sarah. she. teacher. writer. latinist. linguist. nerd. fiction enthusiast. hockey convert. if you don't read the tags on my posts, you will most likely miss half the post.
strugglebus; most reliably reached by DM.
Young Wizards always, MCU often, frequent guest appearances by other fandoms, mainly Miraculous Ladybug at the moment. (plenty of IRL hockey, too, and occasionally baseball.)
[insert link to fic things but mobile won't let me]
if you like any stories or meta i write (or anything else!) feel free to buy me a coffee :)
formerly ijustwanttobeperceivedthewayiam. This blog runs mostly on a queue. (Spoiler policy)
hello i’m not actually necessarily back but i did get dragged headfirst into miraculous ladybug this year and am now caught up so what i do post may well be that. also idk how to update my “about” from mobile rn so i’m gonna try to pin this instead. i’m tagging “#ml s5 spoilers” and “#miraculous ladybug” if you want to block either of those. otherwise hmu if you want to scream about how incredibly intricate, detailed, and nuanced this show is :D
also temporary update, i’m back for the stanley cup playoffs i guess, so block “bruins lb” and “because it’s the cup” if you don’t want to watch me watch hockey? should have said this a couple games ago but i didn’t really intend to do this /o\
So, there are a few dozen different types of ritual done in UGLE - Think like, almost every theatre and am-dram in the country does the pantomimes Jack And The Beanstalk, Dick Whittington and Cinderella - and there are little variations between them, so the Ruritania Empire will start Jack And The Beanstalk with “Once upon a time, a boy named Jack took his cow to market”, and the Urston Grand Players will always start it “Jack the lad traded his cow for some magic beans”.
Some of the variations are used by hundreds of lodges (Many of them have great names - Emulation, Logic, Rationality, Sympathy, Universal - or are named for a person or place - Taylor’s, Preston, Oxoniensis, Bristol) and some are only used by one or two, and ours is (as far as I know?) only used by a couple of lodges, because when I asked what our Lodge’s ritual was called the response was a hollow laugh and “Oh no. No no no. Not again.”
So, tonight I was sitting with my new ritual book and comparing it to an Emulation ritual book - Emulation is from London, and our ritual book is from here in rural East Ruritanshire, and I was delighted to find: Our ritual book encodes our dialect as it was spoken a hundred and fifty years ago. Before tonight, I’d obviously heard our ritual a hundred times but I have never just sat and read it, alongside a copy of what many people would consider the “Default” ritual book, and it makes the differences really stand out. Without using any of the actual words, differences along the lines of:
Emulation: “Oh dearest Cinderella, you shall go to the ball!”
Ruritania: “Cinderella my love, thou mun’t forget ‘ball the night!”
It’s mostly subtle, but it’s there in word choice, word order, and the more that I read the more I think it’s there in turn-taking patterns as well (as in, how you respond to someone calling on you, do you reply immediately- (Dave?//Yes?//Have you seen my hat?//No?) or not (Dave, have you seen my hat?//No?) - It’s easy to miss when most of your Lodge naturally HAVE a strong Ruritanian dialect and accent anyway, and when reciting the accent often gets stronger because people’s diction gets clearer when they’re louder, so it just feels “natural”. It makes me want to seek out ritual from other parts of the country, to see if they also have these little dialect forms, where some ancient Worshipful Master has clearly said “I have never said 'I am’ in my life, the word is 'That I be’…”
There is a tantalising line at the start of the book saying it was compiled with access to the Lodge’s early documents… I am going to go and see if I can read those too.
It’s hard for us now to imagine that in the c19th, the richest and most successful people locally were, well, LOCAL, they lived in the big houses in town that are now divided up into dozens of flats, they went to church in the same church as everyone else, they owned the local mills and foundries and they walked to them along the same streets as their workers and bought their bread and coffee from the same shops, and they will have spoken with a broad regional dialect and encoded that, deliberately or not, in their ritual.
Reading their words, collected by a committee of our Past Masters, in a book printed by another one of our Past Masters, owned by another well-respected Past Master who has now taken his office in the Grand Lodge Above, and now passed down to me by our Superintendent of Works, I feel really close to them all.
I have found a new favourite part!
The “Tracing board lectures” are what they sound like - moderately long speeches (about 2500 words each) which describe and expand upon the tracing boards, which are sort of pictorial shorthands for Masonic ideas. Next year, us junior bretheren will perform one of them in full for the senior bretheren and the visitors.
They have to be memorised and recited in their entirety, and traditionally, would be done mouth-to-ear.
In Emulation, written in commerce-centred London, there are three lines which explain what a pulley is and how it works. In our idiosyncratic ritual written in a pit village where all the pubs are named after mineshafts and the old men still have blue scars, the lines expounding on how pulleys work are replaced with beautiful description of rest and coolness.
I’ve read that Agatha said she loved being married to an archaeologist because the older she got, the more interesting he found her. And I think that is one of the best quotes about love that I have ever heard.
i love you slightly unhinged old british storybook style pokemon that illustrate the importance of accurate text descriptions i hope reddit user BazF91 and his mum are having a great day <3
Here’s some more, just for fun!! I highly recommend clicking on the link
I love it when fan fiction writers are like: “ah shit, this was meant to be one part but I started writing it and now it has to be three”. Like the fanfic is happening to them and not being created by them.
People have been very mean to Emily Wilson online lately. I’ve been on record as saying her translation of the Odyssey (or Iliad) wasn’t my favourite, but do I agree with the accusations of oversimplification or inaccuracy? (Spoiler alert: no.)
you know, i generally prefer ebooks over physical books (for convenience sake), but there is exactly one exception: old gay scifi. because there is Something about holding an old, visibly used copy of a book like that. seeing the age of it, the wear and tear, and knowing there were gay people writing my most beloved genre, and there were characters like me in it and readers like me who got to see themselves as heroes in these stories years, even whole decades before i was even born. there’s just Something about it
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@xeylah !!! always!!! here’s some of the best i’ve read so far:
The World Well Lost by Theodore Sturgeon (1953) - this one’s actually a short story, but i cannot overstate how important it was in terms of breaking the taboo around depictions of homosexuality in scifi; it’s often regarded as the first piece of SF to portray gay people in a sensitive, sympathetic manner. it’s also online! it’s too short to describe without spoiling, so, please just go read it
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1966) - fun, beautifully written space opera with casually bi&polyam charas :) (honestly tho, anything by Delany is so good, this is just my favourite from the stuff i’ve read so far)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) - self explanatory i think
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976) - gut-wrenching novel abt a forcefully institutionalized woman who is able to time-travel to a hopeful, utopian (and queer-normative) but uncertain future
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (1996) - rly raw and devastating cyberpunk novel about a lesbian news reporter living under a dystopian regime
also, beyond Samuel R. Delany, 2 gay SF authors I’d recommend checking out are David Gerrold and Melissa Scott! what I’ve read of Gerrold (The Man Who Folded Himself, Moonstar Odyssey) has generally been more flawed&messy than the books i’ve listed, but still decent and undeniably groundbreaking in terms of its depictions of LGBT charas in scifi at the time, and Melissa Scott is the queen of 90s lesbian scifi (though i’m just reading my first book by her rn, so i can’t recommend specific titles)
this post is making the rounds again for some reason so here’s a couple more hand-picked recs i really wanna add:
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (1992) - lesbian classic and top-tier anthropological scifi, set on a colonized planet inhabited only by women (manages not to get gender-essentialist about it)
The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei (1995) - a Taiwanese queer classic that only got translated into English a couple years ago; quiet, introspective and uncomfortable (complimentary)
Mission Child by Maureen McHugh (1998) - a life-story kind of book about a refugee on a colonized world - and one of the best books about coming into your identity as a nonbinary/genderqueer person i’ve ever read
I made in 21 days between migraines (a feat considering I was getting them every 4-5 days while living with my parents).
Late last night just before midnight, Holly Mop woke up from a dead sleep, full-on Shih Tzu snoring, crawled up on my wedge pillow and buried her nose against the back of my neck, chuffing away like a train.
At first I laughed about being turned into the little spoon by my 10lb dog, and turned over to make a fuss over her, thinking she just wanted attention.
And then about 20 minutes later, after she’d been trying to crawl under my skin the entire time, I felt the first shock of pain ripple across my trigeminal nerve and she started licking my forehead/eyebrow like her life depended on it.
My migraine meds work hard, but Holly Mop works harder 😭
Dogtor Mop staying comfy on the clock.
Tumblr thinks this post contains explicit content, by the way. So in case you’re scared to click it, the above picture is my tiny dog lying under the covers of my pink and green bed.
regrettably the clarification is also covered by the explicit warning. but this is hilarious as a possibly explicit post lmao
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