DEAR READER
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
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Sade Olutola
#extradirty
$LAYYYTER
YOU ARE THE REASON
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pixel skylines
KIROKAZE
wallacepolsom
roma★
Jules of Nature
Peter Solarz
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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NASA
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
we're not kids anymore.
seen from Russia
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@syntheticsymphony
Episode 2 : The journey through Greenest
Linaan, the brave dwarven mother leads the party through the city of Greenest in an attempt to get her family to safety by whatever means necessary. Why is the city under attack and who are its assailants? Does one of the party know more than they are willing to reveal?
Surprise! We’re releasing our inaugural episode a week early to celebrate the new year! Starting Sunday 7th with the release of episode 2, you can expect to find a new episode airing every Su…
New episodes every Sunday to tide you over in the week between your favourite livestreams ;]
Steven Yeun ©Ssam Kim // Glass Men
I work on Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters with Steven. We’ve become friends, and I want the world to know that he is one of the kindest people I know. He is also totally making this sweater work in ways that mortals can only dream of.
Why don’t people talk about this show more?! I mean it’s a masterpiece but somehow it went under the radar
YO ON SOME ANIME SHIT THIS DOPE AF!!!!
Some loser: Wrestling is fake Me: Explain THIS Loser: Holy shit
i’m so delighted that tumblr found out about this match, because lord have mercy, twitter was losing its shit over it
im going to have a stroke
Instead try… Person A: You know… the thing Person B: The “thing”? Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING ROD
As someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:
Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.
Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”
Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.
Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.
Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.
Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.
Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”
Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”
Fantasy Pet Peeve #347
Made-up bullshit names for plants and herbs.
Unless in your world you get milk from a “milk-beast” you don’t put people to sleep with “sleep-weed.” There are dozens of real plants that actually put people to sleep: Lemon balm Valerian Passion Flower Chamomile Poppy Lavender Catnip Hops Rooibos Skullcap Virgin’s bower Lady’s slipper Feverfew Motherwort Bee-balm bergamot perilla figwort I found them after 0.35 seconds of googling.
(herbologists out there: I know there are probably some mistakes there. Feel free to correct me)
On one hand, yeah, I get it that it’s nice to learn about something real in fantasy books.
But on the other hand…I am NEVER going to throw real herbs into my stories. Not unless I know it’ll be near-impossible for a child to overdose. Not unless I know I can take time (without an editor removing it) to explain how to safely prepare these tisanes.
Food preparations are one of the most easily made “fan creations” you can have rise out of a book series, since everyone has food on hand or can run out to a store to buy it, or go outside to try to forage it (if they see the internet says they have it living wild in their area). And you really, REALLY don’t want to accidentally lead someone who is young, or who just doesn’t know shit about cooking or chemistry or foraging, down a path where they poison themselves trying to make something. And that’s not even touching on foraging and “false friends”, where a plant might look one way in your area and be safe to eat, but might be poisonous elsewhere in the world where a similar-looking plant is found. There’s a mushroom in the united states that looks similar to an edible variety in Asia. As I understand it, a lot of poisonings occur among immigrants to the US from the region that has the friendly, edible type of mushrooms because they think the US variety is just as safe to eat, and it’s not. I would hate, hate, hate to set up a situation like that as an author, by assuming that a friendly, edible plant in my backyard doesn’t have false-friends elsewhere in the world.
J. K. Rowling handled this by making her potion ingredients fake or improbable to use. She could have had Snape talking about deadly nightshade, but he’s introduced talking about bezoars. Bezoars are from an animal’s stomach–hard to get, and gross.
Patrick Rothfuss handled it by making sure the dangers of fucking chemistry up were very firmly highlighted.
Unless I have a lot of time and place to safely explain how to use a plant, I’m absolutely going to go the “safe” route (”cheap” route to some of you) of using made-up herbs. I’d rather people be irritated with me being cheap or having weak worldbuilding than finding out some reader went and made themselves ill or dead because they trusted that information from my work was complete or correct.
Sure, some or all of those in the list above might be perfectly safe with no poison lookalikes around. I drink Rooibos tea myself–although I’ve never gotten sleepy from it.
But I’m just not educated enough about plants–even after having lurked on several sites online for months–to take a chance in my writing, since it’s just not me that’ll be taking a chance, but possibly readers who assume I know what the fuck I’m talking about. (When I might not!)
A very interesting response. I admit I hadn’t thought of the dangers of realistic herbology, but you’re right, especially for children’s books. I think there’s a more elegant solution than just making up a name, though. Say “a certain herb” rather than the specific plant’s name and you’re fine. Or smudge the details.
Steven King does something similar with the crimes in his book—describing hotwiring a car in great detail but getting some things intentionally wrong so you can’t go out and do it.
In the vein of ladydomini’s response, I’d favor made-up herb names for an additional medical reason - even if something is super-safe or fairly benign in terms of side effect profiles, people generally don’t take these things in a vacuum, and you can never, ever cover drug-herb interactions in a fantasy world. (You can’t stop and say “Aeryn used St. John’s wort to help her mood, but wouldn’t have if she’d been on SSRIs like Prozac because of the risk of serotonin syndrome, or if she was on birth control, certain HIV meds, transplant drugs…”) But there’s a second reason why you might choose to make up names, and that’s etymology. (It’s also why I picked St. John’s wort instead of going with one of the above herbs.) Because if you’re in a fantasy world where there are neither saints nor dudes named John, St. John’s wort doesn’t make a lot of sense to name-check, and referring to hypericum perforatum wouldn’t be any better. That’s not going to come up as *much,* but it’s definitely another reason. (A third might be that you want an herb that has fantasy-world properties - something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Granted, you could randomly say valerian has magic-nullifying powers, but you might want magical plants for a magical reason - or maybe you want a plant with a pharmacological profile that doesn’t exist in the real world. I’m thinking here of ASOIAF’s moon tea and the tansy plant - it’s apparently both a very effective contraceptive and an abortifacient.) So, yeah, this aspect of fantasy has never bothered me - I’d be more bothered by seeing real-world herbs incorrectly used, especially given the potential for RL trouble. (I guess whether you’d want your healers to be super non-specific or to say “I used tansy and athelas” is a matter of preference at that point; given the abundance of made-up names in the rest of fantasy, made-up herbs don’t bother me.)
Given how many times I read stories like that as a kid and tried to recreate ‘potions’ in the backyard….yeah I’m glad a lot of them were made-up names because me being a clever kid, I would have gone looking. Especially if I’d had the internet. Unless it’s like a practical, safe, real-world use (like “Annie put aloe leaves on her burn to help it heal” or “Margaret drank ginger and hibiscus tea to help her get over a cold”), I’d not include it. Made-up herbs work nicely and less chance of too-clever kids getting Ideas that could be a problem later.
Hell, the side effects make this a valid concern even with ‘harmless’ innocent ones. Did you know for instance that only SOME hibiscus flowers are edible for humans? Or that parts of Dandelion or Aloe if consumed can be a diuretic – which can be dangerous if one is dehydrated? Even aspirin (or ‘willow bark’ if we’re going with old-school herbs) can be dangerous to the wrong person – it happens to be a blood thinner, which is sometimes good if you are having a heart attack, but not so good (i.e. potentially dangerous) if you are menstruating, hemophiliac, bleeding or anemic. I’d actually urge similar caution with crystals and rocks btw; some stones cannot be safely exposed to sweaty skin or water or heat or what not, because they produce unsafe chemical reactions under the wrong circumstances.
as a former dumbass kid that had to be stopped from drinking poison nettle tea after reading a YA wiccan flavored book, please. Use fake names of plants.
This is the kind of thing I would never even have thought of, but it’s a really interesting and valid concern.
i have indeed thought of it, and would like to propose a solution to satisfy both parties:
use made up plants, but put some effort into designing them.
don’t call it ‘sleep-weed’, call it ‘slugbane’ or ‘ketterling’s false poppy’ or ‘somniflora’ or ‘purple fretleaf’. give it a name that sounds like a real plant name. problem fucking solved.
This is an awesome thread with some great details and information fow world building
whenever people are like “SKETCHING CIRCLES IN SAI IS SO HARD” im like
pffft I work with 6000X4000 and the size of the brush can be only not above 2000px
i dont use that trick
this is the sassiest and most helpful tutorial ever.
@tealfuleyes
Artist specialized in paintings of Chase bank on fire
I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called “Disaster Capitalism,” and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. [via mutantspace, via Janie]
https://boingboing.net/2017/04/29/artist-specialized-in-painting.html
just fyi he’s got a cool video series on youtube called PAINT! specifically designed to “fill the bob ross void” and provide free quality art education, an act that is ultimately even more radical than these very badass paintings tbh.
points for the massive shade thrown at duchamp.
and paying respect to ross while offering up the very legit criticism that with his teaching method “it’s like learning one song on guitar.” good stuff!
whoop there it is.
What comic is this?
For those asking, this is from Ms Marvel (2016) #15
Olivia Gatwood, “Ode to My Bitch Face”. Check out more odes from Olivia in her book, New American Best Friend, which came out TODAY!!!!
Monday morning [x]
that moment when u realize…"gullible" looks the same flipped upside down and backwards
wait really???
wait a minute
i don’t like this post
I’ve realized my perception of main stream pop culture is really fucked up. Like I’m pretty disengaged from the cultural zeitgeist when it comes to a lot of things (music, celebrity culture, kinda TV, kinda movies)… and when you’re disengaged, you expect to not know things but you figure you’ll hear about the most popular things. Makes sense? MADE SENSE TO ME.
But no, it turns out my perception (and maybe other people like me?? not sure) is more like a donut. Turns out, I have NO CLUE about the dead center of pop culture and popular media. Stuff outside the center? Totally. And some center stuff bleeds in but like…. I have no real knowledge of rap. Maybe a little about rappers themselves but no context for the music… and I find out “Flo Rida” and “Pitbull” are some huge main stream stars who are bigger than Kendrick Lamar who is someone where like everyone I know whos into Rap talks about him? But like Flo Rida I only know because WWE uses his music all the time and literally the only time I have ever heard of an artist named Pitbull is the story where he was sent to the Tundra in Alaska to perform at a walmart because of some trolled contest and I’d assume both were relative nobodies because I’ve never heard anyone ever mention either of them. And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me.
TURNS OUT I guess no one talks about the inoffensive super averaged out boring popular stuff because it’s just “there” but people will talk about shit they love which makes a lot of sense but the realization that there is this weird blind spot is fucking me up.
I remember thinking at one time that pop music was really unpopular and nobody listened to it. Because everybody I talked to only went on about how much they disliked pop music.
Later I found out what ‘pop’ is short for.
This seems like exactly the same kind of thing
The internet gives us access to unlimited echo chambers. Pop music is an idea sold by corporations like it's just what is popular, for everyone (but we all know what it "sounds like" )
The human experience is strange
i just imagined orcs getting into fights over how their wife is the biggest, most beautiful with the sharpest teeth.
“HOW DARE!!! THROG’S WIFE SHROKKA IS 10 FEET TALL, HER TEETH BREAK BOULDERS, HER BEAUTY SHAMES THE SUN”
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