in this dog eat dog field.

Wolf eat dog? Dog eat wolf? Whatever, I'll workshop that one later. Anyway, if you're having a migraine day, there's nothing for it but grit your teeth and power on through if you want to get anything done. And I always want to get things done.

So I did a lot of reading while I waited for the moon to change. I wanted to be prepared and work according to best practices, you know? Fuck knows I've been around the block long enough not to trust an expert to actually be an expert on my body, so knowledge seemed like the best avenue for control.

Still, I wasn't entirely expecting it when I opened my eyes after the hair had finished coming in and my pelvis had cracked itself into a new shape and my hands curled into claws....

... And I still more or less just felt like me. Sure, I had one bear of a headache, and the raw meat I had carefully packed into a series of puzzle toys beforehand smelled considerably better than it had any right to, but look, that's not even close to the weirdest thing I've ever put up with.

I hadn't really expected to be bored, though. The next day I tucked a couple of journal printouts when I went downstairs to change, and then a couple more. Dissociation isn't that bad, as strategies to cope with suddenly having massively disoriented sensory signals go. I was able to puppet myself around the room just fine when I relaxed enough to try.

It turns out, by the way, that the finger oils people leave on the keypad make it really easy to tell which numbers go into a given pass code. Did you know that there are only 64 permutations of a four-digit password? Really made it easy to get out.

It turns out that you can cover quite a ways if you're eight foot tall and you can move equally well on two feet or four. It looks like I might get to finish that field season after all, tell you the truth...

“Are you the witch who turned eleven princes into swans?”

The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and it was the kind of question she tried to avoid.

Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.

“You a cop?”

The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”

A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.

Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”

A nod.

“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”

A nod.

“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”

A tiny, miserable nod.

“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’

“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”

Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.

The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.

“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”

The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.

“I can work with that,” said the witch.