king
King
āPack it up boys weāve made a social blunderā is the funniest sentence Iāve ever read ššššš
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@raw-bean
king
King
āPack it up boys weāve made a social blunderā is the funniest sentence Iāve ever read ššššš
step one: replace entire personality with open, festering wound
step two: contort absolutely all stimuli in my environment to relate to the my wound in some manner, ideally one which justifies random acts of unbridled aggression and vengeance
step three: marry a girl with generational wealth
foolproof, huh? well. let me proof to you how fool I can be
are you āadaptableā or are you just willing to subject yourself to existing in low key background-level ambient misery
these are different things btw. actual adaptability means not dealing with being miserable long term. and being constantly mildly annoyed/frustrated with a situation but being āable to deal with itā counts as ambient misery. btw.
let this be your sign to make your life just a little more livable. get a dollar store trash can for your bedside so Cup Cityās invasion plans fall through. block a tag or post that makes you grind your teeth every time you see it. get some grip pads so your bed stops sliding across the hardwood a little bit every time you get in it. tell that person you need a little more support. if you get annoyed at a situation more than a couple times, change it. donāt be content with being miserable.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as āproblematicā in class and our professor was like, āThatās cool, but āproblematicā doesnāt really mean anything. It means that the thing youāre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatās not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itās not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youāre trying to say that this is bad, but you donāt want to say ābad.ā Is that right?ā
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the ābadā thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, āIām uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.ā
Once we stopped calling things āproblematicā and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, āthatās racistā or āthatās misogynisticā or āew capitalism grossā out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, āUhhh... Iām not sure whatās so bad?ā and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canāt help but think of this professor being like, āGood starting point, now letās get specific.ā I think when we have to commit to saying āthatās ___ā it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weāre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itās art, and it should be full of problems, because thatās what art is.
Anytime i see a bunch of pride flags i have to restrain myself from saying "where mexico" bc i doubt anyone will know I'm referencing this
picture i got at pride last week; here mexico
This is very dumb but hey
And stay safe everyone!
not to sound like a crazy sjw but parents putting little girls in frilly dresses/lavish clothes and telling them not to run, climb, play in dirt, etc lest they ruin their outfits or somebody look up their skirts is one of the most direct ways we as a society teach girls that they are only ornamental and cut their childhoods short
1st base: raw ethically dubious fucking
2nd base: exist in a public space together
3rd base: you witness me have a real, candid emotion
4th base: I reveal an aspect of my tragic backstory to you
back to the shadows š
inspired by the storm by pierre auguste cot, shriāiia and astarion running away from the sun bc heās a vampire and she has sunlight sensitivity.
please zoom in to see the details! š„¹š«¶
stop deactivating
i thought we all agreed we were here forever
Anok Yai by Thibaut Grevet for Perfect Magazine August 2025
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
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that donāt follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins youāve seen relating to this? I wanna know
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 itās from a shield. If itās hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isnāt there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
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.
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.
#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."
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.
#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
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.
This is Lady Pink, one of the only female graffiti artists active in the ā80s. Jenny Holzer, famous for her feminist postmodern āTruisms,ā designed this shirt and Lady Pink wore it around NYC.