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Main blog: You’re looking at it. Side blogs: Iolausian fields - Whumpy side of the moon Masterlists: (Young) Hercules fics - Other
I'm a little bit late but here's my entry for Day 1 of @gatheringfiki 's FikiWeek2026 for the prompt "Traveling to the Shire"
I'm so happy to be drawing those two lovesick idiots again ♡(˃͈ દ ˂͈ ༶ )
Do you recognize this TV theme song? #722
I know this and can name the series
I know this but can't name the series
I might know this
I've never heard this
angstpt1.jpg
always funny to remember darth vader is anakin skywalker. the adrenaline junkie chucklefuck who used to dive head first out of speeders and built a pod racer in his yard when he was like six is now upper-middle management for the evil empire. half of his appearances in the original trilogy are Meetings. vader spends like 80% of his time dealing with bureaucratic bullshit. status updates. team meetings. holo-Zooms. budget rundowns. anakin betrayed the jedi and caused the fall of the republic and his punishment is being CC'd on every email forever. and you know what. he would hate that. the punishment fits the criminal
Oh thanks but what the fuck does any of that mean
I’ve seen quite a few of these in my time, but this one takes the cake.
This is fucking killing me
Golp: a roundel purpure.
Repeat this to yourself until it begins to have meaning
Okay then since some of you need to be reminded of this:
Roundels are circles in heraldry. They are named according to their color, which also has its own lingo. Let’s meet them!
Bezant: roundel or (gold) 🟡
Plate: roundel argent (silver) ⚪️
Torteau: roundel gules (red) 🔴
Pomme: roundel vert (green) 🟢
Hurt: roundel azure (blue) 🔵
Golp: roundel purpure (purple) 🟣
Pellet: roundel sable (black) ⚫️
If your field is strewn with roundels, you can describe it appropriately as being bezanty, hurty, golpy, and so on.
Just to comment on the words' roots, most of this terminology comes from Anglo-Norman, Old French, Latin, or words transmitted through French into English.
This is very common in heraldry and also in English, due to that whole period when France ruled over England for centuries (the Norman Conquest) and had a huge influence on English vocabulary even to this day.
🟡bezant = from Old French besant, from ‘a Byzantine gold coin’, due to it looking like a gold circle (these coins widely circulated throughout Europe due to most countries not having any gold coins of their own, despite what medieval fantasy will tell you).
🟡or = from French or ‘gold’.
⚪️plate = from the English word, here meaning a ‘silver/white disc’.
⚪️argent = from French argent ‘silver’/‘money’.
🔴torteau = French-esque word meaning ‘little round cake / loaf / tart’, since it's a red disk.
🔴gules = from Old French gueles ‘red’, obscure today.
🟢pomme = from French pomme ‘apple’.
🟢vert = from French vert ‘green’.
🔵hurt = possibly from English ‘hurtleberry’ or from French heurt ‘bruise’.
🔵azure = from English ‘azure’ (a sky-blue color; pigment or paint made of powdered lapis lazuli), from Old French azur (12c.), from a French person's misreading of Medieval Latin lazur, from Greek lazour, from Persian lajward, from Lajward, a place in Turkestan mentioned by Marco Polo where lapis lazuli was collected.
🟣golp = origins unclear; often linked to Spanish golpe ‘blow’/‘wound’, hence a purple bruise.
🟣purpure = same root as English “purple”, from Latin purpura ‘purple dye’/‘shellfish from which purple was made’, from Greek porphyra ‘purple’ (origin uncertain).
⚫️pellet = from English ‘pellet’ and French pastille (same meaning), maybe referring to bullets?
⚫️sable = named after the dark fur of the animal of the same name.
But yeah, most of these terms sound weird since they're borrowed from really old words and/or French. Which makes sense, given that European heraldry started in roughly the mid-12th century.
Different Stories Resonate with Different People
I will always reblog this.
I once spent three hours scouring the internet to find this comic again, I will not let that be repeated.
The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol
you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared
This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times
The White Tree of Gondor. Hand embroidery
This embroidery is done in A3 size using DMC Satin (viscose) thread on matte black fabric. To create a 3D effect, I used a base of two felt layers. The felt was carefully cut to match the curves of the branches and the trunk, and then covered with a padded satin stitch.
Honestly, working with viscose was a struggle. Viscose thread is a tricky material to work with — it is very slippery and frays easily, making it hard to lay down smooth stitches over a raised base. However, I chose this exact thread against the deep black background, because it gives a smooth, shimmering surface. I wanted the Tree to look as if it were forged from real mithril, silvered by moonlight, shining in the dark.
The seven stars above the branches of the majestic Tree are made using the woven star technique. The overlapping threads naturally build volume and geometric facets, so no felt padding was needed underneath them. The light catches the facets of the stars, and the viscose shines just like real metal.
The thick grey cardboard used for the matting is like the ancient stone of the walls of Minas Tirith, the White City, protecting the White Tree. The inner bevel is hand-painted with silver Finetec, and a thin silver cord echoes the metallic shine of the embroidery, completing the artwork.
“Your ancestors are amazed at all your spices!”
“Your ancestors are impressed that you are an educated woman!”
“Your ancestors are proud that you are thriving in spite of what society did to them and you”
It’s all very sweet! But! Necromancy! Is! Still! Illegal! Your ancestors are going back in the ground!
Stop resurrecting them to show off!
waaaay back when I was a cashier in retail we would talk about dumb shit while unloading the truck, and we got to the "what would you do in a zombie apocalypse" me and another worker were like yeah we would just die. End it all, we can't fight or run or shit. I refuse to put that much effort into survival.
And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!
Anyway, random shout out to that guy. You were too kind for retail management, Devin.
also afterwards everyone who was talking about their cool bunker fantasies were like "Damn, Devin's right, we should also be considering helping people around us." which is the only recorded instance of a retail shift making people better human beings.
help I’m having ideas beyond my available free time
help I'm having ideas beyond my available energy levels
not she berry or he berry but no berry
and that is berry good
that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.
One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.
Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.
The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.
Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.
can I get a source on the use of that term, bread and gravy wages?
I assume that's a more modern historian coming up with a clever characterization of army pay, but all I've been able to find is either sites talking about modern fast food wages or else a thousand articles about "why ancient roman soldiers were paid in salt"
if it is a historian's invention I think I wanna read what else this person has to say
Don't know what @probabilitydirigible 's source was, but Bret Devereaux was writing about this subject recently, and mentioned the Classical sources calling them σίτος (bread) and ὀψώνιον (sauce).
(I had a brief moment of recognition reading that, because "opsonins" in immunology are a category of proteins that stick to foreign objects and make them tasty to your immune cells.)
This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP S