Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book is a 1994 fantasy book by Terry Jones parodying the historical Cottingley fairy photographs of 1917 which caused a sensation when they seemed to depict realistic fairies with children.
The story of the book begins when Lady Cottington is a young child and she manages to smash a fairy in her diary, preserving it there. As she examines the fairies she starts to pick out different types and she starts to make a habit of it, pressing more and more of them. As her life progresses and her interest ebbs and flows, this keeps a historical record of her growing into womanhood and as her interests become more adults and the fairies play their tricks on her in turn. The words in the book are interspersed with illustrations of squashed fairies, some nude and contorted into painful death poses.
The illustrations are bizarre and morbid and sometimes funny, and of an excellent quality, and the book itself (the one that I got anyway) had a cool design making it seem like an old diary.
A content warning for those who do pick up the book, drawn by the premise and illustrations, that the storyline does involve some situations that, though described some opaquely, seem to suggest sexual abuse. That wasn’t something I was expecting and it does make the book harder to recommend as a result, since the book as a whole doesn’t give the impression it involves that topic.
Readers of Diabolical Plots may or may not know of its sister website also run by Diabolical Plots, LLC, called The Submission Grinder. The Submission Grinder is a donation-supported website to help writers find publications for their work–it hosts thousands of listings of fiction and poetry publications which are searchable by attributes such as genre, word count, pay rate, and other factors. Writers can track their submissions to these publications, and submission response time statistics and graphs are produced from these submission records for each publication to help writers know what to expect.
Since the site was a few weeks old, way back in the launch year of 2013, it has had the same banner on the top of the site, with the large title text “The Grinder” and subtitle text “milling your submissions into something useful”, with a picture of a meat grinder with written pages sticking out of it and pieces of loose paper blowing away over the title. The image and the title are conceptually tied to Diabolical Plots‘s mad scientist logo–when we were thinking up the name for the site we imagined the mad scientist from the logo stuffing his rejection slips into a meat grinder and cackling while he turned the crank. M.S. Corley was the artist who made the original art.
The Grinder: Milling your submissions into something useful…
We’ve never done an April Fool’s joke before, but this year with all the added stress of social isolation and worries about health and employment, we thought that people would appreciate something that gave them a little laugh, so we scheduled a bit of a light joke in the hopes of brightening someone’s day. On April 1st we announced a rebranding and asked for people’s feedback. On that day and that day only, instead of loading the classic banner it would load one of nine alternate banners. M.S. Corley reprised his role, doing the typography for all nine, and the illustrations for seven of the nine.
The Joke Banners
The Blender
The Blender: Juicing your submissions into something useful…
This one is probably the closest to The Grinder conceptually, since both are ways to process things that people eat–though someone really should have kept the lid on!
The Colander
The Colander: Draining your submissions into something useful…
The flying spaghetti noodles make me laugh every time.
The Flounder
The Flounder: Fishing your submissions into something useful…
This was the first joke idea that came to mind!
The Gander
The Gander: HONKing your submissions into something useful…
It’s a lovely morning at the writing desk, and you are a horrible goose.
The Griper
The Griper: Whingeing your submissions into something useful…
I am the artist for this grumpy pixelated face, M.S. Corley added the angry cartoon squiggles. 🙂
The Kinder
The Kinder: sledding your submissions into something useful…
In case you don’t know, “Kinder” is the German word for “children” (as in “Kindergarten”). This is another artwork courtesy of myself–in case you can’t tell this is supposed to be a line of children sledding down a pile of manuscripts (or rejection slips).
The Salamander
The Salamander: Sliming your submissions into something useful…
I had to Google to make sure salamanders are actually slimy and have long tongues, I wouldn’t want my April Fool’s joke to be factually inaccurate!
The Salander
The Salander: Inking your submissions into something useful
I was asking for some ideas for the jokes from my writing group The Dire Turtles, and someone suggested “The Salander”, when meaning to type “The Salamander”. “The Salander” made me think of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I liked the idea of the dragon. And “Inking” also seemed appropriate since it applies to both tattoos and writing.
The Winder
The Winder: Spooling your submissions into something useful
This one is extremely appropriate because needlework is probably the majority of the Diabolical Plots Twitter feed by volume!
Onward is a March 2020 CG-animated fantasy action/comedy film from Disney/Pixar. It had a brief theatrical release, but its lower ticket shows were attributed to shelter-in-place orders from COVID-19, and as a result it was published on digital streaming services much earlier than usual (we watched it on Disney+).
Ian (Tom Holland)and Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt) are brothers. Ian is a shy, self-conscious high-schooler, trying to build a life for himself but finding that his fear of everything holds him back. Barley is his older brother, graduated from high school and still living at home, full of confidence but not a lot of ambition for doing anything in the real world, focused almost exclusively on his role-playing games which are historically accurate from the time before the magic faded from disuse, displaced by technology. They live in a world with many elements that we would recognized as fantastical–they have a pet dragon that has the size and behaviors of a dog, their mom’s boyfriend Colt Bronco (Mel Rodriguez) is a centaur police officer. But magic itself is absent, until their mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) gives them a package from their father (Kyle Bornheimer) who passed away when he was young, who had asked that it be given to them when they were both sixteen.
It’s a magic staff and the instructions for a spell to bring their dad back for just one day to meet his sons. But the spell goes wrong and only half works, and their dad is reincarnated with only the bottom half of his body, from the waist down. They only have 24 hours to find a way to finish the spell if they want to be able to look him in the eye and have a conversation. With a book of spells and lots of determination, they set out on a quest to do whatever they can to reunite briefly with their father.
Onward is very much up to the high Pixar standard, full of fun and funny moments and feeling very much like the RPG story it’s meant to parallel but with a modern angle: pixie biker gangs, centaur police officers, my favorite character: an ex-adventurer Manticore (Octavia Spencer) now running a children’s restaurant. There are tearjerker moments too, of course, this being a Pixar movie and being about trying to magically reconnect with a deceased father.
Insurgent is a 2012 dystopic science fiction novel by Veronica Roth, the sequel to Divergent (reviewed here) and the second in the Divergent trilogy.
These stories take place in a future Chicago which is walled-off from the rest of the world and has been split into five factions: Candor (who value truth, Abnegation (who value selflessness), Amity (who value harmony), Dauntless (who value courage), and Erudite (who value intelligence). This order has existed for a long time, relatively undisturbed, but now the world is reeling from coordinated attack masterminded by Erudite that involved turning much of the deadly and well-trained Dauntless into mindless killing drones. Now the remnants of Dauntless are scattered and trying to figure out how they’re going to fit in in the new shaken order.
Tris Prior was born Abnegation but chose to switch to Dauntless when she turned sixteen, the one opportunity anyone has to switch. Although she is officially Dauntless, she has shown tendencies that seem to say she is actually “Divergent”, which means she has aptitudes for more than one of the factions. This is considered very rare, and very dangerous–others have died for even being suspected of being Divergent. This unusual trait may have saved many lives because she was able to resist the conditioning that turned much of the rest of Dauntless into mindless killing machines.
She and many of Dauntless are now hiding out in Amity, trying to find their next plans. It is a troubled truce with Amity, who value harmony and thus do not get along well with the violent and impulsive Dauntless. But their refuge isn’t going to last very long anyway, because the other members of Dauntless, the ones who sided with Erudite after the original conflict, are coming.
Another quite good book, Tris is an interesting and compelling protagonist, though she is very hard on herself for some of the things she did when she was trying to save Dauntless in the first book and it is hard to see her tear herself down that way when her decisions were understandable in the circumstances. She makes a good pair with Four, also from Dauntless, who is now her boyfriend. Solid book, well worth reading.
Divergent is a 2011 dystopic science fiction novel by Veronica Roth, the first of a trilogy of books. The story takes place in an isolated city-state that used to be Chicago in the future, where it is walled off from the rest of the world where no one seems to know what is happening outside of it. Almost all of society is split into five factions, each of which values certain human traits above all others. At the age of sixteen, every person must decide which faction they will belong to for the rest of their lives or risk falling into the huddled masses of the factionless who are barely acknowledged by the society.
The Abnegation values selflessness, and expect its members to never think of themselves. Dauntless values courage, its members are like a trained military force, expected to take on dangerous challenges without hesitation. Candor values honesty, and its members are expected to always tell the truth in all situations. Amity values harmony, and wants everyone to get along peacefully. Erudite value intelligence, they’re the inventors of the society. Every person is expected to be a clear fit for one of the factions or they are an outcast, but there are whispers that some people are “divergent” who have tendencies toward several factions at once, these people are considered dangerous to their social order.
Beatrice Prior is born and raised as Abnegation, but although she sees the worth in Abnegation’s values, she feels like an impostor because she can’t seem to hold to those values. On her Choosing Day she has to choose between staying with her family in Abnegation or leaving them behind to join one of the other factions.
The basis of this society is ludicrous (but of course it is a dystopia, not a proposal for a new social order, so I’m not saying it’s a bad idea for a book!). The people in this society have been raised with these ideals since birth so they take them for granted. It can be a difficult task for an author to build this world in a way that the reader can understand it without killing the pacing with an infodump, but this book does a very nice job of it, letting us see what it’s like to live in Abnegation day to day, then meet members of other factions and see how their behavior is different, Beatrice goes through the testing to see her faction leanings and etc.
If there is value in such a segregated society, the worst part of it is that you have to choose for life at the age of sixteen with very little information. People change! What if someone is very like Erudite as a teenager, but tends more toward Amity as they age? Well, too bad, you can either stick with your faction or you can go starve in the factionless.
Beatrice is in her head a lot, examining each angle of the situation, so I related to that a lot, as I am always examining every angle of situation before I make a choice about it, whenever I can. There are a lot of strong conflicts between Beatrice and the other initiates who have just chosen their new faction as they compete with each for entry. The book is full of action and worldbuilding and well written, a great start to a trilogy.
Rango is a 2011 computer-animated western comedy film distributed by Paramount Pictures. The protagonist (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon living a solitary life in a family’s terrarium acting out fantasy scenarios he invents in his ample spare time, and the family is driving with the terrarium in the back, when an accident throws the terrarium from the car, stranding the poor animal in the middle of a desert highway.
Given this opportunity to reinvent himself, he dubs himself “Rango” and takes on the role of a tough-as-nails drifter, enacting an elaborate persona that is completely unlike any personality he has ever actually had to take control and intervene in any problems he thinks the town has. Often as not, since he is concocting complex structures of lies, these lies tend to have unintended consequences and frequently make things worse more often than they make things better, and seem to be more motivated by trying to impress others than about trying to make anything actually better.
I found the movie more frustrating than funny or entertaining largely because Rango is often acting destructively in this elaborate guise of pretending to be a hero and he does not even seem to recognize that he might be the biggest villain of the piece. The more visibly villainous villains may be more dastardly but they are also more comprehensible in that one can understand the source of their actions, but Rango is just acting like what he pictures as the hero because that’s what he’s decided to do, no matter how many die in the process. This is… not admirable, and it’s only a matter of chance that these actions don’t end up killing every person he claims to help.
The movie has some interesting effects and kids will probably like it, but for me the plot was too “let’s congratulate this person who is destroying the lives of everyone around him on the premise of a journey of self-discovery”.
Tales From the Loop is a science fiction series with a montage cast that premiered on Amazon Prime in April 2020, based on illustrations from the narrative art book of the same name by Simon Stalenhag.
Underneath a small coastal town scientists have built The Loop, an experimental facility intended to unlike scientific secrets of all of the world’s mysteries. Everyone knows The Loop is there, but very few people know much about it at all. But there are a lot of things that are odd about this small town, lots of little residues, side effects of the experiments.
While many of the cast members recur from episode to episode, each episode focuses on a different person or people encountering a different mystery, often some unforeseen side effect of some forgotten relic of technology cast off by the experimental facility. The first episode follows a young girl as she tries to find out more about what her mother who works at The Loop does for a living, and she is pulled into the strangeness for herself. Quite a few of the episodes deal with the subject of time in one way or another, from manipulating time, to the passage of time as we age.
This is a really beautiful and well built series. There are so many striking images, so many great moments. In many ways it feels like the best parts of The Twilight Zone, where someone encounters something strange episodically and you never quite know how it’s going to turn out, but here all of these characters become familiar because even though each encounter their own strangeness their lives all interlock with each other, and the consequences from previous episodes still matter and affect the outcome.
One of the episodes in particular I found extremely powerful, episode five: “Control” where a man does the best he can to protect his family from the unknown. It’s a powerful story about the sometimes foolish things we can do when we are afraid for our family.
It’s hard to say very much about the series since each episode is mostly pretty well contained within itself, without spoiling something. But we very much enjoyed it, and if they make a season 2 we will definitely be watching!
Dark Ages is the second season of TBS comedy series Miracles Workers. I use the term “series” very loosely here, because there is no plot continuity whatsoever between the two seasons–if they didn’t actually have the same name I wouldn’t call it a series. Besides the name, they do have a major connection in that most of the cast from season 1 returns… as entirely different characters in an entirely different setting. The other common element is that both are based on the comedy writing of Simon Rich, this season from the short story “Revolution”.
While the last one was a contemporary fantasy that took place in heaven with bureaucratic workers there trying to convince God to not destroy the world, this one takes place in a fictional city in mideival Europe.
Our protagonist this season is Alexandra “Al” Shitshoveler (Geraldine Viswanathan), daughter of Eddie Murphy Shitshoveler (Steve Buscemi). She has big dreams for exploring the world as she graduates from high school but she is obligated to follow in her father’s footsteps to follow the family business and shovel human poop for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, Prince Chauncely (Daniel Radcliffe) lives in his castle and lives his life without any real hardships nor connection with his people, though he also lives in apprehension of the future ascending to the throne of his bloothirsty father King Cragnoor the Heartless (Peter Serafinowicz). Soon their paths happen to cross each other and they form an unlikely friendship and both see a glimpse of a life outside their own and yearn for something more.
The same sense of humor is evident in both seasons, and it’s great to see the original cast back again in different roles so we can see some of their range. Again, it’s particularly fun seeing Daniel Radcliffe playing a role different from what we’re familiar with, especially at the beginning as Chauncely is cowardly and exploitative if not bloodthirsty like his father he does not have a great deal of redeeming qualities. It builds much of its humor on historical elements from that time period, but often exaggerated for comic effect and also the ludicrousness of it pointed out by Al as she chafes against the boundaries of their small kingdom. Well worth seeing!
Miracle Workers is a TBS dark comedy series which, so far, has completely different topics and focus each season. Season 1 aired from February-March 2019, and is centered around the bureaucracy of heaven which is not as heavenly as we would like to believe, and is based on the novel What In God’s Name by Simon Rich.
God (Steve Buscemi) has decided on a whim to blow up the Earth to give him more time to focus on his new restaurant innovation where guests eat food while floating on inner tubes in a lazy river. Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan) has just transferred to the prayer-answering department which, until her arrival, was staffed only by Craig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose ultra-conservative approach to answering prayers makes it extremely unlikely that any prayers will actually be answered. They manage to talk God into making a wager: if they can grant an impossible prayer, then God will not destroy the Earth. The impossible prayer they choose is this: if they can get Sam (Jon Bass) and Laura (Sasha Compère), who are both socially awkward and both have crushes on each other, to kiss as a couple within the next two weeks.
This turns out to be much harder than they anticipate, given the minor physical aspects of the world they have complete control over, and making bigger changes can have major consequences. With two anxious people who are afraid to make their move, two weeks is a tight schedule. And all through this God is going forward with his plans and otherwise using his seemingly ultimate power and odd ambition to go forward with his own divine restaurant plans while our heroes try to thwart him.
This show is hilarious, great writing, excellent cast, it’s fun seeing Daniel Radcliffe in particular playing a role very different from his most well-known role. Highly recommended!
Skip-Bo is a card game created by Minnie Hazel “Skip” Bowman in 1967, that has since been sold to Mattel.
The object of the game is to completely empty your stock pile of cards, which in the standard rules starts with 30 cards (rules recommend changing this to 10 for a quicker game). You can keep 5 cards in your hand, and you can lay down any number of cards on your turn into a limited number of ordered build piles, with Skip-Bo cards acting as wild cards. At the end of the turn you either discard into one of a set of personal discard piles, and play continues until someone depletes their stock pile of cards.
The rules are sufficiently different from other card games I’ve played that it does have a little bit more of a learning curve than most, you have to learn what the difference between a build pile and a discard pile are, for instance. But it’s still not a terribly steep curve and once you get the learning stage out of the way you should be able to play through pretty quickly.
Audience Probably not suitable for pre-school kids as the rules might be a little more complicated than other card games for them to pick up, especially in terms of keeping track of the separate piles.
Challenge Once you pick up the rules, mostly based on chance, though your strategy of how to organize your discard piles will affect your long-term game.
Session Time If you play the main rules of the game, maybe a half hour? With a pile that big it can take a while to work through it.
Replayability No more or less than other card games.
Originality Even fifty years later, it feels sufficiently different from other card games to be notable.
Overall A little bit more of a learning curve than most playing card games (maybe too much for pre-school kids), but not bad. Sufficiently interesting with a bit of strategy mixed with the chance to keep things interesting.
