Beware of Italics

I was not super delighted with every aspect of Valancy's lightning flash in the last chapter... but in this chapter, I'm perfectly delighted with pretty much everything!

I'm especially loving the mental image of Valancy and Barney driving across town, their car fast and noisy, she with her hair flying all over the place and he smoking his pipe... it's giving Bonnie and Clyde crossed over with Kate Beaton's velocipedestrienne:

Only... Valancy, please do not think Barney is asking you out simply because he pities you!

Sure, it makes sense that Valancy would think so, you don't survive 29 years of being belittled without severe injuries to your self-esteem. But clearly Barney enjoys her company for real, even if he doesn't "look at her as a woman"... which he probably also does, and she's just not seeing it either! Whatever the case may be, I believe only a monster would take someone to the movies and to eat Chinese food afterwards if their sole motivation was pity – and by now, I think we can be fairly certain that whatever Barney might be, he is not a monster.

Wonder which movie they saw together?

~

Translation note:

At this point, in Finnish, Valancy and Barney are still addressing each other with the formal you. I keep mentioning this because something about it makes me feel insane. Imagine cruising through town, leaving a devastating trail of scandal behind you, while only addressing each other in the most polite of parlances! These two are the most courteous hellraisers I have ever had the honour of encountering.

I skipped ahead a little bit to make sense of this, and yeah, the translator's choice does track with when Barney first addresses Valancy by her first name in the original English. From my modern-day perspective, it's hard to imagine that even a hundred years ago, people in their 20s and 30s would've been this formal with people their own age that they were genuinely friendly with (so no wonder that Valancy thinks that Barney pities her...) – but of course, I wasn't there, so what do I know. Maybe they did, and maybe to them, there was nothing stilted or ridiculous about it at all.

"Valancy had walked out to Roaring Abel's house on the Mistawis road under a sky of purple and amber...Big cars went purring past in the violet dusk--the stream of summer tourists to Muskoka had already begun--but Valancy did not envy any of their occupants. Muskoka cottages might be charming, but beyond, in the sunset skies, among the spires of firs, her Blue Castle towered. She brushed the old years and habits and inhibitions away from her like dead leaves. She would not be littered with them."

1. Beautiful imagery

2. Beautiful foreshadowing

3. Valancy Blue Castle journey: escaping to her Blue Castle in her mind and not even having anything in real life she wants -> escaping inhibitions and not thinking of her Blue Castle -> going in real life to her Blue Castle.

So many words I didn't know in this short chapter:

mulleins: a tall hairy plant with yellow flowers

pestiferous: pernicious :(

superannuated: old-fashioned

What *are* nice ankles supposed to look like?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I’m going to the Port.Will you go there with me?”

His eyes were teasing and there was a bit of defiance in his voice…

*puts on my David Attenborough voice* and here we see a Barney Snaith in its natural habitat, attempting friendly flirtation.

going at the rate of forty miles an hour…

Which is about 65kph. And wow, that is pretty fast. Especially in a residential area. Here, the limit is 50kph through populated areas…

As for Mrs Frederick, she was wishing she knew how to go into hysterics.

A very telling line. If you’re genuinely hysterical you don’t have to ‘know how to go into hysterics’, do you?

And now every day was a gay adventure.

This feels like it should be the opening banner of a black-and-white movie…

-an impulse born of a feeling pity for her and her starved little dreams. She was looking tired after a wakeful night with a heart attack, followed by a busy day. She had so little fun. He’d give her an outing for once.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

をい。