neonvincent

I was twice as chatty last month than during March, but that's still only four comments.

My comment on Reflections on Fantasy Fiction.

The last fantasy novel I read and enjoyed was Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards from 2001. I don't know if a 20-year-old novel qualifies as "recent" and "these days." I haven't gotten around to watching the book's TV adaptation yet, but I plan on it.

Speaking of TV adaptations, there are three others of fantasy book series I enjoy, "His Dark Materials" and "The Book of Dust" by Philip Pullman, "The Witcher" by Andrzej Sapkowski, and "Outlander" by Diana Gabaldon. I'll admit to not reading any of the books yet, but I plan on doing that, too.

My comment on THEY DON'T EVEN WANT THE SHOWMANSHIP, JUST THE ABUSE.

"It's like if they're getting heaping abuse, and being given demeaning nicknames means the 'kool kids' like them." I'm reminded of the scene from "Mean Girls" where Rachel McAdams as Regina George tells Lindsey Lohan as Cady George "Get in loser, we're going shopping." Cady didn't care that Regina called her a loser, the popular girls (including current Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried) invited her to go shopping with them. I can see why you think the DC press corps is like that.

My comment on The DC Society Pages.

Stephen Colbert remarked that the labels used on the Venmo transactions were too on the nose. He missed the one sent to the then-17-year-old labled "Food." Gaetz's associate Joel Greenberg may as well have used "Candy."
https://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2021/04/colbert-meyers-and-kimmel-take-more.html

My comment on Meanwhile, In The Laboratories of Democracy.

Using a provision to make Michigan more responsive to the people to restrict voting rights; how ironic!

Brad De Long is always worth a read, but yesterday I found out that he has started a new series--Liveblogging WWII. What he's doing is posting complete documents from major historical figures on the 70th anniveraries of their issuance. His latest is Senator Burton Wheeler on "the Meanace of Lend-Lease". He also has writings from Churchill and Hitler, along with Japanese intelligence reports. Unfortunately, De Long doesn't use tags, so one has to dig through his archives manually, but it's worth doing.

It's fascinating reading what people were writing in what amounts to "real time." The closest I've ever come to this experience before was a series of emails reporting WWII 50 years later. The eeriest part was reading dispatches about the Battle of Stalingrad. While I knew how the battle turned out, I couldn't imagine how that happened based on the reproduced dispatches for the first few weeks of emails; the Germans came off so much better than the Soviets. However, the Germans weren't alone; they had many allies in their war against the USSR. It turned out this wasn't as good an idea as it seemed at the time. The USSR was able to stem the advance of the Axis by turning back the Romanians. That was a "plot twist" I couldn't have predicted!

Crossposted to darksumomo on LJ.