Okay. SI bunny has jumped me and left this idea in my pocket: SI!Ares from PJO. He doesn't quite remember he's been reborn here, but he does have an instinct sometimes that somethings coming or needs to be changed. He is reborn as Ares at his birth, so everyone is used to his behavior.
He forms a trifecta with Aphrodite (love being the primary motivation for most soldiers fighting) and Hephaestus (cant go to war without someone crafting your weapons). He loves his kids but is sneaky about his care for them. Hes overheard lamenting that they dont let women fight since he's sure it would be glorious to witness. They say scorned women pray to him in their rage, and berserkers have his blessing when they erupt. His temples are operated by the Greek equivalent of warrior monks.
(I apologize if any of this is insulting to the og culture BTW. My special interest in Greek mythology did not extend to the actual culture so I only know the barest wisps and am hyperaware I dont know shit :)
"why is all the coolest shit nowadays being made by trans women" trans women are disproportionately extremely online autistic computer nerds who critically were able to conceive of society's norms being bullshit and are thus drawn to alternative sources of fulfilment such as creative pursuits
idk who needs to hear this but ‘texting and driving’ actually is about driving & looking at ur phone for any reason including typing new directions into your damn maps app or choosing a song. stop swerving into my lane looking up a playlist to commit vehicular manslaughter to. ‘i wasn’t technically texting’ aint gonna hold up in court babes
As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore
Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people
I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history
You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again
Ok so I forced my parents to watch Project Hail Mary and The Fall Guy because I’m losing my mind right now, and they informed me that the fall guy is actually loosely based on a show from the 70s by the same name, which follows Colt Seavers as he is a stuntman by day, and a bounty hunter by also day and sometimes night. We watched the pilot, (the only available episode on streaming) and while the show is objectively not very good (except for the stunts which are awesome) it has inspired an idea in my brain which I will now put here.
Basically, after the events of the movie, the whole story about how Colt managed to do all this detective work while a bunch of people are actively trying to kill him gets around in the movie industry to the point that essentially everyone is convinced he’s a genius. (He is, but he’d never believe it.)
One day, someone in the industry really needs to track someone down. It could be a personal thing, it could be another Tom Ryder situation (minus the framing) where an actor is off on a bender and they want to keep it on the down low. Regardless, someone needs to be found, and they get the idea to ask Colt to do it.
So Colt is having a normal day when some big movie person shows up at set with a boatload of cash and is begging him to find this person. At first he’s like, “Uhhh no? I would rather never do that again actually. Also I have a job?? I’m busy??”
Then the person offers him even more money, like a frankly ridiculous amount of money. Like so much money that it would be insane to refuse it. So Colt is like, “You know what? Fine, just this once.” And because this isn’t a secret plot to murder him he tracks this person down in like a couple hours and brings them back. Then he goes home to Jody with a crap ton of money.
He expains it to her, and she kind of panics at first, but after hearing how mundane it actually was without the murder plot she calms down, and is like, “I actually kinda get where they’re coming from. You are really good at this.”
Cue Colt refusing to acknowledge that. “Anyway! It’s not like this will ever happen again,” Colt says. “It was just a one off crazy person with way too much money and a big imagination.”
It is not one off.
Word gets out that Colt did this job, then suddenly people keep showing up asking him to track people down. After a few months of this, he’s done it like five or six times, and deep down he’s really starting to enjoy it. One day Jody is like, “If this is gonna keep happening we need to set up a proper business.”
Cue Colt becoming a proper private detective/bounty hunter on the side.
Also in the tv show Colt has exatensivly studied laws surrounding citizen arrests and bounty hunting to make sure he doesn’t go to jail, so movie Colt will also end up doing this. Probably because Jody will force him to.
Anyway, this is a long winded way to say that Colt accidentally starts moonlighting as a bounty hunter and it’s awesome.
This could be extra fun if you throw the coltland twins, or coltlandgentry siblings in there.
Like lalala I’m Colt I’m trying to find some guy that owes someone money- BOOM. Dead older brother appears out of nowhere holding a giant gun, looking for the same guy. He is also a bounty hunter but a litttlleeee different. Huh. Crazy. 🧍Shenanigans insue
(I don’t actually know how this would affect Ryland other than giving him heart problems but I like to include him.)
there are a lot of really good ancient roman laws but i think my favorite is that, if you got struck by lightening and died, you couldnt have a proper burial because it meant that the gods hated you
I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!
all yall make jokes about couples and their nonromantic third wheel having fun together, but im the one getting treated to food tonight by the couple im nonromantically third wheeling. you wish you were me
I'm sorry I read this as "necromantic third wheel" and went on a very rapid powerful imagination adventure. hello lovebirds I'm the skeleton here for breadsticks
was having a complaining competition with my friend about how even liberal environments don't seem to be able to process gay relationships when you're both pretty feminine and always default to thinking you're just friends and then she whips out "when me and [wife] checked into the honeymoon suite after our wedding reception, still in our white dresses, the hotel clerk went 'you know it's only one bed, right?'"
writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months
Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.
You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.
theres a guy who got permabanned from the elden ring subreddit for self promotion for posting too many videos of him no-hit parrying various enemies and bosses but after every successful parry he turns and looks at the camera. and bc hes always wearing the albinauric mask its like:
⚔️ BWOOM
👽
⚔️ BWOOM
thank you downtown_drink1594. i thought it was funny
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
“I’m just doing what I’m told. If I am ordered to remove gold fillings from refugees theeth then that’s what I’ll do”, says police officer Michael Hansen.
Just thought I’d add this since not a lot of people outside of the nordic countries seem to have seen it. This is a danish police officer discussing a new danish law that says the police should seize the possesions and money of refugees to finance the integration.
And it was also a claim made by the military in Argentina during the last De Facto government and dictatorship. They also stole people’s possessions, even before “sucking”* and disappearing them.**
* slawng term used as an euphemishm for abduction/kidnapping.
For additional context: the Spanish flu spread like wildfire amongst American troops at the end of the war and they often brought it home and/or contracted it on their way home. I have come across so many historical burials of WW1 soldiers who died that way. Of the 105 million people living in the U.S., 20 million of them contracted the Spanish flu and it disproportionately killed and permanently disabled young people.
For additional context: the Spanish flu spread like wildfire amongst American troops at the end of the war and they often brought it home and/or contracted it on their way home. I have come across so many historical burials of WW1 soldiers who died that way. Of the 105 million people living in the U.S., 20 million of them contracted the Spanish flu and it disproportionately killed and permanently disabled young people.
For even more context:
That fucking flu originated in america and then spread with the american soldiers over the entire world because quarantain is clearly something that happenstooter people ...
The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918 with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas despite there having been cases before him.[106] The disease had already been observed 200 miles (320 km) away in Haskell County as early as January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the editors of the U.S. Public Health Service's journal Public Health Reports.[80] Within days of the 4 March case at Camp Funston, 522 men at the camp had reported sick.[107] By 11 March 1918, the virus had reached Queens, New York.[108] Failure to take preventive measures in March/April was later criticized.[109]
Americas incompetence murdered 25–50 million people
For these who don’t know: The restaurant she worked at closed down but she left before that and opened her own bakery, that’s apparently very successful!
She has a youtube channel where she shares recipes and cooking advice!
