And like. Of course it is. Nerd_gasm's comment makes me think they meant film!howl but I think book!howl is perfect for this:

He is a blond drama queen with a reputation for being a womaniser who falls in love with someone who looks not in keeping with what people expect of him.

He has escaped from his family to another country. He is incredibly good at his job. He loves nice clothes, he loves hanging out with kids, he takes his training responsibilities seriously, he gets drunk after playing sports. He struggles to express his feelings appropriately. It turns out he wants domestic and "boring" except that it will never be boring because it's them.

His beloved has been hiding who they are and trying to be the person their family/society expects of them, but he finds and loves them.

When his beloved's family finds out about them, the beloved has to spend some time saying no I don't hate him, actually I love him, actually he has been very kind. And he is, and family learn to see that even as they also see he continues to be a chaotic drama queen.

They go shopping. What this actually means is Howl and Ilya go shopping, leaving Sophie and Shane to get coffee. Every so often they come back to dump a load of purchases, give gifts that are met with "I don't need this?!?" by Sophie or Shane, and get kisses/physical touch from Their Person before they go off to another shop having the bitchiest gossip session at the same time.

Shane and Sophie's coffee chat is much more chilled:

Sophie realises Shane is not eating the cake from Cesari's, and Shane says he's just been thinking too much. Sophie has weedkiller recommendations for him.

Shane sees how Howl matches Ilya's flare for being dramatic and asks Sophie how she copes if Howl is having the sort of day that is sad dramatics. Sophie says she puts him in the shower, and they get dinner together after. Shane agrees this is a good way of coping.

Shane says he dislikes shopping himself but he does like clothes that feel right and don't irritate him. Finding them in the shops is difficult but Rose is sometimes helpful. Sophie tells his seams and labels that they better stop irritating Shane or she WILL have something to say about it. Shane's clothes stop irritating him. Sophie says he should bring his other clothes by and she will either alter them or just tell them, and it will all be better.

Sophie says she actually really likes Howl shopping for her - he buys her lovely things, she says, and she blushes.

I want Ilya swinging by to say I love you in Russian whilst Howl says the same in Welsh.

The viral video of a fight in a MacDonald's where a guy pulls a raccoon out of his coat. That MacDonald's was known locally as 99rideau and it was known for being weird as hell at all hours of the night

It has the largest Ikea in north america (or had? Idk if they've built a bigger one)

The drag bar, Swizzles, which was in an alleyway and then down a set of stairs. Sketchy and then fabulous :D

The great Glebe garage sale - every year in summer one of the richer neighborhoods holds a community wide garage sale and over the years it's become bigger and now it's a huge block party

I cant express how easy it is to find great shawarma in this town. We have a huge Lebanese population

During the Ashley Madison leaks Ottawa lit up like a MF Christmas tree because every politician and ambassador has a side piece

It's the capital of Canada and somehow not one outside of Canada knows this

It's the capital of Canada, on the highway between Montreal and Toronto, and yet somehow every band skips us when they go on tour 😭

There's two major universities and one college in Ottawa. One year all three of them had a dry frosh week that ended on the same day, and that day caused a mass casualty incident in Ottawa because of all the drunk students doing dumb things after being sober for so long

The canal. It's 7 km long and connects the two universities, so I used to skate over to see my sister in the winter. Theres little hot chocolate huts every couple km on the ice.

When skating the canal, It's really common to see people in full speed skating gear go rocketing past you.

The experimental farm in the middle of Ottawa which is an agricultural research center and museum. Theres trails and fields and farm animals :)

Ottawa is still in Ontario, the same province as Toronto. During hockey season the entire town divides into Sens fans and Leafs fans. I remember seeing a bus driver in a leafs jersey (jokingly) threaten to shut the door on a guy in a sens jersey when they were playing each other

The drinking age in Ontario is 19, but just across the river is Gatineau, Quebec where you can drink at 18, so underage students will hop the border to go drinking

Gatineau park has a bunch of trails, an abandoned mine, and an abandoned victorian laboratory

OP: How to fold a flying pig. (cr简开JK)

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

"That's a tough one," said the book. "For me, I would say being re-read."

"Because it shows you were loved?"

"No, you can feel that at a first read. It's that I can show more than the first time round."

"It's more intimate?"

Color palette tutorial time!

The fact that LMM never commits to a specific date for the action of The Blue Castle has been a running gag of TBCBC 2.0, but I've been having equal difficulty pinning down where TBC takes place.

Not in the broad strokes, of course - TBC was inspired by LMM's time in Muskoka (in general) and Bala (in particular), so that's fine. It's when you start trying to map the action of TBC onto specific places that it becomes complicated.

A little while back, @moonlightredfern raised the question: Do we think Deerwood is like an east coast USA beach town where it feels radically different in the summer than winter? Businesses only open during tourist season and people coming from all over and a much lower population in winter? and there was a good discussion in the tags that settled on Deerwood being the non-tourist town in a touristy area:

@kingedmundsroyalmurder: I'm wondering if Deerwood itself is stable year-round and Port Lawrence is the tourist hub. I'm projecting a bit from where I live, but out here we have the Tourist Town, with a population that changes dramatically depending on the season and the neighboring Locals Town where most of the people live year-round and whose businesses don't cater to the tourists nearly as much. I kind of like that vibe for Deerwood, because my experience is that the Locals Town is a)deeply snooty and hostile towards the tourists and the Tourist Town and b)noticeably less prosperous and more run down. Which feels pretty Stirling to me - hostile to newness, clinging to past glory, not doing as well as they'd like to be, and blaming everyone else for their problems.

More recently, @mzannthropy has highlighted the train station in Deerwood, that Valancy can see from her window: Wait, why have I not thought of this station so far. Where do the trains go? Can you get to Port Lawrence on train? It was said in the early chapters that the only time Valancy got to go anywhere was when someone remembered to take her in a buggy. Yet there's a train station right outside her house.

So Deerwood isn't a port/tourist town, but it is a town with a train station.

1920s Bala, by contrast, was all three:

Bala was well connected and once was connected only to other Muskoka communities via the steamship lines that plied the Muskoka Lakes. The Cherokee, Islander and Segwun were frequently seen at the dock below the CPR station, and the Ahmic was based on the other side of Bala Bay in Torrance. Steamships have been unable to visit Bala since 1964, when the swing bridge at Bala Park Island was sealed shut. A portion of the former steamer dock remains, maintained for many decades by the MNR and today by the Township of Muskoka Lakes. In 1907 the Canadian Pacific Railway opened a prominent "summer" station at the harbour, complete with freight elevator (a "winter" station was located a half-mile north). There was also a seasonal Grand Trunk Railway (later CN) station across the bay on Bala Park Island. In 1927, six CPR train routes each way served Bala, four on a daily basis. With the influx of many American cottagers, Bala even became a Customs Port of Entry. The Bala Weekend trains continued to serve the tourists until 1963, when the station was demolished.

So did Bala inspire the fictional Port Lawrence, then? At first I thought it must be too small. TBCBC 2.0 has emphasized how cosmopolitan Port Lawrence seems, with its movie theatre and hot dogs and Chinese restaurant - and Bala's census population in 1921 was 362 people (versus a place like Gravenhurst, the "Gateway to Muskoka," at 1,482).

Here's the train station at Bala in 1917:

And here's the wharf at Gravenhurst (from which all the Muskoka steamships set out), in the 1920s:

So, could Deerwood have been inspired by the non-touristy parts of Bala, with Gravenhurst being the inspiration for Port Lawrence? Gravenhurst is too far away from Bala to be reached in a 20-minute drive in Barney's car, though - you could do the drive today in a little over 20 minutes, but not in the 1920s. (That's not to say LMM couldn't have brought the two places closer in her fictional geography.)

If we go back to the idea of the touristy-part-of-Bala as Port Lawrence...it's still a pretty small place.

Image credits [x] [x]

It was apparently a pretty major hub, though - so you could potentially think of Bala's non-touristy parts as inspiring Deerwood and its touristy parts as inspiring Port Lawrence (maybe with a sprinkle of Gravenhurst for added cosmopolitan flavour).

One other point - those millionaire's cottages that they look at across the water? It sounds like those would have been inspired by Millionaire's Row in Beaumaris (also known as "Little Pittsburgh" for all the wealthy American families who built cottages there).

Anyway, for anyone who's trying to work this out for themselves, here are a couple of maps - showing Gravenhurst to Bala, and Bala to Beaumaris:

Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine

Why does "ie" turn "dog" into itty bitty "doggie"? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it's a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?

Print and fold your own copies

8½ x 11 paper

A4 paper 

How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)

Learn more

Things we wish English had: diminutives

(She's right, we fudged a little! The -ie in "doggie" only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?) 

Abso-bloody-lutely, on the only infix in English

Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics 

YouTube channel of Upper St'át'imc nation, one of the groups who speak St'át'imcets, including lots of words and phrases in the language.

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine

Why does "ie" turn "dog" into itty bitty "doggie"? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it's a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?

Print and fold your own copies

8½ x 11 paper

A4 paper 

How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)

Learn more

Things we wish English had: diminutives

(She's right, we fudged a little! The -ie in "doggie" only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?) 

Abso-bloody-lutely, on the only infix in English

Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics 

YouTube channel of Upper St'át'imc nation, one of the groups who speak St'át'imcets, including lots of words and phrases in the language.

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)

No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.

the header is tablet-woven linen, with the linen weft for the band used as the warp for the rest of the piece on a warp-weighted loom, which you can see in the photos below (there is also a previous post with more process photos here). the reverse is a negative mirror image of the front, since I wove this as double-weave pickup rather than tapestry:

additional details below the cut: