yojfull

[yojfull]

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

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Neil my dude, after showing my mother season one of Good Omens and my dad seeing a bit of it I mentioned you also wrote Coraline and either my mom or dad (don't remember which one said it) said you must have been a weird kid.

Could you please confirm or deny whether or not you were a Weird Kid™?

I was a weird kid.

[yojfull]

the wenis is a dance

(thanks to tiktok user @thatbaroneboy for the amazing compilation!)

[yojfull]

Imagine just how funny a Discworld's take on NFT would be. Imagine CMOT Dibbler selling badly-drawn pictures of the Librarian via the clacks.

[yojfull]

Rereading Sunshine by Robin McKinley (one of my favourite vampire books). All I remember from reading it 10 years ago is the amount of page-time dedicated to baking cinnamon rolls. But I've realised, this time round, that the baking of cinnamon rolls is the symptom of a much larger theme in characterisation - Rae's ride-or-die commitment to the 'I'm just some guy' bit.

Every single chapter, another thing is revealed about Rae that puts her closer to being a special snowflake Chosen One: her name is Raven Blase but her nickname is Sunshine, she has sunlight powers, she's not just an innocent bystander but the daughter of a powerful warlock, she can help a vampire walk in sunlight, she's performing powerful magic. And every single time Rae just turns round and says to the reader, "but that's not important :) I'm just some guy :) I really like baking :) ignore that gothic heroine coding :) it's time to get up at 4am to make bread :)"

Her commitment to being Just Some Guy is genuinely carrying the novel. Every single day she becomes more of a Chosen One, but there's cinnamon rolls to make. Fucking D&D-ass characterisation. High art.

#i love this book #robin mckinley #just so good at subverting tropes #but the one that lives rent free in my head is Chalice

[yojfull]

[yojfull]

I’ve never been a real star wars fan but the phantom menace came out when I was 6 and my older brother was 8 so we were absolutely among the target audience and we had toy light sabers & we spent a lot of time playing star wars but my brothers were anakin and obi wan etc. and my best friend was padmé which meant i had to come up with a star wars oc and since my brother was anakin i decided okay. i would be anakin’s sister.

i made up a backstory that i was his twin sister who also lived on tatooine and i also had latent force potential but qui gon and obi wan didn’t even try to meet me even when anakin mentioned me and they left me behind.

this was an utter betrayal to me obviously, like my brother got rescued and i got abandoned and i could have been him and i should have been him. i should’ve been at his side. i should have gotten training and all else. i should have been a jedi too.

but they didn’t even care to meet me. so i had this intense grudge against the jedi and i ended up developing my skills myself and then i grew up and got myself off tattooine and set out on a mission as a rogue force user to kill obi wan.

and 6 year old me really embodied that role. she felt that. so when I was like 25 & rewatched the original star wars trilogy for the first time since childhood, when obi wan came on I was like ugh. I hate that guy. and my friend was like “WHY?”

and I thought about it and realized it wasn’t actually his character. I was remembering my childhood self insert oc beef.

Like, sorry you wouldn’t get it but obi wan and I have history.

[yojfull]

"i dont want topless women or leather daddies at pride" then why are you going. like be really fucking serious why are you going

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#dino rancher #children's TV has some fucked up career options

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I was thinking of how every time I see Cal with a blue lightsaber I'm confused (even if thats his canon colour) bc I mostly play with yellow/orange and see people thag play with those colours

SO imagine Cal in TL4J just showing up one day with like a pink lightsaber or some thing and everyone else is like wot

i have a solution to your problem (sound on)

[yojfull]

[yojfull]

*touching his extremely defined six pack* who did this to you.....

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i'm sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i'll consider giving any thought to

[yojfull]

[yojfull]

“Another and larger part of Tiffany’s brain was thinking of the word ‘susurrus’. It was a word that not many people have thought about, ever. As her fingers rubbed the trout under its chin she rolled the word round and round in her head. Susurrus … according to her grandmother’s dictionary, it meant ‘a low soft sound, as of whispering or muttering’. Tiffany liked the taste of the word. It made her think of mysterious people in long cloaks whispering important secrets behind a door: susurrususssurrusss… […] ‘I like words,’ said Preston. ‘“Forgiveness”: doesn’t it sound like what it is? Doesn’t it sound like a silk handkerchief gently falling down? And what about “susurration”? Doesn’t it sound to you like whispered plots and dark mysteries? … Sorry, is something wrong?’ ‘Yes, I think something may be wrong,’ said Tiffany, looking at Preston’s worried face. ‘Susurration’ was her favourite word; she had never met anyone else who even knew it.”

— The Wee Free Men and I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett

[yojfull]

no multi option, agonize and choose, no results option, pick one to find out or scroll onward

#laundry! #i have two small children #who have tons of tiny clothes #so much laundry inmy house