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purplewitch156 · 3 months

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Ooh, I'd love to hear about Strange Horticulture or the White Road!

Strange Horticulture is a video game. It’s quirky and chill and atmospheric. You run a plant shop, receive mail, find cryptic notes in your desk from the previous owner, and make concoctions from your plants to sell to customers. Periodically you get to travel and source new plants for your shop. It rains often. It feels very Victorian. You can water and rearrange your potted plants. You have a cat.

I’m aware that by making Harry a plant shop owner, I’m pulling him pretty far from his canon blueprint. That’s more the kind of thing Neville would do. But I think I can make it work. I love the idea of how much Lily could have influenced Harry with her Potions expertise. I easily imagine little Harry tagging along with his mother when she set off into the woods to find mushrooms and sap and plants, etc, and help her chop and brew. The fact that you do get to make potions fits in nicely.

It's been a while since I’ve played the game so I’m stretching my memory, but the protagonist has memory problems that seem to hint toward something big and dramatic and there is a cult in the town that is trying to resurrect some kind of demon and you’re kinda in the middle of it.

ALSO, I recently read (and bounced off of cuz I wasn’t enjoying it) Into the Woods by Tana French. In that story when the main character was a child, he and his friends were in the woods and were attacked. The two friends are never found again and the survivor has lost all memories of the event. That was a very compelling idea to me and it’s something I’m mulling about in regards to this story, especially if I decide to lean into the memory loss/amnesia that is implied in the game. But I also may not do any of that. Or I may go down an entirely different road.

I don’t have a whole lot of ideas yet for this one, so I’ll just list some of the big ones down below.

Instead of a cat, Harry has Hedwig.

Snape will be a friend to Harry. I’m leaning more towards making him the same age as Harry, but we’ll see. I think he could still have a crush on Lily but in a childhood/innocent kind of way that would make Harry often say, “EW. GROSS!” We’ll see. This might change.

Tom will obviously be involved in the cult and trying to utilize Harry for his own gains, but I’m not all that sure what that’s going to be yet. I kinda like the idea of him playing Harry – being a charming, handsome, helpful member of the community who is there to welcome the newest addition to the village and get into bed with him as soon as possible while also unleashing a hellish demon.

When Harry gets particularly stressed, he waters his plants and between this cult and rumors of a demon creature terrorizing the countryside and the romantic drama that I imagine Tom might cause, and the possibility of old memories returning of his two childhood friends getting eaten by said demon, Harry’s gonna be watering his plants a LOT. I have such a vision of him in one of these nervous/frantic states and he grabs the watering can and starts pouring it over some poor plant and Tom saying, “Don’t you think that’s enough?” And Harry notices what he’s doing and the poor plant’s practically drowning, flailing its tendrils, and he replies, “It can take it.”

>>>

The White Road is a short story by Kelly Link. It follows a group of traveling performers in a post-apocalyptic setting. The story is very loose and doesn’t explain a whole bunch which means there’s a lot of room for interpretation. In the story, these strange entities walk the White Road. The White Road is always there, always following, always in the corner of your eye. At night, the creatures that walk the road seek others out and if there isn’t a dead body around, they kill everyone, so if night rolls around and you don’t have a dead body, someone pretends to be dead and everyone else pretends to be mourning them. The traveling group goes from town to town, performing and delivering mail.

Now let’s talk about Harry. Harry will be a member of the group, along with Snape and Tom. (I’m not sure yet who else will be part of the caravan.) Whenever the caravan comes to a town, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because they have a doctor (Snape) and they have Harry who can see and communicate with the dead. People will flock to him to seek closure and the caravan is extremely protective of Harry because he (along with Snape) turn out the crowds more so than their renditions of Much Ado About Nothing.

Tom is the interesting one in this. With his personality, you’d think he’d be the guy in charge, but I’m not sure if that’s what I *want* to do. I do think of him as the protector of the group. The one who doesn’t mind taking care of threats and problems with violence and he’s killed quite the number of people. Harry’s going to be a later addition to the caravan and Tom is fascinated and scared of him for what he can do. He’s never really thought about the people he’s killed and the idea that they might be (and some of them are) following him and talking shit about him unnerves him. He’s also extremely attracted to Harry and will be pretty irritated when Harry refuses his advances every time. He will be EXTREMELY irritated when, for example, he learns that instead of sleeping with him – the most handsome bloke for miles – Harry decides to sleep with Snape. It’s gonna be that kind of dynamic, where everyone in the caravan knows everyone’s business and everybody’s hooking up with everybody else.

#wip game #future fics #tomarry #white road au #strange horticulture au

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stringping3 · 2 years

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betterbooksandthings · 2 years

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The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews

The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews is a love letter to 1860's dressmaking. In this victorian historical romance, Evelyn Maltravers is new to the London marriage mart, looking to define herself not as a bluestocking but as a fashionable horsewoman. She only has one season to make an impression and land a match, so she will need the very best riding habit-maker. The tailor who has made a splash with his innovative and flattering designs, Ahmad Malik, is looking to make a name in womenswear beyond his work with the infamous courtesans, Rotten Row’s Pretty Horsebreakers. As a half-Indian tailor in Victorian London, he knows his designs have to be excellent if he wants to take over the tailor's shop. So when Evelyn comes to him with a strange request and an enchanting smile, he cannot refuse her. They strike a deal, he will outfit her coming out season, and she, in turn, will introduce his clothing to fine society. But Evelyn soon realizes a society husband pales in comparison to a life with Ahmad. Can they both give up what they expect from life and move forward side by side?

Excellent. Evelyn's knowledge and passion for horseback riding rival Ahmad's proficiency with fabrics. She and her unladylike friends avoided falling into the trap of making a heroine with non-traditional interests a unique feature in society. I am a big fan of her friends and cannot wait for them to get books (however I would also love to get Ahmad's sister Mira's story). Evelyn is naive and sincere however, Matthews doesn't shy away from showing where that sincerity fails to comprehend aspects of Ahmad's professional and personal life, including the racism he continues to experience. Ahmad and Evelyn's relationship manages to be adorable and I really did love them together.

Now, Ahmad professional expertise is easy to imagine given the level of detail in every stitch. Evelyn is his muse and it comes out in every item of clothing. Even though his designs drive his success, he also recognizes the talent of the seamstresses who work for him. This places him in contrast with other modest in town who produce dresses quickly by employing seamstresses who live and work in horrible conditions. Ahmad's professional failures and successes feel world-breaking. Every time a deadline approaches, a new design is revealed to society, or a new customer comes through the door the reader feels it. The stakes of this season are high for everyone involved and the physically demanding nature of his workload shows throughout the season.

Although Mimi Matthews' research is clear throughout the text, her author's note is particularly interesting. Her knowledge of fashion history and the choices she made to diverge from time period dress-making is fascinating. I would highly recommend reading all end material (but then again I love paratextual content).

Victorian women's dress has never looked so good. The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews is a wonderfully sincere historical romance novel that will suit any shelf. Seriously, you should trot off with a copy if it sounds like it is up your alley at all. The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews is set to release on January 11, 2022.

Thank you, Berkley via NetGalley for providing the eARC of The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews in exchange for my honest review.

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lightofthemoonglow · 3 years

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that victorian au ask have me an idea: re-animator but it's closer to the original lovecraft story but instead of herbert having a medical background in the canadian military and somehow ending up in arkham, herbert is a medic in the british military in the age of imperialism. i just wanted to make this au so it could possibly have a crossover with heart of darkness because it's the inspiration for apocalypse now. pls don't yeet me

Okay, that is a great one

Herbert would have definitely used the war to experiment on corpses. This is just canon (the opening of Bride)

Yeah, i don’t know too much about this time period, but I like the idea that there is this implication that Herbert West isn’t his real name. He just appeared one day

Dan is basically canon Dan, only in this time period

Herbert tries to drift away after the war, but Dan follows him

Generally more chaos because of the ‘medicine’ available at the time. Someone is on cocaine? Like I said, this is not my area of expertise

Send me a potential AU and I’ll tell you five fun facts that would happen in a story.

#herbert-east

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diverse-writing · 4 years

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Book Review: “Queer City” by Peter Ackroyd

Thanks to @kyliebean-editing for the review request! I have a list of books I’ve read recently here that I’m considering reviewing, so let me know if you’re looking for my thoughts on a specific book and I’ll be sure to give it a go!

2.5 ⭐/5

Hey all! I’m back with another book review and this time we’re taking a dip into nonfiction with Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. Let’s dive right in.

The good: Peter Ackroyd is a hugely prolific writer and a historian clearly trained for digging through huge archives of history and his expertise shows. This particular volume--his 37th nonfiction book and 55th overall published work--provides a startlingly comprehensive timeline of London’s gay history, just as promised. Arguably, the book’s subtitle short sells the book’s content; Queer City actually rewinds the clock all the way back to the city’s origins as a Celtic town before it became Roman Londinium. From there, Ackroyd’s utilizes his extensive historical experience to trace proof of gay activity through the ages. From the high courts of medieval times to the monks of the Tudor era, the gaslit back alleys of Victorian London to the raging club scene of the 1980s--gay people have lived and even thrived in London for literal millennia, and Ackroyd has the receipts to back it up. If you need proof that homosexuality has been a staple of civilization since the Romans--and the homophobia has often recycled the same arguments for the same period of time--then look no further.

The mediocre: All that being said, Ackroyd’s “receipts” often tend towards the salacious, the scandalous, and often the explicit. It seems that legal edicts and court cases made up the foundation of his research, so us readers get to hear in full detail the punishments levied against historical queer individuals, from exile to the pillory to the gallows. Occasionally, Ackroyd dips into the written pornagraphic accounts of the time to describe salacious sexual encounters, which add little to the overarching narrative except proof that gay people do, in fact, have sex. Later down the historical record, once newspapers became more common, we also receive extensive account of the gossip pages of the day, complete with rants about the indecency of “buggery” and the moral decay of “the homosexual.” Throughout the book, ass puns and phallic wordplay run rampant, so much so that it occasionally feels like it’s only added for shock value.

While I’m not a professional historian, as a queer person I can’t help but feel that there must be more to the historical record than these beatings, back alley hookups, etc. In focus on the concrete evidence of gay activity--that is, gay sex and all the official documents surrounding the subject--it feels like Ackroyd neglects the emotional side of queerness in favor of the physical side. Even the queer poetry excerpts or diary entries of the time (which I’m nearly positive exist throughout the historical record, though once again I’m not a professional) sampled in this book are all focused on the physical act of sex. No queer person wants a pastel tinted, desexed version of our history--but we also don’t need to hear a dozen explicit accounts of gay park sex. Queer love and queer sex go hand in hand and to focus on one without the other is disingenuous, not to mention dangerous in promoting the idea that queer people are hypersexual and predatory. Admittedly, I do think the omission of queer love is an unintentional byproduct of Ackroyd’s fact-checking and editorial process. He may not have intended to leave out tenderness, but his intentional choice to focus on impersonal records--court cases, royal decrees, newspapers, etc.--rather than personal ones--diaries, poetry, art, etc.--meant that emotion was largely excluded anyway.

The bad: Though Queer City does a good job of following queer history through the ages, Ackroyd fails to connect his cited historical examples with larger sociocultural movements of the time. He discusses queer coding in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but not the larger (oft homoromantic/homoerotic) courtly love traditions that Chaucer drew on. He describes the cult followings around boy actors playing female parts in Elizabethan and Jacobian London but neglects to put those theaters and the public reaction to them within the context of the ongoing Renaissance. Similarly, Ackroyd omits explicit connections to the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, free love, and countless other cultural movements that undoubtedly shaped both the social and legal responses to the queer community. This exclusion, unlike the exclusion of queer love, had to be intentional on Ackroyd’s part; it’s hugely unlikely that a historian with his bibliography accidentally forgot to mention the last millennium’s worth of Western civilization cultural movements. It’s a massive oversight that utterly fails to place London’s queer history within the context of wider history.

And finally, last but definitely not least, oh boy does Ackroyd have some learning to do when it comes to gender, gender presentation, and gender identity. From the very first chapter, it’s apparent that Ackroyd’s research and writing focused largely on MLM cisgender men, with WLW cisgender women as a far secondary priority. While there are chapters on chapters dedicated to detangling homosexual men’s dealings, homosexual women are often pushed to the fringes of London’s queer history. They receive paragraphs, here and there, and occasionally the closing sentence of a chapter, but overall they’re clearly downgraded to a secondary priority within Ackroyd’s historical narrative. Some of this can once again be blamed on the type of records Ackroyd uses; sex between women was never criminalized or discussed in the public sphere in the same way that sex between men was, so it was a less common topic in London’s courts and newspapers. (And, once again, I have the sneaking suspicion that turning to less traditional sources would’ve helped resolve this issue, though in part the omission can likely be pinned on Ackroyd’s demonstrable preference towards male history.)

Additionally, Ackroyd tends to treat crossdressing as undeniable proof of homosexuality. While it’s true that historically queer individuals found freedom or relief in dressing as the opposite sex, the latter didn’t necessarily equal the former. Additionally, if the crossdressing individual in question was female, dressing as a man was often a way for a woman to secure more freedoms than she would receive while wearing traditional feminine outfits. (Also, he tended to use “transvestite” over “crossdressing,” and while I tend to think of the latter as more preferred, the former may be more in use among queer studies circles or British slang). Though Ackroyd briefly acknowledges that women could and may have crossdressed to more easily navigate a misogynistic world, he nevertheless continually dredges out records of crossdressing women as concrete proof of historical sapphics.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room; in clearly identifying crossdressers as homosexuals, Ackroyd entirely overlooks the existence of transgender and nonbinary people in London’s historical record. This omission, arguably unlike the others, seems definitively intentional and malicious. In the entire book, I could probably count on one hand the number of times Ackroyd mentions the concept of gender identity, and I could use even fewer fingers for the number of times he does so respectfully and thoughtfully. Though he largely neglects to discuss transgender history as a subset of queer history, when he does bring up historical non-cisgender identities it’s often as a component of his salacious narratives rather than a vibrant and storied history all on its own. In the final chapter on modern gay London, Ackroyd’s casual dismissal of the concept of myriad gender identities felt dangerously close to modern day British “gender criticism,” which is likely more familiar to queer readers as TERFism masquerading under the guise of concern for women and gay rights (JK Rowling is a very public example of a textbook gender critical Brit, if you’re wondering). By the end of the book, Ackroyd’s skepticism of so-called “nontraditional gender identities” is so glaringly evident that he might as well proclaim it outright.

The verdict: For a book supposedly focused on queerness, the focus on male cisgender homosexuality is both disappointing and honestly not surprising. This book is a portrait of gay London, yes--but it’s also a portrait of Peter Ackroyd as a historian and a professional. It’s clear from early on that he’s writing from the perspective of an older white gay man (I think queer WOC know what I’m talking about when I say that that POV is very distinct, and his clear idolation of 1960s-1980s gay culture makes his age quite evident as well). As you progress through the book, his blindspot in regards to gender and gender politics become increasingly clear, as does his simultaneous obsession and criticism with transgender identities. Overall, Queer City is a clear example of how “nonfiction” doesn’t necessarily mean unvarnished truth--or at least not all of it--and how individual historian’s methods and biases bleed into their research.

A dear London friend suggested Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London: Perils and Pleasures of the Sexual Metropolis as a more gender inclusive review of the famous city’s queer history. While I take a break from London for a bit, I would welcome any and all thoughts on either Queer City or Queer London, the latter which I fully intend to get to eventually so I can properly compare the two.

#book review #queer history #queer city #text heavy tw #sex mention tw #long post for tw #wow this got really long sorrt #kinda starts rambling by the end oops

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coasttocoastreads · 4 years

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Stalking Jack The Ripper//Kerri Maniscalco

★★★★ / ★★★★★

Summary in One Gif:

Pros:

character nuance

rivals turned friends

Cons:

might be gross if you don’t like murder

Plot: 4 / 5

I don’t read a ton of murder mystery, or historical fiction, so this is slightly outside my wheelhouse, but it was really fun. It’s a good mix of character development alongside plot movements. There were a few moments in which I didn’t really buy what Maniscalco was selling, but for the most part, Thomas and Audrey Rose led a pretty believable hunt for a serial killer.

Pacing 4 / 5

Very quick read. Not much to say about it pacing wise, it doesn’t really drag at any point in time.

Worldbuilding 3 / 5

Maniscalco does a really good job at established the skill set of the characters and didn’t have them doing things successfully outside of those skills. It was all fairly reasonable what each character could do based on their education. Likewise, Maniscalco clearly did her research with the Jack the Ripper case. I’m no expert on Victorian England (its a bit later than my time periods of choice), but nothing popped out to me as definitely out of place. While my expertise isn’t in Victorian Forensics, I am quite literally two weeks from being handed my degree in biological anthropology, so I know quite a bit about forensics in general, and nothing popped out and pissed me off in terms of inaccuracy.

Characters: 5 / 5

Audrey Rose is an incredible protagonist. She has the perfect balance of believable flaws and incredible capabilities. I was also impressed with the authors ability for both Audrey Rose and Thomas to have a full range of emotions and be well rounded characters that break the stereotypes of Victorian England in a realistic way that feels genuine. Both of them make mistakes, and both of them hold some arrogance and pride, but they both admit to their faults when mistakes are made. Audrey Rose is undoubtedly a strong woman, but the author does not need to have her never be upset or afraid to make it so, she has a full range of emotions and yet the reader never doubts her strength. As a side note, Thomas owns my ass.

I’d recommend for:

Fans of the show Bones, Historical Dramas, Criminal Minds or just fun history murder teenagers.

Would I travel here?

Can’t say Victorian England is for me, but I’d definitely go to hang out with Audrey Rose and Thomas.

Overall Thoughts:

As a biological anthropology major who’s taken my share of forensic classes, and a lover of historical drama TV shows, when I saw this book being recommended by a friend of a friend I couldn’t resist the urge to check it out despite being a bit out of my usual comfort zone. And I am SO glad I did! Definitely a good fun quick bite of a book to hold me over. It is important to note that they aren’t shy about the nitty gritty of autopsy and bodies, so if thats not for you, maybe pass on this one!

See you next week!

Katya

#stalking jack the ripper #kerri maniscalco #4 stars #katyas reviews #bookstagram #book review #books #booklr #bookblr

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daddys-little-fox-boy · 5 years

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ABO clothing norms headcanons

((Mostly applicable to omega men and alpha women, being the furthest culturally from whats commobly recognized IRL))

Y'aaall I love ABO worlbuilding so fucking much and one of my favorite things to set up in a new RP is clothing norms between the various dynamics across cultures and time periods so I thought I might jot down some of my favorite ideas!

Of course as a nonbinary person myself I hope it goes without saying that I support all clothes options for all genders, but also acknowledge that for the foreseeable future in most of the world, gendered clothing expectations exist in various levels. This is only my thoughts on cultural norms in some of my favorite settings. Additionally my area of expertise is Regency through Edwardian western clothing so anyone more knowledgeable about other times and places feel free to add!

-In general, historically speaking, alpha and beta men, and beta and omega women, tended to dress very similar- Especially for people among lower classes. For most, a betas dress and an omegas dress would be one in the same. Even if there were distinctions it would be mostly about esthetics than shape, since their forms are already very similair. However, with status comes excess. In a culture that mirrors patriarchy, and alphas hold more status, then higher quality materials or quantity of ornamentarion might be present.

*For omega men and alpha women though there is generally a lot more diversity. Take for example mid Victorian England. Corsets for men (alphas and betas) have gone out of style some years ago but would still be very popular for omega men, since it brings in the waist to accentuate their naturally wider hips. They're also still wearing the more trim and fitted coats popular at the turn of the century, and still wear their coats with long, almost skirted tails. They rarely take up the all black scheme that became popular in the late Victorian era since they weren't held to the same fear of femininity than sire men were. Instead their coats and vests were often made from the same shades and fabrics that a carrier woman would wear. Dresses might be seen for formal occasions among the upper class, but work was a reality for most Victorian women in our world and thus would very much be a reality for omega sons. For lower, working and middle class boys, a sturdy skirt might be worn but trousers were the norm.

*For Alpha women in the same time and era, corsets were a rarity. Since so much of Victorian thought on women came from their supposed weakness as those able to carry children and an alpha woman has no such ability, there's little need to protect her "weaker" body. They were the first to adopt walking skirts and the blouse and skirt Edwardian combination so often seen in the early 1900s. They wore suit coats more like sire men did, and took more to the somber color sceme, but as their omega brothers kept the older colors and patterns alive in their clothes, alpha women tended to favor founces, pintucks and ruffles on their shirts long past when they went out of fashion with sire men.

*Long and short hair both cycle rapidly as being fashionable for the two throughout the 19th century

*in many fashion trends around the world, form and color/pattern are what divide an article by gender. For example a man and woman's kimono seems very similar to someone not familiar with the clothing, but the pattern of fabric and style of obi and how it's tied can denote gender as well as age. Thus, depending on wether a culture puts more emphasis on primary or secondary sex, a male omega or female alpha might often find their clothing to be, for example, a somber, neutral colored kimono with an obi tied in a way considered more elbarote than what a beta or alpha male would wear.

*with Modern clothing becoming more diverse in day to day wear, there's still articles or times where clothing distinctions are still seen. Since men's suits still resemble what was made standard in the 1800s, a male omega will still find suits for him sewn with long, a-line seams and looser fitting pants, also stylish for Alpha women (I just really love commraderie between alpha women and omega men and the overlap they often feel with one another). Feel free to add any of your own thoughts or favorite looked from your own world's, original or fanfic!

#Abo #alpha/beta/omega #omegaverse #abo headcanons

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cloversreblogs · 5 years

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My favourite parts of the Hetalia fandom:

Historical Hetalia! I can get lost in the Historical Hetalia tag for days, awed at how intricate these historical headcanons are, plus I get to learn something new every time I search them! These historical hetalia works are a culmination of dedicated research stemming from years of expertise. Hetalia was able to give the historical aspect an edge by not only depicting the classic historical eras used by writers such as Victorian and Roman, but the characters who stemmed from multiple cultures meant that even more obscure periods of time are given love, analysis and care. From the patterns of the clothing to the interactions with historical figures, Historical Hetalia is truly a wonder.

The alternate universes. Hidekaz Himaruya giving the nations human names allowed many fans to be able to do human AUs, and with human AUs came the potential of, well, a lot more AUs. Because Hetalia doesn’t have much of a main plot other than an overarching narrative, the Hetalia characters are perfect to be able to be borrowed into another story, and these characters have their own central conflicts as well. England deals with crippling isolation, France wishes to live a life with love and family, Prussia is a man who had everything but lost everything. All these conflicts translate so well to AUs!

Philosophy about the nature of immortality and nationhood. Hetalia no doubt has a unique view of immortality as well as the responsibilities that stem from this. The Davie comic had America befriending a boy named Davie, but once America saw Davie again he had died, even though America himself was still a child. What I love about this comic was the slice of life element. Too many times you have leaders of nations in fiction who do not talk with their people at all because they’re too busy fighting some other nation, so seeing the personification of a nation be portrayed in Davie is such a breath of fresh air.

#hetalia #hetalia fandom

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mattpitman · 4 years

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Flummox.

There is a lot of confusion out in the world at the moment. We seem to be heading back to school in two weeks and I am worried that things will go back to how they were and much of the progress we have made in the past 2 months may be lost. I am grateful again, to live in this state (Victoria) and I feel the cautious approach was an educated way forward. As a science teacher I appreciate administering more tests, collecting more data, and conducting further analysis. But it seems that educated way of managing a serious pandemic might be lost in the Twitter feeds and Facebook posts of some others.

Either way, face to face or remote, continuous learning is so important.

Education is so important.

This weekend as I looked at the crowd forming outside Parliament House I thought: did our system let these people down? Who organised this random group? Are they just antagonists? A group of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and full-time Facebook posters?

Why haven’t they realised that is not Bill Gates’ house?

Education is so important.

Then there has been the absolute joke that stands for professional journalism. One Victorian newspaper in particular (no names, but I think you probably know), has had an absolute awful run of late; prediction disguised as fact and opinion disguised as policy. Those articles and those “journalists” are as dangerous as the virus. Dragging us further and further apart and away from the truth while masquerading as honest.

Why would you write and publish such rubbish?

Education is so important.

I am a bit of a “word nerd”. I love trying to bring back words that I subjectively believe do not get the frequency they deserve. The eye-rolls from my VCE students usually confirm that I am on to a winner. The word this week is: Flummox.

Flummox is to “confuse someone so much that they do not know what to do”.

Those protests, in my opinion, demonstrated a lack of critical thinking and autonomous thought. Adults who followed rather than determining their own path and who sort truth from their news feed. Future citizens need to be more equipped to deal with the onslaught of misinformation that has increasingly become the norm. I want citizens who ask before acting and question when flummoxed.

Looking at the confusion that is being created and the manner in which select “adults” are coping with it all, I can’t imagine what a young person is thinking as they try to digest everything that is thrown at them each day. Those protests and those articles, if nothing else, made me much more determined to ensure my students are constantly being challenged to question every time they join my classes online, face to face or otherwise.

I recently stumbled across (while randomly reading), Kent Beck’s article “The Product Development Triathlon” on Medium. Kent has a lot of ideas floating around the internet but the concept in this article is his 3x model for product development: explore, expand and extract.

“Explore: Successful exploration is unpredictable, so the highest expected value strategy is to reduce the cost of experimentation and put a little investment into many, uncorrelated experiments. If you’re lucky, one of these experiments turns out to be unexpectedly successful, which leads to:

Expand: Unanticipated bottlenecks appear. All you have time for is to eliminate the next bottleneck just before it derails you. Once growth becomes routine, it’s time to:

Extract: now the shape of the problem and solution spaces are clear. One euro in equals three euros out. Playbooks emerge: here’s how you roll out the service in a new city.”

Doesn’t this look a little like the transition to remote learning?

As a sector we dabbled in online learning, flipping a classroom here, trying an app or two there, then...

Drastic changes occur rapidly as our experimentation takes off and becomes the predominant method of delivery and communication. Those who had experimented more were perhaps better off than those who didn’t so much. Throughout his period we’ve come to bottleneck after bottleneck and managed to keep our classes running and our heads above water. In many cases we have also improved and increased the quality of our pedagogy and developed robust, contemporary learning programs. We are now in...

Extract. The “shape of the problem” is clear. We must maintain the ground we have covered as we return to school.

It might actually be more accurate to call this period that is approaching “explore”. I feel more than ever we are ready to take bigger risks and challenge what a lesson looks like. Our mindsets have shifted from purely “does this address the curriculum?” to “does this benefit the learner?” We can’t risk returning to a predictable way of operating. We need to explore for our students sake.

Finally.

I recently observed a huge increase in a student’s result on a formative assessment task. At first I was sceptical, I did some quick Google checks to ensure there weren’t obvious signs of plagiarism, but the student had produced those responses and completed that task by themselves. A parent teacher phone call confirmed that the student had sat quietly and completed the task without any additional assistance. I asked a student what had changed and they replied:

“I don’t have to worry about other students any more. I can ask you questions whenever I want. Asking questions really helped. I wasn’t worried about not knowing the answer because we talked about it already and I knew what I needed to do this time”.

Remote learning has removed the “noise” for this student and allowed them to perform at a much higher level.

I can’t and won’t say that remote learning works for everyone, but removing some of the “noise” created an environment of clarity, allowing this student to ask questions and avoid confusion. In the classroom, this particular student was so confused (flummoxed?) they likely didn’t know where to start.

Is some of that confusion my fault, of course! I am on my own learning journey, consistently trying to be better. The key is reflection. This change up has definitely provided me plenty of opportunities to take stock and re-evaluate. To stop and realise. This reflection is essential as we head back towards that classroom again. The next two weeks will be dedicated to designing my own “return to school program” in order to cater for all of my students: those who have embraced online and those who are desperate to return.

This pandemic is a horrible thing, but for this student (and myself) it provided the environment they needed to succeed. I am hoping there are plenty more student success stories to come as we continue to provide continuous learning programs all over the country. As we continue to explore, expand and extract we are all redefining what teaching is and what education looks like in 2020 and beyond.

Flummox is to “confuse someone so much that they do not know what to do”.

To flourish is to “grow or develop successfully”.

Whether it’s online or offline, let’s get all students from flummox to flourish.

Here’s a few things that have inspired me this past week as an educator and a leader:

Haileybury Teachers of the Future: Science

Haileybury are a school community that explored online learning before all of this happened and are kind enough to share their expertise in these webinars. The Science team delivered a very insightful program this week and the Junior School team are lined up for Thursday 21st May @ 4pm. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gr6cFaK

Artificial Intelligence(AI) in K-12

(https://emma-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/paqab/71de919fd20c5e29fc83197664a59888/CoSN_AI_Report_2020_R8_4.24.pdf)

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) released this fascinating report exploring the augmentation of learning with A.I. rather than replacing the teacher. Well worth a look!

HGSE: Education now

(https://www.gse.harvard.edu/education-now)

Harvard University Graduate School of Education have been offering some great webinars early (for Australia) on Thursday mornings covering a variety of topics. Upcoming this week is “Teaching to Navigate Challenge and Uncertainty," a conversation with Sarah Dryden-Peterson (Ed.D.’09) about preparing young people — and ourselves — to adapt to change, confront inequities, and strengthen our communities in a time of turmoil. All of the previous offerings are available on the website. I highly recommend last weeks episode which featured current students on the panel.

Game Changers Podcast

(https://soundcloud.com/user-127023293/season-1-epilogue)

Adriano and Phil wrap up the first series of the podcast and set the stage for the second series which releases this week.

Image: dictionary.com (https://www.dictionary.com/e/s/funny-words/#flummox)

#education #theexistingreality #flummox #reflection #randomthoughts #random

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sneez · 5 years

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1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9

oh wiles you devious devil i see how it is. i will do all the ones i havent done yet :~D i love you enormously

1. Who is your favourite historical person?

oh NO do i have to choose......i have multiple so i’ll put them all. none of them will be any surprise! my current and persistent favourites are henry vi, 15th king of england; fryderyk chopin, polish pianist and composer; horatio nelson, british naval admiral; and a recent acquisition, joseph merrick, a victorian man with severe deformities.

3. What is your country most infamous for in history?

so, so many things. infinite things. unsurprising things, given that it was the head of a worldwide empire that behaved in a very similar way to all other empires across history, except on a larger scale; but still. many bad things.

4. Favourite historical era?

ooh i have multiple again!!! the wars of the roses is probably my area of greatest expertise, given that i studied it extensively for two years; but i also love the golden age of the british navy and the romantic era.

5. Favourite weapon?

CANNON

6. Military unit?

i don’t really have a favourite military unit i’m afraid! i’m more interested in civilian life and personal history than battles (although that’s not to say i don’t like battles. i Really like battles. but i prefer the ‘personal life’ sections on wikipedia)

8. What is the last thing you have read, listened to, or spoken of with historical reference?

today i read an entire book about joseph merrick, which was absolutely wonderful. it arrived at 11 in the morning and i read it until 9 in the evening with a break for dinner! i tend to interact with historical stuff pretty much all the time though. i’m thinking about it 24/7 at least!!

11. Have you ever participated in reenactment? What it was like?

i have not but i would love to!!! i really want a suit of armour :~(

15. Were the history classes taught in an interesting way in your school, college, or university? What would you do to improve them if you were the teacher/lecturer?

in general they were smashing, at least at an advanced level! gcse history was a bit perfunctory but that’s not surprising. it was great at A level though, which is when i was first inspired by history! i had the privilege too of attending a very liberal school, which meant there was no beating about the bush in terms of educating us on the british empire. we learned a lot about slavery and other relevant things. i think the best sort of improvement would be teachers with more specialist knowledge on the subjects they’re teaching, but that’s not really plausible until university.

20. Who, if anyone, is your historical crush?

o h n o ...............i have a lot................definitely nelson, definitely chopin, and joseph merrick as well. henry vi i just want to befriend and hold in my loving arms :,{

21. What is your favourite history-based game?

i don’t play many games but i watched a lot of footage a few years ago of someone playing a wars of the roses game, which i have mostly forgotten the details of but looked very interesting! i was a little miffed that they didn’t have named characters to represent real figures from the period but i suppose that would be a lot of effort.

22. [random historical fact about the place you’re living in right now]

mary queen of scots was imprisoned here for a while! she’s said to still haunt the area. nice!

23. What’s your favourite historical song or song containing historical references?

(coughs) horrible histories english kings and queens song (coughs). also BRUNEL by the men that will not be blamed for nothing!!! :^D i’m sure there’s many more but i can’t think of them.

26. Who do you think is a forgotten hero we should know about and admire?

can i say joseph merrick? i’m saying joseph merrick. he’s not really forgotten but he’s not given the attention he deserves i think! he inspires me so much.

#i love you wiles!!!!!!! i love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#asks #reketty

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whetstonefires · 5 years

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Bruce vs Alfred

Oh wow nonny. 😂 You are not pitching slowballs.

I mean I could just say ‘Bruce’ and call it a day but where’s the fun in that.

(I love how all the asks I got for this meme picked the versus option rather than + or ‘or,’ because it’s certainly the most fun but also the one where I have to justify my answers and therefore just wind up hedging myself in a circle because what is objective reality? Not this that’s for sure.)

Okay, so the challenge here is 1) any contrivance used to get them to fight seriously will directly impact the outcome and 2) Alfred’s power level is impossible to meaningfully determine.

Alfred Pennyworth once punched out Deathstroke. Alfred Pennyworth also ran away in a panic to get the 14-year-old next door while Bane was breaking the Bat. Alfred has a murky past working for the British Government and has famously professed a willingness to shoot to kill. Alfred is somewhere between 65 and 140 years old.*

Alfred Pennyworth raised Batman as his third career, and his only real edges are 1) willingness to use lethal force (not applicable against this opponent) and 2) he knows Batman and his methods far better than Bruce knows him.

Bruce on the other hand is larger, stronger, in better practice both mentally and physically, and experienced with far more forms of combat, and Alfred’s kid. (Since the ask says ‘Bruce’ we’ll assume he doesn’t get all his bat toys.)

If you could somehow induce a state in Alfred where he had access to all his expertise on the subject of Bruce but was still willing to kill him…uh, then canon actually says he still lost. Although that was in part because Robin’s mortal peril made Batman panic and get a burst of strength. So maybe one-on-one? But Supervillain Alfred was really buff and had psychic powers, which seems like it throws the odds kind of a lot.

That was the Silver Age anyway.

Red Rain/Bloodstorm/Crimson Mist is an Elseworld and thus also technically irrelevant. But it’s the one where in spite of having staked Bruce at his own insistence, and then regretted later bringing him back because he was no longer himself, and joining a rag-tag team of vampire hunters to put down Evil Vampire Batman, Alfred Pennyworth still chose to spend his last moments spending his lifeblood on resurrecting Bruce again.**

That’s how firmly pro-Bruce-being-alive Alfred is. The edge he can gain from sheer ruthlessness just does not apply here.

It could be neat to put late-20s secret agent Alfred up against late-20s Bruce via time shenanigans and see what happened, especially because there’s a reasonable likelihood Bruce would at some point recognize who he was up against and be thrown off his game, but because of the direction time moves in none at all that Alfred would recognize Bruce.

Of course, the fact that he equally could never have heard of Batman and would necessarily be taken off guard by this man’s lunacy would be a great disadvantage….

Anyway that one would be fun, but I can’t call it. Too little Action Alfred data.

He also loses most of their battles of will, canonically, though of course a lot of that is because they’re usually arguing about what Bruce should do, and he has a lot more control over the outcome than Alfred. The last word, as it were.

In a battle of wits, I will give Alfred 70/30 odds. In a battle of wits with no real stakes, 90/10. I believe that Alfred could set a trap that Bruce would fall right into. Not only because he trusts Alfred and would ignore obvious warning signs of Trap if he knew the situation was under Alfred’s control, but because Alfred would know how to avoid leaving signs that Batman would consider suspicious.

I also believe that considering his total control over most of Bruce’s life, if Alfred ever decided to destroy him, he could succeed without it ever coming to a direct physical engagement. This would be more in the line of spy activity anyway.

That would be interesting, because not only could Alfred tear Bruce’s entire life apart with minimal effort, if he did so without additionally poisoning him to death or otherwise taking one of his many openings to include a component of physical debilitation, and Bruce then came after him…Alfred is also in a position and of a skillset to verbally devastate Bruce to the point that he just gave up. Just went down and didn’t get up again.***

(It is possible to read this as the ultimate arc of the Nolan trilogy tbh, though Bruce’s characterization was so incoherent by the end there that idek.)

Jason would probably cross the line from watching in awed envy to Genuinely Uncomfortable at some point, if he was looking on. It would be brutal.

But on the basic versus level, I’m pretty sure that if Bruce came at Alfred feeling like giving him a beatdown, the only way Alfred was getting out of this without a lot of damage is if he happened to have a taser (or other fast-acting theoretically-nonlethal incapacitating device) in his hand at the time, and deployed it promptly. And even then, only if whatever made Bruce feel extra violent also made him kinda dumb.

*There’s no real likelihood he’s 140, but because he’s composed of Stock British Tropes canon writers keep including bits that suggest he lived through the Late Victorian period, or at least the Edwardian Age, so there is canon support.

**Vampire Batman went on to eat Dick Grayson’s parents. Because go big or go home I guess.

***The fact that Outsider Alfred did not do more of this is attributable to many factors, from ‘Silver Age Alfred had only known Bruce a few years’ to ‘they decided the Outsider was Alfred after inventing him already’ to ‘that was not the style of the times.’ The home coffin delivery by robot Batman and Robin thing was pretty dark tho.

#ask meme #versus #bruce wayne #alfred pennyworth #comics #meta #the outsider #vampire batman #okay this was delayed #but it is done #a nonny mouse #ask #batfam

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