jadevine:

introvertbard:

lilietsblog:

kitstacean:

grison-in-space:

jadevine:

Preindustrial travel, and long explanations on why different distances are like that

I saw a post on my main blog about how hiking groups need to keep pace with their slowest member, but many hikers mistakenly think that the point of hiking is “get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible” instead of “spending time outdoors in nature with friends,” and then they complain that a new/less-experienced/sick/disabled hiker is spoiling their time-frame by constantly needing breaks, or huffing and puffing to catch up.

I run into a related question of “how long does it take to travel from Point A to Point B on horseback?” a lot, as a fantasy writer who wants to be SEMI-realistic; in the Western world at least, our post-industrial minds have largely forgotten what it’s like to travel, both on our own feet and in groups.

People ask the new writer, “well, who in your cast is traveling? Is getting to Point B an emergency or not? What time of year is it?”, and the newbies often get confused as to why they need so much information for “travel times.” Maybe new writers see lists of “preindustrial travel times” like a primitive version of Google Maps, where all you need to do is plug in Point A and Point B.

But see, Google Maps DOES account for traveling delays, like different routes, constructions, accidents, and weather; you as the person will also need to figure in whether you’re driving a car versus taking a bus/train, and so you’ll need to figure out parking time or waiting time for the bus/train to actually GET THERE.

The difference between us and preindustrial travelers is that 1) we can outsource the calculations now, 2) we often travel for FUN instead of necessity.

The general rule of thumb for preindustrial times is that a healthy and prime-aged adult on foot, or a rider/horse pair of fit and prime-aged adults, can usually make 20-30 miles per day, in fair weather and on good terrain.

Why is this so specific? Because not everyone in preindustrial times was fit, not everyone was healthy, not everyone was between the ages of 20-35ish, and not everyone had nice clear skies and good terrain to travel on.

If you are too far below 18 years old or too far past 40, at best you will need either a slower pace or more frequent breaks to cover the same distance, and at worst you’ll cut the travel distance in half to 10 or so miles. Too much walking is VERY BAD on too-young/old knees, and teenagers or very short adults may just have short legs even if they’re fine with 8-10 hours of actual walking. Young children may get sick of walking and pitch a fit because THEY’RE TIREDDDDDDDDDD, and then you might need to stay put while they cry it out, or an adult may sigh and haul them over their shoulder (and therefore be weighed down by about 50lbs of Angry Child).

Heavy forests, wetlands and rocky hills/mountains are also going to be a much shorter “distance.” For forests or wetlands, you have to account for a lot of villagers going “who’s gonna cut down acres of trees for one road? NOT ME,” or “who’s gonna drain acres of swamp for one road? NOT ME.” Mountainous regions have their traveling time eaten by going UP, or finding a safer path that goes AROUND.

If you are traveling in winter or during a rainstorm (and this inherently means you HAVE NO CHOICE, because nobody in preindustrial times would travel in bad weather if they could help it), you run the high risk of losing your way and then dying of exposure or slipping and breaking your neck, just a few miles out of the town/village.

And now for the upper range of “traveling on horseback!”

Fully mounted groups can usually make 30-40 miles per day between Point A and Point B, but I find there are two unspoken requirements: “Point B must have enough food for all those people and horses,” and “the mounted party DOESN’T need to keep pace with foot soldiers, camp followers, or supply wagons.”

This means your mounted party would be traveling to 1) a rendezvous point like an ally’s camp or a noble’s castle, or 2) a town/city with plenty of inns. Maybe they’re not literally going 30-40 miles in one trip, but they’re scouting the area for 15-20 miles and then returning to their main group. Perhaps they’d be going to an allied village, but even a relatively small group of 10-20 warhorses will need 10-20 pounds of grain EACH and 20-30 pounds of hay EACH. 100-400 pounds of grain and 200-600 pounds of hay for the horses alone means that you need to stash supplies at the village beforehand, or the village needs to be a very large/prosperous one to have a guaranteed large surplus of food.

A dead sprint of 50-60 miles per day is possible for a preindustrial mounted pair, IF YOU REALLY, REALLY HAVE TO. Moreover, that is for ONE day. Many articles agree that 40 miles per day is already a hard ride, so 50-60 miles is REALLY pushing the envelope on horse and rider limits.

NOTE: While modern-day endurance rides routinely go for 50-100 miles in one day, remember that a preindustrial rider will not have the medical/logistical support that a modern endurance rider and their horse does.

If you say “they went fifty miles in a day” in most preindustrial times, the horse and rider’s bodies will get wrecked. Either the person, their horse, or both, risk dying of exhaustion or getting disabled from the strain.

Whether you and your horse are fit enough to handle it and “only” have several days of defenselessness from severe pain/fatigue (and thus rely on family/friends to help you out), or you die as a heroic sacrifice, or you aren’t QUITE fit enough and become disabled, or you get flat-out saved by magic or another rider who volunteers to go the other half, going past 40 miles in a day is a “Gondor Calls For Aid” level of emergency.

As a writer, I feel this kind of feat should be placed VERY carefully in a story: Either at the beginning to kick the plot off, at the climax to turn the tide, or at the end.

Preindustrial people were people–some treated their horses as tools/vehicles, and didn’t care if they were killed or disabled by pushing them to their limits, but others very much cared for their horses. They needed to keep them in working condition for about 15-20 years, and they would not dream of doing this without a VERY good reason.

All of this, with one additional nudge : even the people who thought of horses as I think of my car often cared intensely about the possibility of killing or disabling a horse by mishandling it. I would personally be furious if some feckless wastrel took my car and raced it over uneven ground so that it the suspension was shot to hell and the car had to be totaled and sold for parts. And I do not drive a nice car!

Today, we tend to think of horses as cheap to buy and expensive to maintain because those are the real incentive costs in a modern economy. In much of human history, though, horses were EXPENSIVE — that’s a big reason that we associate them to heavily with nobility! Other draft livestock are going to be even slower—good luck making quick time on a donkey or an ox cart—and harder to convince to move quickly for extended periods. And if you’re carrying supplies or any substatial weight? You’ll be lucky to get ten miles, and twenty will be a feat of extraordinary effort akin to a rider doing forty or fifty.

much like cars, draft animals are expensive things that are often vital to either your livelihood, your social life, or both. If there are towns separately by large distances in the setting, then you’d need some way for people to get between them - and if someone’s job relied on travelling between these towns either quickly (messengers, certain service jobs like mercenaries) or carrying a lot of goods between these towns (merchants, traders, etc), their animal being injured or killed would ruin their day, if not their life.

Vague literature based memories (of, like 19th century)? inform me of an infrastructure thing that is a network of, like, stables? courier stations? where a person can CHANGE HORSES (the horses are presumably all government-owned, as is the whole network) and keep going very, very fast in an emergency. I THINK it was specifically for government couriers, but logic dictates that a private individual could probably pay for the service?

Your weekly reminder that this “preindustrial travel” post has been updated A LOT! https://jadevine.tumblr.com/post/738801850678116352/preindustrial-travel-and-long-explanations-on-why

previous poster’s tags: #writing #fascinating info really #that last tidbit seems true though im pretty sure thats how the US postal service started out basically

The Pony Express is very famous… and very short-lived! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

There was also a preindustrial version of it: The Persian / Achaemenid Empire’s postal service! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapar_Khaneh

Notice how this is an EMPIRE and not a “Kingdom,” though?

Read more for why the Pony Express is Not Practical!

Keep reading

@lilietsblog forgot to tag you in my response, but there’s the Pony Express and the Persian Empire’s courier service, who both embody the sheer difficulty of “Hey, if you switch out horses, you could cover a LOT MORE ground! Why hasn’t anyone done it?”

Tealdeer: Switching out horses every ten miles and going full-speed across the country is enormously expensive and enormously dangerous.

whereserpentswalk:

Being thin is morally neutral.

Being fat is morally neutral.

Being muscular is morally neutral.

Wanting to be thin is morally neutral.

Wanting to be fat is morally neutral.

Wanting to be muscular is morally neutral.

Taking steps to become thin is morally neutral

Taking steps to become fat is morally neutral

Taking steps to become muscular is morally neutral

Literally do whatever you want forever. Reblog is you agree.

girlnephew:

tricitymonsters:

modernoracleofdelphi:

last-knight-who-was:

maria-sklodowskas-twix-bar-deac:

radiofreederry:

The liberals want open borders so that we’re forced to let Vegeta into our country

I didn’t even realize this was meant to be mocking at first

I'mma be real with you, I still hadn’t realized until you said that. Fascists try so hard to make leftwing ideas sound bad that they usually just end up making them look metal as fuck.

fixed it 👍

reblog to let Vegeta into the country.

teaboot:

minimal-effort-name:

teaboot:

marleysfinest:

hello please can I sleep in a studio ghibli bed it’s urgent

Okay there all look great with the EXCEPTION of Howl’s bed, are you kidding me

Look at that thang. The duvet, the pillowcases- that shit is embroidered and beaded to FUCK. That’s your victorian great-great-grandmother’s fanciest display sheets for the decorative guest room nobody ever uses. You roll over the wrong way on one of those appliqué czech glass flowers and lose a goddamn eye. Abrasive as hell. Too delicate to machine-wash, too, so the fabric itself gotta be tough like sandpaper. That, or frayed all to shit, like you shift a little in the night and get sequins falling all over like a drunk queen in a bouncy castle. You know I’m right. Look at him. Look at how he’s sleeping and tell me that man’s so much as SAT on those sheets in his life. My girl Sophie did her best but we all know that’s his fancy interior design hashtag #aesthetic Instagram influencer background room. He doesn’t SLEEP there, he sleeps on the couch or on the floor or in the reclined seat of his busted-out Subaru in the garage that hasn’t worked right in five years cause he doesn’t know what an oil change is. That’s the room he uses for makeup tutorials and Shien Hauls (derogatory). Look at that man. Look at him for five seconds and tell me he isn’t gonna wake up in an hour crying over snagged hair and floral imprints on his face. What the HELL Sophie baby that blowdried bitch has a twelve step twice daily skin care routine and you’re RUINING it. Walked right past his twin size flannel futon in the corner down the hall and dumped him in the biggest bed she could find like a bedazzled roadkill possum. Didn’t even put his bonnet on. Sophie I love you so much but first thing he does after he chips his nails clawing his way out of that thing is get your Amelia Bedilia ass. I’m so sorry

This almost compares to that guy who wrote The Rant about hating Olaf

you mean this guy

ALT

scientia-rex:

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

i-say-ok:

free-post-store:

captain-price-official:

youdehponskunt:

ametislady:

nerevar-shid-and-fard:

of-claws-and-dragonscales:

nerevar-shid-and-fard:

how do you guys feel about my lock screen

OP do you take constructive criticism?

there is nothing to criticize here

Who the hell organize apps by color

Mind your business

$0

ok.

serial-unaliver-deactivated2024:

there is no neutrality politics - as long as you’re a human being with emotions and a brain you’ll feel one way or another whether or not you realize it. try talking to a self identified centrist about anything and you’ll see how fast skew right wing. read “both sides” media coverage and you’ll notice that one side is lacking more context and information or even simply worded to sound more negative. actually think and read before taking claims of fairness and neutrality at face value

astronomypolls:

Veil Nebula vs Bubble Nebula

Veil Nebula

Bubble Nebula

See Results

official-megumin:

the one thing I really dislike about the titanfall 2 community is all the “haha schizo pills” jokes

Like just stop, it ain’t funny. It’s really not funny.

hallucinations and delusions aren’t just haha what if this thing I wish existed actually existed. Hallucinations are actually fucking terrifying if you actually had to deal with them on a regular basis then I can assure you that you wouldn’t joke about it

salcristina:

nanalineni:

todaysbird:

vaccines Georg

He’s fine btw. They expected his immune system to react in weird ways but mostly he’s fine and at lower risk of catching and transmitting COVID, and of developing long COVID. He’s fine.

“It’s not clear why the man wanted so many vaccinations or how he obtained them. But after reading news reports of the man’s story, scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) became intrigued and wanted to study how the vaccinations affected his immune system. The man—who told researchers he hadn’t experienced side effects from his shots—volunteered to provide blood and saliva samples to the scientists and allowed them to mine his health records so that they could better understand what effect aggressively stimulating the immune system with a COVID-19 vaccine might have. Even during this analysis, the man requested and received an additional two COVID-19 shots, against the advice of the study researchers.”

pinene:

capacity2:

howlingatthemoon3:

capacity2:

dullahandyke:

People who fuck around on their laptops during lectures are so important I’m watching someone in front of me play tetris online enraptured

I’ll never forget the girl who was shopping for dildos mid lecture. She picked the one I wanted too

You can’t just leave this in the tags 🤣 @capacity2

I didn’t though….. it’s on the post u can see it right there I typed it onto the post

Does anyone want me

bloody-monstrous-wolf:

liberalsarecool:

Voting Blue matters.

Republicans WILL NEVER cancel medical debt.

slymewitch:

tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors:

professional-chaotic-dumbass:

popsunner:

popsunner:

I love going viral on tumblr.com. It’s like if you stood in a field and said some of the stupidest shit a human being is capable of and then like fifty thousand crows attacked you

Don’t do this to me

my brother in christ you made the post

I-I like when people like the things I say

jooshthepunished-deactivated202:

caats:

thinkingabout-girls:

“but what if i’m being annoying :(“ everyone’s annoying dipshit it came free with fucking being alive and existing. now go talk to your friends

chiiri-h:

robinsversion:

chiiri-h:

i really hope that photomatt’s meltdown fucking follows him. i hope that he’s forever associated with this, and that any time someone hears his name, they think of the fucked up shit he pulled. i hope it ends up being synonymous with a childish fucking tantrum.

I wish that “hammer car explosion” and its context becomes as infamous and memed on as “man door hand hook car door”.

I also hope Matt gets bitten 2037543920473919566013 times by furbies in the span of less than a second✌️

I don’t want the funny meme where eventually everyone forgets that this was all over the blatant abuse and harassment of trans women to be what is remembered. I want it to be Matt, and his shit ass behavior. I want it remembered that Matt Photomatt Mullenweg had a fucking meltdown. A meltdown directed entirely at trans women, one trans woman in particular, where he misgendered her, lied about it, chased her off a platform he owns, and then stalked and harassed her further on another platform entirely where he is STILL lying about her.

I don’t give a shit about funny hammer car explosion meme.

I want him remembered for the monstrous shit he’s doing to real actual people and how he held all the cards and tried to use his position of power over another person, a trans woman, and threw a crybaby shitfit and deleted all his posts about it except for his continuous lies and harassment to her to be what’s remembered.

Fuck the memery.

This is the type of shit trans people routinely put up with, and its ignored blatantly. Trans women especially are made out to be sexual deviants, predators, and dangerous and more oft than not remembered as such. I want Matt to go down as a fucking freak for trying to pull this and do it so blatantly.

pomegranategolem:

backup-ominous-threats:

twelfth-list-of-ominous-threats:

vtuberloveslug-deactivated20240:

KOSA IS GETTING FORCED THROUGH

ATTACHED ARE SCRIPTS FOR EITHER A DEM OR REP SENATOR

CALL NOW PLEASE

Bringing this here again because I cannot stress how terrified I am.

please please please guys. call your reps. dont let kosa go through

Just called one Senator, hopefully this bill won’t pass.

rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world:

fairuzfan:

ALT

View on Twitter

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, has a book about this very thing. “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” posits that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust is exploited by elements of the American Jewish community for political and financial gain, and to further Israeli interests. According to Finkelstein, this “Holocaust industry” has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust.

:

scragon:

New friend

trashpandas3k:

Ben Slyngstad

witchesversuspatriarchy:

featuresofinterest:

god i hope the cpsc takes the shot. i think this would dramatically change their entire business model. amazon makes so much money by selling defective or mislabeled or just plain dangerous products and then faces little liability because this stuff is actually being sold by random third-party sellers that don’t get vetted at all and can be hard to prosecute because they’re in china or wherever. this is a big part of what makes amazon so powerful and it would be good for everyone if they were forced to bear more responsibility for the damages caused by the crap available on their website

ryanvoid:

purepopfornowpeople:

party-wok:

gayfarmer:

watchthelightfade:

karrius:

The madden gif maker has banned the use of the word “capitalism”.

“Too many people were using our videogame football gif maker to make communist propaganda. We need to put a stop to that.”

pauljpeg:

pauljpeg:

Spaghetti bolognese with no parmesan is like getting head without your balls played with

Using a different simile would be like getting head without your balls played with

important-animal-images:

envahisseurzim:

ethically sourced from tumblr post under the cut

Keep reading

pftones3482:

So the “food” that the US dropped to Gaza is MREs. Expired. Saw a stitch of this video from a woman saying this is the same thing they did with Hurricane Katrina survivors.

MREs are shelf stable for 7 years. Total. These ones were over 15 years old.

And ofc there were people in the comments being like “ummm well our military eats them just fine, they were expired when I was in the army too” THATS NOT OKAY THO?? NO ONE SHOULD BE FORCED TO EAT EXPIRED FOOD!

Fuck the US, fuck the Israeli government, and fuck you if you think that this is any kind of help to the people of Gaza. They’re starving to death and the US is sending expired applesauce while also giving bombs to their murderers.

omegaverse:

powermonk:

omegaverse:

lesbian-toddhoward:

omegaverse:

shlock brain hurt

not his name.

shamrock going proper mental innit

not even his name.

aveloka-draws:

A secret for another day I guess

jupitermelichios:

chimaerakitten:

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

I hope you don’t mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that’s the same attitude that underlies all the ‘the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it’ or 'fanfic isn’t real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel’ type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that’s just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you’re starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren’t bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?’ or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences’ because your audience is already invested, they’ll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn’t.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you’re relying on the audiences imagination. there’s a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience’s imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it’s essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it’s a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor’s season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it’s the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that’s happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can’t assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person’s view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn’t a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn’t a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

johntheroadagain-deactivated202:

maseratus:

afloweroutofstone:

Yeah man, can you imagine if over the last century the US had interfered in the democratic processes of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Russia, Syria, Venezuela,

Don’t forget Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Burma, Cambodia, Chad, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Hawaii, Korea, Laos, Libya, Mexico, The Philippines, Poland, Samoa, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Zaire

nattousan:

savahnahhallow:

selfundiagnosed:

Unrestrained summer fun

* crazy tire-screeching noises*

rileythemilipede:

i doubt kosa will pass. im 100 percent sure it wont pass. we still have time.

…that being said. PLEASE spread awareness about it. even if u cant sign a petition or anything like that, please spread awareness about it.

theres still a chance it CAN pass. and i dont want that to happen.

i have so many ppl that i talk to through the internet. i dont want to lose that.

PLEASE research. PLEASE spread. PLEASE sign and email your represenetives. we still have time.

bbpoltergayst:

BIGGEST FUMBLE IN MEDICAL HISTORY: cute girl assigned MALE at BIRTH?

abz-j-harding:

victusinveritas:

Meet Pando, not a forest but a single tree. Every trunk of the Quaking Aspen is genetically identical & connected by a single 80,000 year old root system, making it one of the largest and oldest living entities on Earth!

A god

dambiex:

chellings:

sandmandaddy69:

ALT