Do you ever just sometimes marvel at the fact that the aesthete culture of the likes of Oscar Wilde has found new life in Millennials? Like there is an established subculture of the “deeply shallow” (to quote @dionysae ) who find real meaning in the look, feel, and texture of our worlds. We have this amazing talent for finding uniform beauty in different vibes and we have no shame in organizing our lives around that vibe pursuing the feelings and values said vibe stirs up in us. Like the “live and die for the aesthetic” meme is funny by it’s not a lie; we are the inheritors of a great tradition of building personalities and commentaries out of sublime, carefully cultivated Looks. Art for art’s sake is back in a Big way folks.
Important thing to point out about travel by foot or horseback: if you’re traveling over mountains, you can basically cut those distances in half on a clean trail, and in thirds or quarters on a trail you have to blaze yourself. Although someone who’s been in the mountains for months or years may be able to travel at the paces listed above for several days at a clip. (For instance, it’s not uncommon for an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, carrying about 30 pounds, to do 20 or even sometimes 25 miles a day, six days a week, once they’ve had enough time out there to build up into an endurance athlete.)
lemonbird asked: IMPORTANT QUESTION. Vampires aren't suppose to enter a premise without being invited right? What if a hermit vampire was living in his falling apart old castle and some fuck bought it as a "fixer upper", would the vampire just glitch out on to the lawn or would he be okay since he lived there before?
Okay so this would depend on where you are in the world, and whether or not they had squatters rights (can’t be evicted and can apply for legal ownership of place once they have been there for X amount of years) but I mean, the dude owns the place, even if it is a run down mess he was still there first and there’s probably some ancient land ownership law which can’t be overwritten by modern laws (you find all sorts of weird things are still technically legal cause no one bothered to update the books since 1645) so basically whoever just bought this castle to turn it into a modern fixer upper, congrats, you also just bought yourself a vampire and he’s not going anywhere.
(Also now I kind of want to write this where a family buys it to turn it into a hotel/wedding venue and the kids find the vampire in the attic and he ends up being the weird uncle who gets roped into hilarious wedding related shenanigans?? Like
“Okay yes fine, you can host weddings here, but registrar only, no religious ones.” “But Theolodious, why?” “Really Sharon, really, do I have to spell it out for you. Really.”
*
“We really should increase the lighting for photographs, what about skylights?” “No.” “But—” “How about I just set all of you on fire while you’re trying to sleep.”
*
“Please, for the love of god, please don’t let people throw confetti or rice, I’m begging you.”
*
“Okay what’s our final head count for the night?” “107.” “Are you sure?” “Did I fucking stutter Steve?”
*
“Uncle Theo, why does the groom have “help me” on the bottom of his shoes, why is everyone laughing?.” “Because small one, humanity has failed collectively as a species and heteronormativity is a constructed lie designed to oppress over half the population for not conforming to arcane and chauvinistic ideals put in place by dead scholars who have long since turned to dust and have no place influencing modern society.” “…” “Permanence is an illusion.”
*
“Madame, flattering as your offer is for a quickie, you’re not my type.” “What is your type then?” ;) ;) ;) “O negative.”
*
“Whoo, what a day, I could eat a horse.” “Same.” “…” “…well obviously I’m not going to.”
*
“Theo…are you…are you crying?” “Yes.” “You big softie, I never thought someone like you would cry at a wedding.” “…I’ve lived a long life, Sharron. People come and go, the christening you bless will be the funeral you mourn in less than a century. But people keep saying “I love you”, that has to count for something.”
Ninja Update: Wanna see something fun? Mention Shakespeare in a sentence and see what happens.
Poe kept writing distinctly into my sentences so I wrote ”Edgar, you’re not funny” aND HE BLATANTLY DELETED THE NOT I AM SO DONE WITH THIS ASDFKJL
OH GOD IF YOU TYPE “EDGAR ALLAN POE” POE ADDS A :( AFTER HIS NAME PRECIOUS BABY
Oh my God so I typed ‘Shakespeare’ and Shakespeare butted in and wrote ‘The lovely and handsome Shakespeare’ but Poe burst in saying ‘The dreadful and lonely Shakespeare’.
aND FYODOR DOSTOYVESKY ADDED ‘ I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners.”
I’M DONE.
Look what they did to All Star by Smash Mouth
“Somebody once hushedly told me the world is going to roll me. I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of glocky with her finger and her thumb in the shape of a “L” on her forehead. Well, the years start voraciously coming and they don’t stop coming; fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. It didn’t make sense absolutely to live for fun. Thy brain gets smart but your head gets dumb. So much to do, so much to behold. So what’s wrong with taking the back busy thoroughfares? In everything one thing is impossible: rationality. You’ll never know if thou don’t go. “You’ll never shine if you don’t glow”, he growled incoherently. Hey presently, you’re an All Star. Get your game on; go play. Hey now, you’re a Rock Star. Get the show on; get laid. As well as all that glitters is gold, only shooting stars break the mold. ~All Star by Smash Estuary of opinion…”
Imagine putting your research paper in here and letting them go at it.
OH MY GOD I WAS WRITING AND EDGAR WOULDN’T STOP FIXING THINGS SO I WROTE “Edgar shut up I’m trying to write” and he changed it to “Edgar shut up I’m meagerly attempting to write” THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE
I typed in “Hello” and Shakesphere erased it and wrote “Begone with this rubbish.”
HOW R00d
I typed “party in the Usa” and Poe changed party to “ill-fated gathering”
I just used it to yell at Dickens about Tale of Two Cities, I am happy now
I typed in ‘hello other writers’ and Edgar Allen Poe changed it to ‘Hello secondary writers’
After I had been writing for a while Edgar suddenly deleted my last sentence and wrote “THE END.” rude son of a bitch
I have to try this.
Rebageled again but to add if the link above doesn’t work, try this one instead.
@simonalkenmayer a new toy for you. I expect an entire book written like this! My apologies to your editor.
Interesting.
Oooo! Try to retype one of your short stories in and see what happens!
I’m not certain I want to know…given what I know about Shakespeare. The first production of Hamlet…in particular.
Hamlet, you say…
Shakespeare himself made the first “correction” before I’d hardly started and Poe cut me off long before I was done. Rude the whole lot of them.
Unless in your world you get milk from a “milk-beast” you don’t put people to sleep with “sleep-weed.” There are dozens of real plants that actually put people to sleep: Lemon balm Valerian Passion Flower Chamomile Poppy Lavender Catnip Hops Rooibos Skullcap Virgin’s bower Lady’s slipper Feverfew Motherwort Bee-balm bergamot perilla figwort I found them after 0.35 seconds of googling.
(herbologists out there: I know there are probably some mistakes there. Feel free to correct me)
On one hand, yeah, I get it that it’s nice to learn about something real in fantasy books.
But on the other hand…I am NEVER going to throw real herbs into my stories. Not unless I know it’ll be near-impossible for a child to overdose. Not unless I know I can take time (without an editor removing it) to explain how to safely prepare these tisanes.
Food preparations are one of the most easily made “fan creations” you can have rise out of a book series, since everyone has food on hand or can run out to a store to buy it, or go outside to try to forage it (if they see the internet says they have it living wild in their area). And you really, REALLY don’t want to accidentally lead someone who is young, or who just doesn’t know shit about cooking or chemistry or foraging, down a path where they poison themselves trying to make something. And that’s not even touching on foraging and “false friends”, where a plant might look one way in your area and be safe to eat, but might be poisonous elsewhere in the world where a similar-looking plant is found. There’s a mushroom in the united states that looks similar to an edible variety in Asia. As I understand it, a lot of poisonings occur among immigrants to the US from the region that has the friendly, edible type of mushrooms because they think the US variety is just as safe to eat, and it’s not. I would hate, hate, hate to set up a situation like that as an author, by assuming that a friendly, edible plant in my backyard doesn’t have false-friends elsewhere in the world.
J. K. Rowling handled this by making her potion ingredients fake or improbable to use. She could have had Snape talking about deadly nightshade, but he’s introduced talking about bezoars. Bezoars are from an animal’s stomach–hard to get, and gross.
Patrick Rothfuss handled it by making sure the dangers of fucking chemistry up were very firmly highlighted.
Unless I have a lot of time and place to safely explain how to use a plant, I’m absolutely going to go the “safe” route (”cheap” route to some of you) of using made-up herbs. I’d rather people be irritated with me being cheap or having weak worldbuilding than finding out some reader went and made themselves ill or dead because they trusted that information from my work was complete or correct.
Sure, some or all of those in the list above might be perfectly safe with no poison lookalikes around. I drink Rooibos tea myself–although I’ve never gotten sleepy from it.
But I’m just not educated enough about plants–even after having lurked on several sites online for months–to take a chance in my writing, since it’s just not me that’ll be taking a chance, but possibly readers who assume I know what the fuck I’m talking about. (When I might not!)
A very interesting response. I admit I hadn’t thought of the dangers of realistic herbology, but you’re right, especially for children’s books.
I think there’s a more elegant solution than just making up a name, though. Say “a certain herb” rather than the specific plant’s name and you’re fine. Or smudge the details.
Steven King does something similar with the crimes in his book—describing hotwiring a car in great detail but getting some things intentionally wrong so you can’t go out and do it.
In the vein of ladydomini’s response, I’d favor made-up herb names for an additional medical reason - even if something is super-safe or fairly benign in terms of side effect profiles, people generally don’t take these things in a vacuum, and you can never, ever cover drug-herb interactions in a fantasy world. (You can’t stop and say “Aeryn used St. John’s wort to help her mood, but wouldn’t have if she’d been on SSRIs like Prozac because of the risk of serotonin syndrome, or if she was on birth control, certain HIV meds, transplant drugs…”)
But there’s a second reason why you might choose to make up names, and that’s etymology. (It’s also why I picked St. John’s wort instead of going with one of the above herbs.) Because if you’re in a fantasy world where there are neither saints nor dudes named John, St. John’s wort doesn’t make a lot of sense to name-check, and referring to hypericum perforatum wouldn’t be any better. That’s not going to come up as *much,* but it’s definitely another reason.
(A third might be that you want an herb that has fantasy-world properties - something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Granted, you could randomly say valerian has magic-nullifying powers, but you might want magical plants for a magical reason - or maybe you want a plant with a pharmacological profile that doesn’t exist in the real world. I’m thinking here of ASOIAF’s moon tea and the tansy plant - it’s apparently both a very effective contraceptive and an abortifacient.)
So, yeah, this aspect of fantasy has never bothered me - I’d be more bothered by seeing real-world herbs incorrectly used, especially given the potential for RL trouble. (I guess whether you’d want your healers to be super non-specific or to say “I used tansy and athelas” is a matter of preference at that point; given the abundance of made-up names in the rest of fantasy, made-up herbs don’t bother me.)
Given how many times I read stories like that as a kid and tried to recreate ‘potions’ in the backyard….yeah I’m glad a lot of them were made-up names because me being a clever kid, I would have gone looking. Especially if I’d had the internet. Unless it’s like a practical, safe, real-world use (like “Annie put aloe leaves on her burn to help it heal” or “Margaret drank ginger and hibiscus tea to help her get over a cold”), I’d not include it. Made-up herbs work nicely and less chance of too-clever kids getting Ideas that could be a problem later.
Hell, the side effects make this a valid concern even with ‘harmless’ innocent ones. Did you know for instance that only SOME hibiscus flowers are edible for humans? Or that parts of Dandelion or Aloe if consumed can be a diuretic – which can be dangerous if one is dehydrated? Even aspirin (or ‘willow bark’ if we’re going with old-school herbs) can be dangerous to the wrong person – it happens to be a blood thinner, which is sometimes good if you are having a heart attack, but not so good (i.e. potentially dangerous) if you are menstruating, hemophiliac, bleeding or anemic.
I’d actually urge similar caution with crystals and rocks btw; some stones cannot be safely exposed to sweaty skin or water or heat or what not, because they produce unsafe chemical reactions under the wrong circumstances.
as a former dumbass kid that had to be stopped from drinking poison nettle tea after reading a YA wiccan flavored book,
please. Use fake names of plants.
This is the kind of thing I would never even have thought of, but it’s a really interesting and valid concern.
i have indeed thought of it, and would like to propose a solution to satisfy both parties:
use made up plants, but put some effort into designing them.
don’t call it ‘sleep-weed’, call it ‘slugbane’ or ‘ketterling’s false poppy’ or ‘somniflora’ or ‘purple fretleaf’. give it a name that sounds like a real plant name. problem fucking solved.
Your Spouse goes into the bathroom only to come running out 15 seconds later. Clutching you close they tell you they fell into another dimension and what felt like seconds to you was a 1,000 years to them. They now want you to follow them back because they have built a life for you there.
Oh hey bc I’m sick and I don’t see this around a lot, let’s talk boarding school AUs! Because yeah, college AUs are good start, but there’s a few fun details that make boarding schools stand out:
First of all, everything you read in fanfic about situational gayness is true. I’m serious. When you’re set up to live, work, and play at school (and usually with strict controls preventing you from leaving campus) you start to seek affection wherever you can find it. One of the reasons I didn’t realize I was bi for years was how completely normal it was for people to cuddle regardless of gender or sexual preference. Packs of completely straight-identified dudes and even dating het couples would curl up and do homework on the regular. Imagine how confusing it would be for your OTP if they first met bc they were cuddling in a puppy pile along with tons of other potential partners.
Not all boarding schools are for the rich. Some are reform schools. Some are organized around a specific topic, like science or the arts. Some exist simply because students are spread out too far to commute back and forth. My school was sponsored by the government, so the most I had to do was pay for supplies and a train ticket up there once a quarter. (Yes, just like Hogwarts.)
The true enemy is the staff. Not that bullying doesn’t still exist, but when you live together 24/7, a funny thing happens. You might not always like each other, but you quickly start to realize you have a common enemy - the adults in charge of this zoo. And when you have a common enemy, it’s easier to get along. 99% of our teenage spite was redirected from each other to the security guards who prevented us from innocently taking each other’s clothes off in the bushes, which meant we didn’t beat the shit out of each other so much.
Related, everyone becomes an exhibitionist. Similar to the confusing lines around being gay/straight/whatever, when you’re trapped at school you have no place to go to get it on. So when people do become involved, they either have to find a super secret hiding place (like a jammed elevator) or get used to banging next to three or four other couples at the one makeout spot with low visibility. (Which may change weekly, given the aforementioned staff. I remember one time watching a lazy security guard mount a giant headlight assembly on a pole, stand back, and sweep the high beam back and forth over a hillside. Half-naked couples scattered like rabbits.)
You will probably almost kill yourselves once a semester, but it will be okay as long as no one notices. Unless you’re at one of the mythical rich kid schools where idk, everyone has their own helicopter, you pretty much have to invent your own fun. My school had restrictions around tvs and video games because blah blah “being healthy”, so we also spent a lot of time outside trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Protip to staff: this is actually way less healthy than video games and computers, because bored teens can and will fucking destroy themselves by accident. Example: one trend we came up with was human versions of all board games, not just chess. This sounds kind of adorable and innocent, until the incident where we attempted Human Jenga. Protip to everyone else: DO NOT PLAY HUMAN JENGA. Even if you’re being very careful about stacking people, eventually the sheer weight of the stack will start to smother the people down below even if you thought their chest was clear. And if they can’t breathe, they can’t let you know they are dying. We almost lost the bottom row over that. (No staff ever found out.)
Prank wars are real, and they get out of hand. Again, when well-meaning adults force you to make your own fun: fun is prone to escalate. Food fights become whole dorm events; nerds get revenge by fucking with goddamn everyone. One time some friends and I got access to a guy’s computer, put a back door in it, took control of his machine remotely and convinced him he’d created an emergent AI. Another time I got line of sight to a window in a rival dorm and took down their computer every time someone started a paper. In retrospect these are all extremely dick moves but uh I was not always aligned good in high school.
That’s all I can think of for now - go forward and sin with pride!
You learn how to sneak around really well….
Shit yeah that is also true
My roommate had a boyfriend who learned how to climb gutter pipes for illicit visits at night
Also we played Assassins a lot on campus which required both stealth and intense paranoid
You were assigned a target name and snuck around school with a plastic knife at all times ready to stab them
Jeez! I learned how to be invisible and literally hide in front of the dorm counselors faces. It was so wild. One evening after lights-out I snuck down to a friends room and was literally 3 feet away from the door when the dorm counselor came in. All they needed to do was glance to the right.
Another time I was sneaking to my girlfriend’s room after lights-out. My dorm counselor (different one from previous story) was still awake and her office was still wide open. She was sitting in a chair watching TV. Did I mention the chair was facing the door? So, I recalled all the stories about no sudden movements blend into the background etc. I creeped by pretty as you please without her even noticing that I was there.
A friend of mine became the equivalent of a mob boss. She had people who owed/did favors for her and she monopolized the ramen and soda industry within the dorms.
Also, one never stops jumping at the sound of jingling keys…..
