Still here (Qunnessaa, posting under her proposed character’s alias), enjoying dreaming up ways my character might fit into the campaign. Since, as a silksworn occultist, Tsia’s very much a “courtly intrigue” sort of character, I’d like to think part of her narrative arc might be just how quickly she gets her fingers into how many pies, even as she’s an outlandish creature from over the eastern mountains with her own distant past and somewhat mysterious motivations.
That said, some more particular starting points would be natural for her.
Spoilers in spirit of GM’s outline in opening post:
While Tsia is most interested in the Stolen Lands for their elven connections from before Earthfall, the most topical current issues for an Iobarian who likes to think of herself as reasonably well-informed are the civil war that’s brewing in Brevoy and the question of what all’s going on with Choral the Conqueror. Before the start of the campaign and looping back to Restov, I’ve imagined that she’s already caused/run into/got dragged into a spot of trouble in Pitax (which might come in handy for plot hooks later), and may have swung through Varnhold and the foothills of the Tors of Levenies, where she would still be foreign enough not to realize that the locals mightn’t appreciate that she meant “cyclopean” literally when joining discussions about huge, strange carvings higher (and deeper) in the mountains. (“The 'Lenyenko Dark?' Can’t say I know it well, dear heart, but surely the general idea is obvious?” ;) ) One way to nudge all of that closer to the “Overplot” and the “Shadow Plot,” perhaps, given Tsia’s eastern roots and concerns about dragons, might be that, in passing by Lake Silverstep, she heard rumours about a special sword from a dragon’s hoard (which isn’t Briar), and whose significance she is not yet in a position to understand. Since shadow magic offers ways of expanding one’s spell repertoire of interest to someone with limited spells known, if Tsia does start putting the pieces together and ends up visiting the Fellnight, she could conceivably be tempted to share what she knows with an offer she can’t refuse. (A certain staff is something she would be very interested in.)
Anyway! Just to make it a bit easier to see who’s all here, maybe start idly thinking of possible connections, and because I’ve seen similar in other recruitments, here’s a very tentative list of names and ideas I think we’re seeing here? I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone, and if this is a useful sort of thing for GM Hurley, I’m happy to post an updated list once or twice before new submissions close next week:
Daniel Stewart – (possibly a gnome?)
DeathQuaker – Jack Ciarathan, elf slayer Oh, that’s an awkward “ancestry – class” tag combination: “Well, I never!” Tsia exclaims. ;)
ElbowtotheFace – (expressed interest)
eriktd – Zsófia Dobós, human swashbuckler
Evindyl – (expressed interest)
GM_Drake –Anders Smith, android spiritualist
karlprosek – Malylev, human oracle
Kittenmancer – Ta Bayang, gathlain oracle
Mark Thomas 66 – (something nature-themed?)
Monkeygod – (fae-themed, House Arvanxi?)
Nightfiend - Seamus Edelbom, dwarf inquisitor
Qunnessaa – Tsia Troian Malynova, elf occultist
rdknight – (human (?) ranger, or half-elf oracle (?))
Rosc – (possibly an alchemist or swashbuckler?)
TheWaskally – (expressed interest)
Female Elf Urban barbarian 1 | AC 15 T 12 FF 13 | HP 13/13 | F +3 R +2 W +0 | Init +2 | Perc +6
After Vrire and Aurelia’s more perceptive examinations, and with Mizzie moving on to the mournful practicalities of what needs to be done, after a respectful interval, Willow takes the opportunity to indulge her horrified fascination with the excuse of making a start of preparing the body for decent burial, as opposed to the state it’s been left in by … whatever it was.
As carefully and discreetly as she can, Willow starts unwinding the vines from Elm’s body. She’s not entirely sure of either druidic or Shelynite customs, but she doesn’t get the sense that a place like Rosehaven would opt for the most ruthlessly natural methods rather than at least a more slightly formal “laying out.”
She keeps an eye open for the punctures and burns that Vrire pointed out, but especially, since she ends up holding a bunch of them, the ragged ends of the vines that Aurelia noticed were probably torn from something.
Knowledge (nature):1d20 + 4 ⇒ (7) + 4 = 11Or (arcana) or Spellcraft, if applicable, since Willow’s bonus for all of those is the same. If we’re dealing with some mutant pumpkin aberration (What have you done, Linus?!?), she doesn’t have (dungeoneering) trained, though.
Bah! The dice have turned against me. :/
Were these really just pumpkins? Before she can really second-guess herself, once Willow's got the worst of the vines away from Elm's body, so that Bertinard and his helpers will have a marginally less skin-crawling sight ahead of them when they arrive, she rises from where she's knelt down and follows the constable's gaze to the cottage.
GM Roll4initiative wrote:
Constable Elise gestures toward the torn vines and strange moss nearby. “For now… I need you and your companions focused on what happened here. Whatever did this—” her voice drops slightly, “—it doesn’t seem natural. And I fear it isn’t done.”
Elise steps aside to give the party room to work, her posture steady but her eyes sharp with worry. She turns to gaze at the cottage where the door swings lightly in the breeze.
"Right," is all the apprentice says, quietly, before, with a glance at Bellisola who looks, of all her fellow Pathfinders on this excursion, even more likely than Willow for bearing with sticking one's face where something monstrous might snap at it, briskly walking over to the cottage, reaching out to catch the door and peering inside.
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.
This sounds really neat! Count me among the other English majors whose attention you’ve snagged so far. :)
I really like the shared storytelling aspect you’re stressing, and the flashbacks and behind-the-scenes, er, scenes to reduce “latency,” as you put it, and let the players see some of the background to various plots that might not be as clear from their side of the GM screen in other games. That said, what sort of pacing do you have in mind in terms of posting expectations and the like? Layering on multiple scenes representing different layers of time sounds like it might exceed my current bandwidth, to be honest, but if the aim is a more or less standard pace while allowing different layers to pick up the slack when one slows, that’s less daunting, I think.
Like DeathQuaker, I’m very keen on player agency, so thanks to both of you for raising and clarifying how that’s intended to interact with the collaborative layer and narrative tokens.
A quick question about house rules: you mentioned not faffing around with AoOs, which sounds fine for the character I have in mind, but how strict a “not doing” are we talking about, for things like casting spells and whatnot? Not that there aren’t many other reasons why a mage might not want to cast a spell right next to a baddie with a huge sword, but still. :) It’s a calculation that might factor into how some classes play, I think.
In any case, I’ve had a silkworn occultist rattling around my head for a bit, whose profile is here. She ended up being a bit different, in my imagination, from an ordinary Avistani elf (among other things, my ideas for her silks tend towards something closer to Eastern European (Ukrainian) embroidery and Scythian archaeological textiles), so I thought it might be fun to imagine what it might be like if the canonical rumours about an elven court in Fangard Forest were true, and there was an offshoot of the snowcasters living there. As an elf from Iobaria, she would have another perspective on the history of Brevoy (including Choral and his line) and the Stolen Lands, and I hope her stake would be compatible with many others’. In particular, while she’d happily rebuild an elven presence in a suitable bit of forest, if one turns up, she’d also happily take a supporting role as fairy godmother / lady of the court rather than the eventual leader of the incipient kingdom or one of the more obvious movers and shakers. Sort of a Merlin, and potentially happy to return back over the mountains following her Vivien once it looks like the situation in the Stolen Lands isn’t about to blow up in ways counter to her sense of elven interests. “Celtic myth, Greek myth and dramatic tradition, Shakespearean romance and tragedy, Machiavellian court politics, faerie tales, dragon tales, Arthurian legend, and Game of Thrones?” Oooh, that sounds very much like her jam. ;)
Where does white chocolate fall in that consideration?
Do any U.S. companies actually make white chocolate? I think Hershey's produces... something... but I'm not sure what it is.
Probably fewer than one might think, I guess? In my neck of the woods, we import most of our chocolate from all y'all, and even before - *gestures vaguely at politics* - it's been surprisingly difficult to find even white chocolate chips for baking. For the past year or so most supermarkets near me have been stocking some abomination ("white creme," apparently) whose composition doesn't bear thinking about, I'm sure.
I'm hoping it won't take the collapse of the cocoa market, or a generation for whom even the worst North American chocolate is beyond the wildest dreams of the proletariat, to bring climate troubles home, but that would probably be much kinder than what it's actually going to be. :(
On a happier note, although weird supply chain nonsense still applies, I'm trying to fit running around getting materials to play with hippie witch foragings and whatnot into my schedule this week, but I've been faking it terribly, so results will probably be indifferent at best. :/
Female Elf Urban barbarian 1 | AC 15 T 12 FF 13 | HP 13/13 | F +3 R +2 W +0 | Init +2 | Perc +6
*Looks up, checks local witching hour.* Eh, close enough. And everyday is Hallowe'en in my life, so, absolutely, happy Hallowe'en, everyone!
So far the posting rate is fine, though as a chatty poster myself, one substantial post a day is probably what I can manage regularly on my end. And I'm sorry, GM! It occurred to me just after I had Willow wander off that I wasn't helping the party's centrifugal tendencies. I'll try to have her stick closer to everyone so it's a bit less like herding cats.
Female Elf Urban barbarian 1 | AC 15 T 12 FF 13 | HP 13/13 | F +3 R +2 W +0 | Init +2 | Perc +6
Past nautical expeditions aside, Willow is clearly rather restive on a small boat propelled by oars: something about the lack of space for an archer to train. Instead, most days she spends most of her time with her battered primer, practicing incantations in a murmur and twisting her fingers in arcane gestures. Sometimes, for a minute … but it doesn’t come as easy as breathing, or sure enough to trust her life to it, as it would have to, so for now the necessary epiphany for things to just make sense continues to elude her. When the boat moors of an evening, she takes to the opportunity to practice lofting arrows in the falling light on the riverbank with alacrity and determination, but also a measure of relief.
She absolutely does not avoid looking at the far bank and pine when it must be Kyonin on the other side. Never has she ever! That’s the idea, at any rate, but it’s so implausible that Aurelia doesn’t even need to make a show of looking stern, and Willow accepts paying her forfeit – a shot of whiskey – with good grace, unconcerned about being called out on her nostalgia. Soon, she promises herself.
About two-thirds of the way to Rosehaven, a chance encounter helps to brighten her considerably; on another night on shore, the boat shares a mooring with a family of elven merchants heading the other direction on their way to Hymbria, eventually. They’re friendly, if a bit wild, by Kyonin standards, but Willow’s pretty sure they weren’t pirates, and they did share a lovely sparrowfish and the recipe for preparing it that way. Even hints of magical possibilities, if one pulls out all the stops, that will remain beyond her for the foreseeable, don’t dampen her mood, and for the last bit of the journey the apprentice’s heart is light.
Female Elf Urban barbarian 1 | AC 15 T 12 FF 13 | HP 13/13 | F +3 R +2 W +0 | Init +2 | Perc +6
Bellisola Rosenthal wrote:
Sola looks at Aurelia's musket, Mizzie's light crossbow, Willow's composite longbow, Vrire's longbow, and the serpentine creature with Nuwa that's some soft of 'eidolon' beyond Sola's understanding wielding yet another composite longbow, and can't help but wonders what's in their drinks back in the HQ when they put together a fire squad for Petulengro .
*Troop of Pathfinders marches in, bearing a variety of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and announces, “You can make peace with the Society or with your gods. Your choice.” XD I think Mizzie and Nuwa are diplomatic, at least, and on a good day Willow can keep her foot out of her mouth, for someone with a temper / impulse control issues. What’s the worst that can happen?
Swapping stories with the new team reminds Willow that while her trip to the Mordant Spire was exciting but involved no serious misadventures, one of her Cairnlands expeditions was a close thing. Before sailing for Rosehaven, she takes some time to explore Woodsedge, and between the Society lodge and the town is able to track down a wand that should help avoid a trip to Elysium before she can start dreaming about being able to find a way to come back. Unfortunately, anything that she could hope to use herself, eventually, is beyond her ability to wheedle or haggle for, but she’s sure that one of the others would be able to use it to keep any one of them from meeting Pharasma beforetime. She has a couple of Prestige Points burning a hole in her pocket. I could pick up a wand of cure light wounds before we go, just in case?
She indulges in some yearning for a few of the textbooks and scrolls she sees, but that would be another kind of premature. She makes a few notes for (hopefully) the near future, and channels her eagerness through the last of her exercises for the day.
Female Elf Paladin 1 HP 11/11 | AC 19 | T 12 | FF 17 | CMD 15 | Fort +3 | Ref +2| Will +7 | Init +2 | Perc +2
Ghur wrote:
Ghur groaned, a wave of guilt rushing over him. He had convinced the group not to just kill the orcs and to try and use the traps against them. It didn't work. He also convinced the group to siege the orcs out, and now the orcs had gotten free and were using the same traps he tried to weaponize. If he had just resorted to violence, then they might well have already been heading home with prize in hand. He got to his feet, his axe gripped tight. He would not make the same mistake twice. The orcs would die, diplomacy be damned. (un)fortunately, violence came quite easily.
Nooooo! Ruisxys will have to have a reassuring chat with Ghur later, in an attempt to cheer him up and encourage sticking with the let's-try-the-minimally-murderous-method-first style. It might not work, but might result in less guilt when things break down and it's axe-swinging time. :)
That list looks about right to me, but, while their player(s) could correct me, I thought Amir, the mesmerist, might have been an alternative submission to Albert, the wizard? That might make it a marginally easier choice. :) (Both were neat, and very different characters.)
Edited to add: ah, found the post. I don't mean to be officious, just trying to help a teensy bit.
Oh, absolutely! I took a minute to gaze into the abyss and imagine having to make such decisions myself, and am glad I don’t have to! I did have a bit of fun imagining largely arbitrary groupings if it were up to me to form several parties from all the submissions, though. It started from my noticing that those of us with elf-y characters chose quite different ancestries, so in one timeline I can imagine a slightly different campaign in which the story kicks off with elves from across Golarion starting to come together to resettle Azlant, because why not / the time is right / the humans are bound to mess it up. XD And then I didn’t want to leave the others out. I’m looking forward to seeing the actual party that gets chosen, though I can’t promise a filk.
Persifor Jonstonne wrote:
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with Persifor as is as well. One thing to note is that I know the specific pearl his class features are built around narratively isn't involved in the events of Ruins of Azlant at all and I'm actually OK with that if he's selected. I sort of picture it more as a kind of "Grail Quest" epilogue for him.
Neat. I didn’t realize there were particular pearls to be sought. (Soft wizardly voice pops up: “Surely you’re not forgetting about pearls of power, madame Troian.” “Hush.”) I suppose, if you want to really lean into the Grail Cycle sort of thing, you could make sure Persifor ends up having a son who’s even more pure and noble than he is? :)
I recently started playing my first-ever paladin in another campaign – of Yuelral, so she’d probably get along quite well with a pearl seeker – but I’m afraid Tsia’s much more your usual whimsy/chaos elf. (Returning to Arthuriana, watch yer wizards! She’s definitely the sort to try putting annoying ones under/into trees, if possible.) I haven’t really thought that far ahead for obvious reasons, but as an occultist, Tsia might dabble in ritual magic, and the bit that really stuck in my head is Unmaking Touch. Step 1: Acquire a chaos emerald. Step 2: Add more chaos. :) Sounds like a fun afternoon at the sewing circle, at least as Tsia would probably end up doing it.
Anyway, I’m imagining that she's the sort of elf that grew up around so much magic that “magic” means something different to her than it might to us, and hers just happens to work out in ways related to her craft. She is absolutely (eventually) going to take the possibilities of the abjuration focus power Unraveling and run with them. In a gestalt game, her other class would be witch, with the tatterdemalion archetype.
Looking forward to seeing which of us will be heading to Gilligan's Ancorato Island! Good luck, everyone!
Sorry for the radio silence, everyone. I was visiting my daughter at college this weekend, Homecoming weekend, and didn't get home until late last night.
@Tsia Troian Malynova: I'm not that familiar with the occult classes, so give me some time to look it over and I'll get back to you.
Thanks, and by all means, no rush. I appreciate your willingness to take a look. Like I said, I have a couple of ideas if my character makes the cut but needs a tweak or two.
(Glances up at eriktd's running list of submissions - for which, thanks, sir!)
I certainly don’t envy you the decision! There are a lot of fun characters here. :)
… And now I’m thinking, probably because it’s past my bedtime, that whatever form the party eventually takes, an enterprising filker should adapt the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. XD
That's just appalling, on the prof.'s part, and I say that with a succubus' appreciation for petty tyranny. :(
Life happens, and sometimes one runs just a minute late for reasons that it wouldn't be fair to hold against someone, even if others might try to wangle that into breezing in whenever.
But in the latter case, isn't that what teacher training includes practice at withering, venomous stares and a few choice words for? I don't think I've ever had a class where enough people were trying to sneak in late and disruptively enough that I would think the sensible course of action was just to lock the door.
Female Elf Paladin 1 HP 11/11 | AC 19 | T 12 | FF 17 | CMD 15 | Fort +3 | Ref +2| Will +7 | Init +2 | Perc +2
Seeing only the one orc as the door opens, Ruisxys moves to get a length of rope ready to try to lasso the creature, but long before she's ready to take action, Ghur is striding across the room and burying his axe in the unsuspecting thing.
I can live with that, and we'll see how dramatic Xys feels about it depending on how things pan out in the aftermath, if it comes back to bite us. ;)
The paladin winces, and her mouth briefly opens, before closing again as she sets her thoughts aside for the moment for further processing.
Tight-lipped, she adjusts her trajectory to check the next door for signs of movement beyond, before doubling back to check the mess on the table, before her cynical companions overturn it or set it on fire, silencing any clues as to what's going on here as well as any blade.
Sorry, paladins gonna judge! At least she's not an inquisitor! XD
Female Elf Paladin 1 HP 11/11 | AC 19 | T 12 | FF 17 | CMD 15 | Fort +3 | Ref +2| Will +7 | Init +2 | Perc +2
Perception:1d20 + 2 ⇒ (8) + 2 = 10 Stealth:1d20 - 1 ⇒ (1) - 1 = 0 ...And here's where the dice turn against me. XD
Distracted by the need to get Orne out of the weather as it becomes clear that he needs to be bundled up better somehow, and by a lingering unconcern for a ruin of dubious interest abandoned for an indefinite period of time, Ruisxys' steps are not as careful as they ought to be.
A certain amount of jangling metal is inevitable with her armour, but at a particularly awkward point on the trail, her baldric catches unexpectedly and unnoticed on a stone snag that momentarily catches her up short, and forces a cry of surprise out of her that rings out into the cold mountain air, announcing her presence to anything that cares to notice it as she disentangles herself.
For Grumbaki’s half-minotaur, maybe some sort of magic shenanigans without experimentation could work to lightly tweak the backstory? I’m thinking along the lines of the OG son of Minos minotaur, only sort of backwards?
I think way back when in the v. 3.5 days, there were rules for monster cults which involved a certain amount of transformation, and it’s definitely canon in Pathfinder that there are rituals for that sort of thing. Maybe Ghur’s father is a reformed ex-Baphomet cultist, who had, at one point, advanced an alarming degree in the mysteries and acquired horrifying profane blessings – but when he turned away from the demon lord, those were taken away from him, but not without leaving a mark. (Which would, meta-wise, account for why, even as a non-minotaur, Ghur’s non-orc parent can’t ease the family’s integration into ordinary society.) But, because demons are warped and evilly cunning things, when Ghur was in the womb, he was cursed/blessed with full (as it were) half-minotaur “ancestry,” so that every time his father looked upon his progeny he would be reminded of his shame or (as Baphomet might see it) all that he threw away. (With the potential for all sorts of toxicity stewing as a result.) And with an implicit promise that the child might have potential that his father lost…
Something like that? A fun bit of angst that retains a bunch of the grim, but lets Ghur’s parents be trying to be better? Especially, if we're setting this in the River Kingdoms, which I gather is in some ways Golarion's Island of Misfit Toys, where all sorts of odd outcasts can pop out of the rural woodwork, compared to all the weirdos that a large metropolis can explain just by sheer numbers.
Apparently, the biblical "land of milk and honey" is also more like "yogourt and fruit syrup," but accuracy on that point is rather low on the list of ongoing problems for exegesis to the laity, for scriptural scholars.
Wait, is that how we got tea? Part of boiling water to make it safe?
Pretty much.
Tea, the original health food drink for the fashionable set! :)
The Oracle of Wiki collects a few fun factoids from various sources in their article on “Tea in the United Kingdom,” including a paper that argues for the importance of tea to help account for falling mortality rates in the mid-18th century, although in 1731 tea was still suspiciously foreign stuff. I'm not really surprised, but I know less about the earlier bit of the century than I ought to.
And about a hundred years earlier, apparently, a traveler living down to any stereotypes the Chinese might have been pleased to hold about far western barbarians called it “only water with a kind of herb boyled in it” – which, I’d like to think I’m not a snob about tea (though in my better moments I can be honest with myself), but really!*Feels the vapours coming on.* :)
Gender is a mess; an interesting mess, to some of us, but another one of those things that really highlights how humans are a weird bunch of social primates, I guess.
To NobodysHome’s last:
Just to elaborate a bit on what Drejk and Orthos were saying, as I understood it, it strikes me, incidentally, that one thing that didn’t come up in your post is identity as such, as opposed to role. Given that you report all the things you do that fit in the gender box labelled “woman stuff,” and your suggestion that – and I appreciate that your glibness is tongue-in-cheek here – “if you don’t like your gender role, ignore it,” why don’t you consider yourself a woman? Especially since various formulations under the trans umbrella (and beyond) let folks find gender roles that better speak to their sense of themselves?
There’s a weird recursive thing to gender that I don’t think I’ve seen discussed much at all (except, for a bit, by Sophie Grace Chappell in her book Trans Figured), about how gender is as gender does, or what one does/feels, and which ideally gets accepted by society at large. She compares it – noting the limitations of the analogy but not working them out in detail – to how hard it is to separate at least some more or less prestigious jobs / social functions from the doing of them. Judges, I think, and possibly priests and legislators. It’s been a while since I read it.
“You doing you,” for gender, for most people, I think, is something that feeds into their sense of who they are, even if that is driven to an uncertain extent by how many societies have made gender such a big deal. I find it neat that you went from “if you don't like your gender role, ignore it,” to “if you don't like your gender, you do you.” There’s something there, I think, beyond just the delight of a bit of rhetorical variety. :) Culture’s a nasty piece of work. ;)
Could you elaborate on what you meant by the cooption of “transsexual?” I think I know what you mean, but… Anyway, for what it’s worth, I’ve seen a French writer try to float “transsexuation” in a way similar to how we might say something is “sexed,” and to distinguish between biology and “kicks below the waistline” (or above, let’s not dictate what anyone counts as sexy times), but it never took off.
Female Elf Gunslinger 1 / Arcanist 10 / EK 1 HP 33/70 | AC 17 (19 vs. evil) | T 13 (15) | FF 15 (17) | CMD 20 | Fort +8 | Ref +8| Will +7 | Init +2 | Perc +1 | Arcane reservoir: 3/19 points | Spell slots: -/5/1/4/4/3 | resist fire 30
Hello, everyone. I doubt you’ll see this, since I seem to have been a large part of killing this game dead, but after a skin-crawling, brain-spider-y few months of ruinous mental health issues that took over most everything that wasn’t real-life related, I thought I should at least scrape together some iota of decency and offer my abject apologies for just vanishing off the face of the earth without warning.
I’m so very sorry that I let things get out of hand like this, and I have no good excuse for it. I think you’re probably well rid of me, all things considered, and I regret that I let things drag along like they did before simply disappearing.
While I had the capacity to participate, it was a delight to share a game with you all, but life apparently imitates art all too well, and this crazy character was driven by an unhinged player as well for whom edging into higher-level play was too much, for the foreseeable. Again, I’m so very, very sorry that I treated you so shabbily, and I only wish you joy of wherever your paths take you next, without the burden of someone as fragile and flaky as me.
Yeah, yeah, I know. "Griping about what once was" and all that, but seriously?
As of Windows 11 I noticed that my Word documents are now always opening in 2-page, side-by-side format. I hate it. So I Googled how to fix it. And learned that Microsoft removed that functionality from Word: You can no longer save your preferred view, adding two extra button clicks to every doc I ever open.
Hate you so much, Microsoft!
This is why I still use 10.
Which is no longer being supported in October.
Yeah, I'm probably going to get a new computer early this fall. My current is nearing the end of its natural life anyway, but I'm not happy about it. :/
If I knew more about Linux ... but I'm not sure I have the time right now to get a good enough grip on it not to drive myself bonkers.
Goddesses dammit, I hardly needed more bad news from the world these days. >:(
If I could find a way to retreat to a cottage in the woods with a Maleficent-style wall of thorns, I would, but that's sadly not a realistic option for my foreseeable. Gah!
*Take breath, tries to set shoulders back, chin up.* The struggle continues; stay safe out there, everyone.
Major premise: Round, flat, bready things – e.g., laganes, naan, parantha – are easy, fun, and tasty.
Minor premise: Tortillas are also round, flat, bready things.
Conclusion: Therefore, preparing tortillas like any other round flat breads should be fine. >:)
If there isn’t already a Demon Lord of Wilfully Flawed Syllogisms, there should be one. :)
And now I’ll need to add paranthas to my grocery list this week, for some deliberately uber-floofy bread goodness.
I’m sorry to hear that your tortillas have been corrupted. Could you salvage some amusement by trying to style it out as some sort of fusion experiment? I’ve always found that culinary disappointments sting a bit less if I pretend I meant to do it that way all along. (Memorably, once, with a rather unorthodox take on lobster thermidor when substitutions proved necessary.)
I need to read more Mesopotamian stuff, but there's always too many things to read, and the list (and the stacks) just keep on growing.
A recent entry is Irving Finkel's The First Ghosts, about those from that part of the world. He gave a fun talk about them online recently, which is probably up on YouTube. If I recall correctly, the difference between ghosts and demons in Assyrian(?), as far as the cuneiform goes, is that both are built around the sign for ishtar (in the generic sense of feminine divinity, rather than Ishtar the specific goddess), but with the addition of the sign for 1/3 for ghosts, and 2/3 for demons. :)
Other things that I'm already splitting my time between now, rather than consigning to the purgatory of the list, are Aston's Blessed Thessaly (history through to about when Rome shows up and starts making a mess of things) and Faraone's The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times, which is a nice introductory archaeological survey for someone who's normally more of a text person.
Signs of being old: ... Being tired after walking a few kilometers.
Hush, you! :)
I'm going to console lie to myself that it's because we're creeping ever closer to the dark of the year, so even a brisk, shortish walk in the afternoon leaves one in softer, cool-ish light that encourages the worst tendencies of one's lizard brain.
... Belatedly realizes that's an awkward choice of words when speaking with a dragon. :)
Do I need it? No. Do I want it... Yes! Yes, well, for later. For now I have a last piece of Black Forest to finish after my dinner (Bolognese sauce with minced meat on completely wrong type of pasta).
This is a reflection on the limited list
of Polish verbs I can conjugate and spell from memory, without reaching for the "500 Polish Verbs" book on the shelf, because I am lazy.
EDIT: Alright, I looked it up.
Drejk dostaje ciasteczka.
"Cookies" was one of the first nouns I learned. Not on purpose. I didn't learn "cookie" (singular) until months later.
Apparently my aunties are in charge of lesson planning at Duolingo.
Funny thing is that in the first sentence you wrote - ciasteczka is actually singular.
*checks the case declension*
After "potrzebuje" goes... Eeee... Genitive? I think it is genitive, and in that particular case "ciasteczko" becomes "ciasteczka".
** spoiler omitted **
In the second sentence ciasteczka is in... accusative, I think... So there, ciasteczka is plural.
OK, if you’ll forgive a Ukrainian-Canadian too lazy to look up Polish phonemics and too tone-deaf to be sure she can hear generated audio correctly, would either of you be so kind to confirm for inquiring minds how the “ci-” in “ciasteczka” is pronounced?
I’m hearing it as more or less the same as the “cz,” but I am all too aware that I could be crazy. (Not least because, as a barbarian easterner, I might have guessed that it was a hard c, so as if it were ki-steczka, which would sound kind of like “(little) bones” in Ukrainian!)
Coincidentally, I also need cookies (Мені треба тісточки! or, closer to the verb you two were using, Тісточки мені потрібно.*) for a trip back home for the long weekend, so I baked a batch of peanut butter cookies this evening.
(Also: Cyrillic, my friends. It just makes spelling easier. That applies to all y'all Romanizing folks. ;) )
*N.b.: I’m 3.5th generation, or so, depending on how one splits the difference between my parents’ sides of the family, and quite apart from assimilatory pressures, descended from a bunch of hicks, at least from the point of view of the toffs in Lviv or Kyiv, so I apologize for the inelegant phrasing and/or solecisms. I'm blanking on how else my family would say it in a remotely ordinary way, without putting on airs. Well, apart from a couple of other auxiliary verbs.
Dinner tonight (with planned-overs for the next few days, as regularly, as a spinster in her bedsit) was vegetarian (but with real/dairy cheese) nachos, with my favourite yuppie-hippie black/beluga lentils for the pulse/protein. In my neck of the woods, only organic grocers carry them, but they’re my favourite variety of lentil, so living down to my princess-iness it is. For the rest, though, it was just unremarkable taco seasoning from the supermarket, tinned tomatoes, and frozen mixed veg. Oh, and because I'm weird and not living with anyone to complain about it anymore, unsalted nacho chips - I'm really not a huge salt fan, and heart disease runs in my family, so reducing sodium is probably the right move anyway.
Once I make some time to figure out what I need for some proper recipes or to spice up prepared sauces, I have a vague plan of trying my hand at Caribbean pepperpot, and then browsing the local East Asian grocers for inspiration. On that note…
I’m sorry to hear you didn't find your aloo gobi particularly rewarding, DeathQuaker!
It sounds to me like the recipe you found was quite fussy, which I can easily imagine would make the whole thing more frustrating, and then served over rice… I mean, as a Ukrainian, I’m basically culturally and probably genetically predisposed to frankly unnecessary combinations of carbs, but still. When my family makes aloo gobi, we tend to just have it on its own, which may make it easier to balance the spices.
We also just cook everything in the same pot: fry a bit of cumin seeds in oil until they pop, stir in some cauliflower and potato to coat, add a bit of water, cook for ~7 min, add some peas and the rest of the spices, cover and cook over medium heat for ~ 5 min longer until everything’s tender, stirring occasionally. It’s not particularly thrilling, but the main reason I don’t make it more often is because I find it too easy to overdo the oil and make the stuff heavier than it needs to be.
... And now I'm wondering what distance an average person drives in a day. My father, bless his heart, insisted on spending hours in gridlock commuting to work downtown before he retired, even though we lived in the suburbs just over the bridge, so he didn't actually go that far. Which is to wonder, indirectly, if folks that mask up even when driving alone don't expect to be driving for long...
Wow... I think that is so dependent on location and circumstance that I don't think there's a rational concept of "average distance" or even "average time" here. ...
We like irrational and imaginary numbers here! Or, yeah, even as I posted I thought to myself, “This is an ill-posed question, as the mathematicians would say.” :p
I am half-curious, though, despite how much variance there is. I’m guessing that how much time people are willing to spend on the road is the main limit, while how far an hour or so on the road gets you varies drastically based on particular routes and areas. Does her best to assume the posture of a wide-eyed ingénue: Isn’t sorting, filtering, and organizing that kind of complicated but sort of useful data what fancy machine learning / “AI” is supposed to be for, as opposed to, say, generating cruddy “art” to clog up the intertubes? XD
The lunatic mayor of the nearest metropolis to my part of the world has come up with an idea to improve traffic there by, um, digging a ~55 km tunnel under the existing downtown freeway, so commutes and such have been in the back of my mind lately.
Oh, I have an old Bacchus toga and grapevine lying around, and I'll read up on druidism vs. wicca and be a right PITA about the whole thihg.
Terrible cultural history nerd tangent: for extra spite, I would be tempted to try to recreate some of the more, er, let’s say, imaginative reconstructions of what druids were like from earlier periods of Celtomania.
Ron Hutton (who’s a lot of fun!) mentions – I think in Blood and Mistletoe – a visionary fellow who lectured Victorian(?) audiences about the ‘wisdom of the Druids’ or the like, in his apparently earnest attempt at authentic costume. IIRC, it was marked with supposed druidic runes, but to paraphrase the good professor, the audiences were more interested in why he was addressing them in his (rather peculiarly decorated) underwear. If one had an old-fashioned combination / union suit / onesie that wouldn’t be missed, or some impermanent / washable markers…
“What do you mean? I’m obviously a druid!” *Makes sure to look up chapter and verse.*
…
I may be a terrible person. And, unfortunately, I was absolutely the sort of kid that asked her Mum for weird costumes based on whatever books she was reading at the time. At least it led to some fun conversations while trick-or-treating!
Ugh. Preach it! I try to make my clothes last and seek out natural fibres wherever I can, so fast fashion (or worse) and I don’t get along at all. That reminds me that I should put my crank hat on and write a series of letters to my MP with radical ideas to bring the industry to heel.
I love Hallowe’en immensely, even if I’m not sociable or energetic enough to have much occasion to dress up, so bearing my social and environmental concerns around textiles in mind, when I have dressed up recently, it’s been in costumes that aren’t too out there to reuse as mostly regular clothing.
My overall aesthetic probably skews to granola witch, generally, so that helps. In contrast to that, one of my most costume-y costumes in recent years, compared to my usual outfits, was some low-key cosplay of Max Caulfield from Life is Strange (in her mean girl / hipster incarnation from that one alternate universe episode), so bits and pieces of that will resurface when I want to wear something that is a bit less, “I spent my morning foraging in the woods.” :)
Anyway, absolutely: no disposable tat destined for landfill extracted mercilessly from the poor sods making it!
(I am still looking for a proper pointy hat made of responsible material, I must confess, but then, as I said, the line between “Qunnessaa dressed up for Hallowe’en and/or to be accused before the village elders” and “Tuesday” is probably all but invisible at this point.)
But then, Canada's population density is a couple of orders of magnitude below my area's, so a "crowded" Ottawa festival is pretty much a nearly-empty street around here...
EDIT: I was curious so here's the math:
Canada: Population 38.93 million (2022), area 3.8 million square miles. Population density roughly 10 people per square mile.
San Francisco Bay Area: Population 7.76 million (2020), area 7,000 square miles. Population density roughly 1100 people per square mile.
So that "a couple of orders of magnitude" throwaway was spot-on. I'm impressed. Though ask 10 locals about what it means to be in the San Francisco Bay Area and you'll get 10 different answers. Officials have given up and declared that the "Bay Area" is anywhere in the 7 counties that actually touch the bay, even though some of those counties extend across the coastal range and into the Central Valley, they're still considered the "Bay Area". And Napa isn't, even though it's basically our rich people's playground.
EDIT 2: This got me curious about Ottawa in comparison. Population 994,837 (2017), area 1072.63 square miles. Population density roughly 927 people per square mile. So at least it's closer to the Bay Area...
Now you’ve got me curious. There are so many of all y’all that I’m not sure how I’d model where most Americans live (everyone in California and New England?), but using the factoid that 90% of us live within 100 km of the border, a back-of-the-envelope estimate for where most of us live gives me a pop. density of about 100 Canucks/sq. mile, on average, I think.
Which feels about right? Choose a random Canadian town and it’s likely to feel about an order of magnitude less exciting (in terms of people hanging around) to a spoiled big-city princess like me, but not actually desolate, unless chance lands you out in the actual woods or prairie.
Uh-oh. Is this math-y enough to summon a raging Freehold? :)
It's a terrible indictment of the downtown in my part of the world that I kind of like the street festivals here, since it's otherwise dead as a door-nail.
It's appalling, because the thought of the same-ish sort of thing in the metropolis where I grew up makes my skin crawl - but then again, there's always something going on there. Or at least a half-way to interesting window display to press one's nose against.
In all fairness, out here in the provinces, some of the booths are at least run by enthusiastic local shops and community organizations, rather than legions of grim merchants merely resigned to a weekend street closure, so. And it's not just mediocre cover bands here - that's what the community / conference hall is for! :/
I have rarely been happy about my lack of musical ability, but the past few posts have made me perversely grateful that my brain balks at imagining what most of those would sound like. :/
lisamarlene wrote:
quibblemuch wrote:
See this scar here, right under my hairline? Got that when someone tried to argue you could sing any Emily Dickinson poem to 'The Yellow Rose of Texas'.
Man's gotta have a code. And gotta enforce that code, even if it disrupts a new graduate student/faculty introduction tea event.
"Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me" is my favorite to sing this way.
That said, this^ I can imagine, because I've heard this test case! Since sharing is caring, I pulled that one in my first year poetry course. Fortunately (for me at least), my prof tolerated it, and I got away without a scar. :p
"The Yellow Rose of Texas" also features in "The Mixed-Up Medley" by Betty and the Bobs, which is a pretty neat trick even in the short version which is the easiest to find online. I was lucky enough to hear them perform it live, a very long time ago, and was immensely jealous. I would probably be tempted to slip into the "right" tunes all over the place, if I were to attempt such a thing.
1/4 inch scales to 10 feet. That’s actually pretty easy to work with.
Agreed, to a point-- the math is pretty easy, but you run into problems when you need X and Y to be installed at a width of, say, 2'.
Yeah. I can, theoretically, imagine real-life (as opposed to dungeon maps :) ) uses for plans scaled for 10-foot (sub-)units, but as a starving student in a big(gish) city, it is a purely hypothetical vision, at least from my bedsit.
The weirdo in me kind of likes the idea of a work-around to move between scales that results in things like plants spaced at 3'9" intervals, but there's that other side that would worry that it would provoke the landscapers into lobbing said plants at the architect's head during a site visit.
Female Elf Skald 3 HP 21/21 | AC 17 | T 11 | FF 15 | CMD 15 | Fort +5 | Ref +4| Will +3 | Init +2 | Perc +1 | Untrained Knowledge/Lore +4 | Raging song: 10/10 rounds | Goodberries:
^ ^ "I am Alaïs Thalanassa, and I approve this message." :)
Absolutely, do what feels right and healthy, and leave the crazy to chaotic elves who are old enough to know better. Regardless of how the game goes, I hope everything else on your mind settles down soon, DM.
Dare I ask what goes into most soda and/or doesn't into beer?
Setting aside the question of just what mechanism(s) make diet soda so terrible for one, per NobodysHome's link, in terms of unhealthy amounts of sugars, how do your common-or-garden beers stack up against soft drinks again?
It's essentially that in a nutshell: The sugars. A 12-ounce beer contains no sugars at all. A 12-ounce soda contains 36 grams.
Huh. Learn a little every day. The weirdness around why sugar is bad for us has crossed my radar, but since I’m not much of a drinker, I had never really considered how much goes into booze, or not. Although I’m appalled to learn that some of the stuff my dad will occasionally indulge in apparently contains corn syrup?!!!? That explains so much, and not in a good way.
Drejk wrote:
Meh. Beer. IPA or not, it belongs in the sink.
Most heartily agreed! :)
Sugar, though, is likely to be my culinary nemesis, unless I can get a handle on how stevia works. I have to admit a weakness for baking (both production and consumption), but I try to be reasonable about it, all things considered. It’s a rather grim joke in my family that one of the bakers whose recipes we like when we’re feeling indulgent has completely insane ideas about serving sizes and such. From one of hers that I whipped up a while ago, for example, I got 2.5 times as many cookies as the recipe as written, because any half-way reasonable person would take a look at it and say, “Ha ha, no.”
Dare I ask what goes into most soda and/or doesn't into beer?
Setting aside the question of just what mechanism(s) make diet soda so terrible for one, per NobodysHome's link, in terms of unhealthy amounts of sugars, how do your common-or-garden beers stack up against soft drinks again?
*Gestures vaguely to dimly-recalled factoids about the caloric values of old-timey brews in the ages of mass malnutrition.* Based on all the jokes I've heard about American beer, I gather the song is due a new verse or two about John Barleycorn being drowned, poor fellow?**
I'm not a fan of either, by and large. I've had two beers in my life, and see no likelihood of that number increasing, and for bubbly things I'll mostly go through maybe a bottle or two of mineral water enlivened by some cordial or home-made fruit syrup in a year.
I guess I'm a watery tart through and through, though I don't have swords to chuck at the people I might choose to lead various countries. :)
**N.b.: Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. As a philhellene, I will sometimes water my wine - I'm not that much of a barbarian, not to.
A while ago, to try out a very old recipe for traditional northern holiday treats (Bonfire Night, actually, though I didn't end up trying it anywhere near the occasion), I bought some oat flour. The experience was, uh, more interesting than successful (not that I was expecting that the flavours would appeal to my debased modern palate), but I have just made a pan of brownies with oat flour instead of wheat, and they turned out fine. :)
I'm still experimenting with raw stevia that I grew myself, so I haven't figured out the right way to substitute for the lost bulk from substituting for the sugar (maybe bananas, like in DeathQuaker's recipe, or the leftover mash next time I juice some berries), but some delightful sugar-free concoction should be possible.
(With wheat flour, scones/biscuits are forgiving enough that one can mostly just adjust how much dry ingredients go into the mix rather than trying to adjust for the space otherwise taken up by sugar.)
For your oat bread recipe, DQ, could one just add a bit more flax / egg substitute if one felt like skipping the eggs this time around? Since I'm a weird crone on my own, I'm quite pleased when I hear about a recipe that lets me use fleggs instead of having to divide eggs to scale a batch down.
Dinner here tonight will be Olia Hercules' lazy varenyky, with added smashed potatoes and extra cheese, because varenyky without 'taters (unless they're sweet/fruity ones) is just doing it wrong. ;)
Everyone agrees FFXIV has the best glamours of any MMORPG, period.
Personally, my character's pretty much eternally in a modest skirt. Because if I wear skirts in public even around here I'll get stares and I'm sure I would flash way too many people. In-game skirts almost behave themselves epically well, so you'll rarely see my toon in anything else.
EDIT: And considering the fashion atrocities foisted on women over the millennia, I'll cede the skirt to them. I could wear a kilt, but they invite conversations with strangers, which I definitely don't want.
Dare I ask what your idea of a modest skirt is, or what you get up to that you’d be worried about, um, unnecessary … exposure?
Not that I’m philosophically opposed to a bit of thigh-flashing, as Aristotle (iirc) infamously inveighed against in condemning the scandalous freedom of Spartan women, but it’s not really my style. Then again, having imbibed too much of the pre-Raphaelites and Anne of Green Gables at an impressionable age, I may not be a very representative young(-ish) lady. My kid brother giving me up as hopelessly schoolmarmish is one thing, but my minister mum thinking I might incline too much to old-fashioned or church picnic styles does sometimes give me pause. :)
Anyway, I wouldn’t climb a tree in some of my favourite short-skirted dresses unless the weather permits of leggings underneath, but that’s about it.
On a tangential note, I have a trip to Philadelphia to plan for early next year, and I'll have to see if I can work in a detour to the fashion museum at Shippensburg. They have some lovely pieces (that would make my brother roll his eyes at me).
A wacky theory notion sometimes crosses my mind that since (anecdotally - I don't have enough data) it often feels to me that jetlag hits harder losing than gaining time, it might be fun to try just heading west and rounding the globe to try to cheat, but I will never be the sort of person to be able to afford such a lifestyle. :)
(And as a tree-hugging hippie elf I feel guilty enough about flying in general that short of a grand tour style of itinerary, I don't think I could bring myself to it even if my purse wouldn't weep at the very thought.)
