Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.
Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says “There’s no consensus about the origins of skydoves” when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that’s uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they’re an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT’S AN OPEN ISSUE.
Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won’t work, and you can’t call it a “theoretical exercise” just to cover up the fact that you’ve not been able to cast it. You can’t combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that’s just not how magic works, in all due respect.
Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.
Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.
Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student… You keep getting called to go on “quests” which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor’s project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor’s project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.
Ok, doing great on the invertebrates and upper trophic levels, but it looks like we’re at saturation for macrofauna, what we need is a lot more substrate- more rocks, more water, more foliage in general but ESPECIALLY GRASSES AND SEDGES. I’m not aiming for a specific ecosystem, just aiming for enough space for everyone, and that means building terra and the root systems to hold it in place.
Alright folks let’s gooooo!
This is blatant fungi erasure. Good luck getting anything to grow in your ecosystem.
Anyone else here remember the abominably hideous art that used to “grace” the covers of the Drizzt novels from Homeland onwards? The ones with the weird bloated, ancient looking elves wearing horrible gold skullcaps mentioned no where at all in any of the books? These elves that were also supposed to be *black skinned,* but looked barely brown.
I’ve started re-reading the saga and I just can’t stop thinking about that now. Was this a bizarre corporate error spawned by a miscommunication between management and the art department? What the fuck happened? I would assume that, like many novels in the 90s, the artist was commissioned separately and never read the story, and so was producing the art based on a vague description, but TSR had an in-house art department that always did very well with all of its other lines. Drizzt seemed to be the sore failure, to the point of infamy. Yet they didn’t correct this problem for over a decade after the release of Homeland (1990). The strange thing is that the Icewind Dale trilogy, released starting in the mid-80s, actually did have a decent rendering of Drizzt on the covers! But once the gold-skull-caps were released in ‘90, there was no going back.
I think “Sea of Swords,” released in 2001, was the first book that started to use a slightly different style. I think that was around he time that that TSR was sold to Wizards of the Coast, so the change makes some sense. The art was still hideous, but they lost the gold cap and the senior-citizen look (always particularly bizarre for Drizzt, who was basically still an adolescent by elf standards) and actually gave Drizzt black skin. Then they re-issued all of the books with covers featuring something that actually looked like a dark-skinned, young and athletic elf. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief that day, though not without the lingering puzzlement of over a decade of confusion and indignation.
(I have to wonder now, looking back, if this wasn’t a strange iteration of racism. Like yes, this is a fantasy race, but they are specifically a *black* race of elves. Were they not allowed to be beautiful like light skinned elves or something??)
It’s amazing what happens when you’re sold to a company who’s big thing is making art cards.
This was the blue dragon in the 2e monster manual:
Here it is in the 3e monster manual (after the sale to WotC)
Chapters:
7/?
Fandom:
Dragonlance - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Rating:
Mature
Warnings:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships:
Dalamar the Dark/Raistlin Majere
Characters:
Raistlin Majere, Dalamar the Dark, Mari, William Sweetwater, Par-Salian (Dragonlance), Justarius (Dragonlance), Ladonna (Dragonlance), Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags:
Coming Back, Second Chances, Changing the Darkness, Towers of High Sorcery, Return, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Optimism, Definitely Upbeat, Friendship, Dating, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, ish, Healing, Cuddles, Things Get Better, Secret Identity, Secret Identity Fail, magic shows, Raistlin actually having fun for once
Series:
Part 2 of A Second Chance
Summary:
Raistlin is alive again, and determined to make the most of it. He meets old friends, and some both old and new.
Chapter 7 The afternoon tea together is going better than Dalamar could have hoped, better that he was ready for.
anyway i will always remember my freshman year world history teacher who spent a whole day teaching us about the development of hinduism and its cultural impact and the next day came into class and (basically) said “alright so who guessed that everything i said yesterday was bullshit?”
the thing i took away from this was
when learning about a culture You Are Not A Part Of in a class full of liberals, they will accept everything as fact
if something historical sounds simple and widely agreed upon, especially religion, its probably bullshit
you are not smarter than experts. and experts can fucking lie to you anyway.
american non academics have been and will continue to butcher greek mythology and sell it to you like the bible. please. PLEASE. remember those things can be fun but your bullshit detectors should be on.
Okay but he wasn’t just some rando on the internet. He was a teacher who’s job it was to actually teach you this topic. It’s like your doctor telling you the warning signs for covid and then going ‘psych! I made all that up!’
bitch you’re the voice of authority here. You’re just taking advantage of people’s trust to be a dickhead.
Raistlin: Is that all? Dalamar, you disappoint me.I haven’t even taken up the staff yet.Shamefully..It’s a shame that you were my student.
Dalamar: Oh, it’s a shame..
And an important clarification. This is a scene based on a personal text role-playing game in which Dalamar dropped out of his apprenticeship, met a certain bard and changed his gender to start a family. So, Dalamar is a girl here, and she calls herself Mara.
I hope I have explained everything clearly. I apologize in advance, I use a translator.
Jane Bennet is not a fool. She isn’t naive, either. I mean, how likely is it that people go out of their way to contrive of ways to hurt you, specifically? How likely is it that they’ll hurt someone close to them just to stop an affection between you and the person you’re seeing?
I think it’s less you’re seeing the best of people, and more likely you’re thinking “well, realistically, this isn’t a fairytale with villains. People don’t behave this way.” Until they do.
God. This. So I’m simultaneously re-listening to Rosamund Pike read Pride and Prejudice and also watching the stupidest most annoying drama ever go down in one of my volunteer things. And… you know how she says that both Wickham and Darcy must have been misled, that it must have been a miscommunication somewhere that led to both of them believing the worst of each other?
THAT IS THE USUAL THING. THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. No one is really a bad actor, here, but everyone is deep in their feels and talking to everyone else and assuming malice instead of error and incompetence, and honestly, it’s error and incompetence 98% of the time. And it is driving me nuts because people are getting really hurt in the fallout of what is essentially one person failing to communicate to another that the website needed updated. But malice was assumed! So now we have a situation where both Wickham and Darcy are actually ordinary fallible people who talked and gossiped themselves into a big feeling and now hate each other’s guts when being a little bit more like Jane “Surely there must be some error” Bennet would have been substantially more productive and less hurtful - and it’s usually like this!
On the other hand, I tend to Jane, and have been genuinely Caroline’d by someone pretending to be my friend who then turned around and hurt me deeply and in an explicitly malicious way over a long period of time. Still a weird outlier, unlikely to occur outside of novels. Jane choosing to treat betrayal as a weird outlier and to continue to trust and be affectionate and believe that people are just muddling on in their own incompetent and largely well-meaning way is still going to result in a larger number of productive outcomes with better feeling on both sides than taking her experience with Wickham and Caroline and Darcy and deciding to be bitter and suspicious from here on out.
sometimes i think about the history of coffee culture in islam and how it spread like it’s so funny
discovered by sufis who decided it was a miracle from Allah since it allowed them to stay up late into the night for night worship
miracle beans = UNLIMITED DHIKR
cue scholars debating for years about whether it’s haram or halal and if it should be classified as an ‘intoxicant’ or not
fast forward to 16th century ottoman empire, where a woman had the legal right to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee
europeans called it the “mohammaden gruel” or “devil’s drink” bc they believed it to be a “bitter invention of satan and his followers”
fast forward to pope clement viii finally giving in and tasting it to see what the hype is about and then stating: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”
pope clement viii then proceeds to BAPTIZE THE COFFEE BEANS
the tags on this post are some of the funniest i’ve ever seen in my notifications but this one made me choke on my Mohammedan Gruel
GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE
[Image description 1: Tumblr tag #dont talk to me until ive had my mohammeden gruel (end) Image description 2: reply from @writing5novelsatonce: Please to read my offbeat 16th C Ottoman Empire rom com titled “Grounds for Divorce” descriptions end]
So a couple weeks ago I did this poll about our collective participation in toxic fandoms. Now that we’ve talked about the bad a little, I wanted to do a second follow-up poll about our best fandom experiences, but I suspect that answers on a “least toxic” fandom poll will be much more diverse and harder to quantify, so I solicited some suggestions and this poll is the result. Thanks to the folks who commented there!
Basically: Let’s SHOUT OUT Our Fandom Happy Places! Vote and tell me in the tags - which fandom(s) are you in that have just been awesome, happy, cheerful, chill places?
In Which Fandom or Type of Fandom Have You Been Happiest/Most Comfortable?
