#personal blathering

[magnificentsapcaddy]

There's that post I think of a lot about what the different fantasy races' TV shows would be like, and I kind of want to do that for my fantasy world. Because I'm trying to defy the classic fantasy stereotypes and this seems like a fun exercise.

DWARVES

The notion of a dwarvish television show is kind of like the idea of a human television show - they're so far spread that it's hard to pin it down to just one thing, but in Bant, the main continent where my books take place, it's all sooo self-serious. They're putting out soap operas with the pomp and gravity of a funeral. They're also broadcasting 19-hour-long operas and antiquing shows where they tell you why everything is garbage.

ORCS

Think of the most harrowing episode of television you've seen in your life. We're talking major character death. We're talking people dying for NOTHING, real "not Penny's boat" type shit. Like, Romeo committing suicide and then Juliet committing suicide immediately afterwards. Tonally speaking, this is to orcish TV what the "let's go to a hot spring!" episode of a shonen anime is.

PLATYDONTS

So, as a bit of backstory, the platydonts used to be humans but then had an Atlantis happen to them and were stuck in a ~2,000 mile wide time bubble for hundreds of thousands of years. So they're like, fish/seal guys. And I think they're doing soap operas too, but in the dwarvish soap operas, you can't even get to be a background character without an acting degree, and in a platydont soap opera, you can just walk on the set and someone's like, "Yeah, gimme a second, I'll write you in." BIG theater kid vibes from them. Dwarvish TV is serious and orcish TV is brutal, but platydont TV is 18-year-olds wailing and ripping their shirts off over a corpse who is trying to slyly check their phone.

ELVES

I don't expect anyone reading this to know what A Prairie Home Companion is, and truth be told I've never even listened to it either, but I feel like it's all just that. Just some guy in a rocking chair in a plain white studio, "Saw a ladybug the other... you used to see a lot of them in the summer." Bob Ross shows for growing bonsai trees and shaping stalactites. Panel shows where there's even less of a point to the game and it's just four elves like, "You remember how they used to make flour out of acorns in 2749 BA? That was nice. Can't get them like that any more."

PIXIES

Pixies, unlike most of the other sentient species of Tor, were formed from clay and, despite standing about three inches tall, can take a hell of a lot more of a beating than humans. They're making police procedurals where they're shooting at one another with real guns for real and they're fine. Tonight on Pixie Jackass, Merry Brightberry is going to fell a 95-foot-tall oak tree directly on Gorgeous Sunset's head and then cast a spell to make the tree explode, levelling the forest for 500 yards around it. Gorgeous Sunset comes out rubbing his jaw, "Oh, you fuckin' rascal!"

GNOMES

I think gnomes are mostly against television as a concept, but if you gave a gnome a camcorder, you're getting, like, Worker and Parasite back. They're watching Un Chien Andalou and laughing and clapping at some parts and getting pissed off and storming out of the theater at others, and there's no apparent context as for why. Everything is in five-hundred layers of innuendo and metaphor. Peeling back all the layers usually reveals an unfortunately conservative moral, but even then, it's like, "It is a man's RIGHT to stew a pumpkin for three days and three nights under the mullberry bush. And the woke left DOESN'T want you to know."

[fossore]

I know it’s “winter” but the magnolia down the street (early) has flowers and our magnolia (late) has buds. The cats have started shedding. The hummingbird who nests in our yard is making her nest. What I’m saying is despite all astronomic classification and whatever the rest of the country is experiencing, it’s definitely spring here.

[shaydh]

All those "your life matters don't give up hope" posts do nothing for me but what motivates me is that alive, i might find myself in a position where i can drive a right winger to kill themselves :)

[plusultraetc]

okay but what if seeing quirkless pro hero Deku on the news inspires quirkless former-pro Takami Keigo to try the whole hero thing again, but this time on his own terms

[zagz]

sometimes i’ll be like “well! what if idc. what if i decided i’ll stop trying to be a good person.” & then i remember bad moments when i was mean & quite possibly hurt someone & i’ll start coughing up blood

[riverlark]

willpower check failed, new project started…

[shabbytigers]

went to optometrist and they told me my eyes are fine and not to get new reading glasses, which is good news, now if only i could see after midnight 💀 obvi there are no optometrist appointments at the time of night at which i start having problems, so i guess i just live like this now. there is no dignity in aging

also went to a contender for the best supermarket i’ve come across in the city, edeka no 1 in steglitz forum: huge, broad selection, fresh produce, soothing pmc vibes a la waitrose or whole foods. overall i am a kaufland proponent on selection and pricing but the lighting will chip away at your hp the whole time you’re in one

now aggressively doing laundry

had a decent appetite before but now that i’m done with errands and food is at my disposal, it’s gone. wtf. when will my visceral interest in food come back from the war

[kjack89]

A TERF decided to follow this blog this morning (during pride?? The actual audacity), and while I blocked them immediately, it feels like a good time to remind everyone:

Trans women are women;

Trans men are men;

Nonbinary and genderqueer/fluid people are who they say they are; and most importantly of all

This tumblr is and always will be a safe place for trans and queer folks, just as the vast majority of the Les Mis fandom has, in my experience, been a safe place.

And terfs can get fucked 😘

[oflights]

there's no way quidditch is actually fun imo. like i know the seeker thing and how illogical it is has been talked to death but the whole overall concept is so stupid. imagine you're a world class chaser and you're amazing and everything you do is invalidated (or validated) by the performance of one specific player who has nothing else to do with the rest of the players. you have good stats but your win record means absolutely nothing.

there's little strategy; a good defense depends entirely the keeper, which is another way all the positions are just completely disconnected from each other. they could all be playing different sports and nothing would make a difference. beaters are there for Violence ("ethically mean-spirited"). god there are so many bludger moments in fic (and in the books too tbh) that are so dramatic and injurious and it's literally just the beaters playing their stupid position the way they're meant to lol.

i know the reasonings behind this are like: jkr fundamentally doesn't understand sports in even basic ways; the seeker position has to be for The Most Special Guy and that has to be harry always because he wouldn't be Special Enough if the entire game didn't ride on his shoulders; jkr is a bad writer. very annoying that this huge insidious piece of worldbuilding is so bad!!!

[treasuredplanet]

plans to see sleeping at last tonight and based on where we’re at emotionally I’m going to start openly sobbing during the first 0.5 seconds of saturn

[deercharm]

🩷

[magnificentsapcaddy]

I might be talking out of my ass here, but I think it's a lot more fun to do additive writing rather than subtractive writing.

An example. I'm writing a fantasy story. We have elves, we have dwarves, we have gnomes, and we have orcs. And, because I am a big fucking nerd, I started to think about what the orcish language would be like. I came up with a few ground rules

The orcish language has two tones, rising and falling. There is no neutral tone. If you have a bunch of syllables in a row and with a rising tone, and they're all unstressed, you just keep going up and up and up until you either hit a stressed syllable or a falling tone syllable, at which point you drop to a base starting point. Likewise for falling tones.

Like a lot of languages, it's a CV pattern language. Every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel. No exceptions.

Sort of half a serious linguistic effort and half a joke: because orcs "evolved from pigs" like how humans "evolved from apes", their phonology is all pig-like sounds. Lots of plosives and nasals: P's, B's, K's, G's, M's, and N's. And a bilabial trill, just for fun.

However, after being in the weeds of creating the orcish language for a while, I realized that my already-established orc character is named Gog Denka. It's not Góg Denkà; it has no accents. It's not Goga Denaka; there's a solo G at the end of his first name. And the orcish language doesn't have a D in it.

So, one might think, I could either scrap the orcish language and start from scratch, or I could rename this character I've already become attached to.

Or, I could do what I did and say that that's the South Island Orcish Language, and Gog Denka is a North Island Orc.

I don't know. I just think writing is supposed to be fun, and I think it's more fun to expand the world instead of shrinking it down

[fossore]

Forcing myself to get more comfortable driving at night, on highways, and to unfamiliar places was a secondary goal of getting the breakaway pass but it’s actually been decently effective so far

Also the drive from my house to the tank (well, the mall I’ve been parking at for free) took about an hour and a half tonight and in light of that a 7:30 start time makes perfect sense. There were two accidents though, traffic free Google maps puts it closer to 50’.

[shaydh]

Unfortunately I post on dating apps like I am posting on tumblr and I don’t think that works

[plusultraetc]

post-canon Tokoyami takes Hawks flying with him sometimes :(

[g4yr4t]

when someone is idolizing you and you have to be like "look last weekend I didn't come back home on Sunday until 8am bc I was up all night drinking and snorting coke with my friends" so they don't start thinking too highly of you