History Geekery for Steve Rogers

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing! My big accomplishment is having the energy to put together a Book Club for the 616 Discord. It consists of two comics about the Avengers doing their taxes.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Ultimate Wolverine #16 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure yet; it's hard to tell how much brain I will have at any given time, as I am currently getting two or three days between migraines. In baseball non-fiction reading, I am partway through Billy Bean's autobiography but I don't know what fiction to try reading. Probably I should just go for some more tropey m/m romance or something.

Man, why do I not have a They Might Be Giants icon?

They just released a new album (The World Is To Dig), their 24th album, and, yeah, okay, I know I've been listening to them since I was in high school, but I am honestly impressed and pleased that they are still out there making music and also have (unlike most of the other bands I really liked in high school) managed not to do anything massively problematic that I am aware of and are just, you know, seeming to genuinely enjoy getting to spend their lives hanging out and making music.

The r/tmbg subreddit asked people not to rehash the same argument we have every album (that we have been having since the days of Usenet, as they pointed out), which is "why isn't this album more [X] like the last album?" and while I will say that it doesn't have any songs where I'm like "this is definitely the best on this album" (like "Brontosaurus" which was clearly the best thing on Book, their last album) I think "Sleep's Older Sister" (described by someone on reddit as "what if Taylor Swift was high" lol) is going to be stuck in my head, as is "Outside Brain," and "In the Dead Mall," so it's a little weird to me how most of my faves are Flansburgh songs this album, though I do like Linnell's "Character Flaw" and "What You Get." But this seems like a very good Flans album to me.

(I think most of the fanbase would say that Their most popular songs are Linnell's -- Birdhouse, Ana Ng, and so on -- and the Ratings on the wiki bear this out, as the top ten are Linnell. You don't even get to a Flans song on this list until what is currently #17, which is "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head," which I like a lot but I think is, you know, maybe not one of Their most well-known. So I am in kind of a weird position where I generally agree with the fandom consensus but also my absolute favorite TMBG song is actually "Sleeping in the Flowers," which is a Flans song.)

Because I guess it wouldn't be a TMBG album if I didn't have to look any words up while listening, I did have to look up two words. And I don't mean "I couldn't understand the words they were singing so I had to check the lyrics," I mean "I've never heard that word before in my life." So, yeah, I had to look up "galliard" (a Renaissance courtly dance, apparently) and "Coffey still," although in my defense I don't actually know anything about how distillation works.

So, yeah, new TMBG album. At least the world contains that.

Today in Fandom Complaints, I wish to preface my complaint by saying that since, obviously, I am enjoying watching the entire back catalog of Dimension 20 and also Campaign 4 of Critical Role, that clearly I enjoy watching Brennan Lee Mulligan's DMing.

However, I think it's really, deeply weird, that for a guy who clearly defines himself by being a big nerd who knows a lot of stuff about stuff (and, I mean, sure, that's great, I am also a big nerd) -- anyway, that basically everything I have ever seen him say about Latin is totally wrong. If there's Latin, it's wrong. (If there's Greek, it's also often wrong, but there's less Greek, at least. Still bewildered at CR C4 featuring him defining "dithyramb" essentially as "amphitheater" and then telling the audience to "look it up." I... did? It doesn't mean that.)

Yes, I was annoyed while watching D20 Fantasy High that he consistently stresses "Avernus" wrong -- the Latin stress rule is not hard, I promise -- but I told myself that, okay, maybe it's a D&D thing and D&D decided to pronounce the name of their thing differently from the real thing. Sure. Fine. Okay. I was annoyed that D20 Unsleeping City S2 decided to make the cornerstone of its season the quotation "Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo" because then that meant I had to listen to it be mispronounced and mistranslated and taken out of context a lot -- and because it's one of lysimache's favorite bits of the Aeneid it's also one of my favorite bits of the Aeneid. But everyone takes this one out of context a lot now (it's part of the 9/11 memorial, for some weird reason) and I guess I can accept that people don't know it's about Being Gay and Doing War Crimes and that's just how it is.

But, okay, so, I am coming up on the end of the season Mice & Murder, which is basically "The Wind in the Willows but what if we just murdered a bunch of animals at Toad Hall and then a fox version of Sherlock Holmes had to solve the mystery" which I assume is not what the book is actually about although I haven't read it. Anyway, here in the penultimate episode, the characters are given a clue to a passcode, and the clue is in Latin, and they are asked if any of their characters know Latin.

The clue is "mors est in gloria." He repeats this, like, two or three times, and he's clearly reading it off something -- it is definitely the thing he intended to say. (The closed captions spell it wrong, but that is absolutely the thing he is saying. He pronounces it very carefully.)

Because I have clearly put several points into Knowing Latin while building my real life human character my first thought is "well, that's a weird clue." Like, what the hell? "Death is in glory?" Okay, sure. Whatever. It didn't occur to me that it could have been meant to say something else. I just thought it was weird on purpose.

Then he tells the player whose character would definitely know Latin (the character is a vicar) what this is supposed to mean, privately, and they excitedly report to the rest of the group that it means "glory in death."

No. No, it does not.

It's four words. Come on. How do you get this wrong? How do you get this exactly backwards? How do you look at the phrase "in gloria" that you have constructed and decide that you nailed it and that that for sure means "in death?"

I don't expect most pop culture to get Latin right, but, like... I expect better of Pop Culture For Total Nerds, I guess. I would really like D20 to do better. Please. For me. Get someone to check your Latin.

(I also did not buy the two Game Changer pins with Latin mottos from the episode where they gave them Latin mottos because both of them had bad Latin to varying degrees. One of them was bad to a degree where it was like "okay, this contains words that obviously are Not Actual Words and therefore makes very little sense, what the fuck" and the other one was only bad to the degree of "if you know what it is trying to say, you can see how they got there, but this really only means that in Medieval and not Classical Latin." Which, eh. I guess clearly it could be worse.)