my dear watson

a writing blog

[periodinteriors]

Rudolf von Alt, The Interior of the Cathedral of Saint Stephen at Vienna, 1841, watercolor.

[roomhole]

[ordr]

Thanks for sexualizing peoples trauma fuckhead

anytime

[number-one-toku-robot-lover]

Literally any show can be improved by adding more older women. Not many know this, but it’s true.

[616witch]

collection of fonts i like / use a lot! all of these are free to download on the given site underneath. feel free to like & rb if this collection is useful.

[mydearwtson]

its of metal from heaven.... if I could write down all the prose I would

This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind me eye and growing in tandem with me, progressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. The future stains the bleakness so pink. 

We had stood like this all night and now a gorgeous orange morning fell over Burn Street. Sunlight licked between bruising limestones, smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that’s long gone. Stripes of yellow everywhere. Yann I. Chauncey himself was depicted in a stained glass window above the foundry door. He watched from above in flat candy colors. 

The breeze melted on my tongue. Noxious and creamy. Far-off shops roasted cloves, quails, apricots, and wafting off the cobbles came a greasy wet animal petrichor and that citric bright zing of ichorite. Screaming birds unfurled from the eaves. 

[connaisseuse]

Lucrèce by Artemisia Gentileschi (detail)

[mydearwtson]

my qm stats rn are blowing my skull what !!!! is ! happening to me

[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.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[heartnosekid]

the venus girdle (cestum veneris) | aquatilis_expedition on ig

[mydearwtson]

this is the beginning of a historical fiction novel but honestly huge space opera lore inspo

[rottendt]

there is blood in the holy water 🩸

Photo by Iulia Iepure

insta | shop

[loveinthemindpalace]

@the-devoured

[mydearwtson]

clinging desperately to this beta reader feedback

[50x70cm]

agnes-briosch: stained glass window at petit palais, paris.

[sleepless-cavia]

[mamoswole]

When I tell that I LOVE solarpunk

[powersandplanetaries]

[hunter-rodrigez]

Oh, I remember this, the edit was done by youtuber Waffle to the left.

They didn't just cut out the parts with the oat milk, they skillfully edited over all the god-damn branding and replaced the audio.

But what I still find most hilarious about this whole commercial is the fact that everything they show in this solar punk world seems to be made with sustainable, zero waste and reusable materials.

Everything EXCEPT THE FUCKING CHOBANI BRANDED STUFF! The only plastic you see in this whole commercial is all the straight to the landfill packaging made by the very corporation that tries to sell how sustainable and "green" they are. Unintentional self satire at its finest.

They couldn't even show their yogurt and milk in (basically infinitely reusable) glass containers because they pretty much only sell their shit in plastic

It is such a perfect example of the true face of "green" capitalism, it's hilarious.

[undeadentropy]

The punk in this solarpunk comes from cutting the corporation out of the picture

[eco-socialism]

ALSO

Another really interesting thing about this edit is that they changed the label on the side of the apple-picking machine.

From "donations" to "commons". It's a subtle change, but it makes a huge difference in the world-building of the video. The former implies that this big orchard belongs to an owner and that they're donating the fruits to "the less fortunate" (and, by extension, that poverty is still a thing); the latter implies that the orchard belongs to everyone and that the fruits are free to take in the spirit of solidarity.

Waffle To The Left brought out the potential in this gorgeous video and made it an actual solarpunk utopia — without brands and without corporate pandering, complete with true common ownership over land and resources.

[laurenjenae-deactivated20150428]

[talisman]

German luck chatelaine with 13 charms. C.  1870-1880

[a-book-of-creatures]

I’m all set, got my lucky boot and lucky hand and lucky 13 and lucky scallop and lucky treasure chest and lucky anchor and lucky fish and lucky eel and lucky cat and lucky dog and lucky weight and lucky policeman and lucky heart

Basically untouchable

[mydearwtson]

chaos terminal bookmarks !! there are. two lol

Eternity's social area for most oxygen breathers resembled a park, if it was drawn by a human child with crayons. The trees were purple, the sky was a dull orange with a fake sun crawling across it, and the green area was surrounding by a wide walkway and a series fo smaller kiosks and larger freestanding buildings for restaurants and services (the classic doctor, dentist, the Gneiss filer, which Mallory kept meaning to ask her friends about -- what did they file there?)

It was much larger than an elevator on Earth, with fuzzy walls and floor, something between carpet and fur. She tried not to think about it very often, but just now she realizes it was warm.