You said no museums, which is usually where I would start. But, in terms of other stuff:
Camden market is incredibly touristy and busy, but it is also incredibly cool, so I would recommend going there once for the experience and only once. If you can, go on a week day.
You can get tickets to see a show at Shakespeare's Globe for £5 on the day of the show, if you're prepared to stand. Everything will ache but it is a really great experience, I've done it twice
This is a well-known one, but it is worth flagging that both Hyde Park and St James's Park are walking distance from the National Gallery -- again, you said no museums, but the parks themselves are delightful if you avoid the main paths
I've never done it myself, but I've been told that going up the Shard and looking at the view is very cool
Don't bother going inside Buckingham Palace. You will queue for hours and it will be deeply underwhelming
Avoid Bond Street like the plague
Hello, thank you for the recommendations! The weekday tip is appreciated, I also live in a touristy area so I understand how busy it can get :) I'm definitely planning on checking out all the museums, which is mostly why I asked for non-museum recommendations! Unfortunately I only have so long before my flight home, so we'll see how much I can tick off my list. I appreciate all your suggestions!
You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/ implement how screwed are you in terms of cooking?
https://wheelofnames.com/ry4-3s4
The wheel is completed but if you the mod want to change it at all feel free and I couldn't figure out how to get the link to work properly even un-anoned.
Thanks, have a nice day and drink some water
You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/implement!
yeah i like to give my blessing to the most pathetic looking weak little knight at the tournament. she can’t even look me in the eye when i give her my flower and she stutters out that she’ll do her best or something of the like. i think its funny when she has to cry and beg my forgiveness and i get to say “such a shame, i suppose my hand in marriage will have to go to someone else…” and then i get to hear her whimper like a dog. ive done this like 6 times alrea-
Mammal in a Sunday Dress explores the uneasy relationship between femininity, civilisation, and the animal body. At first glance, the figure appears modest and withdrawn. Her posture is composed, her gaze seemingly lowered towards her bare feet, recalling the conventions of nineteenth-century portraiture where women were often depicted as passive objects of observation. Yet as the viewer moves closer, the illusion collapses. Her eyes are not lowered at all. She is looking directly back.
The delayed eye contact transforms the encounter. The viewer approaches believing they are safely observing a woman; instead, they realise they have been observed themselves. The work refuses the traditional power dynamic of portraiture, denying the comfort of anonymous spectatorship. Looking becomes a reciprocal act.
For Cox, the painting considers humanity's persistent desire to separate itself from the rest of the animal kingdom. The title quietly undermines this distinction. A "mammal" is not another creature—it is us. The Sunday dress, rich with cultural associations of femininity, morality, and respectability, becomes an attempt to distinguish ourselves from nature. Yet clothing cannot alter biology. Beneath lace and ritual remains the same vulnerable animal body.
The work also reflects on the historical relationship between women and nature. Across art, religion, and philosophy, women have repeatedly been positioned as closer to instinct, emotion, reproduction, and the body itself, while men have been aligned with reason, culture, and civilisation. Mammal in a Sunday Dress does not reject this comparison. Instead, it questions why proximity to nature has so often been treated as something lesser.
Chiaroscuro isolates the figure within darkness, allowing the luminous dress to symbolise the performance of civilisation while the bare feet quietly return the body to the earth. Neither is presented as more truthful than the other. The painting exists in the tension between performance and instinct, refinement and biology.
Mammal in a Sunday Dress ultimately asks a simple but unsettling question: if every layer of culture were stripped away, what would remain? Not a king. Not a saint. Not a gentleman or a lady. Only another mammal, looking back.
All rules can be put into two groups; don't touch the hot stove and don't walk on the grass
For the first group the consequences of your actions are real, they're directly related to your action. These rules can be broken only if you accept the risk first, maybe you want a burnt hand idk you do you
For the second group the consequences are imagined and enforced by authority, they aren't directly related to your actions people in power just want you to think they are. You should break these rules as often as you can get away with
"You are the gender you were coercively assigned at birth" is in the second group
Calvin's dad: listening to pirated music? I'll show you something interesting.
All rules can be put into two groups; those that have a real consequence and those that have a manufactured consequence enforced by an authority, right?
Calvin: yeah...
Calvin's dad: don't pirate music? Manufactured. Don't touch the hotplate? Real. Don't walk on the grass? Manufactured. Don't climb into the tigers enclosure? Real.
Despite appearing to have real consequences "don't self harm" is actually manufactured
Wow hey alright hold on, much of what's done in BDSM is still very much illegal most places, you should check your local laws but if something goes wrong the top will probably be charged with assault or assault with a deadly weapon or arson or sexual assault or domestic violence depending on the activity involved and the bottom can be charged as an accomplice. You're right that these are both issues of bodily autonomy but a better example is sports. Think about boxing or any version of football where serious injuries happen almost every game, a concussion is way more serious than any number of superficial scars
Most 'manufatured consequences' rules are related to some actual consequences, often when the consequences are too defuse to be obvious or mostly borne by someone else. 'Don't step on the grass' is a good example; the consequence is dead grass, but any individual person is only actually creating 1/1000 of a dead grass consequence. In those sort of circumstances you need to consider a sort of 'everyone doing it' consequence.
Sometimes the real consequence is something like 'the authority of the state/church/old white men/plutocrats is undermined'. It may only be a tiny bit of undermining, but every little helps!
I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.
the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists
Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”
Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”
Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”
Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”
State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”
The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.
[The needleman is one of those monsters that's never the same twice. The original was a White Dwarf creation, the result of a botched raise dead spell incorporating the pine needles a corpse was laid on and fusing them into the resultant creature. Which makes you wonder why this happens so often that you could get encounter groups of up to 50 of them. It lost this origin in the 1e Fiend Folio, but retained its zombie-like appearance. 2e gave them an attempt at a realistic ecology, although it made them explicitly deciduous; they change color and go dormant in the winter, because the author I think didn't make the connection between needles and pine trees. 3e kept that flavor, but Tony DiTerlizzi provided the best illustration yet; its stick insect-like appearance foreshadows the look of the sprites in the Spiderwick books. And in 5e, they got updated as the "needle blight", becoming evil for the first time but losing their enmity with elves.
This version is picking and choosing bits I like best from all of the previous versions, but putting a new spin on why they don't really have a society, just hanging out in the forest despite being intelligent. Making them workers for a single tree also turns them into something of a spin on the orcwort, a monster that appears a couple pages later in the 3.0 Monster Manual 2. That's a giant carnivorous tree that grows vegetable orcs, "wortlings", to gather food for it. The orcwort doesn't really work well, because the orcwort is a CR 20 and its wortlings are CR 3, and D&D 3.x is the worst edition to do a "powerful boss with lots of weak minions" battle in. I avoid that problem by keeping the needlefolk's tree out of combat. It's just a tree.
If you don't mind me needling you a bit, check out the Creature Codex Patreon.]
Needlefolk
CR 2 N Plant
This bipedal creature resembles a humanoid insect made of plant material. Its head is small, featuring mandibles and eyestalks, and its long neck and shoulders are covered in sharp pine needles. Its limbs are spindly, ending in thorny claws.
Needlefolk are sapient carnivorous plants native to coniferous forests. They can perform photosynthesis, but cannot root in soil, and so occasionally feed on small animals to gain nitrogen and other minerals. They hunt birds, squirrels and other game by firing clusters of needles from their shoulders, which also serve to protect them from large herbivores that don’t mind their meals moving around. Needlefolk quite literally grow on trees; some magical confiers can grow needlefolk instead of the usual cones under periods of stress. The needlefolk protect the tree from loggers, beavers and other existential threats, tend to it to remove diseased wood or parasitic fungi, and carry its reproductive cones and plant them in environments where they’re likely to grow well. They do not especially care if other trees in the area are disturbed. If two needlefolk trees grow close to each other, their needlefolk will go to war, the winners eventually killing the losing tree to remove the competition.
Needlefolk are typically peaceful towards humanoids who leave their trees alone, but become violently agitated in the presence of elves. Needlefolk can sense the presence of elves at a remarkable distance, and when they do, recruit their fellows into armies to wage war. The incensed needlefolk will not hesitate to attack the companions of elves, but once all elves in the party are slain, retreat. The specificity of this ire raises questions as to its cause. The leading hypothesis is that some fey power granted trees the ability to grow needlefolk as a way to create a weapon against elves, but who holds this grudge and why is still a mystery.
Needlefolk CR 2
XP 600
N Medium plant
Init +2; Senses elf sense 360 ft., low-light vision, Perception +7
Defense
AC 14, touch 12, flat-footed 12 (+2 Dex, +2 natural)
hp 22 (3d8+9)
Fort +7, Ref +3, Will +3
Immune plant traits
Defensive Abilities spiny
Offense
Speed 30 ft.
Melee 2 claws +3 (1d4+1)
Ranged needles +4 (1d12+1)
Statistics
Str 12, Dex 15, Con 17, Int 6, Wis 15, Cha 6
Base Atk +2; CMB +3; CMD 15
Feats Deadly Aim, Point Blank Shot
Skills Perception +7, Stealth +6 (+14 in forests); Racial Modifiers +8 Stealth in forests
Languages Sylvan
SQ woodland stride
Ecology
Environment any forests
Organization solitary, pair or grove (5-50)
Treasure standard
Special Abilities
Elf Sense (Su) A needlefolk can sense the presence of elves within 360 feet, as if it had blindsense.
Needles (Ex) A needlefolk can launch a cluster of pine needles at a single target as an attack action. Treat this as an attack with a projectile weapon with a range increment of 20 feet that deals 1d12 points of damage plus the needlefolk’s Strength bonus.
Spiny (Ex) A creature striking a needlefolk with a natural weapon, unarmed strike or melee touch attack must succeed a DC 13 Reflex save or take 1d4+1 points of piercing damage.
Woodland Stride (Ex) A needlefolk ignores movement penalties from naturally occurring vegetation.
I'm shocked that you've not done needlefolk before; I was sure I'd already seen your take on them. I had fun with these in 3.5e, I'll have to bringbthem to a pathfinder game at some point. The flavour text here does make a lot more sense.
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