“goddess” “matriarchy” “female wisdom” girl your civic rights
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Jo in Little Women: “I find it poor logic to say that because women are good, women should vote. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country.”
my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”
i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other
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.
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:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes
are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and
organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments …
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product … Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform
physical spaces into meaningful places. …
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the
milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place
contexts …
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each
generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning …
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:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn’t try to read every essay.)
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!
recently my friend’s comics professor told her that it’s acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can’t generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister’s screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won’t be able to generate a script that’s any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It’s only ever the jobs we’re unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don’t.
the tragedy of tumblr is you will inevitably meet people who you should be having a sleepover with. you should be rolling around on their floor and rummaging through their fridge and watching shitty movies with. you should be shopping with should be going out to a cafe with should be wandering through the aquarium with. people who you should be experiencing quotidian joys with… and you cannot! because they live one million miles away
the usa is absolutely on its way to a fully fascist state & whenever anyone says that, there’s always a comment that says “america has always been fascist.” imo you’re willfully downplaying an authoritarian takeover in order to sound edgy. all it does is derail the conversation & diminish the significance of what’s been happening over the last 8 months. nothing will distract from a useful conversation about resistance more than changing it to be about the last 250 years instead. it’s insidious and honestly straight out of a handbook on how to disrupt organizing
People keep missing the point of this post, so let me spell it out: a fascist state is led by a dictator. Yes, the US has always been a white supremacist, colonialist and imperialist state, and has committed horrific crimes against its own people as well as people in many other countries, and we absolutely should criticize that and talk about how we got to this point. But don’t you fucking dare downplay what is happening now because you don’t know what fascism means. Fascism is a specific type of government/ideology, not just a word for “bad people doing bad things.” It absolutely overlaps with nationalism, racism, and militarism, all things that the US is known for, but the US has not actually been led by a dictator before. When you say “the US has always been fascist” you are naively ignoring how much worse things could get - and discouraging resistance to Trump.
When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I’m not crazy)
Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.
Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)
I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)
YouTube didn’t used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it’s worse than TV ever was)
The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don’t hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)
The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It’s been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)
The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)
It sounds crazy. (it’s the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it’s true)
Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is “it sucks”. (it’s too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???
To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)
So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don’t forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it’s true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)
Haven’t seen anyone talking about it here, but vocal transfeminist and writer Tara Knight has been sent a threat from the fbi insisting that she stop speaking about “radical gender ideology” and get rid of the past 3 years of her work.
A black trans woman is getting personally threatened by the fbi for being a transfeminist. What the fuck. Hopefully this gets more reach than my usual posts so that people who are able to can support her.
“The ultimate goal of this specific act of repression is not just to subjugate trans people, but to erase the very fact of trans existence from public life and legal recognition. They’re not afraid of people like this building an army, they’re terrified of them building an audience. I am here to suggest that maybe they should be afraid of us building an army.”
