Idk what put you back in your Sandman era but gotta tell u I am living for it. Your taste in posts is impeccable lmao

Baby I am at all times one post away from doing a deep dive on someone’s Sandman tag and rapid fire reblogging 80% of it.

As a tall person I cannot offer to reach something on a high shelf for a stranger, yet if they ask me I must oblige. This is the law of the giants.

Marc

Happy MGM from writingamongthecoloredroses! What Disney movie is your OC(s) favorite? Is there a personal reason?

Oh boy, it’s been a hot minute since I posted something on this blog, I swear to christ I’m going to finish the novel, things have just been...a little pandemicky out here.  Anyway!

Brenneth’s favorite Disney movie is Robin Hood, she likes the songs and she had Strong Gryffindor Energy even as a little kid, so the narrative appealed to her.  Honorable mention to Fantasia, which she started watching after getting back from Alleirat the first time as an anxiety management technique.  Sometimes she and Crispin watched it together and pretended they couldn’t see each other getting weepy during the Firebird Suite, because that’s what you do for your soulmate/mortal enemy/best friend sometimes.

Crispin’s favorite Disney movie when he was a kid was Mulan, he tried to convince his sister to help him dress up in Mulan’s matchmaker outfit for Halloween when he was six and their parents shut him down.  It continues to be his favorite movie post-Alleirat (she reminds him of Brenneth) but also he can’t watch it anymore because the avalanche scene makes him shaky (she reminds him of she reminds him of Brenneth).  

Shiko’s favorite Disney movie is actually not a Disney movie at all even though she argues that it counts because Disney distributed it, it’s Princess Mononoke.  Brenneth gets a real kick out of watching Shiko argue with Crispin about it.  In terms of actual Disney movies, she actually didn’t watch a whole ton of them growing up but she had a crush on Prince Eric when she was a kid, so, nominally the Little Mermaid.

Krei has never seen any movie, let alone Disney, but in any modern AU/if she ever had, her favorite would be Sleeping Beauty because she and Phillip are the same person.

hi y'all! i decided to listen to the dark of the moon episodes while doing math because i needed some kencyrath content in my life, and i just want to say, it's super fun to listen to, it satisfies my kencyrath craving like crazy, and y'all's joy to be doing this and working together is clear and infectious. (i commiserate about the wiffle ball related confusion.) your podcast is so wonderful to listen to and i hope y'all enjoy doing it as much as i enjoy listening to it!

Good lord, sorry for the delay (both on this ask and on the episode)--it’s been a chaotic couple of...months.

We’re so delighted that you’re enjoying it!  The reason our episodes are always so long is that we just cannot shut up about these books, and we’re thrilled beyond belief that people actually want to listen to us rant.

I’m just so truly touched and startled that people listen to this show, folks.  It’s really a wonderful experience and we both love doing it so much, we might do it even if no one listened, but the fact that there are other people out there getting joy out of our commentary is...absolutely amazing to me.

me thinking the "percy should be allowed to kill" post was abt pjo until I glanced at your tags bc I was wondering which book tlovm was in pjo (I am a fool) and also yes percy critrole should be allowed to kill as a little treat

In total fairness, I feel that Percy Jackson should also be allowed to kill people who treat him badly, as a little treat. If you are treating him badly, then honestly this was your own decision.

Animorphs really went "'Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart,' she said with sudden passion. 'A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside.'" and expected us to see anything other than a trans metaphor??

(I've been reading through all the books on your recommendation and OH MY GOODNESS there's so much good stuff in them)

This is everyone’s regular reminder that SOME beloved childhood authors age like toxic mold into appalling transphobes (’sup, JK), while OTHER beloved childhood authors age like a fine wine and talk at length about wishing they’d been better informed in the 90′s so they could have had queer MCs and also about how much they love and support their trans daughter.

Just as a completely wild and random example that has nothing whatsoever to do with KA Applegate, author of the Animorphs, beloved children’s book series about identity and war.

Also your regular reminder that the Animorphs is once again available online, for free, with the author’s blessing to pirate to your little heart’s content.

Greetings, fellow fan of P.C. Hodgell's "Chronicles of the Kencyrath" series! :D Newbie here who just read all of the books (and short stories) in two weeks, and I AM HERE FOR JAME/TORI CONTENT! I found about the series via the Shipcestuous blog since it was recommended a few times and there's links to where users can read/download THE BOOKS FOR FREE on the blog! Had a hard to find any info on it because the wiki and TVTropes aren't updated. I found your fics on AO3 and fell deeper in love. <3

Greetings! There are like...maybe a round dozen of us fans now, and I think I've managed to collect a fair number of them in my blog over time, so if you're interested in further content I also have a flourishing Kencyrath tag!

Also, my beloved Kencyrath fans, or those who would like to be Kencyrath fans but do not have the funds, I have located the above-mentioned link. Go forth.

it makes me kinda sad that most people are dead before gideon gets to use her two-hander.... fourth house would loose their tiny minds. the inevitable 'so how long have you been using a rapier' 'three months' would be so iconic

YES, god, like, I’m delighted that Gideon got the Affirmation from Harrow, about being good with a sword, but I so deeply want someone who knows things about swords to be informed that Gideon Nav picked up a rapier three months before meeting them and--is she an artist with it?  No, not really.  But she’s superhuman compared to every single other person they’ve known at month three of their training.

And Fourth watching Gideon "What’s A Parry” Nav smash through her enemies like a red-haired battering ram?  Jeannemary deserves that.  Gideon deserves that.

Can I just please get some younger lesbian to hero-worship Gideon as she deserves.

What does "I don't look cops in the eye" mean? Sorry to ask, I'm just not getting it

I live in NYC as a trans person, and while the police-brutality-against-trans-people is higher in other places, it's not zero here. If my family is absolutely required to interface with a cop, my partners do it and do their best to stand in front of me.

is it pitiful that I'm considering diving into the 9000 hours of critical role because I heard there is a canon aroace character? :') a bitch is weak

I RESPECT YOUR MOTIVES, ANON

Hey how do you have the worst luck with doctors?? Have you ever met a medical professional, in any field, you liked and didn't treat you like a 5 year old???

A FEW, but like, not that many. My current cardiologist is really great, but unfortunately my (also great) PCP moved crosscountry! So I gotta find a new PCP who doesn't suck.

And not to take this to a really morbid place, but my luck with doctors is because DOCTORS DON'T LISTEN TO WOMEN. (Obligatory note that I'm nonbinary, but like, trans people in the medical field is a whole other kettle of neglect, so for the moment I caucus as a woman, you know?)

Historically, I have struck out almost every time I've reported an invisible symptom, because I am in possession of a uterus. No matter who I reported it to. Adults did not help me, because I was a girl. I once had a gym teacher look at where I was folded up in a ball on the ground, sobbing, and tell me that if I kept being dramatic and refused to finish the mile run, he was going to fail me out of gym and keep me from passing the seventh grade. His entire logical case for this stance was "girls are dramatic." I have been told "girls are dramatic" by people literally doing surgery on me.

So, the answer to your question is that hysteria was removed from the DSM in 1980. That's forty-one years ago, for the interested reader. There are almost certainly women in the world right now who were diagnosed with hysteria, as adults, with no trace of irony. I'm just collateral damage of a long history of looking at a woman, crying on the ground in pain, and saying "Get up and walk, it's not that bad, you're just getting worked up over nothing."

where's the essay op

Okay so bayonets.  I don't know why I ever pretend that I want to talk about anything but military history and battlefield medicine.  I checked all my sources in the waiting room of a doctor's office so you're just going to have to trust me because they are Gone.  I’m pretty sure this can all be found on a few Wiki dives, though.

First of all, to recap, let me clarify a common misconception.  The triangular bayonet was NOT outlawed in the 1949 Geneva Convention, nor any future revisions—as it was originally a musket weapon, it was fading out of use by World War II and the subsequent Convention.  However, you'll notice that I opted to use to word "violates" rather than "were banned by," which is a fine semantical hair to split and, I suppose, debatable.  Most bayonets were not explicitly banned in the GC, in that there is not an article in the GC saying you can't use them.  However there IS an article in the GC, adopted from the earlier 1899 Hague Regulations, stating that it is prohibited to "employ weapons...of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering" (originally part of Article 23 of the HR, now Article 35 of the GC, expanded in 1977).  Personally, as someone who knows a lot about how a lot of weapons impact the human body, I think that is a more expansive statement than most people would expect, and should be treated accordingly.  Regrettably I do not work for the UN.

Point is, triangular blades specifically are known to cause wounds that are difficult to heal, highly prone to infection, and extremely likely to never fully recover, while also having a relatively low mortality rate.  This is because the axes of a triangular wound, which is shaped sort of like a Y, make it very hard to stitch closed, and very easy for any "twisting" of the blade to create a large hole with ragged edges that's functionally impossible to stitch closed.  As an added bonus, because of the way scar tissue forms, it's possible for one "line" of a triangular wound to pull open other parts of the puncture while the scar tissue forms and pulls on the skin.  Even by standards in the 1700s, triangular bayonet wounds were phenomenally likely to infect and consistently difficult to repair, and modern medicine has made only limited improvements on that situation.  As such, cases have been made that certain types of bayonet/triangular blades in general are therefore in violation of this article, despite not being explicitly banned.

(Side note: yes, the American military violates the GC on the regular.  The American police violate the GC.  I am excruciatingly aware.  The GC is interesting reading generally, but especially if you're an American and you ever feel like being appalled for a few hours.)

Anyway, with that covered again, let's actually talk about the development of triangular bayonets, which might've been out of use by the time of the GC but DEFINITELY violated that article in a big way for a good two centuries prior and are also a fascinating insight into the fact that humanity, as a whole, is really determined to do things in the dumbest way possible.

The first thing you have to understand about bayonets is that they were originally invented as a way to integrate pikes with guns, not knives or even swords.  When arquebuses and muskets were first invented, you were lucky to get a rate of fire around one round per minute, and you still had to protect your army while they were reloading their clunky black powder guns.  Therefore, most infantries between like...the invention of the gun and the late 1600s were comprised of soldiers equipped with muskets, and also soldiers equipped with pikes (a type of spear).  The idea of a bayonet was "what if we put a pike and a musket TOGETHER and then we could give everyone THAT and have way more guns in our army because we don't need pikemen anymore." Which makes sense when you think about it.

What makes less sense is that the initial effort at bayonets was something called a plug bayonet.  You'll never fucking guess what these geniuses (first record is Chinese infantry around-abouts 1600, popular use of plug bayonets recorded in Europe around the 1630s) figured out for their first try at a bayonet.  Here's a hint!  There's not a lot of places on a gun where you can "plug in" a sword. 

Obviously plug bayonets did not exactly catch on as a fantastic solution, because these guns were either a gun OR a short spear and neither was especially good at their jobs.  A bunch of battles hinged on this problem. Which brings us to the end of the 1600s, when English forces in Scotland got absolutely obliterated by a bunch of Highlanders in 1689 because the English were so busy trying to fix their bayonets that the Highlanders literally just charged them, fired one volley, and cut them down with swords and axes. The English took that one very personally (which, you know what, fair, it was a humiliating defeat, especially since the Highlanders had been using that tactic very successfully for a while) and started developing better bayonets.

This is where we get to socket bayonets, AKA what you would probably recognize as a bayonet from a period TV series or a museum.  Socket bayonets have a metal sleeve that gets attached around the barrel of a gun (in this case a musket), so that you can still theoretically use the damn gun while it's attached.  There were problems with the development of socket bayonets (notably, it took a while to figure out how to keep them from falling off the gun during battle), but overall they worked much better and armies started getting rid of pikemen. This was also when bayonets were shortened to a little over a foot, which isn't really important but made them much easier to maneuver.  Socket bayonets were the European order of the day by the early 1700s, and mostly came in three flavors: single edge (like a knife), double edge (like a sword), and spike (like a...spike).  There were pros and cons to all of these (single edge wasn't great for stabbing, spike was ONLY good for stabbing, and double edge was kind of okay at stabbing and kind of okay at slashing), but most importantly, both single and double edged bayonets were fragile.  The heads of polearms were shaped on patterns other than "sword on a stick" for a reason, and it's because "sword on a stick" is not very sturdy.

Triangular bayonets were the solution to this problem.  Triangular bayonets are basically a single piece of metal creased long-ways, with both edges sharpened and the top fluted to form a third edge at the crease.  This makes a much more resilient weapon than a flat blade, because a twisting motion doesn’t risk snapping the blade in the middle.  It also means that now you have three edges, and human nature is to figure “more knife better.”

And don’t get me wrong, as a weapon of war, the triangular bayonet was a great one.  It was introduced in the 1710s and then got used regularly to maim and terrify through the start of the 1900s.  In fact, the triangular bayonet worked so well that it only began to get phased out of use when the style of war itself started to change dramatically during the World Wars.  When warfare was focused on pitched battle (your old school “two armies enter, one army leaves” kind of warfare), the emphasis of a bayonet was on extending the reach of a gun.  A bayonet lets a soldier have a weapon for closer range combat, where a gun—especially a long gun like a musket—is not as effective.  So when you had two armies on the field and a bayonet was first and foremost a way to keep the enemy at least gun-length away, longer bayonets were better.  

But World War I was the advent of trench warfare, which was a terrible idea and also meant that a long weapon, like a gun with an extra foot and a half of sword on top, was much, MUCH harder to work with.  Either fighting took place in no man’s land, where you probably weren’t going to get close enough to use a bayonet anyway, or in a trench, where a weapon as long as you were tall was just impossible to work with.  

(If you know anything about WWI, you’re probably asking me about bayonet charges right now, specifically the concept of “going over the top.”  Contrary to every media representation of WWI ever, “going over the top” of a trench faded out of use pretty quickly.  It was a type of bayonet charge where the soldiers in ONE trench fixed their bayonets and tried to charge no man’s land in an effort to reach the OTHER trench, but it was basically never effective because no man’s land was often heavily trapped and strafed with gunfire and mortar shells.  Also, it was the kind of battle tactic that military history books talk about with phrases like “total annihilation of whole attacking battalions,” so that’s the kind of mortality rate we’re talking about here.  The Battle of the Somme featured a good number of bayonet charges by the British, for context, so people learned and started using other tactics.)

So, since bayonets were only useful in trenches, suddenly everyone was scrambling to shorten bayonets and guns so that their soldiers could get ANYTHING DONE.  And THEN soldiers started admitting that they were literally taking their bayonets off their guns and using them as knives instead, because for trench fighting that was way more useful, and so everyone just decided fuck it, let’s just make bayonet-knives, which is why WWI weapons with bayonets usually look, very literally, like someone duct taped a short knife to the front of a gun.  This was the start of the decline of the triangular bayonet, a full two hundred years after it hit the battlefield, which is a frankly spectacular run for any weapon since the invention of the gun.  Triangular bayonets held on, here and there, through part of WWII, but they were almost entirely gone by the time of the Geneva Convention being ratified in 1949.  However, spike or knife bayonets are still issued to many armies as a weapon of last resort to this day, although they aren’t often used in actual attacks.  Now we have bigger, worse weapons for actual attacks.

 TL;DR, the development of bayonets went like this:

“What if we put a pike ON a gun?  …oh wait, you still want to use the gun?  Sucks to be you, I guess.”

“What if we put a sword on the gun instead?  Then we could put it somewhere where we can still use the gun!  Good luck keeping it on there, though.”

“What if we actually made something designed to get put on a gun and stab people effectively?  Like, what if we designed something with that purpose in mind?  Perhaps?” SMASH CUT TWO CENTURIES

“Well if you’re just gonna take your bayonet off and stab someone with it anyway, can we just go back to giving you knives, then?”

And now you’re caught up on all the dubiously successful ways we’ve tried to mutilate people with a knife-gun.

What’s your opinion of Lan Sizhui ?

He is a good boy.  He is, in fact, the best boy.  He is the sole inheritor of the single brain cell extant in that entire universe, previously held (at times tenuously) by Wen Qing.  He is the best effort of many people who lived a terrible life and wanted the next generation to thrive, and they did a very good job on him, and I love him.  I wrote an entire fic series about how much I love him.  Lan Sizhui is the redeeming characteristic of an entire war, the last survivor of a genocide, and he deserves only the finest and kindest things in life.  My favorite thing about him is that he believes everyone including local disgraceful lunatics should be listened to.  My least favorite thing about him is that I do not have possession of an entire sitcom about him growing up as the star pupil of the Lan Sect despite, you know, everything.

Does this answer your question because I have more things to say.

The potato chocolate cake recipe tiktok reminded me of another recipe that sounds terrible but, according to my dad, is incredible. the chocolate sour cream cake.

What???????

I just googled it and apparently chocolate sour cream cake is a “good old-fashioned classic”????  I have never in my LIFE heard of this concept.

the reason covid vaccines are coming out so fast is bc they have the FUNDING to do all the testing, and there's no market research to see if people need it- they know the vaccine is necessary! medication research + money = medication comes out faster

EXACTLY

Vaccine research has to scramble for funding under most circumstances--but!  COVID is a threat to everyone!  Suddenly the whole goddamn world has decided to toss a coin to their local lab monkeys and as a result, the COVID vaccine has been able to skip a lot of the usual hurdles.  They’ve done all the appropriate stages of testing.  They just did them fast.

Please, please, PLEASE, get the vaccine when it becomes available to you.

And then continue to be very, very careful.  Masks, avoiding large gatherings, all that stuff has to keep going while we get the infection rate under control and keep an eye on how the vaccine plays out in the long term.  Take care of yourselves, take care of your community, and get the shot.  Everyone in that treacherous “high risk” category, myself included, thanks you for your service.

God, that fic was so so good, absolutely adore it! and yeah, I agree, I really like Xue Yang at his ''a monster slowly going mad in cursed city, transforming it into disturbed necrophiliac shrine to man whose life he ruined and refuses to admit he feels regret'' low.

(this fic)

Listen, I love and respect everyone in the fandom who just wants a redemption arc for Xue Yang, I want them to have a nice time, but for ME PERSONALLY, if we're not dealing with the fact that Xue Yang is an unapologetic mass murderer who turns an entire cursed village into a shrine for the corpse of the man he loved and also hated and also idolized and also thought was an idiot, what are we even DOING here.