Assorted thoughts update #1 (for real this time)

A lot's been happening in my life, none of which I'm feeling very motivated to vent about, so as always I use my nerd space to rant about nerd stuff. I've been reading a lot of Ace Attorney fan takes lately, throughout Tumblr and Twitter, and I've read both interesting meta and... more frustrating discourse that comes up frequently.

( The discourse in question, so I can complain a bit )

But anyways. Aside from that, I've been doing some interesting reading/research:

• I finished a book called Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire by Stephen Arata a few weeks back, which is a historical literary study on degeneration theory in the late nineteenth century: specifically, it discusses an analyzes narratives of "decline" as depicted in the popular literature of the period and as written by famous authors, all concerned with writing about anxieties of class, the body, and the empire in different ways (whether in a critical approach, or in a demonstration of the author's own anxieties). I thought it was a pretty engaging and fascinating read, especially when it came to the examination of the various authors. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson, the latter especially for how he argues for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as being a critique of the bourgeois class, reflecting Stevenson's own cognitive dissonance over potentially rising into it with his professionalization as an author. I think people should check this one out if they haven't!
• I haven't finished Titus Groan since I last talked about it (I'm so slow at reading... sob) but I'm definitely beginning to rank Mervyn Peake up there as one of my favourite prose-writers. He has such a clever but unexpected way with words, and it makes up for much of the ways that his writing is (at least, to me) pretty unsubtle. He just makes it work! I wish my vocabulary was as extensive as his.
• God I wish it were possible to learn new languages instantly in order to make research for my writing projects that much easier. That said, I've been finding some really cool detail tidbits on cultural aspects of the first Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War for something I'm currently working on. Here's a fun link to a picture + woodblock print of the Meiji Emperor's procession to Tokyo, where he eventually moved in permanence, after the end of the former. Here's another picture someone uploaded of older members of their family during the celebrations in London after the relief of Mafeking. I love looking at the more human details of history.