Latest Posts by laberrant - Page 5

iliad tumblr simulator

🦉 ithacasfavguy Follow

boss is asleep. currently on a quest to steal some wine

🦉 ithacasfavguy Follow

stop reblogging this i'm gonna get caught you fuckers

#/srs

(729 notes)

🌻 achilles Follow

hahaha it would be so funny if i got so deathly drunk my hot doctor boyfriend had to escort me to the infirmary and pin me down so i dont end up stabbing someone and holding me by the hair to force my chin up and make me drink medicine hahahahaha

#please #pleaseee #i am so gay rn

(2,486 notes)

🚬 menelaghh Follow

i miss my wife

(215 notes)

🦢 helen Follow

currently having the time of my life. everything is great. except my new husband. i hope he dies

#captive princess life

(8,632 notes)

🐌 patrokloss Follow

never thought id have to say this but please do not try to make homemade wine with random shit you find on the woods ?? a guy just died

#psa #medicine

(371 notes)

👤 hektoroftroy Follow

guys im gonna be honest the worst thing to ever happen in my life was my brother coming back

🐭 parisbutitsnotfrance Follow

:((

👤 hektoroftroy Follow

you are literally on my DNI. this is your fifth account. please go away

(420 notes)

💪 jaxajax Follow

why are all the animals coughing to death?

#is this normal #vets of tumblr answer me

(13 notes)

🦦 die-a-medes Follow

these trojans ain't shit 😂😂😂 we'll be winning this easy fr

🦦 die-a-medes Follow

girl help it's been ten years

(824 notes)

👁 cassssandra Follow

being haunted by visions can be very fun actually

#therapist told me to be positive #trying

(5 notes)

🐭 parisbutitsnotfrance Follow

hello

🐭 parisbutitsnotfrance Follow

stop telling me to kill myself???

(8,753 notes)

🌻 achilles Follow

i hope you nerds name men on men attraction after me when i die

#if this doesnt happen then what is the point

(10,942 notes)

Well i do think that bicycles are the best mode of transport ever invented

But while trains still have their problems, they are way more efficient than individual cars, and pollute less. In places where rail lines already exist, they should be used instead of cars

do any of you have any idea how environmentally destructive high speed rail has to be? You need a practically 0% grade for HSR. you know many goddamn bridges and tunnels and blasting through mountains you'll need for that? how much concrete? maybe we don't need to replace air travel with a comprehensive HSR network...perhaps we need to fundamentally reduce the need for high speed long distance trips for shit like business meetings or middle class people's 5th vacation in a year

DAY 15

GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 15

"Don't lie to people" is all very good until u remember how funny it is to give the wrong birthday to an astrology person and have them go "that explains so much abt you

moomin summer

Hm, I was pondering about the recent-ish trope of Adventuring Guilds (effectively trade unions for protagonists in fantasy rpg-inspired settings, which I’m sure I’ve seen in a bunch of things but the main example that springs to mind is Goblin Slayer to my annoyance but the Hero Association in One Punch Man has a similar albeit superhero-slanted deal), and how mechanically in the setting they exist to ensure x reward is provided for x amount of work/danger involved but in a meta sense are there so the characters don’t have to go looking for heroing gigs on ye olde Craigs Lyst or something.

It’s an interesting idea, similar in a manner to the many fantasy trope-tinged guilds in the Discworld novels of the late great Terry Pratchett, although an amusing idea occurred to me with the idea of trade unions for fantasy heroes.

Like, if there are unions to ensure employment and fair pay for folks clearing out dungeons, getting gnolls out the cabbage patch, stopping gnomes from going through your bins, and so on, then, logically, there much exist fantasy hero scab workers as well.

Folks that the local king or something brings in for lower pay on more dangerous jobs. Folks who are, say, completely new to the setting, out of their depth, and are thrust into a dangerous situation by a seemingly benevolent authority figure because said authority figure is too cheap to hire someone who understands the risks involved and asks more suitable wages for the role…

Y’know…

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that. 

i think im funny

Watch a Zionist tell an Orthodox Jew that he isn’t a Jew because he’s against the genocide in Gaza. Antisemitism at its finest.

500 notes and I will post my most ironic outfit

getting a note on a super old post

"Elk Centaur" by Francois Lelong

Stevens Point Sculpture Park, Wisconsin, USA

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

Some very eloquent notes on violence as a necessity for resistance.

The science behind THC + alcohol as a combination is literally soo interesting because it basically causes the crimson red duckling in your body to confront the serpent in the bronze vessel of your heart. Basically you feel good because the duckling is able to eat the harmonious seeds stored within the vessel and transfer these positive energies into your body. You can have bad highs when this happens if the duckling awakens the serpent and it bites the duckling. The interesting part is when you ingest alcohol after THC because it floods the vessel and causes the serpent to fall into a deep sleep. The duckling never gets attacked by the serpent when this happens because it is unconscious and the duckling is actually able to get fat from the harmonious seed, which causes an enjoyable sensation.

ich hasse es wenn leute "ich glaub ich spinne" wort für wort als "i think i spider" übersetzen, WEIL ES IST NICHT SPINNE WIE DAS TIER SONDERN SPINNEN WIE AM SPINNRAD. KORREKT WÄRE "i think i'm spinning" NIEMAND VON EUCH KANN ETYMOLOGIE

disney concept art: the most beautiful dynamic original thing i have ever seen

disney finished project: rubber same face minimalism regurgitated plots 

This footage of Elmo after messing up a take on Sesame Street is peak relatable

my "i don't need a rabies shot because i eat the vaxx-laced meatballs that fish & wildlife leaves out for the coyotes" shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt

Because what are fruits but symbols of greed, and love, and humanity

Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney// @noquietrevolution//@vampireapologist // Oranges, Gary Soto // We Are Okay, Nina LaCour // Twitter user super_smasha// @inkskinned

the gang's all here

main blog is @ashleyloob

Small town murder mystery where it eventually turns out that literally everyone in town is a member of some secret society or sinister cult – except it's not one big secret society, it's a bunch of little ones, ranging from as many as a couple dozen members to as few as three. Each secret society is aware of their own immediate allies and rivals, but none of them have the complete picture of how extensive the town's secret society problem is, nor do they know that every single resident is a member of at least one. Some residents are members of multiple secret societies. Some residents are unwittingly members of multiple secret societies, having mistakenly concluded that Secret Society A is Secret Society B's hidden inner circle, when in fact they're unrelated. There's at least one pair of secret societies whose leaders each believe that the other is a false front that they set up to distract their enemies. This goes on for five seasons.

The thing is, in many countries there already exist thousands of kilometers of rail that are really underused. They are maybe not high speed, but, they could very much be used for regional travel instead of cars.

And for far travel, WE NEED TO BRING BACK NIGHT TRAIN !!!! How cool is it to go to sleep, in a bed inside a train, in one place, and to wake up in another place? It is the closest you can get to teleporting. And the best part is, you can do it on existing rail lines: you dont need to be that fast since you are sleeping anyway

do any of you have any idea how environmentally destructive high speed rail has to be? You need a practically 0% grade for HSR. you know many goddamn bridges and tunnels and blasting through mountains you'll need for that? how much concrete? maybe we don't need to replace air travel with a comprehensive HSR network...perhaps we need to fundamentally reduce the need for high speed long distance trips for shit like business meetings or middle class people's 5th vacation in a year

8 months of Genocide and, 15,500 children killed

30,000 orphans

35,000 child amputees ( Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in the world)

and there are people out there still justifying this??? like are you not human enough?

DO NOT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE!

(the linktree to donate for the people of Palestine is in my bio)

Glad everyone is getting so much joy from early Quaker names! Looking forward to seeing any future pets/children/bands/drag acts named after stuff on this list.

starting an elite paramilitary black ops group who sneak into the homes of authors and cut one to three zeroes off any number of years given in a fantasy or sci-fi novel