Yes, Honor is dead. But I’ll see what I can do.

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
aethersea
vinshuka

So this past weekend my friend and I went to TCAF, we saw a ton of cool stuff but I also convinced them to go to the Arthur Conan Doyle Room with me at the Toronto Reference Library with me as I had been meaning to make the trip.

For any one who doesn't know the Arthur Conan Doyle Room is a massive collection of ACD, Sherlock Holmes, and related books (there are 25000+ books) located on the 5th floor of the library and completely open to the public. You can take items right off the shelf and read them. The library was pretty quiet that day so we had the whole collection to ourselves.

Part of the collection is in this wonderful little room. Themed after Holmes' study.

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There's even a piece of the Reichenbach Falls.

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Of course we have the "Watson going through it" Sidney Paget print.

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When I was first told about the collection I was told to be on the look out for the copy of The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes they have, which we found on the shelf to the left of the fireplace. My friend was delighted to read a section of it out loud in that very echoey room for our amusement.

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I found this Japanese language novel featuring what I can only describe as "Shonen Protagonist Sherlock Holmes" that I just needed to share with everyone.

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We spent a good couple of hours looking through things, they have a lot of various editions of the canon in a number of different languages, as well as a ton of parodies, pastiches, and Holmes adjacent items. My friend and I are planning another visit later this summer as we barely scratched the surface of what the collection has.

So if you do find yourself downtown Toronto, I highly recommend stopping by.

Arthur Conan Doyle Collection
Home > eResources & Research > Special Collections & Rare Books Arthur Conan Doyle Collection
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sherlock holmes books this fandom
penmeetspage
professorsparklepants

I'm obsessed with how Hadestown Orpheus isn't just a musician and a demigod, he's a visionary and a sorcerer and a fucking prophet. He pulls a melody from ancient times, before the change of the seasons. He sees through the earth and spies the rivers of the underworld and the wall that's being built around it. He reaches his hand into the heart of a god to divine his emotions and literally plucks his heartstrings.

tag theft: he's the poet - the poet: the longer and more he works on the song the more he understands exactly how the world has broken and the clearer he can see the mechanics and causes of how it has broken and what the consequences are and also: we're told his gift is to see how the world could be but the story he's in is cyclical! temporarily broken but we see it repaired every staging so looking forward at that possibility....he can also see the past with more clarity even than those who lived through it hadestown greek mythology broadway
dimir-charmer
unpickled-olive-deactivated2025

all the food classification discourse is phenotype-based and no more sophisticated than ancient greek zoology.

"pizza is a flat bread with toppings baked on"?

let me guess: you define a man as a featherless biped, don't you plato?

no, we need the taxonomical model. food evolves and adapts and descends. it fills niches that cause it to diverge from its ancestors and converge with other, unrelated species. unlike most animals, food is capable of horizontal gene transfer, making taxonomical divisions less linear.

american pizza (Focaccius rotunda) is descended from an italian baked flatbread dish. deep dish pizza (F. r. patina) is a subspecies of american pizza which evolved in the american midwest. it is taxonomically unrelated to common species of casserole in the area (and casserole is not a taxonomic category but a polyphleytic grouping, much like fish and crabs)

unpickled-olive-deactivated2025

"sushi is a burrito" yeah and a bat is a bird.

unpickled-olive-deactivated2025

hotdog is actually genetically in the ramen clade for reasons scientists don't understand yet

yummy arguments science this is actually very well reasoned
booksandchainmail
anodymalion

Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).

I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:


  • At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.
  • And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.


  • Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.


  • About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.
  • Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"
  • Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)
  • Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.


  • The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.
  • Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol


  • Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.


  • The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.
  • Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)


  • Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.
  • Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.


  • Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.
  • He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol


  • Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.
  • Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular


  • The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.
  • Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."
  • At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.


  • There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.


  • Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.


  • He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip
anime
aethersea
teaboot

Using Fey Law as a heavy-handed metaphor for corporate IP copyright

teaboot

  1. Saying their name will draw their attention.
  2. Using their likeness will spark their ire.
  3. Encroachment upon their domain will earn punishment beyond earthly tithe.
  4. The consequences of their regard may be intangible and long-lasting.
  5. Rarely, you may earn their approval, but it is not worth the risk.
  6. You must ask their permission, which is rarely granted.
  7. Once they have you, they will not let you go for a hundred years.
  8. You must be clever and use trickery and wordplay to evade them.
  9. The master of each domain has their own unique and fickle nature, and some are more forgiving than others.
  10. One must use titles and euphemisms to discuss them without their notice- IE, "The Rat", "The Bird Website"
teaboot

Starting a mass movement to refer to specific Tylwyth Teg by name until they lose their power and become common household standards like Kleenex and Velcro

fae modern fantasy
big-ass-magnet
bestintrek

image

Bajoran whale? Trophy taken by a Cardassian and left hung up in the station as symbol of Bajoran strength?

The teeth aren't pointy, it's not a predator. It's something non-violent that the Cardassians took and killed and displayed.

This is from an end of the set they didn't show often, where Sisko enters the Prom if he comes from his quarters.

s1e10 The Nagus (the one when Nog drops out of school and Jake teaches him to read)

respocked

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These tags intrigued me enough that I went out to find it. Here it is: the Cardassian Sushi Ad.

ds9
big-ass-magnet
exlibra

i have to say, the enormous, dried corpse of a fish hanging from the ceiling doesn't really make me crave sushi for dinner. but what do i know.

exlibra

and anyway, why is it still up there? is a load bearing fish, in that removing it would trip enough security systems to make the whole process too annoying to go through? do they just think it looks kinda cool? does the crew decorate it for the holidays with fairy lights and hats and shit?

unamccormack

Maybe Garak's fed them some bullshit that it's a tremendously rare specimen, of huge scientific significance, and they keep trying to contact someone at a university back on Cardassia Prime only to get polite but baffled rebuffs.

Maybe there's the Bajoran equivalent of a traffic cone that regularly gets put on it, in the manner of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow, or Jake and Nog carry out a series of escalating dares involving clothes, jewellery, underwear, etc.

I have, in all my long years of watching DS9, never noticed that bloody fish, which tells you exactly how good video tape quality is, something about the state of my eyesight, and also more generally about my powers of visual observation.

katbelleinthedark

Counterproposal: people keep stealing parts of it.

There is a a statue of a poet in my city that's famous for two things: it's a high school exit exams good luck charm and kids dance polonaise in front of it every year, and having its quill stolen. The poet has a quill in this statue and it used to be made of bronze so people used to steal it to sell for scrap. It kept getting replaced with a new bronze quill and then was subsequently stolen. At some point, they stopped making the replacements with bronze and just opted for dyed plastic (in hopes that such a worthless thing would stop being stolen) but at that point stealing the quill had become a local extreme sport (will you be faster than the police and the civil servants whose offices the statue is standing pretty much right in front of) and a tradition. Needless to say, the plastic quill is still being stolen.

Incidentally, we also have another statue in my city (this one if front of the university), one of a fencer, and his bronze sabre is also traditionally stolen and was also replaced by plastic and is still being stolen.

Anyway. So as the other post said, this fish isn't a predator and maybe during the Occupation people were stealing bits of it and it drove Dukat insane and he kept getting them replaced (with fake parts because sourcing genuine ones would be too much even for his budget, but he always pretended it was real).

unamccormack

Aha, I love all this. Maybe it’s like the prank car stunt here and people disassemble and then reassemble it in weird places. Inside one of the holding cells is a particular triumph. Nobody ever works out who it was; Odo longs for it to be Garak & Quark so he can throw the book at him; alas, no evidence and mysteriously no footage either.

ds9