Adventures in Fantastical Creatures

It was quite early in the morning when Anya decided to go take a walk. The sky had just begun to turn into a light purple, and the sun wasn’t even out yet. Not many people were out and about just yet, save a few bakers and shopkeepers setting up their respective businesses. Anya idly watched them bustle about as she walked towards the beach with her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets.            

   Nearing the sandy area, her attention was captured by some flowers that had fallen to the ground, no doubt the result of the storm last night. There were also twigs, leaves, and some small shells strewn about. Anya bent down and picked some of them up, putting them inside her pocket to store them away later. She continued on her way towards the sea, watching curiously as some crabs and beetles here and there scuttled across the shell covered land towards the water. The beach was at its most serene when there were no tourists chattering and littering away.

           A sudden splash from somewhere on her right startled Anya. It was followed by a couple more splashes, albeit these were quite a bit softer than the first. Intrigued, Anya deviated from the path, and made her way towards the rockier area. As far as she knew, it didn’t have any fish in it. So why the splashing?

           The answer was waiting in the form of a mesmerising tail entangled in a fishing net. Anya couldn’t help but stop in her tracks and let her mouth drop open upon seeing it. The tail was thrashing around weakly, it’s movements growing more sluggish as the seconds passed by. Snapping out of her trance, Anya scrambled towards the lake, grazing her elbow on a particularly rough rock as she slipped accidentally. She didn’t stop, however, choosing to simply increase her speed with a small hiss while taking a pocket knife out of the pockets on her jeans. The water was a deep, murky green, and that combined with the shadow of the rocks above, and the darkness of dawn, made it very hard to see whatever it was that had gotten tangled in the net. And where she was stepping.

           Grimacing, Anya stepped into the pool, grateful that she was wearing a sturdy pair of boots. At least she wouldn’t have to walk around with slimy socks. As she braced herself against the rocks beside her, the creature thrashed again, splashing some water on Anya’s shirt, making her curse. While looking at the water dripping down her front in mild disgust, the creature slowly moved underneath one of the low hanging rocks, obscuring it further.

           "Hey, calm down,“ Anya said, holding her hands out placatingly. "I’m only trying to help, I swear.”

           She did not think it would work, but the creature surprisingly calmed down enough for her to make her way over to it and begin cutting the wires of the fishing net. The creature was ridiculously huge, which made it all the more difficult to entangle it. It was also very scary. Anya hoped it didn’t like to bite.

           Untangling the creature took up a lot of time, but finally, finally, Anya was close to finishing. The creature was clearly getting restless, what with thrashing its tail around constantly. This forced Anya to bend down and partially hug its tail in an effort to reach the last bits of wire clinging to it. As she cut through the remaining line, the tail jerked suddenly, knocking her off her feet.

           With a yelp, Anya fell on her back, and under the water. Her arms flailed around, and she accidentally inhaled a large amount of the salty water. It made her splutter and cough, which only ended up with more seawater going down her windpipe. Her glasses had fallen off in her panic, and the water stung her eyes painfully.

           Something gripped the front of her shirt all of a sudden, and yanked her out of the water, before roughly slamming her back onto one of the few smooth rocks present there. Anya grunted in pain, her eyes still shut tight as the salt burned in her eyes. She tried to wipe her eyes roughly before opening them, only to freeze at the sight of the massive creature in front of her.

           Its skin was of a light purplish hue, and it had bright blue eyes. There were fins lining its scale-covered arms. It was scowling down at her with what looked like an extremely distrusting look. It opened up its mouth, which unhinged like an eel’s jaw, and Anya saw at least 3 rows of terrifyingly sharp teeth. Shivering, she hoped that it didn’t plan on using those on her. She squirmed a little as her back began to ache from the pressure, but the creature tightened its grip even further, giving her no chance to move.

   "Uhm, can you please let me go?“ She asked in a small voice. The creature stared at her for a second before replying in rough noises.

   "What?”

   The creature grumbled for a few minutes, before abruptly letting her go, making her splash down inside the water once more. She gasped as she hit the freezing water, making the creature grab her shirt again, and lift her up, before very gently setting her down on the ground. She sat there for a few minutes in a complete daze as the creature disappeared somewhere, only to return with her glasses. Anya quietly took them with a muttered thanks, and put them on, frowning as everything remained blurry and distorted because of the seawater. When she looked up, however, the creature was gone.

   She made it back to the yellowing building she called home at around 8 o’clock. All of the other occupants were already up. Her roommate approached her with a look that was part amusement, and part concern.

   "What happened to you?“

   "Pretty sure I just met a mermaid,” Anya murmured, flicking her now dry and extremely stiff hair.

   "What?“

   "Uh, nothing. I got lost and fell into one of those holes with seawater in them..”

   "Sounds like something you’d do, honestly.” The older girl huffed and shook her head.  “Go get changed. Dia is just about to finish with breakfast"

   "Yes ma’am!“ Anya answered before speeding up the staircase with a two fingered salute.

   "Kids these days…”

I can’t stop laughing because…

like I don’t know how you can get more obvious than tweeting “I’m sure I’m bisexual,” but clearly The Sun isn’t convinced

tbt to the time a bi woman explicitly said she was sure she was bisexual and “journalists” were like

I mean, it’s a thing…

biphobia is rampant in all walks of life sadly

The look on Bowie’s face in that last picture, he’s just like “how thick are you? I’m bi, deal with it”

the concept of how sir arthur conan doyle was as a person always sends me into fits. imagine making the most famous literary character of all time but you hate the character so much you try to kill him off. but everyone is so horny for this asshole detective they make you bring him back. even your own mother gets mad when he’s dead because she likes him. raising your prices to ridiculous rates to avoid writing holmes stories backfired and now you’re rich. it’s absolutely a pain because it’s keeping you from your true passion which is spiritualism despite how one of your good friends harry houdini keeps telling you it’s bullshit. you consider your best novels to be historical ones but they’re well over shadowed by the nemesis of your own creation sherlock fucking holmes. some fake photographs from some kids convinced you faeries were real and you wrote a whole book about it. you started writing stories in medical school. and yes, also you are a doctor. after you’re dead, they erect a statue of sherlock holmes across the street from your birthplace, causing you to probably roll over one hundred eighty degrees in your grave and scream into your casket pillow.

I love the carefully intertwined urban legends in which antifa are dangerous radicals coming to shoot your livestock and trash your community but also limp wristed colorful haired gender nonconforming soyboys and girls who couldn’t possibly pose a physical threat and they’re funded by Soros in cash and drugs but he also doesn’t pay them because he’s sneaky and they’re suckers and they’re black but they’re also white and they’re poor but actually they’re spoiled rich kids and they’re hot then they’re cold they’re yes then they’re no they’re in and they’re out they’re up and they’re down

the human rights campaign is suing the trump administration over their decision to do what they’re doing to section 1557 of the affordable care act, allowing medical care providers to refuse service to trans people.  if you can donate, please do.  i’m going to try and figure out literally any way i can make extra money so that i can donate as well in my current situation.

as an audience we need to show our support for john as well 🙏🏼 we’ve done it before and we’ll continue to show our support for him. FUCK RACISTS

OZAI CHALLENGED HIS 14 YEAR OLD SON TO A WHAT

ZUKO GOT HIS SCAR FROM WHO

yknow what? mr. firelord i am inviting you to meet me in the fucking agne kai pit and i do not care that i am not an expert firebender and will be facing you with nothing but my wrath and my 2 fists i am going to die historic + i WILL go down calling you a bitch and a chode. thank you in advance.

i challenge ozai to agne kai and i’ll be bringing a 12 gauge shotgun. did you just say that’s not fair, lord puppy kicker? grand high bullies the little children? say it again, i want to record it for youtube.

Uncle Iroh ghostwrote this

Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.

Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason.

John Boyega at Hyde Park demonstration #BlackLivesMattter

[Transcript]

[Boyega]: I want to thank every single one of you for coming out. This is very important—this is very vital. Black lives have always mattered! We have always been important. We have always meant something. We have always succeeded regardless, and now is the time. I ain’t waiting! I ain’t waiting! I have been born in this country, I’m 28 years old, born and raised in London, I’ve grown tired—every black person understands and realizes the first time you are reminded that you are black. You remember, every black person in here remembers, when another person reminded you that you are black. So none of you out there, all those protestors on the other side protesting against what we want to do, protesting against what we want to try and achieve, [?] you, because this is so vital.

[Other voices, to crowd]: Sit down! Sit down!

[Boyega]: Sit down, guys, we have to sit down. If you could sit down, if you can sit down. Now I need you guys to understand, I need you to understand now how painful this shit is! I need you to understand how painful it is to be reminded every day that your race means nothing! And that isn’t the case anymore. That is never the case anymore. We are going to try today—we are a physical representation of our support for George Floyd.

[Crowd cheers]

[Boyega]: We are a physical representation of our support for Sandra Bland! We are a physical representation of our support for Trayvon Martin! We are a physical representation of our support for Stephen Lawrence! For Mark Duggan! It is very, very important that we keep control of this moment and we make this as peaceful as possible. We make this as peaceful and as organized as possible. Because you know what, guys, they want us to mess up. They want us to be disorganized. But not today! Not today!

[Other voices]: Not today!

[Boyega]: Not today! And now this message is specifically for black men. Black men, we—[Boyega cuts off, crying and bending over from emotion]

[Crowd]: Speak! Speak!

[Other voices]: You can do this, you’ve got this.

[Boyega]: Black men, black men, we need to take care of our black women. We need to take care of them! They are our hearts! They are our hearts, they are our future, we cannot demonize our own. We are the pillars of the family. Imagine this, a nation that is set up with individual families that are thriving, that are healthy, that communicate, that raise their children in love, have a better rate of becoming better human beings, and that’s what we need to create. Black men, it starts with you, and it’s done, man—we can’t be trash no more. We have to be better.

You don’t understand, I’m speaking to you from the heart. Look, I don’t know if I’m going to have a career after this. But fuck that--[words bleeped out]. This, today, is about innocent people who were halfway through their process. We don’t know what George Floyd could have achieved; we don’t know what Sandra Bland could have achieved. But today we’re going to make sure that that won’t be an alien thought to our young ones. I’m sure you lot came today, you left your kids, and when you see your kids there aimlessly playing, they don’t understand what’s going on. Today is the day that we remind them that we are dedicated, and this is a lifelong dedication. Guys, we don’t leave here and stop, you know. We don’t leave here and stop. This is longevity. Some of you are artists, some of you are bankers, some of you are lawyers, some of you own shops, stores. You are important. Your individual power, your individual right, is very, very important. We can all join together to make this a better world. We can all join together to make this special. We can all join together!

[End transcript.]

NYT Opinions

Why we should stop fetishizing having asbestos-free baby strollers

John D. Smith is the owner of an Asbestos mine

after all of this is over we're supporting every single john boyega movie. or series. or whatever. if he's there for 3 secs we're watching that shit. every single thing. this man's not losing his career on my watch.

Shutting my brain off to enjoy fantasy novels gets harder and harder all the time.

Stuff the European Middle Ages didn’t have and it distracts me when they show up:

WHY DO I HAVE TO KNOW THESE THINGS. NO ONE CARES.

Petition to be able to scrub my brain of overly-detailed knowledge of the past.

(This is part of why I enjoy The Untamed. My brain is not stuffed with facts about Chinese history, so I don’t automatically notice when they put a 15th century sleeve on a 13th century outfit. I realize this will wear off as I learn more about Chinese history, but it’s nice while it lasts.)

Lis I hope you know that every time I watch The Tudors I now giggle helplessly at the black clothing next to the skin thing.

Also now I have to check what sort of oranges they would have had in Tudor England ;).

Moors brought bitter oranges to Spain in the 10th century. The Alcazar palace of Seville in Spain is scented with extensive orange plantings. That’s why in English, they’re often known as “Seville oranges”. The oranges don’t make good eating raw, but pieces appeared in food for their flavour and orange oil was used in perfumes for its scent. Orange marmalade in England is documented back to the late 15th century (and these days, English marmalade is the main use for bitter oranges, everyone else having decided they were too much trouble). Sweet oranges, which go back ages ago in China, only reached England after 1660. 

(Here’s a page about the history of citrus, which includes records of Henry VIII’s citrus purchases)

I was about to say, they definitely had oranges, diamonds, and musical harmony. I'm not sure about potatoes, or the dye

They had diamonds. They did not have sparkly diamonds. Europe didn’t develop the technology to make diamonds that refracted light and glittered until the middle ages had ended.

Medieval diamonds were cut very simply, so in some lights they would appear clear like glass, but they just as easily appeared black.

This is how diamonds were depicted in artwork:

Here are examples we have of diamonds cut using the table or point cuts available:

So all those medieval princesses with diamonds that “glitter like starlight” or give off a “brilliant white fire”... yeah no. You want the 1600s and 1700s for that.

This is all very interesting but can someone please explain the "no musical harmony"-thing in more detail

Short version: what we know today as “harmony” (multiple “parts” or “voices” sung or played at the same time, chords, all that shit) arose out of very specifically the Western Xtian music tradition and is kinda weird and has a very weird history. 

Most human music traditions (that have not, at some point, come into contact with the harmonic tradition) are monophonic. That is, there’s one part or tune. The melody may be very, VERY complex, or the rhythms may be incredibly complex, but every instrument that makes notes (as opposed to just rhythms) and all singing voices are, within one piece, singing the same thing. 

This was also true of the Western music tradition until some of the way into 10th century. 

We don’t know exact reason why, as it happens, monks started adding in a new line following the original at about a fourth or fifth above, or fourth or fifth below. But I tend to like the theory that it started at the very beginning because you suddenly had to do something with the boys whose voices were breaking. 

See, Xtian monks were singing extensive prayers seven times a day. You’ve probably heard these referred to as “Gregorian chant”, but they actually predate Gregory, and the word “chant” can be a bit misleading because these are what modern ears would call “songs”. And there’s an extensive sequence of this that monks are supposed to sing at seven different points of the day. Every day. For their entire monastic career. 

Now when you’ve got all adults that’s not a huge problem: none of these plainchant prayers have a fixed starting pitch, so you just pick a pitch that works best for your group. And even when you have young child oblates (that is, children dedicated to the monastery) it’s not that bit a problem because they can just sing an octave up. 

But AMAB individuals, absent any hormonal intervention, go through this period where the voice radically changes and deepens. (Actually technically AFAB-without-hormone-intervetion voices ALSO change at around the same age, but it’s nowhere near as dramatic so people outside of the actual classical vocal world tend not to know this. But I digress.) But it doesn’t do it all at once. It actually spends quite a bit of time with a very restricted range: neither as high as they used to be able to sing, NOR as low as they will eventually be able to sing. 

But they’re still SUPPOSED to be able to SING THE DAMN LITURGY WITH EVERYONE ELSE. 

So one theory is that some bright monk or abbot thought, hey, when you sing the exact same pattern but a fourth or fifth up from the original, it still sounds pretty good! And that suddenly puts it in the range that most of our voice-breaking-boys can sing. 

(Why fourth or fifth? Within that music tradition, fourths, fifths and octaves are “perfect” intervals. Why that is involves diving way more into musical theory than is useful right now.)

It might’ve been some other reason; they might just have gotten, you know, bored. After singing the same thing (at minimum) seven times a day every day for four hundred years. 

But once that started, people started running with it, and you developed “polyphany” for the first time we know of. Now, polyphany is not technically harmony: harmony is actually a very specific branch and development of multi-part singing that wouldn’t happen for another five hundred years or so. But in terms of what MOST people think of as “harmony” - that is, multiple “parts” to any given song, singing in intervals with each other, etc, yeah, polyphany is the first time we’re singing in those multiple parts. 

Or - somewhat later - playing instruments in multiple parts. But it took even longer to COMBINE the idea of a VOICE singing particular parts OVER a harmonizing instrument underneath. 

While there’s a strumming instrument underneath there you’ll note that it just strums literally the same thing all the way thru. The bowed instrument and the finger-picking instruments can and will both themselves play highly intricate melodies, alone! But it WON’T be like you’re used to hearing with a guitar now. That’s not how that music conceptualization works. 

Polyphany eventually got HELLA COMPLEX to the point where someone wrote a Mass for 40 Voices. Note that this does not mean “mass for forty people singing” but “mass for forty totally separate parts”. Eventually people got bored, and invented “harmony”, which is a shift in the conception of how musical notes relate to one another, and that’s when the Early Baroque started. 

tl;dr: If you’re early enough or working outside something vaguely analogous to the Catholic Xtian mediaeval musical tradition (or making something up to invent it with a different lineage) then no, you DON’T have harmony; even once you have multi-part stuff it’s not actually harmony (it’s polyphany) and doesn’t work the way most people think harmony works. 

If you’re working in a fantasy world there are, of course, ways around this. There is for example no reason not to imagine that the Teleri, music-obsessed as they are, came up with polyphany and later on with harmony; and if you want to imagine that your made up world has potatoes you can! It will COMPLETELY CHANGE the food realities of your culture and you should look up the impact of the introduction of the potato (once they convinced people to use it) on various food economies, but in a world that doesn’t have a Europe and Americas situation, there’s no reason potatoes can’t be in your fantasy world, although I will almost certainly be able to tell whether or not a fantasy author has decided they’re gonna have their fictional society have potatoes, or whether they’ve just not bothered or not known they should go look at what potatoes would do. 

It’s a lot trickier when it comes to actual historical fiction. 

(pssst. Sub-Saharan Africa had polyphony before Europe did, although as far as we can tell there is no cross-polinization between the two musical traditions.)

“Harmony” happened because the Catholic church didn’t like what polyphony was doing to the ability of people listening to understand what was going on.

It’s the middle ages, Latin has turned into Italian and French and Spanish and whatnot, and the common people don’t really understand Latin anymore, and the mass (worship service) is still in Latin, so the common people don’t know what’s going on every Sunday at church. But at least in theory, everybody needs to be able to understand the words.

With polyphony, you’ve got what are essentially however many parts (anywhere between two and forty) singing what are basically different songs at the same time.  The words overlap, by which I mean they’re singing the same phrases at the same time, but because the rhythms are so different, the phonemes are distorted and you can’t understand the words.  It’s gorgeous!  God, it is gorgeous.  But you can’t understand the words, and so however aesthetically pleasing it was, it is not very spiritually edifying.  There were all kinds of edicts about what kind of music you could have in church, and for a while it looked like they were going to ban every form of music other than a single unaccompanied vocal line sung in unison.

This is where harmony comes in.  If everyone is singing the same words at the same time, you can have different notes and still understand what is being sung.

This is not the only reason for the transition from polyphony to harmony, but it was one of the major factors.

ty on the African polyphony. I have jackshit formal education in musical theory or history but I was like 'huh i could swear that i read on wikipedia while researching the mbira that...'

What'd K-pop Twitter do?

Dallas PD set up this app to submit videos of “rioters” and kpop people just sent live-streams of them dancing until the servers crashed

Okay, very begrudging critical support for the K-pop stans

Its become pretty clear that local and even state officials do not have any real control over the police.

If police weren’t an unhinged paramilitary force answering to no one, I doubt the nyc mayor’s response to his daughter being doxxed by the police union would be to ignore it and suck up to the cops even harder