Mytly

If I saw the clues and caught the hints then yes! I am clever and me and the author/creator/artist etc were in on it together the whole time!

If I didn't notice the clues or got fooled but can clearly see them in hindsight then "Ha! You won this time storyteller! I am delighted by this game we play!' and then I enjoy putting the pieces together afterwards and enjoying how clever it was. I feel like the creator respects me as an audience

If there is a "twist" that comes with 0 clues or foreshadowing at all I'm annoyed. I'm pissed off. I feel like I'm being condescended to and patronised. It's not clever or interesting and makes me annoyed I ended up caring about characters and plot points that ended up meaningless.

Because it's not that these stories don't have foreshadowing or plot clues. They just abandon it for a "surprising twist"

A story that pays off the clues is letting me into the fun and makes a participant in the story

Random plot twists that don't connect to anything in the story are not clever. If we don't see it coming because the writer didn't provide any clues, they aren't clever and it's totally unsatisfying (and I will NEVER read this writer again). These clues need not be lit up in neon with a parade of elephants and showgirls. But they need to be present

In the book he sacrifices himself to save Rocky and Erid. He saves humanity, saves his home planet, then chooses to turn around and save another one.

"A consummation greatly desired," Jeeves agreed.

"The forces of darkness vanquished, the rightful king upon his throne, and all that. And, even more importantly, Tuppy Glossop disengaged from that horsy female and returned to the bosom of my cousin Angela."

"Indeed, sir."

"Rather a shock running into the Reverend Aubry Upjohn riding that fell beast, what?"

"I though you displayed great alacrity in relocating to that ditch in the nick of time, sir."

Far below us, the molten lava did a rather spirited impersonation of boiling soup. I mopped the p. off the b. with a handkerchief I'd improvised from an orc loincloth. I had been to some deuced uncomfortable country estates in my time, don't you know, but at least there one had been able to toddle downstairs and pour oneself a quick W. and S. as needed to stiffen the sinews. Galadriel's Buck-U-Uppo was excellent at vitalizing the limbs to forge on the last dreadful mile and all that, but it lacked the comfort that speaks to the soul.

I contemplated the glowing river. "Redirecting the army of Aunts to that Isengard place was a stroke of brilliance, I thought."

"You are too kind, sir."

"Still, all things must end, as they say. Travel is broadening to the mind and all, but it is past time to attend the call of heart and home. Among other considerations, I think something took residence inside this mithril shirt somewhere around the Morgul Vale and has been wandering about biting hither and thither ever since, and I am filled with the desire to strip it off and do battle with the blighted thing."

"Understandable, sir."

"I heard rather a good one the other day: Sing hey! for the bath at close of day that washes the weary mud away! -and by Jove if I don't think they were on to something, Jeeves."

"It is undeniably felicitous to be surrounded by the comforts of home," he assented, and yet I couldn't escape a certain sense of firmness about his gaze.

I sighed, for I knew what he wanted. Well, I mean, I'm all for taking a firm stance and not being trodden on in one's own home and all, but as far as rallying around to save the young master goes, none could have rallied more greatly than Jeeves. If a little firmness was the price I had to pay, well, so be it.

Slowly I undid the old school tie from around my neck. It was harder work than one would have thought; as if it could hear what was rattling around in the old brain, the ring that was threaded on it put in a last surge of effort in the gleaming and enticement department, filling my mind with heady visions: Freddie Widgeon gnashing his teeth as I sank yet another dart into the bullseye, Aunt Agatha wreathed in tears and begging my forgiveness for ever having misjudged me, Jeeves gazing admiringly as I displayed my newest waistcoat for his edification…

It was the last that broke the spell. Cursed objects of all-consuming power were all well and good in their sphere, but there were limits, don't you know? And yet I hesitated. "You don't think I could slip it on and just have a quick total domination of the world before I toddle around to the Drones for a stiff one?"

Jeeves gave a gentle cough of reproof. "I think you will find it for the best, sir."

It was a wrench, but one could not deny the man had earned it. With a heavy hand, I held the ring out to him. "Take it, then. You will know what do with it, I'm sure."

He took it from me with the sort of shimmer that showed he was exceptionally gratified. "Thank you, sir."

I watched as the ring fell from his hand into the depths below. It hit the lava and rested there for a moment before slowly sinking beneath the glowing surface, and as they caught fire I almost felt that the Old Etonian colors glowed brighter in approval. That Wooster, they seemed to say: not much in the brains department, but he gets the job done.

Outside, there came a hideous wailing as of something ages old abruptly losing the power which bound it to this mortal plain and all that, which I took as our signal to leg it down the nearest drainpipe before things got sticky. The road goes ever on and on, what? Yet I paused there, at the end of all things, because some things have to be said.

I do love Miles Vorkosigan, carrying most of The Vorkosigan Saga, entirely full of himself, reaching the end of fifteen-or-so books, fancying himself the cleverest and slipperiest little being in the galaxy, boxing with his father and loving him and losing him and finally a father in his own right, faced with his mom at the end of the series.

I loved rereading Vor Game after Gentleman Jole, and sniggering at Miles being mildly irritated by stupidly hot Lieutenant Jole with his stupid perfect career and his stupid being there. Yes, Miles, that's your stepfather. He's looking at your dad like that because he loves him. Everyone else in the room knows, it's just you live on a really backward, patriarchal planet, so nobody mentions it.

I really want one tiny little extra scene in Gentleman Jole. I wish Mark had shown up. Imagine it:

Miles, known genius, the Emperor's very own eccentric detective, who grew up in his parents' house, listening to his mother explain his parents' polycule very patiently in small words: "wait... so all those homophobic remarks about dad that I've been hearing my whole life... and all those scandalous rumours about his ex-boyfriend... and that hot younger man dad worked with who was around a lot... who ended up coincidentally stationed the same place you were... that was all because dad was BISEXUAL???"

mark: I know, it’s so nice that they have each other. Aral’s had so much to deal with and -

miles: ✋ can we rewind to 5 minutes ago and then pause there for 12-16 business days.

“IVAN KNEW? THAT IDIOT IVAN?”

Also, if anyone hasn't listened to the My Word As Vorkosigan podcast, the one on GJ&tRQ is the funniest of the bunch.

Try a genre that isn't currently On Trend. If you don't like the current romantasy bestsellers because they all follow the same tropes in order to game the tiktok algorithm, try something that isn't romantasy.

Read something written before 2010. There are plenty of amazing books being written right now also, but if your problem is with current trends specifically, go read the books that people were complaining were "ruining literature" twenty years ago. They're great.

Walk into any second-hand bookshop and just start looking around. There will be a lot of the thing you don't like there and there will also be a lot of other stuff, some of which you do like.

Make friends who like the same sorts of books as you.

This might only apply to me, but I get a lot of recommendations by simply being into vaguely philosophical video essays. If you follow a lot of the Jacob Geller Types on youtube or nebula then you will get more truly awesome science fiction recommendations than you know what to do with.

Write a web serial and every few days somebody will pop into your inbox saying "this thing you wrote kind of reminds me of [x], have you read it?" and it's almost certainly something you've never heard of in your life but now you have another story to check out that you know touches on themes you've demonstrated interest in.

If you find yourself in truly desperate straits, go to tvtropes.org and type in a trope you like. Scroll down to 'examples'. There's a whole long list there of stories about a killer on a leash, or battle couples, or whatever else you're in the mood to read about today.

I realize that the problem in most of these cases is that people don't really have places where they can get book recommendations, and wind up picking up whatever's trending on social media. However, even the tiniest bit of effort (such as Googling) can turn up huge lists of recommendations, including in the genre that you want. A tiny bit more effort will turn up more recommendations than you can possibly read.

Anyway, here's a video that includes a list of 300 book recommendations, specifically curated so that you don't have to rely on the algorithm for recommendations. Here's the actual list: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/b9e364fb-9b97-49a7-b3b5-bc24064e6cbd. The video description also includes several sub-lists on The StoryGraph.

I don't just say it based on vibes, like we know Camilla/Palamedes lived on a space station for a long while and their bone density is not lower than usual (based on plot/behavior at least), which would be basically impossible for a "normal" human and they don't have any related circulatory issues either. None of the female characters (not just house citizens, none) are mentioning periods even once, which makes me question if they even still have something resembling periods. We have characters (probably) coming from planets with way higher gravity than ours and they can take those stresses.

At this point it's not a stretch that the people of Dominicus either had to adapt over generations or their respective lyctors did some adjusting because those are some weird things.

I’m just curious how many people at some point in their lives have played/learned to play an instrument of any kind.

I included a nuance button bc I know there might be some folks who might be like “well I played the recorder in grade school but idk if that counts” — count it if you want or hit nuance if you’re unsure! 😊

To be clear, if you studied an instrument to any level of proficiency, even if you’re out of practice now, please select yes!

I put this together as a resource for my own writing awhile back and at first just stared at it in utter bewilderment. Is Beleriand really this small?! It seems like the answer is yes, and I'll give a quick explanation as to why below.

I've seen various stitched together maps of the First and Second/Third Ages, but the primary ones I've encountered still end up with the distance measurements not quite reflecting what we have in the text or map legends.

Without going into too many of the tedious bits, the basic overview is that I put this together by superimposing the maps in Photoshop, aligning Himring and Tol Himling, then drawing this out till the two iterations of the Ered Luin crossed. The primary thing here was ensuring the distance between Himring/Himling and the Ered Luin remained the same in both places.

There were various other details as well, but the key factor for determining whether this was feasible was to check whether it held up when comparing the numerical distances we are given as well.

This is simplest on the map of Middle-earth in the Third Age, since the official map was kind enough to provide a mileage legend. However, the Beleriand map was not nearly so forthcoming. So off we go to everyone's favorite chapter of the Silmarillion (Of Beleriand and its Realms) where we find that East Beleriand is described as being

at its widest a hundred leagues from Sirion to Gelion and the borders of Ossiriand

If this is 100 leagues, then we can convert that to roughly 345 miles and move that rasterized line down within the same file and line it up with our mileage legend from the map of Third Age Middle-earth (scaled as shown in the first image). Which gives us this:

Almost spot on!

Which, I'm not going to lie, really shocked me. I expected to find that this was wildly off since I've always assumed these maps to be fairly equal in my head. But no, it seems that all the epics of the First Age really did happen in an area no larger than Eriador.

One last image that I find interesting is isolating just Beleriand from this stitched map while retaining the water's tint so you can see the approximate whereabouts of the new shorelines would have ended up.

"I mean, is she in love at all? I've never even heard her call him by his first name. How can you be in love with someone you're not on a first-name basis with?"

Final

NO ANTIPROPAGANDA PLEASE

Propaganda under the cut

@hugintheraven's propaganda:

Cassie is a fat black girl who is the moral center of the group and is often deeply unpopular both in and out of universe for it. She argues for peace with a mouth red with the lifeblood of her enemies, because she may hate violence, but she understands that keeping her own hands clean is not the same as doing the right thing. Vote Cassie.

My Propaganda:

Attempted to talk up her best friend to a Hollywood heartthrob by saying “that’s not all she can do! She also had a house fall on her.”

Ended the alien invasion of Earth by coming up with a way that the invaders didn’t have to steal Earth’s resources and could live in peace.

Forgets to gender half the time.

Not scared of: venomous snakes, giant spiders, polar bears, eels, maggots, alien centipedes the size of school buses, 7-headed monsters the size of buildings. Is scared of: skunks.

Once gave her phone number as 123-45678.

Likes Nine Inch Nails, dislikes Megadeth.

Responded to Marco asking if “girls get all weird about bugs and snakes” by dropping a live garter snake into his hair.

Even her parents canonically think she’s cool.

“One-woman army” who single-handedly fought 20 human-controllers and won to save her friends from a trap she warned them not to walk into.

Favorite channel is Animal Planet.

Has a side gig in ecoterrorism. Is implied to keep this up even after the war ends and she becomes a government rep.

Deserves kudos for the brain surgery on her friend, but ALSO did leg surgery on a random Australian man while in hork-bajir morph.

While these two are both idealistic characters focused on building a better world, powerhouses in their respective realms as the One Woman Army and the Mother of Dragons, both with the brains to apply that power, both caught in wars for their respective homes and both have undertaken personal moral crusades…

But for all Daenerys pretty words, she most often ‘frees’ those enslaved by taking control of them herself. Sure, GRRM writes them as willing to join her – and serve in their former capacities – but if Grey Worm or any of his command decided they didn’t want to fight? I definitely can’t see Daenerys dealing well with a good chunk of her army deciding to settle down and become woodworkers or something.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Daenerys also views her conquest and rule of Meereen and all the people within as a sort of testing grounds for her ability to rule Westeros. That’s...an interesting mindset that lends itself well to her white savior complex but GRRM doesn’t strike me as an author who’s fully aware of all those implications.

Cassie keeps true to herself through a war. Yes, a big part of that is because she has her friends and the hard decisions they make to thank for this at times – how well would Cassie’s plan have gone without Jake murdering 17,000 helpless non-combatants? Or Rachel’s willingness to get her paws even dirtier for the sake of keeping her friends a little cleaner? But the author acknowledges this. She’s the one to plan and trap David in rat morph. She’s also earlier the one who willingly traps herself in caterpillar morph for the freedom of a single child.

Daenerys would NEVER

Ultimately, Daenerys says she would like to be a good queen, but would rather idealize that role than change anything about ‘The Wheel’ that ultimately sparked that war. She wants to win but isn’t as committed to changing the rules by which people get put in power. She’s part of the wheel, unwilling to give up being the axle in order to break the rest of it – as that means breaking everything her own family has done for three hundred years.

Cassie is willing to betray her own comrades to break the rules of engagement the Yeerks and the Andalites have laid down. She breaks that wheel. Not alone. Not even the One Woman Army can do it alone. She can’t do it without sacrifice, without blood on her hands and teeth and especially on the hands of her friends. But she took the axle of that Wheel of War and authoritarianism Andalite Imperialism and Yeerk Conquest built and curb-stomped it! The only Animorph who has the endurance to keep on going in war and in peace.

Moreover, their anti-Daenerys arguments have no basis in the books either. Daenerys literally tells the former slaves she frees that they are free to leave and do whatever they want and that no one will try to stop them. She does at one point think of her experiences in Slaver's Bay as preparing her for her future role in Westeros. But she also comes to realize that such a view is mistaken, and that Slaver's Bay is not a testing ground but a place with people she's responsible for. This realization forms the climax of her arc in the third book, and she spends the entirety of the fifth book (she doesn't appear in the fourth book) making compromises for the benefit of her freed people. Several people (former or current slave owners, that is) urge her to leave Slaver's Bay and go to Westeros (including offering her ships to get there) so as to get rid of her, but she is firm that she cannot leave until her people are safe and taken care of. How does that count as "idealizing the role of queen" or anything of that sort?

Nifty little language game here.

I can read back to 1500 with basically no difficulty

at 1400 I have to read slowly and carefully, but I can understand all of it save a couple words

at 1300 I can still comprehend most of it if I read slowly, but a much larger percentage of the words are unfamiliar to me, even with context

I can't do 1200 or anything past it. It is, as the author says, a wall. It feels like a closely related foreign language. I had Spanish lessons at a very early age so I actually do okay at romance languages and skated through 1300 on thstt, but am totally lost here because I know zero German, and as German roots become more prevalent I lose all footing.

Except...

Now I wonder - does being a saint change you to the point where you can no longer be sufficiently empty? Because we know that the saint of the Bastard in Lodi (Masquerade in Lodi) didn't really know what was going on. Caz definitely had no idea, and didn't even know anything weird was happening until halfway through his role. Ista may have known a bit more than Caz, but she was in many ways such a child (she's such an odd character, because she's an empty-nester, but also effectively a teenager, even though she's my age.) She had also been cast loose when the Bastard scooped her up.

Would Caz be capable of becoming a saint again, or has he been so filled up with knowledge of the gods that he can't empty himself enough? Pen can be sent over and over again because he doesn't need to be a saint - he just hit "accept" on the terms & conditions while still retaining his autonomy. The saints of the Bastard (who are obviously way more common than we realised) persist as saints, but really have just one job. Petty saints have a much smaller role (and, like the saints of the Bastard, they do the same thing every time. They dispense justice by knowing who's lying. They help women survive labour.)

we know the bastard doesn’t like reclaiming his demons, that mishandling or abusing demons is a grave sin worthy of throwing penric and the saint at it. the bastard *wants* demons to linger in the world, to accumulate knowledge and experience and density. there’s a parallel there between the way a saint’s soul has to be stretched before the god can visit. des has brushed up against—is it every god in the pantheon at this point? the bastard most commonly, but the mother was there when they rescued pen’s in-law, the son was there when they redeemed the lost shaman’s soul, the father was there in masquerade at lodi (i think?) has she met the daughter? for as much as penric is god-touched for a human, des is even more notable as a demon. so it’s possible that it’s not just (or even!) pen that’s being loaned out, but des.

And then there's the stage of 'rereading because it is x time of year'. The Night Watch reread is in may, Hogfather around winter solstice. Reaper Man in autumn. Carpe Jugulum and Witches Abroad are both great October reads.

And past that is the stage where the books have all started to blend a bit in your mind but there's this one quote that absolutely fits what's going on right now, hang on, let me reread these three books to see which one the quote was in.

And of course, concurrent with all these is the stage where you're trying to get someone else into the series and you're rereading the ones you're thinking of recommending so you can tell them relevant things and not just the ones you like best which may well be in entirely different parts of the series.

Okay, I'll admit there are a handful of Discworld books that I didn't like quite as much on reread (mostly ones starring a guy whose name begins with "R" and ends with "incewind" 😝). But there are several more that I loved a lot more on reread, including my favourites, Night Watch and Small Gods, which – hard as it is for me to believe now – I wasn't particularly impressed with the first time around. 😱 There's also I Shall Wear Midnight, which I've read thrice, and which went up a star rating in my mind every time (from 3 stars to 5 stars). Even with ones where my rating stayed the same, I learned to appreciate them on a deeper level upon reread, such as Monstrous Regiment (which I had enjoyed the first time around, but hadn't really thought much about the queer themes).