u/Mundane_Regret_428

So often in mysteries (especially procedurals), journalists exist to fill a certain role. They will either be so ambitious that they would sell a five year old witness out to the mob if it meant they can scoop their rivals, or they will just completely make things up with zero care if they're true or not as long as they make their deadlines.

So. Who are some examples of actually conscientious journalist protagonists? They can be morally grey and do things that aren't actually allowed in real life as long as their motivations aren't entirely self-interested and they genuinely want to help people at least some of the time.

I had been recommended the Odelia Grey books as body positive rep and the first chapter has her basically going "I'm so huge that it beggars belief at 215 lbs" (MAN the early 2000s....) which when you said goodbye to 215 lbs a decade ago stings 😂 So are there any series that are just about a plus size sleuth who is either neutral about that or actually likes themselves the way they are?

So. First off, I don't expect she'd have been married off to Frederick III which would have meant no WWI eventually. But I'm mostly wondering if we know enough about her beliefs and positions to have an idea of what her rule might have looked like as opposed to her brother's. From what I have read of her, Vicky seemed to have a good head on her shoulders and to also be kind and considerate, so my initial assumption would be that she would be a good queen. (Also for the purposes of the thought experiment let's say her rule lasts as long as Edward VII's did since Vicky died so soon after Victoria.)

For me, it is that I always imagined the Fat Lady's friend Violet as being about a foot tall and perched on the Fat Lady's shoulder because she came from a small painting and the Fat Lady's painting was very large. The idea of the portraits scaling up or down to the size of the painting they were in genuinely didn't occur to me until much later. I genuinely had to check Goblet recently to make sure Violet WASN'T described like that!

I love Charlotte Holmes and Lord Ingram Ashburton's dynamic in Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series, and I grew up swooning over Rick and Evy O'Connell, but finding more couples like them is hard especially because it's not a subgenre like enemies to lovers or something easily searchable, it's a dynamic that can show up anywhere (although it might be a little more prevalent with battle couples and mystery solvers). I'm just so very tired of fictional men who take it as a personal slight that their girlfriend is brilliant, especially when it is a recurring problem over the course of a series.

I love cozies but a recurring problem I keep running into is the heroine will be dating a guy (frequently in law enforcement) who is annoyed and/or threatened by the fact that she keeps solving mysteries. Are there any series apart from Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series that feature a love interest who loves how smart the heroine is?

Watching flawed adaptations like the 1953 Kiss Me, Kate and knowing how many adaptations just completely fail (Cats 2019 and Les Mis 2012 being the top of that category in terms of overall execution) made me curious because I know that movies cannot just be proshots and do have to change things, but are there examples where the changes didn't destroy the original? It genuinely makes me sad that all we really have that's accessible for great musicals a lot of times is the adaptations when the adaptations are frequently so bad so some reassurance that sometimes the people involved do get it right would be very nice to hear.

So about a year ago, Logic Pro started saying that it could not find my interface for sound output (which I have my external speakers hooked to) and would default back to the computer speakers until I unplugged and replugged the interface. Since the latest update, it has also decided that my phone is the default external mic input and will keep asking to connect with my phone even when I have unplugged and replugged the interface.

I have tried going to the sound setup in settings and switching to the interface, and I have gone into the Audio MIDI setup app to try to permanently set my interface as the default, but nothing lasts after restarting the computer.

Is this a bug that has to be fixed in a software update or is there something I'm just missing?

So I recently got the book A Night at the Opera by Sir Denis Forman as a quick and easy reference guide, and he mostly seems fair...and then argues that Ariadne auf Naxos has beautiful music but an absolutely terrible story that should never have been written and actively encourages people to only listen to it rather than watch it because "whatever your mind can come up with is better than what is happening onstage".

So! As I have yet to see it....Is he correct, partially correct, having a very personal bias, flat out wrong, or what?

Looking into this to make sure I don't run afoul of copyright for a retelling of the story but: I am fairly certain that Mrs Lovett does not have a first name in The String of Pearls (it is 500+ pages on kindle so I haven't made it through the entire thing since I started yesterday!), and that Christopher Bond is the one who named her Nellie, which was carried on by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. But I can't find anything that actually SAYS that that's what happened so! Anyone more knowledgable about this than me, please chime in!

This has bothered me for probably 20 years because most of the rabbit legends have a clear answer to what stuff is. They know about dogs, they know about extinct or endangered animals like bison, they can usually describe things to the point that we can understand them. They also have no problem describing mythical creatures.

So what on earth was the Thing in the maze???

I know that "the greater horror is in not knowing" is the point of that story and it worked extremely well. But what on earth do we think is an animal that has the cruel intellect of a human to the degree that El-ahrairah himself refused to ever discuss what he saw??

Learning about opera royalty has meant seeing a LOT of shows mentioned in their biographies that are, as someone who is not a big fan of tragedies, not things that I would want to watch. (For example I'm sure La forza del destino is amazing, but reading the summary was the emotional equivalent of being kicked repeatedly.) But it seems strange to me that all of the legendary opera stars would be tragedians so: are there any whose claim to fame was they were truly masters of comedy performing?

Since this is so often described as THE comic opera of all time, I thought it worth looking into, but I know that comic opera is tricky because a lot of productions focus on beautiful singing to the detriment of the actual comedy. So what's a very funny, well performed version and do I have to worry about any that are technically well done but dull?

Farces are very funny but I also want big exciting mythic adventures that have happy endings, or great love stories that don't end in tragedy. It's unfortunately one of those questions you can't really google effectively because it's based on vibes rather than an actual subgenre, especially when the big star making roles tend towards tragedy (like Norma or Aida or Carmen or Brunnhilde).

If there actually is a term for this type of opera I would love to be corrected and pointed in the direction of them.

When I was young I saw and adored Papp's staging of Pirates of Penzance. I thought it was one of the funniest shows I had ever seen and I can still quote huge chunks of it.

Then I watched Brent Walker's version of H.M.S. Pinafore and it felt like none of what made Pirates fun was a part of that show. (I actually only watched half of it and never finished it.) Apparently that is one of the worst versions ever but. Is Pinafore still funny or are we too removed from the Victorian era to enjoy it? I just remember everything feeling slow and self-important and far too much time being spent on what felt like tragic ballads like Poor Little Buttercup.

I keep reading everywhere that it's quite possibly the funniest comic opera of them all and then trying a new version of it and watching until the end of "Ecco, ridente in cello" and wondering if anything funny was supposed to have happened or if this is plot setup and the actually funny parts happen later. So. Should I just be patient and push through or is it one of those "in its time, it was very funny. Now, it's intermittently mildly amusing" things?

It is always difficult with singers who have an enormous back catalogue to know what are the absolute must hear recordings. So! What are the biggest recommendations for:

Maria Callas

Montserrat Caballé

Beverly Sills

Marilyn Horne

Deborah Voigt

Birgit Nilsson

Also if I am missing someone who I really should include in that list, please let me know!

When I was in college as a music major, they would show us filmed performances, largely ballets. The ones that stuck in my mind are Giselle, Frankenstein, and Firebird. All three absolutely gorgeous, but I personally have a hard time with being immersed in tragic art. So what are the funniest ballets out there, and are they available to stream anywhere online? Wikipedia only listed around ten or so comic ballets and I'm sure there are far more than that out there.

I am looking into getting an annotated version of the books because I have heard that a ton goes over everyone's heads (since Carroll was not just writing math puns and logic puns but in-jokes) and I want to finally understand one of my favorite books from my childhood. But I have been burned by "annotated" classics before (I found an "annotated" Dracula that was really just Dracula with a bio of Bram Stoker and a list of characters added to it) so which is the one that has all of Carroll's jokes and puns and references explained?

I would like to get into far more of Shakespeare's oeuvre than I have (I have mostly read a few of the more famous ones and have approximate knowledge of some of the others via pop culture osmosis) but I don't really know where to start with performances. I would like modern ones if possible, and if there are companies that produce well-performed versions consistently on YouTube that would be very cool. I don't care about big names being involved nearly as much as will I be enthralled for a couple of hours.