books & birds

it is a rookie mistake to assume that the person making deeply anachronistic, inaccurate, and fairytale-esque knightposts knows nothing about real knights. i know all about real knights. i just think overseeing the farmland on your estate, explicitly being in it for (more) land and money, fighting less than half the year, and dying of cholera is sort of boring while swearing undying oaths is really sexy

american blackbirds are icterids but european blackbirds are thrushes but american robins are thrushes but european robins are flycatchers and they are named robin because (checks notes) brits in the 1400s called them "robert" on account of they are just some familiar guy who shows up in your yard. hold on post canceled is that really why they are called that? what the fuck. they did this with jackdaws and magpies too? i can't even be annoyed. how human. "who's that? that's bob." fuck dude it sure is.

thinking about ivan&gregor... very interesting dynamic to me. hi my names If I Stay Real Quiet They Wont Put Me In The Family Torture Nexus and this is my cousin Trapped In The Torture Nexus Forever. normal!!

goddd I forgot how much I missed cordelia. 5 minutes into Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen and she chugs half a bottle of wine and tells a man he should have babies with her dead husband. she spends so much of the vorkosigan saga in the background doing feminism that u forget she's the woman who ended a civil war by bringing her husband a head in a bag

I think the reflective pool should contain giant salamanders

The Vorkosigan saga is a series where the lingering legacy of past conflicts is nearly omnipresent. From the personal all the way to societal level, consequences of the Time of Isolation, Cetagandan Occupation, Mad Yuri's War, Komarran Invasion, and all the rest just keep on coming up. And in case any of the political or emotional stuff is too subtle for you, surprisingly often there is An Old Bomb that's important to the plot.

One of my favourite Murderbot quirks is it's absolutely refusal to acknowledge that Dr. Bharadwaj is it's therapist.