How does it feel to be the funniest motherfucker to ever grace my inbox
Tags:
#Hannibal #names #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cannibalism cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
i guess now that phones are a thing you dont need a watch but pre-phone everyone who didnt wear a watch was a fucking chump, and itrs STILL a good idea now cuz what if youre in a no-phone situation, or just dontr want to bring your phone, etc
(i stopped cause the strap broke and kept needing to be replaced and I decided it wasn’t actually worth the effort to figure how to find someone who would sell me a non-shitty watch strap when I already was carrying a phone with me at all times. The watch itself is fine and I could totally go back to using it)
i remember the era before everyone had a phone though. People kept asking me the time.
I get compliments on my watch sometimes at work. The customers think it’s a by-electronics-standards antique, guessing that it’s from the 80′s. Actually I bought it at Walmart in like 2013 for $20, and they’re still readily available for not that much more [link].
I really like this design: it’s elegant, shiny, doesn’t depend on Velcro (which wears out a lot faster than clasps) like most of my childhood watches did. It runs slow by about one second every 2.5 days: roughly once a month I sync it with time.gov.
Even now that I have a phone I plan to replace this watch if/when it wears out, preferably with an identical one. I like being able to just glance at it rather than have to take my phone out, dumbwatches are permitted in many contexts (work, exam rooms) where general-purpose computers are not, and the battery lasts much, *much* longer than a phone or smartwatch battery. I’m not sure I’ve *ever* had to recharge this watch, and if I did it was only once.
I used to wear a wristwatch pretty consistently, because they are much handier than phones, but for some reason I have a bad habit of snagging the watch face on something (like a doorjamb) and ripping it right off, so I haven’t replaced my latest one yet. :P
That watch takes me back – it looks a lot like the one I remember my father wearing in the actual ‘80s.
I stopped wearing a wristwatch in my teens/early twenties, because I had a problem with wrist perspiration: if I wore a watch with a fabric wristband, the band got manky very quickly, and if I wore one with a metal band, the metal corroded and I got a nasty rash on my arm.
I tried a pocketwatch for a while, because I have a secret hankering for nice waistcoats that doesn’t match any other aspect of my lifestyle, but I couldn’t afford a good pocketwatch and for that matter I couldn’t afford a good waistcoat either, which made the whole thing less convenient, and after the watch broke I didn’t persist.
At that point, I probably could have tried wristwatches again – whatever hormonal thing had been causing the perspiration issue had long since settled down – but by that point, there were electronic devices with clocks on them everywhere I went so I didn’t see any point.
(In a slightly better-ordered world, I might be wearing a smartwatch right now, because I bought one of those wrist step counter gadgets in an attempt to keep myself active while I was stuck at home… but I can’t get the farshlugginer thing to work.)
Yeah, I bought this watch in large part because it resembles my dad’s watch and I like the way his looks.
(I don’t think *his* watch is literally from the 80′s either, but as someone who was a young adult in the 80′s he comes by the aesthetic honestly.)
“I wish ancient people preserved their writing and artifacts better” I write in electronic signals on a piece of hardware that can’t retain its efficacy for more than a few decades.
Time to laser-print my entire blog on titanium plates and bury them underground.
Tags:
#this but unironically #I want to do more with K-selection strategies but it’s hard to know where to start #and how to do it on anything resembling a budget #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw
One big problem with mystery shows, as compared with (well-signposted) mystery novels, is that they don’t give the viewers time to think things through before the parlor room scene. There’s no clear narrative break-point where the viewer knows they have all needed evidence to solve the mystery and can stop to think; even if the detective comments that they know who did it, what are you going to do, pause 3/5 of the way through the episode to comb over all the clues and discuss the mystery with your friends and so forth? That’s impossible during the initial serialized release (since TVs don’t allow one to pause), and impractical when watching via stream or disk (since it requires groups of people to take the generally-unnatural action of staying paused in the middle of an episode for an extended timespan, and that’s if they know where to pause at all).
Fortunately, there happens to exist an already-developed TV structure perfect for avoiding this problem: the structure of the 1966-1968 Batman series. Each two-episode story (which was the show’s default length, albeit with occasional exceptions (always in the longer direction, not shorter)) ends its first episode with Batman and Robin in some sort of death-trap, and its second episode starts with them escaping the trap and ends with them beating the story’s villain(s).
I’d really like to see a mystery show based on a similar structure. The default story length is two episodes. The first episode of each story ends with a dramatic reveal after which, by one contrivance or another, the audience is clearly told that the case is now solvable. The second episode then starts with the protagonists responding to the big reveal, and ends with the parlor room scene. Live viewers get a week to think through and discuss the solution between the episodes’ releases, and after-the-fact viewers get the advantage of a clear narrative break-point at which to coordinate their pausing-and-thinking, for an overall-improved mystery-solving experience relative to the current one-episode-per-story status quo.
(For bonus quality-of-life, make sure each episode is free to stream at least until the release of its associated parlor-room-scene episode, such that live viewers are on equal footing with archival viewers in terms of being able to rewatch pre-reveal episodes and refresh their memory about all the clues.)
Tags:
#interesting ideas #story ideas I will never write
The second person I’m going to summon is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Really rub the salt in the wound there
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #high context jokes #(maybe; not sure how widely known the context is) #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
i guess now that phones are a thing you dont need a watch but pre-phone everyone who didnt wear a watch was a fucking chump, and itrs STILL a good idea now cuz what if youre in a no-phone situation, or just dontr want to bring your phone, etc
(i stopped cause the strap broke and kept needing to be replaced and I decided it wasn’t actually worth the effort to figure how to find someone who would sell me a non-shitty watch strap when I already was carrying a phone with me at all times. The watch itself is fine and I could totally go back to using it)
i remember the era before everyone had a phone though. People kept asking me the time.
I get compliments on my watch sometimes at work. The customers think it’s a by-electronics-standards antique, guessing that it’s from the 80′s. Actually I bought it at Walmart in like 2013 for $20, and they’re still readily available for not that much more [link].
I really like this design: it’s elegant, shiny, doesn’t depend on Velcro (which wears out a lot faster than clasps) like most of my childhood watches did. It runs slow by about one second every 2.5 days: roughly once a month I sync it with time.gov.
Even now that I have a phone I plan to replace this watch if/when it wears out, preferably with an identical one. I like being able to just glance at it rather than have to take my phone out, dumbwatches are permitted in many contexts (work, exam rooms) where general-purpose computers are not, and the battery lasts much, *much* longer than a phone or smartwatch battery. I’m not sure I’ve *ever* had to recharge this watch, and if I did it was only once.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #recs #in which Brin has a job #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #and I’m not sure if this fits the spirit of the tag but it certainly fits the letter: #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
So I’ve been working on writing Merlin fanfic and, like a moron, I decided I wanted it to be more historically accurate because the actual canon is a shitshow about that.
I start doing some writing, some researching, and discover that stirrups won’t arrive in Britain until the 10th century or so. King Arthur is like… early 500′s roughly.
So no stirrups. That’s not a big problem. Except it is argued that it might have been a major contributor to feudalism. Which, ok, good to know. So Arthur is pre-feudalism, got it. Shouldn’t change too much, right? (wrong)
Oh, what’s this that feudalism requires for those new wealthy landowners?
Fucking. Primogeniture.
(friendly reminder: this is the right of inheritance for the firstborn son. Like for land, or titles of nobility… or kings)
So if my research is right, King Arthur didn’t have an inherent right to the throne because he was the firstborn male heir. He was fucking ELECTED. (or maybe a lady in the lake threw a sword at him, who knows, this is all myth anyway)
But the fucking kicker?
The thing that DOESN’T EXIST in King Arthur’s time?? Because feudalism won’t show up for several centuries?
Fucking.
Knights.
In summary, the story of King Arthur is just modern day fanfiction from medieval/feudal Europe with rampant OCs, overpowered everyone, too much fucking drama, and like three different werewolves.
Also no stirrups.
this is how i learned young there’s no such thing as canon
King Arthur was ahistorical fanfic in the 12th century when the tales as we know them took shape, and in every retelling since then. It’s basically always been about projecting the author’s values backwards in time to an idealized past.
There’s literally a book exploring this and how modern retellings have continued the spirit of High Medieval versions called Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy. Because silk and potatoes, like stirrups, knights, and feudalism, were also not seen much in post-Roman Britain.
There really is no “historically accurate” way to write King Arthur. Even attempts to set the story in the 6th century are constructed ahistorical fantasies. You basically just have to decide which brand of anachronism you want to go with.
Hello, I have a doctorate in medieval English literature and am here to tell you: Arthuriana was always fanfic. What’s more, they’ve always been EXACTLY like BBC’s Merlin – a mash-up of time periods in their setting, but ‘modern’ (for each rewriting) in their tone and priorities and in-jokes – plus, of course, a dash (or a whole lakeful) of “It Was Better Back In Those Days”. Exactly which days “Those Days” were changes from century to century – by the fourteenth (Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc) they were mostly looking back to the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine if they were specific at all. In Eleanor’s time, which we tend to think of as the golden age of chivalry, Arthurian authors (Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes) were looking back even further (and there’s some wistfulness for a lost pre-Norman England there too); in the fifteen century, Sir Thomas Malory (who gave us what ebcame our definitive English-language collection of Arthuriana for later centuries) was looking back from the vantage point of years of civil war to the glory days of the mid-fourteenth and Edward III’s court.
And Geoffrey of Monmouth (who, yes, is a character in Merlin) is the 12th-century historian that @star-anise mentions who was the first person to popularise these obscure Celtic and British and Welsh myths by pulling them together into something that looked like history and writing them up in Latin AS part of his “history of the kings of Britain” – a work which is itself heavily nostalgic for pre-Norman times – and, incidentally, deciding on a “date” for them to have happened.
But yes, Arthurian knights always had stirrups and were feudal because that was true of the times in which they were written and 100% of Arthurian writers agree that JOUSTING KNIGHTS ARE FUN and that is important. Actually, a lot of them also wore the high fashions of whatever day their stories were written in, because what better way to convey “this fairy queen was unimaginably beautiful and wealthy” than to have her wearing amazing exotic textiles and colours and jewels you’ve only just heard of from far-away lands?
Brinens and Things 