why do people think household stuff is Sad and Boring
my kitchen has enough cast iron in it to go to war with the Seelie AND Unseelie courts, I get to have a tiny box that CONTROLS MICROWAVES and I don’t even really know what microwaves ARE but THEY ARE HARNESSED AT MY COMMAND, I have a box that makes Winter Happen in a controlled space AND at two different levels of Winter AT ONCE
like please just appreciate sometimes how much Awesome is in your house
who let the Space Orcs into the kitchen?
I have scary news for you: the space orcs MADE THE KITCHEN.
(You really do have enough iron in your kitchen to go to war with all the Courts tho. Your stainless steel stuff has MORE IRON IN IT even than the cast iron – the names are really deceptive, but we make steel BY PURIFYING THE CARBON OUT OF THE IRON ORE. I also have enough salt and herbs to fuck with everything going and I don’t even seriously cook.)
In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
Concept: fantasy world where dragons are A Thing™ but instead of them being these rare, semi-legendary creatures who exist solely to terrorise and wreak havoc and mayhem and burn inconveniences to a crisp they’re like… dogs… vaguely domesticated cats…
They come in loads of sizes and it’s a common thing to hear them scritching across your roof or rummaging in your garbage. You pass by like four every time you go to the market.
There’s even some snoozing at market stalls and strays playing with children and stealing scraps of food that fall in the street, with mottled scales and mixed textures of feathers and mismatched jewel colours.
Your favourite baker has three tiny western diamondtips who are in charge of keeping the ovens fired up and don’t always eat all of the bread. Sometimes.
Linda Bagshot on the corner has a ground rooster who can’t fly but always reaches up and stretches her neck out as far as she can to try and scrounge pets as you pass her garden wall.
A local inn is named after its summer aura who is the length of the room, all careful length and soft scales, with breath perfumed like spring breeze and scales that emanate just enough warmth to comfort, just enough that you won’t fall asleep, just enough that it’s tempting nonetheless.
The school you went to has a forest guardian older than the town itself who spends all his time slowly ambling down the corridors, and his favourites are the kids learning their first letters who like to read to him, sound out letters and marks that don’t have any correlation just yet, and you know that nobody has conclusively proven that dragons understand human tongues but you also know that if anyone understands, it’s him.
There’s a festival of dragons, a public holiday where banners are strewn and candles glow even into the wee hours and rainbow confetti and paint clogs the streets and maybe some overexcited babies set things alight but that’s ok, the town prepared better this year, far fewer people will lose their gardens and eyebrows this time, they promise.
And yes ok, there are big dragons. Ferocious dragons. Dragons that only come out once every ten years to feed and pillage. Dragons who rule the seas and shake mountains, who take flight and block out the stars. There are reasons you don’t go into the woods at night, reasons some wells are avoided, reasons entire villages up and vanished without a trace.
But there are also dragons who curl up with your children to rock them to sleep, and ward off nightmares. There are dragons who open doors and fetch supplies and guide those without sight. There are dragons who mimic words and whistles and delight in your joy when they get them just right.
There are dragons who adopt orphaned piglets, kittens, lambs, calves, puppies, ducklings. There are dragons who sunbathe and dragons who need kept on ice and dragons who climb atop weather vanes in storms to conduct electricity. Dragons who sparkle like jewels in the light and dragons who glow in the dark and dragons with flora creeping in and around their scales and dragons who sound like windchimes when they fold their wings.
Were there any books or plays famous for being badly written almost to an archetypal hilarity before My Immortal? Like were there any 19th century memetic gothic romances or?
Even just within SF fandom, The Eye of Argon (1970) is a classic viral example of hilariously bad writing from pre-Internet days; there were contests at cons to see who could get the farthest reading it without cracking up.
William Topaz McGonagall’s poetry was considered hilariously bad in his day (late 19th century); according to Wikipedia, “He found lucrative work performing his poetry at a local circus. He read his poems while the crowd was permitted to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes and stale bread. For this, he received fifteen shillings a night.”
I don’t know much more about the history of memetically bad literature than these two examples, but hopefully people can add more!
Also, “A Tragedy” by Theophile-Jule-Henri “Theo” Marzials, considered by some to be the worst poem ever written in the English language. (Obviously I am in love with it and intend to somehow incorporate it into my wedding vows.) http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/Marzials.Tragedy.html
There’s also Atlanta Nights, collaboratively written by a group of science fiction writers.
The primary purpose of the exercise was to test PublishAmerica’s claims to be a “traditional publisher” that would only accept high-quality manuscripts. Critics have long claimed that PublishAmerica is actually a vanity press that pays no special attention to the sales potential of the books they publish since most of their revenue comes from the authors rather than book buyers. PublishAmerica had previously made some highly derogatory public remarks about science fiction and fantasy writers, because many of their critics came from those communities; those derogatory remarks influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica’s claims.
One chapter was written by a predictive text emulator.
I’d like to nominate Julia A. Moore, another awful poet of the late 19th century. A lot of her awful poems are about tragedy and disaster, but described in such a shallow way (and either bluntly matter-of-fact or super maudlin) that it does not exactly bring a tear to the eye.
The literary club J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were members of held competitions to see who could read the farthest into something by Amanda McKittrick Ros without laughing. She’s famous for incoherently purple prose, and Mark Twain called her first book
“one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.” Sample:
“Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood
that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained
passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”
I think my favorite is how she reacted to preps nd flamerz people criticizing her work; she called critics stuff like “clay-crab of corruption” and “bastard donkey-headed mite.”
This might seem fun for some people, but for us it’s not.
You see, Palawan is known for its non-commercialized islands and untouched beaches. There are only a few resorts in there, and the government limits tourism population there. Here are some pictures of our beautiful islands:
Nickelodeon, however, wants to capitalize the island of Coron, Palawan. They’re going to build a resort and theme park there. They claim that they want to “spread environmental awareness” but they’re really not. Building this resort will disrupt the marine ecosystem; thus destroying the environment there. Also, Palawan is our last ecological frontier in the Philippines. If they’re going to continue to do this, more and more big companies will cash-in to commercialize Palawan- and I really do not want that to happen.
I know petitions won’t do much, but at least we can prove a point that Palawan should not be disrupted. Please sign this petition, so that it will not only show that us Filipinxs don’t want this, but people from different countries as well. Please spread it around as well, so that people from different countries can be aware of what Nickelodeon is doing.
Ang aming kalikasan ay hindi dapat sirain. Maraming salamat po.
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
Kimchi and Justice 