*paws at the screen* Damnit. I want his clothes. I mean, Chakotay is a lovely person, and I keep wanting to have him sit down and let me draw him (because references are fantastic), but. I want the shiny pretty dark silver vest and the black underneath and just. *sighs, and makes more grabby hands*
(Ok, so it’s actually a leather jacket over black, and the silvery color is because lighting, but whatever. I want what my brain resolved. And I wouldn’t mind the leather jacket anyway.)
… And another bit of drama in Star Trek that could be avoided with seatbelts. *thumps head on desk a moment* One thing that definitely could be improved on. I mean, inertial dampers are all well and good, but they only go so far, and especially in the shuttles, which are far more likely to, oh, crash land than a star ship, seatbelts would be a huge safety feature.
Dear god, sleepy intimacy makes me so very happy.
One person sleeping with their head on the other person’s lap. Getting all drowsy-snuggly when they’re too tired to see straight. Being tucked in and kissed on the forehead before they pass out. Gentle touches while they drift off. Trusting the other person to watch over them and make sure nothing happens to them while they’re out.
Just… sleepy intimacy, man.
Sleepy intimacy is one of my favorite things, and I think the last point is why – it’s all about trust. Trusting someone enough to let your guard down. To lower your defenses. To be vulnerable.
That kind of trust is not always given easily, which is what makes sleepy intimacy so heartwarming.
*hugs you all* Because today is a day for hugs, and I’m going to run out of spoons if I go putting hugs in everyone’s ask box.
Feel free to reblog this to give a hug to every one of your followers.
*who is comfortable with being hugged. If you do not like hugs or are uncomfortable with physical contact, or even just prefer not a hug from someone not a mutual friend, cookies or other snacks suitable for your dietary needs and restrictions.
The good: Mattress rotated (cannot be flipped because of the construction of the mattress), sheets changed, floor under the bed swept, and the shelves that are functionally out of reach emptied.
The bad: The water was cut off because the bill payment and cut off order functionally crossed in the mail. (I have gone out and acquired a gallon of water for today, and things are done so they’ll turn the water back on sometime today.
The ugly: Whas-his-name the neighbor’s one puppy does not care if I live on the other side of the fence, I am too close to the fence and thus too close to his space and he must borkborkbork.
(His sister, however, believes that scritches are necessary, even if they must be through the fence. I have put bricks where she found a place to stick her nose part way through to ask for scritches, so she does not do something like dig herself through.)
- Nesting
- Hoarding things
- Taking things apart
- Wandering
- Shitty memory
- Needing pressure on your body to sleep
“why are you inside the blanket”
“you don’t need that many ????”
*takes pens apart constantly*
“so you mean to tell me you go to town to walk around the shops and that’s it?”
*in a familiar area* “where to ____” “idk sorry”
*tries to balance weighted lap pad on my shoulder as I sleep*
Fucking mood
Welp. The wandering thing is new but EXPLAINS SO MUCH.
Nesting, yup. Hording all the things. (Ok, stuffed animals and toy cars and lego and so. much. fiber stuff.) Taking things apart, not so much. Half-build them and then wander on to something else a lot, though.
Wandering… *wobbles hand* I tend to be very focused on where I want to go unless I’m somewhere without people. Because people. Just. Nope. Nopenopenope.
*snerks* I write shit down to attempt to remember, and then fuck if I can remember where things are written down. My memory is my phone and my laptop and my iPod and my external hard drives, and my wetware is just used to access it. And then there are the things I do remember, which are varied and eclectic and awesome and while I can tell you what happened at Henry V of England’s coronation in 1413, I can’t tell you what I was doing last month without going to find what I bothered to write down on my tumblr.
And pressure on my body. I turn the A/C up at night in the summer to justify having four blankets on top of me so I can sleep.
Sometimes yes? I tend to be screaming my history nerd at the Tumblr wall to see if it sticks. *g*
And yes, non-Christian Knights/Paladins/Fighters need more recognition, worldwide.
Anonymous said: March 11th 2018:i recently discovered Of A Linear Circle and it made me really
want to know more about the history and stuff of europe mostly because
it contradicted practically everything i ever learned about the medieval
period and made me realise that i don’t actually know a lot that wasn’t
sanctioned as appropriate learning in a christian school in the early
90’s. do you have links for where i can start?
*whimper* Uhmmmm. Can you please narrow your field of focus? The Medieval era of Europe is basically the Fall of Rome in the 400s until the recognition of the Renaissance over one thousand years later. That is a LOT of ground to cover, in a lot of countries, and most of it is composed of insanity. A ten-year period alone in a single country (or countries or whatever they were at the time) can contain massive quantities of STUFF just because so much was happening. (A lot of it had to do with stabbing, backstabbing, and more stabbing, but Because Politics that were Not Simple. …okay, most of the time it wasn’t simple. Sometimes it really did boil down to some asshole saying to his contemporaries: “I hate those motherfuckers over there. Let’s go kill them.” Like Castille & Leon’s king Alfonso X deciding to declare war on the new Kingdom of Portugal even though the royal family of Portugal was composed of the dude’s siblings and cousins. Though that was less assholery and more “Because I can.”)
tl;dr: Google is your very good friend but you’ve gotta have a starting point more specific than “Medieval Europe.” ❤
Anonymous said:
March 10th 2018:Concerning your research to Köln: You are so awesome. Another
article gave me “Kolne, Colne, Kollen, Collen, Coellne oder Coellen”
used since the middle ages while Günter Lehnen gave me the years of the
“Franken” and following them the “Kurfürstentum”. I did not find
much dated younger than 1400+.Maps or illustrations were mostly 1500+
and 1600+. You: so awesome.Also: I cannot find out when fermentation of green tea leaves
started to make black tea. the internet was not helpful and my books
about tea are mostly of herbal teas and green tea. And one of my books
is mostly the Japanese Tea Ceremony but has a very interesting part
about the history and former preparation of (green) tea. You: so
amazing.
Regarding
Köln: German historical records from the era of the early Holy Roman Empire are a PAIN IN THE ASS. The fact that you found a few more variants is impressive. One of the maps I was using was all in some calligraphy-scripted old-ass pre-modern German, so I had to find
Köln by studying the freaking landmass on both it and a modern map so I could use “coast shaped like this and city is in THIS direction by THIS body of water” to be able to find the city, which is what netted me Coln. That map still had all of the Otto II-era duchies on it, including the ones he lost to the Slavic tribes. There are easier to read maps out there that show off the duchies and cities and boundary lines in 975 AD, but they all use the modern spelling of said cities. That is ultimately not very useful.Regarding black tea: “China is the birthplace of black tea, which in China is called, perhaps
more appropriately, hong cha – red tea – after its the red colored tea
it usually produces. It’s history in China can be traced back to the
late Ming Dynasty, around the year 1590, when the first black tea –
Lapsang Souchong – was produced in the area around Wuyi Mountain in
Fujian province.” Also semi-useful website, since everyone else claims it to be the 1700s (nope, too late) https://tea101.teabox.com/history-of-black-tea/ So! There ya go. There is your starting point. ❤
On the scope of medieval Europe and history thereof – if you can find people who have posted about SCA Arts and Sciences projects, you can get some references on things to look at. Or people who post about researching their persona, though bugger if I know where to look for that online beyond find out what your local group is and find out if they’ve got a newcomers event or a fighter’s practice or contact info for the chatelain or seneschal or herald, all of whom might have a better idea of looking for resources and information than I do.
Or, if you’re really not interested in getting near the SCA, there are other organized re-enactment or living history groups you might look into, and they may well also be able to direct you to resources for their particular time/place. I’m just most familiar with the SCA, myself.
(And so much yes on the so much stuff happening. I tend to be narrowly focused on the reigns of Henry IV and V, and what’s going on in England and France at those times, and there’s still so much more than I can cover for any one Thing. And once I get the current draft of a project worked out, I’m going to be diving into the 1420s and 1430s in England and Scotland and also things about women in 15th century England in particular, and that. That is going to be a lot of work and involve finding actual books ‘cause Reasons.)
This advice is heading
for five years old; agent and editor opinions change much faster than that,
depending on the marketplace (I’ve seen it happen). Other agencies – or indeed
other agents in these agencies – may have had different opinions then; they and
the people quoted here almost certainly have different opinions now.For example: all five of my Alban novels have a prologue, though never more than a couple of pages
and sometimes much less. Nobody objected; in fact when I turned in one of them without a prologue – I think it was “The War Lord” – my editor (not agent, the book was already beyond agents) asked me where it was and requested one “to match the others”. Go figure.Be aware of the clichés
in your chosen genre (see TVTropes.com and “The Tough Guide to FantasyLand”; that way you can avoid them or – sometimes just as
effective – use them in a deliberate, self-aware way. I’ve seen attempts to
avoid using clichés that are so obscure I had to
pause and work out what the carefully non-cliché phrase actually meant.“Pause and work out…” is not a good thing
to make your reader do.Starting in media
res used to be a standard piece of advice – hit the ground running, etc. Now it’s
less popular because starting in the middle of the action requires more
back-story and (gasp) flashback and for a while there (it may have changed again) back-story and flashback was considered lazy writing.Write your story
the way you think your story works best; if an agent, or even better an editor,
tells you it would work better written a different way, pay attention because
they know what the market wants.But don’t try to second-guess what they’ll
want based on posts like this; it’s like doing rewrites based on test-reader input when each input is different and sometimes contradicts the others. (Been there, done that, with “The Dragon Lord”, and until @dduane pointed out that the inputs were just suggestions not commands from on high, the book was Not Proceeding At All).Second-guessing won’t work, you won’t enjoy it, and if
you’re not writing fiction because you enjoy it, a short kilt and a tall stand of nettles will have the same effect for less time and effort.Unless you enjoy that…
Hm. This train of thought is pulling into some very odd stations.
Time to stop.{:-o
I’m setting all my clocks forward today because time is an illusion anyway, and Spring Forward starts in the US tomorrow morning at 2am.
This is your reminder to set your clocks forward, engage in at least an hour of either debate or grumbling about the origin, purpose, and continued efficacy of Daylight Savings, and then pretend to be a really ineffective time traveler who is just stuck an hour in the future all afternoon.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 