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I'm grabbing your shoulders and looking deeply and homoerotically into your eyes. Listen to me. Listen. It Is Not Your Fault. They sell orchids in these shitty little plastic pots and fill them with water and stick them in heavier ceramic pots without ANY drainage holes. And then the fucking care sheet tells you to water these TROPICAL PLANTS with ICE CUBES. Of course they're going to die.

Orchids are a special type of plant called an epiphyte. You know those little air plants that are all the rage now?

I'm talking these babies. You can do cool things with them like this:

And this:

(link to the Etsy shop btw. These look cool. Though honestly you can probably find some art miniatures and do this yourself without much effort)

They don't have roots, so you can do whatever you want with them. You can put them in a globe or put them on a statue or just leave them on a table, they don't care. They're super low maintenance and easy to keep alive. All you have to do is dunk them in water once a week.

That's an orchid. An orchid is an air plant. In the wild, they grow on trees. Their roots are designed to anchor them to trees, not to dig into the soil. They NEED air. The moment they get waterlogged, which they will in those shitty little pots that you buy them in, they're going to rot, and eventually the whole plant will die. They can't have ANY sitting water. None. They need pots with drainage holes that are elevated so air can reach them from the top and bottom. This is what I mean by elevated btw:

Put something at the bottom of the pot that creates an air gap between it and the surface. Make sure it has gaps so air can flow through. Put a plate at the bottom to catch water when you water your orchid, every 2 weeks or whenever you remember. I have solved all your orchid woes.

And don't water them with fucking ice cubes. I'm going to find whoever invented the ice cube advice and fight them with my fists. These are tropical plants. They don't know what ice is. They're not evolved to deal with below freezing temperatures. If you water them with ice cubes you're just going to give your orchid frostbite, and it will die. No ice cubes.

ALSO if your orchid is in a pot, make sure you use orchid bark, not soil, as its potting medium. Though, honestly, you don't even need a pot. Like:

Look at them, just chilling. THIS is how they grow in the wild:

I think that's a different species of orchid than the phalaenopsis orchid we grow in cultivation, but the point still stands. That ^ is their natural habitat.

this is really complicated - i can put it in two boxes, both of which are packed very full.

disconnection from the material reality of the past

when characters display a very specifically modern mindset (about social issues especially, but other stuff too)

(I also get bothered by some kinds of modern language - I don't mind it when, idk, an author uses "sensible" with the modern connotation of "practical" and not the 18th century "emotional" or "empathetic", but "yeah" or "okay," or even, as i found out when someone used it in medieval fantasy, "holy shit" will get on my nerves.)

there are modern things where (made up example!) a character who's supposed to be a cook will talk about making caprese salad for a fancy restaurant in December, and someone snarking on the book will say "yeah, right, they should know better than to make something that depends on a fresh summer vegetable!" and even with greenhouses, that's pretty fair. and that's even more extreme in the past. it's 1650 in Verona, it's December, you cannot obtain fresh tomatoes. i don't think this means that people in the past were, necessarily, more emotionally or spiritually in tune with the cycle of the year, or the labor it took to get clothes, or furniture, or any other material item, and of course wealth can insulate people from some of that difficulty, but it does mean that the seasons had more direct impact on people's lives. It's possible to, for example, buy clothes ready-made, but for anything fancy, it's more likely that it'll be made to fit if it's new, or altered extensively and painstakingly if it's not. that means that tearing or staining a fancy dress isn't just an issue of looking bad - you can't just replace it, and you probably won't throw it out - you figure out how to reuse it. those concerns of access to material goods are just a lot closer to the surface of the world than they often are now.

my objections to modern attitudes about the world are not that people in the past 100% accepted the views of their contemporaries - there were always people who didn't, and it makes sense that a protagonist would be one of them. but people wouldn't phrase those objections in the same way that modern people would - say your main character doesn't want a woman accused of being a witch burned. "God's power is such that the Devil cannot give this woman the ability to sour milk" is most likely going to be more persuasive to the crowd than "witches aren't real." and sometimes that's rough - it's not super fun to read about a Roman with Roman attitudes about provincial wars, or slavery in the city, but I put something down because a Roman character said (in internal dialogue) that he was disgusted to see that a man had been tortured because "Romans simply didn't do that." Historical Romans did do that, routinely - a slave could not testify in a law court unless they had been tortured. Even with distasteful things like that, I'd much rather it just be glossed over than to have them say the "correct" modern thing. It just makes it feel too much like the theme park version of the culture.

That 90s celestial, gothic decor???

Give it to me right now

The Red Knight by Ami Thompson

Updated 12/1/21 

Updated 12/31/21