sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: history

one

can't believe that before I was obsessed with birds I didn't know what my favourite season was -- each season has its benefits and drawbacks, after all.

but now it's obvious that spring is the best season! and not just because of the spring bird migration (though obviously the spring migration is great). looking for birds, looking at birds, and spending time in environments that birds like: all of these things have opened my eyes to all the other joys of springtime as well!

and spring begins as early as february now for me, because the signs of spring I know how to recognise can begin that early, whereas I used to feel like it wasn't really spring till the trees started leafing in may!

two

the more you befriend people who go by a noun as a name, either online or in person, the more you get to have fun tripping up on words in sentences, like "hey why's this blog post about architecture mentioning my frien --oh right. words means things!" it's great. genuinely recommend.

three

the curse of the crafter: looking at things and going "ok but I could make that tho"

ok but WILL you. and do you have the time!

it's amazing how many things I confidently believe I could make at this point

four

I really love that Queer as Fact puts significant effort into talking about as many different queer people as possible, from many different racial and cultural backgrounds, even when the subject is challenging to find info on in english or at all. And they do a good job at working to be respectful of people groups they're not a part of, and at being up-front when there's things they don't know.

Every individual episode is interesting of course, but also the impression that builds over time as you listen through the archive is a deeply felt sense of the intellectual truth I already knew, that queer people have always been present no matter where you go. It's nice!

five

did you know: anne carson translations of greek tragedies good actually. anne carson good at words. greek tragedies compelling and delicious. theatre!!!

one

I love seeing all the cool projects that my friends and mutuals take on! Creativity and passion being directed towards so many different kinds of things, according to our skills and abilities and drive! It's an endless delight 💖

two

One of the nice things about having a sibling is that she shares and understands many of my formative childhood references. I told her about learning to use the buttonhole attachment for one of my sewing machines and she immediately quoted Uncle Alec from the book Eight Cousins -- exactly what I was thinking about as I did the buttonholes!

three

I'm really enjoying the new Porter Talk series on the Discover Library & Archives Canada podcast! Featuring lots of recordings of interviews with black sleeping car porters in Canada in the 20th century, getting to hear in their words and voices what experiences they had and what they thought about things, with contextualisation from the podcast host and expert guests.

Stanley Grizzle was a porter and union activist who became deeply interested in preserving archival information about porters, and he took on the project of interviewing as many porters as he could. His fonds includes 30 hours of cassette recordings of interviews! One loves to hear of these kinds of people who decide something is important even when nobody else at the time values it, and go to great length to preserve and archive it.

You can find the podcast here, with 3 episodes of porter talk so far: https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng/collection/engage-learn/podcast/pages/podcasts.aspx

four

Recently I was reminded why I do not do jigsaw puzzles at home. I cannot be chill about jigsaw puzzles. If there is an incomplete jigsaw puzzle in my vicinity I WILL be working on it until it is done. Non-stop. I simply can't leave it be! It is the most more-ish of perhaps any activity I know, for me!

My parents basically had to shove me out the door when I was visiting them the other night, because I was working on a puzzle with my mom at their house, and it reached my parents' bedtime, lol.

five

Very funny how so many novels are thematically about The Power Of Stories. Why yes you would think that stories are powerful, author, wouldn't you! You're a storyteller.

But also. Authors are 100% correct in using this theme because stories ARE powerful! It always hits because it's the truth!

But then I would think that, wouldn't I. I am a person who loves stories!

one

whenever I work on a sewing project that involves a lot of piecing scraps of fabric together in order to achieve the necessary size/shape of pattern pieces, I think to myself "piecing is period" thanks to bernadette banner. even though nothing I'm making is particularly period!

two

kinglets might be a load-bearing portion of my mental health rn and you know, I'm so valid for that. they're such perfect birbs

three

recently I was listening to a library & archives canada podcast episode about a collection of hebraica and judaica, and the collection manager was talking about a particular volume that was written out by hand by a non-expert in the 18th century, in the context of a village that didn't have access to a printing press

and the collection manager said he can't imagine what it would be like to want a book so much that you would take the time to write out the whole thing by hand in the evenings after your full day of work

and meanwhile I was like. when you were describing this book, my first reaction was that I want to try writing out a whole book by hand!! it sounds fun! and I don't even have the context of that being my only way to be able to have that book!

four

it's funny being in fandoms (danmei!) where the canon is horny enough that I actually do not read most of my blorbos as asexual. I have spent most of my fannish life casually accidentally assuming everyone's ace because there's no canon to explicitly contradict it. sure they love each other, but sex?? why would they want that?

but now. like. the sexual attraction and interest is right there on the page! in detail! so obviously it makes sense to write fic about it. even if, the whole time, I seem to have internalised it as merely one of the weird quirks of these particular characters, lol

(It just seems so fake to me that most people are allosexual!)

five

I need to learn not to gasp in delight and whisper "oh! hi there, friend!!!" when I see a cool bird near me that I wasn't expecting lol. birds tend not to like that!

six

thinking this morning about an SVSSS fic I wrote where a background character is wearing yellow....evidence that PIDW is set prior to the Tang era and the development of sumptuary laws proscribing the wearing of yellow for commoners? or evidence that airplane wasn't thinking very hard about sumptuary laws when he was writing? (or both? :P)

one

it's wild to think how much of the span of my life I've been an internet/fandom person, in all the different ways I've done so over the years. I think I'm up to 24 years since I first got an account on a fannish forum!

two

something I would never ever have expected of myself from the first, like.....30+ years of my life. is that I'm enjoying finding ways of incorporating the colour pink into my wardrobe.

certain shades, and in certain ways -- it can really fit into the type of vibe I'm aiming for these days! I always avoided it when I was younger, and strongly disliked it as a child, because it was a "girly" colour and as a closeted-to-myself nonbinary person I was basically allergic to things that would make people see me as a standard-issue girl.

but there are ways to incorporate pink into outfits that don't make it read as "girl" but as "gay" and you know what. that's GREAT actually, it turns out!

three

bakkhai as translated by anne carson is SO MUCH FUN to put on in zoom theatre, highly recommend the experience

four

huh the master of demon gorge podcast episode about the chronicles of the eastern zhou kingdoms started with a history of the fiction genre in chinese, which is interesting to me because it comes quite directly out of a tradition of people writing down the stories they hear told in marketplaces and other informal contexts - which is to say, a tradition of folklorists. called the "school of small talk", and small talk is, I gather, still how novels are referred to today!

hello melding of my ur-special interest in folklore with my current interest in cnovels!!

five

this year's AOS announcement about bird species in north america has been released, and there's some big news! the common and hoary redpolls have been lumped into a single species! (along with the lesser redpoll)

from the various reading about redpolls I've done, I think this is a very good move, and I'm glad to see it's backed up with genetic analysis as well.

some of the other changes are very interesting too, but for me personally the redpoll news is the most exciting!

one

me every night: THIS is going to be the night I get it right and am asleep at a good and reasonable time

me every night, hours past bedtime, not yet in bed: it's a total mystery how this has happened yet again!

two

last week's podcast learnings: hang on, my personal nemesis Li Shimin wasn't the only emperor called Taizong, there was a Taizong emperor of the Song as well?!

*goes to wikipedia*

aha, same characters for Taizong for both Tang Taizong and Song Taizong, and it means "Great Ancestor", I'm picking up what's being put down here

three

me looking at fic tags saying "eroticised blood drinking" like okay I'm listening..... and then I notice the "alternate universe: vampires" tag and yeah nah I'm outtie

four

sometimes you see unknown birds flying over a distant treeline going about their business, and you get so emotional (positive) about how many birds there are beyond your ability to perceive, living their lives and doing their things, that tears come to your eyes!

five

whenever I spend extensive time outside in a healthy ecosystem, I'm amazed at the sheer variety of different insects I see. like, other than all the mosquitoes and deer flies, I hardly see two of the same species, and yet I'm constantly seeing bugs! it makes me want to know about all of them, which is an impossibility because there's SO many!

wow I thought I was going to be short on thoughts to crosspost this week but I just have SO MANY that you're getting a bonus sixth thought, instead of the usual five I constrain myself to

one

last week I looked over my spreadsheet of short stories/novelettes I've read, and my rate so far for 2024 is that of the 195 stories I've read (or started to read and then DNF'd bc no thanks), I liked 13 of them enough to rec

which is 7% of the stories

WHEW.

now, there are a few other stories in there where my notes read something like "this is a well written story but it's not for me" so the rate of GOOD stories is slightly higher than the rate of stories I personally enjoyed.

but still!!

two

tfw you go to a pride themed thing with a bunch of vendors and you leave without having purchased so much as a single sticker. The marketable local queer aesthetics appear to be: witchy, goth, cutesy, horny, or combinations of the above

no shade on those aesthetics! but they are not what I personally go for

three

do any of you have recommendations for a good podcast on the history of korea? the more ORV I read the more I'm like....yeah I Would actually like to add korea to my list of east/southeast asian history podcasts I listen to.

I did give a try to the one Korean history podcast I found when searching around, "The History of Korea" by Allen Lee, but I listened to 45 seconds of the first episode and had to bail.

1. his "favourite" piece of history is a violent conflict: my eyebrows are up and I'm worried he'll be one of those dudes who thinks about history solely as a series of wars to obsess over, but I'll keep listening for now, I might be pre-judging too hard

2. refers to the "medieval" era all around the world as being essentially the same: uh oh, I have significant concerns, especially after the first point. I'm highly wary! I don't trust this guy!

3. refers to "peasants and lowborns meekly accepting their lot" as the way things were in that worldwide medieval period: ok now I'm done. immediately. goodbye!!

four

god my linkding is devolving even more. I just restarted my server and the pages loaded nicely for like... less than 5 min and now I'm getting errors again. I really do need to make the time to try updating the version like betty suggested trying!!

maybe tonight?

ALSO I need to get around to making the rest of aviansoph.com work! see if I can figure out the FTP after my disheartening failure last time

but that's probably going to have to wait till like. July.

five

in almost every respect I appreciate that canadian culture is largely a shoes-off-in-the-house culture. HOWEVER. when I'm wearing cute shoes that are an important part of an outfit I've put together, I am personally victimized by this expectation!!

six

listened to a catbird singing in my dreams last night; listened to a catbird singing while biking to work this morning. life imitates art!

one

I love how in the Merlin recordings of bird noises you can listen to, some are quite recent but some are decades old. The file for the song of the sora is from 1960! When I play it to learn what a sora sounds like, I'm listening to a bird from a different world... but its song is still relevant to me today

two:

xie lian's bamboo hat is a ship of theseus situation, right? there's no way it could survive intact for so many centuries, without any spiritual power to maintain it, so xie lian repairs it whenever necessary, and over time every single bit of bamboo is replaced (multiple times), bit by bit. but it's still the same hat!

three:

damn, early vaccine people were hardcore:

On May 19, 1924, Spencer put a large dose of mashed wood ticks, from lot 2351B, and some weak carbolic acid into his arm by injection. This vaccine worked, and for some years after it was used by people in that region to convert the illness from one with high fatality rate (albeit low incidence) to one that could be either prevented entirely (for many of them) or modified to a non-deadly form

(was I furiously googling tick-borne illnesses after finding a tick attached to me? MAYBE. ughghhhh I hate ticks)

four:

LOOK AT THIS DINOSAUR ART I COMMISSIONED. I'm gonna tattoo it on my body!

https://www.tumblr.com/sophia-sol/749827050436755456/artists-tags-commissionsart-by

five:

I enjoy that I've now been listening to enough paleontology podcasts that I can hear someone say "another case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny" and just, like, nod along

translation: it's not unusual for the baby version of an animal to have traits that are shared with a more basal part of its lineage, which it loses as it grows up, just as its species lost that trait from its ancestors over time

in this particular case the animal being discussed is a beaked toothless archosaur, which comes from a toothed lineage, and the baby of this archosaur has teeth and then loses them and develops a beak as it grows up into an adult. very cool!

one

since I've gotten to the episodes of the Master of Demon Gorge podcast where the host has abandoned the format of telling things off-the-cuff to a friend, and instead it's polished and prepared explanations of the topics at hand, it has easily become my favourite chinese history podcast. Interesting topics, well-explained, by someone who has thought about the ways in which the past is relevant to today but without overdoing that aspect. and it's by someone who thinks critically about questions of empire, which I particularly appreciate.

some podcasts excel at the conversational banter between hosts and some excel at straightforward lectures and it's good when podcasts figure out how to do what they're best at!

I have lots of MoDG archive to go through yet and I'm looking forward to listening to all of it

two

body things I've successfully re-trained myself on: how to sit/stand up straight without rounded shoulders, how to hold a pen in a better grip, how to stand/walk without pronating my ankles

body things I have not successfully re-trained myself on (yet): using my glutes as evolution intended.

SOMEDAY I will properly harness their power and then I will be unstoppable

three

my svsss extras zine fic is finished and submitted!!! final word count: about 4.5k. I love it very much and I can't wait for folks to get to read it. and I can't wait to read the rest of the zine myself!

I have immediately started working on a new fic, about a character I haven't written before. I say that like it's not the norm lol, most of my fic writing history has been me writing something about a new-to-me character, it's unusual actually that I just wrote two fics in a row about the same ship! (for both mdzs remix and svsss extras zine, I wrote bingqiu)

My new fic is about mo xuanyu, and I really need to review all the mxy parts of mdzs more closely, taking notes of any relevant details, before I continue working on this fic. I'm sure that there are things in my mind that are misremembered details, and that there's interesting stuff that hasn't stuck with me

I do always like it when I can ground things more fully in the context of what the canon actually says!

four

please consider this very important wangningxian thought: https://www.tumblr.com/gravitywonagain/718830771835666432/the-thing-about-wen-ning-being-a-fierce-corpse-is

five

this week I discovered that musicolet is very diligent about finding all audio files on my phone and has integrated all my Merlin Sound ID recordings of birds into my music library. yes, a file that's, say, 23 minutes of listening to me walk interspersed with the calls of canada geese and red-winged blackbirds is exactly what I want when I put my music library on shuffle 😂

one.

rereading mdzs and noting that the Gusu dialect is described as sounding like an oriole. looking up what kinds of oriole would be most likely found in the relevant region of china. looking up what they sound like.

YEP the vibes check out!

https://ebird.org/species/blnori1

two.

I recently listened to the Antiques Freaks podcast episode about staple repairs in ceramics and I'm just like HELL YEAH. can we please have repairing our current possessions with staples be an option. yes yes we all know these days how lovely kintsugi is but have you considered STAPLES as an option

when I was growing up my family used a glue called "china weld" to fix broken dishes. it worked great. but its manufacture was discontinued, and these days afaik there is no adhesive on the market that is waterproof, food-safe, and suitable for gluing ceramics. which kind of implies that china weld, which worked great mechanically, was perhaps not as food-safe as the packaging led one to believe.

anyway. what if you don't like disposability culture and you break a plate in your dinnerware set and want to fix it to continue using it. a perfect context for applying staples! why can I not pay someone to staple my plates together!

three.

clear all over again how much the bookmarking system in ao3 was not designed by a heavy user of bookmarking tools. every time I use it for anything!

current frustration: seriously, you cannot even filter your personal bookmarks by whether or not they're private?!

also: no mass edit function!!!! why can't I, say, select everything that I've given a particular tag, and then mark all of those bookmarks as recs?

I use ao3 bookmarks as an add-on to my main system of pinboard bookmarks. using ao3 bookmarks allows me to see at a glance at the top of a work page whether I've read that work before or not (or whether it's already on my tbr list), which is SO helpful. So I added an ao3 bookmark for all the fics I have bookmarked on pinboard.

but I recently realized that for the fics I read and liked, it would be nice to make those bookmarks public on ao3 so that people who trawl bookmarks for recs can see my +1 to it being a worthwhile read

so I'm going through my many thousands of ao3 bookmarks to update them all..... and I have Opinions.

I started to put together a list of things that I currently find it rewarding to spend time doing or thinking about or learning about, or am interested in getting into, and um. that is too many put some back.

birds
plants and insects
rocks
rock climbing
hiking, camping, canoe tripping
dinosaurs and prehistoric natural history
human history
queerness and queer history
fashion and clothes history
sewing and mending
fibre arts
drawing and art and art history
reading
sff, romance, wuxia, xianxia, danmei
the Hugo awards
writing book reviews
fanfic and fandom
folk & fairy tales and mythology/religion
folk music
singing, playing trumpet, playing other instruments I don't know yet
theatre and musical theatre
interpersonal dynamics
friends/family/partner/community
engaging with local politics/activism
databases and information organization
languages
gongfu cha
home canning and preserving
baking
home decor
bicycle repair

orz

EDIT: how could I forget that I deeply want to try book binding! and pottery making! and I love doing jigsaw puzzles!

Reading the lyrics of The Marseillaise today, I was kinda struck by it -- because yeah it makes a lot of sense as a song of the revolutionary period, but as the national anthem of modern-day France? It just seems kind of....incongruous. Really? You're still going to sing about watering furrows with impure blood? Really?

But then, hell, I've always felt a bit uncomfortable even with my own country's national anthem, and that's about as unbloody as national anthems get --

OH WAIT NO

BREAKING NEWS

I definitely didn't just spend way too much of my afternoon reading through the wikipedia list of national anthems until getting bored somewhere in the H's because they all start sounding kind of the same, what are you talking about, but if I had, dude, there's a lot of REALLY GOOD ONES out there that don't mention any kind of violence at all, not even obliquely! I think my fave is Cape Verde's, because it is a) successfully poetic, b) nonviolent, c) super into freedom, d) hopeful in tone, and e) not just all "my country is the BEST country".

But idk, I'm bad at patriotism, so reading most of these national anthems just made me either go "lol so cute" or roll my eyes. I have trouble thinking of myself singing ANY of them with any kind of genuine sentiment, really. And Canada's is actually rather mediocre when it comes to all the awesome that other countries have for their national anthem. I mean, Australia's, for example, is all "Australia's a super great place to live and everyone knows it, and we welcome anyone who wants to come hang with us!" It's a "lol so cute" anthem but in a really endearing way, and I could get behind having something more like that, instead of the sexist language, and the unnecessary reference to God, and the military-language-in-disguise of "we stand on guard for thee" that Canada has.

BUT ANYWAYS THAT WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL POINT OF THE POST. The original point was that one of these days I'm going to have to try to figure out how to reconcile my pacifist upbringing/inclinations and my deep love for Les Miserables despite its glorification of Just War.

(THIS POST HAS A LOGICAL FLOW OF ARGUMENT IN MY HEAD if not in reality.....)