Anne McCaffrey really woke up one day and decided that dragon and solar panel can absolutely go in the same sentence and that this fantasy sci-fi setting should go on 20 books and spread on a chronology that spans on millennia from the arrival of humans on an exoplanet to the moment the new civilisation don't even remember they come from somewhere else and that's very sexy of her
Need this incredibly badly right now.
reblog and put your results in the tags: i made a “what type of bender are you” quiz (atla) except its one where a lot of effort and research was put into it so that the results could actually be accurate. enjoy!!!
Cornell University Press is having a flash sale today only, 22 June 2020.
Every book is priced at $12.34 US. with code 091234.
My regular readers may be especially interested in:
Robert Parkers “On Greek Religion”: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801477355/on-greek-religion/#bookTabs=1 The hardcover is regularly priced at $92.95 and the paperback is regularly priced at $30.95.
Jörg Rüpke‘s “On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome”: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501704703/on-roman-religion/#bookTabs=1 The hardcover is regularly priced at $49.95 and the paperback is regularly priced at $24.95.
As one might expect, there’s some interesting medievalist stuff too.
Viðar Pálsson’s Language of Power: Feasting and Gift-Giving in Medieval Iceland and Its Sagas: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780935995213/language-of-power/#bookTabs=1
Jon Vidar Sigurdsson’s Viking Friendship: The Social Bond in Iceland and Norway, c. 900-1300: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501705779/viking-friendship/#bookTabs=1
New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780935995237/new-norse-studies/#bookTabs=1
Jenny Jochens Women in Old Norse Society: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801485206/women-in-old-norse-society/#bookTabs=1
Theodore M. Andersson’s The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (1180–1280): https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801477829/the-growth-of-the-medieval-icelandic-sagas-11801280/#bookTabs=1
Paganism in the Middle Ages: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9789058679338/paganism-in-the-middle-ages/#bookTabs=1
And, of special interest to a few of my mutuals:
Marcelle Thiébaux’s Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479694/stag-of-love/#bookTabs=1
Let’s consider Lan Wangji learning to love touch thanks to Ah Yuan… We know he has never been comfortable with physical contact, but with time Ah Yuan starts to bring it out on him until it becomes another part of himself.
Like, the moment he took the child to gusu he kept him between his arms, with the excuse that the boy was scared, and lonely, and hurt, and so feverish he could die so he needed comfort… and yes, he had to go through his own punishment and heal his own wounds, but after much begging and pleading (and ater Lan Xichen insisted on his behalf), they allowed Ah Yuan to be, at least, in the same room as rich-gege, sometimes even within Lan Zhan’s arm reach, so he’d hold little Ah Yuan’s hand as he slept the pain on his back away.
And then, when he was secluded and hidden away to reflect on what he had done, Ah Yuan was kept secret with him. As he gained his mobility again and stopped feeling sick and disoriented 100% of the time, Lan Zhan recuperated some of his discipline, and forgot how to bring/ask for comfort. Therefore, he made a promise to start to learn how to do it.
In the beginning, when Ah Yuan cried and cried because he had hurt himself or because he missed his family, Lan Zhan would watch him silently, or sit next to him, rubbing his back as soothingly as he could. Ah Yuan would drop himself across his lap, or curl onto it, crying earnestly onto his chest. From then on, Lan Zhan would scoop him into his arms if the boy every cried. His hand learnt by itself to cup the back of the boy’s head, and that it’d bring a sense of protection to the little kid.
He made a promise to never let Ah Yuan feel unprotected again. No matter at what cost.
One time, Ah Yuan got a tiny cut on one of his fingers and came running to him, teary eyed and suffocated, holding the finger up as if it was burning.
“You have to heal it!” Ah Yuan pleaded, but Lan Wangji could only blink at him, without understanding. “You have to kiss it better!”
And Lan Wangji has never been able to deny this little boy anything, not since he rescued him from a premature death. He brought his little hand close to him and left a feather touch of his lips on the wound, even if the touch didn’t feel all that natural to him. Ah Yuan smiled, satisfied, and left to keep playing whichever game he had made up.
That time, Lan Wangji learnt that kisses had some sort of magic in them, and that they could heal.
Of course, Lan Zhan has to take care of the boy’s hygiene. They bathe in the river together, and Lan Wangji rediscovers, from a completely different point of view, what parents have to do for their kids, and at which times they have to function in their kid’s behalf. He comes to accept that intimacy and to sustract the uneasiness it’d bring into his chest if it were anyone else. Bodies are natural, in the end. There’s nothing gross or shameful in them. Maybe that’s the hardest part for him to learn.
Ah Yuan grows a bit, and his hair with him. That’s how Lan Zhan finds himself combing Ah Yuan’s knots off his mane, shushing the boy after an unintentionaly sharp tug, and smiling softly when the boy hums pleasedly.
It becomes a part of their routine, after that, to sit with the sunset’s light before them, combing Ah Yuan’s hair straight and listening to the sound of chirping birds and the trickling of the river nearby. At some point, Ah Yuan requests to do the same to rich-gege’s hair, so Lan Zhan lets his hair loose and closes his eyes, allowing the little boy to stand at his back and brush his already brushed hair until it’s as even as the surface of their dining table.
Some mornings, Ah Yuan would find seating space on Lan Zhan’s lap while he plays inquiry, and Lan Wangji would move Ah Yuan’s little fingers on the strings to ask Wei Ying’s spirit the same questions he’s been asking for months, to which they receive no answer. Every time, Ah Yuan would giggle and try to play by himself, or watch mesmerized as Lan Zhan did it himself. The wounds in Lan Zhan’s chest wouldn’t bleed so deliberately with Ah Yuan near him, listening without understanding to all he has to say.
When they were finally allowed to reunite with the rest of the sect, Lan Zhan had grown an habit of holding Ah Yuan’s hand as they walked up and down the mountains, or to help him up the stairs. He walked up to the main gates of cloud recess with Wen Yuan holding his hand. Before they stepped in, he told the little boy:
“From now on, your name will be Lan Yuan. Understood?”
Lan Yuan took his thumb out of his mouth and nodded. Lan Qiren frowned when he spotted father and son, hand in hand, walking into their sect, into their home, breaking a few hundred unwritten rules (and others that were written too, but Lan Wangji had paid debt for all those already).
By becoming a Lan, Lan Wangji had to give the boy his forehead ribbon, which’s meaning and symbolism he explained superficially, for Ah Yuan wasn’t old enough to fully understand. Still, he tied the headband around his head, carefully, telling him he couldn’t take it off from now on, and that only he and his family could touch it. Lan Yuan nodded, understanding. Lan Zhan’s fingertips touched the boy’s cheek momentarily, offering him a smile.
Those gestures and touches started to come natural to him with time, but with time Lan Yuan growed, and as he aged he was told he couldn’t t act like a little kid anymore, that there’s things he could and couldn’t do, love he could require and comfort he had to bring to himself. However, when he’s eight, he starts to get nightmares, and although he doesn’t want to ask Lan Wangji for help or wake him up in the middle of the night for some silly reason, he still curls at the edge of Lan Wangji’s bed (he sleeps in the jingshi with him until he’s around fourteen, when he joins in the other disciples’ dormitories) and leaves before the man wakes up, hiding back in his own bed.
It’s like this how Lan Zhan finds him one night: sitting by the bed with his head buried between his arms, a hand curled on his bedsheets. He draws him off the floor and into the bed with him. Lan Yuan is so sleepy that he doesn’t have the energy to excuse himself, or to complain that he’s a big boy and doesn’t need to, and nuzzles close to Lan Wangji’s warm body instead, sighing happily as the man embraces him with an arm.
Lan Wangji discovers there’s no specific age to stop needing your loved ones, or to ask for their love. He also learns that if he holds Lan Yuan really close, nothing bad can happen to him. Not in any existing way.
By the time Lan Yuan becomes Lan Sizhui, most of the gestures Lan Wangji learnt to be able to love him right have been left forgotten in their past. However, he can still encourage the now teenager with a squeeze on the shoulder, or by pressing a light hand at the bottom of his back.
He learns that there’s no need for touches to show affection, because there’s a thousand different ways to let Ah Yuan know he cares about him. He brings him gifts from his trips, leaving them by Ah Yuan’s table in the dormitories, the way he always dreamt he’d do to Wei Ying, at some point or another. While they eat, he puts more and more food in Ah Yuan’s bowl so he grows stronger, so he’s never sick or feeble again. Whenever Ah Yuan asks for a lesson of inquiry or to accompany him to feed their rabbits, Lan Wangji Mns, even if the boy is supposed to be somehere else. Sometimes, he’d ask for Lan Sizhui’s presence and he’d walk them to watch the sunset together, for no other reason than to enjoy each other’s company.
And it all pays off, really.
It pays off because Lan Sizhui trusts Hanguang-Jun with everything he has. When he needs help, he asks for it. When he doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he goes and learns from Lan Wangji’s wisdom. When he feels conflicted, he knows that Lan Wangji will listen to him, and help to all of his extent.
It pays off because Ah Yuan doesn’t cry anymore. Not in the way he did when he pleaded for his uncle, his aunt, the family that wasn’t going to be back. It pays off because he has the sweetest, purest of smiles, because there’s something soft and tender on his expression that has been crafted on him with pure, unadulterated love.
It pays off in Lan Wangji’s heart, too. And when he finds Wei Ying again, it’s already easy for him to give him gifts, to grab his hand, to brush the hair off his face, to smile his way, to say yes, yes, I trust you, I love you, I’m never leaving you. And he thinks that, maybe, if he had learnt how to love long before, Wei Ying would have never died.
Maybe he would have been able to save Wei Ying like he had saved Ah Yuan, and like Ah Yuan had saved him.
Saoirse and Ben
Couldn’t stop sketching Song of the Sea.
does william laurence have a good singing voice?
I wanna say yes because that’s adorable, and on a related note do you think he sometimes absent-mindedly sings/hums old familiar sea shanties while working at menial tasks?
Because I do and this belief is very important to me
William Laurence absent-mindedly singing Heart of Oak under his breath as he does some manual labor task around camp is my new favorite thing.
“heart of oak UMMPH are our meeen heart of oak [THUNK] are our shiiips- Roland, catch hold of that strap there and toss the end back- yes, thank you- we aaaaalways are readyyyy…”
Also do you think aviators have their own shanties and working songs? They must! Someone needs to write some. Someone with more musical ability than me.
yesssss perfect And after the whole sorry affair with the dragon plague and stuff he stops singing, he doesn’t even hum - those of his crew who are still with him frown, and wait, and Emily makes a point of asking Temeraire for the words of the Captain’s favourite songs because she hopes she can tempt him to sing along if she starts. But the Captain just looks up from his maps, or the newest dispatch, and he furrows his brows and the new lines on his face grow deeper, the ones that only appeared when he stopped smiling, and he says: ‘Roland, keep it down’ and ‘Roland, mind your work’ and ‘Roland, I do not think this is appropriate’ and Emily sighs and finishes her task and goes to stand by the dragon’s head And Laurence remains grim, and angry, and scowling; for months and months all the way to New South Wales, and all the way across the continent and back, and when Tharkay leaves Emily holds her breath each time the Captain speaks and she listens for his breathing at night because she is waiting for him to break And then they get their valley, and they start building their new home, and the cattle is flourishing and the pavilion is taking shape, and one night as Emily lies wrapped in her blankets and pretends to be asleep she can hear Laurence quietly shift, and get up, and he sits by the dying fire and feeds it dry twigs, and at first Emily thinks she’s imagining things but then she’s sure she can hear him humming It’s not much, just the barest bones of the smallest melody, but Emily smiles and falls asleep a little easier And the next day she does her work more eagerly, and the men don’t scowl and curse quite as much, and Temeraire brightens and stops clawing at the ground And it’s not much, but for Emily, it’s more than enough, because after all this time, the Captain is singing again.
Timeline of the lives of the wolf359 namesakes. Long story short, Kepler is hella old.
Art plus history = cool ducking art
If you ever thought about starting a podcast, but felt stuck figuring out where to being, I wrote this for you. Three years of making @wolf359radio and @focusedafshow, I’ve learned a lot and packed as much of it as I could in this epic Medium post. If you like my article, please recommend it on Medium by pressing the green heart! Also, I’d appreciate if you’d share it with anyone you think would get value from it :) Podcasting has unequivocally changed my life for the better and I hope you consider letting it transform your world, too!
I’m pretty sure everyone knows who or what Peppa Pig is. If you do, you probably have watched it one time or another when you were little. I used to like it because of the simple vocabulary it has and it gave me great joy when I understood a whole episode in English.
If you’re a language learner you know how difficult it is to listen to shows or movies in your target language because they’re so fast. Peppa Pig is obviously a children’s show, but it has been translated into a lot of different languages that may help out any beginner in a language or anyone who wants to give a watch and see if they understand it! Peppa Pig - being a children’s show - uses slow speech and simple vocabulary that small children can understand, here’s a list of Peppa Pig in different languages you can watch on YouTube:
These are the ones that can be found on YouTube. Unfortunately, there are some languages missing but if anyone knows where one can watch them please feel free to add!
First Look at Tomm Moore’s New Film, ‘Wolfwalkers’
Cartoon Brew reports: Tomm Moore’s first two features, Cartoon Saloon’s The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, cemented his status as a storyteller and filmmaker of the first class, while boosting Ireland’s animation scene into the global limelight, earning him two Oscar nominations and countless other accolades. Now, with Wolfwalkers, Moore is ready to deliver what he describes as the “final panel of our Irish folklore triptych.”
It’s an idea that Moore has been developing for years. Wolfwalkers tells the story of 11-year-old Robyn Goodfellow, a young apprentice hunter who comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack of wolves. Her life changes though after she saves a native girl, Mebh, which leads to her discovery of the Wolfwalkers and transforms her into the very thing her father is tasked to destroy.As he has done with earlier works, Moore uses Celtic folklore as a window into our contemporary world. Thematic undercurrents of wilderness versus order, and man’s impulse to control nature, are key to the world of Wolfwalkers.
Embedded below is the film’s ‘concept trailer’. Enjoy!
Song of the Sea (2014)
