from Mage Arena

Somewhere along I-90 in South Dakota

Image Description: A replica of a human skeleton appears to lead a replica of a tyrannosaur skeleton on a lease through a grassy field.

a cat 3 by the look of it

anyway one thing that keeps recurring to me as I read around medieval history is like

it's so easy to think that life moves faster now than it ever has. we're here to see it, for one. and for another, our material culture keeps changing at a very rapid rate. technology is moving quickly and the speed of mechanised production allows it to move even faster. also we have access to mass media and we see changes happening on the other side of the world as clearly as the ones happening in our own back garden.

but then you look at medieval history, through the poor documentation and the lack of evidence and the often confusing names and dates, and it's like

huh

yeah ok so if i was this age in teesdale in 1080 i would already have lived through two invasions, two famines caused by the intentional razing of farmland, the invention of an entire new government infrastructure, two or three redistrictings, a religious upheaval, and the scots going from "ancient enemies" to "tenuous allies" to "currently attacking but i can't tell if it's loot-based or a defence of that alliance". also i still have to get the harvest in and we're due for a plague year.

so idk maybe life has just always been moving unbearably quickly is my point

coming back to this while reading Christopher Dyer's excellent Making A Living in the Middle Ages (2002) and specifically where he's talking about collective action in the age of serfdom

and you have, like. you have villages taking collections to pay for a lawyer to bring what is, in essence, a class action against their lord or officials. you have constant arguments between peasants who want to make money and peasants who just want to get through the winter. you have direct action and planned negotiation and tax-dodging and the agreement to simply Not Tell disliked lords that someone got married (so you don't have to pay the tax on marriage). you have village politics determining major court cases through jurors and reeves. you also have very recognisable union tactics like striking, tactical property damage, and working to rule. you have people paying fines on others' behalf, and what looks like a premeditated agreement for THIS guy to take (in modern terms) arrestable action and we'll all back him up.

and that's really valuable to me, tbh. recognising both that there's a long history of class solidarity and shared action, and at the same time, that the working class has never been unified, that there's always been infighting and disagreement on priority

but also: just that there has always been action. we are often shown a narrative of medieval life where peasants either Accept Their Lot in quiet dignity and do as they're told, or they violently rebel in the first instance. and dgmw there are plenty of instances of rioting or rebellion or just punching the tax collector in the fact. but there's also a whole complex structure of grassroots politics and negotiation behind that, and there always was.

How Sir Lancelot had do with the Fiend from... MARS!?

Ok ok ok coffee shop au though. Seivarden is on like month four clean and set up with a stupid job on a stupid station selling stupid bitter bean tea to stupid uncivilized hicks who wouldn't know real tea if it bit them on their stupid ungloved hands and she is this close to saying "fuck it" and spending the total savings from her minimum wage earnings on a raging bender but also she doesn't because of Mysterious Asshole Stranger. MAS is an arrogant jackass. She calls Seivarden her personal name straight off her nametag like they know each other or something but also has yet to introduce herself. MAS hums constantly in a voice like she's been gargling rocks for the last thousand years and Seivarden has a lot of time to listen to it because MAS is a regular who comes in every morning and does Amaat-knows-what on her handheld for literal hours but also Seivarden literally does not care because MAS speaks fluent Radchaai in an entirely understandable accent and Seivarden is desperate to figure out what the entire fuck her deal is. She doesn't even wear gloves. Is she Radchaai and doing the equivalent of vacationing at a topless resort? Is she just weirdly good at languages? One time MAS watched Seivarden struggle to get the stupid automated cart with the shitty-tea-bean delivery to work for twenty minutes before standing up, picking up a 40 kilogram bag under each arm like it was nothing, and walking into the back with them. She was singing a song about horses the whole time. What is her deal.

Meanwhile Breq has long since passed "why is Seivarden here and alive" and moved on to enjoying making Seivarden bring her tea while using Space Google to figure out whither next on the hunt for the Fuck Anaander Gun

Breezy is not larger than a cranberry grape juice

BIG NEWS: Breezy IS NOW bigger than a cranberry juice!!!

fast & loose seasonal studies 🍂

first attempt at rpf how did i do

Rainbow-bearded Thornbill (Chalcostigma herrani), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, found in the Andes of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia

photograph by Faber Mosquera

Untitled © Peter Solarz

bath time

[id: a gouache painting of a wet tiger sitting in a body of water. their hair droops and they have a neutral expression on. the water is brown and blue swirls while the sky is green. end id]

[additional id: the tiger looks very round, due to it being wet. It is very cute]

Say hello to my newest creation, the beep (bee sheep).

Suddenly woke up around 4PM with a vivid idea for a DnD-style fantasy anime, about a generic fantasy hero having to save the world with a representative member of each of the other four major allied races: gnoll, dryad, naga, nurikabe. (No, I don't know why my brain decided on those.) This has been a recurring event through history to repel an ancient evil, but it's been centuries since the last time.

There's a major gulf of cultural understanding because the human kingdom has since moved far from the others, but it's still traditionally the human hero's role to translate. So, the human kingdom's court mage casts a spell on him so he can see them the usual way with one eye, but as humanized versions showing what they seem like to their *own* races with the other; he has to swap around an eye patch to go between them or he gets dizzy from the overlay.

Character descriptions and more worldbuilding under the cut (sorry, they're rambling notes I just hammered out quickly before I forgot anything; no names yet because I thought of it literally hours ago):

Some scene ideas and more worldbuilding:

More under the cut:

Eurasian blue tit