The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Leah:

is getting geography 100% right *necessary* for valuable history? i doubt it.

Having my state's place as a border state totally usurped by Tennessee with this error, (and with considerable pride in my own family Civil War history and with Civil War historians in my immediate family), I would have to say that geography is pretty damn important, even incidental geography. Saying it doesn't matter as much because it's not relevant geography is like saying you shouldn't bother to use proper grammar because you're just writing a work email. It's the sort of accuracy that's important all the time.

Geography was desperately important to the people fighting the war. It helped to shape the ideals and the causes of the people fighting the war. It should be at least as important to the people writing about it. If you don't walk the fields over and over again, if you don't know each creek and sunken road, then you're talking through your hat, as far as I'm concerned.

But that could also be my bruised pride as a (typographically omitted) Kentuckian.

We've been watching this video all week long, interspersed with the Discovery Channel ad. We've downloaded both the songs and made a cd just to use the two songs as the beginning and ending frame of the playlist. (Discovery Channel has made Boom de ada available for free.) I've emailed family friends I haven't seen in ten years, just to link them to this video. It is wonderful and silly and amazing and it makes me cry.

If we could get some more of this kind of thing, and that Discovery ad, we might just save this place, and each other, after all.

Ah, I remember those days, those days of fourteenth-generation videos subtitled in wobbly English over preexisting Mandarin Chinese subtitles! I remember having episodes 14-23 of a series and nothing else, except for maybe a movie that seemed to have been made in another dimension by people who had read the plot of the actual series in a magazine while waiting for the dentist.

Those days, they were glorious. Then anime went on the internet and I was a dinosaur before the age of 30. I'm still catching up.

Maybe those sales of DVDs are falling because the market is saturated, and not many people want to buy entire overpriced box sets of series they haven't even seen. (So they go to youtube to watch it first.)

Fullmetal Alchemist is a brilliant anime, and shines in the dross of recent output. I'm not particularly a fan of the manga, but that's a matter of personal taste. Avoid the fandom at all costs, at least until you have watched the show in peace and quiet. One does not simply walk into FMA fandom. There is Evil there that does not sleep.

How refreshing and pleasant! I've always liked best the notion that writers are writers, and 'fanfic' or 'genre' or 'Biography of Ferdinand de Saussure' is just what the writer is doing, not what the writer is. Good writing is good writing, regardless.

So good to see such a balanced article. Congrats!

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