#feeblekazoo

oooh, you got a really good one! “God Bless The Grass” by Malvina Reynolds

favorite bit:

I am enjoying this line of thought. OK so I did some more googling to make sure I had my facts straight here - so in the sequel (Verne did a crossover fic of his own work) Nemo is canonically Indian. However, the sequel also has a totally broken timeline (it is simultaneously set during the American Civil War, so 1865-ish, and set DECADES after 20,000 leagues, even though that book starts specifically in 1867). So, turns out Nemo time travelled, so anything is possible.

OKAY so Nemo is an indian time traveller who did not, in fact, invent the submarine. Instead he did a much cooler thing of reverse-engineering a submarine without any of the usual submarine technology.

And ALSO once he was in the 1860s for the second time he was like “I miss jazz, they had good jazz in the future” so he reverse engineers jazz but it has kind of a hindi bent to it bc that was his first exposure to music.

The saxophone existed by this point so he didn’t have to like, reverse engineer that too but he did travel to Belgium to get a saxophone off Adolphe Sax. But he also gets some other cool sax instruments, like the saxhorn, so he and Mr Sax spend some time trying to work out how to do jazz with like, the early precursor of the contrabass clarinet.

Oo, yes please! How is next week going to go for me?

i haven’t even drawn a card yet and i can tell you the answer is going to be “badly”

You have drawn the bundle. This is a dark shape wrapped in rope netting. It sits atop a table, suggesting to me a medium size, but is otherwise eerily similar to the shape of a person wrapped tightly up in foetal position: seeming to suggest a spine on this side, arms wrapped around knees, and this clear lump of a head at the top. But it is likely too small to actually be a person, unless it is upon a very large table, if that is any comfort to you.

Oh, this was a fun one! Silly fantasy story about a fairytale world in which all the famous knights and warriors have retired, so people from medieval fairs/fantasy festivals in our world get “recruited” to fight in a war.... Again, unedited NaNoWriMo story and thus very messy, and also the two different POVs are written in different languages, which made it challenging to find a bit to post (because the bits I liked more were all in German).

Silence fell again. Miri chewed and swallowed her food without really tasting it, absent-mindedly chasing Konstanze away from her and the vampire’s plate every so often. This whole strange thing here still didn’t show any signs of being any less than real, still none of the inconsistencies of a dream, no signs of being a fake – as much as she looked around, the furniture and the view from the windows didn’t show the slightest sign of modern times – but it also didn’t become any less impossible. A talking fox? A honest to God talking fox? It couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t. Talking foxes like that showed up in Disney movies, where they were called Robin Hood. But he had talked. She had seen his snout move. There was no way, no way on earth, no way in hell that this was just a trained fox and a hidden microphone.

And that dwarf. He still didn’t look any less than someone out of a fairy tale, or maybe out of the Lord of the Rings. True, nobody in the movie had ever been this grubby, so shabbily dressed and grease-smeared, but…

She only just suppressed another gurgle of sudden laughter.

This was Elrond’s council! This place here, this was the Rivendell of this crazy story she had landed herself in, the place where they all met, where they had all come, not always entirely voluntarily, and from where they would leave to battle evil.

The sudden mirth was short-lived. Elrond’s council had been where it had been decided that the main characters had had to go into the heart of danger, into Mordor itself. It didn’t sound as if there was a place like Mordor here, or someone as inherently and deeply evil as Sauron, but that didn’t mean this world was any less deadly.

In the Lord of the Rings, few of the main characters had died. But how likely was this much luck in real life? All right, so she still wasn’t entirely certain that this was real life, but to be on the safe side, she should treat it as if it were. And in real life, one could assume that if someone walked into a situation that promised certain death, one would be dead. In real life, people didn’t get rescued by wizards and giant eagles. In real life, people didn’t go to fairyland, and meet talking foxes, either.

Yeah, 20,000 leagues is 1870s, jazz is 1920s. Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea though.

yknow im giving this more thought. what if ............................ captain nemo invented jazz.

pros: captain nemo invented submarines so maybe?  cons: captain nemo is (i think canonically?) a white guy so that doesnt hold up

maybe... idk what the protag is called or anything about him (except that i think he’s a sailor, and definitely gay) but could HE be the guy who invented jazz? that would add some Parallels to the novel. smth smth Nemo’s accomplishments are hidden by his own ego, while MC’s accomplishments are hidden by oppressive society?

Also they might have entirely wrongheaded ideas about what constitutes goodness (I once bought chai from a fancy specialty chai stand... and it literally was just cinnamon milky tea. Chai of lies)

My mum always asks whether they make powdered, syrup or brewed chai... but I suspect goodness comes down to actual spice ratios and that's a whole other complicated issue.