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fromtheheartofeurope_feedSecond paragraph of third chapter:
“I think you’ve given him too much, Tommy,” said Tuppence innocently. “I fancy he wants to give some of it back.”
This was Agatha Christie’s second published book, in 1922. Tommy and Tuppence, a young man and a young woman recently relieved of war duties, start their own business called “The Young Adventurers”, and are hired by the British secret service to thwart the shadowy mastermind behind various political agitations, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, and who threatens to unleash upon the United Kingdom the ultimate horror: a Labour government.
They go through various adventures including a vastly rich young American and a wily Scottish lawyer and MP, and eventually the Secret Adversary is unmasked, his identity not being a surprise to the attentive reader (there’s a moment at the end of Chapter 12 which narrows it down considerably). The motivation of the villain is fairly clear, but his means seem to be as fiendish as might be convenient for the plot. There is a romantic subplot also, which again won’t come as a surprise to the reader, and it gets the two protagonists to where they need to be.
I thought The Secret Adversary was very silly when I first read it at the age of twelve; and I still think it is very silly now that I am fifty-eight. You can get it here.
The book did make me wonder about Agatha Christie’s knowledge of Ireland. Clara Boehmer, Agatha Christie’s mother, was born in Dublin in 1854, but to a career army officer father (born in Martinique, died in Jersey) and and English mother (born and brought up in Chichester), and her father’s regiment moved to Malta, along with the infant Clara, before she was a year old. So I don’t think we can look for Irish sensibilities from that source.
The background incident which sparks the action of the plot of The Secret Adversary takes place on the Lusitania as it is sinking off the coast of County Cork in 1915, and there is then a hurried shuffle without incident across Ireland until Holyhead is reached and some action actually happens. The Secret Adversary is funding Sinn Fein in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 17 it turns out that he also has a prominent Irish Unionist MP on the team. As with the Bolsheviks, and as with labour disputes in England, in the world of The Secret Adversary the political problems of Ireland are entirely generated by external troublemakers.
Of course when Christie was writing The Secret Adversary in 1921, with its 1920 setting, the Irish situation would have been frankly confusing to the English newspaper reader. The War of Independence was in full flow, and the government was desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully trying to spin the situation in its favour to the British and international public.
In April 1921, in fact, the Lloyd George government attempted to discredit Sinn Fein by publishing a dossier “proving” that they were tools of the Bolsheviks; this failed to convince anyone, and King George V was asking the Irish for peace two months later. But that episode obviously resonated in Christie’s mind for the incident with the Sinn Feiner in Chapter 8. I did wonder if the wily Scottish lawyer and MP character was based partly on Edward Carson, but I think Christie would have been too sympathetic to Carson to create such an unflattering literary portrait.
More broadly, over the next fifty-plus years of her writing career, the Agatha Christe wiki lists only one short story, “The Apples of the Hesperides”, as actually set in Ireland (see analysis here), and another dozen characters across her entire œuvre as having Irish connections. The garden in Hallowe’en Party is explicitly based on the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. According to Irish expert John Curran, she did a tour of Great Gardens of Ireland in the 1950s (and Miss Marple then goes on a smilar tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain in the late novel Nemesis).
But it rather looks like Ireland is a mere background detail for almost all of Agatha Christie’s work. There’s no reason why it should be more than that, of course, and no evidence that it could have been either.
I’m hopping through the Agatha Christie novels in my own special way. Next will be Peril at End House. Probably.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Death on the Nile | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
heleninwalesoursinThinking about the 'how can you do/think about normal innocuous quotidien things' while shocking horrors are going on -
(Am not actually going to invoke pet genre of 'look at all these novels being written at a time when World War 2 was just about to begin/beginning'.)
This was just a coincidental thing that occurred to me when I was talking about something tangentially related when being a Nexpert for a journalist yesterday.
Who wanted to know about a certain sex manual v popular in its day and its author -
In the course of which I mentioned that it was not prosecuted for obscenity** unlike Eustace Chesser's Love without Fear (1940). One would have thought that possibly people had other things on their mind in 1940 than maximising matrimonial happiness, particularly considering that families were being broken up by men being conscripted into service, women being evacuated with their children, etc etc, but anyway, it was published, and sold several thousand copies before, in 1942, it was prosecuted for obscenity by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Again, one would think people had other things on their mind. Anyway, Chesser and his publisher decided to take the case to court and plead not guilty before a jury, bringing three medical witnesses for the defence. The jury was out for less than an hour before returning a 'not guilty' verdict.
***
Yesterday saw snowdrops appearing in the local park.
*WH Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
**However, the Pope did put it on the Index.
james_davis_nicoll
andrewduckertamaranth
The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. [p. 229]
The novel opens with Alice Law, a postgrad in Cambridge's Department of Analytic Magick, drawing a pentagram that will take her to Hell. Her stated mission is to rescue the soul of her advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, from Hell. Alice blames herself for his death: she didn't check that pentagram correctly. And without Grimes' mentorship and letters of recommendation, she won't be able to fulfil her ambitions.
But just before she closes the pentagram, an unwanted companion shows up. ( Read more... )
redbirdcrooked_timber_feedSo the Trump administration has just pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, WHO.
WHO is the biggest and most important international health organization. It’s an arm of the United Nations. It’s been around since 1948. Almost every country in the world is a member.
Most people have only the vaguest idea of what WHO is or what it does. Teal deer, they do a lot of different stuff, most of it pretty good. They were crucial to eliminating smallpox a while back. They come up with cool ideas like a list of essential medicines and health care products that are cheap and easy to produce, along with easy how-to guides on producing them. They do all sorts of research, especially on public health. They were deeply involved in controlling Ebola. (You haven’t heard much about Ebola lately, right? Thank USAID and WHO.)
To be fair, WHO also has some significant negatives. It’s part of the UN system, so it skews slow and inefficient. WHO leadership did not handle COVID well… I mean, they really did not handle COVID well. They made bad, dumb choices based on not offending (some) member countries, and then they doubled down. It wasn’t great.
But anyway! I have one personal story about WHO, from my time in development, below the cut.
So while most of my career was with USAID projects, I worked for a couple of years with the United Nations Development Program — UNDP — in Tajikistan, in Central Asia. Our project was in a small Soviet-era office building just outside the center of town. Sometimes the power would go off and then — RRRR — the building’s generator would kick in. Every few months there would be an earthquake, and we’d have to evacuate the building very quickly. There was a coffee shop around the corner that had astonishingly good tiramisu; people said the chef worked for years in Italy, or possibly Moscow.
Anyway! The building contained a bunch of different UN offices and projects. And as it happened, the WHO offices were down the hall from us. We shared a coffee station with them. Modern coffee machines had not yet reached Tajikistan, so this was your classic drip coffee maker, the kind with the paper filters and the plexiglass pot. (Office etiquette was clear and simple: first person in the morning made the pot, and if the pot ran empty before 4 PM you cleaned out the grounds, rinsed, and made a new pot.)
[In memory yet green.]
Because we shared the coffee station, I was regularly hanging out and chatting with the WHO guys. As a result, I learned a great deal about public health, communicable diseases, parasitic worms, and the like.
Sometimes this information was not entirely welcome. For instance: early in my stay in Tajikistan, I found a barber that I really liked. Not only did he cut my hair well, but he would also provide a classic shave: hot whipped lather in a cup, straight razor. — Have you ever had one of those? From a barber who knows what he’s doing? It’s pretty great.
[the classics are classics for a reason]
But then one day I noticed that my barber was taking his straight razor out of a big leather wallet… and then, after shaving me, was putting it directly back into that same leather wallet. Something was missing. What could it be?
[Hmmm.]
So the next day, at the coffee station, I casually asked one of the WHO guys: did Tajikistan have any infections that could be transmitted by — hypothetically, let’s say — unsterilized razors?
Turned out, yes! And the nice WHO guys gave me a detailed list: two or three nasty viruses, plus a couple of really horrific bacterial infections. One guy was so helpful, he want and found a textbook with illustrations! “The lesions are distinctive, see? They can go right down to the bone.” “Yes, and this one is actually pretty common. There were like three hundred cases last year, just here in Dushanbe alone.”
For the rest of my time in Tajikistan, I shaved myself.
But that’s not the anecdote. This is the anecdote: one afternoon, while pouring myself an end-of-day coffee, I heard some crowd noise from down the hall. Wandered over, coffee mug in hand, to find that the WHO guys were having a party.
Little office parties at five o’clock were a Soviet tradition that the Tajiks had kept on. You’d get one every couple of weeks. Someone has a birthday, a graduation, a new baby? Someone has bought an apartment or a car? A new employee has arrived, an old employee is leaving, someone got a promotion? At 5 pm you gather with your office colleagues and you “wash” it. Which means maybe a cake or some pastries, but definitely vodka shots. To Zulfikor! To Dilbar! To baby Ilham — long life and health! Ba salomati! Zhiveli! Cheers!
(Okay, digression here. I’m a pretty light drinker. My Tajik colleagues could knock back six or eight shots in the hour between 5 and 6 and then stroll away home. I simply could not do that. But not joining the toasts would be rude. So one day I said, guys, I’m very sorry, I just… don’t like vodka.
(Now this was bizarre, almost shocking — wide eyes, drawn breath — but okay: foreigners could be weird. I mean, this was very strange, very strange indeed, but… well, Doug doesn’t like vodka, poor guy, he was probably raised without it and never learned. A rapid-fire colloquy in Tajik ensued, followed by the careful question: well… what do you like?
(“Whiskey!” I said cheerfully, secure in the knowledge that the only whiskey in the city was at the airport Duty-Free, and that the cheapest bottle there was $75. I knew my colleagues liked me, but I was pretty sure they didn’t like me that much.
(And sure enough: for the next couple of months I was allowed to nurse a single vodka shot through each party, taking only small symbolic sips, holding up bravely under the pitying gazes of my Tajik office-mates.
(And then one day, they suddenly came in — all smiles! — and announced they had a wonderful surprise for me! “One of the Marines from your Embassy was leaving,” said one of my colleagues, “and he gave this to my aunt, his maid, as a gift! And when she heard about you, she said oh, the poor man! He must have it!” Everyone nodded, delighted by this tale of selfless generosity. “And here it is!” My colleague held out the bottle —
[not included: the name CURTIS written in black Sharpie on the label]
(If you’re lucky enough to not know: Southern Comfort is formally a “whiskey-flavored liqueur”. It’s made from cheap whiskey mixed with fruit juice and corn syrup with a dash of artificial vanilla. It is syrupy and sticky and so, so sweet — cotton candy, caramel, marshmallow sweet — and it leaves an aftertaste like cough syrup. Just seeing the bottle sent my mind reeling back to high school. It’s exactly what a 19-year-old Marine would take on his first tour abroad.
(But I was a cultural ambassador, and hoist by my own petard, and noblesse damn oblige. So over the next couple of months I choked down every thick, syrupy sip of that pinkish-yellow liquid, one gag-inducing shot at a time, right down to the last sickly-sweet drop.)
Where was I… oh yes, the WHO party. It was already well under way. Half a large cake was gone, and a couple of bottles of vodka had already been emptied. There were also some presents. That was unusual. Presents were only for very special occasions indeed.
“Who’s it for?”
“Carlos and Danny!” I vaguely knew these guys. They were… infectious disease? Public health?
“Why? What’s happening?”
“They’re leaving!”
“Oh.” Well, people did move on. “Where are they going?”
“Someplace with malaria. Danny is going to Guyana, and Carlos… someplace in Africa, starts with M?”
“Mozambique.” Another WHO guy.
“Yeah, Mozambique.”
Oh, right, they were the malaria guys. “Oh, okay. Well, is someone coming to replace them?”
This simple question brought an unexpected reaction. The WHO guys stared for a moment, then grinned. “Hey! Hey guys! Doug here wants to know if anyone is coming to replace you!”
Pause. Then, laughter! Some whoops, back-slapping, two guys did a fist-bump, everyone was smiling… what? The WHO guys enjoyed my perplexity for a moment, then leaned in to explain. “Nobody is replacing them. Because…”
…a little bit of history here. Tajikistan was the poorest corner of the czarist Russian empire, and then it was the poorest corner of the Soviet Union. And because it was poor, it was afflicted by various diseases. One of which was malaria.
Well, say what you like about the Soviets, they were pretty good at basic, meat-and-potatoes public health. By the 1930s they had anti-malaria campaigns up and running all over Central Asia: quinine, mosquito repellent, draining stagnant water, all of it. By 1960 or so, the work was complete. Tajikistan was malaria-free!
Until the Soviet Union broke up, and the Tajik economy collapsed, and public health went straight to hell. Malaria came roaring back in the early 1990s, sweeping over the border from Afghanistan. By the turn of the century it was firmly re-established, sickening tens of thousands of people every year and killing hundreds, mostly kids.
Well, the post-Soviet Tajik government was very poor, and also very corrupt. But they were bright enough to realize that public health is one of the cheaper ways to buy legitimacy. So they called in the WHO to run their anti-malarial campaign.
(In theory WHO was there to help the Tajik government run the campaign. But the Tajik government was, as noted, very corrupt. The relevant Minister would roll up in his Mercedes now and then, and would listen to what the WHO guys had to say. Then he would nod sagely — yes yes, make it so — and roll on out again. WHO provided the money, the drugs and the planning, underpaid Tajik doctors did front-line delivery, and hundreds of Ministry employees and local officials were the foot soldiers.)
And after ten, twelve, fifteen years of this, the result was… success. Slowly at first, and then faster, the number of malaria cases declined. And then suddenly there weren’t any more. Occasional cases might still pop up, almost always coming in from Afghanistan. But they’d be caught and isolated. Malaria was no longer endemic. And after some back-and-forth, Tajikistan was formally, officially certified as malaria-free. So Carlos and Danny were moving on, and nobody was replacing them, because their work was done.
And I just remember being a little bit… awe-struck. Because I was working in development, yes? And this was it. This was the dream. If you worked in development, and you were serious about it, then what you really wanted was to work yourself out of a job. Almost all of us would retire long before that could happen, of course. But not Carlos and Danny. They were heading off to fight elsewhere, sure. The war went on. But this battle? This battle was done.
I remember standing there by the empty vodka bottles and the paper plates for cake, coffee slowly cooling in my mug shaking my head and thinking… damn. It could happen. We could actually win sometimes.
And there is still no malaria in Tajikistan today.
And that’s my WHO story.
oursinMy feeling, on finding somebody who is apparently a reader in political theory at a well-respected institution of Teh Highah Learninz positing this, is that he may have read a lot of political theory, poor lamb, but maybe he should spend some time with dystopian science fiction if he's going to contemplate these sort of questions.
I suppose, with the Organ Donation register, there is an issue that a) it is Opt-In and b) presumably by the time many people reach that state when their organs come up for donation, those organs are probably past their Best Before date.
(I just now, in connection with an entirely unrelated transaction with a government body, was solicited to sign up with the Organ Donation Register. Already have, thanks, if anyone will want my tired old organs when the time comes.)
And on the intrusion of Commerce into this matter, has this person considered the sorts of things that have been happening - only, one admits, affecting the bodies of wymmynz? - over selling their eggs, or being surrogates, and the stories one hears are Not Pretty.
He might also consider Richard Titmuss' famous 1970 work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy on blood donation:
[T]he author compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.
In the 18th century, for example, some viewed being paid to sing as akin to prostitution, and professional opera singers, particularly women, could be deemed morally suspect. At that time, therefore, it might have seemed appropriate to subject professional singing to legal strictures, just like prostitution.
(I'm also thinking - has this one cropped up on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
agonyaunt or have I seen it elsewhere - of that scenario in which member of a family - even an estranged member of family - is being heavyed into being a donor for a relative because they are A Match. Was it even child adopted but later traced?)
ffutures
james_davis_nicollheleninwales
fromtheheartofeurope_feedFull title: Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België: Vitruvius’ erfenis en de ontwikkeling van de bouwkunst in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden van renaissance tot barok = Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Belgium: Vitruvius’ legacy and the development of architecture in the Southern Netherlands from the Renaissance to the Baroque period.
Second paragraph of third chapter, with the quote that it introduces and footnote:
| We weten ondertussen dat zijn eerste uitgave van de Generale reglen viel in 1539, onmiddellijk na de terugkeer van Lombard. We zien bovendien dat de tweede uitgave van het beroemde vierde boek van Serlio pas valt in 1549, tien jaar later. Deze tien jaar omspannen dus de hele periode waarin allicht ook Bruegel nog volgens Van Mander op doortocht kan geweest zijn bij Cocke. Bruegel werd immers kort daarna, in 1551, vrijmeester. De omschrijving waarin Carel van Mander de architecturale verdiensten van Pieter Cocke vertolkt, moet ons overigens wel wat tot nadenken stemmen. Bekijken we daarom eerst even de originele passage van Van Mander op folio 218: | We now know that his first edition of the Generale reglen was published in 1539, immediately after Lombard’s return. We also see that the second edition of Serlio’s famous fourth book was not published until 1549, ten years later. These ten years therefore span the entire period during which Bruegel may also have been passing through Cocke’s workshop, according to Van Mander. After all, Bruegel became a master craftsman shortly afterwards, in 1551. Carel van Mander’s description of Pieter Cocke’s architectural merits gives us pause for thought. Let us first take a look at the original passage by Van Mander on folio 218: |
| ‘In desen tijdt / te weten / in’t Jaer 1549. maeckte hy de Boeken van de Metselrije / Geometrije / en Perspective. En gelijck hy wel begaeft en geleert was / d’ Italiaensche Spraeck ervaren wesende / heeft de Boecke van Sebastiaen Serlij, in onse spraeck vertaelt en alsoo door zijnen ernstigen arbeydt in onse Nederlanden het licht gebracht / en op den rechten wech geholpen de verdwaelde Const van Metselrije: soo datmen de dingen / die van Pollio Vitruvio doncker beschreven zijn / lichtlijck verstaen can / oft Vitruvium nouw meer behoeft te lesen / so veel de ordenen belangt. Dus is door Pieter Koeck de rechte wijse van bouwen opghecomen / en de moderne afgegaen / dan t’is moeylijck datter weder een nieuw vuyl moderne op zijn Hoogh-duytsch in gebruyck is ghecomen / die wy qualijck los sullen worden: doch in Italien nemmeer anghenomen sal wesen. ⁴⁴ | (in archaic Dutch) In this time, namely in the year 1549, he wrote the Books of Masonry, Geometry, and Perspective. And as he was well-endowed and learned, being experienced in the Italian language, he translated the books of Sebastiaen Serlij into our language and thus, through his diligent work, brought the light to our Netherlands and helped the lost art of masonry back onto the right path, so that the things described obscurely by Pollio Vitruvio can be easily understood, or Vitruvius no longer needs to be read, as far as the orders are concerned. Thus, Pieter Koeck has brought forth the correct way of building, and the modern way has been abandoned, so that it is difficult for a new, foul modern High-German way to come into use, which we will hardly be able to get rid of, but which will never again be accepted in Italy. ⁴⁴ |
| ⁴⁴ lets verderop staat dan nog: ‘want zijn Weduwe Maeyken Verhulst gaf zijn nagelaten Metselrije. Boeken uyt in ‘t Jaer 1553. – VAN MANDER 1603, fol. 218. | ⁴⁴ Further on it says: ‘for his widow Maeyken Verhulst published his bequeathed masonry books in the year 1553. – VAN MANDER 1603, fol. 218. |
I got this ages ago, in the hope that it would shed a bit more light for me on the artistic context of the work of Jan Christiaan Hansche, the Baroque stucco artist who I am obsessed with. I did not really get what I wanted; the second last chapter has nine lovely full-colour photographs of his ceilings, but amazingly doesn’t actually mention him by name in the main text – the chapter is mainly about the Banqueting House in Greenwich, which last time I checked isn’t even in Belgium. (The captions to the photographs do credit Hansche.)
Architectural history isn’t really my bag, and although Dutch is probably the second language that I feel most comfortable reading, that’s not saying much, so I must admit I did not read it forensically. I got enough of it to learn that the individual travels to Italy of particular artists, especially (of course) Bruegel and Rubens, had a big impact on their work, and also that the publication of architectural textbooks, by or adapted from Vitruvius, in the bookish society of early modern Belgium, allowed the new/old architectural ideas to proliferate.
But none of that really matters, because the glory of the book is the hundreds of photographs of buildings and art, which surely must be a pretty comprehensive gazetteer of the surviving architecture of the period in Belgium. If we had that sort of coffee-table, this is the sort of book I’d be putting on it. I got it for only €30, and the going rate for slightly more loved copies is €20 – really good value for what you get. So I didn’t really find what I wanted, but I am happy with what I got.
You can get it from various second-hand vendors (it was published by Lannoo in 1999, so it’s out of print). The ISBN is 9789020937053.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore.
torque_control_feed
As the guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander write in their editorial:
The articles in this issue of Vector work in both directions, teasing out the ways archives and libraries can be informed by SFF works while also exploring the assumptions SFF works make about libraries and archives.
In “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data,” Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski ask the question of whether librarians exist in the future of Star Trek—certainly a topic of relevance to today’s “AI search” upheavals. In “The Queen a Librarian Dreams of,” Kathryn Yelinek examines the connection between information literacy and restorative justice in the fantasy world of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue.
Next up are a pair of trips through fictional archives. In “Archives, Information, and Fandom,” Tom Ue and James Munday consider how the Halliday Journals from the world of Ready Player One present the impacts of (mis)direction and information surplus on researchers. Grace Catherine Greiner’s “Finding Nothing Can be Finding Something” explores the capital-A Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, with its interest in medievalisms, access, and “simultaneous bookishness and orality.”
Hopping back to libraries, Guangzhou Lyu’s “Library of Disassembled Past” takes a look at a floating library in China Mieville’s The Scar, exploring how libraries can serve as places of “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.” In “Magic and Critical Librarianship,” Ellie Campbell interrogates the ways libraries and other memory institutions can institutionalise racism, colonialism, misogyny, and homophobia, as shown in three fantasy short stories. And the last article in the issue, Monica Evans’s “You Are the Library,”considers how digital games can engage players in “library-like mechanics,” drawing on the long history of the value of information and exploration in game design.
Whether you’re a librarian thinking about installing a science fiction reading room, a fantasy novelist looking for worldbuilding nuggets for your next doorstopper about nautical librarians, a SFF academic who’s intrigued by archives concepts in games, or just someone who’s stopped by the information desk of this editorial to ask where the metaphorical toilets are, we hope you’ll enjoy your time with the insightful explorations of libraries, archives, and the future of information that make up this issue of Vector!
Cover by Kalina Winska. Original artwork title: The ethereal and eternal contest, with no winners and no losers, occasional bursts of anger, frustration, and perhaps…shame; waves of humility are often too weak to reach the edge of the world. (graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and ink on wood panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2020).
andrewduckerandrewduckerjames_davis_nicoll - So, in my Outgunnedfromtheheartofeurope_feed - The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie; and Agatha on Irelandheleninwales - Making progress?oursin - While someone else is eating or opening a window*james_davis_nicoll - City on Fire (Metropolitan, volume 2) by Walter Jon Williamsandrewducker - Interesting Links for 27-01-2026oursin - (no subject)tamaranth - 2026/015: Katabasis — R F Kuangxkcd_feed - Early Arthropodsredbird - meanwhile...james_davis_nicoll - This is a death trapcrooked_timber_feed - WHO: An anecdoteoursin - Maybe get people to sign up to the Organ Donor register instead?ffutures - Another fantasy bundle - Shadowdark Compatiblejames_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Shadowdark Compatibleheleninwales - Weather not good for walkingfromtheheartofeurope_feed - Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger Tijstorque_control_feed - Libraries, Archives and the Future of Informationandrewducker - On the current set of politicians leaving the sinking partyandrewducker - Interesting Links for 26-01-2026zaluzianskya and skylark_photos
