Requests: OPEN. See pinned post. 18+. 20. AlbusLebron on ao3. English, Español, Français. I have things to say. Often on Genshin Impact, but sometimes on other things too.
I'm a fanfic writer currently focused on Genshin Impact (原神). My blog features my thoughts on Genshin, and often fics I write on ao3 spawn from ideas I post here...
You can find my ao3 here.
Feel free to send me asks! If you want to send a fic request, please see this Ask Game.
Here's a list of Genshin fics I recommend reading. I will update this regularly.
Below are some fics on my to-write list.
Multi-chapter:
Rewriting the Akademiya
Sumeru Murder Mystery - ft. Albedo, Hu Tao, Heizou, & Charlotte
Skyward Blessing - inspired by this fic. Will have different people be gifted the Skyward weapons by the Anemo Archon.
Adepti Family Dinner - see this description.
Albedo wump with Cyno & Tighnari - see this description.
Shinobu & Klee's Birthday Bash
Venti's relationship with his kids
Xiangling visits Dragonspine - unsure whether to make this one comedic or dramatic. Could go both ways.
Oneshots:
Tumblr Requests
Venti & Ganyu - how she got Amos' Bow
Klee runs away to Liyue and learns mechanics from Xianyun
Ragbros meet the House of the Hearth trio
Albedo meets Sigewinne; Kaeya meets Neuvillette
Other Major Genshin Posts of Mine:
*I shall update this later*
I have more to say about all of these, so feel free to send me an ask about them! It may even motivate me to write them sooner.
Inspired by what I've written, and wanna write something similar? Feel free! I only ask that you credit me. Fandom is interactive and I'm here for a conversation.
I've also been thinking a lot about the Three Deadly Selves since the last Lantern Rite. What caught my attention the most is that, despite Zhongli teaching this technique to Zibai, Zibai could never completely eliminate her deadly selves because she's an angel who had no impurities to exorcise. I believe this is what led us, along with Zhongli, to have to find her deadly selves so she could become whole again and resurrect.
What intrigues me is, if Zhongli was the one who taught Zibai how to exorcise the Deadly Selves, that means he himself had impurities to be exorcised. If I had to guess, I would honestly say that this impurity is anger. Much of Zhongli's calm personality and gentleness seems to stem from rage repressed for millennia; the Adepti say he was different and more ruthless before, and artifacts in the game suggest that he had to "seal his own hatred" in order not to be corrupted during the Archon War. Also, the whole idea of Zibai finding Morax split into three, with his three deadly selves brutally fighting each other, is a really cool but also really terrifying concept. She was unable to identify what he is, yet acknowledged that despite this he was "strong enough to rival the divine," and the other versions of him chanting "Lord of Geo" and "Heaven's Star" like, hello?? That's incredible!
Trying to let go of impurities, such as rage, is also a very Taoist concept, and Zhongli is quite Taoist in his approach of accepting his own erosion and the natural flow of Teyvat.
Anyway, here's a drawing I made of the old besties because I love them
Stop calling the crumbs shit. None of you realize how hard it is to photoshop crumbs falling mid-air via a birds-eye perspective. They don't just have 'mid-air granola crumbs' on google, no one has ever thought of photographing that before. I had to color a bunch of boulders brown. I had to find images of various boulders and color them brown, whnich yeah, when I say it out loud, does make it sound like a funny euphemism for shit, but it's really more of a light brown color and it took a lot of time and effort, so stop.
Stop calling the crumbs shit. None of you realize how hard it is to photoshop crumbs falling mid-air via a birds-eye perspective. They don't just have 'mid-air granola crumbs' on google, no one has ever thought of photographing that before. I had to color a bunch of boulders brown. I had to find images of various boulders and color them brown, whnich yeah, when I say it out loud, does make it sound like a funny euphemism for shit, but it's really more of a light brown color and it took a lot of time and effort, so stop.
#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary. And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to participate in this system. If that means I go to Hell, so be it. Going to Hell now.”
(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature. Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too. Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.” Interesting guy. Sorry for the long parenthetical.)
Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.
And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.
I somehow don’t remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.
The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.
Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.
So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”
(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)
Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”
A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.
Update: Crossed out “aunt,” because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finn’s aunt.
#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary. And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to participate in this system. If that means I go to Hell, so be it. Going to Hell now.”
(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature. Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too. Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.” Interesting guy. Sorry for the long parenthetical.)
Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.
And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.
I somehow don’t remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.
The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.
Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.
So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”
(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)
Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”
A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.
Update: Crossed out “aunt,” because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finn’s aunt.
#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary. And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to participate in this system. If that means I go to Hell, so be it. Going to Hell now.”
(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature. Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too. Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.” Interesting guy. Sorry for the long parenthetical.)
Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.
And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.
I somehow don’t remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.
The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.
Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.
So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”
(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)
Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”
A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.
Update: Crossed out “aunt,” because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finn’s aunt.
I'm not......worried, but I am anticipating a reaction. because if the double amputation scene in Sir Cameron was too much for some people, then chapter 5 of The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo is definitely going to be a mass filtering event. that's when the cannibal incest spiders get introduced, and they uh.....do some stuff that you can probably guess at based on what I call them.
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.
I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.
Can't believe no one's mentioned Consider the Fork yet, which is about how environment/resources shape our ways of eating, which shapes both our culture and our concepts of politeness. So interesting, really recommend!
There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.
I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.
Can't believe no one's mentioned Consider the Fork yet, which is about how environment/resources shape our ways of eating, which shapes both our culture and our concepts of politeness. So interesting, really recommend!
Hell yes more love for Dain! <3
I'm only playing Genshin for like 1-2 months now but he seems so interesting? I'm already making a list with prompts for him and Venti in various scenarios. I am very unwell about them.
As for the request, how about Dain and "Worship" if you don't mind? That sounds very intriguing to me.
Sorry this took so long! Getting back into writing now.
You can read it here under the cut or on ao3.
Dainsleif and Worship
Dainsleif felt sick at the idea of worship. He had seen others be put on a pedestal before, lifted high above any consequences their actions could have. That folly led to the destruction of Khaenri'ah, both from its own foolish rulers and the cruel deities of Teyvat. He could think of no positve outcome from worship. Even seemingly small rituals lead innocent children to adopting rose-colored glasses about their idols in adulthood. This disdain for any act of worship was a contributing factor in his choice to stay out of cities. Though his primary motivation was still hunting abyss activity and avoiding the hassle of being asked for official documentation he did not have.
Today though, was one of the few days he had to step into a city to get supplies. He had chosen to visit Mondstadt, to avoid a festival going on in Liyue. Fontaine and Inazuma were permanantly off-limits because of the paperwork they required for entry. The other nations were too far. So, against his wishes, he walked into Mondstadt's shopping district to get food.
The people of Mondstadt always seemed so relaxed and cheerful. It tugged at his heart; he wished the people of Khaenri'ah had been able to see such prosperity. A few refugees had escaped the initial destruction and had scattered over Teyvat, and some of them, he knew, had chosen to settle in Mondstadt. For reasons he couldn't fathom, some had become more active in serving the Archon than others.
First he went to Good Hunter to buy some of the more expensive ingrediants that Mondstadt General Goods didn't sell.
"Good morning sir!" The waitress, Sara, greeted him cheerily.
"Morning. 2 portions of ham and cheese boxed please."
She smiled, "Certainly. That'll be 2,100 mora please!"
She turned away to begin packing the food. As he was waiting, he overheard a child crying in the alleyway. It sounded like they had been crying for a while. A part of him wondered if he should go see if there was a problem, when the child starting speaking to themselves.
She sniffled, "Dear Lord Barbatos."
Dainsleif tensed.
"P-please lend me strength and send the winds to guide me. I'm worried about my sister. She's moving far away for work and I dunno when I'll see her again. She's really excited, but I can't do this without her. She helps me make friends and do my homework and and fix my clothes. I dunno what I'm gonna do when she leaves! I'm gonna be all alone. Please send the winds to guide me. Thank you."
By the end of the prayer, the girl was barely sniffling anymore. She sounded calmer.
Sara gave him his bag of food, "Thank you! Maybe the Anemo Archon bless you!"
He tried not to grimace as he grabbed his bag and walked toward Mondstadt General Goods. Blanche was just as cheery as Sara had been.
"Thank you for your business! May the winds guide you on your travels!" She waved bye.
Dainsleif had already had enough of all the casual prayers. He was ready to return to the wilderness. As he walked down the stairs, he saw the child from earlier smiling. She was standing the next to the Anemo Archon in disguise, as he played music for her. He looked up at Dainsleif and smiled.
Dainsleif ignored him and walked away. He had Abyss Lectors to track.
