#The Game

[misscrazyfangirl321]

If you're reading this, you've won The Game. It's over, it's done, and you can breathe. Now any time you see posts telling you that you lost The Game, you can smile, shake your head, and feel sorry for all of those OTHER people who are still playing The Game, while being glad that you yourself are free.

"But that's not how The Game works-"

If someone can arbitrarily decide that everyone on Earth is playing The Game, someone else can arbitrarily decide there's a way to win.

Congratulations on your win!! Celebrate with a treat of your choice.

[definetelynotdepressed]

god cursed me into seeing this image so im making it everyone elses problem

[icantflyjets123]

[theblvcksupreme]

Tia Mowry in The Game (2006-2015)

[lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks]

I have a friend who loves calling me randomly at odd hours just to say The Game and then hang up. if I don't answer he leaves it as a message. one time he even came at me from a private number just to catch me off guard. he is relentless.

fortunately my psychologist wants me to get back into a non-screen related hobby to do before bed to help me sleep, and she highly approved of getting back into cross stitching, I just needed to think of a design for a project

if I'm working on it every night hopefully I will have it done by his birthday in June, I'm debating on whether to put it on a wall hanging or a cushion

[suckmydictionary5]

[nortsauce]

Larry is no longer allowed to babysit.

[hopelesslyprosaic]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back full force into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[rhetthammersmithhorror]

The Game | 1984 — aka The Cold

[lazyyogi]

You go to school, score the grades, get the job, make the money— pay the loans, the bills, the rent— all while scrounging just enough energy to keep going.

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in a game you never consented to play?

Every moment you fail to question the game is your consent.

But wanting the game to improve isn’t the same as questioning it. That just tightens the chains. 

No one seeks escape from a prison that still fascinates them. Freedom begins the moment you lose your taste for it.

And then you’ll see: to question the game is to stop asking how to win… and start wondering who’s playing.

[amrodyj]

jeckole consumed my mind (wip)(i don’t do commissions)

[pinkygripper]

RARARARRARARARRARARARA!!! 🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖

wahey! To all the dearest darling pookings and poopies happy day to you.

ughhhhhhh I have so so much coursework taht is all due in friday (twitching sounds grow louder) On the plus side WICKED YIPPEE.

this idea came to me in the midst of a locked in acedemic weapon haze so I had to share this low quality sillyness with you guys, the beautiful creatures lurking in my phone, sustaining me with lovehearts and other tokens of affection.

THIS IS DEDICATED TO @ineptus-in-aeternum for telling me how to add emojis yippeeee!

To all the people doing hard work (especially people revising for upper sixth mocks :""0 ) I believe in you feel joy and wonderful slaygastic days

alsoooo guh cynthia erivo's voice??? ariana grandes voice??? expect more art hehehhe... maybe... le sigh.. so much work but we cringe on..... WE CRINGE ON!!!!!!! 🦖🦖🦖

xxx

[thunder-cube]

[rogers-rainbow-radio]

Roger Taylor in Crazy Little Thing Called Love - 1980

[storyweavingspider]

Love is showing people cursed images you find on the internet or in the annals of your phone, so that you may partake in the joy of inflicting a cognitohazard upon them, so they can then inflict it on others.

It’s even better when it recalls another cursed item :3