AlexanderRM

To The Substitute Art Teacher - Jordan Bolton

Pre-order my new book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

Japan, you have like forty different sets of cardinal numbers depending on what it is you're counting. I don't wanna fuckin' hear it.

Let me tell you about one of my high school friends’ old Dungeons and Dragons PCs.

Olaf Olafson was your pretty straightforward Northman Barbarian type. Huge, strong, pale, red-haired and with a tremendous beard. What made Olaf special was the little things.

Despite living in a world with clerical magic, demons, and other powerful alignment-based Outsiders, Olaf was an atheist. This was because his people believed the last world had already ended and the gods went with it (basically post-Ragnarok). All that was left were ‘spirits’. Powerful spirits. Who could grant deific magic. But they weren’t gods, and you didn’t have to worship them- in fact you shouldn’t, because it would just inflate their already swollen egos.

Despite being an enormous, frightening, powerful man with dubious hygeine and a propensity for going literally berserk in combat, Olaf was a gentle fellow in towns and villages, had a deep fondness for small fluffy animals and children, and was a generous tipper.

Olaf liked to drink. Not mead, but wine. He liked to sip it. It made him feel ‘civilized’. He never drank it quickly enough to get drunk. His meals almost invariably consisted of “Wine. Meat. Cheese.” Which was what he would order in literally every tavern. They’d ask him to clarify, what sort of wine? What sort of meat? What sort of- Olaf would raise a hand and repeat, slowly, as if to a fool: “Wine. Meat. Cheese.” 

Olaf spoke broken common, more or less Hulk-speak, referred to himself in the third person almost exclusively, all that fun stuff. Then we had a story arc where I sent them up to Olaf’s homeland, where everyone spoke ‘Northman’ or whatever the hell I called it. While up there, he was incredibly fluent. Even poetic. “My brothers! I have returned from the decadent lands of the south, bearing riches and glory, and tales of great deeds!” The other players caught on and talked like a pack of movie Frankensteins, barely able to communicate in the foreign tongue.

For a long time, Olaf was the most financially stable member of the party. Because he bought a tavern in their home-base-town, hired the senior barmaid/waitress lady to be the manager, and funneled the profits back into the business. He kept his adventuring money and his tavern money separate, except when he would sometimes spend adventuring money to expand the tavern. 

 There’s not a lot to do in 3rd edition with skill ranks when you’re a barbarian, so eventually Olaf sank a point into Healing on a lark. A few sessions later, they captured an important enemy NPC, but he’d lost an arm in the fighting and was about to die. Their cleric had been captured and their NPC paladin wasn’t around, either. There was no magical healing available, and no one else had any ranks in healing. The dude was about to die, and take with him the knowledge of where their friends had been taken. Olaf- with a  single rank in Healing I remind you -offered to save his life in exchange for the location, and the guy agreed. Olaf then stuck a sword in the fire, said “Olaf see this once,” and cauterized the wound.

It worked, of course. I didn’t even make him roll. I was too busy trying not to piss myself laughing. “Olaf see this once.” Jesus Christ.

An absolute legend

You know if we're lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who complain about the commercialization of Christmas?

This really started at the 19th Century dawn of the German Empire, contemporary with the growth of a thick commercial retail culture – "Christmas" as we know it is essentially an epiphenomenon of the department store – and much early criticism focused not on how it detracted from a religious cast the holiday had once had, but on how it was becoming a yearly ritual of riches flowing from Christian pockets into the tillers of Jewish retailers, manufacturers, and traders.

As time progressed and the Second Reich fell, this was the theme of infamous interwar antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer's editorial cartoons at Christmastime every year.

(This was also, coincidentally, when and where the traditionally minor Jewish holiday of Hannukah was glowed up into a rival gift-giving celebration, so as to undercut Christmas as a draw for [then much more common, often with secular motives of cultural belonging] conversion.)

oh hey, he'd scheduled this!

This weirded me out first because I had to remember he must have scheduled this post but then for the weirdly on point, timely message from beyond the grave

I DIDNT CHECK TH E SONG FULLY BEFORE POSTING THIS I FUCKED UP

congratulations!!! through doubt, you have unlocked backstory!!!

imagine, if you will, innocent, overly-trusting me listening to the mario galaxy ost and getting to the honeyhive galaxy theme, and thinking “wow! this song would go great with a pokemon walking gif!”

a brilliant idea! i immediately search up the song, and oh, how naive i was.

the third result is very official-looking!! a perfect candidate for a quick youtube rip–it’s just a meme, it won’t hurt anybody.

the first few second autoplay, and it seems legit! i quickly copy the url and download the file, then make the post

at this point, i haven’t seen the gif along with the song i’d intended to put with it, so i have a listen!!

and let me tell you, the surprise i got,

this is now rowlet’s theme

Now this is what I want from yuri.... but there was only one gun 😳😳😳

this is also why gnomes tend to be so odd and varied, AFIK. D&D has them enough for people to have a vague concept, but not culturally or magically defined well enough for any consistency downstream.

If we're gesturing toward D&D, gnomes are another case of inconsistency over time there. Early on, they're depicted as short, big-nosed nature lovers, but late in the Second Edition they take a hard swerve to being a monoculture of wacky inventors owing to the breakout popularity of the Dragonlance campaign setting, then the Third Edition jettisons all of that and turns them into skinny dwarves. I'm not sure what the Fifth Edition thinks it's doing with them, and I have a sneaking suspicion the game's authors aren't 100% sure either!

On the topic

As a child I loved the animated TV series "David der Kabauter" (German title) which in English is David the Gnome, in the original Italian David el gnomo

German Wikipedia says kabauter are small dwarfs... With pointed hats

So what looks like your cliché garden gnome is actually a cousin of Gimli I guess

However the English wiki says kabouter is just the Dutch word for gnome, which corresponds to the Irish leprechon, English hop, Scottish brownie or German kabauter which is an old word for KOBOLD

But apparently the series was based on a series of Dutch books about kabauter, which in German was translated to Heinzelmännchen

Which are benevolent House spirits who scuttle through the city at night and do your chores. And in the supposed city of origin, Cologne, they are tiny men with pointy hats, who can become violent under certain circumstances (which is why I immediately grew wary of one character in Neil Gaiman's American Gods)

In the City of Mainz though, their cousin the Mainzelmännchen, are little guys with no beards and specifically round hats, who do the same job, but also 6 became the mascots of a TV station, doing little funny skits between ad breaks

So these are leprechauns, Kobolds, gnomes and dwarfs all in one and words are meaningless in the face of "small guy with a penchant for chaos"

The IUCN criterion used to exclude Pluto and the other dwarf planets–that they don't clear their orbits–is very useful if you're studying how stellar systems form and evolve. From that perspective, the eight major planets really are in a different class from any other bodies in the solar system, and probably deserve their own name. But if you're doing "planetary" science–i.e. studying the bodies themselves–then it's completely irrelevant. As far as anyone knows, the size you have to be to clear your orbit doesn't form any kind of natural boundary where the dynamics of geology or atmospheric chemistry abruptly change. For that matter, one of the other IUCN criteria, that you have to be orbiting the sun directly, is also not that relevant.

This is the crux of why terminological conventions shouldn't be treated the same as other kinds of scientific knowledge. Even if you can make the claim that the convention is in some sense objective, it will still be contextual. Statements about utility always are. Statements of scientific fact, on the other hand, should at least be true (if not relevant) in any context, regardless of by what means or within what discipline they were discovered.

how do you feel about "a whale is not a kind of fish"?

Organising biology in terms of phylogeny is beautiful and important and good because, to quote Dobzhansky, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Sometimes, the categories we make are arbitrary. Let's say we were dividing the world into "tall people" and "short people". Obviously, the distribution of heights is a more-or-less normal distribution and there's no natural place to divide the categories, so we might make a division according to something useful to us. Perhaps "tall people" is everyone above 1.7 metres because there happen to be a lot of shelves that people can reach if they're 1.7 metres or taller, so we're actually dividing the world into "people who can reach the top shelf" and "people who can't". But fundamentally you could also organise the world into "people taller than me personally" and "people shorter than me personally" if that's useful to you, and nobody can really tell you that you're wrong.

There are other categories that are really not arbitrary. Let us say that height wasn't a normal distribution. Perhaps everyone was always one of six heights: 140cm, 145cm, 150cm, 170cm, 175cm or 180cm. Someone who is studying the world might say: "huh, there seem to be two categories of people - short people and tall people". Because something weird is going on here, and it requires an explanation. We aren't arbitrarily dividing the world into "people 140cm - 150cm" and "people 170cm - 180cm", we are asking "hey, why the fuck does everyone seem to belong to two clear non-arbitrary height categories? What happened to all the 160cm people?"

Species is not arbitrary. We do not have a smooth spectrum from the most lionlike creatures, to lion creatures with some eagle traits, to half-lion-half-eagle creatures, to eagle creatures with some lion traits, to the most eagle-ish eagles. Lions exist, and eagles exist, and griffins do not exist.

Species is real. Those are real categories. We're not making them, we're observing them.

We are not at liberty here to create some sort of arbitrary boundary according to what is most useful to us, like "hehe fish is all the things that live in the sea". If you want to talk about sea-dwelling creatures, it is not difficult to say "sea-dwelling creatures" or "swimmers". We have an urgent quest before us: to discover what the fuck happened to the griffins.

Why is the universe the way it is? Why do animals seem to be easily sortable into discrete buckets, which mostly can't interbreed, mostly without in-between forms? Why are some of those buckets very similar and others very different?

All of the answers to these questions are to be found in the study of evolution and speciation, and thus it is your sacred duty to study phylogeny if you wish to categorise animals. You must understand that you are not making up categories that are useful to you; you are observing a reality which is neatly divided into chunks for you, and your job is to understand how and why that happened. If you cannot explain eg. the debate between ecological and biological species concepts then you have no place debating whether whales are fish. You're not interested enough in the question of what makes fish a category in the first place to have opinions on the fish category.

You can, of course, layer other labels on top. You can talk about "marine creatures" or "endangered species" or "species native to Madagascar" or whatever. But we cannot lose the curiosity, the most fundamental part of the scientific ethos - we can't lose the thing where you observe the natural world and go, "Huh, creatures do seem to be sorted by Nature Herself into discrete categories. I wonder why and how?" and that takes precedence over any arbitrary categories you later wish to create. That's why phylogeny categories are the true and fundamental categories, and any other categories are optional extras.

Thus whales can be a kind of "marine creature" or "swimmer" or "sea-dwelling animal" if you like, but they cannot be fish. If you recognise whales as a category at all, you do so because the process of evolution and speciation created a noticeably distinct and unique group called "whales", and it's weird as fuck to acknowledge that process on the level of calling a thing a whale at all but then disregard it on the level of thinking a whale is a fish. If you think whales even exist at all, you are already dealing with phylogeny whether you like it or not.

although phylogeny is very useful when doing biology, there's nothing magical about the string of english characters f-i-s-h that forces it to refer to whatever phylogeny grouping rather than marine creatures. whales are indeed not fish, but this is contingent on the details of how human society interacts with marine animals and whales and fish in particular

compare "vegetable" with "cruciferae", one of which is a lot more of a natural scientific category than the other:

it would be ridiculous to say "carrots can be 'an edible plant' if you like, but they cannot be vegetables"

an anime flashback that you think is trying to explain why the character loves this tricket so much because their father gave it the them, only to realize the flashback is actually trying to say that the character loves their father BECAUSE their father gave them a nice trinket.

Can I please have a cappuccino but with oat milk and a big pump of sugarfree chocolate syrup and... Lol I remember your stupid ass from 2,300 years ago. We were living in seleucis on the tigris river during the same span of summers... do you rememver a red ibis bird with beautiful plumes? Yeah U were a sort of dull brown goat that didn't train and dint make milk or kids. Yeah? No? Eventually the Zoroastrian homesteaders who owned you started feeding you contaminated barley to try and kill you lol. Maybe you remember the ergotism? Anyway. also I want one of these 🫵stupid little breads in the case

Just finished hamlet & had to share THIS

btw this is literally what goes down. it’s great. 

You just know the ye olde peasants went NUTS at that last part

'we transcend petty political tribalisms like left and right' is--not always, but much too often-- a marker that what you're about to read is unfiltered, high-octane, triple-distilled Turbo Fascism

Give the tankies some credit, sometimes they say similar things too! And like, 6 other radical ideologies in very different directions.

I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.

I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.

But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.

I forgot that you're on tumblr

Does the imbalance in "meaningful aspects of macro-level existence" imply that oxygen or carbon or something rules the world?

Yeah, my first thought was that carbon-benders are extremely powerful, whereas all the [synthetic element that doesn't exist in nature and lasts a fraction of a second]-benders are essentially muggles.

(Which actually would be a cool explanation for the existence of muggles, they're the people born with the potential to control element 300 or something.)

But I think the idea in the OP was more of a metaphorical system based around the properties of the elements, rather than element-kinesis. Even Avatar does this a bit; air-benders are really good at dodging like a leaf in the breeze, water-benders can heal because water is soothing, earth-benders can echolocate because earth is good at conducting vibrations, etc.

Aerb, the world of Worth the Candle, stands out as a prototype I think - a setting with a ton of different magics, like Gold Magic or Bone Magic or Gem Magic, each based on different metaphors and properties of the thing in question. (Gold is valuable so Gold Mages get more powerful the more gold they hoard but risk being undermined by their greed, Gem Mages shoot lasers based on the refraction of light through their gems, bones form the underlying skeleton of the body so Bone Mages can pull a creature's innate abilities from them, etc.)

So like, a xenonmancer wouldn't necessarily control elemental xenon, they might channel it's unreactivity to become immune to poison and acid (a shared power of all Noble Gas mages?) and it's fluorescence to shoot beams of blue light.

The more I think about this, the less unwieldy it seems, since the properties of elements are fairly well-structured. (A xenonmancer is a noble gas mage and a fluorescent, plus probably some stuff based around density and being a gas at human-livable temperatures, etc.) If you really wanted each elemental school to be totally unique magical schools in ways that are somehow still convincingly tied to their properties, even allowing for cultural properties like "gold is valuable", that would be harder.

Quickly sketching out a setting:

I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.

I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.

But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.

One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”

So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”

Every time I come across this post the last sentence smacks me in the face

oh this post’s back

This is your monthly reminder to go and operate every water shutoff valve in your home, including the main shutoff if you have access to it – those things do seize up if they're not operated frequently, and you don't want to be discovering that fact for the first time while a busted faucet handle is blasting two gallons a minute onto your kitchen floor.