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afteriwake:

Fic Line Guessing Game
A – go to my AO3/FF.net/Wattpad and pick out a line or three from one of my stories. Must be a full line, please – no sentence fragments or speech tags or other such nonsense.
B – I will respond with which story of mine I think it’s from.
C – A drabble (type-thing) to anyone who stumps me.

(via plaidadder)

flyingonravenwings:

apilgrimpassingby:
I thought today - the TV show I’d really like to see is one about a medieval monastery.
You could have all kinds of characters: the pious guy who joined because he wanted to serve God, the son born out of wedlock sent there to cover up his parents’ shame, the geek who wanted to study Latin but couldn’t afford to go into university, the former knight sick of violence and afraid for his soul… Plus monasteries were centres of pilgrimage and places where criminals could take refuge, so we can have a lot of characters who crop up for a few episodes and leave.
Some plotlines I thought of:
Our relics aren’t bringing in the pilgrims the way they used to - what do we do?
A women fleeing an abusive marriage has taken shelter in the monastery - how will the brothers respond to having a women in their midst?
One of the monks wants to leave - will the abbot accept or not?
A murderer has taken refuge in the abbey, and the abbot decides to try and save his soul - what will happen?
People are coming to the monastery for food during the famine, but the monastery is itself short of food - how will this be dealt with?
War has broken out between two local lords, and the monks attempt to broker a treaty - will it work?
I’ve already mentioned some reasons why I think this setting would lend itself to television, but I’d also love to make it for two other reasons:
Get people to understand how weird medieval religion could get, but also that, within its own frame of reference, it was a reasonable and consistent belief system.
Show people that the Middle Ages consisted of more than just muddy people stabbing each other and burning scientists at the stake.
You have just literally described Cadfael
a 90’s BBC procedurial where an up and coming Derek Jacobi is a former Crusader turned monk who solves crimes
VERY historically accurate, with a big focus on the belief systems of the time and practical discussion of world Views
He has to deal with local politics during the Anarchy, wrestle with religious extremism, discusses the seperation between Catholicism and Islam, rival Abbeys, the protection of knowledge in what some percieve as an ignorant world
The entire Series is free on Youtube

(via educatedinyellow)

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

Have you ever noticed how some shops are so posh their food stops tasting good. Why is anyone still shopping at Pret a Manger? You’re like “Ah, I fancy getting a delicious sandwich, perhaps I shall get a cheese and ham,” and then the ham is 0.01 mm thick from a soon-to-be extinct heritage pig in Portugal and the cheese is a memory of cheddar made by artisans from Sicily and most of the filling is rocket and chia and sunflower grains all in a tasteless mini-baguette, and the overall effect is not Cheese and Ham Sandwich, no; it is Joyless Seeds On Sad Bread. And it’s £12.

plaidadder:

Long Boring Task Day, Holiday Edition!
I have a long boring task for today. Ask me things and I will endeavor to divert! Holiday themed or otherwise!

Still doin’ the task, still open for asks.

A question my kid frequently asks me, to which I haven't yet managed to find a satisfactory answer: What is the funniest and/or weirdest thing that's ever happened to you?

solointhesand

plaidadder:

Oh man, I’m too old to answer this one. I have lived too long and seen too much.
Here is a weird memory that has stuck with me over the decades: In my dorm in college there was a basement level we called the “steam tunnels.” Like the rest of the stories the steam tunnels went in a big square around a central courtyard, and there were rooms off the corridor (the practice rooms were down there, there was a kitchen, a game room, etc.). I was walking along the corridor and I heard this rushing sound coming from one of the rooms. The door was open so I went in.
The ceiling was made of square acoustic tiles held up by these metal strips. One of the squares had come out. And gushing through the hole made by this missing tile was a column of steaming hot water. It was just blasting from above the ceiling onto the floor, in an unending torrent driven with such force that it basically kept its vertical shape even though it was no longer contained by a pipe. Just a solid pillar of hot water, with steam rising from the hot puddle on the floor that was getting bigger and bigger. The room was empty.
When you see something like that which is just…inexplicably incongruous…there’s this moment where you’re like, “This seems really weird. But it’s happening. Does that mean this is normal?” In this case, I stared at the falling column of boiling hot water and thought, “Is that supposed to be there? Do people know about this?” And then I decided that probably they didn’t and I went off to go find someone who might know how to address the problem.

Bonus answer, both weird and funny:

Mrs. P’s mother used to host this big Christmas party for the whole extended family. Mrs. P has a bunch of older cousins, many of whom have had several children. So after we had been together for a while, I attended my first one of these parties. With that many people, of course, it’s sort of chaos. I was standing in the living room having a cocktail party conversation with some of these extended family people, and I happened to look over toward the piano. One of the boys had one of his cousins by the shirt, had backed him up against the piano bench, and was punching him in the head. In a room full of adults. I was the only one who had noticed.

I looked at the puncher and yelled out, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

Everyone stopped and followed my gaze. The respective parents pulled the kids apart and the puncher was taken on a brisk walk around the block by his dad. There were no further punching incidents. But anyway, that was my introduction to the extended family: “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

A question my kid frequently asks me, to which I haven't yet managed to find a satisfactory answer: What is the funniest and/or weirdest thing that's ever happened to you?

solointhesand

Oh man, I’m too old to answer this one. I have lived too long and seen too much.

Here is a weird memory that has stuck with me over the decades: In my dorm in college there was a basement level we called the “steam tunnels.” Like the rest of the stories the steam tunnels went in a big square around a central courtyard, and there were rooms off the corridor (the practice rooms were down there, there was a kitchen, a game room, etc.). I was walking along the corridor and I heard this rushing sound coming from one of the rooms. The door was open so I went in.

The ceiling was made of square acoustic tiles held up by these metal strips. One of the squares had come out. And gushing through the hole made by this missing tile was a column of steaming hot water. It was just blasting from above the ceiling onto the floor, in an unending torrent driven with such force that it basically kept its vertical shape even though it was no longer contained by a pipe. Just a solid pillar of hot water, with steam rising from the hot puddle on the floor that was getting bigger and bigger. The room was empty.

When you see something like that which is just…inexplicably incongruous…there’s this moment where you’re like, “This seems really weird. But it’s happening. Does that mean this is normal?” In this case, I stared at the falling column of boiling hot water and thought, “Is that supposed to be there? Do people know about this?” And then I decided that probably they didn’t and I went off to go find someone who might know how to address the problem.

The Magnus Archives Entities as Literary Movements

Here follows a slightly fictionalized version of a conversation I had with PJ today. We were walking along a beach in the fog. The beach was deserted because it is December.

PJ: This is very The Lonely.

ME: Yes. You know I’ve been thinking about how many of the Magnus Archives entities are actually features of the sublime.

PJ: What’s the sublime?

Keep reading

Of Love and Perfection

So last night, I went to go see my local dance school’s idiosyncratic production of The Nutcracker. It’s half Nutcracker and half dance recital–this school focuses a lot on ballet but they also teach hip hop, tap, and various other dance forms, so they incorporate those classes into the show. This allows them to replace some of the cheesy international stereotype dances in the Land of Sweets, which is a not inconsiderable side benefit. Anyway, I went because my friends have a kid in the show and I wanted to support them.

I really enjoyed it, actually more than I was expecting to, and that made me happy. I do community theater, and as much as I love our shows, I’m always secretly wondering whether people in the audience are really enjoying the show or just being good sports because they love us (because the audience is inevitably mostly friends and family of the cast). So it was nice to be able to go to someone else’s amateur show and be genuinely glad to be there. I realized at some point that part of it had to do with the fact that most of the dancers had ordinary bodies.

Most professional ballet companies select for the same very specific ideal body type, and insist on sort of machine-sculpting all of their dancers to fit it. When you go to see The Nutcracker done by a professional outfit, all the women will have more or less the same shape and they will all also be able to do amazing feats of athleticism while also being slender and willowy to the point where they can actually sort of create the illusion that they are boneless. At this Nutcracker, there was a range of body types, and there was not the same uniformity of extension, toe-pointing, etc. Sometimes you could tell how @#$! hard it is to be on pointe. And as much as I enjoy the professionals, I found myself moved by this show in a different and maybe more profound way. Most of these dancers aren’t going to go on to do this for a living. But they’re doing it, well, because they love it enough to want to do it well, *while* doing all the other stuff that ordinary life demands that they do.

The root of the word “amateur” is from the Latin verb for love. And there’s something important and irreplaceable to me about being in a theater with all that love.

During the summer Olympics, Google ran an ad for their AI, Gemini, in which a father decides to ask Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete. He asks Gemini to do it instead of letting his daughter write her own fan letter because, verbatim quote, “this has to be perfect.” This ad generated so much negative publicity that Google pulled it before the Olympics were over, though you can still find it on YouTube (the title is “Dear Sydney”). “This has to be perfect?” Why? Who is this perfection for? If you’re a (technically) amateur athlete and you get a physical letter from some little girl you’re inspiring, and you open it up, do you want to see perfection or do you want to see love? Obviously it’s love. Love is the point of a fan letter. Perfection, however these copywriters imagine Gemini is producing it, is in this context utterly beside the point.

I enjoy professional theater a lot. I enjoy professional ballet. It’s cool to see what elite performers are capable of. But the whole side-hustle thing, the assumption that you will stop doing art if you can’t make it professionally, the monetizing of every fucking talent or hobby or special interest driven by paid influencers infesting every fucking platform, is harming us partly because it pushes us to expect perfection in the places where we should be looking for love.

Do you find waffles to be an annoying food because of how difficult it is to evenly spread butter on them?

Anonymous

sarahthecoat:

yesornopolls:
Do you find waffles to be an annoying food because of how difficult it is to evenly spread butter on them?
Yes
No
waffles are great because they can hold so much yogurt! (or fruit and whipped cream, if it’s that sort of party)

Long Boring Task Day, Holiday Edition!

I have a long boring task for today. Ask me things and I will endeavor to divert! Holiday themed or otherwise!