out of my mind waiting to hear back about this job. submitted references at 9am on monday and still haven't heard anything. but i made kohakutou and my poppies are blooming
Im in the mood to eat scarabs and shrimp
distracting myself from will-i-get-this-job anxiety by planning my most elaborate charcuterie board yet
interview went well but i'm still rattled from my cab ride over, where the driver asked me if i was going to the haircut store. what a blistering read
first masc job interview today. i always dressed masc for job interviews before, but back then it was like "will they be put off if i'm not pretty enough?" and now i'm shining my cracked thrift store shoes and shaving my 30 beard hairs and wondering "will they be put off if i'm not manly enough?". i mean obviously i'm just going to be myself. but gender stresses me tf out
One thing about the European Middle Ages (that were a thousand years long period with many changes and transformation bla bla bla) is that they were very isolated and honestly, poor. Yes, the Silk Road existed and there were even European communities in Persia and China (but they also decayed), yes there was lots of art and culture and such. But Europe was still a rather isolated and poor part of the world, no matter if we now understand the Middle Ages were more complex.
(and in the early dark ages, yes, it WAS that bad, with cities shrinking to the size of old Roman amphiteaters and the overall quality of life for everyone disminishing with trade routes severed everywhere and literacy and infraestructure dropping. Don't think that just because it wasn't a completely dark time and things still went on, it wasn't bad)
ANYWAYS, my point is that most of the things we associate with "medieval" fantasy and worlds are actually from the Rennaissance and Early Modern Age. Those worldbuilding pedants (and my friends) focused on military matters point out the plate armor and weapons, others point out the availability of books and literacy and architecture, I point out the food and luxury items that you just couldn't find otherwise...
And that does imply something. It implies a connected world, one that is very much more modern. It implies trade networks to bring a whole host of exotic and luxury goods (transoceanic networks, if we are talking about things only found in the tropics, since virtually all modern fantasy is set in temperate areas but I ranted about that elswhere), it implies printing press and increased literacy, it implies an increase on wealth to afford all those things, and places where those goods and wealth came from... especifically colonialism (but we don't wanna talk about that, right? you don't want me to go quoting Eduardo Galeano right?).
And those things also imply MORE; social and religious conflict, the dawn of modern science, trade networks, intercultural contact, and again, colonialism and imperialism.
And that clashes with the general fantasy plot of good and evil kingdoms in a mostly static world (still from the classic view of the European Dark Ages), where technology, society and even individual dynasties don't change for centuries or millenia. All with the trappings of a society in full change. People love their princesses with silk dresses eating chocolate, their knights with plate armor eating potato stew, and wizards with huge libraries in cities that can allow enough wealth to employ them, but don't want to think that this might not be signs of a static theme park world, but a world that was increasingly interconnected and changing, like our early modern age. (and thus, an interesting story)
And why don't you want to learn about those changes that built our modern world? The cultures where most of the things you take from granted came from? (some, in my opinion, could be more well known in the west...) Why the boring coup-out of "it's just magic XD" when you could think a little more and create something interesting?
so no, it's not just about potatoes, but it's a good question to ask first.
#absolutely#the wealth has to come from somewhere#the different-climate foods have to come from a different climate#i want to know how globalisation works in your world!#a thoughtful answer is so much more fascinating than 'idk it's not important to the story'#and i think that considerate economic worldbuilding is never wasted#because class and resources are huge drivers of life circumstances and hence characters' personalities#dnd tag
i saw this post last year and could not stop thinking about the sink kitty. so (with artist's permission) i got it tattooed last week :)
at the gym trying to not think about drinking and there is a four-years-sober hockey player on the television saying "it doesn't get easier"
then why try at all!! if the 1460th day is still as hard as the 2nd day then why even try!!!
today is day 47 and it did get a lot easier :) the first 12 days were awful but then on day 13 the chorus screaming in my ear shrank a tiny amount. and now it’s dwindled to a rude little mosquito under a glass.
starting to understand what that guy was saying. there’s no way to kill the mosquito and it will always be whining, but the glass never gets heavier.
last d&d campaign it took me till session 69 to kill a PC. now in our new campaign it's session 4 and i turned a level 2 rogue into paste with a runaway train
follow up on this: today i got to play a PC for the first time in 11 years. i built an armoured support wizard optimised to stay standing. i cast a debuff and was feeling so confident with my +5 to concentration checks with advantage - and the paste rogue, a first-time DM, took me from 49 to 0 in one hit
i almost wrote "sideeyeing anyone who tells me they like that book" but then realized that
i only saw through that book's flimsy science because of two university courses i took, one with a module on How to Lie With Statistics, and one that was explicitly about epistemic failures in science journalism. probably anyone who recommends me pop-science books hasn't taken philosophy courses to train this specific spidey sense and i need to remember to be charitable instead of derisive!
The three of us have studied forest fungi for our whole careers, and even we were surprised by some of the more extraordinary claims surfacing in the media about the wood-wide web. Thinking we had missed something, we thoroughly reviewed 26 field studies, including several of our own, that looked at the role fungal networks play in resource transfer in forests. What we found shows how easily confirmation bias, unchecked claims, and credulous news reporting can, over time, distort research findings beyond recognition. It should serve as a cautionary tale for scientists and journalists alike.
First, let’s be clear: Fungi do grow inside and on tree roots, forming a symbiosis called a mycorrhiza, or fungus-root. Mycorrhizae are essential for the normal growth of trees. Among other things, the fungi can take up from the soil, and transfer to the tree, nutrients that roots could not otherwise access. In return, fungi receive from the roots sugars they need to grow.
As fungal filaments spread out through forest soil, they will often, at least temporarily, physically connect the roots of two neighboring trees. The resulting system of interconnected tree roots is called a common mycorrhizal network, or CMN.
When people speak of the wood-wide web, they are generally referring to CMNs. But there’s very little that scientists can say with certainty about how, and to what extent, trees interact via CMNs. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prevented the emergence of wildly speculative claims, often with little or no experimental evidence to back them up.
One common assertion is that seedlings benefit from being connected to mature trees via CMNs. However, across the 28 experiments that directly tackled that question, the answer varied depending on the trees’ species, and on when, where, and in what type of soil the seedling is planted. In other words, there is no consensus. Allowed to form CMNs with larger trees, some seedlings seem to perform better, others worse, and still others seem to behave no differently at all. Field experiments designed to allow roots of trees and seedlings to intermingle — as they would in natural forest conditions — cast still more doubt on the seedling hypothesis: In only 18 percent of those studies were the positive effects of CMNs strong enough to overcome the negative effects of root interactions. To say that seedlings generally grow or survive better when connected to CMNs is to make a generalization that simply isn’t supported by the published research.
Other widely reported claims — that trees use CMNs to signal danger, to recognize offspring, or to share nutrients with other trees — are based on similarly thin or misinterpreted evidence. How did such a weakly sourced narrative take such a strong grip on the public imagination?
Source: undark.org
#i read The Secret Life Of Trees years ago#and was astounded at how unscientific it was#everyone was heralding it as a revelation#but there was no PROOF#also it was a weirdly imperialist book#as he frequently extrapolated from european ecology to insist that his pet theories must be true worldwide#it's great if you take it as scifi because it is literally science fiction
don’t like it when people say you can’t have potatoes in ur fantasy novel without detailed explanation. who gives a fuck
“ohh in europe they didnt have those until” well its not europe is it. its middle earth its earthsea its some country somebody made up
when people say that though they are not necessarily doing a cinemasins gotcha about Realism though they are often pointing out that colonialism and its results are so deeply ingrained into the global north’s understanding of its own history that they backport those results into their cultural imaginary of the european past where these fantasy worlds clearly and transparently draw from innit
roofbeams-deactivated20180202
Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you
Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,
middle schooler obsessed with using perfect grammar online -> adult who uses like every text abbreviation possible
Master the rules then grow beyond them obviously