loooooooool but you're right, I don't know the ship name either, damn
people are tagging it with a boring mashup but i guess that works. Geraskier. Boring! Cmon can’t we have something fun like buttergrump or witchercup or something? only i guess they call him dandelion not buttercup so that’s less amusing. Fine fine fine we just do squishnames in modern fandom, I just won’t tag it, LOL. (I’ll use the AO3 relationship tags.)
magickedteacup replied to your post“god damn it”
>:D
I don’t think people will be upset, but I am a little self-conscious that I started the story off tagged with an & relationship tag for them. Whoops!
missbuster replied to your post “god damn it”
ONLY ONE BED OH NO
See and I started off the scene with Jaskier perfectly aware that there was only one bed and genuinely not being concerned because he and Geralt had shared beds so many times over the years, and being quite blasé about the whole thing. Here I thought I was subverting a trope!!
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “Discussing Vested Stock Options The Other Day, Like You Do”
I would be very down because aside from the hilarity of characters I feel like you'd be able to explain it in a way that I'd actually understand. so. I selfishly support this impulse.
Well, nobody can fully explain the stock market, and stocks themselves can be very complex, but stock options and vesting are relatively simple to explain in the basic sense.
Stock options are just a low-price guarantee. The company says to an individual, “For the next [fixed length of time], you can purchase up to [X] amount of stock for the low fixed price of [Y].”
So, say you’re a member of the board of directors of Starbuck Inc. As a board member, part of your compensation package is 110 stock options that expire on January 1st, 2020. Those have no real monetary value, they have no physical form, and you don’t own the stock, just the option to buy. But until January 1st, 2020, you have the option to purchase up to 110 shares of Starbuck Inc. stock for $6, regardless of the actual value of the stock on the open market. If the price goes up to $12 on the market, you can purchase at $6 and then immediately sell it all for $12.
It gets more complicated, especially since the amount you hold may impact your say in how the company is run, but that’s the basic idea.
However, most companies want their board and their employee pool to remain stable, so they add an additional constraint onto those stock options: vesting. Vesting just means “This isn’t real yet but will become real in X amount of time as long as you’re still here for X amount of time.” It’s like taking those stock options and putting them in a safe with a timer on it.
Starbuck Inc. has offered you 110 unvested stock options to join their board of directors. The options still expire on January 1st, 2020, but they won’t vest until January 1st, 2019. That means that you can’t actually do anything with them unless you stay on the board through January 1st, 2019. At that point, they are “vested” options; they become real, and you can exercise them (buy the stock) for the duration of 2019.
Again, it can be very complex -- for example, you have options that may not vest unless the company hits certain goals, or you may have rolling vesting options, each year you get new unvested options that will vest the following year (or two years or whatnot). And sometimes in our job we will take unvested options into account when calculating someone’s net worth. But that’s really only something you need to know if you’re actually dealing with it, and at that point you’re probably making enough money you can hire an accountant.
Vesting is an important concept to grasp because at least in the US, often your company will match your retirement investments but won’t “vest” them for a certain amount of time. Like, for my first three years at my job, my company was matching the amount I put in my retirement fund, but if I left before three years were up, I didn’t get to keep all of that money -- the longer I stayed, the more I got to keep, until after three years I got to keep 100% of all the money they had put in and all future money they would put in.
@gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “why is my dash so dead literally all day today?? like wtf do u ppl...”
well I mean I should be cleaning and I also have people misunderstanding my point about the plot of infinity war in my mentions, so I don't know where I was going with this
we all ‘should’ probably be cleaning but this is how it goes. thank u i had to go find what u were talking about and btw i totally agree with u. like giving up hundreds of lives (millions when u consider the consequences of a thanos win nvm the dying in battle part) so they don’t have to give up one is like.. crazy and i get that it’s not the /same/ but like how would he truly justify that to himself.
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,...”
yay flax! growing and processing flax and spinning and weaving linen is a super ambitious questline of mine! I have some grinding to do first though.
missbuster replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,...”
I’d like to know what happens to the flax after it’s been cut and... laid down? Does it soak?
(replying to both at the bottom because interspersing plays merry hell with formatting)
I love linen so much, but I don’t know how to weave at all, and I barely know how to spin, and yet. And yet! Attainable things, perhaps? Who knows how far I’ll get in this new-ish hobby.
I also took up papermaking as a hobby, ostensibly, because I want to use the not-suitable-for-spinning waste material in papermaking because that’s apparently a desirable thing to use. I cannot find much information about doing that, though, and I have yet to actually do any papermaking at home. So...
So the process for flax is basically: 1) grow it, 2) pull it up, 3) let it dry (this is where I am; it’s in sheaves, upright), 4) “ripple” it to remove the seed pods, 5) ret it, which can be done either by letting it lie in the field or on a lawn to be repeatedly wetted by the dew and dried by the sun, OR by submerging it in either still or running water; the former method is slower but apparently better-quality in the end, and the latter is faster and more controllable, and then 6) brake it (physically beat it to break up the outer layer of the straw), 7) scutch it (scrape it to pull off the broken outer layer, 8) hackle/heckle it to comb the remnants of the straw off of the “line”, or interior bast fiber of the stalk. Then you can spin it and weave it.
I have done basically none of this before but I’ve watched demonstrations in the past, so. *shrug* here’s hoping!
“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel...
[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]
SINCE YOU ASKED
I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though.
I have SETTING:
so it’s presumably postapocalyptic but I don’t want to get into the brass tacks of that. Some society presumably was preserved. Genetic engineering had gotten as far as restoring a bunch of Ice Age megafauna as the climate changed, though I don’t get into it; it’s been long enough that nobody really remembers the details except some urban egghead types.
The Earth’s magnetic poles sometimes shift, or have done so in the past, meaning all electronics go on the fritz. (It could also be sunspots. Again, some of the eggheads know for sure, but the majority of people don’t know or care.) This happens enough that people are used to it. Radios exist, but everyone keeps pigeons because sometimes the radios don’t work.
There are settlements where agriculture is practiced, and the cities are where most of the manufacturing happens. Far out in the countryside are populations of hunter-gatherers, some of whom farm seasonally, some of whom don’t; many of them are pastoralists, and herd animals. Others follow megafauna herds and more or less manage them.
Our Heroine, the protagonist, is a hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherers in her area are loosely organized into clans, and are matriarchal, organized by bloodlines. If they want to breed, they have to breed with someone from outside their bloodline, which means either finding a visitor from another clan, or traveling to a larger settlement, or in some way making arrangments. Children belong to the clan, though, so even if a woman travels to find a mate, she would come back to her clan to give birth and raise the child. (Sometimes sons are given to their father’s family. It’s complicated.)
It doesn’t work that way in the cities, but our heroine doesn’t really know that; she’s well-traveled, but only within her herding ranges.
But the radios stop working, right as they’re trying to track the mammoth migration: the herds are radio-tagged, so they can be more effectively managed. They can’t get the collar signals, and they can’t raise any of the other settlements or the city. Their pigeons go unanswered, until they’ve depleted them. (The way a pigeon works is that they’re one way, so you have to go to the city to get a pigeon that’ll communicate with the city.)
So, with no further ways to reach the city or the intermediate settlements, a couple of the clans have come together and determined that they’ve got no choice but to send an emissary, even though it’s prime herding season and normally they wouldn’t send anyone to the city until after the harvests and all.
So our Heroine gets chosen to go to the city. She doesn’t want to go, she’s already got a daughter, but for some reason she’s the one who’s got to make the trip, so she figures, well, she’ll try to find someone to get another baby from while she’s there, and maybe she can trade some of her cool knicknacks and get some fun stuff, and she’s never been to the city so maybe it’ll be rad. She goes along with, like, a cast of characters, I haven’t decided who. It’s a big deal to get to go to the city.
But there’s the adventure journey bit, that’ll be fine.
But I haven’t figured out yet a) why the radios don’t work and b) why the city hasn’t been responding.
Also I was toying with letting her ride a mammoth to get there, if some of them are semi-tame, but that might be too much. I figure they’re about as tameable as elephants but tame elephants get handled every day. She probably rides a horse instead. Maybe a mammoth tags along for fun, though; they’re probably curious. That might be fun. (They know better than to give it any of their luggage, if it’s only coming for kicks. It could run off at any time.)
I was sort of considering that maybe it’s that usually the radios break because of sunspots and this time it’s a magnetic pole instability that’s causing it, which means they can’t just wait it out. Or just that it’s much more severe solar flares than usual, or somesuch. There could be some angst over whether there’s been an explosion or something somewhere on the planet-- there may be some remnant of knowledge preserved about EMPs among the remnant egghead community in the university-- and so the academics in the city are very worried, and that’s why nobody was responding to the pigeons. (It could also be, mundanely, that they were out of pigeons. Or, in the case of magnetic pole anomaly, that the pigeons were getting lost too, and so not useful as messengers!)
Anyhow I hadn’t worked much out beyond that she goes to the city, causes a minor stir with her mammoth (who maybe wanders off into the countryside and wreaks some havoc that she then has to deal with while she’s enjoying the city), and she meets a very interesting nerd-boy who she decides to court, only it turns out sexual mores are very different in the city, and he’s not sure what to make of her and also her arms are as big around as his thighs and he’s really not sure what to make of that. Anyway maybe Our Heroine and Skinny Nerd-Boy maybe go on an adventure to Fix All The Radios or somesuch.
Only they wouldn’t be able to fix the radios, and the adventure would probably be doing research, and I suppose she can read but she wouldn’t be all that interested in libraries, but maybe she’d find out she was.
And mostly I want to poke at the gender roles and play in the fun semi-utopian setting.
But I need a Plot because I can only really fix my characters by Doing Something.
So, that’s where I’m sort of stuck, and also I haven’t let myself think about it very much, so.
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “walburgablack replied to your post “galadhir replied to your post ...”
I am interested in this discussion but don't have much to add! I've never written with a group before. Maybe a mix of a chatroom and, like, reply-all emails with attached chapters?
I hadn’t really necessarily thought through what to do so much, but having someplace to bitch about writing, ask advice, and mostly, be accountable to other people who would ostensibly care whether I wrote into the darkness, and who I in return could care about, would be useful.
Gosh, way back in college I used to do critiques, and I’ve exchanged beta-reading with various people over the years, but. Mostly I just don’t want to be alone in the dark. And fanfiction has been great for that but I’m super tired of not owning my canon, you know? Investing years of my imagination in a character that the original creators never thought that deeply about, or that other fans suddenly decide is The Worst / a two-dimensional caricature / the one they ship with a character I dislike etc.
i taught myself some/most of it on piano very roughly and it was really just very fun, other people be damned! don't let your dreams be dreams!
A minor, D, D minor, G, D, D minor, G, E minor. Wait a minute no two verses are alike? And the chorus:
Am E MajorE C majorC Toss a coin to your Witcher D MajorD A minorAm O’ Valley of Plenty D MajorD A minorAm O’ Valley of Plenty A minorAm O’ A minorAm E MajorE C majorC Toss a coin to Your Witcher D MajorD E MajorE E7E7 A minorAm O’ Valley of Plenty
Yeah that’s. That’s definitely not the 1,4,5,1 structure my teacher’s been working on with me. I can’t.... even... can that be right?? [link to my source: https://www.guitartabsexplorer.com/sonya-belousova-Tabs/toss-a-coin-to-your-witcher-crd.php I am not sure this is accurate.]
Anyway I clearly don’t know enough about modern songwriting structure. This is far too complicated for me to figure out for a joke, so. No, alas.
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “for the record”
sigh I've been having thoughts on and off about maybe finding a cheap-ass lute somewhere bc what I've got is a keyboard and piano is hard and now they're turning from thoughts into That Would Be A Hilarious Joke, Do It, Y'know You Could Sing While Playing It, Too, It's Kind Of Like A Small Guitar, Right, And Those Are Supposed To Be Fairly Quick To Pick Up (when you're not doing classical guitar, jesus no)
Well, speaking as a Player Of Obscure Stringed Instrument, it seems to me the only way to really do anything is to find an instructor. For me. YMMV a great deal, of course, but I’ve owned a guitar for a full twenty years and can’t play it like at all, and I even bought a harp like a decade ago to no avail, and now after a year of banjo lessons I can, well ok I can play the songs I’ve learned and clearly can’t teach myself new ones so maybe I’m not a good judge of literally anything...
In other news, now thanks to a generous donor I have seen episode 2 of the Witcher and can say several things for certain: 1) I still don’t know what the fuck is going on but I can get what they’re doing with the timeline, I don’t know why but sure why not, 2) OK I get why people like this, and 3) Henry Cavill is working way harder than this fucking deserves, he is a goddamned treasure.
