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hi! i'm bee_oh_ess/bee-oh-ess on all platforms, but you can call me "bee" for short :)
i write fic on ao3 but am mostly just here. i also draw. i will prolly be hyperfocused on some media of some type at any point. rn i like anything minecraft, alan becker, dispatch, and planetlord and spokeishere from lifesteal season 5 (lol)
memory
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normally i don't add much if any context to my pieces, but i feel the context behind this piece is much necessary.
this is an actual place, an actual sign, placed on 2b2t. it's on the lonely island, a base -100k out, just a few thousand blocks off the western highway. it was a base created by a group of friends; bennydeece, momo_the_bear, audiotone, the_breeze and anna8anana. they all played and built together for a while.
eventually the friend group lost contact with audiotone because they only knew him on 2b2t, and didn't have any other way to contact him. they all posted signs on seperate times when they'd logged in their last few times. the last sign placed was by bennydeece, and this was that sign; it had been placed after breeze had passed away june 7th, 2012.
Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.
Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.
I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.
“Slutantions” has me crying laughing
i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.
“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry
love,
blue”
the subject line was “OW”
THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”
As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.
On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”
Reblogging for the last addition
Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.
Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.
Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.
IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.
It’s even worse than i remember it
I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.
Once emailed a professor from my hospital bed high on painkillers after a really bad car crash which my heart actually stopped the email “Dead cant class sory”
i was very sick over new years and one day i woke up to find i had emailed my manager in the middle of the night:
she said it was the most beautiful sick email she’s ever gotten
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
More stuff!:
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!
Yeesh these are just like... an idea that suddenly popped up in my head, honestly ideas always popled in my head every like... 10 seconds or so Im just having a hard time fighting the demons off before they make me burnout lol
No comics for this one, cause again, it's just a fleeting idea. A fleeting idea that somehow made lore for this. Anyways. Enjoy!
also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.
my ancestors seeing me shrug off a diarrhea session
People in the notes confused because they're so accustomed to running water they don't know how close diarrhea might have otherwise come to killing them if they've had it even once lol it's killed more humans than just about anything in history
We’re the granddaughters of the bowels you couldn’t irritate
Mine would be baffled that I've gone 5+ years with bloody diarrhea. Inflammatory Bowel Disease has probably always existed, but they didn't have treatment.
I do want to specifically shout out Dr Thomas Latta, who is the person who gave us IV hydration, and pretty much magically cured cholera with it in his first attempt. From his diary:
I attempted to restore the blood to its natural state, by injecting copiously into the larger intestines warm water.. trusting that the power of absorption might not be altogether lost, but by these means I produced, in no case, any permanent benefit.. I at length resolved to throw the fluid immediately into the circulation. In this, having no precedent to direct me, I proceeded with much caution. The first subject of experiment was an aged female. She had apparently reached the last moments of her earthly existence, and now nothing could injure her – indeed, so entirely was she reduced, that I feared I should be unable to get my apparatus ready ere she expired. Having inserted a tube into the basilic vein, cautiously – anxiously, I watched the effects; ounce after ounce was injected, but no visible change was produced. Still persevering, I though she began to breathe less laboriously, soon the sharpened features, and sunken eye, and fallen jaw, pale and cold, bearing the manifest impress of death's signet, began to glow with returning animation; the pulse, which had long ceased, returned to the wrist; at first small and quick, by degrees it became more and more distinct ... and in the short space of half and hour, when six pints had been injected, she expressed in a firm voice that she was free from all uneasiness, actually became jocular, and fancied all she needed was a little sleep.
Diarrhea can very easily be death by dehydration, especially when you can't consume oral fluids (Cholera causes extreme vomiting as well). Not only did we solve part of the problem with clean water, the other half was learning how to put clean water into our bodies (with salt).
Also fun fact, Thomas Latta was active in England at the same time as John Snow, the father of epidemiology, also in response to the Cholera epidemics at the time.
Throughout history, so many people have worked so hard to alleviate human suffering, misery, and death. You will never know the names of all the people who have spent their life’s passion to take care of you, someone divided from them by decades, even centuries, someone whose existence they’d never know, whose name they’d never hear. But they did it, all the same.
I think this is an important thing to keep in mind.
this is how much I love this game
i spotted the glow over the mountain tonight
my turn to turn in just when the weather's getting nice
You are the player. Wake up.
