Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
I want you to understand this. I NEED you to understand this. My mother read me the hobbit as bedtime story, and I started pushing myself to read before pre-school so I could in fact read the hobbit for myself instead of having to wait for bedtime.
I didn't do so right away but jesus wept I PUSHED myself to learn to read SPECIFICALLY so I could read The Hobbit! It is, in fact, a children's story! And children only see page count as 'there is a lot of this fun story to read!'
When we treat children as incompetent, we cultivate the idea of incompetence into them. We read The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and many more stories in our childhood that people now think are too long or too complicated for children. If you have children, read to them. Not just from what the current market thinks is “age appropriate” for them, and usually is very new: Foster a love of stories in them by letting them read the simple books on their own, but reading books they can’t read for themselves yet at story time and bedtime.
You might recover your own ability to focus for more than 20 seconds at a time too…
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck.
anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that
the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people
“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.
“Bluh, I don’t wanna go to school” Sarah grumbled, “I’m too tired.”
And now, when neither Sarah nor the narration are allowed to directly say that she’s tired or doesn’t want to go to school:
Sarah glowered at her backpack, still yet to be zipped up. She stifled a yawn, and found her gaze drifting back to her comfy, cozy bed. “I could… skip a day,” she muttered, before shaking those thoughts from her head.
2: struggle to remember all this stuff WHILE they’re writing, and/or
3: feel like their writing is lacking even when they know this stuff
THIS IS A TIP BEST SAVED FOR REVISION!! A lot of stuff like this is! When you’re writing a first draft, the only thing you should be worried about is getting the message on the paper. My “first draft” usually looks more like a rough outline and jumps around between eloquent prose, emojis, sincere dialogue, and sometimes things like “blinking white guy dot gif”. Because that gif has a very specific emotion, right? But it’s hard to put into words, it’s time consuming, and when I’m just trying to get my thought out before it slips away from me, I don’t want to stop and ponder how best to go about it.
In your first or second pass, it’s okay and normal to say “I don’t want to skip school. I’m tired.” As long as the improved/revised version makes it to the final product, you’re a-okay. 👍
PS: if you’re a fanfic author and you’re just creating for the fun of it, you can disregard this entirely if you want. I looked at this and thought “yeah but that’s a lot of work” and then remembered that I don’t have to do it when I’m not Writing Professionally. Is it objectively good advice? Yes. Do I HAVE to do it when I’m just posting things on the internet for free? Absolutely not.
I don’t want to hear any writing advice from Stephen king not because I think there would be no value in it but because whatever works for Stephen king is between him and god and that demon he made a pact with that lets him write 3000 words in one sitting daily.
Yeah, as a person who often does 3k words in a sitting, frequently for days or weeks in a row, and has never done cocaine.... it's not the cocaine, and it's not a god-given physical trait like being the "hottest friend".
It's practice. Not just practicing writing in general, but intentionally practicing for speed. I have taught writing in formal settings, and the thing that seems to most frequently slow people down is the amount of time they spend tinkering with, worrying about, and sweating over every individual sentence as they write it -- and then they've written 800 words and they're fucking exhausted, because all of that worrying takes a LOT of cognitive energy. Turn your brain off. Practice not caring if it's a perfect sentence because you can fix it later. Just slap some bullshit on the page. Keep your fingers moving.
If you can type 60wpm, and you type without stopping, you'll have 3k in under an hour. Now, realistically, I'm a fast writer, and I do still pause to do a LITTLE tinkering now and then, so I compose at a rate of around 25wpm, even though my top typing speed is around 80wpm. At 25wpm, 3k would take me roughly two hours. Let's round it up to two and a half hours for a couple thinking breaks.
The point is, this is doable. 25wpm for two and a half hours, including some thinking breaks. It's not particularly superhuman, any more than being able to run a mile is superhuman. It just takes intentional training towards a specific goal and prioritizing what you're spending your day on.
When you first start practicing for speed, then yeah, a lot of what you produce is going to be garbage, and step one is to let that be perfectly fucking fine. Your mantra is "It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done" -- it's a lot easier to edit a pile of raw material than to try to get it perfect on the first go. As you practice, you'll get more adept at the writing craft part of it too, so the product will not be garbage stream-of-consciousness anymore. The sentences will start to snap together one after the other like lego bricks.
But you don't get there if you say, "Well, it was just the cocaine" or "This isn't applicable to me because Stephen King is doing a completely different activity." Neither of those things are true. He's a regular human being, and I'm a regular human being, and so are you. Writing fast is a learnable skill, just like being able to run a mile or any equivalent feat of physical exertion. If you don't WANT to learn that sort of skill, you definitely don't have to. But there's a difference between deciding that you don't WANT to learn the skill and reflexively deciding that the skill must be impossible, and when I see people saying "That seems impossible, so there's no point to me even trying," it makes me sad.
Because there's no such thing as impossible. Some things are just Very Tedious.
Bro, blocking someone and then using their tag like this is, all offence, weak as fuck. Like all you had to say was, na bro I don't promote pedo protags on this here blog, because I wholly agree with the premise of your argument given contexts (i.e., writing abusive relationships to show the evils, great; writing abusive relationships to show the romance, yikes).
This response is so, so comically shitty within the context of that tag, oh my god.
Something being nasty is not a good reason to ban fiction about it.
If we accept that "something being nasty is a good reason to bad fiction about it" then we give a foot in the door for all the people who truly, genuinely believe that queer people are nasty to ban all queer literature.
This is not about defending bad people this is about defending the freedom of good people from tyranny, you moron.
I think if you take it to its logical extreme. Say, banning people from writing stories of sexual abuse. That could then be said "well ANY talk about sexual abuse is bad."
And from that, you could ban books that talk about it irl. Or books like how to recover after being abuse. If its not something to be discussed AT ALL.
The fact that I’ve seen this post in some form on my dash like 100x and each time there’s new idiots who do not get that you can’t have *some* censorship.
Either you’re for it or you aren’t.
The moment you agree that something should never, ever exist in fiction is the moment that anything can be banned.
Remember a while back how Tumblr banned a bunch of tags, including many popular innocuous ones that even people who are for censorship used and were upset about?
When censorship happens, stuff YOU like can and will be banned. That’s how it works.
Remember how a bunch of people had their accounts terminated here only last year for writing about their own sexual abuse?
When you ban “pedo” topics, say, any talk of child sexual abuse in any form, that means people can no longer write about their own experiences. It means people cannot educate others so they can learn how to protect themselves or get help from these situations.
Censorship is authoritarian. Full stop.
Even if “everyone” agrees something is “gross” and “shouldn’t exist,” that does not fucking matter.
Do you know who generally believes queer people are gross and shouldn’t exist??
The same people who are banning books left and right solely because they have queer characters or relationships.
The same people who attack and kill queer folk for simply exisiting.
This is not just some fandom matter or a case of being chronically online.
Protecting freedom of expression is essential, and if you do not get that, I don’t know what to say to you.
And the people who keep bringing up child sex abuse as a reason for censorship are doing it very specifically because everyone feels like then they HAVE to agree with the person in favor of censorship.
It’s not that there isn’t widespread societal agreement on this. It’s that they want you backed into a rhetorical corner where you feel compelled to agree with them.
Also, like, we KNOW how this shit shakes out in fandom because it's happened before.
In 2007, Livejournal capitulated to the "pedophilia and sex crimes!" cries of (hate group) Warriors 4 Innocence, and you know what communities got shut down? Slashfic communities. Sexual assault survivor support communities. Authors who'd written non-smut m/m fic even got caught up in it. It was DEVASTATING to fandom spaces. I think pretty much everyone knew at least one person whose account was literally DELETED, or were a member of a community that was wiped off the map because they were considerate enough to include topics like "sexual assault" or "BDSM" in the profiles under the badly-named category of "interests" to indicate that posts on said blogs or communities may include discussion of things like that. Even if it was for a SUPPORT group. And it was because a group of religious bigots came to LJ and said essentially "EVERYONE thinks it's gross and that it's promoting CSA, we should ban it."
Like, strikethrough and boldthrough were a large part of what propelled AO3 out of a more unfocused conversation on one person's blog about hosting a site INTENDED for fandom content, into being an actual archive and nonprofit. And it's a large part of why you won't find AO3 banning topics that you find "gross".
Censorship is authoritarian and it will ALWAYS have more collateral damage than you can imagine.
Going to add that fiction which had sexual abuse and communities which played around with it as a writing topic are the very things that protected me from irl sexual abuse when I was a teenager.
I was in a dicey situation, and realized that while my situation did not match up to any of the superficial or textbook cases mentioned in passing (if at all) through school, it matched up a LOT to what I'd learned about irl sexual abuse through works of fiction and the rhetoric of my communities. I got out of that situation and dodged what was, in retrospect, one hell of a nasty bullet.
If it hadn't been for that "nasty" fiction and those "nasty" communities, I would very likely have been abused, and subject to further violence spiraling out from that abuse.
Learning from every source in your life that sex is disgusting and sinful, that you should be ashamed of your feelings, thoughts and desires and then having someone in a dog mask tell you, "No, it's all cool, actually," is mind-blowing lol
In the comments seeing a lot of aces saying "Yeah I appreciate that kinksters are often accepting of ace people" and that is because there are many asexuals in kink! Sexual attraction or behavior is not essential to kink/BDSM.
My spouse and I are both a-spec kinksters who do a lot of Kinky Activities and exactly zero traditional genital-involving sex. I write about being nonsexual kinksters professionally as well.
"One funny thing: At most of the kink parties Selena went to, no one was doing anything that seemed to be sexual. People would say, 'I'm tying someone up, that's sex,' but much of the time it didn't seem to feel sexual and nobody could explain how this made sense. Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn't care about sex, but she did love rope, so it was unclear exactly what was happening here, and what she actually wanted.
Intimacy, it turns out. Selena cared about intimacy, and kink was a way for her to be intimate with others. Intimacy and sex are not the same. Intimacy can be in service of sex or sex can be in service of intimacy, or they can be completely separate..."
-Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Yes some languages like French or Thai or Japanese have nonsensical or weird spelling but you can already read English so you should be used to that by now
if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.
You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.
There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.
It's more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that "losing your humanity" does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works
Cyberpunk authors know about printers, and have extrapolated from there. The really messed up ones have owned and used flatbed scanners, and you can see the scars come through their writing.
I wonder if any furries doing ferretsonas incorporate their whole thing where they develop health problems and sometimes die if unspayed ferrets don't get pregnant.
This makes me wonder if in ferret-person society, male sex workers are considered to be a lifesaving profession, like a doctor or firefighter.
I bet they've got a special uniform. And if you call the ferret equivalent of 9-1-1, they'll race to your home to save you from your own endocrine system, using only a Barry White album and their dick.
(it's traditionally a male dominated profession for obvious reasons, but in recent years there's been a big advancement in trans rights in Ferretopia, so there's now at least one pre/non-op ferrettgirl in each squad.)
I was trying to figure out the uniform look, and I was thinking something like this, but a little more casual, and with different colors. The primary color is white, and the secondary color (the stripes) is red, and the back of the uniform has a big red heart.
I thought I remembered seeing a firefighter wearing a uniform in those colors though, like maybe in the 80s? So I googled "white uniform with red stripes" and it suggested this:
And God damn it I can't not see it this way now.
Sure. It's a furry society which has completely normalized male* sex work and even considers it to be an important part of society, they're lifesaving workers alongside doctors and firemen, and THEY DRESS LIKE THIS. To quote Ferret John Mulaney; "this might as well happen. Ferret life is already so God damn weird."
* well, male and pre/non-op transfem. Although honestly I don't really have a reason why they can't hire ferret women who just have good strap game.
Unfortunately the ferret women with good strap game wouldn't work. Getting a good rogering won't fix the problem by itself, actual pregnancy is required.
I have to imagine a sufficiently scientifically advanced ferret society would have put significant work into medical solutions that prevent death without mandatory pregnancy, but I can also see this being A) culturally controversial amongst the conservatives, and B) not always available when needed, so Emergency Hookers will probably still be a thing.
I was figuring it works slightly differently, even if that makes it less accurate to non-anthro ferrets. Getting pregnant would certainly solve the problem, but it's not required. You just need to be Seriously Fucked. That's enough to break the heat. It does need to be quite intense, though: you're not just having some light casual sex, you need to be railed, of the intensity where you feel sore for days afterwards. Generally they go overboard, because if they underfuck a poor ferretgirl in heat, she'll still be in heat and they'll just gave to get called out again and start the whole process over. This is also why you can't just masturbate out of your heat: you can't manage the intensity needed without a bunch of extra devices to assist in the process.
As for medical solutions: yeah! Ferret society would be ahead of our own in things like birth control. And they can medically end a heat... But it's hormonal and has some annoying side-effects, and it doesn't last as long. You get fucked out of your heat and you're good for the season. Take the pills and it works more like omegaverse suppressants: as soon as you're off them, it comes back, sometimes even stronger because it's been held back so long.
And the sex workers are a longstanding and admired part of ferret society? So it's an easier option. They use condoms, of course, so you don't have to get pregnant, and at the end of the day... it's a lot more fun than having to take a pill.
So the majority of ferret girls end their heat with either partners or the sex-workers. The drugs get used by people with religious exemptions (one of the religions thinks it's wrong to have sex without intending to have a baby. The church doesn't like the drugs either, but it's less of a sin to take heat-suppressants than it is to use a condom), medical issues, or other personal issues (like orientation conflicts (there are lesbian and asexual ferret girls: sometimes they can't find a trans woman sex worker or they don't want to have sex, period!))
Anyway, the heat cycle being hormonal DOES mean that it affects trans ferretgirls (ferrettgirls) too. So it's a good thing that getting Seriously Fucked breaks the heat: much like our own, ferret medical science hasn't yet made it possible to get trans girls pregnant.
Trans masc ferrets eventually stop getting heats, btw. It's their low levels of ferret estrogen (ferretstrogen) that keep them from going in heat. It still happens sometimes because the hormone levels weren't exactly right and the ovaries KEEP TRYING, but fortunately there was a big thing with the union for the sex workers where they've made a big push to make sure they can take care of men in need too. Homophobia thankfully was never a big thing in ferret society, but they still weren't immediately just okay with serving men... But like I said, they worked on it and hired more bisexual sex workers and did training to make sure they're not using female-specific language and all. So it's much better, even if there's some lingering assumptions that they're all MEN who have sex with WOMEN: that's how their whole profession was defined for decades.
But in the year of our ferrety lord 2024, a man might call 6911 because he's deep in heat and a tall ferret woman might show up in that god-awful outfit to rail him into next week. Because of woke.
So all full service sex work is legal and legitimized, it'd be horribly hypocritical to have publicly funded male sex work that is admired by all, and to simultaneously criminalize and demean other sex work. So that's only happened historically in particularly regressive regimes.
It's actually been more common for the opposite to happen: societies that considered it a civic duty. More than a few ferrety countries have required men to go into military service for a year or two, unless they were serving the public in some other way: working as a firefighter, doctor/nurse, or a sex worker.
Thankfully that's not the case any longer. Now the job is more of a professional/volunteer thing, rather than a conscripted force.
The majority of the workers are professionals: they went to school for this, this is their only job, they're paid by their city's tax budget. They work year round.
But there's also a volunteer contingent, something like the Army Reserve? They've got the training (and their certifications are up to date) but they have another job (or they're in education or are a homekeeper or whatever). They're only called in for big surges.
See, heats are a hormone level thing but they're environmentally triggered. In "nature", they'd trigger every spring after maturity*, so basically all the ferret girls would go into heat at once.
But in the modern world, that's less the case. When ferrets go into heat can happen at different times, and then it tends to be yearly around that time. It's shifted all over the place thanks to the modern world messing with environmental triggers: artificial light, global warming, air conditioning... It mostly stops the natural triggers from working so it's just anytime.
But... Enough ferret girls DO go into heat at the usual time that there's always a big surge around the beginning of spring. The professional crew can't keep up at those times, so they call in the volunteers. It's a civic duty, a bit like jury duty? You can't get arrested or fined for saying no, but many people do it just out of a sense of civic pride. In big cities though the surge is often bad enough that they do offer more than the basic compensation. And there's protective laws for doing it: your job can't fire you because you had to take a week off to rail ferretgirls into the mattress.
You gotta have a certification though. It's not that hard to get, a few weeks of classes and a hands-on test at the end. All universities offer it, and usually you can find a community center offering classes in an old church. You just gotta take lessons in how to do it properly, how to be polite and appropriate, what you might be asked to do, and the hazards** of the job. Then you go down to your local DHM*** office and take the in-person test. Certificates are good for 5 years, then you just need to retake a paper test and the in-person again.
But yeah. Most of the year it's just the year-round professionals manning the shop. How many depends on the population. Your small towns will just have a single station, and big downs are divided into a bunch of districts. Universities usually have one or two stationed on-site.
* thankfully the ferret population doesn't have an issue with precious puberty, that's all I can say. All ferrets going into heat are at least the ferret equivalent of 18.
** and they are many. This is a job and a medical thing needed to save a life, but ferrets are still human like you and me: it's very hard to completely avoid catching any feels. And God forbid you are being called out to save a ferret woman because her husband isn't up to it: they have policies about this exact situation because of all the murders.
*** Department of Heat Management, the government agency that oversees this profession. It's an eternal source of humor how they're stereotyped as being the "sexiest government agency" but really they mostly do paperwork and run it all like the DMV so it's about the least sexy thing imaginable, even if sometimes you gotta go down to their offices and fuck a gal hard enough to prove you can do it****. Thus the humor: that dissonance. Plenty of sex, but no sexy.
**** the existence of the certification must come up in dating/cruising, and that's gonna have some interesting implications. Imagine you're going out with a guy (or a gal! It's the 90s!), and they pull an official card from the government that certifies they know how to Fuck Good and they've had to prove it. There's plenty of bars where you can get laid on the strength of that alone.
Kind of sad that I knew my fursona was a ferret when I was eight, before I knew a) what a fursona was b) that ferrets do this c) that I am severely sex-repulsed. I hope spaying would be socially acceptable.
It could be way worse, of course. I could be a stoat, and be pregnant before I was weaned.
Oh yeah. The hormone pills are mainly there for people who don't want to do the traditional way out of a heat but might want to have kids later. They're more like birth control.
Spaying is totally accepted because of how it can be a health thing. They invented that surgery early on! So yeah, if you're sex-adverse or just never want to have kids, you can totally get spayed in the ferret world. You just take ferretstrogen to maintain bone density and avoid masculinization (assuming you don't want a mustache! Maybe you do?), but without your ovaries you can keep your hormone levels consistent, and thus never go into heat.
(this is a lower dose of ferretstrogen than the ones most trans women ferrets (ferrettgirls) are on, which is why they usually get heats and spayed women don't)
It's a society that accepts and glorifies a specific type of sex worker as lifesaving, not a society that pushes sex on everyone. Sex-adverse (for any reason!) people are welcome here in ferret society.
@foone I don't want to tear apart your world building, but how do you account for most of the population having children every year? Is pregnancy after sex less common with ferrets or is there a massive overpopulation problem? Or do ferrets die in large quantities every year to match the population boom?
They don't have to have children every year. I maybe didn't make that clear enough.
You basically just need to have sex "good enough" that it triggers the reproductive system to go "I definitely got fucked: end the heat, release the eggs, let's get pregnant!"
You don't need to actually get pregnant for that. If the person fucking you is infertile or wearing a condom, it'll still end the heat. So the majority of female ferrets don't actually get pregnant during their heat, unless they actually want to have kids.
Everyone who doesn't want kids either has a partner who can help them end their heat (while using a condom), gets a heat technician to help them, or takes heat suppressants.
Their birth rate isn't high at all: they endured long enough with high birth rates that as soon as they figured out birth control, they inverted their population growth and then it flattened back out in the long run.
Unfortunately the ferret women with good strap game wouldn't work. Getting a good rogering won't fix the problem by itself, actual pregnancy is required.
According to the RSPCA the "good rogering" method does work for real life ferrets and is done in real life with males that have a vasectomy and not full neutering, it's just not recommended because it may need to be done repeatedly throughout the breeding season, a vasectomized male ferret still has all the behavior problems like aggression and pissing on things that a fully intact male does, and direct quote:
"However, although mating is a natural behaviour, the act itself is often violent and very stressful for the jill. Repeated matings may result in damage to the jill's neck, so this practice is not recommended."
With the conclusion of: "If you are not a reputable breeder just spay/neuter your pets please"
So yeah, if you're sex-adverse or just never want to have kids, you can totally get spayed in the ferret world. You just take ferretstrogen to maintain bone density and avoid masculinization (assuming you don't want a mustache! Maybe you do?), but without your ovaries you can keep your hormone levels consistent, and thus never go into heat.
Again per the RSPCA link above, they do make "heat suppressants" for ferrets in real life as implants or injections. However the side effects of spaying/neutering are different in ferrets than in humans and result in adrenal gland disease which can result in hair loss and muscle wasting, and I think the hormonal implants may be helpful even for a spayed/neutered ferret to prevent the side affects.
Also I want to share that I have seen this subject come up 2-3 separate times in Redwall Fanfiction. One of them was "Romsca gets a sketchy back alley spaying surgery because going into heat on a pirate ship would be extremely dangerous or a very awkward situation with someone else on the crew and a career limiting move either way" (note: this is a medieval tech setting without hormonal birth control, or safe surgery for that matter, and the more competent surgeons in the setting generally ain't treating ferrets. This is a "the anaesthetic and the disinfectant are the same thing: booze" type deal), and the other was "Veil Sixclaw is an orphan because in a ferret marriage 'husbandly obligations' are serious business and Veil's dad ignored them anyway. His parents' relationship can be summarized as:
Bluefen: "Seriously you have to fuck me or I will literally DIE!"
Swartt:
and by the time Bluefen got desperate enough to try not-so-ethical methods that resulted in Veil's conception, being in heat for months months fucked up her health so much that she didn't survive the pregnancy"
And uh yeaaaahhhh fortunately I have not come across any "what if stoat biology worked like IRL?" stuff in the Redwall fandom because let's just not even go there
In today's linguistics class we talked about metaphors, and we really want two of the ones we talked about to become conventionalised.
So first of all this one girl told us about a newer metaphor in Russian, "I have paws", which is something you say when you don't really want to do something, so you say you're incapable of doing it since you have paws instead of hands. Like, "hey, finish that report" "aw but I have paws :(" and I think that's adorable. It's like "I'm just a girl" but for animals.
We also had the task to invent a novel metaphor and have the others guess what it means, and the teacher really liked my "she's such a capybara" = "everyone loves her". Capybara energy is like golden retriever energy except you're chill about it. You're just vibing and everyone digs that.
Anyway I think these deserve to become more common in English
once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.
Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.
So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!
"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.
This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!
i will never forgive the internet for making the phrase “fiction affects reality” inherently suspicious because like fiction absolutely does affect reality in the sense that the themes and messages of media can challenge or affirm people’s biases, it can impact one’s ideology, so much of fiction is commentary on real social issues
and yet! everyone who uses the phrase fiction affects reality is using it as a pro-censorship argument and i simply do not fuck with that
Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”
