Newly Discovered Document Confirms a ‘Legendary’ African King www.medievalists.net/2026/03/newl... #history #AfricanHistory #Nubia
09.03.2026 21:05
👍 34
🔁 14
💬 0
📌 1
Newly Discovered Document Confirms a ‘Legendary’ African King www.medievalists.net/2026/03/newl... #history #AfricanHistory #Nubia
me making a publisher figure out how to vertically typeset chinese from right to left
I can't read the article but is it identifying the prevalence of first-person as a fanfic influence? because while I know my reading practice is atypical that does NOT line up with my sense of fic — I almost never see first-person fanfiction, I would say, and it's Marked when I do.
if we all put our little fractions of time together maybe that can add up to enough time
a little dream I like to dream is of bookstores with books in any language
if anything we should be encouraging people to remove the English from their books. write in your native languages, write in the languages you've learned — stop giving English space. make monolingual readers work for it.
Celtic Studies Association [of North America]
International Association f[or the Fantastic in the Arts]
Indigenous Literary Studies[ Association]
Canadian Union of Public Em[ployees]
hello??????????????????????
"List all organizations you've been a member of in the last decade" and the box for the name of the organization has a fucking /27-character/ limit, and you're not supposed to use abbreviations (= acronyms, I assume? because otherwise this is not possible).
working on our PR application and I must say: the digital components of this are the worst-designed application I have ever had to use for anything, ever.
<3
signs you may be thinking about the Egyptian New Kingdom or 8th-century BCE Assyria rather than the HRE:
polytheism
highly centralized palace economy
literate secular bureaucracy
large-scale infrastructure projects
imperial conquest + mass deportation/population control
institutionalized diplomacy
so much notionally Euro-medievalist fantasy bears a much closer relationship to the political, economic, and cultural systems of the Eastern Mediterranean of the Bronze and Iron Ages, in everything but onomastics and the climate of its setting, than it does to any part of medieval northwest Europe.
review of Jack Schaefer's classic Western novel Shane. this is one of the most wildly homoerotic books I've ever read, and it is also a book that is structured by settler-colonial violence in profound ways that I suspect Schaefer never considered: anduilleaggheal.neocities.org/leirmheasan/...
review of Jack Schaefer's classic Western novel Shane. this is one of the most wildly homoerotic books I've ever read, and it is also a book that is structured by settler-colonial violence in profound ways that I suspect Schaefer never considered: anduilleaggheal.neocities.org/leirmheasan/...
tomato, tomypo
this is definitely something I was trying to work/think around, because I hate it (haaaaate it) when people posit that belonging to a genre is soley a matter of authorial intent (cory doctorow had a really grating definitely of SF that leaned hard in this direction) - it's so limiting!
Imo the typical framing is an exclusionary one - one wherein the conversation is a requirement for participation, and its absence a failing - and so this framing of it as something that can be interacted with almost, idk incidentally? is incredibly refreshing.
As ever, Mark as Read an excellent and thought-provoking time.
I do not personally vibe with the "genre as an ongoing conversation" framing, for a whole bunch of reasons, but I am interested in Molly's different take on it here than the usual framing.
add to them and/or are enriched by them!
not that I don't appreciate the ability to compose threads all in one go, but really it's just a testament to the fact that tumblr, with no character limit, is the superior microblogging platform.
and some of this is likely to be Intended by the author or signaled — textually or paratextually, in cover design or blurb or bookstore placement — by/around a given work, but it opens the door for texts that weren't conceived in relation to these conversations at all but nonetheless add to them.
so the question becomes: what texts, when we bring them together, make for a more interesting conversation? and, likewise, what texts are made more interesting by situating them in relation to a particular conversation (that may or may not be ongoing)?
I think Molly's follow-up usefully belies this: if a text can come to be part of one genre conversation despite its author intending to participate in an entirely different one, that I think signals to us that genre is something /readers/ bring to texts.
this I think highlights something that still bugs me about Chiang's definition — the idea that genre comes from authorial intention and/or resides in a given text (by virtue of the text's evident(?) participation on a genre conversation).
I would guess he's one of the strongest non-Borges candidates (if not THE strongest non-Borges candidate). maybe Verne, as an entry point if not a stylistic/conceptual influence? maybe the Strugatskys? but other than that...
the start was a bit rough for me but I was really blown away by "A Time Beyond Your Reach" and "Eternal Summer Dream" — I wish either were available in a more accessible form to recommend to people!
it's all about tangents, babyyyyy
But at the moment (and I'm willing to be talked out of it) at the moment I think I do still like the position I take at the start of the review, of trying to think about what a given style is offering, rather than (as I do see happen) always short-handing as "old fashioned"
I think this intersects with another point made towards the end of the pod, the relationship of politics and style; how much is the didactic tone of certain older SF read as "male" for instance; further complicated when the work is in translation and coming from a different political context anyway.
Possibly it resonated because I recently wrote a review where I was grappling with that in the context of translated work that derives at least some of its notion of what SF is from work that is "old" in Anglospheric terms locusmag.com/review/if-we...