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writingbiologi · 5 hours
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Concepts like sex magic and fertility deities in fantasy are actually really interesting to me as a person with a lot of interest in anthropology and mythology like Yes I am curious about the weird sex that elves have but its pretty much exclusively explored by authors who are Weird Horny Dudes and forget about putting that stuff into a d&d campaign
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writingbiologi · 12 hours
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Sleepy Eepy Mareepy
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writingbiologi · 12 hours
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writingbiologi · 1 day
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I want a movie or manga or some sort of media where there's a high fantasy party of like 6 people and literally none of them like each other literally at all. and not even in like a jokey way, they all abhor each other to their core. no one knows why they're still together as a party but if one of them died no one would care or protest
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writingbiologi · 2 days
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Tumblr won’t let me add this tiktok to another post about Jack & Jill dances but I’m full of spite and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen so have it anyway, the amazing impromptu Mamma Mia dance 💃🏼
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writingbiologi · 2 days
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some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.
it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:
doing it wrong:
She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.
doing it right:
Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.
Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.
This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.
Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:
She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.
Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:
She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.
Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.
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writingbiologi · 2 days
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biologist here! why are plants green? well they suck up air from the sky (blue) and mix it with the sunlight (yellow) i fucking love science.
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writingbiologi · 3 days
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You gotta understand man, literally half of modern pop culture doesn’t exist without Toriyama
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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i'm so sick of being the only person who can make simple connections of how doing a thing to the ecosystem has effects. so so so so sick NO ONE knows the ways of the plants
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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You know what fantasy stories don't use enough? Different measuring scales, and confusion caused by them. Because before the metric system, practically every place and culture had their own measures for weights, lengths and distances. It would be fun to add that into a story for added realistic cultural confusion.
The average dwarf is four or five feet tall, but not in human measures. Yeah they're still shorter than humans but the dwarf foot (and the namesake measure of length) is bigger in proportion to their body. "Is that in dwarf feet or human feet?" is a common question to hear on construction sites, wherever human carpenters and dwarf masons are working together.
A dedicated local Common Misconception Historian has a pet peeve about the whole "princess Featherblade was only 12 years old when she led the attack on Marshland Halls" -myth, because the historical recordings on the human side are off. While she was remarkably young, that myth came about back in the day when humans were still trying to apply "dog years" to elves, and in an elven life span, 120 years is not a direct equivalent to a 12-year-old human.
A whole culture whose smallest unit of weight loosely translates to "about as much as an apple", and varies from region to region depending on the size of local apples. These people are famed for their alchemists, whose uncanny ability to simply measure their ingredients by heart, making their recipes essentially impossible to replicate. This famed skill is a matter of survivor bias - the ones that don't have that knack ten to explode into fine mist.
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of "cute donkeys" and came up with my head full of things I didn't know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.
Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.
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The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:
Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that's about the single thing they're better at than a mule of the same size.
So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.
Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule
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But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That's because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it's easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.
Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it's arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it's shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.
The Poitevin mule
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This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.
With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they're very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.
The Poitevin Mulassier
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Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.
The Baudet du Pitou
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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writingbiologi · 5 days
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Have you played THE QUIET YEAR ?
By Avery Alder
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A game about playing as a community after the collapse of civilization. Over the course of an in game year you will play out their attempts to manage resources and various community projects while creating a map of your community and the surrounding landscape.
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writingbiologi · 6 days
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i’m such a “i want your attention” but “won’t bother you” kinda person
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writingbiologi · 6 days
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writingbiologi · 6 days
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