being a person in your 20s is like being 40 and being 16 at the same time. i am simultaneously too old and too young for this shit
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Iconic Tumblr Blorbo : Round 1
You FIGHT against Miette?? You freeze her body like a an ice cube? oh! oh! Jail for little man Jail for little man for one thounsand years!!!!
💚steddie || ronance💛 parralels / chaotic 😜 gay || cool 😐 bi
commission for @szczypawice
how can people enjoy shows without spending all of their freetime shitposting about them on tumblr and reading fanfiction of their ships until 3 am
that feeling of being queer in the 80s and the person you’re totally not crushing on is suddenly invested in their ex. 😋🤭
Things that People Forget About When Writing Sword Fights
- You don’t have to dodge by a foot. You only have to dodge by an inch.
- Not all swords are made the same way. You wouldn’t fight with a katana the same way you would fight with a broadsword.
- You don’t need to aim for the heart or the head. Get the vein in wrist, and you could incapacitate that hand.
- Small cuts matter. If you’re cut up enough, you’re going to start suffering from blood loss, and that’ll put you at a disadvantage.
- The blade isn’t the only thing that matters. There isn’t some set of rules in sword fighting where you can only stick the stabby end into the other person. Hit them in the head with the hilt, and they’ll feel it.
- If there are multiple attackers, you want to incapacitate or kill each one as quickly as possible. Endurance matters, especially when you’re not only swinging/stabbing/aiming something that is 2-5 lbs (ceremonial ones were a lot heavier, but wouldn’t be generally fought with) but also taking/blocking heavy blows from at least one opponent.
You don’t have to dodge
by a foot. You only have
to dodge by an inch.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
That final haiku actually makes for a pretty good maxim!
All the above. (Including the haiku.) :)
But also, regarding the not-just-the-stabby-end advice: significant sections of the numerous medieval-and-newer swordfighting manuals now available in translation are devoted to the art of clobbering or otherwise messing up people with the hilt of your sword in numerous inventive ways. Many of these are potentially quite lethal, and mean you won’t have to waste time cleaning your blade.
…Additionally, while thinking in this mode, feeling the need to mention a favorite move of my iaido master, back in the day: the one where you spear your (seated-across-from-you) opponent in the gut with the hilt of your katana as you’re drawing it… then finish the draw and chop your opponent’s head off. The move is called “Mutiny” (don’t ask me what it would’ve been in Japanese; if he ever told us, I can’t remember). But I can’t tell you how many times Shihan made us practice that damn move. There was just something about it that appealed to him.
Anyway, generally speaking: if you’re going to write swordfights, you may not have the time, inclination or money to study the sword yourself, but you can at least read the fecking manuals. They’re easily found. Here’s a link to one of the best-known ones, circa 1459.* These will break you quickly of any idea that medieval-period swordfighting was some kind of inelegant boring bash-clash-bash-clash operation.
…Oh, and re the recommendation about not going for the heart or the head: This is definitely on the money. If I was in a swordfight and was in a rush to get it over with, the femoral artery would be my choice. Wait for your opponent to expose it (or get them to, usually by you stepping back out of range so they have to step forward, exposing any opportunities offered by their leg armor while it’s flexing). When they do, chop deep on the inside of the leg above the knee. Then get out of range again so your opponent doesn’t fall over on top of you. Two minutes or so for them to go profoundly shocky: then five to seven minutes for them to bleed out. But regardless of the timings, since you’ll likely have bisected one or more of their adductor muscles on that side, they definitely won’t be getting up to run after you…
*Particularly directing your attention to the plates illustrating judicial divorce combat.
i love that specific ao3 phenomenon where you get a sudden influx of kudos on a work and it’s clear someone shared your fic but you have no idea who they are or where they shared it. it’s like being a dickensian orphan receiving money from a mysterious benefactor.
The thing about Those White People Baby Names is the way they so poetically express the tension between individuality and rigid conformity. These parents all want to name their child something unique, because they value the concept of uniqueness, yet simultaneously they abhor it in practice… ergo, 30 different spelling variations on the most normative possible names. This homogeneity-masquerading-as-diversity is inseparable from capitalist consumer culture and in fact is directly analogous to the experience of walking into a grocery store and being asked to “choose” between 50 varieties of toothpaste with the same exact ingredients, 12 brands of laundry detergent, etc.
Somebody’s third eye is WIDE the fuck open??!!!!!!!
okay so there’s actually a reason behind this that isn’t just “white people are terrible and really really boring!” it’s to do with Mormon culture. specifically: the fireworks you get when sexist expectations and terrible petty drama collide.
most of Those White People Baby Names are originally Mormon baby names. they’re chosen (or invented) by women in Utah; they tend to filter out to the rest of the world through things like “mommy blogs” and “baby name books” and “parent forums.”
you know how every culture has a “hey, welcome to the world, lil baby!” ritual? the mormon version of that is called a baby blessing. the baby’s father, and a handful of other men in the family, go up in front of the congregation during a Sunday service and say a special prayer. it begins by reciting the baby’s full name and then saying “I give you a name and a blessing.” It’s not something you can avoid doing- if you try, people will think that you’re trying to hide something. baby blessings are mandatory, and everyone in the congregation will watch and judge you.
because of this, your baby’s name gets a good bit more of a spotlight in Mormon culture than it does in secular culture, and that’s saying something.
Mormon women start picking out names for their hypothetical future kids in fourth or fifth grade and snipe at each other for picking “weird” or “bad” ones. it’s something that’s supposed to be in the back of your head long before you have a kid. and because people will judge you if you pick a name that’s “too boring” or “too weird”, it is already an intricate dance of finding something that’s “interesting” enough to pass muster but not so “interesting” your kid won’t survive kindergarten.
and that dance becomes even more intricate when Baby Name Drama gets involved.
see, because you’re supposed to put so much time into your baby’s name, a lot of women get… overinvested, let us say. the perfect name they picked for their baby is THEIR baby’s name and NO ONE ELSE’S. if you so much as dare to BREATHE that you’re naming your baby/pet/favourite laptop the same thing, you have STOLEN their BABY’S NAME.
so here’s the thing… say you really wanted to name your daughter Amy. You love the name, it’s classic, it’s cute, it’s perfect for your little girl-to-be… and then your sister-in-law gets pregnant and LOUDLY ANNOUNCES that she’s naming her baby Amy! and you know for a fact that she’s the type of person to throw a massive petty shitfit over you STEALING her BABY’S NAME. your family will take sides. her family will take sides.
if you want to avoid the drama, and you’re dead-set on naming your daughter-to-be Amy… well, then you name your daughter Aimee, or Aimi, or Aimy. It’s not the same name, it’s pronounced the same but it’s not the exact same name, so you can shut up, sis-in-law.
from what I understand a lot of the Crazy Name Spellings came from this root- “it’s not Kaylee, it’s Kayleigh, I swear I didn’t steal your idea”- and then once it became a trend, people named their kids that to be ~trendy~ just like they did with every other stupid trend.
but the root cause of Terrible Trendy Misspelt Baby Names has very little to do with white people being boring and conformist, and certainly nothing to do with capitalism. it’s a good old fashioned case of a) sexist expectations warping women’s behaviour into really really stupid shapes and b) Petty Small Community Drama.
This is a terrific addition to this post that I don’t think actually contradicts my main idea all that much
Its explains Reneesme I’ll tell you that.
All super interesting, but I do want to point out… Aimee is not a unique spelling of Amy… Aimée is the original* spelling. It’s a French name (literally translates to “loved”) and Amy is the anglicized spelling.
(*the original spelling in Old French would be Amée, but in modern French it’s Aimée. But either way, “Aimee” predates “Amy”).
I think the other thing here is that…standardized spelling (especially for names) is relatively new in English. like, “was not fully cemented even as late as the early 19th century” new.
Henry VIII had three wives named Catherine, and they spelled it that way but also Katherine, Katharine, Katerine, Katherina, Catherina, and- in the unfortunate young Howard’s case, Katheryn. yes! the modern-looking Y spelling is actually centuries old!
we have been trained to regard name spellings as mutable for far longer than we’ve considered them fixed. so I feel like that makes people more willing to play around there