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@stinkyracoon
a Large Raptor like Bird that can cast summoning spells by mimicking another monster's roar
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@creekfiend was very kind in sharing some writing resources with me, and I thought I'd pass along the kindness by listing them down below.
N.K. Jemisin's article 'Describing characters of color in writing'
Mary Anne Mohanraj's article on approaching characters of colour
Renee Harleston's article How to 'Write Characters of Color Without Using Stereotypes'
Working with Colour, a resource site for writers
the book Writing the Other by by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which had a description that cut deep, because I've definitely fallen into this trap out of fear:
and then a video recommended by @sheprd (thank you!) about pitfalls in descriptive language
if anyone else has more resources to add, feel free to reblog with them! this is something I want to learn more about.
I was talking yesterday about how I should probably change the skin colour of a character in a not-yet-written book, because that character is a large, aggressive dragon-shifter and I was worried about her being read with unintentional and offensive subtext.
I haven't gotten my hands on Writing the Other yet (it's still in the mail!) but from reading my way through these articles and watching the Princess Weekes video, I now understand that 'white-ifying' a character you're worried about is a lazy and cowardly solution. so, if I do ever finish the book Eres loses Everything, I'll keep her as is, do my best to be thoughtful, and hire a sensitivity reader to pick out any blind spots.
thank you to everyone who passed on resources, I really appreciate it!
here are a few more resources I've found, if anyone’s interested:
Writing Diversely FAQ
Writing With Colour blog
A conversation between many writers on writing diverse characters
Four Tips to Help You Incorporate Diversity and Inclusion in Your Writing
A Medium Article: "Yes, You Should Be Afraid to Write “Diverse” Characters"
Vogue UK Nov 2019 - Jourdan Dunn by Nick Knight
Day 32 - Asperitas Angel
Happy Cloud Appreciation Day! ☁️ I decided to an angel based off of my favorite cloud type, Asperitas! They are chaotic and turbulent and visually fascinating, though not actually destructive like she is here. She’s just terraforming for fun
messed up that you can literally be better and nicer in every way and the adventuring party will still be like "waaa its a shapeshifter waaaa the real whatstheirface would never say that" like ok maybe i am a picture perfect copy of your friend that i imprisoned beneath the earth and replaced when you werent looking. so what. maybe they were a cunt. maybe i thought youd appreciate an improved version of your friend. with awesome eldritch tendrils.
I keep trying to record something on how books are bad at writing fighting training, and it keeps being like 12 minutes long
Bad as in prose? Or bad as in how training to fight actually works?
I'm just curious
The latter.
Basically, "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" is a cruel and useless form of "training" and only makes sense if you're trying to show that the "teacher" is being cruel or doesn't know how to teach. Showing it as a legitimate and useful form of training indicates to me that the author didn't bother to do any real research.
There are sort of two ways to look at it as a trope.
It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)
Or it’s one of those things where the overlap between people who write books and people who practice martial arts is so small that most writers trust the trope blindly and never think past it.
Just a few tips from someone who's been doing HEMA fighting (and training) for about a year
-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps
-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.
- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back
- Footwork drills
- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords
- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position
- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear
- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes
- Learning how to maintain your gear
- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.
- Even more drills
Obviously some of this is pretty modern, but I can't imagine that it would be incredibly novel even to people from 600 years ago. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!
Adding onto this with even more things, now that I'm nearly 2 years in and have done a couple of tournaments!
Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial
When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing
There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.
However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.
Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight
At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can
Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other
Thats all I can think of for now, but if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out!
It's been a while since I've done martial arts, but this reminded me of some other points specifically about sparring as a training tool:
At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.
This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.
Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.
People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.
You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.
If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.
If sparring/partnered fighting is 100% losing with no real guidance, it won't teach you how to ever win, it will just teach you how to lose, which is actively unhelpful. The goal of sparring in that way becomes learning how to lose less badly, which may be great for self defense but isn't particularly great for actually learning how to successfully fight.
my piece for the ani-may scroll show at nucleus house portland!
this sirene wall scroll will be a limited edition of 25 🖤 the show is running from now through to june 1st!
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Monarch
girlknight who goes *CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK* across the battlefield because she's a giant centipede (her princess is normal)
I couldnt stop thinking about this… centipede girlknight……
Monster Mashtober by Samantha Mash
lil 16 page zine that i made at the coffee shop this weekend! a sort of pick your path style mini game, because i love wizards + interactive fiction. hope you get out of the wizard dungeon!!
you can make several seals and put them on the hot dashboard of your car
I hit 15K words for "angel" cosmic horror romance soo... keesssss (人*´∀`)。*゚+
A large blue whale sails silently through the ocean.
I have spicier stuff on my Patreon.
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serious answer: I ran some quick math (below the cut) and found out that this ant would impart about ten times the amount of energy as an impact by a 45kg Howitzer round, or one thousand times the energy yield of a typical handgrenade. Ordinarily I would expect something like an ant to disintegrate on impact at high speeds, but there is simply so much energy in that ant that it would have nowhere else to go but forward - even if it completely exploded on impact without penetrating, you would definitely die and definitely need a closed-casket funeral. If it simply went straight through without meaningful disintegration, carrying the majority of its energy away with it, with this being a hypersonic projectile (actually, it's a relativistic one) it still would definitely shred at least a grapefruit-sized hole in you just from cavitation damage. Given the ridiculous speed, it would also create a significant amount of heat and a concussive sonic shockwave as it did so, definitely killing you instantly and probably turning you into charred ground beef.
TLDR yes you would be super mega dead
oh but the ant so small I can take it
that's true I didn't think of that
My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that
Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass
It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE
After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.
Once you are aware of an unreachable blind spot it nags at you constantly and you can feel it like a hard little lump under your skin you need to poke and scratch at and it’s ardghgguychgghhbhhhbhhh