Hello, Delicious Tea

This is like how you hear about how the reason why most of the Egyptian pyramids now resemble piles of rubble is that locals over the course of the last 4,500 years have been quarrying them for stone to build their houses (the Great Pyramid is no exception, it’s just so absurdly big that they’ve barely scratched the surface, and struggle to reach the polished stone at the top. Little remains of most smaller pyramids), or why we don’t have a lot of “common place” metal artifacts from medieval Europe is because people would melt them down to recycle the metal (even those fancier pieces no one could bring themselves to destroy have largely been defaced by Renaissance people who got a kick out of over-polishing suits of armor).

I learnt to spin in the rural Andes of Peru. I was five years old and already alarmingly behind the curve. [...] It took me over three years to become an adequate spinner. The year I was eight, my spinning was considered acceptable in quality by Andean standards (if slowly produced). Andean weavers require one type of yarn, fine and strong and smooth - and they are exacting judges, so this was no small feat. By this age, most girls in my peer group were spinning yarn for the family's weaving supply. Others had shown particular gifts for spinning and produced yarns for some of the town's finest weavers. The rest of us, the merely adequate young spinners, regarded these girls with mild awe. Although it might sound like we'd spent our childhoods being sternly schooled in how to spin (and we had), our textile activities were our primary social outlet. We went out in the Inca ruins to pasture sheep, taking our spinning and weaving with us. We raced up and down hills and terraces, played tag, and gossiped. Spinning was one more game, even though we knew it was an important life skill. Those girls who were fast, perfect spinners at that age were like the girls who could sing or dance or run the fastest, only spinning was more important than that. And we were competitive: we challenged each other to improve, constantly. By this time we were fearless with our spindles, which were never out of our hands unless we were weaving or eating. We spun while running, jumping, chasing sheep. We would pass spindles to each other while walking, talking, and spinning on them; we spun off the sides of Inca terraces, hearts pounding while the other girls watched, joking, chattering, saying, "You can't do it! It's going to break! You'll be chasing that spindle all the way down the hill!" The really good spinners never had to chase their spindles. As for me, it was a good thing I was one of the faster kids, because I chased my spindle a lot. With these games and challenges and the strict standards of our elders, even the completely average spinners among us became capable of production spinning. It was simply part of our lifestyle, as commonplace and essential as tying shoes or talking on the phone are in the industrialized world.

Vetinari: everything I do is a carefully calculated move to keep the city running efficiently

To be fair, you can’t carefully calculate Vimes. Vimes is a shotgun solution that you point in the general direction of a problem, and he’ll solve the problem and anything in the blast radius of that problem

That’s an interesting one, the parallels between Detritus’s crossbow and Vimes himself are not something I’d ever have considered otherwise. The Piecemaker/Keeper Of Thee Kinge’s Piece. Both known for leaving holes in walls.

Vimes has canonically forbidden Detritus from using the Piecemaker on people (and presumably also dwarves, trolls, etc). That means it’s a weapon against property, which often translates to being a weapon against power.

we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting

I love a good Very Specific Resource. Here are the links to my posts about resources carefully crafted to share a specific bit of history (updated as needed)

Love this kind of thing, even (especially?) when I have minimal interest in the underlying topic.

inspired by a rant i was going on elsewhere bc someone tweeted something very stupid and uninformed about hamlet and it got my back up as someone who took two single-text-focus english literature courses in college and they were on wuthering heights and hamlet, i now put it to all of you on here:

Have purchased for TeaBud her very own wooden spoon

in the 2020s people don't own rolling pins they subscribe to Breadr+ to rent an exciting new model every month! explore a wide range of colors, sizes, weights, grips, and materials to find the model that fits YOUR dream lifestye!!!!!*

The (Un)official Tumblr Census 2026