jabbage

[jabbage]

I feel like tumblr should be bigger fans of The Blues Brothers. It's a movie that has everything we value as a community. Attention and respect to pioneering black musicians, open hostility to nazis, open defiance to police, Carrie Fisher with a rocket launcher and flamethrower, a soundtrack that goes hard as hell, John Belushi so blasted on cocaine that he continues to do somersaults despite having a broken ankle. It's got it all!

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A pretty lean month of reading for me, with a game release and a trip to the US taking up a lot of my time!

The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family by Mary S. Lovell

You know when you first find out about something and you start seeing it everywhere? That's been me with the eccentric Mitford sisters, six daughters from a minor aristocratic family who all courted fame and infamy. So when I spotted this book and the chance to find out more, I grabbed it.

It's a chunky read, but the sisters lived such jam-packed lives that Lovell is able to zip things along fairly briskly. For the most part the Mitfords are not especially likeable subjects for a biography (and the two fascists, Diana and Unity, are really quite vile.) but they are fascinating. I enjoyed all the snippets featured from their letters, which are full of Wodehousian nicknames and 'Mitfordian' sayings known only by the family.

It's always a problem reading biographies of awful people that biographers nearly always have to fall at least a little bit in love with their subjects in the process of writing about them, and so I wasn't surprised that it felt a bit too generous towards its subjects. I think Lovell did a good job at conveying just how pervasive bordering on mainstream fascism was within the British aristocracy prior to WW2. It all felt sickeningly familiar and relevant.

Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett

This was my first one of the 'later' Pratchett books, and I went into it with slight trepidation. It's about football. Could Pratchett really interest me in football in the same way he's got me interested in postage stamps or opera? And I also know that this is one of the first books where his 'embuggerance' began to get in the way of his writing.

I became immediately fond of some of the new characters taking the lead in this book, especially Mr Nutt and Glenda, who I ship with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. I'm probably biased, but I loved getting to see the ordinary people behind the scenes at Unseen University.

The structure of everything being centred on a football match provided a neat, well-worn format to hang things from, which might have helped Pratchett to bring this one together pretty well. There were a few parts of it surrounding exactly why the football match was happening which I'm not sure completely flowed, but I was having a great time and didn't really care.

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are you easily clockable as queer

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Worth every penny!!!

Have you worked out which postcard was meant to show through the cut out window?

My favorites of the Granada Holmes postcards

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your cry of "they're totally gay!!!" is valid and i support you. what i will not tolerate is you implying the actions they took could only be motivated by romantic attraction instead of a deep bond of friendship

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thank you so much for creating a game where we can play Holmes as aroace, it makes me so happy!

Yaaaay!!! It makes me happy too 😌 That is the original ending I wrote, and it's very special to me!

I wrote Beekeeper's Picnic Holmes to be a-spec in all of the endings of the game. Even in the romantic one, it's apparently taken him decades to figure out he was feeling romantic love and he seems not to quite know what to do with that, which sounds like he's in the grey-a realm to me.

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In the Beginning...

In the beginning, God made phantoms and thieves.

If you're reading this in English, there's a 90% chance you first learned the word Kaitou from Kaito himself—and only slowly come to realize just how many corners of Japanese pop-culture it's really bled into, from Tezuka to Tuxedo Mask to Princess Peach. There's thieves, there's thieves with style, and then there's phantom thieves. A law unto themselves in their own worlds and ours, a breed of gentlemen who can magically stay gentlemen while doing the most ungentlemanly things known to society.

You'd need a book—probably a whole shelf—to properly explore all the ancestors of this proud archetype, never mind all the twists and turns it's taken in modern times. But we're a bunch of poors in money and time, so let's settle for just one tonight.

Fun fact, there's a doctor in Japan who runs a full-time clinic, lectures for one of the top med schools, and still finds room to blog about his fifty-odd niche interests. With him lighting the way, we tracked down this: the oldest book Japan's National Library has ever picked the word Kaitou out of.

Not a gentleman sort of book, you'd assume—and be absolutely right. Dated 1908 (just a little after Leblanc's Lupin, just a little before his first Japanese translation), Eishirō Suzuki's Strange Worlds is a loud, proud freakshow, trotting out ghost story after tall tale after Believe-It-Or-Not article about some wackos in America marrying in a lion cage. Our story of interest comes about halfway in: six pages and change, unmistakably headed 怪盗.

What lies within? A tragically forgotten ancestor to this great and greatly profitable archetype? Or a dead-end that happens to share the name and damn little else? Or, despite all odds, a combination of both?

Why don't you see for yourself?

Pull up a seat, grab a drink, and enjoy our exhaustive translation of history's first...

Phantom Thief

In the days of Jōkyō,¹ near Shitaya's Ikenohata-town, a pawn-shop called Yamaguchi Place² stood rich beyond imagining. Its master, with eleven vaults to his name, was a long and proud worshiper at the Benzaiten³ shrine on Shinobazu Pond. Now, it happened that this man heard the Shogun’s offices had recently surveyed the pond for land-filling, and grew troubled.

One evening, having closed early and settling the day's accounts, the boy tending the shop heard a tap at the front door, and opened to look. Lo and behold—there was a magnificent palanquin, inlaid four-square with silver, bound on every side by tens of fine, sentinel-eyed Samurai. Shocked, the boy ran to his master telling all. The master, no less shocked, came out with warm greetings, asking the company into his home.

Then from the palanquin emerged a most exquisite woman, so noble and divine of bearing that she might have been taken for a celestial maiden, with face sweeter than any peach or plum, and dress of the richest twill brocade. With hardly a sound this beauty sat, drew open her vermilion lips, and bade all listen—

“To begin, my being is not of flesh, but an envoy of Her Lady Benzaiten, in whom thou hast believed all thy life. The Shogun's men mean to bury Shinobazu Pond, and Her Ladyship suffers no small distress hearing this, for Her own power may well draw sanctuary from any ladle's-worth of water, but Her kith and kin—some hundreds upon thousands of scales—must wilt and suffer without mires to call home. “Deep ran Benzaiten's pity, and with it a divine will to bring salvation of some, of any kind. Mercifully, thy garden declares a most generous pond, and in behalf of those kith and kin I call upon thee to guarantee it as their new sanctum. If thy faith in Benzaiten be strong and true, take not these words in vain. Know only that Her Ladyship wills a night of storm and squall, fast approaching, to lay Her kin. Come that day, thou shouldst make fast the doors of thy home, withdraw to thine own room, and put no eye at door-slit, nor foot outside to enquire. Heed this, and Benzaiten will grow thy riches ten-fold in reward. Such is my message, in sum.”

Hearing this, the man grew ecstatic—rapturous, even. He spared nothing treating his guest, servants and all, to the very end of their departure.

In less than a fortnight came a dawn with greying skies, and by afternoon rain was falling, the wind slowly rising. On this day the man chose to fast, thinking it the day Benzaiten would descend, and so admonished his family and cohorts, warning them to keep the doors firmly shut and let no-one out after dark.

As the night crept toward second-watch,⁴ the wind grew wilder and wilder, until all the trees and bamboo in the garden could be heard thrashing, and all the water in the pond roiling. Now every breath was held, every head bowed, every heart thundering, thinking it time for She to come. Gradually the rain stopped and the wind ebbed, and the master, unable to wait for dawn, immediately threw open the door, eyes cast on the garden and its pond. There, he saw fish darting—more than the prior day—and thought, Benzaiten, your fellows are sown. Then, thinking of the promised reward, he rushed to check his stores. But as he swept up and down the row of vaults behind his shop, what did he find? Every lock undone, and every door open! Now uneasy, he entered, and found nothing left! Not the pawn-goods, nor the furniture, nor the thousand-ryō boxes. Floor to ceiling, everything was nigh-bare. He stood alone, dumbfounded and gaping.

Now, it happened that a shrine sat in the mountains on Kōshū-Kaidō Road, and before this shrine came men in packs, reeking of banditry, laying down their fresh and ill-gotten gains, eager for a proper portioning.

Onto this the shrine opened its doors, and who should be shocked to see the bandits' chief! No older than twenty-eight years she stood, with beauty to shame the sky and stars. A beauty that laughed aloud and said—

“My, what lovely work, boys!”

It was this very enchantress who had gulled the shop-master by claiming to be a goddess's envoy—and then, catching the slightest storm, sent all these men to his shop in dead of night. Some had hitched ropes to trees and bamboo all around his garden, and whipped them to bluff the sounds of a roaring wind, while others had beaten at the pond to affect waves. Under such clamor they had cunningly hidden any sounds of vault doors opening, of wares being moved.

A most unusual—most phantasmic—thief, no?

—Eishirō Suzuki, Strange Worlds: Tall Tales and Oddities (1908).

¹ Approx. 1684–1688 CE. ² No relation to Kappei. That we know of. ³ Wealth goddess strongly associated with rivers and lakes. One of Japan's Seven Lucky Gods. ⁴ Approx. 9—11pm. Adapted from Old China's gēng-diǎn system, each "watch" marking one-fifth of the time between sunset and dawn.

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I'm leaving to go to the US to attend 221b Con very soon! The good news is, my parents are coming to housesit and catsit!

The bad news is that means I feel the need to clean my house. Not just to "landlord inspection" levels of clean, but to "inside of cupboards are clean" levels. I even had to clean the inside of the microwave!!!

(Not depicted here, the couple of hours of pre-cleaning required before I felt comfortable enough to switch a camera on)

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I finished the game! Loved every minute of the smallest stakes mystery solving imaginable while I tried to get an angry mother to please forgive me so I can obtain some cordial lol

All of the side characters were so charming too, even the ones who didn't speak much. I love that they all made it into Holmes' attic, even though he pretends like he's not interested in most things haha

The ending was so sweet, I cannot believe how phenomenal the voice acting is in this game. I love that you left it up to us to choose how to interpret their relationship, but you still had every option ooze the sentimentality that such a lifelong companionship would bring between them. I adore your Holmes and Watson so much!!

It's so evident in the entirety of the work (and all the little references) how much you're a fan of the Holmes canon, this is truly such a labour of love that can be felt down to the single pixels! Thanks so much for making this game, I enjoyed every second (and I'll be going back at some point soon to choose the things I didn't the first time!)

❤️❤️❤️

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I finished the game! Loved every minute of the smallest stakes mystery solving imaginable while I tried to get an angry mother to please forgive me so I can obtain some cordial lol

All of the side characters were so charming too, even the ones who didn't speak much. I love that they all made it into Holmes' attic, even though he pretends like he's not interested in most things haha

The ending was so sweet, I cannot believe how phenomenal the voice acting is in this game. I love that you left it up to us to choose how to interpret their relationship, but you still had every option ooze the sentimentality that such a lifelong companionship would bring between them. I adore your Holmes and Watson so much!!

It's so evident in the entirety of the work (and all the little references) how much you're a fan of the Holmes canon, this is truly such a labour of love that can be felt down to the single pixels! Thanks so much for making this game, I enjoyed every second (and I'll be going back at some point soon to choose the things I didn't the first time!)

❤️❤️❤️

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His face when he realized he was about to fall

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Some quick reviews of my March reads!

Carpe Jugulum - while the pacing wasn't as sharp as some Discworld novels (there was lot of repetitive breaking into and out places) I'd read about these characters breaking out of a paper bag. This was a fantastic novel for Granny Weatherwax. And once again I was charmed by Pratchett's ability to critique and poke fun at religion while not devaluing the importance of individual religious belief to many people.

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz - alas this was a step down from the previous books in the series. I don't usually mind too much about retconning so long as it's done to make things more fun, but here the Wizard's backstory is changed in a way which makes his reappearance uninteresting. It lacks the structure of previous books.

The Importance of Being Earnest - how had I not read this before?!? Love it.

Manja - Story set in the Weimar republic about a group of children all conceived on the same day and their varying fortunes. It's a classic manic pixie dream girl story, but with beautiful prose. I had trouble keeping track of the very large cast.

The House of my Mother - I hadn't heard f Shari Franke, but on picking this up and reading she was the child of a family blogger, I thought it would be much more about the negative fallout of that cultural phenomenon as the kids born into it reach adulthood. It is partially, but Shari's story ends up being more extreme, featuring a destructive 'wellness' cult. It's rough going, but an absorbing real life account.

Small Gods - the classic! I was due a reread.

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I was at a bookstore looking through the art section and I saw a spine that said The Camden Town Nudes which was interesting because this didn’t seem like the bookstore where I would ever find something like that and I wanted to have a casual look but like. This also wasn’t exactly the bookstore where you felt like you could look at naked pictures let alone just suggestive paintings of them, it’s a really small shop as well, so I was like right I’ll just take a quick peek, I’m an art student, I love history, maybe I’ll buy it. I looked both ways and saw the shopkeep had left momentarily and no one was about, so I opened it and found it was an entire book featuring nude Edwardian women all painted by Walter Sickert between 1905-1912 and it was actually quite a revolutionary set of paintings for its time given that it featured very raw depictions of working class nude women in dark London instead of the elegant, white bedsheet clad, Demure middle and upper class women usually depicted.

And of course RIGHT as I flip to this lady’s boobs practically taking up an entire double page spread, every customer in a 5 mile radius appeared from around the corners of the shelf including the shopkeep and immediately regressing to a wet, pathetic Edwardian man from 1908, startled, I dropped the large book which caused a giant SLAP on the floor in this already silent store thus causing all patrons to look down at me scrambling on my knees to close a giant book of Edwardian boobs and let me tell you it would not have been nearly as funny had I not immediately felt like some Edwardian local pervert who just tried to sneak a cheeky peek at the erotic book in the bookstore only to drop it dramatically causing a scene, red up to his ears trying to shove it back on the shelf. Like such a casual and normal thing in modern day but looking at Edwardian women suddenly turned it into this egregious act as I apparently became possessed by the spirit of a moustached man in a bowler hat and morning coat going Good Heavens I mustn’t gaze upon these images in public lest the constable haul me away!

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Hi Jabbage, my bad if this is not the place to ask but have you sent keys for the game’s soundtrack for Kickstarter backers yet?

Uhhhh...I have now! Thanks for the reminder <3

If you're a backer you should be able to download it here.

And if you're not a backer, it's available on Steam, and also there's a better DRM free version on itch.io!

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Listen

LISTEN

I'm so so unwell about the Beekeeper's Picnic okay like I had to cry for a solid 30 minutes after playing it in order to be functional again. Please accept my soul my loyalty and my firstborn. I'm so so obsessed I've never loved any game this much before. The book references, the HELIOCENTRIC MODEL OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, the tender way Sherlock calls Watson "my dear, dear Watson", the reveal and all the feels at the end, the sense of community and the lovely characters in this game, the sheer love emanating from it - I'm so obsessed, I will be replaying it multiple times over.

I hope you won't mind if I make fanart/animatic/fic about it?

Like I need you to understand you have permanently altered my brain chemistry I'm screaming crying throwing up, the way they love each other (and all the options for us to define the kind of love that it is - including the secret fourth option that isn't brotherhood or friendship or romance but something beyond definition entirely) makes me so so feral it made my aroace soul so happy like. I need you to understand how much this game means to me. It's the most objectively perfect depiction of Sherlock and Watson and the most soothing beautiful art and environments and game play ever. Genuinely sending you so much love and appreciation 💖

WAAAH thank you so much, what a lovely message 💖 I've read it through three times already and I'll genuinely treasure it. I felt it was right to make it so the player can choose the exact nature of their feelings for each other, but the "secret fourth option" is that one that means the most to me and I think wanting to portray that kind of love was very central to me wanting to create the game.

If you made any fanworks that would be *awesome*, please let me know if you do!

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Bookbinding