#posting this here instead of on my main because. well

[fluffyglass]

ok here is the official frankie fluffyglass ceo of wigglefunny explanation of the plot of Something Ain't Right (this will be LONG)

It takes place a bit after The Cost of a Snack (as evidenced by Shelda having a new snakified leg), and starts out with Wambus internally monologuing about how he knows what the journalist (whom I'll be referring to as Stranger or "the stranger" for the rest of this post) did to Gramble, that specifically being feeding him bugsnax in his sleep. However, if you've read COAS I'm certain you recall that Wambus was not there and did not see what Stranger did. So how does he know they did it? The answer might surprise you: he doesn't.

Wambus is projecting. In the past (before the events of the game, and even before the events of The Fight), Wambus fed Gramble bugsnax. This is represented by the repeated motif of Kweebles rather than Strabbys. While in the present Gramble has a Strabby arm, when Wambus fed him bugsnax, he had a Kweeble arm instead. On the third page, when the stranger turns around and has Wambus's face, this is Wambus's conscience reminding him of what he did.

Wambus then turns to denial, asking himself different ways Gramble could have become snakified. Sleepwalking, lying about it, et cetera, but Wambus knows these aren't realistic. He knows what he (and by his own extension Stranger) did. Stranger being lit in red and Wambus being lit in green represent the respective bugsnax they gave Gramble. Also from this point on, Wambus isn't snakified, showing that the following events all take place in his mind rather than in reality.

Gramble's body being covered by black squares (which I'll refer to as censors) is Wambus's mind trying to block out things he doesn't want to see. Stranger showing up out of nowhere is kind of just an outlet for Wambus to incite his own self hatred. He hates and wants to kill the stranger for what they did, because he hates what he did in the past.

Throughout the ensuing fight, Stranger and their dialogue is censored. Why? Because Wambus isn't fighting the stranger. It's a reenactment of another horrible thing he did to Gramble in the past, that being The Fight. The censored dialogue is what Gramble said during the fight (which is irrelevant to the story), mirrored by Wambus parroting his own dialogue from then as well. That's why some of the dialogue doesn't seem to fit (see "Not when you've hurt so many", and him cutting himself off from saying "Weepy little rancher").

Then is the Big page, the only clear memory of the entire comic. He's blocked out so many things, but Wambus is never able to unsee the look of horror on Triffany's face when she witnessed The Fight. He's not looking at Gramble. He doesn't want to see Gramble. He can only clearly recall the instant he knew he was Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

The following page is mostly a blur. He sees Triffany (with Filbo hiding behind her; the two of them lie to cover this up later by calling it a fight rather than a one-sided assault. Also I'll mention that Gramble was so out of it that he can't remember The Fight either, so literally nobody can contradict the lie), then he sees Gramble, and then everything is drowned out by the knowledge that He Is Guilty. The last panel shows him waking up (now snakified again, this is real) in horror. Triffany next to him is censored because he can't stand to think about her face, looking at what he did.

Ummmm yeah that's basically the story of Something Aint Right. Other stuff that didnt fit anywhere else is the main pop colors being Blue and Orange which are Wambus and Stranger's fur colors, and Gramble's hat eyes always staring at Wambus.

This is the official explanation of a weird surreal art piece I made that is supposed to be speculative but I love talking about my own work too much to keep it that way.

Something Ain't Right - Bugsnax

[can-i-see-your-passport-please]

Hello girlies I need songs about computers/robots/AI so I can make a playlist and feel sad about it. I have a broad definition of "song about computer" here is what I have so far to show you what I mean by "broad definition"

I will explain any given song if asked

Please take this as an opportunity to recommend me songs about robots and androids and computers and such

[al-luviec]

still haven't moved on from zane in this episode (aka I hit tag limit again and am unhappy about it)

[cuteniaarts]

Digitalised + coloured + redesigned version of my Suiren and Vaatu sketch from two days ago, as promised!!

Coming up with Suiren’s design was a very long process of trying and failing because after you’ve drawn 9+ different versions of one character, the creativity starts to run a little dry, but I’m actually really proud of this one, she looks absolutely adorable <3

(Also yeah I did mostly just scribble Vaatu’s pattern because who has the energy to draw the all out accurately. Not me, that’s who, I’m chronically tired. People who draw him on the regular have my utmost respect. He’s still a funky little guy though :D)

Bonus, Raava incessantly screaming inside Suiren (and being completely ignored because Suiren is tired of her) while all this is happening:

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

In case it's hard to read/understand: "If I had a nickel for every time I had a story with a blonde girl named after a plant, who has a German father and a French mother but absolutely hates said mom, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice."

weird, extremely-specific tropes in my stories: pt 1

[sheyshen]

Something I want to build on with vincent at some point is how much the years of being an adventurer has taken a toll on him. he spent so long just being angry at the world but as he gets closer and closer to carteneau he does start recognizing how reckless he's been and the mistakes he's made over the years. friendships (especially with layla and nhea) helping him get a little closer to how he used to be before finally stopping and trying to do better for himself when he loses his leg. and the fact that guilt has really solidified in him to still make him push himself in his healing rather than combat (though sometimes still pushing himself too far) and how the years of treating himself like a weapon have taken a toll on his mind (he has terrible nightmares that only a select few have been able to help him through it)

[netscapenavigaytor]

actually i feel like a whole essay could be written about "Random Humor" and how it did not really go away so much as get rebranded and change its presentation somewhat. tumblr especially loves its absurdist non-sequiturs but it is afraid to call it as it is (random humor) and quite frankly some of the posts on this site WISH they could be as funny as a ytp from 2009. i havent the braincells right now (or maybe ever idk) to write such an essay though

[elegyofthemoon]

shaking you're lucky anti entropy visual novel is fucking broken again i think permanently i would not shut the fuck up about that visual novel

[kindnessoverperfection]

wild how the more i'm working on recovery. the more i realize how fucking bad i miss her.

[skelly-bean]

I love the character I’ve made for baldurs gate 3 SO. MUCH!

I feel like there is so much going on with them visually but I don’t even care they’re amazing

I also love the guardian I made a lot too - definitely put way less time into making her but I was so tired of overthinking in character creation haha

[kethsi]

Not to take away from everyone’s hype about the upcoming skill (of course I am hyped too!) but Cani already is a neck romancer...

[heyitslapis]

My posts are always like a fucking iceberg

[liquifiedfurby]

literally giggling and kicking my feet rn from researching birds.

[jadevine]

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

Update March 1, 2024: Hey there folks, here's yet another update! I reposted Part 2a (the "medieval warhorses" tangent) to my writing blog, and I went down MORE of the horse-knowledge rabbit hole! https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/741423906984951808/my-post-got-cut-off-so-i-added-the-rest-of-it Update Jan 30, 2024: Hey folks, I've posted the updated version of this post on my blog, so I don't have to keep frantically telling everyone "hey, that's the old version of this post!" https://thebalangay.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/preindustrial-travel-times-part-1/

I should get the posts about army travel times and camp followers reformatted and posted to my blog around the end of the week, so I'll filter through my extremely tangled thread for them.

Part 2 - Preindustrial ARMY travel times: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/739342239113871360/now-for-a-key-aspect-that-many-people-often-ask

Part 2a - How realistic warhorses look and act, because the myth of "all knights were mounted on huge clunky draft horses" just refuses to die: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/732043691180605440/helpful-things-for-action-writers-to-remember

Part 3 - Additional note about camp followers being regular workers AND sex-workers: https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/740604203134828544/reblogging-the-time-looped-version-of-my

--

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" per day. 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, so by the time you're done slogging through drier patches of wetlands or squeezing through trees, a deceptively short 10-15 miles in rough terrain might take you a whole day to walk instead of the usual half-day.

If you are traveling in freezing winters 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.

Traveling in TOO-HOT weather is just as bad, because pushing yourself too hard and getting dehydrated at noon in the tropics will literally kill you. It's called heat-STROKE, not "heat-PARTY."

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.

—

UPDATE January 13: Several people have gotten curious and looked at maps, to find out how a lot of cities are indeed spread out at a nice distance of 20-30 miles apart! I love getting people interested in my hyperfixations, lol.

But remember that this is the space between CITIES AND TOWNS. There should never be a 20-mile stretch of empty wilderness between City A and Town B, unless your world explains why folks are able to build a city in the middle of nowhere, or if something has specifically gone wrong to wipe out its supporting villages!

Period pieces often portray a shining city rising from a sea of picturesque empty land, without a single grain field or cow pasture in sight, but that city would starve to death very quickly in preindustrial times.

Why? Because as Bret Devereaux mentions in his “Lonely Cities” article (https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/), preindustrial cities and towns must have nearby villages (and even smaller towns, if large and prosperous enough!) to grow their food for them.

The settlements around a city will usually be scattered a few miles apart from each other, usually clustered along the roads to the city gates. Those villages and towns at the halfway point between cities (say 10-15 miles) are going to be essential stops for older/sick folks, merchants with cargo, and large groups like noble’s retinues and army forces.

Preindustrial armies and large noble retinues usually can’t make it far past 10-12 miles per day, as denoted in my addition to this post. (https://www.tumblr.com/jadevine/739342239113871360/now-for-a-key-aspect-that-many-people-often-ask )

[autolenaphilia]

This post has been in the back of my mind ever since i saw it last year because it is a mask off moment for a usually more subtle transmisogynist. : I blacked out the account names being accused in the screenshot above, because i don't want to be spreading fake transmisogynistic callouts around even to be criticquing them.

Like "trans women are sexual predators who use their identity as queer women as cover to prey on children and other vulnerable people, and liberals are too afraid of being called transmisogynistic to stop them" is like the basic transmisogynist narrative. It's literally the terf narrative about trans women. This is the real terf rhetoric, not trans women criticizing (trans)misogyny.

Yet it is still so common among ostensibly transfem-accepting liberals/leftists. Like trans women using their identity as a shield against legitimate criticism of their predatory behavior is such a common trope in queer spaces that claim to be against terfs. This is because TME people use hating on terfs as a substitute for dealing with their own transmisogyny.

This is extremely common among people in the callout culture transmisogyny fandom like the screenshotted blogger.They go for this line about "transfems using their identity as a shield against genuine criticism" all the time when their obvious if lightly veiled transmisogyny is pointed out. This is their main argument, their own shield against criticism. And it rings very hollow when these people call out transfem after transfem as sexual predators based on them liking harmless kinks like fauxcest and CNC, literally using old radfem arguments against kink.

What this sort of thing is, is the denial that transmisogyny even exists. A claim that instead of being an especially oppressed class of women, we are actually a privileged group. And terfs here are open about saying it's because we are men and have male privilege. The more subtle kind of transmisogynist, the "trans women are women, terfs dni" crowd, leaves the trans women have male privilege bit unsaid but implied.

And of course it's false. As people are surely aware, being transfem makes you more likely to publicly accused of being a sexual menace. And they are most likely false accusations. Accusations against the privileged and powerful, like cis men, are seldom false. The social power that these men wield make it dangerous for any victim to come forward.

Accusations towards members of marginalized groups like transfems, however, are easy and safe to make, because they don't have that kind of social power or privilege. Their position in any social setting is tenuous, and it's easy to turn the group against them to exile them. Transfems don't have the power to defend themselves even against the flimsiest of accusations, while privileged men can defend themselves even against the most well-documented ones. Transfems are instead more likely to be victims of abuse, and then DARVOed by their abusers, being accused of abuse when they were actually abused.

The fact is that transfems can "scream transmisogyny" but few TME people, including other lgbt people, are not likely to listen.

And this is not a "white girl" problem despite what the screenshotted post implies. This problem is far worse for black transfems suffering from transmisogynynoir, and other non-white transfems. Read writings written by black transfems like Position of Guilt: Black Hot Allostatic Load by Anonsee Storyweaver.

[phantom-of-the-memes]

Since I’ve been making posts about American/ British entitlement towards Ireland, I thought I’d talk about this video here.

I am a student at this college. It’s a big tourist attraction for many reasons, but the main one being that the book of Kells is kept here. I am also from Kells itself, but Dublin having the book and not Kells is a whole other issue.

So this protest that’s been happening over the the past few weeks is in response to the college once again raising rents for student accommodation to astronomical rates. That being when rent in Dublin (and Ireland as a whole) is already unliveable. You’d find cheaper rent off student accommodation, but it’s hardly easy to find places like this. As well as this, the majority of the student accommodation isn’t even on campus to begin with. Most are about a 45 minute luas journey away. So what the fuck are you paying for?

This protest is necessary. It’s been a long time coming. Time and time again they prioritise tourists over us. Buildings are old and falling apart, equipment isn’t functional, accessibility is god awful. I know this because I am disabled and use a rollator, but I can’t even use it on campus most days because there’s simply no ramps/ elevators in some buildings.

In one of my lectures last week we were in one of the old buildings. We had a lot of content to cover, but of course the projector wasn’t working. The professor spent fourty minutes trying to get the computer/ projector to work, but to no avail. So we have a whole lecture to catch up on! All of this while I was looking out the window at this atrocity:

A new building for tourists! Yay!

They’ve been building new school buildings for years, but of course instead of finishing them, they’ll spend their time and money on the tourists. I’m not even having an exam in one of my modules because they told the professor that there simply isn’t enough room to host our class for the exam. And it would be “too expensive” to book a venue… it’s only a class of about thirty. He had written a whole exam and we were under the impression we’d have one, but now it’s just continuous assessment I guess!

So you have to understand why we’re not exactly jumping for joy for the tourists. There are hundreds on campus everyday, just generally being annoying and entitled. And yes DISCLAIMER; not all tourists, not all Americans/ British people, blah, blah. But from my experience, you do encounter some obnoxious people everyday.

So that’s why they blocked entrance to the book of Kells. That’s why it’s disgusting for the tourists to be arguing with them and demanding entrance. For once we just want our college to prioritise us! So yeah we will revoke your entitlement, because we are the ones who study here, we are the ones who have to LIVE here.