rampant silliness

Hi hello, I'm knick! she/her || 24 I like cats and am unwell about star rail

[the-hounds-daughter]

Wait for me mutual . You are not far

[the-hounds-daughter]

very pleased to see that everyone loves their mutuals

[segamascott]

[knickety]

Can sitcom level nonsense STOP happening in my personal life please and thank you <3

[cxrrently]

[wovi]

*

simone weil

[wovi]

*

ursula k. leguin

[knickety]

okay so I'm only partway through the star rail update as of posting this but THE BAIHENG FLASHBACK. WITH THE BOW YINGXING MADE FOR HER. can we talk about this please

Yingxing initially wanting to name the weapon after "a divine beast that could tread over any chasm and lead its master back from the brink of death" ow ow ouch okay. okay. Gifting her a weapon evoking, unknowingly, after what he and Dan Feng would attempt to do for her. I'm sick

[star-mom-selkie]

happy pride month

[qi-mera]

More of you need to learn about these ☝️

[jadenebula]

[jstor]

Happy Pride! JSTOR Daily has a round up of LGBTQ+ articles happening this month - check them out: https://daily.jstor.org/lgbtq-pride-month-editors-picks/

[julykings]

in my delicate nature

[puppygirldick]

Stained glass smoker window on a purple obs

[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.

[hbmmaster]

calling things "cutes" is so uh. what's a good word for when something is cute but slightly more cute

[hbmmaster]

the word cutes is autological

[julianplum]

🐟🐟🌕🐟🐟🐟🐟 // swallowtail shiners // gouache on hot press paper

[lizardsister]

hey boss i can't come in today it's a sunny day and there's a lovely breeze coming in through my window, yeah it's rustling the branches of the tree outside that's finally bloomed so it's pretty serious

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

still thinking about this youtube comment i screenshotted ages ago

[voidsetup1]

and out of the darkness - you you you you you