booksandchainmail

[booksandchainmail]

reblog this and tell me in the notes which book you've reread most in your life, pretty please!

#when i was in elementary school I pickd out a book to bring to school every morning #and if I couldn't decide I had defaults #so definitely one of those #in order of how oftenI think I read them #tale of time city #dragon's blood #wolves of willoughby chase #nightbirds on nantucket #the gammage cup #the adventures of robin hood #the magicians of caprona #and a bunch of eva ibbotsons #books

[booksandchainmail]

catherine foundling remains absolutely iconic

incredible banter doesn’t make or break a story, but it really feels like the cherry on top

#pgte

[booksandchainmail]

I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.

I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.

So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.

Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".

Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.

[booksandchainmail]

There is the opportunity for a trick question along the lines of: You have tossed a coin 99 times and it has come up heads every time. What do you predict for the next toss? Heads; tails; equally likely.

With the correct answer being 'heads'. Because with a fair coin toss they're equally likely, but! Do you know what the global rate of unfair coins is? I don't, but it isn't zero. Trick coins exist. Even ruling that out, the primary purpose of coins is not equal-probability randomization and I'm pretty sure no one is validating their aerodynamics and/or density to make sure they're fair.

So you modify your previous idea of the probability distribution of the coin toss outcomes, and figure the next toss is more likely to be heads.

Actually that's a fun idea for a Bayesian statistics exploration — what does your posterior distribution do as you accumulate more and more results from what is in fact a two-head coin?

#stats

[booksandchainmail]

#anime

[booksandchainmail]

found it. this sent me into hysterics one night

#food

[booksandchainmail]

Incredible book. There’s no way to describe Exordia fully in a sentence, so, it’s about Obama-era foreign policy and the 1980’s Anfal Kurdish genocide and storytelling and first contact à la Roadside Picnic à la E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, by the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Science Fiction Fantasy Horror Queer Mystery, I guess??

(Also, you should read The Traitor Baru Cormorant)

#exordia

[booksandchainmail]

In a perfect world Ssrin would have a tumblr

#exordia

[booksandchainmail]

I love Iruvage as a villain because he just leans into it so hard. Out of the khai we see in the book, Ssrin is rebelling against the Exordia and Maessari seems like she's coldly carrying out her orders - like threatening a planet with nuclear annihilation is a normal Tuesday afternoon. But Iruvage knows explicitly that he is an objectively bad person, that his actions are evil, and that he is going to literal, actual capital-H Hell when he dies, and he decides to ham it up. He plays fucked up cat and mouse with the Chinese special forces team. He taunts Davoud and Clayton relentlessly even though they're nominally on his side, and then toys with the fighter pilots, and the Spetsnaz guys, and even Ssrin when he thinks he can get away with it.

Iruvage says to everyone, "I know that I am objectively marked by the universe as evil, so I'm going to be as monstrous as I possibly can, because it all ends the same for me anyway. And I'm going have some FUN on my way downstairs."

#exordia

[booksandchainmail]

#exordia

[booksandchainmail]

Reading Exordia so slowly partially because I’m tired as balls lately, but mostly because at any given time while I’m reading I have a dozen tabs open on Kurdish culture, Middle Eastern politics, American military terms, physics vocabulary, Korean actresses, and African American poets

#exordia

[booksandchainmail]

everyone who said "sorry but he's not going to die he's going to be getting the best healthcare available" must be feeling pretty embarrassed rn

[booksandchainmail]

separate post cuz i dont wanna clog the notes on that Medea art but:

Hercules also killed his children

and you can say oh but that was a fit of divine madness and that's true. but now try to explain how Medea's madness was not divine. her parents were the son of Helios and an idyia- a 'water nymph'. SHE was divine. Hesiod literally states that her and Jason's marriage was a marriage between mortal and divine.

so either Hercules is not a greek hero, or Medea is a greek hero with tits

#medea #mythology

[booksandchainmail]

[booksandchainmail]

Absolutely love it when anything is described as "stopped being biology and started being physics". Unparalleled imagery right there.

[booksandchainmail]

Mulder. Please tell me what part of the american legal code covers this.

[booksandchainmail]

so on royalroad, the english-language serial webnovel website, there's ads created by users for other stories at the top of each chapter - you know, for the common case where you're reading a book and you want to suddenly start reading a different book. (they set it up in a way that's fiddly to block.)

they're kinda fascinating? I almost want to start collecting them. they triangulate into genres with bulletpoints. isekai. cultivation. reincarnation. yes romance. no romance. harem. no harem. some of them use anime-styled art or fantasy concept art (most likely a lot of it either AI-generated or used without permission/attribution, I get the vibe)... but a lot of them are straight up just memes.

hell lemme just refresh the page a bit and see what I get. I'm only a liiiiittle selective here.

...I could keep refreshing but you get the picture.

and sure, it's just the same as the AO3 tagging system with a different set of aesthetic priorities right? people are searching for stories which scratch a very specific itch. but there's something weirdly fascinating in advertising a story based on how formulaic it is. or ads for a novel that look like ads for a mobile game. how so many of them refer to their protagonist as 'MC'.

I assume this like, works, or people wouldn't do it? Same principle as long light novel titles. otaku database theory stuff. I just... don't really get it! who's it for?