this will end in flames @this-will-end-in-flames - Tumblr Blog

Hey, John Green, unpaid intern! Everything Is Tuberculosis is in the new The Vampire Lestat promo!! Nothing funny to add, I think it's just neat.

Bye, John Green, unpaid intern!

I would say "Now even vampires are tuberculosis," except vampires have always been tuberculosis.

naominovik

The officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of the Temeraire novel series by Naomi Novik!

This is launching tomorrow! Super excited; Magpie Games are doing this and they've got a really great approach to the RPG that lets players play both people and dragons \o/ Check out if you're into TTRPG!

tlirsgender

Weird peeve time. Calling lab grown gemstones “fake” is stupid because it’s the same shit just not formed naturally. An artificially grown diamond is the same shit as a natural diamond it is the exact same material bro it’s all fuckign carbon

tlirsgender

It’s carbon it’s pretty and it didn’t involve slave labor what’s not to love??? Hi I’m having geology opinions tonight apparently. And I’m right

tlirsgender

There is so much bullshit in the diamonds industry to be mad about tbh. It also ties into the bullshit of the wedding industry as a whole but we don’t have the time to unpack all that

val-ritz

not even going to lie, the day i learned i could get like 15 lab grown rubies the size of dimes for $20 is the day i spent $20 on rubies, and i have never once said to myself “man, i wish this cost $1,600 and the lives of eight children to produce”

fuckyeahmineralogy

We are a pro-lab-grown mineral blog here, not only is it massively cheaper but massively more ethical as well in many cases.

thegreenpea

another very cool lab grown gem is Moissanite. It has a 9.25 on the mohs hardness scale where diamond is a 10. Moissanote also has a 2.69 refractive index in comparison to diamond’s 2.419 and here is the difference

and the best thing about moissanite? It is all lab grown and it costs only a fraction of what diamond costs. So fuck the diamond indsutry and buy lab grown gems which cost significantly less

rubixpsyche

Also it’s just cool to think of some mad scientist lookin person doing shit against the law of the universe and making pretty gems for you. Like cmon. This shouldnt be allowed probably. But humans really be like on gOD i want some shiny an just started MAKIN em

zathechaosgod

for years people wanted alchemy, well now we have alchemy and we’re making gemstones out of it and suddenly “it doesn’t count” anymore

batmanisagatewaydrug

how to not feel like someone is going to shoot me with a gun every time I open my work email

snailifier

🐌✨️ get snailed! 🐌✨️

how to not sneel like snomeone is snoing to snoot me with a snun every snime I snopen my snork esnail

batmanisagatewaydrug

gonna be so brave tomorrow when I snopen my snork esnail 🥲

bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher

Oh you're writing a gay smut fic with a fantasy setting? Don't forget to give one of your characters a

philosophicalparadox

It’s not that mysterious though.

Anyone carrying a bladed weapon carried oil. (More on that in a sec) Oil is what you use to clean and condition steel, especially, since water will rust it.

Many people in the Middle Ages used scented oils for their skin and hair from noblemen to lowly serfs.

Oil was incredibly abundant and quite cheap. The TYPE of oil however does matter in this.

Sheep oil (rendered from their fat) was very common and used for all manner of things from making soap to treating skin conditions. Rendered sheep fat has a very light texture and is a decent carrier oil without too pungent of a scent. Unfortunately it did rancid fast so it was common to add lots of herbs to it to help preserve it, especially rosemary, borage, marjoram and citron peels. This is how it became a common “perfume” oil used to scent hair skin or clothes. Nearly anyone would have had this handy somewhere.

Rendered pork oil was very common too and was most popular as a cooking oil.

Vegetable oil made from walnuts, almonds and flax seed was by far the most common non-animal oil. Nearly anybody had a bottle of almond or walnut oil in their pantry or on their person. These were by far the most popular oils used for conditioning steel, with walnut oil preferred because its tannins also gave armor a patina that kept it better. Only the absurdly wealthy ever wore polished armor. Everyone else blackened it to make it keep better. Walnut oil is good at doing that.

Walnut oil also works well as a lubricant. People back then DID use sexual lube by the way. No prostitute would be caught dead without it. Their favorite types were walnut and olive oil, though almond oil might be used in a pinch. They also used watered down acacia gum in southern Europe, which was sticky but slick and easy to re-wet.

Olive oil though was THE oil in Europe. It was expensive, comparatively, but obviously people considered it well worth its cost because it was found everywhere south of the Seine and frequently seen in even minor lordly houses or knights quarters much farther north. Considering quite a few people of the time thought it had aphrodisiac qualities when applied as certain way (likely because raw olive oil has a warming effect) I think you can imagine the most common reason it was sought after by men in particular.

Olive oil was also used in medicine and just about any church had some floating around somewhere because it’s conveniently good at treating minor infections and is wonderful for toothaches.

So the mysterious vial of oil isn’t at all mysterious and even if he were carrying it around with the sole intention of using it for sex, that wouldn’t actually be that strange either.

contemptible-scoundrel

norbert, the aggrieved

ever-jovial barnaby

the great archibald

shrewd percival

timid constantine

ultimatedykebehaviour

i draw them because i love them

mckitterick

these cuties are called hyraxes or dassies and are distantly related to elephants

thenatsdorf

Black cats are lucky. (via leahweissmuller)

immaplatypus

MAN [IN THICK ACCENT]: Black cat bring good luck. Not bad luck. I have black cat - See, him face - And I am not dead today: Good luck!

official-mugi

“See him face”

I sure fucking do see him face

just-things-i-enjoy

Him face

luccorvus

Reblog him face for good luck in 2021

catsbeaversandducks

Reblog him face for good luck in 2021 (2)

bakarilennox

Reblog him face for good luck in 2022

pluralwizard

Reblog him face for good luck in 2023

erindizmo

Reblog him face for good luck in 2024

impishdullahan

Reblog him face for good luck in 2025

lichfromspace

here’s the og video. Go see him face for real this time

sylvain1970

Cernunnos, sculpture en bronze de Christophe CHARBONNEL

shadowhunterandwizard

Y’all I’m screaming

lemon-embalmer

fantasy characters: “Geez”

me: who the fuck spread Christianity there

lemon-embalmer

this two-years-old shitpost just gained a hundred notes who the snickerdoodles dug it up

she-who-fights-and-writes

W H A T

slumpyspaceprincess

@rogha

thewhisperingescapes

mirkwoodest

In moments like this I always fall back on the fact that they also aren’t speaking English because they don’t have England or the many languages and conquering peoples that contributed to the creation of the English language and therefore the work musr be a translation into recognizable terms in our world’s terms. Call that Tolkien Brainrot.

bellbottom-jeans

Definitely funnier if you make fantasy explanations though,

Champagne is a wizard who sells bubbly alcohol.

It’s called English because of the original Lish people, all languages start with En here.

French fries are not potatoes they’re roots of the french plant.

Goodbye is now short for ‘good be your eye’ wishing you luck seeing the path ahead.

Jesus Christ is a long dead lich who used to cause everyone problems and we haven’t stopped saying her name when things go wrong.

thatgaydemigodnerd

And that’s the Pratchett approach

derinthescarletpescatarian

First ape to go to the watering hole with a container and put some of the water in it so that they could drink more later without returning to the watering hole must have been lauded as a fucking genius.

lyricwritesprose

Actually, as someone who used to study anthropology (albeit a very long time ago), I think it is generally accepted by now that the ability to Carry Containers Of Stuff is generally agreed to be one of the real tool-using leaps in human development, perhaps as important as fire. I mean, you'll get the impression that people studying early humans are basically spearhead experts, but that's just because spearheads don't decay. (And because for a long time people assumed that hunting was The Most Important Thing, which has a fascinating intersection with implicit bias and sexism and stuff, and yes I am still bitter at things like 2001 for popularizing the idea that the most important part of human evolution was the ability to bash the shit out of a thing/animal/person, but that's a whole other story.)

Carrying stuff is huge.

If you can put meat in a bag, you can carry more meat. If you can put something like nuts in a bag, then nuts abruptly become a food that you can bring back to the tribe or save for later and not a food that you're required to eat on the spot because they are tiresome and stupid to carry by hand. In both cases your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better.

If you can put your baby in a bag, you now have both your hands free to stick a spear into things, pick nuts, fish, dig tasty cicadas out of the ground, etc. Your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better, and so did your ability to defend yourself while you do it. (And let's face it, your babies were already getting downright ridiculous in terms of the time it takes them to be fully walking-ready, due to brain size and being essentially premature; inventing Multitasking With Baby is like, pure survival at this point, and your way to do that is to create a specialized bag.)

If you can put water in a bag (first water containers very well may have been animal bladders or stomachs, not pots) you can bring water to your sick tribe members and they have a much higher chance of recovering.

And then you have elaborations of the basic "thing that contains objects" idea. If you make an exceptionally loosely woven bag and put it in the water, you can on occasion finesse some fish into it. And then you have delicious fish. If you put yourself in a loose and flexible bag of animal skin, your tribe can operate in the cold better, which changes your entire migration pattern and opens up new environments to you. If you make a hard container and fill it with water and put it over your fire, you have invented a new type of cooking that unlocks whole new food types, such as vegetables that need softening in order for humans to eat them. (Of course at the same time your stomach is becoming steadily more dependent on being able to fuck with your food in this way, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the less energy you spend on digestion, the more energy you have to spend on other things, like brains. And big brains are good for unlocking whole new levels of communication, allowing for fantastic new levels of foraging cooperation, passing knowledge through generations, mate selection, and even various sorts of mental recreation where you imagine something that you don't see, and then convey that to your fellow beings.)

Bags are important, is what I'm saying.

teashadephoenix

I love all of this but I am going absolutely FERAL over the correlation that clothes = person bag. Bc you're so right but I never woulda thought of it like that

raevenlywrites

i lost it at "put that baby in a bag bc its already taking a ridiculously long time to walk on its own goddamn"

sioltach

watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)

loth-catgirl

alex51324

slander! Did any potentates steal the barley on his watch????

They did not.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Scifi writer fear: readers who like to do more math than you do

derinthescarletpescatarian

Writer: Okay so this seems like an appropriate size for this room, given its function and the drama needed for the scene...

Readers: Perfect! we were told 3 chapters back that this room is 'the average room size for a spaceship of this type', meaning that we can use this size information to back-calculate the volume of the spaceship, adjust for the stated 0.9atm air pressure... and then looking at the required air cycling rate for humans... we can see that the air purification system briefly described in chapter 6 when they were replacing air filters would be impossible for this spaceship!

derinthescarletpescatarian

Tumblr ask 6 months later: It was really clever how you used the size of the rooms and the air filter system to hint that the ceilings of all the rooms were very very low and thus let the audience deduce that humans in the future are much shorter than humans today! That's a great little nod to the 'humans have gotten taller over time' thing that people like to say, and really subtle, since people who hadn't done the math on the room volume would never see it!

Writer: ... Yes. That was... very clever... of me... to do.

elizabethswitch

Showing numbers to sci-fi readers is a little like making the let's-play pose at an excitable terrier of unidentified provenance.

chaumas-deactivated20240115

the other day in the groupchat we were talking about how historical fiction will often try to code aristocrat characters as more sympathetic by only having them have a single servant instead of a whole household of staff but instead this just makes them look like an exploitative employer who’s so cheap he would rather pile impossible amounts of labor upon a single guy than hire enough help to actually run his house

chaumas-deactivated20240115

also yes it makes the entire batfam look completely monstrous. Alfred isn’t a butler he’s some kind of career housewife holding himself psychologically hostage.