Brain Rot Central

Gotta get it out somehow 🤷 @anameorsomthing.bsky.social Occasional mature content

[anameorsomthing]

Damn, Lestat really fell in love with the facade Louis put up, took steps to erode that facade, and the spent the rest of their relationship resenting and punishing him for not upholding it. You ain’t know this man at all.

[leftbeeftheory]

Sometimes a dual income male partnership is four men and two women

[anameorsomthing]

To be fair, HJ and LaVonte are the only ones with income

[anameorsomthing]

Best Jeanist attends a celebrity mega church, and you can’t change my mind.

[anameorsomthing]

[anameorsomthing]

… I should call her

[anameorsomthing]

[thorn-ranger]

I think they should put maxwell gotch into a starstuck odyssey so that he can increasingly more frustrated with the pure whimsy and frivolousness of anarchera and everyone on the wurst

[anameorsomthing]

[anameorsomthing]

I just know Maxwell woulda fucked with KP Hobbs.

[anameorsomthing]

Yo did they add an extra Gotch brother?

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[cannibalcharon]

Western Washington vs Eastern Washington is a good example of a rain shadows effects for fellow writers.

Western Washington:

Eastern Washington:

For fantasy writers, Washington is a really cool state to study because we have nearly every biome from alpine forests, desert, alpine desert, rainforest, riparian forests, wetlands, coastal, and so on. We have two main mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades. We sit on three tectonic plates which give us said mountains (and earthquakes). Our ecology is really neat here.

[anameorsomthing]

Me, ignoring the app limits that I myself set

[anameorsomthing]

I want to put Superman in Death Note. Will elaborate when not high.

[anameorsomthing]

Why would they make them that shape?

[anameorsomthing]

Time honored female tradition of talking to your friends shitty man.

[hangon-silvergirl]

game changer (dropout.tv) + the onion; i've been here the WHOLE time

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

still feel like we have not appropriately tapped into the comedy goldmine that is: Dracula's first canonical appearance features him wearing a goofy hat and a huge false beard. this is uproarious. this is rib-tickling! this has so many implications!!!

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

where on earth did he get the beard? he lives in the middle-of-nowhere and all of his neighbors are too terrified to cook or clean for him. where did he find someone to sell him a false beard?

was it mail-order, the way presumably all of his books and maps are? did they even have cartoonish disguises available by mail-order back in late 19th cent Romania? did Dracula have to sew it himself? i need to know these things!!!

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

@chaos-has-theories truly you live up to your url:

#clearly Dracula goes out irregularly as his own servants. The people in the coach weren't surprised to see him as his 'coachman' #he goes to town in his huge floppy hat and hoitily toitily tells everybody that his MASTER wants this and his MASTER wants that #and if they don't comply his MASTER is going to be angry and scahahary and anyway he's having the time of his life #He's convinced that he's fooling everyone. He is not #but the point is he can just buy whatever and the people will be equal amounts terrified and annoyed but they'll get it for him

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i like to imagine the villagers are terrified of him BUT also aware that he is rich-as-midas and out-of-touch with human society...so they just charge him a 500% markup and call it a day. over the years he has become the village's primary source of income and this is the true reason he's been allowed to stay. "yeah he's a bloodsucker but he's propping up a half dozen different local economy sectors we're keeping him"

*dracula strolling to the village to buy a roast chicken for his Good Friend Jonathan* "it's one roast chicken how much could it cost 1604 romanian lei?"