This video depicts a moment that is nearly impossible to observe: a sperm whale surfacing with a giant squid clenched between its teeth. These predators hunt at depths exceeding 800 meters, where light does not penetrate, and only biosonar directs the pursuit. Consequently, clear surface images are exceedingly rare.
This is, factually, the first footage of this that we have ever gotten. This has never been observed by a human being before in recorded history. The only reason we knew these whales ate those squids before was the beaks of the squids found in the stomachs of dead whales, and the battle scars on whales consistent with fighting giant squids.
My favorite thing about this clip is that, in the original uncropped footage, you can see her calf is right beside her, ascending from the depths along with her. Whale calves don’t dive until they’re taught by their mothers. It is very likely that this footage is of a mother whale teaching her calf to hunt on one of its very first dives.
When I saw this footage for the first time, I cried a little tbh.
Arising from the inky depths with a delicious giant squid snack… with mama.
I was too tired to have the focus for Dark Souls-ing in the last few days, so binge-played 1000xResist and now I feel like I'm been punched in the head.
Basically a walking simulator/visual novel, so don't go expecting complex gameplay, but HOLY FUCK.
For all of you looking for fiction with fucked-up complicated women who are somewhere on a spectrum from "morally grey" to "evil but sympathetic" (with the odd dip into "idealistic but destructive") having fucked-up dynamics with other fucked-up complicated women: 1000xResist has SO MANY of them. It has almost no characters who don't fit that archetype, in fact.
(I considered whether it passes the reverse-Bechdel test -- i.e. two male characters have a conversation that's not about a woman -- and I think it may juuust scrape past in a 5-second exchange in one of the flashbacks, but barely. There are very very few men in this story, for plot-related reasons.)
I found out afterwards that the development team were a devised theatre group who decided to start making a game when everything was shut down during the pandemic, and somehow this fully checks out (complimentary).
Do note the content notes from the devs: Photosensitivity Warning: Flashing Lights, Cursing and Crude Language, Generational Trauma, Acts of Violence and Terrorism, Disease Outbreak, Mention of Suicide, Mention of Animal Cruelty/Pet Death, Blood, Body Horror, Emotional Abuse, Bullying, Dead Bodies, Vomit, Drowning, Fire, Gore, Needles, Racism and General Mature Content.
(I would also add a specific note for torture, and for fucked-up mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships, that being one of the core elements of the game, along with the aforementioned generational trauma.)
A reminder that books make great gifts for readers. And of course a great gift for an author is a preorder for a forthcoming title. In my case that would be She Is Here—which I just saw as one of the recommended queer memoirs for 2026.
– She Is Here by @nicolagriffith: essays, poems, and stories that think rigorously about disability, gender, art, and power…
I hadn’t thought of SiH as a memoir before but when considering the interview, the poetry, and the essays—all of which are, on some level, autobiographical—then, yes, I suppose it is. So yet again I learn something about one of my own books from a reader :) I love that!
You can preorder the book in North America and the UK, and book professionals can download a galley from Edelweiss or Netgalley—though on the latter the galley will be archived at the end of the month, so there’s just one week left to take advantage of it. Enjoy!
An all-new Bundle featuring the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, the tabletop game of eldritch horror from Monte Cook Games based on Steve Shell and Cam Collins' Old Gods of Appalachia anthology podcast.
Had not been seeing these lately, but over the past few days have been spotting several out of the back windows.
Which is one cheering thing among various niggles and peeves -
Yesterday I was informed that my order from Boots was being delivered, and then got two texts saying they had tried to deliver it but no-one answered. WOT. There was somebody here all the time.
Also a text that my other package (fresh yeast via eBay) had been delivered (this comes through the letterbox) - no sign of this so presume it has gone to the wrong door, and so far nobody has come round to pop it through ours.*
However, at least the Boots parcel turned up today: address label had street number blurred so reasons for mistaking, usual postperson recognised name, possibly yesterday was a seasonal worker?
Other annoyance: Kobo ereader running very sluggish - though this does not seem to apply across all books, which is weird?? Anyway, I connected to wifi in order to update the software, as possibly bearing on the matter, and dash it, it synced a whole load of things I had already downloaded and I have been obliged to clean up the duplicates.
I am, though, grateful that Christmas grocery orders have been nothing missing and no substitutions except for 1 thing which was not at all critical. Also oops, the pudding I ordered was rather smaller than I anticipated, but I feel one can have too much Xmas pud, and there are mince pies, brandy butter, etc.
The Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude Book Club: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
From time to time I may post about the ways in which Wake Up, Dead Man interacts with some of the classic mysteries listed on the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude book club syllabus. The book club list is certainly a clue, but it’s also a bit of a red herring. Not all of the mysteries on this list play a major role in the film, and some of the mysteries that I think this film is most engaged with are not on this list.It’s not like nobody else has noticed these borrowings, but it amuses me to talk about them. We’ll start with one of the most obvious: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Spoilers for both Wake Up Dead Man and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd follow.
The moment Dr. Nat came up to the alcove saying, “Don’t touch anything,” and pushed Father Jud aside to get to the body…the MRA veteran cannot help but be reminded of the phone call that Dr. Sheppard fakes in order to be the first to get to the crime scene so that he can push the dictaphone out of the way before anyone else sees it. So I was thinking, hm, what is he trying to hide here. And I wasn’t that surprised to find out that Dr. Nat was the one who really stabbed him.
From time to time I may post about the ways in which Wake Up, Dead Man interacts with some of the classic mysteries listed on the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude book club syllabus. The book club list is certainly a clue, but it’s also a bit of a red herring. Not all of the mysteries on this list play a major role in the film, and some of the mysteries that I think this film is most engaged with are not on this list.It’s not like nobody else has noticed these borrowings, but it amuses me to talk about them. We’ll start with one of the most obvious: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Spoilers for both Wake Up Dead Man and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd follow.
So. The thing that really elevates The Murder of Roger Ackroyd above typical clue-puzzle mysteries (including many of Christie’s own) is what this novel does with narration and point of view. The book is narrated by Dr. Sheppard, a close friend of the deceased Roger Ackroyd and the town doctor of King’s Pyland. He has a sister named Caroline who was an early protoype for Christie’s Miss Marple. There’s a point close to the end of the novel, after Poirot has already revealed a lot of the information he’s uncovered, where Dr. Sheppard mentions to Poirot that he’s been writing about the case–inspired, he says, in part by the novels published by Poirot’s original sidekick/narrator Hastings. Poirot says, fabulous! Let me read it. Dr. Sheppard, flattered by Poirot’s interest, hands the detective his manuscript–which is exactly the same book that we’ve been reading. Poirot reads the same book we just read. And it confirms for him something he already suspected, and which we are soon going to be kicking ourselves for not having figured out: Dr. Sheppard is the murderer.
So The Murder of Roger Ackroyd isn’t just about who killed Roger Ackroyd; it’s about how murder mysteries work and, by extension, how reading works. After finishing a clue-puzzle novel, unless we guessed right, we end up feeling stupid for not having been able to figure out who the killer was. But in fact, MRA shows us exactly why we can’t solve the mystery the way the detective does. We are unable to get outside of Sheppard’s perspective; we can only see what he wants us to see, and pay attention to what he points us toward. We trust him–and not just because Sheppard and Poirot are explicitly presented to us as a doctor/detective team that replicates the Holmes/Watson partnership (and the Poirot/Hastings partnership, which itself is introduced in Mysterious Affair at Styles as a replication of the Holmes/Watson partnership, though tragically Hastings initially believes that he’s the Holmes in that team). We trust Sheppard because you have to trust the narrator to some extent in order to read any narrated story.
Yes. There are unreliable narrators. But even unreliable narrators have to give you a basic fact pattern that you can trust, or else the story becomes meaningless. An unreliable narrator usually tips you off about the fact that he’s unreliable; and in a book with an unreliable narrator, the author will usually offer you indirect access to a different perspective on that fact pattern. For instance, the narrator of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is very unreliable when it comes to her self-presentation and in her worldview, but she does not tell the reader about things that didn’t happen or deny things that did. To be a paranoid enough reader to spot Dr. Sheppard as the killer, you’d have to spend so much time challenging everything he says that you’d never make it through the novel. Poirot knows Sheppard is the killer partly because of investigations that we haven’t seen him do–because obviously he’s concealing his true motives and actions from Sheppard, who he knows is the killer.
Anyway. So the fact that Wake Up Dead Man starts with Blanc reading Father Jud’s narrative about the Good Friday Murder immediately puts you on notice, if you’ve already read MRA. We’re primed to be suspicious of Father Jud’s voiceover narration, even more so when we discover that MRA is on the reading list AND that Blanc (who’s definitely read MRA) is the one who talked Father Jud into writing the narrative. But at the same time, Father Jud’s naration generates so much affection and sympathy for him as a character that we just can’t be as suspicious of him as we know we should be. So during the first section of the film, if you know MRA, you feel like I know this trick but I am still falling for it. And then when Blanc comes out after having read it and says, “Why’d you do it?” you have that moment of “oh fuck, it really WAS him all along”–until you realize it’s way too early in the film’s running time. And I like how Johnson doesn’t try to prolong that moment. He knows it can only be temporary. He knows we know he’s not going to reveal the killer that early.
I would put the casting of Andrew Scott in this film in kind of the same category of meta-red-herrings. If you know Scott from either Sherlock or Fleabag, then you have to expect that he’s going to play a major role in this film. Surprise, he’s a minor character who’s certainly weird and very funny but definitely not an Andrew Scott Character. But I digress.
Part of what MRA was trying to tell everyone is that there is really no such thing as “fair play”–and that readers don’t really want that anyway. What they want is the *illusion* of fair play–the belief that they *could* solve the case independently of the detective. But we can’t. We can guess, and if you read enough clue-puzzle mysteries, law of averages says sometimes we’ll be right. But we’re never *really* playing along–because we can’t really see the story world the way the detective sees it. Even if he is narrating.
…I don’t even go here but it is REALLY funny now that “Heated Rivalry” is on TV to watch the normies try to wrap their heads around the phenomenon of women being into m/m.
“Why are middle-aged straight women so into ‘Heated Rivalry’?” asks some fucking thinkpiece.
So, Good Omens the novel basically leaves out Jesus entirely. The TV adaptation includes a scene where Aziraphale and Crowley witness the crucifixion and briefly discuss how it got to this point. The temptation in the desert is referenced, but that’s all.
I understand and 100% concur with Gaiman’s decision not to really Go There. It would throw up barriers for viewers who aren’t Christian (or aren’t *still* Christian) while inevitably offending a significant number of viewers who are.
Nevertheless, my brain keeps asking me the question: what if Aziraphale was involved in the Nativity, the way Crowley got dragged into the Antichrist’s birth, because he was Heaven’s agent in the field? And what if, like the birth of the Adversary, it was…kind of a shitshow?
GABRIEL: Hey, Aziraphale, you know how these human things work. I’m supposed to go tell this woman she’s going to have a baby with the Holy Spirit. The Almighty suggested I ask you about how to break it to her. Got any pointers?
AZIRAPHALE: Uh…try to be kind?
GABRIEL: (checking his phone) Kind, got it.
AZIRAPHALE: And…and…I mean to say, that is, perhaps *explain* to her what the plan is, before you ask her to–
GABRIEL: ASK her?
AZIRAPHALE: Well…this is going to change…well, I mean everything, and it’s… it’s customary…to ask.
GABRIEL: OK. Be kind, explain, ask. Got it.
AZIRAPHALE: And be gentle! Reveal yourself…you know…gradually! They’re very easily frightened!
GABRIEL: (is already gone)
*****
MARY: (is minding her own business)
GABRIEL: (crashes through ceiling with full wingspan, halo, divine radiance) HAIL MARY FAVORED AMONG WOMEN!
MARY: AAAAAAAAAAAAGH
********
GABRIEL: Hey Aziraphale, can you let the humans know their Savior is being born tonight?
AZIRAPHALE: Is he really? How lovely! I’ll get started straightaway.
AZIRAPHALE: (disguises himself as a shepherd, goes out into the fields by night, low key starts talking to other shepherds about this family that just arrived in Bethlehem but they couldn’t find a hotel room and now they’re in a stable and the wife is having a rather special baby and wouldn’t it be lovely to go see them and maybe bring them something to eat)
GABRIEL: (watching from on high) Hurry up, you nitwit, she’s already fully dilated, they’re gonna miss it
AZIRAPHALE: What’s so special about THIS baby? Well, you see, that’s quite an intriguing question. How well up are you in your Isaiah?
GABRIEL: Fuck it. We’re going in.
SUDDEN MULTITUDE OF THE HEAVENLY HOST: GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST AND PEACE ON EARTH AMONG–
SHEPHERDS: AAAAAAAGH!!!
AZIRAPHALE: Oh for Heaven’s sake–
SHEPHERDS: RUN! RUUUUUNNNN!!!!
GABRIEL: (flying after them) BE NOT AFRAID!!!
LOCAL SNAKE: Well, that went down like a–
AZIRAPHALE: Oh hush.
Further headcanons :
* Gabriel is so embarrassed by the whole thing he asks Aziraphale to memory-wipe everyone who witnessed this debacle
* Crowley was there, though, and nothing’s wrong with HIS memory
* Decades later, Luke is running around collecting stories about Jesus. Crowley lures Aziraphale to a bar, gets him drunk, then introduces him to Luke.
* Aziraphale spills the whole story while Crowley gazes at him soulfully and Luke scribbles away
* Over the next millennium or so, Crowley dedicates significant time to ensuring that Luke’s version of the Nativity is the only one ever represented in popular culture
I've been too exhausted to do any of the semi-bespoke painting I half-promised over the summer, but I had a last-minute compulsion to make hand-printed cards because anything that looks like work went into it makes me appear marginally better.
You see? the cards say. An Effort.
I don't mind how they turned out. Sort of "the Dove of Peace is pissed and wants you to get your shit together."
Image: Classice Yule Log with three white candles, bedecked with boughs and ornaments (surrounded by silver reindeer).
HAPPY SOLSTICE to all who celebrate. And those who don't? I hope you had a lovely Sunday all the same.
Our Solstice was much as it is most years--a quiet, family affair. We have some traditions, the first of which is making rosettes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosette_(cookie)). I have attached the Wikipedia article if you have no idea what a rosette is--it is, in fact, a deep fried cookie. Personally, if done well, I think they taste amazing, like sugar and AIR. Because, basically, the batter is ultra, ultra thin and you use a cookie iron to to crisp up a lot of vanilla and sugar-flavored nothing. Our recipe actually comes from a class I took on Christmas cookie making several years ago, but very likely (this being Minnesota) comes by way of Norway, though possibly Sweden or Finland.
The cookie making class is memorable because I was the youngest person in the room. I really figured that probably I'd be the oldest, since I presumed things like rosette, pizelles, krumkaka, etc., were the sorts of things that grandma would pass on and, maybe, it skipped a generation. Nope. It was me an all older ladies and on older guy who kept telling everyone that he took the class hoping to pick up a lady. (Yep, he was that old.) Anyway, me and all the older folks all had a lovely time and I was really only there for the hidden rosette knowledge because everyone agrees there is "a trick to it."
And, there is.
The trick is making sure the irons are hot first--but also not too coated in oil. But that little layer of hot oil will, in fact, help them come off. In fact, ours often just fall off the iron into the bubbling hot oil. So, we always have to have tongs to hand.
Image: me patiently waiting for the bubbles to slow down the appropriate amount. Mason in the forground. Our kitchen all around and a few exampes of the cookies drying on the paper towels. The irons come in a lot of shapes--star and flower/rosette shown. Not pictured is the Christmas tree.
We never want the rosette process to be arduous so we only make as many was we feel up to, call it good enough, and then I usually make a fun lunch like deep-fried shrimp. We have charcuterie for our Solstice dinner meal, light our Yule log (pictured above), open presents, and then take a bit of the Yule light upstairs in a safe, insulated container and keep the light burning for the longest night.
I like to joke: if the sun came up on December 22, thank a pagan!
Our Solstice gifts are always books. There is a version of the Icelandic Yule Cat where the present you must recieve is not new clothing, but a book. We decided to adopt that tradition. Mason got a Terry Prachett book (and a gift certificate for Uncle Hugos) because he's been on a Pratchett kick lately; Shawn got the last and final Phil Rickman novel The Echo of Crows; and I got Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Hew Lemmy and Ben Miller. My gift is one I asked for because I've really enjoyed their podcast by the same name.
Also as is traditional, someone's present must include the Solstice wrench. It has been Mason for many years, now, in part, I think because we started using it to baffle a child who could very distinctly tell the shake of LEGOs.
You can keep your King's Cakes, we have the Solstice Wrench!!
By chance our friend John J. sent along a bunch of other book-related presents and so we opened those at Solstice as well.
Image: Shawn inspecting a surprise gift (one of many!) from our friend.
A lovely time all around.
So, again, I hope you all had a lovely Solstice. If not, we can all enjoy the return of longer days. More sunshine! Hooray!
The common or Mediterranean octopus, Octopus vulgaris, is native to UK waters but ordinarily in such small numbers it is rarely seen. A sudden increase in the population – a bloom – is caused by a combination of a mild winter followed by a warm breeding season in the spring. The ideal conditions meant that more of the larvae of the common octopus were likely to survive, said Slater, possibly in part fuelled by the large numbers of spider crabs that have also been recorded along the south coast in recent years.
(Oy! Ooo are you callin' octopus vulgaris?)
(We will just note that one of the novels by a certain Lady Anonyma featured Cornish wreckers and Sea Monsters.)
There were also
a record number of grey seals observed by the Cumbria Wildlife Trust, as well as record numbers of puffins on Skomer, an island off the coast of Wales famed for the birds.... the first Capellinia fustifera sea slug in Yorkshire, a 12mm mollusc that resembles a gnarly root vegetable and is usually found in the south-west. In addition, a variable blenny, a Mediterranean fish, was discovered off the coast of Sussex for the first time.
The DIE roleplaying game designed by the Image comic's creators, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, plus three volumes of adventures for an unbeatable bargain price!
So, I'm reading something about an abusive relationship. So toxic, in every tiny respect. But the commenters! You've got a handful of them happily chirping things like "Oh, Abuser is trying so hard! He's really just controlling because he's worried, but look, he's trying to make Abusee happy!" and we've got another handful saying things like "I don't get why Abusee doesn't just leave. I mean, he's in public, is he scared of getting hit? In public? Like, geez."
Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?
Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.
(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)
Over on Patreon I’ve posted three short stories—my gift to those who’ve supported me this year. If you’d rather, you can just buy the PDF or epub, WHAT MATTERS—monsters and heroes, dragons and princesses, and a young girl’s chemistry experiment going global—for $9.
Can they use their abilities in the course of their mandatory voluntary community service? Or maybe, the question is, how to use them without running into the bar on endangering other people or themselves?
Today's lunch: lamb chops which I cooked thusly, except that as I had no small bottles of white wine I used red, turned out very well; served with Greek spinach rice and padron peppers.
It turns out if you really want to raise the profile of your writers' union, all you need to do is announce LLM-generated works are eligible for awards, as long as they are not entirely LLM-generated.
NMIXX released a video containing both a holiday version of "Blue Valentine" (the same tune and lyrics, but with holiday-style backing music) and a rerecording of "Funky Glitter Christmas." Enjoy!
So, forging ahead with what looks like it’s becoming the 12 Days of Wake Up Dead Man over here, I have a follow-up post to the last one about the religious stuff which focuses specifically on three earlier mystery stories which I believe are referenced in this film (either intentionally or indirectly) and which don’t seem to have become part of the conversation (possibly because they are not on Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s book club reading list). They are:
“The Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
There is a common theme here; but if you haven’t seen the film yet, the theme itself is a bit of a spoiler. So I will put the rest of all this behind a cut tag. SPOILERS FOLLOW. BIG SPOILERS. ALL THE SPOILERS.
In re: The Moonstone intertext, I think you’ve pinpointed why the ending felt a bit…different to me, despite following the usual Benoit Blanc formula of sticking it to the rich assholes. (Spoilers!)
For the Solstice—which here in Seattle is 7:03 am tomorrow—I’ve made a special fiction bundle, three stories downloadable as either a PDF or epub. Two of the stories are snowy, one is not; one is grim, two are not; and there’s a dragon. That bundle will be available to Patrons, a special thank you for helping fund publicity efforts in the US reissue of Aud, the UK first publication of Aud, and up-coming She Is Here.
Speaking of which, a couple of the February events may have to be rescheduled. I can tell you more about that after the holidays but for now I’ll just say it’s not bad news. In fact it’s gobsmackingly, knock-me-down-with-a-feather, amazing news. Chortle.
Our tree is up and decorated—but not yet destroyed. Mainly because I haven’t had time to figure out any kind of new SFX. This year I may have to resort to a old favourite—maybe that dragon…
The cats are well, though very fighty. I think it’s partly the weather (endless drenching rain of atmospheric rivers, one after another) and partly the latest trio of raccoons who have been trundling fatly around our neighbourhood at night, trying to get into everything, including our house. George, sensibly, hides under the bed, but Charlie takes exception. He desperately—desperately!—wants to get out there and take them on and gets very cross when we won’t let him (pound for pound he’d be outweighed six to one). So he takes it out on George.
And speaking of rivers, Slow River and Ammonite will be reissued with spiffy new covers and bonus content in June next year—just in time for pride. I’m pretty pleased about that.
I have other news, too, some of it very pleasing—but that, too, can wait for January. Meanwhile, for the holiday season, I’m changing my website avatar to a winter wren. I love these little birds: like tiny feathery brown truffles I could pop in my mouth. It’s based on one I created for my black and white zoomorphics series. I really do have an outrageous number of those things now. One day I’ll figure out what to do with them. For now, back to stopping Charlie murdering George because he can’t murder the raccoons…
So, forging ahead with what looks like it’s becoming the 12 Days of Wake Up Dead Man over here, I have a follow-up post to the last one about the religious stuff which focuses specifically on three earlier mystery stories which I believe are referenced in this film (either intentionally or indirectly) and which don’t seem to have become part of the conversation (possibly because they are not on Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s book club reading list). They are:
“The Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
There is a common theme here; but if you haven’t seen the film yet, the theme itself is a bit of a spoiler. So I will put the rest of all this behind a cut tag. SPOILERS FOLLOW. BIG SPOILERS. ALL THE SPOILERS.
So all three of the above-named classic mysteries involve jewels. I’m sure all of you have deduced that this post is going to be about that giant freaking diamond that Prentiss spends his whole fortune on and then swallows. We’re gonna take ‘em in chronological order.
First up, Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone, an early and very popular prototype of the mystery novel which casts a long shadow over the genre in England. This partial summary is going to sound very familiar because it spawned so many imitations: in 1799, while serving as an officer in the British army in India, an aristocratic ne'er-do-well named John Herncastle hears a legend about a diamond that was once fixed in the forehead of a statue dedicated to the Hindu god of the moon in the temple at Somnauth. (The temple at Somnauth is real. The diamond, the statue, and as far as I know the moon god were invented by Collins.) This diamond is known as The Moonstone. During the long period of invasions and regime changes that preceded the arrival of the East India Company, the diamond was stolen out of the statue; and at that point, a legend arose that the diamond itself was cursed and that it would bring misfortune to anyone who possessed it. In 1799 at the Battle of Seringapatam, John Herncastle has the opportunity to loot this diamond, killing three people in the process, one of whom restates the Curse of the Diamond just before expiring. Back in England, John Herncastle becomes a social outcast because of this story; and 20 years later, he dies and leaves The Moonstone to his 18 year old niece, Rachel Verinder. The very night she receives her birthday present, the Moonstone is stolen out of her bedroom and disappears. This causes all kinds of trouble for Rachel and her near and dear until the diamond is finally tracked down and recovered–not by the English family who legally owns it, but by a group of 3 Brahmins whose sacred duty it is to find the stone and return it to the statue in the temple at Somnauth. The epilogue of this very long novel is a description of the ceremony in which the diamond is restored to its original location in the forehead of the statue, and the 3 Brahmins, their mission now complete, part company forever.
Throughout the novel, Collins plays around with the idea that the “curse” that comes with the diamond might be real in a metaphysical/supernatural sense. But the plot ultimately, I think, validates the last words of the witness who describes Herncastle’s theft of it in an old family paper: that “crime brings its own fatality.” The diamond brings misery to its owners because it excites human greed; but also because its status as a spoil of imperialism generates so much fear and guilt. Herncastle’s theft stands in for the larger crime of the East India Company’s ransacking of the subcontinent and the complicity in that of the British government, the crown, and the entire Victorian middle class. And to get to their happy ending, the protagonists of The Moonstone have to ultimately decide that they’re better off without it.
So there are two things about The Moonstone that I see showing up in Wake up Dead Man. One, obviously, is the idea of the diamond as the concrete form of all the evil caused by the love of money. The other is the association of the diamond with Grace, the “harlot whore.” The Moonstone is stolen out of Rachel’s bedroom between midnight and three o clock in the morning, a time when a single Victorian girl definitely should not have anyone in her bedroom. Rachel acts, after the theft is discovered, as if she has something to hide; and this underlines the symbolic connection between her literal jewel–the Moonstone–and her symbolic “jewel,” i.e., her virginity. We are dealing in The Moonstone with a patriarchal society where “virtue” for women is defined almost exclusively in sexual terms, and where a young unmarried woman from Rachel’s class is valued primarily for her worth on the marriage market. The loss of “her jewel,” as narrators keep calling the Moonstone, and Rachel’s refusal to tell anyone what happened in her room that night damages Rachel’s reputation and leads to the novel’s only official detective deciding that Rachel herself must be the criminal.
Prentiss is, if possible, even more creepily patriarchal than Jefferson becomes. He fetishizes the supposed innocence of Martha, the “good girl” who hasn’t yet undergone the fall into puberty. And when he decides to hide his fortune, instead of going and burying it in a secret grotto on the island of Monte Cristo like a normal person, he turns it into a giant diamond–a form which he clearly believes will pose a specific and irresistible temptation to Grace and to all of Eve’s daughters (with the exception of Martha). So, like John Herncastle in The Moonstone, Prentiss leaves the diamond to Grace as a cursed legacy. That is, he bequeathes it in such a way that it prompts her to do more damage to her reputation–by leaving her, not the diamond itself, but the proof that a diamond does exist, and a hint (via the statue of Jesus that replaces the jewel) that it is somewhere in the church. He may believe that he’s protecting future generations from temptation; but he is actually setting a cruel trap for Grace, one which succeeds–spectacularly–in sending Grace to hell, at least in the minds of everyone who knew her.
If you believe in The Moonstone as an intertext for this film, also, Father Jud’s decision to hide it inside the new crucifix he makes for the church picks up some interesting resonances–since it parallels the restoration of the Moonstone to the Hindu temple and to a statue which Collins’s English (and Protestant) narrators usually refer to as an idol.
Doyle was certainly familiar with The Moonstone–that novel very, very obviously influenced the plot of The Sign of Four–and “The Blue Carbuncle” borrows a lot of the ideas that The Moonstone established about cursed jewels. Holmes has a speech about how jewels are “the devil’s pet baits,” and how for the really famous jewels every facet may stand for some bloody deed committed in order to possess it. But in “The Blue Carbuncle” the jewel’s exotic backstory–like the Moonstone and the Agra treasure, it originates in Asia, this time from China instead of India–is given a very perfunctory treatment. The focus is on finding out how the jewel got from the Countess of Morcar’s hotel room into the crop of a dead goose. I like to think that “The Blue Carbuncle” is where Johnson–and who knows, perhaps Prentiss in his own story world–got the idea of hiding a jewel by swallowing it, though of course there are more modern stories about people smuggling things in their GI tracts that could also have inspired this.
And finally, The Nine Tailors, a 1939 mystery novel by Dorothy Sayers, whose 1929 novel Whose Body? is on the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s reading list. (Whose Body?, as far as I can tell, influences this film only inasmuch as the film sort of has a double plot, and its solution involves a doctor, a body swap, and a bathtub.) The Nine Tailors is also about an apparently impossible death that occurs in a church–and it also involves a priceless emerald necklace which was stolen years and years ago, and which turns out to have been hidden in the church. By the time we get to The Nine Tailors, the idea of the jewel as a symbol of Britain’s criminal imperial past has completely dissipated; we don’t know where the emeralds in that necklace came from and nobody in the novel cares. But The Nine Tailors is a mystery that raises a lot of the same Big Questions that Wake Up Dead Man raises. It’s possible Johnson doesn’t know the novel–it is famous, but it’s not super popular because it is very complicated and because it is about a lot more than the actual mystery–but I think it’s also possible that The Nine Tailors served as a model for the kind of mystery Johnson set out to create in Wake Up Dead Man. Anyway, the question of what it means that the jewels wind up hidden in this Anglican church’s one surviving pre-Reformation Catholic art form (its angel roof) is one I don’t really have an answer for; but it is another possible source for Grace’s ransacking of the church.
Anyway, make of all that what you will. It’s possible that nobody’s talking about these as intertexts because Johnson’s not talking about them, possibly because he doesn’t know them. But I find it interesting.
And the reporting on the acquisition of the Cerne Giant by the National Trust was very very muted and mostly in the local press. Mention of the sale as part of the Cerne and Melcombe Horsey Estates in 1919 in the Bournemouth Times and Director. The Western Daily Press in June 1921 mentions it as having been presented to the National Trust by Mr Pitt-Rivers; and the Weymouth Telegram's account of a meeting of the Dorset Field Club mentioned that the 'valuable relic of antiquity... had been placed in the custody of the National Trust'. There was also a mention in the report of a lecture on 'Wessex Wanderings' in the Southern Times and Dorset County Herald in 1921. No mention of the Giant's gigantic manhood, though references to his club.
See, my immediate response to this question was, "All Christmas stories are ghost stories." And then I had to sit down and think about what I actually meant by that and whether it is actually true.
In the field of Renaissance studies for a while there has been this debate going on about "enchantment." Often the focus is the question of whether Shakespeare's audiences actually believed in magic/witches/the fairies, or whether they saw these things as entertaining fictions. But more broadly, you have some scholars arguing that Shakepeare and his contemporaries were still living in an enchanted world, where the magical/mystical/marvelous was an accepted and expected part of daily experience, and some arguing that Shakespeare's era was the time when people began to become disenchanted.
This debate will never be resolved, but I'll tell you one thing for certain: whether that enchanted world ever actually existed or not, we have been missing it for a very long time. So when we find enchantment in fiction or in song or story or whatever, there's joy, but there's also melancholy; we're glad to have it in fiction but we miss that enchanted reality that may or may not have ever existed but is definitely not what we're living in now.
So, focusing just on Anglophone Christmas stories (I know little of Christmas stories in other languages or climes), I would say one of the definitive features of that genre is the rediscovery of enchantment. No matter how commercialized and comedified and formulaic a Christmas story gets, it's always about enchantment. In Hallmark Christmas movies, we rediscover enchantment through romance and True Love. In "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and the Peanuts Christmas special, enchantment is rediscovered in the everyday--and this is somehow made possible by the failure of commercialism. But then there is the genre of movies that focus on the secular mythology generated around Santa Clause--the elves, the reindeer, etc.--where either we are transported to the magical world of Santa's workshop at the North Pole and just sort of snuggle up inside it, or we discover that Santa is actually embedded in our own reality and to unlock the enchantment he represents we just have to adjust our own perceptions. Even Christmas stories where neither Santa nor the infant Jesus (who is typically left out of American Christmas stories except in the context of Christmas pageants) appears offer enchantment through its depiction of home and family, where Christmas is magically able to resolve conflicts and restore love to people who have almost lost it.
You can only rediscover something after you've lost it. So behind every story of the triumphant re-emergence of enchantment is our sense of having become estranged from it. All of these stories, even things like the Santa Clause franchise, acknowledge the deadening effects of disenchantment and celebrate the discovery that the world still contains magic and miracles.
So, "A Christmas Carol" is a ghost story in that it contains ghosts and is about haunting. But I guess I'm saying that Christmas stories are haunted by the loss (to most of us; those of you for whom the world is still enchanted, never change!) of things like ghosts, elves, and magic in general. And I would argue you can see that even in the way Christians tell the Nativity story to each other. There are four gospels and Jesus is in all of them but the story everyone knows is the one with the most enchantment: angels, a traveling star, and wise men bearing gifts which seem entirely fabulous to twenty-first century Americans. I mean I actually bought a bar of soap claiming to be scented with myrrh and frankincense the other day. It exists, and I bought it, and I don't know which thing to be more worried about.
NB I'm not entirely sure Mr Child is up to date with what is currently on school syllabi and in school libraries, in particular on the basis of that Carol Atherton book, Reading Lessons I was reading recently....(on which I commented, 'how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....'
Does he really think schoolkids get plonked down with David Copperfield in their tiny hands at an early age?
(I think I was, what, 13 and in the top stream at a grammar school when we first got it, and that was back in the Upper Neolithic when we had to read it chiselled on granite slabs. I suspect things have moved on since then.)
And my dr rdrz know me and that I am all for reading should be pleasurable and people should read what they like and children's reading should not be gatekept - hat-tip here to Mr Fischer at my primary school who was all 'Comics are not the devil, comics can be a good thing' which was pretty progressive for 1950 something.
But maybe I'm most in particular raising my eyebrows when A Particular Genre is being touted, and moreover, one that is, shall we say, bloke-coded?
I think he's making a lot of assumptions there about what kids will read and want to read, but what do I know, I was hyper-lexical from an early age.
OK, so, if we are *not* counting sweets, my favorite Christmas food is not really specifically Christmas, it's just something my parents often made for Christmas dinner: roast leg of lamb with garlic and mustard.
So for Holmes and Watson's Christmas dinner:
I can't really get specific about the libations as I don't know much about all that but obviouly there'd be mulled wine, and probably brandy, and definitely port. If I'm thinking about this happening in the Missing Pages universe, which I may as well admit I am, then Watson's father's pocketwatch is really gonna get a workout at this meal.
So I'm gonna say for starters we have roasted chestnuts (which Watson bought from a street vendor) and French onion soup au gratin (haven't looked this up to see whether it existed before the 1880s but come on, of course it did) because it is the cosiest fucking soup ever and anyway I hear tell Holmes has a French grandmother so maybe it's her recipe.
Following the soup & nuts we have a fish course. It is tempting to go with red herring here but I wouldn't wish that on them so let's say a nice Dover sole in a pretty simple sauce, butter or maybe with a bit of lemon.
And now, for the roast fowl: OF COURSE it's gonna be goose. I found this recipe that claims to approximate the roast goose the Cratchits have in A Christmas Carol and it's good enough for government work. Every goose recipe I've looked up talks about roasting potates in the goose fat so we're definitely doing that, along with sage and onion stuffing, because this meal doesn't already have enough onion. However, as a nod to "The Blue Carbuncle," there will also be cranberry sauce on the side, so there's some acidity they can cut the richness with and to remind both of them that carbuncles are RED, that is the definining characteristic of a carbuncle, goddamnit I will die on this hill.
After the roast goose you have to have a cheese course. So obviously to continue the blue carbuncle theme they can have a nice Stilton (see, eventually I'm willing to accept the blueness of this freaking carbuncle) and gorgonzola and then I figure a nice hearty cheddar wait I'm just listing cheeses that I personally like now. OK, we'll just stick with Stilton and then something blander milder like Wensleydale.
As a palate cleanser after that we have oranges. They're in a big glass bowl in the middle of the table and Holmes tries to knock it over and blame Watson but Watson's too quick for him.
After the oranges come the Christmas crackers. No matter how stupid the paper hat is, Holmes has to put it on. It's a rule.
For dessert: look, I can't NOT put a plum pudding on that table, but honestly, I hate the taste of plum pudding, so there's also a gingerbread 221b that Mrs. Hudson has put together which they demolish together after the meal is over.
I stumbled across this well-spell-crafted game whilst wondering around itch.io: The Daily Spell, a story about a sudden surge in magical beast manifestations in a fantasy city, told through daily word puzzles that resolve into the headlines of brief newspaper articles that advance the story. Quite delightful and very well done.
when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?
Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.
Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.
(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)
Last night I discovered that Kiiras had released a Christmas song, called "Kiirasmas." I don't think I'd objectively say it's a good song, but it's still fun to listen to.
A few years ago, I did a K-pop Christmas song Advent calendar. This morning, as I added "Kiirasmas" to my K-pop Christmas playlist, I realized that if I wanted to post the whole playlist one song a day, I'd have had to start back on October 15! ^^
After having to spend 40 minutes listening to the store playing Christmas music while I waited for the pharmacy to fill a prescription. I'd like to say: No matter how Christmas-adjacent some of its lyrics may be, "My Favorite Things" is not a Christmas song. I'm willing to get seriously injured on this hill. However, if it means that I'll hear "The Christmas Song" less often, I'm willing to act like it's a Christmas song.
Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.
The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.
Well, we think there is some primeval fertility mojo all ready to support the threatened species, no?
The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)
Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals. The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go. Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.
Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.
So when I posted my non-spoiler review of Wake Up Dead Man, I said I would come back at some point and do a review with ALL the spoilers where we can talk about the whole plot. I think I may wind up doing more than one; but at any rate, behind the cut tag there are going to be spoilers in this. For everything. SPOILERS. FOR EVERYTHING.
Mainly, this is going to be about the religious dimension of this movie. Rian Johnson is not Catholic; he grew up Protestant, something he talks about in this interview with Sojourners. He admits in this interview that one of the reasons he chose to set the story in a Catholic church rather than a Protestant one was aesthetic. “Honestly, most of the churches I actually grew up going to look like Pottery Barns,” he says; but “there is nothing cooler-looking than Catholicism. Growing up as a Protestant, there was always an exotic nature to the Catholic Church.”
So, that seems kind of shallow; but the reason for that aesthetic difference runs pretty deep and has a lot to do with the history of the genre Johnson is working in. So this is not going to be me, as someone who did grow up Catholic, busting on Johnson for being inaccurate. This is me being genuinely interested in the friction created by Johnson’s use of a Catholic setting to work through his Protestant experience–and, in the end, what that does to prepare us for what’s happening to Benoit Blanc in that GIF I led with.
As Rian Johnson well knows, mystery novels are all about de-mystification. It’s always the detective’s job to take something that seems unknowable and turn it into a logical explanation. Reason conquers superstition; the unknown becomes the transparent; impenetrable mysteries become mere puzzles.
At the same time, the mystery novel has always had a conflicted relationship with its Gothic roots. Despite our insistence on a rational and entirely explicable universe, there is always a sense of letdown at the end when we finally get all of our answers. While we celebrate the intellectual effort required to create the puzzle, we mourn, a little bit, the loss of the magical, the marvelous, the sinister and the supernatural. The solution makes us miss–just a little bit–the mystery.
John Dickson Carr’s novel The Hollow Man (published in the US as The Three Coffins) addresses this sense of loss at some length in that lecture about locked-room mysteries that Blanc summarizes for Father Jud and Geraldine. That lecture starts, kind of amazingly, with Carr’s detective, Gideon Fell, acknowledging that he and all the people he’s speaking to are characters in a book and they may as well just admit it. Fell goes on to complain about the fact that readers are never satisfied with the solutions to locked-room mysteries. As with magician acts, he laments, people go into them knowing that the magic is just an illusion; but when you show them how the trick was done, they’re mad about it. People won’t allow themselves to believe in magic, but they still want the thrill of it. The writer of the locked room mystery has to deal with that same conflict between the desire to know and the desire to be amazed. Wake Up Dead Man dramatizes this conflict instead of trying to ignore it. Father Jud is a priest; Benoit Blanc is a detective. A lot of this film is about the tension between those two roles and how they overcome it. In the end, we can see that they’re interdependent. The priest can’t do his job unless the detective can keep him out of jail. And the detective needs the priest to help him understand why his job really matters.
So here’s the thing. I absolutely buy Father Jud as a Catholic priest. He is very recognizable to me as a kind of avatar of the aspects of Catholicism that I always connected with the most: love, mercy, compassion, grace, humility, forgiveness, service to the poor and the afflicted. Institutionally, Catholicism and Communism were sworn enemies; but doctrinally there is a lot of overlap, something that expressed itself in the liberation theology of the Latin American Church during the mid-20th century. I look at him and I feel like I know exactly what mass in his church would be like, the only doubt being whether the singature hymn would be “Here I Am, Lord” or “On Eagle’s Wings.”
Everything about Monsignor Wickes, on the other hand, makes much more sense for an evangelical Protestant. There are Catholic priests whose theology is just as bad and whose effects on people’s lives are just as toxic. But part of the Catholic Church’s problem is the hierarchy’s uncritical belief in its own authority and assumption of the faithful’s obedience to it. A toxic Catholic priest, in the pulpit, doesn’t go out there screaming and sweating and trying to rouse everyone’s passions. He doesn’t need to exert himself personally; the institution will produce the obedience he desires.
The whole backstory with Prentiss is also much more consistent with Protestant churches. Because Catholic priests take vows of celibacy (and in spite of the fact that they often break them), being a Catholic priest is not a job that can be handed down from father to son–or grandson. Wickes is, despite the generation gap, essentially a preacher’s son–and that explains a lot about his personality. It becomes clear, right before the murder, that Wickes has never really wanted this job and has always hated doing it–something which makes sense for a kid who was raised to take over his father’s family concern. But a Catholic church is not a family concern. It’s part of a diocese which is part of a global organization with many layers of hierarchy, and decisions about who’s going to preach in it next are made neither by the current priest nor by the parishioners. Indeed, that’s the only reason Father Jud gets to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in the first place: because the diocese sends him and Wickes doesn’t have the authority to refuse him. But go back to Prentiss’s generation and the pretense that this is a Catholic church really starts to break down. The script explains that Prentiss was married and had already fathered Grace before he became a priest; but that doesn’t explain how Prentiss can have “founded” a parish which has been around at least since the nineteenth century, or why the diocese allowed him to build that gigantic tomb for himself and his descendants on church property, or allow Prentiss to appoint his grandson as his successor.
So. The whole storyline with Prentiss, Grace, and Eve’s Apple is really about a Protestant church; Monsignor Wickes is basically an evangelical pastor in priest’s clothing. This is what I mean by this being an impossible Gospel. Wickes, as a Catholic priest, is kind of impossible. HIs whole backstory is also kind of impossible. But that impossibility produces some interesting possibilities.
The main reason that Catholic churches are “cooler-looking” than Protestant ones has to do with disagreements over the relationship between the material and the spiritual. One of the defining features of Catholic doctrine is the insistence on transubstantiation–the idea that during the consecration, the host actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. Despite the fact that none of its physical properties change, it still somehow becomes the actual body of Christ. The whole idea of the sacraments is that they are physical actions performed by humans in which God (usually understood to be in the form of the Holy Spirit) actually participates. The idea that the divine can inhere in the material is also what informs the Catholic aesthetic that horror directors and mystery writers alike are still strongly drawn to: the statues, the crucifix with Christ actually on it (as opposed to just the cross), the stained glass windows, the candles, the vestments, the incense, all of that is based on the idea that sensory, embodied experience can be a means of encountering the divine.
This is an idea still really matters to me, and to which I still cling in many ways. The institutional church has, of course, warped this idea through its animus toward sexuality and the misogyny that arose from that. But for some strains of Protestantism, rejecting Catholicism meant rejecting the idea that you could reach the spiritual through the material. So “low church” Protestants–the ones who wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from the Catholic Church–turned against all this ornamentation as idolatrous; all of these statues and other representations were not bringing people to God, but rather diverting the attention and devotion that SHOULD be God’s onto worthless material objects. Which eventually, after many twists and turns, leads to the Pottery Barn aesthetic of which Rian Johnson complains.
And here is the thing that I find fascinating but don’t know how to read yet: from an aesthetic point of view, in the backstory, Prentiss’s whole Eve’s Apple plan turns Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude from a Catholic church into a Protestant one.
By turning his fortune into a diamond and creating the whole treasure hunt plot, Prentiss motivates Grace to ransack the church, tearing up or smashing everything that could conceivably conceal a diamond. This kind of rampage is something that went on all the time in England during its Protestant reformation, when churches that had once been Catholic but would henceforth be Protestant were ransacked and the art inside them either stolen or smashed. The effect of her search is to strip the place down to the stone walls; not even the crucifix survives.
Monsignor Wickes, instead of trying to refurbish the church after Grace’s death, decides to leave it bare. This fits in with the whole theme of people clinging to hatred/anger/resentment instead of allowing themselves to understand and forgive. But it’s also Wickes deciding that lack and starkness and deprivation suit his “ministry” better.
And one of the things this means is that from a sensory point of view, Christ is no longer in that church. There’s no crucifix; there’s no cross; just the shadow where one used to be. Wickes’s religion in the end is neither Catholic nor Protestant. It is instead what Christianity becomes when you remove Christ from it.
Anyway. This has already gone on too long so I’m going to wrap up by pointing out something about that final scene in the church that I only noticed on rewatch:
After hilariously interrupting Father Jud’s confession with the organ, Blanc has trouble getting the ‘flock’ to settle down and listen to him. They continue trying to get Father Jud to incriminate himself to them until Blanc, in desperation, charges up to the pulpit and starts yelling from it. This, as he must have known it would, activates everyone’s conditioning and we are shown how, one by one, they shut up and sit down. Blanc has stepped into Wickes’s place and assumed Wickes’s role, complete with his rhetoric about guilt and wickedness. He’s using the same machinery Wickes used to establish his own authority and get compliance from the people he wants to control. If he stays there and does his standard Poirot-style denouement, he’s just going to reinforce that hierarchical distance between himself and the people he’s preaching to. He’ll become the new patriarch–and materialism will become the new cult.
But instead, he looks at Martha and he realizes that she’s already felt remorse and punished herself for it. And at that point he gets out of the pulpit and comes down to the level of the altar. And it’s only after he gives up his authority–after saying “I cannot solve this case”–that the light shines on him. The light doesn’t prompt his revelation; it just confirms it. And then he sits down on the steps, putting himself on a level with the rest of the congregation. He’s realized that he was doing the same thing Wickes always did–making everything about himself, putting himself Christ’s place, using the place around him to aggrandize his own power–and that he can’t go on doing it. And all of that’s down to what Father Jud has taught him.
So…this is the first thing I’ve seen in a long time that has made me want to post about any of this stuff. Like most Americans I am primarily exhausted by religion now–especially by the hideous version of Christianity that has ascended along with its adherents to surround Trump’s throne. So I appreciate all the genre stuff and will probably soon have more to say about that. But I also appreciate that the film ends with Father Jud finally getting to replace that crucifix–and to put Eve and her apple at the heart of it. We’re going to need so much renewal once this hideous catastrophe of a presidential administration is over. I’m glad someone is out there trying to imagine it in terms that go beyond party and ideology.
Dragonslayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough (also known as Oreo and S'mores, Biggie and Smalls, Pikachu and Snorlax, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and any other name the fandom can come up with) are one of the most iconic boss fights in the entire Dark Souls series.
There are much harder ones in later games (and in the DLC), but they're still legendary and still regarded as a Serious boss fight.
They're also a famous mid-game difficulty spike and cause of rage quitting. Conversely, if you can get through O&S, people often say you should have the skills to beat the rest of the base game.
The major issue is that it's a duo boss fight, with one agile speedster (Ornstein) who can zip most of the way across the room in a single move, and also throws lightning, and one heavyweight bruiser (Smough) who is slower but not that slow -- he has a charge attack to close distance fast that hits like a freight train -- and does huge amounts of damage.
So for the first phase of the fight, you have to try to keep track of where they both are simultaneously (not to mention where you are in relation to the room, so you don't back yourself into a corner and get trapped) and constantly manoeuvre to try to be able to get in a hit on one without being hit by the other.
If you kill one of them, the fight goes into a second phase where the surviving one absorbs some of their powers (so if it's Smough, he gets lightning, while if it's Ornstein he gets sized up and picks up part of Smough's moveset) and also restarts with a full and vastly increased health bar. Though there is a general consensus that the second phase is more manageable than the first phase simply because you're not having to fight two bosses at the same time.
(You can summon an NPC or other human players to try to help you, but the bosses get extra health to compensate and it's still tough. And also I have been having enormous fun trying to beat all the bosses without summons so far, and am averse to the extra complications and unpredictability of having more people -- human or NPC -- in the mix while I try to figure out a fight. Though I've also had enormous fun being a summons for other people on boss fights, so zero disrespect to people summoning*, it's an excellent game mechanic.)
As I may have mentioned once or twice, my brain has huge difficulty tracking multiple moving objects (which is why I can't drive or cycle on the road) and I have the reaction speed of a slime mould.
So yeah. I knew O&S are the big mid-game stopper and I was very aware that this could potentially be the point where I hit a wall and the game became flatly impossible for me. Or at least where I'd have to summon to get through it.
And that did not happen. I solo-ed O&S.
It took multiple sessions over multiple days before I mastered it, but that's standard for me on DS boss fights. And I had SO MUCH FUN. It's SUCH A COOL FIGHT.
I did a thing that was a real achievement for me and I am very proud, and especially given the shitshow this year has been, I'll take it.
{*Necessary disclaimer only because Dark Souls fandom has historically had a section who are toxic as fuck and would like you to know that you didn't really beat the game if you summoned or used magic or whatthefuckever else they disapprove of.}
This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"
But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.
It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.
The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.
I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.
Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_comfortable_courtesan![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
plaidder_tumblr_feed
