#it is nothing like it’s source material but it is so good

[roach-works]

Why did wheat become a widespread staple crop given that it's difficult to harvest/transport/etc? This is not meant to be snarky or combative in any way, it's a genuine question. Are there any books you'd recommend for learning more about this kind of economic and technological history? Thanks.

sorry, i've long since forgotten all the actual books i've read about it, but i will always recommend This Guy:

also as very much a non-expert, my semi-informed opinion on Wheat is that growing complicated and difficult compared to going to the grocery store, and doesn't stack up very well to living in a food forest like north and south americans managed, either.

however, wheat is a grass, and grass grows in a lot of places that people also like to live in, and so wheat farming isn't as crazy a venture as it might otherwise seem.

in a lot of climates, it's possible to plant the grass, harvest the grass seeds, and store the seeds long enough to get you through the part of the year where there's nothing much to eat. if you manage your social and material technology right, you can store a lot of the seeds, and you can even transport them around before they rot, meaning you can now export the seeds from places where grass grows into places where it doesn't. the stalks of the grass that you can't eat provides food for the animals you need to help you grow the grass. and transport the seeds, too.

the social structure required to grow wheat in bulk (a steep and violent hierarchy) does three things: feeds everyone in it with enough extra that the guys on the bottom of the organization can survive to grow more wheat next year, and allows the guys on the top can sequester the rest as profit, consolidating their power. the third thing is that as land is converted to wheat fields, it stops yielding any other food but wheat, which locks people into the system for good. once a people depend on a staple cereal grain for their main source of calories, there isn't an easy way back: forests are chewed away for more wheat fields and those woodlands that remain are shifted towards hardwoods for agricultural tools, rather than food forests with fruit/nuts/shrubs, and even those maintained as game preserves still can't support the needs of entire villages.

in arid and semi-arid conditions, it's even harder to step away from dependence on grain farming because there the agricultural development is along rivers where the land can be irrigated, and the population of people supported by grain production is extremely concentrated into those small areas rather than spread across the entire biome.

in the northern parts of eurasia where grain couldn't be produced at scale because it was too rocky and too cold, people mostly went fishing, and when they grew stuff it was hardy root crops like beets and turnips.

DISCLAIMER: this is all very approximate. but now you know as much as i know.

P.S actually here's the last thing about wheat: it probably all started as a way to reliably source and produce beer, which was invented a long time before bread. bread was invented from wheat when the guys who were producing the beer seeds wanted to start exporting beer seeds to people who wanted beer far away, so they baked the seeds into tablets you could easily transport and then ferment with water once you got to your destination. eventually the traders who were transporting the beer kits started eating them, too, and crackers as a snack food really took off. look up the wikipedia article on beer if you don't believe me.

[ckret2]

i am FASCINATED by the little scraps i've heard about bill's uncle. am i allowed to know more about him. and if the answer is no do you have a chapter estimate for when i am

yeah sure, I already made a post on Bill's mom, I've finally got enough material to make a post on Bill's dad.

Bill got his gorgeous eyelashes, warm color scheme, black limbs, and personality from his mom. He got his shape, his brick lines, and his slitted pupil from his dad. His dad's a self-made businessman*! (*His dad got suckered into joining a multi-level marketing scheme and now he makes money by suckering other people into joining the MLM scheme.)

And: his dad has a brother. They're twiiins!

Bill keeps targeting twins. (The Stans, the kids, TBOB says Pyronica's got a twin sister Hydronica...) I imagine Bill's twin obsession is rooted in something close to home.

Because Euclid & Euler's eye split in half mid-development, they have unusually oval-shaped eyes—a common sign of twins. They've been going to an optometrist since they were toddlers to deal with poor eyesight and floaters in their peripheral vision. They've had a mix of surgery, corrective lenses, and medication to narrow their field of view to the area they can see clearly. So when baby Billy said he was seeing "bright white dots" on "the outside of everything," Euclid went aha! He knows exactly what Bill's seeing!

He did not, in fact, know what Bill was seeing.

Bill's parents didn't regularly visit family, but Euler was the one relative they saw most often. He was the first person to snap out of the "haha it sure is funny how Bill can guess when somebody's about to knock on the door" rationalizations to realize that Bill really could see things no one else did.

And since Bill's parents are sort of disasters who think starting a cult is a great get-rich-quick scheme, Euler was one of the most emotionally stable role models in Bill's life. It sure is a good thing that Euler was a constant presence and nothing happened to him during Bill's tender formative years!

"But wait," you say, "you told us that Bill got his shape and slit pupil from his dad. But wouldn't that mean he got genes for a square? And how could he have gotten a slit pupil if that wasn't a genetic trait, but a consequence of an eyeball splitting in half?"

Triangles and slit pupils don't run in Euclid's side of the family. But squares and twins do.

I imagine Bill's twin obsession is rooted in something close to home.

"So Steve exists in your headcanon—?" No. He's a stillbirth his parents pretend doesn't exist. He's a crime Bill committed before he was born. He's the imaginary phantom Bill's parents are searching for when they look at Bill—starting fires, hallucinating, spitting up his medicine—and wonder what he'd be like if he was different. He's a symbol representing a source of unconditional love and support that Bill deserved and needed, but never had. Steve's all those things—but he doesn't and never has existed.

And there at last is my Euclid headcanons post. If y'all are interested & didn't see it, here's my Scalene headcanons post! And some headcanons about shape twins that still basically work post-TBOB, we just know now that Euclideans don't need a line and a polygon to reproduce.

(95% of my headcanons about Bill's dad & uncle are pre-TBOB. The only difference is that I originally designed Euclid & Euler as green trapezoids that had split from a hexagon. Trapezoids so that Bill and his dad could do this, green so that Bill's dad could be the original color Bill was designed as before the Gravity Falls crew made him yellow & so that his family could be money-colored: gold-colored Bill & mom, dollar-bill-colored dad.)

(After TBOB/TINAWDC revealed his dad's a triangle and either red or blue, I decided to make the twins blue-green (because I wanted to keep in that "bill's original color scheme" reference) and finagle it so that Euler could still be a trapezoid; after Pyramid Steve came out, I suddenly had a really good thematic reason to make them blue-green. I'd been playing with the idea of making Bill a shoulda-beena twin, Steve finalized that decision by giving me a physical design that could tie into Bill's extended family.)

[dreamyzworldlove]

how do i explain to people that one of the most formative fanfictions i’ve ever read is a polyamorous sanders sides fic that takes place in a small dubiously alive town in Appalachia where every child is taught to how to not get abducted by the fae that live in the forest. it also might be inspired by the crowned prince series

[deerspherestudios]

Hi! I just want to say that I like the new update for mushroom oasis! Can't describe it with my words but I really like your concepts for it!

I have a question to ask it's not a interesting one i think, why Mycehal call the mc firefly? It's pretty cute nickname but does he use it only mc when he found them?

Like i say it's not interesting one but i was curious, hope you have a good day and stay hydrated

Are you asking if he uses it only for MC, or for anyone he comes across? Personally, I think he only uses it for MC but it can also be accepted it's a given pet name to anyone he comes across (like how some people just comfortably refer to strangers as 'honey', 'sweetie', etc) and mean nothing by it. Both works ::-)!

Funnily enough there is a brief mention of why he uses it in the Day 3 script, so I don't think it makes the question uninteresting at all haha! Although that does mean it counts as spoilers (sorta) but he does explain why he calls you 'firefly' eventually ::-)

Then again I'm re-writing the Day 3 script so who knows, we'll see how it goes!

[markantonys]

is ROP lacking in the female character department or have i just been way too spoiled by the plethora of them in WOT? lmao

like, galadriel's excellent, 10/10 no notes. but it feels like the others are always playing second fiddle in a storyline the source material designed to be about men (disa, miriel), or are bopping around on a charming sidequest that, while important as a breath of lightness amidst the heavy stuff, is nowhere near as compelling as the ring-related storylines (nori, poppy). (or had to get written out due to the actress leaving; such a shame because i imagine bronwyn would've been a big player in the southlands storyline this season.)

and i think it mostly comes down to source material. i have a vivid childhood memory of reading the hobbit and then the fellowship of the ring and then quitting because i got bored and cranky about there not being any girls except for arwen in like 2 chapters, so i would not be surprised if much of ROP's source material is similar, where the vast majority of the important players are men. and the show is doing what it can to add in more ladies, but it's just tough to make them feel like they're on an equal level of narrative importance as the men for whom the story was originally designed.

and that makes me so incredibly thankful for WOT and the huge amount of story-driving women RJ baked into the story. i give him flak for some things, but in this regard he was truly ahead of his time! and ahead of OUR time, even today it's rare to see a (mainstream) story with such a wide array of female characters. and that's made the show's job easy; it doesn't have to fight the source material to make women important in the narrative, because they already are. i saw a text post the other day about "tasting the good bologna" and how you can never be satisfied with a mid-quality thing again after you've had the most luxurious version, and boy have i tasted the good bologna with WOT and female characters.

[mellowmaidenhairs]

i think ppl who are super online or into fandom should watch/read/etc something without ever touching fandom discourse or making aus or shipping characters just like every once in a while

[okimightbecrazy]

Me every time I hear people talking about Wizard of Oz characters in the context of Wicked: Okay, but Wicked is a fanfiction of the Wizard of Oz. You know that, right?

[queenhawke]

braddavid is so funny bc like. mq's main relationship (grimmpop) is so interesting and layered and complicated and is without a doubt the heart of the show yet so many people (including me) collectively went ummmm but what about the two funny middle aged men. what if they fucked

[transvampireboyfriend]

*banging on my mutual's bedroom door* CAN I PLEASE SEND YOU Y/N FANFIC THAT I WANT TO BE A HATER ABOUT

[lesbianralzarek]

sometimes the ships i hate arent even that bad, but just so far removed from canon that 90% of dogshit takes in the fandom are made by those shippers, so i develop a rage response to a ship thats just so whatever

[bearenjoyers]

sorry im just thinking about bcs but like. why not add a few smaller scenes of gus interacting with his own men? why does it seem like, in comparison, mike is almost immediately elevated to a higher status than those two in bcs purely because we actually get to see him having normal conversations with gus? like i understand they might not keep the plot moving as well because of the fact obviously if victor is currently doing something it’s because gus told him to etc. but for the most part all of the smaller interactions gus does have with those two ends up being in a somewhat high stress situation where it feels very tense between everyone. and it’s just like damn! is it always like that?? why do those two even care that much about their jobs if their boss is a bit of a dick? etc. i think even an additional scene or two with those guys (either alone or the both of them) talking with gus in a more normal situation could’ve both added a bit more depth into how gus treats his employees (we got a lot with how he treats lyle and co., but not a whole lot with the illegal side of things), how comfortable vic and tyrus feel around him in a calmer setting, and exactly why they both feel the need to be as loyal as they are to the guy.

and also on the other side of this i don't think it'd hurt to maybe elaborate on their pay just a bit..? i'm not saying to randomly put a number out into the atmosphere but i just mean some smaller things like. do they buy nicer things for themselves? what's their housing situation? what's their car situation? are the escalade / yukon their own vehicles or does gus just use those two for business situations? do they use them when they're doing their own stuff off the clock or do they have their own cars? etc. that can also help with understanding their motivations a bit. don't get me wrong i don't think they should be visibly rich or something because that's not what gus would want but just smaller things! cause it's easy to write their loyalty off as Well they probably get paid super well, which i'm sure is true, but if they don't show a single hint of that then what's the point. even something as simple as giving tyrus a nice watch, or maybe victor having a nicer looking gun, etc. something small like that. because as it stands right now the average 41 year old viewer who watched the show once only knows and will only ever know victor and tyrus as those two guys in the background who do random stuff for gus with no clear motivation. just the personification of "On it boss (salute emoji)". and to be honest this is true for a whole lot of fans who do watch the show multiple times and enjoy thinking about it more in depth, because on screen we barely have anything about the two.

and to be clear i'm not trying to say we should have an episode just for them or something like no i understand they're side characters. i understand we don't need all that. and i understand this is also primarily Jimmy's show. but it's not like these two are on the same level as like, arlo or paige and kevin etc. these guys have been around since brba. victor was literally introduced in the same episode gus was. and they are a huge part of gus's story, especially in brba. s4 wouldn't have been what it was without victor and tyrus. and in bcs, ignacio's situation wouldn't have been the same if it weren't for victor and tyrus as well. and i just personally believe that if their goal with gus in bcs was to go back and elaborate on how everything came to be and show what he was like a few years younger, they could've dragged victor and tyrus into that. and i think his character would've benefited from taking that extra step with those two.

[garlic-sauc3]

versions of booster gold made by people who obviously dont know much about booster can be so infuriating because they tend to depict him as stupid or as a joke and then people who only know him from these depictions in more popular media have a skewed impression of him

[angeloftrumpets]

this man website updated and

[hidingoutbackstage]

Tbh I feel like if your only interest in a fandom is in the popular aus that popular users make then maybe you don’t actually like the content of the media

[imminent-danger-came]

There ain't nothing Shera does that Lego Monkie Kid doesn't do better.

[neomedievalistbr]

she master on my chief till i collection