#Laundry Files

[owlbear33]

gods the description of old George's assault on the new annexe gets me every time

[stainlesssteellocust]

Building on the previous posts

>some of the Host nobility brought their personal cooks etc with them

>some of these petition the New Management to be allowed to go into business in this strange new world

>lol why not says Fabian

>alfar have to be forced via blood oath to obey food laws

>humans salty over the Battle of Leeds try to fuck with their restaurant sometimes but that’s fine, kicking the shit out of human beings is healthy enrichment for the People

>First occasionally shows up when she’s feeling homesick but is constantly suspicious that the staff are gonna poison her and Alex for Leeds-related reasons

>The food’s alright but the real money comes from selling amphetamine-laced energy bars and setting up an opium den

>the elves don’t understand capitalism but Yarisol makes the numbers work, somehow

[wendell-witling]

The only thing that's stuck with me from this is that if your name is Howard you may, perhaps, secretly be Lovecraft's reincarnation.

[spacecowboywhit]

Deeply-Scary-Sorcerer's Song

[Sung by DSS James "TEAPOT" Angleton from The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, to the tune of "Major-General's Song" by Gilbert and Sullivan]

I am the very model of a Deeply Scary Sorcerer

I've information mystical, secret, and full of horror-or,

I know the Plateau of Leng, and I quote the texts historical:

From Necronomicon to Schiller's Bible, in order categorical;

I'm extremely well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

I understand equations, both the Dho Na and pentacle,

About Turing's Theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, (bothered for a rhyme)

With many cheerful facts about those cults and dreams of Cthul-hu's.

I'm very good at banishing and multidimensional calculus;

I know the scientific names of beings rugose and squamulous:

In short, in matters magical, political, or covert operator-or,

I am the very model of a Deeply Scary Sorcerer.

I know our mythic history, from Benthic pledge to Archive of Atrocity;

I answer many a hard audit query, I've learned a pretty taste for deniability,

I quote in elegiacs all the times of strife and fuss,

In conics, I can scrawl wards parabolous;

I can tell undoubted unicorns from deep ones and beings like a phallus,

I know the croaking chorus from that violin of malice!

Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore, (bothered for a rhyme)

And whistle all the bars from that instrument of terror-or.

Then I can write a simple spell in Babylonic cuneiform,

And tell you ev'ry detail of the King in Yellow's truer form:

In short, in matters magical, political, or covert operator-or,

I am the very model of a Deeply Scary Sorcerer.

In fact, when I know what is meant by "eldritch" and "cyclopean",

When I can tell at sight a human Hand of Glory from one of pigeon,

When such affairs as summonings and surprises I'm more wary at,

And when I know precisely what is meant by "calculations multivariate",

When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern sorcery,

When I know more of tactics than a novice in arcanery –

In short, when I've a smattering of interdimensional strategy – (bothered for a rhyme)

You'll say a better dark and evil being has never been set a-free!

For my metaphysical knowledge, though I'm an ancient entity,

Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;

But still, in matters magical, political, or covert operator-or,

I remain the very model of a Deeply Scary Sorcerer!

------------

Inspired by @stainlesssteellocust 's idea of a Laundry Files musical curse story. I didn't spend long and am not music-inclined, but had to.

[aharonov-bohm-affect]

This is sort of the conceit of the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross.

Fantasy Sociology (what would it do to agriculture if there was dragons)

Fantasy Psychology (the mental effects of having certain patterns of thoughts that generate fireballs)

Fantasy Biology (what if u had lighting sacks in yr cheeks)

Fantasy Chemistry (these r the elements and what u can do with them)

Fantasy Physics (orbital mechanics and magical floating rocks: a guide)

Fantasy Mathematics (its just normal mathematics)

[sustainableyadayadayada]

stuff I've read in 2023

This is just a grab bag. I’ve read two reasonably entertaining novels set in near futures where climate change is ravaging the world. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock was the more entertaining of the two. Stephenson is a good storyteller and his books are easy to read. But obviously, read Snow Crash first if you never have. I’m about half way through Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley…

[ttrpgcafe]

I've had a fascination recently with what I'm affectionately calling "office-horror", things like the Laundry Files, Triangle Agency, The Bureau for Liminal Horror, and, many years ago, the podcast SAYER. I don't know why this particular genre of horror calls to me, but I wonder if it isn't related to me wanting a job in civil service, which almost certainly entails working in an office. Like, I don't know what to expect, and that's manifesting as an anxiety about the work that has me fascinated with this genre of horror, I think. Idk, I'm mostly just rambling, but I thought I might see if there's a more concrete answer from the wider world for why people like this kind of horror.

[owlbear33]

I have an urge, it's a traitorous urge, I wanna know what happened in Barcelona

[stainlesssteellocust]

Rambling about fictional food. Again

Love the stuff about the alfar figuring out magic in prehistory, even before they learned proper speech

Just imagine them ripping open multiverse-spanning portals to find more berries and storing their food in Flintstones-ass temporal stasis grids it’s so funny

Being able to preserve your food with time-freezing is interesting, actually, especially when you consider how that might have affected other methods of food preservation. Yes you can make British-style jokes about them knocking over nations for spices, but it goes beyond that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if salting and smoking etc was originally done by slaves or other poor, marginalised alfar groups who weren’t able to use large amounts of mana. Slower, less reliable, ‘dirtier’ practices. Over the millennia the others would have noticed ‘huh that tastes good’ but it would still be a minor part of their cuisine for quite a while, so some of their stuff, especially low-quality snacks or rations, might be quite bland. This tracks: While she never mentions human food being better on average, First considers alfar time-stoppered military rations to be…not great, and is much happier eating a late night kebab while sober, which, er, wow lol.

Generally speaking I reckon the Host (or rather, the support structures they left behind to die) generated their own food, so mostly the stuff you can grow in a borderline-arctic nation…though considering greenhouses, biomodding and other forms of Literal Magic, who knows what they might have?

I have a vague thought that high-class alfar meals might be focused on minimally prepared and extremely fresh basic ingredients as a show of cleanliness and quality, with much of the flavour coming from sauces and condiments added at the eating stage. A steak that was time-frozen moments after being carved off the animal, still steaming from the beast’s body heat as it’s flung into a pan in front of you…the meat itself is unseasoned, or hit with salt and pepper etc moments before cooking, but the flavour comes from the multiple sauces and dips that are served along with it, which probably draw from alfar poor-people food roots somewhere way back in history.

I already figured they’d have slaves gather pure snow in winter to be magically preserved and used to make a shaved ice sort of thing as a summer dessert, it’s in one of the Cold Iron Bound drafts. Of course the elves are absolutely sophisticated enough to just freeze water in the summer, they just send the help to dodge monsters because they can. Absolute unhinged decadence.

Are there any strange holes in their knowledge? We know they don’t have paper, are some foods the same? Maybe, due to the preservation stuff mentioned above, they don’t really have cheese the way we do? In a cold European climate they probably did drink milk, but they might not have progressed that vital technology to the same degree as us. Cassie might look at blue cheese and be like “absolutely not that’s disgusting”, repulsed even though, as I said in a previous post, I’m not convinced she has a cannibalism taboo.

On the flipside, maybe they still have Silphium. They have a lot of extinct animals, after all. Cue Cassie badgering Alex to learn how to cook with Hing, since it’s the closest thing left. Poor guy. He doesn’t strike me as a kitchen natural but considering First finds cooking your own food to be actively bizarre, I think it’s probably going to be on him lol.

I reckon they have spices. Even in antiquity we were able to get some. Of course we don’t know what trade looks like on Alfheim (they want to call us Urukheim so) or how the Americas interact with Eurasia or anything, really. But the Morningstar Empire extends to Africa and into Russia, so they’ve got the grasp for it. And Cassie was ���easy’ when they were talking Indian food IIRC, so I think she implicitly has some spice tolerance. Yeah not all Indian food is like that but it suggests she wasn’t limited by an inability to eat it.

…Maybe, considering their stoicism and hatred of emotional weakness, the elves one-upped each other by handling incredibly spicy food back home.

*cut to Cassie in a Thai restaurant, desperately maintaining a poker face while trying to convince Alex to swap dishes with her as if he can’t see the tears running down her face*

Alex: Look Cass I’m happy to walk through a sketchy portal with you, I’ll kill your family for you, I’ll eat and shoot and beat people to death for your sake, but you chose the spice level and you’re going to have to live with that decision

and yeah they totally eat their enemies hearts and stuff too

[d8tl55c]

me: waiting for shoe(s) to drop

Personified Alan Becker YouTube Icon: oh... buddy...

[sonicandvisualsurprises]

1979

Searching for all-time favorites to post is so much fun. I suddenly remembered I Saw Batman in the Launderette, and what a joy it is to hear it again after many years!

"(I Saw) Batman (In The Launderette)" by The Shapes is a memorable slice of British punk!

I love the quirky and surreal lyrics, the crisp and sharp guitars and punchy basslines.

[ravenfirethief]

What nobody mentions is that all those colonies are gone now because they were eaten by the Many-Angled Ones.

it’s a common misconception that maths is all theoretical; they actually keep the 0 in a vault in France and u can go look at it if u got connections.

[bytedykes]

[ID: simple sketch of Luo Binghe kneeling by a washing machine, hugging it with a tear in his eye. He's wearing a dark sweater and jeans. /end ID]

bingge reverse transmigration washing machine love-hate relationship. and post

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played THE LAUNDRY ?

By Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall and John Snead

Balancing the fight against Lovecraftian horrors and British bureaucracy, your team works for a secret division of the government intent on keeping the Old Ones at bay. And, more importantly, keeping them a secret from civilians.

"You’re a spy. Well, you are now, at least. Previously, you were someone who learned things humanity was not meant to know. Namely, that magic is real, it exists in the higher realms of mathematics, and it has some really messed up devotees. And if you know that much, then you’re not left with much of a choice — you work for the Laundry now."

There is a Kickstarter right now, ending soon, by Cubicle 7 games

[shoshiwrites]

I am laughing at myself a little (ok, a lot) for thinking I was just going to blithely string together the whole Jo/Bucky longfic over the break and not completely dismantle my existing timeline, aka exactly what I have been doing over the last two days (and having so much fun)

[3thanguy7]

pulling out my all-time favorite bookpost for this one (from the laundry files, the apocalypse codes)

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".