Like a tree, but not

Justice and Wheel of Fortune

What do we want?

Appropriate consequences!

When do we want them?

And not just in the novel: After all, Melville had asked Nathaniel Hawthorne to his cottage. In 1851, while composing Moby-Dick, he wrote Hawthorne a series of letters as heated by mid-19th-century standards as any scene in Heated Rivalry. In inviting his own possible situationship to come to his home—in his first known letter to Hawthorne—Melville, like a doped-up, concussed Shane, affects a lightness that doesn’t disguise its own feverishness: 'I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure […]. Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. […] I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold.' This 'welcome,' pleasurably effervescent on the tongue but freighted with the unsaid, is Melville’s version of the Canada Dry ginger ale and Coca-Cola that Ilya and Shane stock for each other."

woot woot

happy inceptiversary to my friends and followers and all those who strive to keep the magic of inception alive and well

tomorrow is july 16th so don’t forget to

-wait for a train

-wait some more

-has it arrived yet

-keep waiting

-hate your carpet but caress it anyway

-stab your salad and make a bitchface

-think about elephants

-call yo’ wife, call yo’ kids

-no forget the wife, she crazy

-maybe you crazy

-hire a new intern at your office

-scare the intern

-no really scare the shit out of the intern

-find a thick sexy intelligent man in mombasa

-have un cafe

-while you’re there get your sugar daddy to pick you up in his limo

-pet a cat at a friendly neighborhood drugstore

-flirt with your same-sex coworker

-do it again

-good job, keep at it

-pretend you’re both straight so your boss doesn’t get mad

-board a boeing 747 in first class and put your feet up like its NBD

-MOAR CHAMPAGNE PLZ

-sleep for more than 12 hours 

-cause it’s what you’d do if given a free first class ticket in a private cabin

-wake up a few mins before your boss so you and your obviously ~straight~ coworker can join the mile high club

-pretend you’re relieved that your boss woke up at all

-exchange stories about your dreams during the flight with your coworkers at the airport bar

-buy the intern lunch, asshole 

-also hire the intern if the intern has not been scarred for life 

-share a tangerine with michael caine

-wait where is that from

So first of all: let me tell everybody how things went with the new glasses.

Briefly: they're brilliant. The new varifocals work way better than earlier versions of them have routinely done. (This is apparently secondary to the way my eyes continue to change shape as I get older. It continues to make me snicker that I'm getting Iess nearsighted as I age. "So," I said to my Eye Lady, "if I can manage to live to, like, a hundred and twenty-five, I'll be twenty-twenty?" She gave me sort of a cockeyed look. "Well... you'll still be astigmatic. As for the rest of it, let's see how things go...") The reading glasses are no good for the computer: they6're genuinely just for reading. ...But this is okay, because the varifocals work fine for computer work. So THAT whole business has turned out more than satisfactorily... and thanks once more, from the bottom of my heart, to all those who helped out. ❤️

And get this. I went out to lunch after picking the new glasses up, and in the middle of lunch found myself paper-outlining a paranormal police procedural trilogy. (headclutch) So that went well. ...And no, I can't tell anybody anything about the plotting on these: it's too soon. But this looks like something of a change of writing voice (and thematic material) for me: darker than usual, maybe a touch grittier. We'll see how this group of works sets itself up as work gets going. (Other works further along in progress are in front of these right now, but that's fine. Giving things time to mature is never a problem.)

Anyway: typically enough, some other unexpected health junk that had been behaving itself during the spring then started kicking up cranky in June and over the last couple of weeks. (eyeroll) I don't want to get into more detail than necessary about this, but it's an outgrowth of the internal problems that have made me give up long-distance travel. It's required a goodish outlay of cash, and has resulted in me falling behind on my rent.

My landlord is being really easygoing about this, but nonetheless I'd very much like to get caught up on this before it gets any worse. (As being behind this way, I'm finding, is increasingly interfering with my work... especially as that's now become so much easier to get to grips with due to the new glasses.)

So it seems to me that this is a good time to repeat the Summer Reading Sale over at Ebooks Direct!

I imagine lots of people here know the drill. Everything's cheap, and the ebook bundles are all being held at their lowest price points for the duration (meaning specifically the "All The Wizardry" bundle, the Middle Kingdoms series bundle, the LGBTQ Pride collection, and the Feline Wizardry bundle—Even our "Give Me Everything You've Got" collection, which is the whole ebook store in one package, has had a bit knocked off.

So could I get folks to reblog this post so that people who might not have caught one of these sales before can do so now if they want to? Please & thank you!

And additionally: for those who're already up to the gunwales in ebooks and don't need any more, but still want to help out with the rent situation—if you'd like instead to drop something into my Ko-Fi, it'd be very welcome. And if you feel like doing this, I thank you very much in advance! 🙂

...So that's the news from Lake Wobegon for the moment. ...Now to slip outside and give the potted plants a potful or so of water as an evening drink. They've been suffering from the (unusual-for-us) local heat wave, there's a wildfire watch on (leading to a ban on selling portable BBQs), and we're also having a ban on watering things with a hose at the moment. (sigh) One thing after another...

the word cider is from french, the original pun doesnt work in old english. the oe word is æppelwin, literally apple wine. there isn’t a word for spider that rhymes with win, so i had to look around for some other options.

oe authors tend to be much more concerned with the alliteration of words rather than rhyming. poetry will sometimes rhyme a bit, but verse structure is much more focused on what alliterates. so, instead of finding a word to rhyme with win, i wanted a word that started with the same sounds and i settled on wiht

wiht means a thing or a creature. it often means stuff in general, but it also has a sense of animals and monsters specifically, which is the meaning i was thinking of here. so this means apple creature vinegar

rejected options:

wine, which means friend. sounds super close to win, but i decided the tone was too different from the original

31 Days of Bond Fashion

DAY 14: THE TERRYCLOTH ROBE as seen in Goldfinger (1964).

James Bond is held up the world over as a paragon of masculinity and gentlemanly style, and each Bond has his signature wardrobe piece. Roger Moore had the safari jacket, Pierce Brosnan had his overcoats, Daniel Craig had his knitwear, and Connery? Perhaps because of his background in bodybuilding, he loved wearing little more than a towel. His most memorable towelled resort outfit – even more memorable than his towel skirt in Thunderball – was this blue terrycloth playsuit. 

The outfit, which is widely considered Bond’s first fashion faux pas, might have come down to an error in communication. The script called rather ambiguously for “combination robe-trousers’ for the scene, but the costume department interpreted it as this: a belted onesie with a camp collar and three-quarter zip that took its shape from a jumpsuit. Underneath, and visible because of the playsuit’s very short shorts, Bond wore a pair of blue swimming trunks. The trunks were outshone by the playsuit and some other very famous blue swim shorts in the franchise decades later. 

Playsuits were typically worn by women at the time and the outfit hints at a few themes related to gender and sexuality across the franchise: dress and undress, the popularity of towelling in 1960s clothing, and Bond as an object, more Bond Girl than Bond. 

While the playsuit isn't considered Bond's most fashionable look, it has proved popular enough for Orlebar Brown to make a replica, albeit with slightly longer shorts. It's priced at £395.

Ahhhhhh so here I am… finally making content 10 days into @inceptiversary. I really want to participate in the festivities this year too, but I’m taking classes in the summer so I don’t have a lot of time to draw (´；ω；`)

Anyways, here is Day 10 of the 30-Day Challenge: Yusuf’s favourite chemical. Hopefully I’ll find time to do the ones I didn’t get to last year…

Abby

Week 2 results are in!

Thank you to everyone who read, voted, and commented!

The first place goes to @thestalwartheart , who wrote ‘dysfunction’!

Sadly, because this week was another double elimination week, we must say goodbye to @vex-verlain who wrote 'the unimaginable’, and @extravagav, who wrote 'one giant leap for man'. Thank you both so much for joining us!

Author names have been added to the original drabble post and comments are being emailed to authors. Authors, if you would like to know your ranking for this week, let us know in a reply to that email!

Authors are encouraged to add their drabbles to the AELDWS AO3 collection if they post on AO3!

Snake: “He was at church when a bomb went off, got pierced by a crucifix, survived by drinking his family’s blood.”

Raiden: “So that’s why he’s called Vamp?”