![[sticky entry]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
I'm establishing a base here, in the attempt to nudge fandom as a whole to DW and in general back to this style of fandom. If fandom jumps in another direction, which it likely will, I'll probably follow. But I'll be bitter about it.
So, *wave*. I'm Manya, aka thebluejay on Ao3, pilfered-words on Tumblr, until recently bluejayfic on Tumblr, before that bluejayfic on LJ and thebluejay on FF.net, before that a_blue_jay on LJ but that wasn't a fandom journal.
Also I guess I'm on Discord, Manya#4569.
UPD 12/16/2018: I also have a pillowfort, empty for now while I figure it out: pilfered-words.
My discord servers ATM are: the new Queen’s Thief server, the Social Shakespeare server, @suspected-spinozist‘s translation server, the glowfic server, the EA Corner, and a bunch of private and semi-private servers.
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Mar. 31st, 2019 01:10 am “…His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman’s hands. Or maybe she hadn’t been patient. Maybe she’d been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.”
- Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
- Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
(no subject)
Mar. 27th, 2019 04:50 pm “Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera
***
Long as I live, my heart will never vary
For no one else, however fair or good
Brave, resolute, or rich, of gentle blood
My choice is made, and I will have no other.”
(crosspost)
Mar. 10th, 2019 12:00 amThis tumblr post makes me so mad. Especially the last part. So:
Reminder that, at the time, the USSR was actively persecuting avant-garde artists, arresting them under absurd suspicion of espionage, harassing them and driving them to suicide, torturing and murdering them, secretly murdering them and staging car accidents, arresting them for making “anti-Soviet” art, arresting them for "counterrevolutionary agitation", driving them into exile, razing galleries with bulldozers. The workers do not need this trash, they said. Anyone making bourgeois, anti-Soviet, meaningless art is an enemy of the people, they said.
Why would anyone want to publicize the fact that the US treated its artists better than that, we just don’t know. Clearly it’s all brainwashing.
Я с детства мечтал, что трубач затрубит,
И город проснется под цокот копыт,
И все прояснится открытой борьбой:
Враги - пред тобой, а друзья - за тобой.
И вот самолеты взревели в ночи,
И вот протрубили опять трубачи,
Тачанки и пушки прошли через грязь,
Проснулось геройство, и кровь пролилась.
Но в громе и славе решительных лет
Мне все ж не хватало заметных примет.
Я думал, что вижу, не видя ни зги,
А между друзьями сновали враги.
И были они среди наших колонн,
Подчас знаменосцами наших знамен.
Жизнь бьет меня часто. Сплеча. Сгоряча.
Но все же я жду своего трубача.
Ведь правда не меркнет, и совесть - не спит.
Но годы уходят, а он - не трубит.
И старость подходит. И хватит ли сил
До смерти мечтать, чтоб трубач затрубил?
А может, самим надрываться во мгле?
Ведь нет, кроме нас, трубачей на земле.
- Наум Коржавин
(no subject)
Mar. 5th, 2019 12:00 am Today is a holiday! A joyous day, to be commemorated and celebrated every year.
(no subject)
Feb. 22nd, 2019 09:18 pm" …Мне жалко что я не крыша,
распадающаяся постепенно,
которую дождь размачивает,
у которой смерть не мгновенна.
Мне не нравится что я смертен,
мне жалко что я неточен.
Многим многим лучше, поверьте,
(crosspost)
Feb. 20th, 2019 04:00 pmMWT posted this on her tumblr. I haven’t read the other three books, but I definitely think of Curse of Chalion and the Queen’s Thief books as connected. There’s a straight line from the Sermon of the Cups to “If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me.” And surely Gen would sympathize with Caz’s description of being loved by the gods “as a teamster loves his mule that carries his baggage, whipping it over the high passes”.
(no subject)
Feb. 10th, 2019 08:45 pmOne of my weirder hobbies is exploring, in detail, the family trees of medieval monarchs and nobles. With a particular focus on England, and, because this is me, on characters from Shakespeare’s history plays.
They all marry their cousins. It’s kind of absurd. Any two important families are connected to each other five different ways. You can see very clearly on the family trees which families had a close alliance in 1326, which suddenly lost status in 1399, which died out after the Wars of the Roses. If you have a little outside knowledge, maybe as much as Wikipedia gives you, you can see where the family connections drive events: where a son-in-law had to take his father-in-law’s side in a dispute, or where the next-person-in-line for a title and a piece of land pushed his claim and started a war.
They were constantly at war with each other, and because of the web their families were woven into, this meant they were constantly at war with their cousins. They died young, and their family lines died out, so that their inheritance went to their cousins - often the same cousins they warred with. If they lived long enough, they fathered many children, and the children’s children tore each other apart for a share of the land they believed belonged to them by right.
And - they were patrons to great artists. They painted and wrote poetry themselves, they commissioned portraits of themselves and poems in their honor, built cathedrals and founded universities. And, eventually, the world they built changed them.
They all marry their cousins. It’s kind of absurd. Any two important families are connected to each other five different ways. You can see very clearly on the family trees which families had a close alliance in 1326, which suddenly lost status in 1399, which died out after the Wars of the Roses. If you have a little outside knowledge, maybe as much as Wikipedia gives you, you can see where the family connections drive events: where a son-in-law had to take his father-in-law’s side in a dispute, or where the next-person-in-line for a title and a piece of land pushed his claim and started a war.
They were constantly at war with each other, and because of the web their families were woven into, this meant they were constantly at war with their cousins. They died young, and their family lines died out, so that their inheritance went to their cousins - often the same cousins they warred with. If they lived long enough, they fathered many children, and the children’s children tore each other apart for a share of the land they believed belonged to them by right.
And - they were patrons to great artists. They painted and wrote poetry themselves, they commissioned portraits of themselves and poems in their honor, built cathedrals and founded universities. And, eventually, the world they built changed them.
(no subject)
Feb. 6th, 2019 01:30 pm As expected, trying to split my attention between here, pillowfort, and tumblr just results in me not making posts anywhere. I do want to have a record of tumblr bullshit, for my own amusement, so here's the latest:
- About a week ago, they changed all the colors to be bright enough to cause headaches. In the name of increasing accessibility. I'm all for accessibility, but would an off switch really be that hard? XKit got us an off switch about two minutes after the feature came out.
- Now they're introducing group chats. "Great!" a naive person might think. "That seems like a useful feature!" Unfortunately, this is tumblr we're talking about. The way they implemented group chats is "create a group chat on a particular topic at random, add random users and tumblrbot to it".
- Text posts made from mobile have a 100 paragraph limit. (including lines of dialogue.)
Of course, the 'previous' button on paginated dashboards is still broken, flagged posts aren't reliably showing up on the 'Review flagged posts' page, and searching for 'fandom wank' is still impossible, but at least tumblr is working on the important stuff, right?
(crossposted to pillowfort)
Yuletide recs
Dec. 26th, 2018 11:07 am Yuletide 2018 recs, first edition!
Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Katherine Climpson explores the documentation of an unusual example of medieval matrimony.
It's an 'as seen by later historians' fic! I love these. And of course Peter and Harriet are Peter and Harriet still, even in medieval times.
Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
First through the stone arches, with a self-supplied fanfare of unladylike but triumphant whoops, rode a pair of young women on blowing horses belly-splashed with mud.
This one is Betriz's story. I've always loved Betriz, and this story makes her shine, with all her courage, joy, and loyalty.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
If Linda was honest with herself, she’d only done what she’d done because Sonia would have laughed to hear of it.
Everything you need to know about this story is communicated by the tags: "Ensemble Cast; Post-Canon; They Provide....Leverage"
(crossposted to pillowfort)
(crossposted to pillowfort)
oh tumblr (part 9865)
Dec. 18th, 2018 12:39 amJust logged back on to tumblr after spending the whole day fighting addiction as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bewareofitalics said, in futile protest. Here's what we have so far, in addition to the old bullshit:
bewareofitalics said, in futile protest. Here's what we have so far, in addition to the old bullshit:- Posts the algorithm thinks are NSFW are hidden, just as tumblr said they would be.
- The algorithm is still terrible. My painfully clean blog had two screened posts: an emu video and that one 'alternative cover ideas for Queen's Thief books' post.
- Tumblr is still not telling people what posts got screened. (Tampermonkey script that does that is here.)
- You can't see your own screened posts, at least on your own blog. You can see them in the sidebar by going to https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/[blogname]/[postnumber]/
- Blogs marked as explicit get their icons pixelated.
- Allegedly, it's possible to turn off that flag, because the control for it is just disabled on the front end, not actually blocked from the back end. If anyone had doubts that tumblr's incompetence exceeds even their malice...
- I, at least, don't see the Appeal button on flagged posts, but I think others do.
- Apparently tumblr's blocking the Wayback machine, so people can't even back up their shit.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and I forgot the most personally annoying thing, which is that they broke paginated dashboards. It looks like it works at first, but trying to go from, say, page 3 to page 2 just gives you the first page material.
I liked reading my dash in chronological order, not backwards.
Queen's Thief fic: For the Love I Bear
Dec. 14th, 2018 01:25 amI wrote a story! It’s about Relius and his ill-fated love affair. I read this tumblr post and the story bloomed in my head, fully grown in seconds. (And then I sat on it for months before finally doing the final edits.)
Edit: re-reading it in cold light of the morning, I... actually like it? I actually think I wrote a good story. Weird.
Crossposting some old Tumblr stuff
Dec. 7th, 2018 10:20 amI'll be crossposting the stuff from my Tumblr I'd be sorriest to lose, so the number of posts on here will rapidly increase. :P
Also, I have Thoughts about the tumblrpocalyse, about tumblr in general, and about myself on tumblr in particular, which experience shows I will probably think of writing up and not actually write.
Writing is haaaaard, ok?
Edit 12/8/2018 11:41pm: And I'm done crossposting! I'll back up my tumblr so I don't even lose the reblogs, but the things I actually wrote should now all be here.
Also, I have Thoughts about the tumblrpocalyse, about tumblr in general, and about myself on tumblr in particular, which experience shows I will probably think of writing up and not actually write.
Writing is haaaaard, ok?
Edit 12/8/2018 11:41pm: And I'm done crossposting! I'll back up my tumblr so I don't even lose the reblogs, but the things I actually wrote should now all be here.
(crosspost)
Dec. 5th, 2018 01:07 amso far we have:
- the old news: blogs deleted without warning or appeal
- the other old news: some tags have become unsearchable
- the explicit news: the impending doom of all adult content
- posts being flagged by an extremely buggy algorithm which flags text, cartoons, trees, and, shockingly, memes making fun of tumblr.
- bloggers not being notified of flagged posts. apparently we’re supposed to go through thousands of posts by hand.
- years-old posts suddenly appearing on a blog’s first page. Theory goes that these are the posts that were flagged by the algorithm and got unflagged by a human
- drafts getting posted. Theory goes that these are also getting flagged and cleared, and when they’re cleared, they get posted
- blogs getting muted. Some blogs just don’t have any new posts show up after a couple hours ago.
Fuck you too, tumblr.
(crossposted from tumblr 12/7/18)
(crosspost)
Dec. 3rd, 2018 05:18 amGosh, reading people’s angry posts is cathartic. Tags I’ve been scrolling though:
(crosspost)
Nov. 30th, 2018 12:47 pm BTW, in case someone thought the cloud of artists and bloggers having their tumblrs deleted had a silver lining, the pornbots aren’t gone. I just blocked-and-reported one that followed me this morning.
(crossposted from tumblr 12/7/18)
(crosspost)
Nov. 24th, 2018 02:39 pm" I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking"
-- Dorothy Sayers, via Peter Wimsey in Have His Carcase
