I make stories, theoretically

(still on the same vein, this post by @/creatingblackcharacters is a pretty nice resource to start out i think every now and then i reread it i think it has nice things to keep in mind)

every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.

i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.

Equiping an armor tutorial

Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.

…didst thou mean dollars?

“Nevermind. They’re using some basic silver coin and then enough gold to be worth ten silver coins is called a ten-piece”

…Si, si, el Peso!

Trying over, they’re minted by the king so they’re called crown coins, or, these days, abbreviated, they’re just Crowns

Naturligvis, vi skifter Daler ud med Kroner!

—

So you can just… do this, with pretty much any word you want. You buy a sword with 50 Eeg, so called because they used to have eagles printed on them. That laser costs 200 orcs, or Oort Republic Credits, but a lot of people still call that 200 hippo because before the Belt War the Hippolyta Mining Co. scrip was the de facto standard currency around here and the name stuck around (and in some bars you can start a serious fight by using one name or the other). Your meal costs 10 cigs - originally short for cygnets, which was a hundredth of one swan, a coin named for the royal mint in Swansea - which are easily confused with the neighboring kingdom’s “sigs”, named for the banknotes that carry the signature of the royal treasurer (the exchange rate is not 1:1, but it’s close enough that along the border it’s fairly common for merchants to try to cheat you by “confusing” one for the other). The nation of Gofrandar issued crystal chits in a variety of colors for different denominations, and the blue ones were the most common and were produced mainly in factories in the city of Largon, leading to the name “blue largo”, and that was centuries ago and most people today haven’t even heard of Gofrandar, much less Largon, but six different nations still have currencies called blarg.

Here in Canada, we replaced our dollar bills in 1987 with coins of the same value. Why? Because a coin lasts way longer (20 years) in circulation than bills (less than a year), it’s simply an economic measure and cheaper for the Canadian Mint in the long run. It was argued that the Canadian Mint would save $175 million a year when they switched from the $1 bill to the $1 coin.

The dollar coin had a Common Loon on the back and an engraving of Queen Elizabeth on the front side. This was the second design. The first design with an Indigenous person and a French voyageur paddling a canoe, but the master dies were lost during delivery. Look it up.

So, of course, Canadians immediately started calling the coin a “Loonie” after the bird on the back.

When the Canadian mint retired the two dollar bill (yes, we used to use those heavily), the new coin had the Queen on one side and a polar bear on the obverse.

And what did Canadians as a country immediately name this new coin? Did we call it a “Bear”, or maybe a “Polar” or something related to our northernmost territories? Maybe an “Ice Flow” or a “Burg” after icebergs that float down from the Great White North?

Nope.

And in case you hadn’t figured it out, we call them “Toonies”.

And yes, “Toonie” is a portmanteau (a combination of two words) of “two” and “loonie”.

Now, the dollar coins have Loons on them, but you are just as likely to find many different engravings, celebrating different events and folks of importance to Canadians, such as the Parliament buildings, the WW1 Vimy Ridge memorial, Terry Fox, the Vancouver Winter Games, The Grey Cup, Anniversary of Parks Canada, the Anniversary of Canadian Confederation, just to name a few. Not to be left out, the Toonie has had a number of different redesigns as well.

And what do we call all of these different coin designs?

Yup, no matter what the obverse design is, they are all still Loonies and Toonies.

body language masterlist

a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

550 words to say instead of fuckin said

638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

I think healing magic would be like that. Suddenly there are no more sick days sitting on the porch with a cup of tea or weeks where you take it slow because you hurt your foot so you should stay off it as much as you can. No one holds the door for you when you’re on crutches because “you should just go get that healed.” There are no flowers or “get well soon” wishes because it’s not that big a deal. Your spouse won’t spend an evening rubbing your back or making your favourite comfort food. Your adventuring party will expect you to just walk it off and they might complain that your temporary injury slowed them down. “Why were you so careless?” they might say. “If you’d just watched your footing we’d be there by now.” Your injuries are nothing but a minor annoyance to everyone else but you’re thinking how if the healer wasn’t there you would be dead right now.

A fic written 2 years ago is NOT OLD. Two years is nothing. Two years ago was yesterday.