Dear Internets: as a reader new to the Vorkosigan books (I know, I know; I’ve been meaning to read them for years), which book should I start with?
Relevant factors include publishing order, internal chronology, accessibility, and quality of writing. Recommend the one you think is most likely to make sense and hook me into the series.
xahra99 asked this in comments to the last “writing fight scenes” post, and I couldn’t remember very well, so I put it to you all here:
What films and/or online videos would you say show relatively accurate knife fights?
I know I’ve seen some that looked good, but none of them are coming to mind right now. I figured it was more efficient to ask the Great Internet Overmind, rather than staring at the wall trying to prod my own memory into working. (It always makes me think of that line from Hamlet: “Cudgel thy brain no more, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.”)
kniedzw and I finally joined the twenty-first century yesterday, buying ourselves a pair of smartphones to replace the ancient flip-phones we’ve been using for years. We went with Androids — mostly because of my husband’s overpowering hatred for AT&T — so now I ask the internets: what apps do you recommend?
Free ones are fabulous, but I’m also willing to pay for stuff that’s good. In particular, I’d like a recommendation for some kind of calorie tracker, because I know my eating habits are very bad; not in the usual way (“oh, I eat too much ice cream”) but in the “I kind of forget to eat in the first place” way. I don’t know what, if anything, I want to do to change this, but I figure it can’t hurt to spend a couple of weeks actually paying attention to what I’m eating, and when, and what it adds up to. Having a phone app to track it with would help.
Beyond that . . . y’all know me. I do not need the Nascar app that came installed on the phone and is seemingly impossible to get rid of, but geeky things like Google Skymap are totally up my alley. What do you recommend?
I’m not sure how to phrase this best, but — at what point in history did we start to develop actual, workable “detection” devices? I’m thinking of things along the lines of a Geiger counter, but it doesn’t have to be a radiation detector; just a device to measure anything not visible to the eye. Wikipedia claims Gauss invented an early magnetometer in 1833, but the claim consists of three not terribly informative sentences, and the article on Gauss himself just says he developed a “method” for measuring magnetism, without specifying what it was.
Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I’m trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)
Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?
For the amount I’m having to juggle who knows what about whom and when they know it (and when they don’t), I really ought to have a mystery novel to show for it.
Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.
Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)
Ah well. L’Editor liked it — quite a bit — so there’s that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it’s entirely of my own making. Can’t really blame anybody but myself for that.
Oh, hey! The “l’editor” thing reminded me. If you’re a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn’t much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.
Do psychiatric facilities generally fingerprint their patients?
If cops were to get hold of bloodstained clothing, how long would it take to run an analysis on the blood? And what information would that give? How about analyzing non-visible blood residue on a knife?
(I’m trying to clear some written-but-not-revised stories out of here.)
Does silver nitrate have a distinctive smell?
How about sulfates? Do they tend to smell of sulfur, or not?
(This is what I get for deciding to put faerie science in my books. I have to figure out how the real science goes, then figure out how the fantasy version goes, then figure out how to describe the fantasy version, based on but maybe not identical to how I’d describe the real version. If I ever do this to myself again, somebody please kick me.)
How would you describe the smell of acid? Does it have a smell? (Any kind of acid will do; I’m looking for commonalities here.)
So I’ve got this reading and signing at Borderlands Books on Saturday (3 p.m., if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to come). I have a fair bit of time to fill, and so I’m intending to read several different things, as well as answering questions and signing books. I’ll definitely do a bit from A Star Shall Fall, but I’d also like to do a couple of short stories. The question is, which ones?
You know what that means: time for a poll.
Edited to add: I’m disqualifying “Silence, Before the Horn,” “Driftwood,” and “The Last Wendy” on the grounds that I read them during my previous Borderlands event.
Is Colonel Brandon’s first name ever given in Sense and Sensibility?
I need some kind of yardstick by which to gauge the destructive potential of one stick of dynamite. Presuming it was jammed into a device built largely of sturdy wood nailed together, how large of a device could the dynamite effectively destroy? (For values of “destroy” that equal “render it completely inoperable, such that the thing can’t really be repaired.”)
I know that’s a very imprecise description, and I’ll be getting imprecise answers, but it would be nice to know if one stick would be enough to trash, say, a car-sized target, or more, or less.
. . . before the Elljays cannot answer a question for me?
I need help from somebody who has on hand a translation of the Black Book of Carmarthen that is NOT Skene’s. (Because apparently that one is very inaccurate?) There’s a specific poem I need, not too long, and it would be dandy if I could get it sooner than my next trip to Stanford’s library. Comment here, and I’ll drop you a message via e-mail with the name of the poem I’m after.
I know there are a lot of factors that will influence the answer to this question — dog breed, environmental conditions, etc — but as a generalized thing, how long after a trail is laid down can a dog follow it by scent?
Continuing the theme from last night, I am having an extremely crankypants day. The cloudy weather isn’t helping; this is the kind of day where I could really use to go sit in warmth and sunshine, and there is neither to be had.
Halp?
Please to be posting good news, or funny anecdotes, or pictures of adorable kittens. I could use it today.
Making a new post here because it’s easier than replying to everybody who brought up the same points.
Thanks for the input from everybody. I can’t give you the reason why my characters want a second baptism performed, as it would be too much of a plot spoiler, but the short form is that this is a fantasy novel; the reason for it is metaphysical, and can’t be solved by that character going to confession. You’ve given me what I need, though: the reason why baptism isn’t repeated, and then the conditional form that the priest would use once they convince him, against his better judgment, to do it. (I suppose I could have the characters perform the baptism themselves, but it loses a bit of that ritual and narrative oomph, which they would be very eager to have on their sides.)
So now I can write an argument about whether there’s any other power in the world capable of annulling the gift of God’s grace, and that was what I needed. Once I have the scene written, I’ll find somebody who knows the specifical historical Church practices to read it over for me and tell whether it works. (If any such person reads this post, do let me know; the scene takes place in 1884, post-Vatican I but pre-Vatican II.)
To my Catholic readers, or anybody else familiar with the nuances of Catholic policy regarding baptism, especially nineteenth-century policy on same:
1) If an adult converts to Catholicism, do they receive a Catholic baptism? Is the answer to that question dependent at all upon whether they were previously baptized in a different Christian denomination? Does age affect it, and if so, what’s the cut-off point for different treatment?
2) If there were, for plot reasons, a character who had originally been baptized into the Catholic church, who really really needed to be re-baptized in the same tradition, how would the argument about that go? (As I understand it, re-baptism isn’t something that’s supposed to be done, but there’s an unusually compelling reason for it in this case; what I’m asking for is basically a run-down of the objections the priest would make, that my characters can then overcome.)
3) Does anybody have a handy link to the text for the baptismal rite Catholics used in the nineteenth century?
A question for my buff female friends: how many push-ups can you do?
(I ask for story purposes. I’m doing Fun Work, and need to know how many my jock protagonist would do if she felt like showing off. Which she does, ’cause she’s like that.)
I totally have to surrender my Latin geek card in shame, but attempting to figure out this phrase is stalling my forward progress in the scene, so I’m just going to toss it out to the LJ mind and get on with what Dead Rick is doing.
How would you say “Two worlds joined as one” in Latin?
I don’t suppose there’s anybody out there who’s read enough vulgar Victorian writing to tell me what the period equivalent would be for “fuck you”?
I might check the OED historical thesaurus the next time I go to Stanford, but I don’t necessarily expect to find an answer there. (The OED itself has “fuck you” starting in 1932, and “go fuck yourself” in 1895 — but that one’s distinctly an American quote.)
“Go to hell” is the obvious choice, but it’s one faerie talking to another, so I’d like to come up with something less theologically-based if I can. I have options, but if there’s some awesome Victorian phrase I could be using, please do let me know.
