I am not the monster of this story

aliferous: (adj.) having wings

apricity: (n.) the warmth of the sun in the winter

aspectabund: (adj.) letting emotion show easily through the face or eyes

aurora: (n.) dawn

balter: (v.) to dance gracelessly, but with enjoyment

cafune: (n.) the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love

catharsis: (n.) release of emotional tension

charmolypi: (n.) a mixed feeling of happiness while being sad

diaphonous: (adj.) light, translucent, and delicate

dulcet: (adj.) sweet

ephemeral: (adj.) fleeting

ethereal: (adj.) extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world

eutony: (n.) the pleasantness of a word’s sound

halcyon: (adj.) a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful

illecebrous: (adj.) enticing

irenic: (adj.) promoting peace

kalon: (n.) beauty that is more than skin-deep

kalopsia: (n.) the seeing of things as more beautiful than they actually are

lacuna: (n.) a blank or missing part

lilt: (n.) a pleasant gentle accent

ludic: (adj.) full of fun and high spirits

meraki: (n.) to do something with love or soul

nefelibata: (n.) cloud-walker; one who lives in the clouds of their own imagination

nepenthe: (n.) something that makes one forget their sadness

nubivagant: (adj.) wandering in the clouds

numinous: (adj.) feeling fearful yet awed and inspired

orphic: (adj.) beyond ordinary understanding

pyrrhic: (adj.) won at too great a cost

pulchritudinous: (adj.) breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty

scintilla: (n.) a tiny trace or spark of a feeling

selcouth: (adj.) unfamiliar, strange, yet marvelous

sirimiri: (n.) a light drizzle of rain

susurrus: (n.)  whispering, murmuring, or rustling

sweven: (n.) a dream

temerate: (v.) to break a bond or promise

viridity: (n.) innocence

one day there is a new bad guy. he is holed up in his Evil Fortress waiting for the knight to inevitably show up. however, what the rest of the kingdom doesn’t know is that he is the best swordsman on the continent. there is no way the knight will defeat him, and he knows it.

she arrives at his fortress to find him smugly slouching back in his Throne Of Darkness. “well?” he asks. “here to duel?”

 So You Want to Name a Sino: A Guide to Not Making a Fucking Fool of Yourself

Note: this will be long and very, very extensive because god I am so sick of this shit 2k16 I just want absolution and I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and even if it is I’m asking it, I’m not asking it emptyhanded I’m asking it with a WHOLE GUIDE FOR YOUR PERUSAL, because I’ve found that Wiki’s great if you want to know why and how we use names and not really great for when you actually want a name.

A theme of this blog seems to be my long suffering, and I want it known, recorded, carved in stone that as of almost 1:00AM on Thursday, December 22nd, 2016, I am officially Fed Up with the way Sino characters are named in fiction.

Let us be clear: this is first and foremost An Attack™* on all the white authors whose imaginations can only extend so far to provide us with a glut of Lings and Linglings and Ailings (not that those aren’t beautiful names) and Peonies and Pearls and, god forbid they start getting creative with their Sachas and their Wai-maes, but this is also for the Sino authors who can’t seem to do it either. And like, I get it. It’s not easy. Sinos are a disparate bunch with varying degrees of fluency in varying dialects of Chinese. Romanisation and naming customs are weird.

But also can we leave the idea of the inscrutable mysterious unknowable East in the 20th century please? There are resources. This is one of them. Let’s start before I steep for too long in my own bitterness and annoyance.

A dragon pet being valuable doesn’t overcome a dragon being plausible. I’m sure some dragon fanatics who have the wealth, land, and disposable people to domesticate one dragon would occasionally manage to, but not civilisations.

I’m sure one guy who really loves the abstract idea of heritage would put the effort into breeding their dragon so that their great great grand daughter could have a dragon too, but there’s nothing to say that grand daughter will feel the same way about a load of descendents she’s never going to meet.

Dragons (as described here) would be flying animals. Giant flying animals. Giant flying animals that breathe fire. Flight is the single most costly mode of transportation ever evolved by a huge margin; birds on the wing use about 7 times the energy that they use while at rest. By comparison, we humans only use less than twice our “resting energy” while walking. As is expected, these ratios increase with an animal’s size. A dragon large enough to carry a human is gonna need a FRICKEN LOT of energy to be able to fly at all, which requires a fast metabolism to provide (yes, even if it doesn’t fly very much).

Secondly, fire. How would they produce it? They sure wouldn’t breathe fire just by thinking “burny” thoughts, and the flames most dragons are depicted as producing are strong and persistent which isn’t consistent with the common “gas bladder” explanation given by many. This suggests the production of liquid fuel, a method of ignition, and more importantly a way to throw that fuel far enough for the dragon to hit things without burning itself alive. I don’t know how it’s gonna accomplish those things, but I guarantee you that it ain’t gonna be cheap. The fuel alone would require so many kilocalories, like you wouldn’t believe how many KCs are in a napalm-like fuel, like holy crap. It’s gonna need a TON of food to produce that.

Omnivore dragons.

A dragon marauds into an area and eats all the livestock, sure, but there’s also crops, trees, plants, houses, etc. Why should dragons just eat all the sheep in an area when they can break the grain silo open and go to town? Devastate a year’s worth of harvests then try to waddle away because they’re too fat to fly (like a gorged vulture).

Even “carnivores” like bears and wolves will eat fruit, nuts, grass, things, etc because it’s easier than chasing down prey. Why restrict dragons? Why insist dragons are too discerning?

Foraging is a very expensive activity. To make the investment of food-collection worthwhile, an animal needs returns on whatever it eats that outweigh that investment. Cows eat grass, need to spend pretty much all of their time grazing just to turn an energetic profit, and their lifestyle is hardly a fast-paced one.  Cheetahs, on the other hand, eat tasty tasty dead things only every once in a while, and theirs is the most fast-paced life of any terrestrial vertebrate. The tradeoff is that they can’t afford to do anything but rest while they’re not foraging.

Back to the issue at hand, why should a dragon be strictly carnivorous? Let’s look at the numbers: A pound of grain (in this case wheat) has about 1,500 kilocalories of available energy, while a pound of classic Dragon Food (sheepies!) only has about 1300. From just this, the argument for the “omnivorous harvestfucker” dragon is pretty convincing! However, lean meat is not the only component of sheep. They’re also full of tasty fat (3500 KCal/lb) and bone marrow (3500 KCal/lb).

Assuming your average sheep weighs ~150 pounds and has a median bodyfat content of ~15%, a hungry dragon can expect to net a whopping 275000 kilocalories from a single animal. Compare that to the 225000 kilocalories from a similar mass of grain. It may not seem like much, but when you’re a massive hypercarnivore that 50 million calorie difference is a huge motivator.

Like, look at buffaloes. They’re grazing animals that produce meat and fur that can, and historically has, been used for food and shelter. And yet, they have only very recently been domesticated. Not because ancient people didn’t want to domesticate them, but because they couldn’t. Buffaloes are huge and they will attack you if you mess. It’d be like being attacked by a steamroller.

That’s the same reason why we’ve never domesticated lions or tigers or bears (oh my). As cool as it would be to ride a friggin’ war bear into battle, they’re just not good for domestication to get your war bear in the first place. When you just have a stick with a pointy rock on one end, maybe a sheet of metal covering your torso, and more gumption than is good for you and your going up against something at least twice your size with daggers attached to each of its toes and no problem attacking you to defend itself, your not gonna win.

Dragons, in most depictions, are big as houses with diamond hard scales, have claws the size of people, and, in many stories, have human like intelligence (which brings up a moral aspect to domestication). Oh yeah, and they can fly.

Maybe the odds of achieving a capture of one would be plausible now in modern times where we have the technology to match their power, but in medieval times, you can get a group of fifty of the strongest warriors to try and catch one, but the only thing you can be guaranteed is that most of them will die in the process, assuming that the dragon doesn’t just fly off to begin with, in which the warriors would have no way of following. And then, assuming by some miracle they do manage to catch one, they still have to catch a second one for breeding. And after the lose of life capturing the first one, you’ll be hard pressed to find people willing to go after a second one.

The only way around that is if your dragons are no bigger than horses with little natural protection to begin with and then you breed them into the large powerhouses you see in stories (that’s what they did in the Pern novels by Anne Mccaffrey).

Because why bother stealing food from the humans when you can just get the humans to willingly give the food to you. You might have to do a bit of guard work for them or let them ride on your back or go attack other humans for them, but in return you get fed choice meals, get better places to sleep in beside a cave (that will increasingly improve with human technology), have a safe place away from predators to have your eggs, have that hard to reach spot scratched for you whenever it gets itchy, and just over all have a more secure life than you would’ve trying to survive on your own in the wild. 

In short, if you watch over the sheepies and protect them from predators and thieves for a few hours, you will get to eat some of the sheepies in reward, which takes a lot less effort than trying to steal them yourself.

Dragons domesticating themselves because humans have hearth-fires and buildings that keep out the cold, vastly diminishing the energy they have to consume to regulate their body temperature and making winters much more comfortable (some castles and manors have giant fireplaces, perfect for a dragon to sleep in, curled around the fire).

Dragons domesticating themselves because humans don’t eat the bones or viscera of animals they butcher, and depending on prosperity level may consider some of the cuts of meat undesirable, so the remnants of a hard day’s work for a butcher might be a very easy-to-get source of calories (especially if dragons are like lammergeyers and have the ability to digest bone).

‘Cause I’m thinking, you know, the thing about domestication is that animals tend to domesticate us right back. People who could tolerate and bond with the first dogs were more successful than the ones who couldn’t - I’m thinking guarding and caretaking behavior as much as hunting. Early Europeans (speaking VERY roughly, there) lost their lactose intolerance after/during the domestication of cattle. Cats, as mentioned above, chose us, not the other way around, and five minutes on the Internet could tell you what an impact that choice had on us. ;) There’s this symbiotic sort of co-evolution that happens when humans and animals develop that relationship that I think is really cool.

Apply that to self-domesticated dragons. Magical creatures with humanlike intelligence who can fly and breathe fire. What impact would that have on our bodies and our societies?

We’d become more resistant to heat, for one thing - imagine a dragon getting up from its fire bed in the morning and trotting out for breakfast still dripping embers. (No more rushes on the floor for us!) We’d come to depend on fewmets for fuel and shed scales for fine etching tools. We’d gain resistance to certain cross-species diseases from exposure alone. Depending on how magic works in this world, we could gain resistance from magical ailments the same way, maybe even become harder to curse. Little ones with a talent for spells would go to Madam Dragon for instruction. Dragons with a more crafty bent would unite their talents with that of smiths, potentially accelerating our metalworking technological development. Dragon-based travel methods would interconnect the world the same way the invention of the train or airplane did.

Day 2049 -  18 November 2016

Thank you for the past 20 years. 

Happy Pokemon Sun and Moon release day!

αἴσιμος (aisimos) appointed by the will of the gods, destined

δύσμορος (dusmoros) ill-fated

ἐξαίσιος (exaisios) beyond what is ordained or fated

θεόμορος (theomoros) destined by the gods, imparted by them

κακόποτμος (kakopotmos) ill-fated, ill-starred

μοιρίδιος (moiridios) destined, doomed

μοιρόκραντος (moirokrantos) ordained by destiny, fated

μόρσιμος (morsimos) appointed by fate, destined

鹿韵记  

I’m pleasantly surprised to find a shop that produce such beautiful and cute clothes with Han Chinese elements~ 

this is what so many people are failing to understand when they whine about how youth rights advocates should stop concerning ourselves with silly little things and just worry when there’s “real abuse” happening. the two causes are one and the same. perpetuating the idea that children are morally obligated to be submissive primes them for abuse. perpetuating the idea that parents must be dominant in order to be fulfilling their responsibilities encourages them to be abusive.

stop praising kids for submissiveness. stop remarking on how “good” they are when they don’t argue or complain. stop equating “respect” with obedience. stop calling a child “well-behaved” when what you really mean is that they’re being silent and taking up as little space as possible.

instead, praise kids for goodness and moral strength that come from within. recognize them for acts of kindness and selflessness. show pride in them for helping others. encourage them when they take responsibility. support them when they stand up for themselves.

stop praising parents for dominance. stop expressing wonder at their ability to keep their children on a short leash, to silence them with a word, or to strike fear into their hearts with a look. stop looking impressed when parents gleefully expound on all the ways they’ve been “tough” on their kids.

instead, praise parents for cultivating good human relationships with their kids. tell them how great it is to see them make their kids smile. recognize them for respecting their kids, for talking to them like people. encourage them to spend time just hanging out with their kids, in moments that aren’t about teaching or correcting or giving orders. recognize the courage it takes for them to admit when they’re wrong. support them when other adults cast judgmental eyes because they’re not being disciplinarians.