A Little Bit of Chaos

"Out of chaos springs forth order and disorder, reliant on each other, all three connected and perpetually intertwined for all time."

[ladyhistory]

Me entering any museum: man I’m so excited to learn all the things

Also me: GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP

[wandering-elf]

There are two dragons inside of you. One hoards knowledge and the other hoards trinkets. They’re both very excited when you bring them to a museum

[everythingfox]

(via)

[why-i-love-comics]

It’s Jeff - Infinity Comic #8 (2021)

written by Kelly Thompson art by Gurihiru

[foolhearteyes]

anyway stream montero

[foolhearteyes]

[qalamoun]

‘Children of Shatila’ (Lebanon, 1998) film by Mai Masri. In this scene the youth of the Palestinian refugee camp interview an elder with a video camera.

[liberal-memes]

Liberal Memes

[sunsailsandmoonwalks]

my favourite part of The Rise Of Skywalker is at the end when Rey realises she didn’t love Kyle Ron so she and Rose live out their happy life as Finn and Poe’s lesbian neighbours.

[fruitpilled-peachcel]

the face allah makes when a white western lady who claims she’s a witch and uses reddit hits him with that dollar store hex spell

[vestahlls]

For anyone thinking that’s a joke:

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

At least she lives up to her username

[parakeet]

oh to be a citizen in a whimsical fantasy world where you get to benefit from all the cool shit but dont have to get involved in the world ending plot cus youre not the protag ur just some fuckin guy who runs a stall selling silly little trinkets and travels around the region on griffinback or whatever the fuck

[howtofightwrite]

Considerations for Slaying a Dragon

Realistically, if One Person needed to defeat an approximately house sized, fire breathing Dragon, what weapons would they use? Medieval weapons of course, and Magic is definitely allowed.

I know that realistically it seems like an impossible task, and that’s part of it. A lot of people have died fighting this dragon, and this character is only capable of it because his rich father has been training him since he was little, so maybe that helps? (I’m trying my hand at subverting the ‘princess in a tower’ trope)

I honestly just don’t know how to handle this. Should I just say “Fuck It” and chuck whatever realism is left out the window? That’s kinda what I’ve been doing so far, as I’d just given him a sword a lot like the Buster Sword from Final Fantasy, but I thought I’d ask you anyway.

So, there’s a couple problems here. Let’s start with the dragon.

There is no concrete set of rules for dragons. Everything is particular to the story you’re looking at, or, in this case, writing. Giant, fire breathing, murder lizard only gets you so far. Dragons range from being just another wild animal to thinking beings with superhuman intellect, depending on the setting. Similarly, they range from being just another chunk of meat with a slightly crunchy exterior, to literally immortal and impossible to kill, with examples everywhere in between.

Obviously, there’s a bit of a difference between a story of someone hunting a mundane apex predator who’s been picking off professional game wardens, and someone trying to slay Jormungandr. These are entirely different genres of storytelling, and it’s not as simple as pinning down a size and saying, ‘it breathes fire.”

What are the best weapons? It depends on the dragon’s durability. Things like lances or ballistae are probably your best options, if they work at all. Of course, if the only weapon that can harm it is an enchanted letter opener, then you’d need to use that, and try to figure out a way around the limitations of it not having an edge, and only being a few inches long.

This feeds back into a different problem, and it’s not there already, but heading into dangerous territory. Magic is a cheat. When used carelessly, it will leach all of the tension from your story, and cause the entire thing to collapse. “Just kill the dragon with magic,” isn’t going to be a satisfying ending, and leaves you with the question, “why didn’t any of the last thirty would-be dragon hunters think of that?”

The more difficult that the magic is (by any meaningful metric), the less harm it will cause to your tension, and there is even potential for benefit. If your character is trying to find a magical means to dispatch the dragon, and that’s the core of their quest, it does go a long way towards why none of the previous hunters simply zapped that overgrown iguana out of the sky.

(I’m trying my hand at subverting the ‘princess in a tower’ trope)

Don’t.

There are times that I could gleefully shoot that website into the sun, and this one of those.

It can be a very useful when you’re trying to pull a work apart and see all the underlying thematic elements.

However, when you start looking at it like a shopping list, something is about to go very, very, wrong.

This is one of those times.

What you have is a rich, privileged kid, swooping in to save the day. That’s not a “subversion,” of a damsel in distress (of any form), that’s a version of Bruce Wayne’s superpower being his bank account.

TV Tropes is not a dictionary of narrative elements, it’s a thesaurus, and if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, should be avoided for the same basic reasons. Be especially cautious of picking a trope and trying to, “subvert,” or, “deconstruct,” it. Both are very popular in the Tropes community, but are exceedingly difficult to reverse engineer off a Tropes article.

An actual subversion of the damsel in distress would be the comic strip of a dragon that is casually executing would be rescuers because the princess isn’t interested in them, and the king’s posted reward is marrying her off.

Another, classic, subversion of the damsel in distress would be Princess Leia in A New Hope, and the host of imitators that followed over the next couple decades.

However, Batman is not a subversion of a damsel in distress. Not only because he’s male, but also because he’s not in distress.

I honestly just don’t know how to handle this. Should I just say “Fuck It” and chuck whatever realism is left out the window? That’s kinda what I’ve been doing so far, as I’d just given him a sword a lot like the Buster Sword from Final Fantasy, but I thought I’d ask you anyway.

I’m going to say something that will sound utterly bizarre: “Realistic” is what you make of it. It’s in how you create and justify your world.

This is also why that site can be useful. If you want a snapshot of all the different systems of magic used in fiction, it’s all in one place. Granted, some of it is going to be a bit distorted by fans, who are distracted by how awesome they think their favorite series is. But it is a quick place to start a lit review.

When you’re telling a story, you’re going to be influenced by the media you’ve consumed. That can be books, TV, video games, comic books, music. Very importantly, there isn’t a wrong answer here.

The world you create is boundless. If you want to tell a story about people swinging around implausibly massive swords, that’s an entirely valid option. You may want to find a way to justify it, or you might just want to run with it, and let the audience deal. It only becomes a problem if your world doesn’t support the idea.

Now, the Buster Sword is a visual motif. It’s not going to have the same effect in prose. Obviously, if you’re writing a webcomic or doing animation work, there’s a legitimate aesthetic in comically oversized weapons. If you want to go that route, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Similarly, greatswords are anachronistic in medieval settings, but most people won’t catch that, and it’s really something you only need to worry about if you’re chasing historical authenticity.

Finally, I would not discount spears. They’re extremely underrepresented in modern fantasy, but have a huge footprint in myth.

If your character’s quest is to find a mythic weapon to kill the dragon, that’s fine. You now have a very solid explanation for why that weapon is different from the world around it.

-Starke

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Considerations for Slaying a Dragon was originally published on How to Fight Write.

[telltaletypist]

something i like about watching old movies is how small a lot of them feel. like every movie nowadays is trying to be the most important thing to ever happen but back then a movie could just be a guy having a really fucked up day and that was enough

[jay-kwellyn]

A cute little rainy porch moment from this morning in my née dress that I got from a friend!

Help feeds black trans artist!

Venmo: @jackieswellin Cashapp: $jdizzy360

PayPal: [email protected]

[dear-ao3]

[lagozze]

Ao3 authors will literally post under any fucking circumstances

[i-dont-like-milk]

[brinty]

[everythingfox]

“So that’s what the little space in the dashboard behind the cup holders is for”

(via)

[andmaybegayer]

Incredibly happy I stumbled across your blog, brain noise tag is marvelous. Question though, what in your scientific opinion is the rarest color in the known universe (mainly primary and secondary colors, nothing too specific)?

Hmm. Interesting question. I'd say probably high-spectrum purple/violet, since blackbody radiation can never emit it alone. There's lots of red and orange and yellow things because stars are that colour. Blue things are less common but at least very hot stars are bluish. Anything hot enough to emit purple is also hot enough to emit all the preceding colours so it just looks white. I suspect but don't know how to prove that stars outweigh planets significantly enough that this fact alone means purple is rare as hell.

You only get purple from things that are purple coloured (iodine, Tyrian purple, a handful of metal oxides, Gastly from Pokémon), and from some gas emissions. The entire Orion nebula glows purplish in visible light, which is hydrogen alpha red + blue starlight, I think? That definitely counts as purple to humans even if none of the individual things in that collection are purple. This raises a counterpoint: nebulae are huge, so you'd need to have a rigorous definition for rarity. Items Vs surface area Vs volume Vs mass.

[official-kircheis]

I suspect but don't know how to prove that stars outweigh planets significantly enough that this fact alone means purple is rare as hell.

you can look at how bright a galaxy is and that will tell you roughly the amount of mass in stars in it, since star luminosity depends on mass. if you then weigh the galaxy,

[andmaybegayer]

I simply require a very very large graduated cylinder filled with water within which I can immerse the galaxy. I'm sure they have that on McMaster Carr.

[official-kircheis]

That's one way to do it but you can also look at the motion of the stars and use Newton's laws to infer the distribution of mass.

[andmaybegayer]

I'm pretty confident that there's less planets than stars, but whether there's more loose gas than stars will depend on what your measure for a Coloured Thing is, since iirc there's about twice as much loose gas than stars by mass in the galaxy, and there's a lot of space between galaxies for intergalactic media. I still think stars win this one since most loose gas will be red Hα or maybe that orangey helium colour.

In a shocking twist, dark matter turns out to be purple, proving this guess to be incredibly wrong by pretty much any metric.

[lithnin]

By mass, there is not only less planets than stars, but less planets than starlight – that is, the universe contains less mass-energy in the form of planets than there is in the form of visible light emitted from stars. See "optical" vs "planets" in the diagram below:

(ref)

[andmaybegayer]

oh cool entirely sensible but fucked up nonetheless

[ingridverse]

Wouldn't the rarest colour be magenta, in that it doesn't exist?

[andmaybegayer]

that depends very heavily on whether you're defining colour as "thing that exists as a single frequency in the spectrum of light", which vastly simplifies this but is also not in the spirit of the question. Colour is a perceptual thing, not a physical thing, there's absolutely no essential reason why 403nm is purple and 720nm is red and why we didn't have slightly different eye proteins that start at 550nm or just see in Shrimp Colours. The rarest colour is the single cosmic ray way the fuck off the spectral chart that was created once when four enormous stars were turned inside out by a supermassive black hole all at once.

Magenta "exists" insofar as it is something most humans can perceive and name, in the same way that the sensation of "hot" or "cold" exist, when in truth that's just kinetic energy seeping across your flesh and into your average molecular vibration sensors, so I elect to consider it a colour like many other colours we encounter day to day.

The Orion nebula as mentioned above is (from earth) actually a kind of magenta, composed of red Hydrogen emissions and blue starglow. Whether that counts is a metaphysical question.

[makingqueerhistory]

“I do not desire exclusive femininity, just as I do not desire exclusive masculinity. Each time someone is insulted and dissatisfied within me; with women, my femininity is active, with men-my masculinity! In my thoughts, my desires, in my spirit-I am more a man; in my body-I am more a woman. Yet they are so fused together that I know not.”

— Zinaida Gippius