Latest Posts by magsintherain - Page 3

if i had a nickel for every time a vaguely historical musical about a morally gray male lead had the wife sing a song about her husband's absence including the refrain "time" as one of the last songs in the musical, i would have two nickels. which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice

so the ithaca saga, huh

my jaw was dropped for twenty two minutes and thirty five seconds straight

okay update I’ve been Instagram stalking and I think I can put pieces together. This is such a long deep dive so bear with me.

January: "I have two that I've written the first draft of and will go into revision soon. I have one that I'm writing now and I'm about halfway through. I have another that I'm planning." (source)

I will label these four books, in order, Mystery Book, Big Book, Paper Model Book, and Little Graceling Book. We'll follow them over the course of the year, and you'll see where the names come from.

The one that she was writing at the time, we're going to call Paper Model Book, because she said this about it: "My WIP includes a character who’s building a paper model of a castle and does other paper art too. Butterflies and moths are also an important part of the book." (source)

This draft was started many months earlier, pre-brain surgery, and went on pause for obvious reasons. From earlier notes, it appears the main character may have an M name. (source) I believe the draft was started all the way back in September 2023, and just took a while due to the aforementioned brain surgery, as well as copyediting for There Is a Door in this Darkness. (source)

She continued working on Paper Model Book for several months. She finished and submitted the manuscript around late April/early May. Several of the notebooks for this book have fox stickers on them, and she also had fox socks and fox art on her desk, which could mean there are foxes in it, but could also mean that she was just in a fox mood.

May: "With this draft done, I now have three entire books in revision, plus There Is a Door in This Darkness releasing on June 11." (source)

In May, she was on a bit of a vacation, but mentioned at one point that she was "listening to a lot of math podcasts and books to help me with a character I’m brainstorming." (source) Guessing this was for Little Graceling Book, the book she started writing in September; it's the only one she would have been planning/brainstorming for.

In June, she began revising a 430-page book. She described this revision as "so complicated" and the novel as "pretty complex". (source) The first draft of that book was written, in part, summer 2023. (source) This should be the one we have called Big Book. She continued revising Big Book for several months, while also doing release stuff for There Is A Door in this Darkness.

Peeks from that revision:

(source 1, source 2)

In September, she started plotting a new book, which we will call Little Graceling Book. Two posts about it have been tagged #gracelingrealm, implying that it's the next Graceling book.

Words I have caught in her notes for this book include: “fox” “castle” “heartless world” “the reader has guessed what A is up to and so has O; move on to other mysteries” (who’s A?? could it be adventure the fox??). Stickers include at least two foxes and a very Graceling-feeling castle.

On November 10, she mentioned writing “a bunch of pages, in a book about a world where things can change for the better (as they can in our world).” <3 (source)

A few days ago (December 21), she posted that she will be setting aside the partial first draft of Little Graceling Book to return to Big Book, her next book to come out. This book has gone through two drafts, and she’s about to get editorial letters back that will allow her to start on the third draft. There appears to be a grandfather clock and a horse sticker on the cover of its notebook, but we don't know anything else about it as far as I can tell. (source) "For this revision, I've realized that I need to understand what's happening inside a kaleidoscope." (January 18) 👀

She also shared that two other books (Mystery Book and Paper Model Book, as far as I can tell) are in progress and hanging out on a shelf. They appear to be printouts with sticky notes in them, which indicates that they're further along in the revision process.

So. That's what I have. Hopefully this is of interest to someone besides me that will justify the several hours I spent back-scrolling Kristin Cashore's Instagram lol

hi excuse me kristin cashore is working on FOUR books rn ??

what do we think they are 👀

Have you seen this Guardian article? I'd love your thoughts on the last two paragraphs!

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/21/were-figuring-out-cool-ways-of-storytelling-how-tiktok-is-changing-the-way-we-watch-musicals

Fascinating article, but HOLY SHIT?

I KNEW WE WERE GETTING A GAME, BUT THREE?? AN ANIMATED MOVIE AND A STAGE SHOW??

If we get all of these it would be beautiful- (I wonder which High Level Company?? I’m nervous???) Also I NEED the stage adaptation- I’m gonna cry?

“for nine days I’ve stayed wide awake” -Odysseus

Gilgamesh could NEVER

They should install public grappling hook points

Beth Riesgraf as Parker in Leverage and Leverage: Redemption

24 page comic adaptation final: COMPLETE! Now I just have to print it tomorrow and everything will be peachyy

Edit: forgot to say this but this is an adaptation of a few chapters of the book Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore.

Second edit: I’m not actually going to continue drawing this… it’s a whole ass novel 😭

99% of all murders committed by women in ancient greek plays are completely justified

pspspspsps poetry mutuals come here... new quiz... making you the patron saint of something...

there's something about maggie/sophie that will always have me in its thrall... it's not even about the mutual nate of it all, necessarily, although that's delicious.

it's also about, they both love art in a visceral way. and about the fact that maggie recognized sophie in the museum. that the "of course she bloody speaks spanish" is reminiscent of the cat and mouse game sophie had fun with with nate.

and it's the easy way in which sophie manages to instruct maggie. and how "she's turning into quite the grifter" actually does highlight how sophie's area of crime is probably the one maggie's most suited to, too.

and then, of course, there's the whole thing about maggie being "the most honest person" the team knows and sophie being The Liar of all time.

something so simultaneously jagged, mismatched and soft, understanding about them that makes me want to eat gravel.

I’m sorry to talk about Luigi Mangione so much but like. Imagine his parents.

Your son was living the good life. Valedictorian, Ivy League, working for game design startups, surfing in Hawaii. He’s doing great, right? Nothing really out of the ordinary. Maybe he posts some weird stuff on Twitter, maybe he’s dealing with an injury, but like, he’s still mostly a normal kid.

And then, fairly abruptly, he drops off the face of the earth. No one has heard from him. You reach out to his old high school classmates. You hear nothing. Your texts go unanswered. You file a missing persons report.

And then the next thing you know he’s on national news for killing a health insurance CEO ???

update wtf guys

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

Sophie loves to go dancing, but she rarely goes with Nate. He takes it too seriously, and he always get involved in the dance hall politics. Plus, as technical and detail oriented as he is, he isn't really good at dancing. He can do the steps, but he doesn't understand how to let himself get swept away by the music.

The first time she asked Eliot, he laughed at her. Said there was no way he was going to spend his night off in some dusty ballroom when he could be at home relaxing. She'd shrugged it off, having anticipated his refusal, and had gone by herself, intending to find a partner when she got there.

Except when she showed up, she found Eliot dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair pulled back in a pony tail, mumbling something about not wanting her to have to go without a partner.

The next time she asked, he complained about how slippery his shoes were and how handsy Mrs. Gunderson had been during the open dance, but he picked Sophie up at 6 and dropped her off at 10 and smiled most of the time between.

A week after that, she found a flyer for a foxtrot competition slipped under her door, with the note "I'm free on Saturday" scrawled across the bottom.

(They won.)

They go several times a month now. Hardison laughs when he finds out, but Eliot says it's good exercise. Parker is very excited about their trophy but loses interest when she finds out it's plastic. Nate comes to watch sometimes, because as much as he dislikes dancing himself, he appreciates the skill involved.

(Maybe he's picking up pointers. He'll never tell.)

I think a very funny dynamic for Sterling on Leverage: Redemption would be for him and Harry to be old best buds (and it just never came up until now)

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

You guys went all in on becoming better people and you brought me along for the ride.

i think 'I trust you with my life but not your own' as a trope is one of the ones that can always fuck me up no matter what

okay no but now I'm really thinking about it, right

it's canon that Maggie had no idea IYS denied Sam's cancer treatment, that's the only reason she stayed friendly with Blackpoole. So au where instead of letting his life fall apart, putting together the team, and then taking down Blackpoole, Nate decides to echo current events and just. Fucking shoots his boss.

and Maggie has no clue why.

maybe he succeeds, maybe he doesn't, either way he goes to jail for this (he was not planning to get away with it). And Maggie's just lost her son, now her husband's an (attempted) murderer and in prison, she's on her own and has no answers for any of this.

So she goes looking.

she might not directly have Nate's contacts and experience, but he had to have talked about these cases, she knows who a few of these people are through him. But she also has her own connections through the art world - like, Parker and Sophie at least have to be talked about by appraisers, collectors, people who work with the things they steal. And she has Sterling, who while still probably not helpful for breaking the law at least likes her more than he likes Nate and might be able to get her some more information. Like why the fuck Nate did what he did.

And she's not a mastermind, she's not Nate's level of manipulative and three steps ahead of everyone else, but she doesn't need to be. She's smart and charismatic and quick to put pieces together (the fucking button camera scene). So. She figures it out.

And then she has to decide what to do about it.

She's not going to be able to exonerate Nate - he shot a man in broad daylight and fully admitted it. She might be able to break him out of prison if he's up for being on the run, but that's a matter of hot debate between the two of them right now. (She could totally do it, especially with the team, she and Sophie are just waiting for him to stop being overprotective.)

(side note: nate's face when he finds out his ex wife and international criminal not-technically-an-ex are running a team together while he's stuck in prison? priceless)

but what she can do is protect other kids like Sam. Seek out corruption, find the people being hurt, and with her team, stop the people responsible from ever doing it again.

she just needs to create a little bit of leverage.

so I know I'm not the only one who saw the United Healthcare news and immediately thought of Leverage

but my thought process was, if Leverage was involved, they wouldn't have been the ones to kill the CEO. not their style. so I'm imagining Leverage in the middle of this whole con to destroy the CEO when out of the blue someone else comes in and just murders him.

hardison: so i did all that *insert technobabble hacking nonsense* for nothing??

eliot: no offense to the shooter, but if we wanted him dead, i could have killed him so much cleaner and made it look like an accident. amateur move.

A story in three acts:

Leverage 4x10- "The Queen's Gambit Job"

Leverage 1x10 - "The Juror #6 Job"

Leverage: Redemption 2x3 - "The Tournament Job"

Found Family Battle (Finals)

I can't stop thinking about this rabbit hole I went down a few weeks ago when I was procrastinating on my Iliad paper.

So basically. In the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (the one we read in class), he has Helen call herself a slut.

"That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, widely powerful,  at the same time a good king and a strong spearfighter,  once my kinsman, slut that I am. Did this ever happen?” (Lattimore 3.178-180)

Naturally I'm like yikes. Then I started wondering whether this was actually what it said in the Greek, and whether other translators disagreed.

(This is not a new thing to wonder about; people talked about this quite a bit after Emily Wilson discussed it.)

To summarize: the Greek word used here is kunops, which literally translates to dog-face or dog-eyed. This word is used precisely two other times in the Iliad: once in book one when Achilles is insulting Agamemnon and once in book eighteen when Hephaestus is talking about how his mother (Hera) threw him out. Surprise surprise, the male translators usually don't use the same word in those two places.

I could have stopped here, but naturally at this point I was like, obviously the best possible use of my time would be to go down into the depths of the library and see what word is used in these three places in every single translation of the Iliad that we have.

Too much time later, I ended up with this:

I think this table kind of speaks for itself.

Just. The way that the male translators all decide that when a woman is called "dog-face," that must mean that she's a shameless bitch, but when a man is called "dog-face," he can just be a dog-face. The bias is REALLY showing through here. I can understand shameless, but where are they getting slut bitch whore?

Lattimore is supposed to be the most literal translation! But then he just has to go and call Helen a slut for no apparent reason! Why would he do this where did it come from I want to scream. why do they assume that a woman criticizing herself has to be about sexual condemnation??

Some things that are worth noting!

As I mentioned, people have talked about this a lot in regards to Emily Wilson's translation! She gave a couple great interviews about her translation of this word (here and here). What many people forget is that she wasn't actually the first woman to translate the Iliad into English, nor was she the first person to translate the word as "dog-face." That was Caroline Alexander, eight years earlier. I love Wilson as much as the next person but let's not forget Alexander.

Yes dog-face is an insult! And yes it arguably is associated with shamelessness! There's a lot to unpack about why Helen was talking about herself this way. But it's really hard to analyze that when the bias of the male translators is bleeding through so much. I appreciate the decision to translate it literally and let readers decide for ourselves what she meant.

first rule of fandom is everything goes back to destiel

second rule of fandom is everything goes back to kirk/spock

third rule of fandom is everything goes back to holmes & watson

fourth rule of fandom is everything goes back to achilles & patroclus

hi excuse me kristin cashore is working on FOUR books rn ??

what do we think they are 👀

Leverage: Redemption (2021-present) The One Man’s Trash Job (S02E02)

in Leverage, in the background of some scenes you can see ads for or clips of another Dean Devlin production, The Librarian movie series. seems like The Librarian movies exist in the Leverage universe. BUT! at the end of the first david job, sophie’s storage unit contains the Judas Chalice, which is the titular arrifact in "The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice". it’s not an actual artifact irl. so there’s kinda 2 possibilities in my head at the moment:

sophie stole the prop, and considers it so precious that it’s stored amongst her stash of very real, very old artifacts. she’s like the worlds biggest Librarian fan.

the plot of The Librarian movies & tv show are real in the Leverage universe, and the movies are dramatic retellings of real events. sophie owns stolen cursed artifacts because of course she does.

(notably, sophie is seen holding & blowing into the judas chalice right after admitting that she has the real second david… you know, her big betrayal? the reveal of her judas kiss? etc etc)

every time i see someone call kirk and spock the oldest ship, i'm filled with the urge to go "hmm actually the holmes and watson girlies have been here for a hundred years now", and i refrain because i know the natural conclusion of this game is gilgamesh and enkidu

y’all ever see a piece of fan content about your favorite character that is so horrifically different from what you personally believe and you just

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"