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There's something extremely depressing to me about how many people just don't want to get weird with female characters the way they do with male characters.

Like, I can kind of see why a lot of people feel weird about writing about bad things happening to female characters, but what it leads to is everyone putting female characters up on a shelf where you can admire them but you can't actually do anything interesting with them because that might be sexist or just make people feel bad. And I think that's actually a whole lot worse in the long run.

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they should invent an existence where the sweetest, most thoughtful people you've ever met don't suffer an endless series of indignities and injuries at the hands of gormless, self-obsessed monsters

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the silt verses - chapter 8

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Have you heard about mole genders?

I’ve heard of this concept in sci-fi, but thought it was absolutely made up. I know some fish and frogs can change genders, but not in cycles like this. Wild. If I slapped this down in some alien world without explanation, I’d laugh in my own face. But no, real biology IS that bizarre.

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If you want to “shock your audience” maybe you should just try writing a good story.

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This machine kills AI

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A message from Rob Wilkins.

Shortly before he died, Terry Pratchett assured me that, if there is an afterlife, he would give me a ring and let me know. That was ten years ago - and still no call.

From which, incidentally, I draw no firm conclusions. What if there was an afterlife, but with no phone signal?

But of course there is one place where Terry indisputably lives on: in the pages of his books and in the minds of the millions of readers around the world who turn those pages and continue to find them funny and true. For, while his words live on, so does Terry, and that will be the case, no question, not just for this one decade so quickly gone, but for many further decades to come.

So let me join Lyn and Rhianna in raising a glass today to the magical persistence of books and to Sir Terry; gone but still so very firmly with us.

Rob Wilkins

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A story to boost the morale of a broken country.

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the leftism leaving people's bodies when it's time to build a villager trading hall

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twenty years across the sea

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LIKE TO CHARGE REBLOG TO CAST LET'S GET THIS FUCKER EXPLODEDED

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99% of all murders committed by women in ancient greek plays are completely justified

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Digging through my WIP folder and I found notes for a story idea I had about a dragon adopting a human.

Not on accident, mind you, the dragon doesn’t just stumble across a human infant and adopts it. The dragon decides it wants to adopt a human.

The dragon explains this to its lich friend: “I want someone to take care of me in my old age! A human would be great! Imagine how easily it could talk the other humans into leaving me alone! And– and it might decide to grow up and become a goldsmith, right? Some humans become goldsmiths. My human might decide to go into goldsmithing too!”

“I think you’re overestimating the percentage of humans who become goldsmiths,” replies the lich friend, who is not terribly discouraging of the idea, but also not particularly invested in it at this point. It seems like a plan with a lot of potential points of failure.

The dragon is undeterred, mostly because it has a whole hoard of gold coins and goblets and jewelry and trinkets that seem to indicate to it that there must, in fact, be a great number of humans who know goldsmithing to have produced all that.

Anyway, the dragon decides to shapeshift into a humanoid form, go into a city, and adopt a human child. It needs the lich’s help, because it doesn’t know anything about human fashion. The lich’s knowledge on the subject is a few centuries outdated, but they attack a few fancy carriage on the road and reverse-engineer an outfit from what the humans inside them were wearing. (Those humans were nobles, it’s fine, it’s a victimless crime)

The lich fusses a lot with the humanoid appearance of the dragon until everything looks just so.

(“Am I actually doing it wrong, or are you just making me shapeshift into something you find more attractive?” the dragon asks.

“If you want me to pose as your husband, this is the price to pay,” the lich replies.)

They go into the city, anyway, and they find an orphanage on the shady side of town, where the tired, overworked and underpaid matron clearly sees there’s something not right about these two, but not in any obvious way she can put her finger on. She’s just happy to have one less mouth to feed.

Anyway, child get! 

She comes along quietly, and doesn’t even comment when she’s taken to a dragon lair.

The dragon is ecstatic with its new acquisition.

(“Does it know any commands?” the dragon wonders. “Sit! Stay! Roll over?”

“You may be thinking of dogs,” the lich points out. “Children do not perform tricks.”

They both looked at the human child, trying to figure out how to approach her.

“So, what scam are you running here?” the little girl asked suddenly, startling both the dragon and the lich.

“I was wrong,” the lich says, “they’ve definitely been teaching children new tricks since I was alive.”)

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Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!

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I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.

I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.

So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.

Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".

Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.