Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime

how am I supposed to go to sleep now

Okay basically:

You get the European High Middle Ages by achieving agricultural surplus.

NOT having agricultural surplus means: You just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. Producing food is the highest agricultural priority. Everyone who CAN make food DOES make food. Major agricultural events like harvest, planting, fishing, roundup, and butchering are all-hands-on-deck events where the entire community has to work together to make sure you last the winter.

These are Earth winters in Northern Europe. Winters that last a couple of months.

The High Middle Ages in Europe were made possible because agriculture got good enough that some places could produce WAY more food than was necessary, which allowed others to specialize. You need a LOT of agricultural surplus to get:

The last one is the especial kicker. That kind of economic and agricultural devastation is very characteristic of the Hundred Years War, which ASOIAF is mostly based on. It arose when you got so much agricultural surplus that you could literally set fire to crops and mills and kill peasants and still make it through the winter.

So Westeros is, essentially, an incredibly food-secure society.

And then

You tell me

THAT WINTER LASTS ANYWHERE FROM A FEW YEARS TO ALMOST A CENTURY???

And all the Starks do to prepare for it is sound ominous and put glass greenhouses in a stone castle?????????????

Man so much this.

I never got involved with GoT because I’d been warned it was grim in a way I find unfun, but I heard it was about a bunch of people competing to be ruler of a region defined by periodic multi-year winters, of which the first in a while was coming up soon. And that the writer had described his goal as ‘like Tolkien but with more realism.’

And I assumed for actual years that a core element of the entire drama was the different would-be leaders and factions having different logistical plans to prepare for the Ice Zombie Climate Change Decade (including presumably at least one ‘That’s Fake Haha’) and how much of what kinds of supplies are to be stored in what ways, for whose benefit, and the constant loss of precious time as everyone backstabs each other, while the constant shifting of power means that no one’s infrastructure plans get fully realized, so Westeros has about 20% of the necessary granaries and Winter Is Coming.

Until I casually asked a fan who’d been explaining the ice zombies and the Crazy Big Wall to me what the culture’s norms for caching food for the long winters had been, traditionally, only to find that nothing of the kind had ever come up.

For admittedly neither the first time nor the last, I was so bitterly disillusioned in a cultural phenomenon in which I had steadfastly declined to participate.

#i know#this is not the first time i have ranted about this on this blog#but!#but!!!#i just cannot get over#he ripped off Pern and bragged about his realism and couldn’t be arsed to care about the agricultural economy in any meaningful way#and he wants to talk his worldbuilding up contra TOLKIEN?#man that guy may have stylized his politics#but at least i understand how people in middle earth#are alive#anyway

I love it when people are Mad About Worldbuilding. Those are my kinda people.

I would 1000% be there for a North where they look grim and dour to Southerners because they think the Southerners are fucking morons who are way too frivolous and are not preparing enough while the North has been busting ass to actually, really, seriously prepare for the next who-knows-how-long winter since the end of the previous one bc Winter Is Coming you fucking grasshoppers and the idea of the South being able to order them to part with even one single grain of their stores or one salted sardines when the going will inevitably get tough is galling and makes every true Northener want to just put a sword through their hearts and spare the North from them and their feasts.

I want the entire North to have figured how to survive on, like, mushrooms they grow in dark rooms that they just need to keep heated up and have no actual need for sun, and like drinking a little bit of your horse’s blood every day and then carefully tending to the wound, and thus storing dried and dehydrated grain that would be somewhat inedible for humans but can keep their cattle going a long time. I want them to specialize in long term storage of foods like salting and drying. I want them to have invented glass jars sealing, and be mildly off put by even the though of food that goes bad in only a couple of days. (They see someone just leave a tomato on their counter without doing anything to cook/prepare/conserve it and get twitchy.) I want them to have an agriculture based on lichen and to be professionnal ice-fishers.

I want the North to have a food culture that is so wildly different from all the other groups that they’re constantly told their food is weird and bad.

This was created by someone who takes jabs at Tolkien during interviews for not spending more time on “Aragorn’s tax policy”…

I wonder if the long winter idea seemed like a good idea at the start, then all the politics and war and stabnation and rapeicity took over and seasonal stuff got sidelined or even forgotten.

The next books are called “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring”, so those seasons may be getting a bit more attention.

Let me know if it happens.

Have never read or watched ASOIAF/GOT but. Whaling. Whaling should be like the main industry in this world during the cold time

if u guys like this shit you should read this detailed blog where he rips the entire concept of the dothraki horse lords to shreds lol https://acoup.blog/category/collections/that-dothraki-horde/

This blog fucking SLAPS!

george martin’s face off

I am listening through the audio version cackling with GLEE over its beautifully pedantic bitchiness. It makes for 2-3 hours of listening and I am GONNA listen to ALL OF IT instead of sleeping. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Current favourite quote (which happens to be the last bit I read up to, because it keeps topping itself):

I hope ancient and military historian Dr. Bret C. Deveraux, visiting lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill, has a very I Fucking Love You Dude day.

Also, to everyone defending ASOIAF like “It’s not supposed to be history, it’s fantasy,” have you not been paying attention to all the frickin’ times your own author and showrunners have blown their own horns about “historical realism”? George RR Martin practically built his brand by sneeringly implying that anything with less rape and racism was just namby-pamby whitewashing because only HE has the guts to portray all the (looks at smudged writing on hand) sexy sexy violence.

It’s 2022 and ASOIAF showrunners are STILL putting on clown noses and talking about how they HAVE to include gory scenes of rape, violation, and murder, because 🤡that’s what life is really like in a patriarchy🤡.

people trying to insist a fandom is tiny when it /only/ has a few thousand works on ao3 meanwhile my current fandom is a sixteen book series and has several hundred fewer works than goncharov, a movie that, and i cannot stress this enough, doesn’t even exist

#measuring the size of fandoms based on their goncharov index#this has been a useless text post you may now resume your normal programming#rote has a goncharov index of 0.63#for perspective ofmd has an index of 26.5#spn’s is 360.8#the cosmere is 2.26 for a fantasy book comparison#i am very normal

The Goncharov Index, everyone.

I propose a corollary to the Goncharov Index: the Goncharov Author Index: your fandom more fics on AO3 but written by fewer people.

(As of this writing, Goncharov remains Yuletide eligible)

Every once in a while I remember that Trent doesn't know Rebecca tried to sabotage the team by bringing in Ted. And I'm just curious if we'll ever see him find out.

One of the fics I've always wanted, DESPERATELY, in this fandom where exactly this happens, because if it did?

Richmond would be over.

@themardia (my expert in all things English Premier League) has described to me what exactly would go down*, and it's kind of horrific — because what Rebecca did was not only grossly wrong and unethical, but was actually illegal. As in, girl could (probably won't, but could!) go to jail for trying to sabotage her own team.

At minimum — at BARE MINIMUM — she would be forced to sell the club and would be banned, probably for life, from ever owning another English football team. Other leagues would follow suit, because FIFA will tolerate a lot of shit but they won't tolerate someone trying to decrease the value of their leagues. She would also get sued to kingdom come by the other EPL owners (Rupert would be especially delighted by this) and lose... pretty much everything she has. She's not rich enough to protect herself from the truly rich owners who comprise the majority of the Premier League.

The club would go up for auction, basically — Rupert couldn't buy it, unless he sold West Ham in a hurry, but Edwin (or hell, Jack) probably could, assuming that its price is merely ludicrous instead of absolutely disgusting the way most EPL clubs are.

And whoever came in would look at Ted as being an agent of Rebecca's schemes — he might even be found complicit, since Rebecca told him the truth right before they got relegated. How could he prove he didn't know before then? Rebecca would try to save him, of course, but at the very least Ted would also be out on his ear, along with Beard and Roy (and it's possible they'd go after Nate, even though he's no longer at the club — there'd probably even be some vile garbage about how the only reason he got promoted was to keep the team relegated, or something. And Rupert wouldn't lift a finger to help him, I don't think). Higgins would also, of course, be out on his ear — if anything, he'd be the most likely to suffer real consequences, because a) he's not a rich and powerful person and b) I fully believe he would try to shoulder more guilt than he actually deserves for what he did. Rebecca would, again, try to save him, but what if she can't?

Some of the players would stay, depending on their contracts, but can you imagine the hit to morale if they found out their boss had sabotaged them to the extent of getting them relegated, and that their coach not only knew but never told them? I think most of the team who could leave, would leave. Which would destroy the Total Football gameplay — would destroy the very fabric of the club. No manager coming in could control the damage that would do; they'd likely get relegated the following year. Such a catastrophe tends to snowball, and Richmond might well falter the following year, too — going down to League One, something that rarely happens but considering this kind of earthquake wouldn't be impossible.

And what would that do to the fanbase? Mae's pub would probably go out of business, its status as a Richmond Pub now considered bad luck; hundreds of people who relied on Richmond's status in the Champion and Premier Leagues would lose their jobs. It would be a disaster for every single person who had anything to do with the club.

And so to imagine Trent writing that, knowing what would happen, but writing it because it was the truth and because it was wrong — and then seeing all the fallout from that? WHEW THAT WOULD BE QUITE THE STORY.

*what she described is not, of course, what I've written here, because my brain is a sieve, but I think I got the gist of it

fun fact, every year there has to be at least one song that's dangerously close to a pagan ritual happening live on stage, otherwise the old gods would be angry and we definitely don't want that to happen.

this year it's moldova's turn

Arguably the old gods were angry anyway and the result of their wrath was the jury vote.

"Graham Norton is joining as host tonight, he will also run up and comment for English TV. If he get feeling he might even sing England's entry."

-swedish commentator

[Three images of a bird.

First: the bird looks forward. Caption: "Good"

Second: the bird bends its neck all the way back. Caption: "Evening"

Third: The bird is facing forward again, its beak is open, light shines from its eye, and the entire image is tinted red. Caption: "Euroooopeeeee"]

*\o/*

here’s my post on how I use scrivener: https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1144745.html

speaking of “suggestions as you type”, one thing I tried in scrivener and ended up not using -- but others have said they find it very useful -- is you can create your own custom shorthand. Let’s say I don’t want to type the name “lannamichaels” over and over again in my fic. I can instead tell scrivener that when I type “lm”, change it to “lannamichaels”.

It's Eurovision week

[Animated gif of John Oliver on The Daily Show set, standing with one foot on the desk chair. He is waving a rainbow pride flag. Caption: Do you hear the people sing?]

I'm not evading the question, I'm disputing the implicit assumptions which inform the question. There's a difference.

Oh boy I sure hope my good friend Jonathan Harker has a much better time on his business trip this year than he did last year.

MDZS: Chosen Otherwise by nirejseki

Posted by: lannamichaels Fandom: 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Pairings/Characters: Meng Yao Rating: Not Rated Length: 5K Creator Links: nirejseki on AO3, robininthelabyrinth on Tumblr Theme: Fix-It Summary: Could you eat respect, if you were hungry? Would respect keep you warm at night when you were freezing? If a sword were held to your throat, could respect block it? When the laughter of your enemies filled your ears, could the respect of a single man let you ignore it? Did it really matter so much, to have someone see you as you truly were and to still decide you were worth something? …yes. It seemed that it did. (in which Meng Yao, who’d never met a single moral in his life, decides nevertheless to be a good person) Reccer’s Notes: This is one of my favorite Meng Yao fics. He makes the decision to be the man that Nie Mingjue thinks he is: ruthless and vindictive by nature but still striving to be a good person. It’s a choice he makes over and over again, and they all live happily ever after (except Jin Guangshan). Fanwork Links: Chosen Otherwise by nirejseki comments & original content @ fancake

SVSSS: Black holes and revelations by 00janeblonde

Posted by: lannamichaels Fandom: 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Pairings/Characters: Original Shěn Qīngqiū/Yuè Qīngyuán Rating: Teen Length: 2K Creator Links: 00janeblonde on AO3, blondejaneblonde on Tumblr Theme: Fix-It Summary: Shen Qingqiu had been on Qing Jing for four years when he found out the truth. Happy Qijiu fic for 7/9 Day! Reccer’s Notes: Shen Jiu finds out that Yue Qingyuan hadn’t abandoned him. He’s not sure how to deal with this discovery. Should they have an honest conversation about it? Should he pretend to have amnesia? Run away? Invent time travel? Fanwork Links: Black holes and revelations by 00janeblonde comments & original content @ fancake

[ID: five gifs of Damiano David performing Coraline at Sanremo 2022. /end ID]

If you live in Chicago, uh, NASCAR is….it’s coming.

Parking restrictions start June 2nd, and rolling road closures start June 10th, for a July 4th weekend road race. If you live or work in or near the loop, the article has full details.

I’m just gonna like. Not go anywhere I can’t get to by foot or train for the entire month of June. Which is how I operate usually, except for the occasional bus, so there’s that at least. 

I swear these people think cities are amusement parks that they can show up to and take over whenever they want, with no consideration of the people who live or work in them.