On a happier, completely unrelated note, although more menacing to some, it looks like the powers of fashion - at least in my part of the world - have decided that this season will at long last include more greens than it has for a while.
Which means that a bunch of shops have basically set up Qunnessaa traps in their windows, making skipping around town that much more perilous.
Spring is arriving up here, and I'm starting to look forward to when the magnolias and hyacinths will start blooming.
Buy a green veil and then use it as a blindfold to not look at the other shop's windows.
I'm actually trying something adjacent to that: I found a reasonably good deal on some pretty linen at the local fabric shop, and am now agonizing about what to do with it, both in terms of what sort of top to cut it for, and then colours and patterns for embroidering it. It should keep me out of the worst trouble I could otherwise get into. :)
On a happier, completely unrelated note, although more menacing to some, it looks like the powers of fashion - at least in my part of the world - have decided that this season will at long last include more greens than it has for a while.
Which means that a bunch of shops have basically set up Qunnessaa traps in their windows, making skipping around town that much more perilous.
Spring is arriving up here, and I'm starting to look forward to when the magnolias and hyacinths will start blooming.
Now I'm horribly curious. Not a fan of firearms, but as someone who grew up close to some historic sites that would regularly do demonstrations and/or mark the hours by a cannon "shot," why wouldn't folks just load some blanks?
Currently reading Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. This is the source of much of what people 'knew' about witches way back when. Esoterica has a wonderful video on the book. The edition I have is (or claims to be) the Rev. Summers translation, but it is without any introduction or foot/end notes or any critical information to help understand the contents. There are also a number of minor spelling errors which makes me worry if there are translation errors that won't be apparent.
Either way, it's a fascinating read, though it makes me feel bad for not having read every source it quotes and cites. The bit about witches making penises disappear is the most entertaining bit so far.
Summers was a decidedly weird character. (Among other things, he claimed that Surrealism was a Communist conspiracy, at one point.) I think Robertson Davies (maybe?) talked about the delicious, "rich fruitcakey-ness" of his prose. Anyway, it's been a while since I've thought about the Malleus, but IIRC, one of Summers' shortcomings is that he rather swallows the mythology hook, line, and sinker, and doesn't, for example, translate carefully to bring out the Latin genders. Compared to the connotations that have accrued around "witches" in English, malefici (masc.), to give the devil (Kramer) his due, does add a bit of nuance to his paranoia about what women get up to. (I have never absconded with any gentlemen's parts. I'm not that sort of witch and heretic. ;) )
I'm not sure if there's a more recent, more critical edition than Mackay's, but that was big when I read it. In two volumes, with the translation in the second, and in a separate paperback printing to make it more accessible for folks who don't want to deal with the Latin.
Currently between books at the moment, mostly. Speaking of largely outdated texts, I do still have to get through the latter half of Solomon's Noonday Demon about depression, and I should pick up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell again soon. I should be good and avoid bookstores when I do the shops this afternoon, but we'll see how that goes.
The number I saw on our national public broadcaster up here was $20 billion, over the next seven years, re-purposing the proposed orbital station for the Artemis mission. That still sounds ... rather ambitious, given what little I know from what catches my attention about NASA these days.
Interesting! Thank you, and NobodysHome too, for the insight. It sounds to me like the overarching categories were fissile enough to be closer to what high school looked like to me, from the limited perspective of the stacks. :)
We would lump jocks and nerds and what-have-you together when we were feeling petty about it, but I think day-to-day in my school the differences between, say, football jocks and badminton brats, or computer nerds and the creative writing weirdos, kept the lines from being drawn as starkly as I gather they are in those old movies. (Though I have to admit I've not seen them!)
I'd have to pick my brother's brain on it, but junior college might have been worse, at least at the larger one he attended, while I stuck with one closer to home that had the program I wanted, and was small enough that critical masses of cliqueyness couldn't be reached. Unlike his, as I remember him telling me, mine only had the one cafeteria, rather than several divided and defended fiercely among the various factions.
Allowances are real and not something that just shows up on TV like the jock, band, and nerd cliques?
And FTR, in the 1980s the jock, band, and nerd cliques were absolutely a thing. So just assume all the writers are over 50.
Huh. Did they easily sub-divide, back then?
Those seem like awfully broad categories from my memories of high school, and I don't know if anyone could have rallied all the jocks or all the nerds, but then the '80s were before my time.
I would have fit under the nerd umbrella, but my people could be narrowed down to a more specific, secretive, and fantastically unpopular niche.
Indeed! I guess no one says "The die is cast!" anymore, either? Or is it that they forget why it became proverbial? Barbarians, quibbler, we are surrounded by barbarians.
There are measuring cups that split the difference, marked with several scales for various staple ingredients by weight, which I figure will probably be close enough for a barbarian like me. I keep thinking one of these days I should get one, but I haven't been moved to get to the kitchen supply store for ages.
@Qunnessaa: You've got until next week, I'm ending the recruitment on Saturday the 28th and making my decision on Sunday. Should be plenty of time! As for the character idea, I very much like the idea of the cabalist, tons of interesting implications there. I will say ahead of time that you can't have two familiars, so the vigilante talent that grants you one doesn't stack with the witch VMC one. Honestly I don't really see the point of with VMC, but you are certainly welcome to do so!
I just ... really like hexes? ;) I'm not entirely sure I'll stick with the VMC, though maybe if the Ritual Hex feat would work with it. I know Extra Hex is specifically ruled out, but the former, while flexible, can only be taken once, and has the potential for occult mishaps that might allow for interesting developments in a post-apocalyptic game. Yikes!
The week ahead might well have me at my wits' end, so I'll try to get some of the crunchy bits sorted before that becomes the sort of fiddly thing that the week will probably not encourage indulging. So far, I have got some ideas for
the 20 questions:
1. What is your character’s name?
Mara Devdvir. The central cluster of consonants in her last name isn’t particularly Common, so she’s used to answering to Deirdre. When she has a chance to clean up a bit and get away from her small terrace farm for a while, in the more bourgeois neighbourhoods of Cliff Terraces and, certainly, High Ember, she’s known as Rain (or sometimes “Rainwoman” when it needs to be absolutely clear that folks aren’t talking about the bloody weather). Just to clarify, Mara is her vigilante identity and who she “really” is, and Rain is her social identity, rather like Bruce Wayne is the costume in the masquerade scene in the Burton film. :)
2. How old is your character?
123 years old.
3. What would somebody see at first glance (i.e. height, weight, skin color, eye color, hair color, physique, race, and visible equipment)?
At first glance, Mara is typically slender for an elf, but unusually short (5’8”). Her complexion is pale, like the lightest peach-pink of roses from before the First Scouring, and although she never tans, her brown hair is heavily streaked with blonde from the dimming sun. Her eyes are a dark green that she gathers would once have fit in well beneath the canopy of a temperate forest.
At home, on the terraces of the ash farms, she looks like a rather fastidious gardener really unhappy about the whole dirt situation. In the more elevated areas of Cinderwake, when she’s had the opportunity to clean up, as Rain, she is just as fastidious but considerably flashier, dressing in a defiantly ironical approximation of pre-Scouring gentry fashion from more demotic materials. (Something punk princess, possibly including some tattered vintage/antique pieces.) In any case, she prefers cuts and colours that let her fade deftly into the shadows when she wants to. She generally carries whichever book she’s currently studying, vials for materials for horticultural experiments, and a priceless antique elven sword at her hip that has survived from before the First Scouring.
4. What additional attributes would be noticed upon meeting the character (i.e. Speech, mannerisms)?
Mara tends not to meet others’ gaze, and really doesn’t like to be touched, under most circumstances. She speaks very quietly, and it sometimes feels as if she might eventually forget how to do so entirely, tending her isolated “farm” alone. She’s a bit more gregarious in her persona as Rain, but even then she’s quiet and somewhat aloof.
5. Where was your character born? Where were you raised? By who?
She was born on the little plot her family took care of, but after greedy death gradually claimed them – first her siblings, then her mother when Mara was still a slip of a girl, and finally her father in despair, some 50 years ago or so – she moved to a smaller holding since she’s alone and needs less room. She doesn’t mind, since it gives her more privacy for her experiments both herbal and magical. She was largely raised by her widower father, who made sure, when he felt the end creeping up on his broken heart, to prepare her as best he could for adult life on her own. She had to grow up fast.
6. Who are your parents? Are they alive? What do they do for a living?
Like Mara, her parents were Ash Farmers before her, though they weren’t born to it. They never talked about it, but they must have been born only a few years before the First Scouring, and their parents abandoned whatever lives they had before that to try to coax and nurture what goodness they still could from the fields and gardens that life depends on even as hell rose to cover the earth. Magic must have been involved, at some fairly high level, and some of it survives in her, though she’s only been able to maintain a pitiful gathering copied for her own use when most of the arcane lore that she knows of has somehow found its way to and is “preserved” in the library of the High Abbey.
7. Do you have any other family or friends?
In her childhood, Mara heard about cousins in one of the long-lost other bastions against the end, whose notional survival was desperately wished, but none of them have ever been more than a rumour to her. She has a few acquaintances among the handful of Cinderwake citizens of similar longevity and congenial atttitudes, and has stolen a few moments with like-minded mayfly women over the past few decades, but she only has one or two close friends. Her closest is Siana, another elf who’s about her age, and whose heart seems to be in the right place for someone who grew up in High Ember: she taught Mara most of what she knows about staying out of trouble and navigating the more densely-populated regions of Cinderwake by mundane means. Closer to home, but not conviction, a few terraces down among the ash farms the elderly, Scouring-bleached gnome Rozigrubb keeps an eye on his younger neighbour, seeing she struggles with a similar melancholy and malaise to his own, though at least she doesn’t seem to be literally draining of colour. Both of them can occasionally benefit by what he can remember from when even cantrips were more plentiful, especially in relation to illusion.
8. What is your character’s marital status? Kids?
Mara is single and likely to remain so for the foreseeable: there are relatively few elves in Cinderwake, and she hasn’t met one yet that would be compatible (she and Siana did briefly entertain the theoretical possibility, before quickly acknowledging they would never work that way), while apart from her own people, most of the bastion’s inhabitants are of stock that withers and dies of old age, if nothing else, far too quickly for her to cling to life with a non-elven girlfriend. If there even are ways that she could have children that she would find acceptable that aren’t lost in the library of the Abbey or to the destruction of past Scourings, that doesn’t address the problem of justifying the ludicrous idea of bringing more children into the world, unless she finds reason to entertain more hope that the world will get better, not worse.
9. What is your character’s alignment?
As her truest self, Mara is Chaotic Good; when she steps away from her duties for any length of time as Rain, and/or has to deal with the frustrations of working with or around the powers that be in the loftier regions of Cinderwake, her principles loosen to the point that she would more accurately be described as Chaotic Neutral.
10. What is your character’s moral code?
If it harm none, do what you will. Mara is strongly opposed to people holding power over others, and dreams of a world with enough for everyone’s basic needs to be met and enough left over to use as they see fit for their own pleasure. She is inclined to be generous in assessing everyone’s abilities, thinking that trying to force people beyond their capacities to “toughen them up” or worse is at best deeply misguided and likelier merely cruel. Let everyone be a prince/ss, whatever that looks like to them. To get there, though, she is certainly willing to use the propaganda of the deed, as it were, in what she views as a proportionate manner.
11. Does your character have goals?
She wants nothing more than to find ways for plants of all kinds to do better in this fallen world, even if she doubts she’ll ever be able to hope any could thrive. In her wildest dreams, she imagines at least seeing some of the species that once adorned the earth making the best go of it they can under her nurturing care, but she worries that that would be too cruel.
12. Is your character religious?
Yes, in an alarmingly idiosyncratic way. While she clings to her memories of the stories about her people’s gods from before the end of the world, especially the Dancer (who cherished love in all its forms, but especially romantic/sexual), the Queen of Trees, and the Writer of the World (goddess of magic), now that the gods are dead, Mara reveres the hope of “the Forest and the Flower,” as she puts it, above all. Privately, this turns into the much less hospitable “Wildwood.” She’s about ready to write off people, generally speaking, in favour of trees, if any are left, and even if she’s no dryad herself. While she can appreciate the necessity for the “Flame” in theory, she is, given her botanical commitments, ambivalent at best in practice.
13. What are your character’s personal beliefs?
She’s a dreamer and an egalitarian at heart, though the horrors of the fallen world as often turn those dreams into nightmares and cynical pragmatism: she’s not remotely convinced the Ember Council, or their minions, or the forces of law (or Law) are best equipped to steer society to anything like recovery, but she’s also got a reasonably clear sense of the odds of replacing them with a system more to her liking. Frustratingly, she’s committed to incrementalism. As an elf, if she can hold on out of sheer spite, she might just be able to live long enough to plant some seeds she can be proud of before the earth covers over her ashes.
14. Does your character have any personality quirks (i.e. anti-social, arrogant, optimistic, paranoid)?
Mara is misanthropic and depressive. Left to her own devices, there’s a fairly good chance she might starve in the darkness, if it were not for the plants and the books she needs to take care of. If the opportunity arises on a good day, she can throw herself into such pleasures as one can find away from the Ash Farms, but it never lasts.
15. Why does your character adventure?
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. She has little hope that it will make things better in the long run, but she’s damned if she won’t at least try as long as she can avoid giving up, even if it’s in the smallest things that despair deigns to yield to her.
16. How does your character view his/her role as an adventurer?
Mara sees her role as salvaging what she can when more has been lost than anyone she’s ever known could imagine (and as the generations of short-lived species pile up and crash back down ever more frantically), as well as to give it the best chance of surviving as long as possible after her. In her wildest dreams, maybe she can even improve something: spread some knowledge, develop a hardier strain or a more fruitful cultivar. Apart from the chance of snatching something precious – whether artifact or lore – from oblivion, adventuring hones the skills she’ll need to develop to have any hope of making a good difference in the world.
17. Does your character have any distinguishing marks (birth-marks, scars, deformities)?
Not exactly a mark, but if she’s not always wearing them, Mara always has a pair of gloves ready to hand. Gardening gloves, most often, but flashier on the rare occasions she gets up to the Cliff Terraces and High Ember. Despite this, she tends to get hangnails and split skin around them; the wind and a nervous habit of chewing her lip tends to leave her chapped, too.
18. How does your character get along with others?
Quietly: with good grace if left to her own devices, less so if they start asking awkward questions. Unfortunately, as a bit of a radical and misanthrope, awkward might include anything that shows too much deference to the “nobility” or that demurs from the idea that plants are better than people. She can bite her own tongue, but if too much nonsense is flapping around her, Mara might be impelled to speak out.
19. Is there anything that your character hates?
Most people. She prefers the company of plants. Inequality and injustice: she’s a committed anarchist, in her small way. (She’s not particularly brave about it.)
20. Is there anything that your character fears?
The potential consequences of her own despair. Early in her childhood, during a depressive episode, Mara withdrew so deeply into herself that even the few precious charges her father committed to her care did not survive, and his silent disappointment has haunted her ever since, even if he forgave her and trusted she had learned from the experience. She fears how she might lash out if pushed hard enough, if met with impatient lack of understanding, if she gives in to not only nihilism, but its most destructive forms.
I'll see what comes out mechanically in the next day or so. Hopefully my character might, with one of the caster-y vigilante archetypes, play something like a sneakier, witchier magus with a thing for plants. (I considered just going with a nature-bonded magus, but giving up the arcane pool was worrying, and my last hexcrafter is still too fresh in my mind for me to want to roll up another just yet.)
The thing I find perversely fascinating is the intersection with pseudo-legal (I think that's what the professionals call it?) "theory" that Sovereign Citizens often try to use to get out of the usual death and taxes stuff.
Up here in our Vancouver, there was a fairly prominent case of a ludicrous, ugly dispute between neighbours in a condo, in which one of the parties went off the deep end into "freemen on the land" / "strawman theory" nonsense, basically - at least as far as I can recall and understand it - claiming to separate the enunciative "I" from the legal person it's attached to, so that Jane Doe is on the hook, but "I" (like everywhere else in a contract or whatever) is a completely different person, over whom the law/feds/Flying-Spaghetti-Monsters have no authority.
Why anyone would think that would work is beyond me, and I'm a chaos faerie.
This sounds interesting and horrifying! I’m not sure I’ll be able to flesh out a character concept in time, but I think I might like to try!
Very broadly, so I don’t get too deep into it if what I thought of wouldn’t be easy to fit into the campaign, I’m thinking of something like a cabalist vigilante (with witch VMC), an elven Ash Farmer. The class and archetype are just an easy way to get limited spellcasting more or less the way I would like it. Rather than trying to figure out what the setting-appropriate equivalent to masks, capes, and spandex would be, the “dual identity” would play out more as the difference between what she’s like in her home district and while adventuring, and when she’s able to clean up and visit the nicer parts of town. :)
Somehow, she clings on to just enough anarchic idealism to be chaotic good, but she’s a misanthrope, and probably cares more about the poor plants she takes care of and who never deserved all of this than she does about most people. That said, she really hates inequality and unfairness, so arbitrary power as embodied by so-called ‘nobles’ or sectarian cults probably focuses her ire, and reins in her most callous impulses. Her corruption is Shadowbound, and I would like to focus on the threat of nihilistic despair: I’d like to imagine her corruption really set in during an episode in which she was brought so low that she stayed inside, prostrate, long enough for some of her charges to die because of her neglect. Ever since, there are periods she just has to avoid all light, and the question is always whether she’ll still care enough to come out for the sake of her plants, if nothing else.
In any case, whether or not I go any further with this, you’ve got me thinking that I should revisit Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, which is horrific enough that I haven’t in a long while, so that’s my vote for how evocative I’ve found the premise for this campaign!
It was Mardi Gras today, right? And the lunar new year, and Anthesterion (though the Anthestheria as such, the festival proper, start at the end of our month this year), and Ramadan starts tomorrow, so busy time of various calendars. :)
So, pancakes this evening for me! Nothing fancy, though I did add a handful of frozen raspberries. And there are some left over for breakfast! (So, uh, I suppose one can guess which of the above occasions is most salient in my house. ;) )
Good heavens! Now I'm morbidly fascinated. $225? (Plucking an arbitrary obnoxiously large number for anything that isn't, I don't know, a shipment of anvils?)
I'm not entirely looking forward to when it will be time to start thinking about next year's garden. Fun seeds are annoyingly expensive for something that should be fine in an envelope. (I know, emphasis on the "handling," of "shipping and.") And bare-root is something else, and I'm a community garden sort of girl for the foreseeable, so fancy plants aren't really on my agenda.
Yes, and yes. I've seen some homebrewed ideas for how to do it here on the 'boards, and if my character makes the cut, I'm hoping we could work out something along those lines. :)
It's not so key to my character concept that I couldn't skip it and go plain wizard if the GM isn't feeling it.
From the, "Irony is a dish best served bitter" department:
The U.S. Postal Service provides a service where they'll send you photos of all your incoming mail each day so you'll know what to expect. I assume it's to check for unreliable delivery, since that's what I'm using it for. But before they can start, they want you to send them a verification code. Which, since my cell phone number isn't public so they wouldn't accept it as an authentication method...
...is supposed to be coming in the mail.
Speaking of, I tried to mail a package to my mom visiting panama today.
I want you all to guess how much they wanted to charge.
Guess.
Winner gets to...I dunno, have me do something embarrassing. For me. Note I have no real sense of embarrassment.
Alright, I'll bite, because I'm a young crone who still likes sending the occasional letter or postcard, so this is adjacent to my interests. :)
I guess I should round up? For all the desperation of the post here, at least the powers that be aren't actively hostile to it, as I understand it. Please tell me they didn't try to charge you closer to $100 than, say, $50?
(For the record, the latter is about what a medium-sized, light-ish package to Panama from a metropolitan area would be charged up here, converted into USD.)
Probably less pedantry and more just me being wrong, but this bugged me: I need to clean out my sock drawer and refresh my hosiery, so I started browsing online for something fun, only to be met with, among other things, "solid sheer" tights.
Now, I understand that what they're getting at is "unpatterned, but including more exciting colours than flesh tones and black," but given the range of skin tones, let alone the desired diaphanous effect once one puts the damn things on, *I* would think anything sheer introduces too much variation in effect for "solid" to be quite the right word.
If I wanted a solid colour, I would get opaque tights, and if I just wanted a particular hue, I would get a monochrome pair, I think? Or just "colourful" rather than "patterned." (:
In all fairness, I presume, since Aristotle complains about that sort of thing in the Poetics and how some of the writers in Athens were letting tragedy down, that it might be an age-old problem.
*Glances at title of thread.* *Looks worriedly at her roll and double-checks her Will modifier.* XD
Whispered rumours have it that that elven lady who’s made such a splash in Villegre recently must be a Nidalese agent, what with her pallor, the way shadows cling to her and her dark finery, to say nothing of the way she strolled through the Nightways Gate, her fluency in Shadowtongue, and that she isn’t much like most any other elf one might meet in Kintargo. Star Lace, as most know her, is amused by such gossip and doesn’t go out of her way to dispel it, even if it’s nonsense: it tends to mollify Thrune loyalists, and she has spent some time in Nidal doing research.
In fact, she is what she looks like and claims to be, shadows aside: a visiting noblewoman with an interest in arcane magic (as many elves have), and who just happens to be visiting Kintargo as she travels wherever her studies take her. The latter are both broad and deep enough in scope – it is to be hoped that her interlocutors are very interested in the minutiae of spellcraft – as well as open to local curiosity, that she doesn’t even much need to avoid her conviction that there’s an aiudara to be found somewhere in Ravounel, as opposed to descanting on the finer points of the branches of illusionary theory, legends of local dragons, or (with sometimes ghoulish relish) academic gossip and other cliqueish tittle-tattle.
For all that, Star Lace is decidedly too much of a strange, foreign wizard to be particularly welcome in the greatest houses of Kintargo, and the closest friend she’s made in town is Lady Docur, with whom she shares an appreciation for elven tradition, the finer things in life, and subtlety in general. She’s already had an opportunity to give a lecture or two to Docur’s girls as a visiting scholar, but she suspects that there’s more to the schoolmistress than is immediately apparent, and that Mialari is testing her before offering an introduction to some terribly exciting secret society. But who? From their conversations, Belenis is sure that Mialari knows that while she’s sympathetic to the cause of the Sacred Order of Archivists, the Irorans aren’t quite either of their styles, or weren’t – are they even still active, or have they been worn out by the devil-worshippers’ damnable, dogged persistence? It is a mystery and a challenge that the visiting aristocrat very much appreciates.
Unfortunately, shortly after Star Lace’s arrival in Kintargo, the city was disgraced by a much more prominent personage, the new Lord Mayor, Barzillai Thrune, who drastically accelerated the pernicious influence of his house on a region that had previously been spared some of the worst. Beyond the absurdity of his tyrannical proclamations and her own past experiences of being bullied as a child, which would have been enough to inspire her contumacious resistance, there was a certain feeling that noblesse oblige, not least after having caught Mialari’s eye in some measure, and with her own serene confidence that her talents might eventually prove useful for those hoping to elude a tyrant’s grasp. Accordingly, when more than one word of a protest to be held in Aria Park came to Star Lace, with a hint that someone with a connection to the Silver Ravens – one of the mysterious organizations whispered about on the fringes of Lady Docur’s circle – might be attending and feeling informative, her next course of action was, ironically, clear.
I used the tables from Ultimate Campaign, in part, and it tickled me that the dice made Belenis an heiress in line to be a countess back home, when her dad retires, so technically she outranks Barzillai, who's only a paracount, although the Lord Mayor thing presumably changes things within Kintargo proper, and there's the spiritual/churchy side of things on which she couldn't compete. I'm sure that couldn't possibly come up. ;)
In terms of possible progression, the plan is to stick with wizard through to the mid-game, when she might start taking levels in the Pathfinder Savant prestige class, but that's not really unwizardy anyway.
Hmm. Still working on the details of how the character I’m working on might end up in and fit into Kintargo around about when things get interesting with the arrival of Barzillai Thrune, but I think some of the broad strokes are coming together.
She’s decidedly an outsider, so probably swept up into things mostly by her sense that good people shouldn’t just stand by and watch or skip town. More immediately, if less creditably, as an obsessively curious person, it wouldn’t be too tricky for someone to dangle a tantalizing mystery in front of her that a certain obnoxious villain’s antics are getting in the way of solving. As a wizard, she’d bring a bunch of Knowledge skills and attention to weird details to bear, and as an illusionist, eventually get quite good at covering up subversive shenanigans, I hope. (Probably aiming for a support role within the party, generally. I love suggestions for spells the whole party would enjoy!) As a fancy elf, Lady Docur is probably who got her involved, possibly with a discreet hint that if she plays her cards right, she might introduce her to some interesting secretive folks.
So as not to spoil things for folks less familiar with the AP:
The Lacunafex, though that might only be revealed in time. At first, my character might think she’s being teased with clues about the Sacred Order of Archivists, or the Silver Ravens, only to actually run into the latter in the course of things, and the rest is history in the making. ;)
Some more fragmentary ideas for characterization/vibes and pragmatics:
Spooky librarians! (Or, what if we smooshed Willow into Giles’ role? Every Scooby Gang needs one!)
Should probably think about putting some skill points in Bluff or whatnot, but she’ll be starting out very much in her happy wizard bubble until the real world intrudes
Campaign trait: Urban Sleuth – focusing (mechanics-wise) on local dragons, but in-character chasing after all of the suggested questions, with a secondary focus on Professor Mangvhune, which feeds into various secret societies by way of “dark academia” nonsense :p
Reasons to protest: Meeting a contact – who are these Silver Ravens, anyway?
I have a pot of stir-fry (Ants Climbing Up a Tree, again) that will probably last me to Friday.
Thinking ahead, I have some potatoes that need to be dealt with, and I kind of want varenyky, but don't feel like the fuss.
Frozen minced(?) lobster is on special in my neck of the woods, which sounds like it might be intriguingly old-school to work with, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Find a recipe for crab/lobster cakes, I guess?
I've got a wizard in the works that I might like to try out. An elf with too many maxxed-out library cards and her nose in too many secrets. I think there's an elf gate canonically close to Kintargo that she might conceivably know about. :)
Planning ahead, might we be able to work out some sort of homebrewed variant multiclassing for the arcanist? (E.g., like this, maybe?) No rush, and no problem if that's too much trouble. I just haven't been able to figure out what I would ideally have in mind for her through stacking archetypes.
I have played in a couple of Hell's Rebels games before (up to about early into the third volume, I think), but I can keep past experience separate.
One might naively think that they would be kind enough to make sure the first bit at least works out to a common denominator, if not (gasp!) a whole number.
Limeylongears wrote:
gran rey de los mono wrote:
One of my nieces posted a thing to the family group chat today, saying "Your baseball name is your grandfather's first name, and the last thing you bought as your last name." Why baseball name? Who knows? Most of the last names were things like "snacks" or "bang" (apparently it's an energy drink" or "coffee". I replied "Well, right now my name would be '[Grandpa's name] Groceries', but if you had asked tomorrow night it would probably be '[Grandpa's name] Arby's-Roast-Beef-Combo-with-Curly-Fries-and-a-Dr-Pepper-with-No-Ice.'" Which is probably a bit long for the back of a jersey.
Anyone else care to share?
Douglas 'Root' Ginger.
With slight adjustments - translating, and because we're going to have a room league of our own - I guess that would make me Theo(dora) Apple(s).
(That strikes me as a bit more baseball-y than ladies going with their grandmum's first name, though Anne Apple would make for fun introductions with the near homophone. :) )
Hmm. My go-to for flavour tends to be curry on the spicier side of things, so that might be tricky. Maybe General [Tso's]* Chicken, if you can find a decent prepared mix/sauce and are OK with westernized Chinese ?
*Your General may vary. In my part of the world, it's Tao.
Chicken Véronique? It's on my list for soon-ish, since I have the ingredients.
Véro instructions:
For two chicken breasts:
3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp marmalade
1/4 tsp tarragon, crumbled
1/4 c dry white wine
8 med mushrooms (chopped or sliced fine)
1/4 c whipping cream
1/2 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp water
3/4 c green grapes
Melt 1 tbsp butter, cook chicken in pan 'til golden on either side. Stir in marmalade, tarragon, wine: simmer until cooked through. (~15 min.) Meanwhile, fry mushrooms in rest of butter, add cream to pan juices, quickly boil. Blend cornstarch with water, add to sauce, return to boil, add halved grapes, and (again) let it boil. Serve sauce over chicken.
Any luck? Or would we have to fall back on fanfiction and Mabel Maney’s parody? :) I think Maney does a very good job of channeling the feel of the revisions from the ‘60s through a very camp aesthetic. It’s much of a muchness, always. And affectionate, if ruthless.
My mum was so disappointed in Nancy Drew that she more or less actively discouraged me from reading those, though I ended up a bit more of a sci-fi girlie in any case, so Tom Swift more than the Hardy Boys, to a certain extent. I stopped reading the lot quite a while before I was in a position to realize that Nancy/Deirdre would have clarified things for me so much sooner. (Though I think that might only have been possible after the adventure game series, anyway?) But all this is getting wildly off-topic from taking 10 on dinner checks! Unless anyone can recommend fannish cookbooks for sapphists? :)
In much less exciting news! Three-Cup Chicken, and yes, it is Taiwanese, now that I checked my recipe. Soy sauce, black sesame oil and wine for a marinade, spiced up with a pinch of sugar, ginger, basil, and ideally Sichuan chili crisp to taste. I’m between batches of the last, and didn’t feel like faffing about with a bunch of jars, so I made do with some hot sauce powered by the more usual peppers for my part of the world. I probably should have done it properly, or been more generous with the spice (to compensate for the wine?), but it was fine, if not particularly exciting. I had it with rice and some steamed mixed veg.
Wow, didn't know I had fellow food history fans in here. I collect historic cookbooks. :)
My brother's partner has a background in social history, including of food, so I can reliably get new recipes and facts when I have a chance to pop over to their place. :)
I, on the other hand, despite hanging out here, don't actually care much about food, so when I change things up it's mostly out of Chaotic resentment towards the idea of order and stasis generally rather than a heartfelt interest in culinary experiments.
I did see a copy of the official Nancy Drew Cookbook at a secondhand bookstore here a while ago, but they were asking an absurd sum for a record of historic low expectations of young readers. I'm not sure who the books were intended for, originally, since the level of the text and the reader's assumed interest in the emotional lives of teenagers seem to be at cross-purposes. (Who is this ... Ned(?) guy? It's been a minute.) Similarly, the Cookbook's idea of when kids might want to "entertain" and what they could hope to achieve don't seem to line up: leafing through it, its suggestion for "pizza" was particularly heart-breaking.
Maybe I was just a weird kid, or it was a different time, or both.
Anyway, about to try an approximation of Taiwanese (I think?) Three-Cup Chicken tonight. Will see how it turns out!
TL;DR: We were never allowed representation because the Boomers outnumbered us, yet now we're being blamed for ruining the world because somehow we had a hand in something we were never allowed to have a hand in. All the while being completely self-reliant from an early age and then being told we weren't responsible enough for any real responsibility.
*Channels her inner Indigo (Fan)Girl.*
*Wails:*
"Did they tell you it was set in stone?
That you’d end up alone -
Use your years to psych you out:
You’re too old to care, you’re too young to count?"
>:(
The demographics are horrifying, aren't they? I'm not sure what it must be like to be a sociologist watching on, these days.
Predictably, I gather - after some quick Googling - that while the Americas are roughly representative of the global average of parliamentary (broadly speaking) demographics, that's because Central and South (and the Caribbean) compensate for North America. And compared to here in the frozen north, looks like Congress is about 12 percentage points lower, for proportion of representatives under 45.
We do both (beef stock and tomatoes, about 1:3 ratio) and of course onions!
Recently, inspired by xkcd, I have added trying out popular regionalisms from the land of my foremothers to my list of things to do eventually, speaking of horrifying the Italians, but I would need to plan a trip to the butcher's.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope that things get so much better for you that next time you need to refill your prescription it goes smoothly and you won't even have to remember the nonsense from this time around. :/
Dinner tonight was pizza soup. Mostly because I had suitable ingredients (including overripe tomatoes that had to be dealt with) and it's been a while, but also, sometimes chopping the heck out of a pile of vegetables is pleasantly cathartic.
Got a middling baguette to go with it at one of the supermarkets I rarely stop at because it was actually more or less on my way this evening, and of the usual places I might go A) the one was, conversely, inconvenient, and B) the other, though pleasingly more diverse/international in its stock, regrettably does not do fancier European bread. Great paranthas, though. (Oooh, maybe next time!)
I do also need 1) to get my knives sharpened and 2) to learn how to do it myself.
My wife got me 'The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation' as a gift, so I've been reading that.
As a professional (sort of? aspiring? - still a student, really), I think everyone should, but is it ever depressing. :)
Recently got through Artemidorus' Oneirocritica in translation, mostly just for gleaning some oddments of social and religious history. The broad context is accessible for anyone who's spent some time with the Second Sophistic, but there are more amusing ways of getting there than jumping into the deep end of weirdo diviners.
Just starting Barton's oldish ('90s) intro to ancient astrology; still looking for something light from my piles of things to read.
I have eaten the most important meal for black people on new years day- sweet potatoes, black eyed peas with turkey neck, mustard greens with a scotch bonnet and fatback, rice, and of course, a gigantic glazed ham.
GRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 2026
If you'd forgive my ignorance and felt inclined to generously inform a clueless white girl, could you elaborate just a teeny bit on the significance of the meal?
I'm not entirely estranged from my family's ethnic food-ways inherited from our European roots, but it's been a near thing after outlasting years of pressure to fit in where I had no interest in doing so.
(Among other things, there's probably enough vampire, uh, Transylvanian (let's go with that) in my bloodline that I have an apparently baffling and shameful aversion to garlic. ;) )
this is a tradition going back to slavery in the US when black people were given/found/grew what was seen as "lesser" foods and food-adjacent items to eat. It turned out to be unexpectedly full of nutrients. Beans/peas are full of protein, greens are especially nutritious and the liquor is full of vitamins and minerals and has the flavor of everything it cooked in(including the pepper. Mmmmmmmmmmmm spicy and great on a cold day. Feel like you're coming down with something? You aren't anymore!!!!). Smoked meats were usually available in very very modest quantity and could be used to flavor an entire meal when larger portions were unavailable. Pork was also usually available in modest quantities, and sweet potatoes- a rare link to Africa- were also usually available/grown.
It is to be eaten on new years day for luck, and to remember history.
Thanks to both you and Ambrosia Slaad! Good to know! :)
Nothing particularly traditional has been in the offing recently on my end: too isolated to feel inclined to do a full Ukrainian Christmas, in terms of both effort and quantity. Might do belated bits and pieces if I find the energy. DeathQuaker's mentioning gołąbki a few posts back offers an idea of what to do with the other half of a cabbage if I decide to make borshch.
Instead, this weekend's been a batch of Ants Climbing up a Tree, in a Taking 10, casual sort of way: some sort of packaged Sichuan stir-fry mix (close enough to the "chili crisp" that I gather was big a while back), proper doubanjiang, onion, ginger, cumin (not-a-vampire aversion to garlic), generous splash of soy, fried up with ground pork and noodles finished in a bit of broth, served over rice and with indifferent frozen mixed veg, which helps turn down the heat.
Also baked a batch of hybrid ginger snap / oatmeal raisin cookies that turned out fine, but a bit less zingy than I would have liked. Next time I'll have to use lighter molasses or add more spice, bearing in mind that the recipe is from the Prairies and a person who's probably about my age (?) but has an inexplicable fondness for the sorts of stuff that induces bemused reminiscences from my mum and her siblings and was already unfashionable in their youth.
I have eaten the most important meal for black people on new years day- sweet potatoes, black eyed peas with turkey neck, mustard greens with a scotch bonnet and fatback, rice, and of course, a gigantic glazed ham.
GRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 2026
If you'd forgive my ignorance and felt inclined to generously inform a clueless white girl, could you elaborate just a teeny bit on the significance of the meal?
I'm not entirely estranged from my family's ethnic food-ways inherited from our European roots, but it's been a near thing after outlasting years of pressure to fit in where I had no interest in doing so.
(Among other things, there's probably enough vampire, uh, Transylvanian (let's go with that) in my bloodline that I have an apparently baffling and shameful aversion to garlic. ;) )
It is regularly pasta night in my house, as tonight, though over the weekend I had made a batch of vegetarian chili, with my favourite yuppie lentils. Dessert was Australian lumberjack cake. (Apple and dates, with a broiled brown-sugar coconut topping. Needs to be watched more carefully than I did (alas!), at least with my oven that runs hot, but will probably add it to my recipe collection.)
I also made a batch of varenyky/pierogies for the next few days. I must roll out the dough thicker than my grandmother did, because I always end up with leftover filling, but this year I left it late enough that it will go into the pot for the stargazy pie that is on the verge of becoming my solstitial tradition. Doing a full Christmas Eve thing on my own is too much, but I do try to keep it meatless, and I can work in some of the other traditional things over the twelve days.
I went for my first årsgång / year walk this morning: probably did it badly, but I gather there are some traditions (unsurprisingly) that it goes better the more one does it over the years. :)
lisamarlene wrote:
I looked it up.
(Like, seriously, I mentioned it to Eve when I texted her last night to wish her a blessed Modranecht, and she thought I was crazy.)
So, hey, let's compromise. The door to the sauna is open, just like on the old Infocom Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.
Maybe you'll shed your robe and go in.
Maybe you'll wait outside with a bundle of birch twigs ...
I'm really not a sauna person. Designated switch-girl? Well, maybe, but I'd be a bit worried about having to deal with someone too happy to be on the receiving end.
Which reminds me that a while ago I saw folks looking for volunteers to help with research for designing better hockey helmets, but they weren't looking to fill what might be my ideal role:
"Who's that girl with the stick?"
"That's Q-. She's the assistant helping us run our tests today. Try not to flinch, and don't worry. Our models for the efficacy of this design are very promising!"
"Wait, what? Is it too late..." *Whack!* XD
Anyway, the rest of my solstice is probably going to be more meditative, and most of my family celebrates Christmas instead, so I might get a start on some of what's traditional for our holiday dinner that can be prepared ahead.
Nothing fancy here for dinner tonight: pasta with a sauce of chopped tomatoes, splash of wine, pinch or two of various herbs. (Need to get more cumin, or just grind it myself, since I have an improbable amount whole, from restocking at the nearby supermarket which at least gestures to a more diverse / international clientele, and so stocks reasonable spices in larger quantities than yer typical Anglo dealers.)
I also had an absurdly small scrap of pastry dough left over from the last pie I baked, so I made myself a single butter tart using a drastically scaled-down version of the Kitchen Magpie's recipe for the filling. She suggests using maple rather than corn/golden syrup, of which I theoretically approve, but it ended up runnier than ideal. Next time I might see if another couple of minutes' baking would do the trick, but I think it's just the nature of the beast, especially if one leaves out the raisins, as I did.
Hmm. Could that (trying to find a bright side) be a somewhat heartening indication that they're not tracking absolutely everything about everyone? One would think that it would be sensible to let people, wherever they are, buy stuff for their friends in their friends' local currency, since that's what the recipient would be on the line for if they bought it themselves, but.
OK, *I* might think that would be sensible, but I'm a [*redacted*, for politics].
NobodysHome wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:
I was lost to that long ago. I try to declutter, but then I see new minis and am defeated.
Minis aren't clutter -- I have racks of them, set up in cases and displayed for use during games.
If you use it on a regular basis, even for recreation, it's not clutter.
The kids' giant case full of Nerf guns and ammo wasn't clutter 15 years ago. Now it is.
Alas, I fear I'm unlikely to ever get around to painting the miniatures I have in my collection hoard, and should probably try to find them a good home sooner rather than later. :(
Fortunately, (digital) embroidery patterns also don't take up a lot of space.
A: "My wife has kindly asked me to stop referring to the neutered male pets of the house as 'my council of eunuchs'."
B: "This is literally why you have a council of eunuchs. What do they advise?"
A: "Right now I'm eating dinner and they're just wiggling their butts. Not very helpful."
I showed this to my Pathfinder group tonight, which led to a 5 minute discussion of twerking eunuchs.
IYKYK.
... It felt like someone had to say it.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I'm not the right girl to do so, but I'll let it stand, for the sake of the historical record. I obviously need more sleep, or coffee.
Ooof, I get that. My maternal grandmother was born just before the Depression, and the family very definitely never talked about what that was like and the effect it had on her. Almost certainly a factor in a very complicated relationship with food.
I am - certainly culinarily - a barbarian with simple tastes, though, so very plain stuff sounds fine by me. (And industrial tomato ketchup is the Queen of Sauces, no matter what the snobs say. :p )
That said, I do like the idea of cooking, and spices are tons of fun to play with (curries are great!), though indulgent baking is more my thing when I feel like putting any effort in.
Here's the immortal Alkman for any other barbarians in the thread, in Burton Raffel's loose translation:
"And a huge cauldron, hot
With your dinner, soon.
But still cold, until that thick winter soup
For gluttonous Alkman
Comes boiling up.
No fancy slop for Alkman, no.
Like ordinary people he likes real food."
;)
Extra points for the irony that he's most famous (today?) for lovely, intricate poetry written for choruses of young women, back when Sparta was still cool - before they turned into the militaristic dystopia fetishized by generations of real weirdos. :(
What amuses me the most is that this is supposedly a "traditional" Ukrainian recipe from the late 1800s, and it all sounds perfectly legit: crumble a sausage, shred 3 beets, shred 3 carrots, shred half a head of cabbage, dice some potatoes and onions...
...all solid winter root vegetables or larder items that you'd expect to find in any Slavic peasant's winter store...
...then...
..."Dice 1 cup of fresh tomatoes."
Nope. You have broken immersion. -10 points.
Apparently tomatoes were slowly becoming popular in Poland and Ukraine during later parts of 19th century, so if the recipe is from late 1800s, then it is possible, though of course more likely it was a recipe for gentry/middle class than peasants. Coincidentally gentry and bourgeoise were more likely to be writing cookbooks than actual peasants...
"Winter" recipe more likely would be using tomato paste than fresh tomatoes, of course, but it is another matter.
My family's recipe calls only for juice, not fresh tomatoes. Though "recipe" is being generous - in practice, it was a kludge from three separate ones until I insisted on finally sitting down and writing out how we actually do it instead of scrambling around the kitchen at the last minute after remembering, "Oh, right, but Baba would always add..."
My dad's side of the family has been urban for at least as long as it's been on this side of the Atlantic, but my mum's has roots homesteading in Saskatchewan, so we have some peasant cred there. The most personal layer of our recipe - that doesn't come straight out of a cookbook that we know of - does start with, "Take a bucket of beets," at least, and other quantities are similarly generous and approximate.
Making borscht for Impus Major today, and I'm convinced that the requirement to shred all the root vegetables was invented just to give the cooks something to do during those long, cold winter days. Pretty sure dicing would work just as well...
EDIT: Fortunately, I have a pre-ensh*ttification Cuisinart so the shredding is pretty darned quick.
Some of us just ... like knives, ok? ;)
But even so, borscht is a nuisance. I'm trying to plan ahead for an occasion in the next few weeks to motivate me, because it's a production and a half, as you're clearly all too aware.
I made "lazy varenyky" yesterday to use up some ingredients in the fridge yesterday, but, again, I'll have to make the real deal soon when I can find the energy.
