#also alternatively it's oh general my general

[introvertbard]

@grison-in-space @mysteryteacup What's up, this post has been SERIOUSLY updated! I also have a section SPECIFICALLY on warhorses, and why everyone who rides and/or knows history is begging writers to 'PLEASE stop putting your medieval knights on Basically-Modern, Chunky, and Slow Draft Horse Breeds! Real warhorses were not like that at all!' https://www.tumblr.com/introvertbard/752832508636332032/your-weekly-reminder-that-ive-updated-my-nerdy Also, I've seen both sides of the "are horses cheap, expensive, or BOTH" coin. (I'm in the United States, for reference.) There are many Americans who DO think horses are "for rich people," and others say that "horses are cheap to buy and expensive to own." A horse CAN cost as little as 1,000USD... but you'll need more money for the horse's basic needs (boarding stables or "the land, food, and a barn/stable for you to keep your own horses in," and a vet who can both treat horses AND head to your place for emergencies).

The "cheap to buy and expensive to own" saying seems largely like a caution sign, to keep starry-eyed people from naively buying a horse because "wowwwww, it's only X much money!", and then going bankrupt trying to take care of it.

Usually, the ones who say horses are "cheap to buy and expensive to maintain" are in rural areas, while the ones who say horses are "just expensive in general" are in cities. It may also be a generational thing, because a lot of older folks expect "good basic horses" (ie, not champion athletes or breeding prospects) to be like 3,000USD, while younger folks see a horse for the same price and think "uh-oh, what's wrong with them?" Because "cheap horses" are commonly expected to be "problem horses (medically or training-wise)."

And then the stuff you need to actually USE THE HORSE will eat up even more of your time and money. A saddle, bridle, and saddle-blanket/pad set alone can easily cost you several thousand dollars, unless you shop around for secondhand ones and KNOW HOW TO AVOID GETTING SCAMMED. If you want to DRIVE your horse, I don't even know how much you'd need for a cart/buggy, the harness to hitch your horse up, and "places that are suitable to DRIVE your horse the old-fashioned way." As for when "driving your horse to different places" means "you need to transport the horse to shows, parades, or to far-off trails," you need a good horse-trailer and a VERY strong car (generally a pickup truck or an SUV). Alternately, you need to know another farmer or horse-owner.

Preindustrial travel, and long explanations on why different distances are like that

I saw a post on my main blog about how hiking groups need to keep pace with their slowest member, but many hikers mistakenly think that the point of hiking is "get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible" instead of "spending time outdoors in nature with friends," and then they complain that a new/less-experienced/sick/disabled hiker is spoiling their time-frame by constantly needing breaks, or huffing and puffing to catch up.

I run into a related question of "how long does it take to travel from Point A to Point B on horseback?" a lot, as a fantasy writer who wants to be SEMI-realistic; in the Western world at least, our post-industrial minds have largely forgotten what it's like to travel, both on our own feet and in groups.

People ask the new writer, "well, who in your cast is traveling? Is getting to Point B an emergency or not? What time of year is it?", and the newbies often get confused as to why they need so much information for "travel times." Maybe new writers see lists of "preindustrial travel times" like a primitive version of Google Maps, where all you need to do is plug in Point A and Point B.

But see, Google Maps DOES account for traveling delays, like different routes, constructions, accidents, and weather; you as the person will also need to figure in whether you're driving a car versus taking a bus/train, and so you'll need to figure out parking time or waiting time for the bus/train to actually GET THERE.

The difference between us and preindustrial travelers is that 1) we can outsource the calculations now, 2) we often travel for FUN instead of necessity.

The general rule of thumb for preindustrial times is that a healthy and prime-aged adult on foot, or a rider/horse pair of fit and prime-aged adults, can usually make 20-30 miles per day, in fair weather and on good terrain.

Why is this so specific? Because not everyone in preindustrial times was fit, not everyone was healthy, not everyone was between the ages of 20-35ish, and not everyone had nice clear skies and good terrain to travel on.

If you are too far below 18 years old or too far past 40, at best you will need either a slower pace or more frequent breaks to cover the same distance, and at worst you'll cut the travel distance in half to 10 or so miles. Too much walking is VERY BAD on too-young/old knees, and teenagers or very short adults may just have short legs even if they're fine with 8-10 hours of actual walking. Young children may get sick of walking and pitch a fit because THEY'RE TIREDDDDDDDDDD, and then you might need to stay put while they cry it out, or an adult may sigh and haul them over their shoulder (and therefore be weighed down by about 50lbs of Angry Child).

Heavy forests, wetlands and rocky hills/mountains are also going to be a much shorter "distance." For forests or wetlands, you have to account for a lot of villagers going "who's gonna cut down acres of trees for one road? NOT ME," or "who's gonna drain acres of swamp for one road? NOT ME." Mountainous regions have their traveling time eaten by going UP, or finding a safer path that goes AROUND.

If you are traveling in winter or during a rainstorm (and this inherently means you HAVE NO CHOICE, because nobody in preindustrial times would travel in bad weather if they could help it), you run the high risk of losing your way and then dying of exposure or slipping and breaking your neck, just a few miles out of the town/village.

And now for the upper range of "traveling on horseback!"

Fully mounted groups can usually make 30-40 miles per day between Point A and Point B, but I find there are two unspoken requirements: "Point B must have enough food for all those people and horses," and "the mounted party DOESN'T need to keep pace with foot soldiers, camp followers, or supply wagons."

This means your mounted party would be traveling to 1) a rendezvous point like an ally's camp or a noble's castle, or 2) a town/city with plenty of inns. Maybe they're not literally going 30-40 miles in one trip, but they're scouting the area for 15-20 miles and then returning to their main group. Perhaps they'd be going to an allied village, but even a relatively small group of 10-20 warhorses will need 10-20 pounds of grain EACH and 20-30 pounds of hay EACH. 100-400 pounds of grain and 200-600 pounds of hay for the horses alone means that you need to stash supplies at the village beforehand, or the village needs to be a very large/prosperous one to have a guaranteed large surplus of food.

A dead sprint of 50-60 miles per day is possible for a preindustrial mounted pair, IF YOU REALLY, REALLY HAVE TO. Moreover, that is for ONE day. Many articles agree that 40 miles per day is already a hard ride, so 50-60 miles is REALLY pushing the envelope on horse and rider limits.

NOTE: While modern-day endurance rides routinely go for 50-100 miles in one day, remember that a preindustrial rider will not have the medical/logistical support that a modern endurance rider and their horse does.

If you say "they went fifty miles in a day" in most preindustrial times, the horse and rider's bodies will get wrecked. Either the person, their horse, or both, risk dying of exhaustion or getting disabled from the strain.

Whether you and your horse are fit enough to handle it and "only" have several days of defenselessness from severe pain/fatigue (and thus rely on family/friends to help you out), or you die as a heroic sacrifice, or you aren't QUITE fit enough and become disabled, or you get flat-out saved by magic or another rider who volunteers to go the other half, going past 40 miles in a day is a "Gondor Calls For Aid" level of emergency.

As a writer, I feel this kind of feat should be placed VERY carefully in a story: Either at the beginning to kick the plot off, at the climax to turn the tide, or at the end.

Preindustrial people were people--some treated their horses as tools/vehicles, and didn't care if they were killed or disabled by pushing them to their limits, but others very much cared for their horses. They needed to keep them in working condition for about 15-20 years, and they would not dream of doing this without a VERY good reason.

[jewishcissiekj]

Hi again hehe, I would also love to see your version of Hera!

oh captain my captain (ignore me giving up on drawing her lekku markings halfway through) + a picture of the doodles with my hand and micro galaxy squadron asajj for perspective just to show how tiny they are lol

[meamiiikiii]

[reverse entry AU]

so glad the work week is over!

no more meetings!

what do you mean its only tuesday.

[abusivelittlebunny]

The security guy at the Frankfurt train station McDonald's looks like Pedro Pascal and I'm going insane delirious from my day long travel imagining security guard Javier railing 2am drunken depressed McDonald's visitor Steve in one of the booths.

[vimbry]

returning to my little project of making a fake neopet out of my fursona for the Third time, because I keep changing their design before I can finish it.

on the second attempt, I decided to stop being lazy and actually make larger vectors instead of drawing directly on a 150x150 canvas - which, surprise, is a hell of a lot easier. this time around, I'm also using the flash colour palette to make everything a bit more authentic. and I made one of those pet info pages you could see by going to the species list.

I've almost completed the basic recolour/minor lineart adjustment paintbrush colours. gonna post a bigger collection of them later when they're all finished, then move on to the unique poses, but these are my favourites so far. I was actually keeping so rigid to the official styles for a few of them (proportions & anatomy, consistent colours & shading, etc.), before straying away enough from desert to realise, wait, I can just have fun w/ it lol.

[catwouthats]

Thinking about how Anita Fite…

Okay I can’t even type this out I’m gonna start crying so I’m just gonna say I’m listening to Your Best American Girl by Mitski

and I’m crying anyways now fuck

[icewindandboringhorror]

It's always interesting to hear about people's weird/unexpected "alternate life paths". Like, something that you could have done with your life, a job you almost took, a school you almost went to, etc - that was still actually realistic enough that it could have happened, but NOW it seems to not suit your current personality.

Like for example, I currently hate advertising (how manipulative it is, brands trying to be 'relatable', social media amplifying it to an obnoxious extreme, etc.) so much that even seeing a little ad before a youtube video is grating to even witness, but there was a point in time where I was genuinely seriously considering going into marketing/making commercials as a career lol. Or like, I have a relative who was very inclined to be a pastor when they were younger, even though today they're a super strong atheist, etc. etc.

[welcometogrouchland]

EXTREMELY CRUSTY but I’ve been working on oc designs in between DC prompts. My little meow meows im so sorry i neglected you (i will inevitably do it again </3)

[hungryslothwrites]

i love you characterization that's a little to the left of canon!!! i love you speculative characterization!!! i love you complex characterization based on alternate universes!!! i love you alternate and unconventional characterization!!!!!!

[nostalgia-tblr]

re: my seemingly fringe "I don't think we're meant to think Odin was a dreadful cunt" take, when was Thor 1 actually made? Like... 2010/2011? Because I think Odin is (presumably based on comics canon) meant to be "a bit distant but overall good as a parent" but 2010ish is well after the recent (historically recent, by which I mean since maybe the 1980s) shift in our culture's ideas about fatherhood and what make "a good dad" as well as similarly radical shifts in how we approach disciplining children. MCU!Odin is therefore odd because he's a couple of generations out if he's meant to convince the audience that he's A Good Dad or even an acceptable one. Even the people making the film can't have (all) thought he was any good so with this in mind I'm more open to the idea that Odin is meant to be fairly shit. (But not entirely, and certainly not to the point of him being evil - he's doing his best and arguably the issue isn't him but the culture they've all been born into.)

IDK how old the writer was but there could be an intentional generation-gap thing going on there? An "everyone thinks this is acceptable and even good parenting, but it isn't and everyone involved is getting messed up by it." You don't have to go that far back historically before failing to show regular affection to your kids wouldn't be seen as a significant flaw in a father (whereas it absolutely would be in a mother - v interesting that as the status of women in our society has increased our idea of a good dad has shifted significantly towards an ideal that would previously have been considered "maternal" and thus "unmanly." Oh hey, looks like patriarchy is bad for men too!)

I still think a lot of fanon and fanfic overstates it (which is fine until we're at the point of inventing obviously abusive behaviour and then seemingly forgetting that we made that up), and that Odin is at least meant to be 'doing his best' but yeah Them Thor Films must surely be aware that his best is nowhere near Actually Good, yeah? I mean unless they were written by a man who lives in the 1950s, which they probably weren't. (There is absolutely some generational variation in how far the social change has taken hold but you'd have to look for a long time before you'd find a man of any age who'd say "I really wish my father had been more reserved and had spent less quality time with me" rather than wistfully expressing the opposite of that.)

[wundrousarts]

Fun Fact: If you use Twitter at all (in its dying days...), go check out the Nevermoor Quote Bot if you haven't already! It tweets out a Nevermoor quote every hour, pulling from the books and any extra chapters. It currently has 1016 quotes, and who knows how many Silverborn will bring.....

[b-blushes]

obviously there's a billion other things but one thing that sucks about being sick/disabled is that most of the time i don't have enough energy to both get to and from somewhere, and also BE in the place. brain-wise and, like, life-fulfillment-wise, things would be way better if i could spend more time somewhere that isn't by myself in my house (although for much of the time this is the best environment to manage my various disabilities), but physical-ability-wise, often the travelling to and from a place takes all the 'spare' energy i have, so i can't actually *be* at the place without experiencing a level of various symptoms that negates the benefits of being there in the moment, or being so so ill when i get home, or the 'being at the place' leaving me unable to safely travel home in the first place. it sucks.

anyway i guess that the flipside of that is super strong appreciation for the instances that i *can* do things, the people that help me get places, and the people who're happy to meet outdoors and/or with precautions. it makes a huge difference to have some things to look forward to, even if i am greedy for more!

[katyspersonal]

Also I had a dream that I was sort of an apprentice/underling of Djura and even had a small room of workshop on my own! I was creating some guns but I was working on a huge static one that'd work automatically even in my absence? It used both actual mechanics and Arcane stuff, like eyes of Kin used in it would automatically spot an enemy and determine what to shoot them with more or less, and besides normal bullets and big explosive bullets there were also parts of phantasms such as Call Beyond parasite to cause shooting of small projectiles, and lasers (I presume Kin eyes included were Amygdala's then..... rip)

I haven't finished working on that thing before alarm clock worked but dammit combining engine and Arcane was such a cool idea hahaha; I GOTTA use it somewhere

[therainingkiwi]

I am a Jew.

I did not know that civilians lived in Palestine until i was probably sixteen. SIXTEEN. You know when I first learned that Palestine existed? Oh, probably when I was three or four, in Hebrew school.

I was literally taught that Palestine is a nation of terrorists. I thought it was basically one giant army base where Hamas planned attacks, rather than a real country with hospitals and cities and schools. Again: I did not know that civilians and everyday non-terrorists lived in Palestine until I was a fucking TEENAGER (and even then, it was despite my synagogue's best efforts, not because they changed the shul curriculum or anything).

I'm not saying this because I'm proud. I am DEEPLY ashamed to have once believed this. It's why I focus my anti-Israel activism around the Jewish community in particular: I do not trust myself around Palestinians because I fear I haven't rooted out my prejudices enough for them to be safe in my company. I'm not sure I ever will.

But you need to know how intense Israeli propaganda is. You need to know WHY so many people can't distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Israel has spent lots of time and money on its international image. They've spent possibly even MORE time and money to smear Palestine into the mud. Israel relies on the world seeing their colonization as valiant Jews holding steadfast against evil Islamic terrorists. Without their indoctrination, they don't have power.

I hope Palestine rises higher and freer than Netanyahu's worst fucking nightmares.

I was asked why there's a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it's important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it's not about Hamas.

The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.

I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.

Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they're just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just... scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go "Arab." An Arab is an Arab. It's a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it's all the same to them.

It's a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.

Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren't the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don't create an ethnostate by sharing.

You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won't all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That's asking why they won't let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn't be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.

[roseverdict]

it is 4 AM which means it's Desperately Claw At Hobbies In An Attempt To Make Some Form Of Money To Set Aside So I Can Go Be An Adult Instead Of The Parentals' Puppet time!

[pricknim]

During my time i university I've come to the conclusion that ai bros are the most annoying type of programmers. Especially the ones that will go out of their way to learn some underground, barely documented language and are using some kind of special Linux distro. Like yall might be smart and shit, but you're still the most insufferable people on earth