A Skerrick of Thought @pilgrimsprogess - Tumblr Blog

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filibusterfrog

halfling and orc lore by @dreamawa-y (illustrations by me :))

spookygibberish

Little Men

gorjee-art

Can't sleep, so I doodled a Money! Chester's unusual companion. Elysium has weird pets...

gorjee-art

Whatever, you get a Maurice too.

spookygibberish

I should actually post wips here

spookygibberish

these things again

kilncreatures

teacup goose horse small size suitable for apartment living

gnarlyghost

Ecologists

sonandheirofnothinginparticular

wifegideonnav

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

a-book-of-creatures

New T. rex described - Tylosaurus rex, that is. And it’s a big one

tenaflyviper

There IS a monster at the bottom of Loch Ness.

It's a 30-foot prop designed by Wally Veevers for director Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

The prop sunk while being towed by a boat, and was left to sleep with the fishes. It was eventually found during a 2016 underwater robot survey.

It remains there to this day, with no one brave enough to try to get footage of its current state.

fictionadventurer

One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!

starfieldcanvas

the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

chocolatepot

People like to tie the shift from courting to dating to the 1920s, but it's actually a bit older than that. (Caveat that everything I'm about to write is about the United States; the same thing may have happened elsewhere, but my sources are about American social history.)

Courtship was something that happened semi-publicly, in large part because women tended to live with family until they married. A man would come to pay a call and sit in the parlor with the woman he was courting ... and usually members of her family, like her parents or siblings (or uncles/aunts and cousins, if she was living with more extended relations). It was about pleasing all of them, and proving to all of them that he intended to marry her.

In the late 19th century, young working-class women started to move out of the family home for work, and not just to the other side of town — to cities across the state where they didn't know anybody. They usually stayed in boarding houses, where the landlady wasn't interested in hosting chaperoned evenings of courtship in front of the fire. As a result, they spent time with men in dance halls and bars, something akin to modern dating. On the positive side, this gave women the independence to make romantic and sexual choices away from their parents' influence. On the negative side, the women taken on dates (disparagingly called "charity girls") were frequently pressured to have sex in exchange for the money spent on them, money they were unable to spend on themselves due to their low wages.

Dating practices then spread to college students around the turn of the century. Among these upper- and middle-class young people with , the idea that the male party was owed sex in exchange for the date was not as much of a thing: dates were public courtship, held without the direct involvement of family members but still under the eyes of the community. This eventually spread out to become an ordinary part of teenagerhood in all classes. And yes, there was no assumption of exclusivity: teenagers were expected and encouraged to date widely, because going steady was a precursor to engagement, which they were too young for. (It was also the norm prior to WWII for couples attending dances to dance with other people at them. It was in fact the male partner's duty to find other people for his date to dance with! And he couldn't leave whoever he was dancing with unless she had a new dance partner.)

marzipanandminutiae

Similar to the non-exclusive 19th century courting, 19th century balls were also considered social events and it was thought rude (and sometimes even scandalous, for young unmarried women) to only dance with one person. Even married couples would not be together the whole night, that would spread themselves around to make sure everyone enjoyed the amusement equally

fullmetalfisting

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

mysteryteacup

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

alarajrogers

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

chekhovs-raygun

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

ariaste

Medieval people also already knew that putting things out in the sun helped to keep them clean (UV radiation killing bacteria). So everyone knows that after you use a butter churn, you rinse it out, give it a scrub, and set it out in the sun to dry, or else it will go sour and everything you make with it will go bad fast. Likewise with when you want to get sheets and clothes really clean and fresh, you boil them with lye soap and then lay them out in the sun to dry.

victusinveritas

fullest-circlest

If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.