E. "Papermonkey" Jokinen

Welp! Guess who lost their wallet. Great way to spend one's day by running and calling around closing money cards and asking whether the mall and shops I've been the past two days have seen it.

So far it's been all no see, but at least I got the bank closed so nobody's going to spend my severance pay while I wait for the new card to arrive in approx a week.

Sigh.

Wonder if any of the grocery stores around here take mobile pay or do I have to order a delivery or something.

Hurray, the police station answered my email this morning saying they have my wallet!

Gonna go fetch it in a bit.

The bank card is still closed, so I'm out of payment methods untill the new one arrives in a week-ish, but at least I won't have to replace ALL my stuff.

That was a stressful day, let me tell ya.

Reading the last book in the Icewind Dale trilogy, about halfway through the book. Okay, I can shrug off random dragon cameos that have no relevance to anything in the story, the flat characterization and the flimsy worldbuilding, but my suspension of disbelief just got overloaded and snapped by a camel.

The protagonist party are in the stereotypical fantasy south (tm) and have bought camels to proceed on their journey, and one of them gets bitten by his dromedary to show what a nuisance the animal is, and the book describes it as having "blunt teeth", and boy my brain ain't taking it.

Like, excuse the entire fuck out of me, have you SEEN dromedary teeth??? Those things have FANGS! And they are VICIOUS!

I'm just flashbacking to the news many years ago when a dromedary killed a wild ass stallion in the Helsinki zoo, that's not a harmless little nuisance, that's a huge arse beast fully capable of maiming you.

Seriously, google dromedary skull and marvel at their weaponry, that's such a great design.

"Blunt teeht" my arse...

Like seriously! That is multiple sets of sharp!! *wild gesticulating at a picture!*

dromedary camels have been recorded - decapitating a human in a single bite - killing donkeys, dogs, LIONS, and each other - mauling crocodiles, horses, wild cattle, and once even an elephants trunk to the point that the wild elephant probably died from the injuries as they were determined to be bad enough to prevent it from eating or drinking. - eating cactus.

Thisssssss!

Like, it's a pet peeve of mine when people go and be like, oh, it's a herbivore, so it's kind and gentle and harmless and dull, because "herbivore=vegetarian" so it won't want to eat you (ha!), and only carnivores are allowed to be awesome. And like, in domesticated species like cattle or sheep we spent tens of thousands of years selectively breeding them specifically to be nice to humans just so keeping them would be even possible, and they're still capable of maiming us if they so choose (cattle can murder you just by accident, and some of them will even do so willingly).

You really think wild animals like deer and stuff are out there selectively breeding themselves to be as easy for predators to eat as possible? You do know that's kinda the exact opposite of how natural selection works, right?

Anyway, seriously, if youre writing a book and including actual real animals in it, even if it is a fantasy setting, researching the animal you're writing about is warmly recommended.

Reading the last book in the Icewind Dale trilogy, about halfway through the book. Okay, I can shrug off random dragon cameos that have no relevance to anything in the story, the flat characterization and the flimsy worldbuilding, but my suspension of disbelief just got overloaded and snapped by a camel.

The protagonist party are in the stereotypical fantasy south (tm) and have bought camels to proceed on their journey, and one of them gets bitten by his dromedary to show what a nuisance the animal is, and the book describes it as having "blunt teeth", and boy my brain ain't taking it.

Like, excuse the entire fuck out of me, have you SEEN dromedary teeth??? Those things have FANGS! And they are VICIOUS!

I'm just flashbacking to the news many years ago when a dromedary killed a wild ass stallion in the Helsinki zoo, that's not a harmless little nuisance, that's a huge arse beast fully capable of maiming you.

Seriously, google dromedary skull and marvel at their weaponry, that's such a great design.

"Blunt teeht" my arse...

Like seriously! That is multiple sets of sharp!! *wild gesticulating at a picture!*

Got my severance pay today, and to honor the occasion of seemingly having a little more money than usual I slipped and performed a financial irresponsibility by ordering couple new septum rings.

One's a plain gold ring just like the one I have now, but sliiiiightly bigger (not big enough to require stretching, but still two millimeters more radius), and made of gilded sterling silver instead of colored titanium.

The other's a cheap gold colored surgical steel one with some zircon stones, for special occasions like family weddings or something.

Never really had jewelry before, but maybe a little treat now that I do have one (1) piercing through my flesh. It has been almost a year since the piercening too, so I think it counts as an occasion for celebration!

Oooh, the ring does have a bit more heft to it! (Old ring on the left, the bagged one is new) I'm liking it!

It even slipped right into the hole no problem! Now, how on earth do I close this bastard, why is the clicker closure so hard to get yourself...

Also here's the other fancy bastard:

Which... in hindsight I have no idea how to put on, seeing as I can't rotate it fully around while it's IN my nose, in order to close the lock. Eh, I'll figure it out if/when needed, it's not like I bought it for normal wear anyway.

Now, excuse me, I'm going to go battle the other one shut somehow.

Eyyyy, I did it!

Man, the difference a couple millimeters do when they're on your face! The old one was basically hugging my nose (demonstrated below), while this one I can actually feel.

I am satisfied.

Got my severance pay today, and to honor the occasion of seemingly having a little more money than usual I slipped and performed a financial irresponsibility by ordering couple new septum rings.

One's a plain gold ring just like the one I have now, but sliiiiightly bigger (not big enough to require stretching, but still two millimeters more radius), and made of gilded sterling silver instead of colored titanium.

The other's a cheap gold colored surgical steel one with some zircon stones, for special occasions like family weddings or something.

Never really had jewelry before, but maybe a little treat now that I do have one (1) piercing through my flesh. It has been almost a year since the piercening too, so I think it counts as an occasion for celebration!

Oooh, the ring does have a bit more heft to it! (Old ring on the left, the bagged one is new) I'm liking it!

It even slipped right into the hole no problem! Now, how on earth do I close this bastard, why is the clicker closure so hard to get yourself...

Also here's the other fancy bastard:

Which... in hindsight I have no idea how to put on, seeing as I can't rotate it fully around while it's IN my nose, in order to close the lock. Eh, I'll figure it out if/when needed, it's not like I bought it for normal wear anyway.

Now, excuse me, I'm going to go battle the other one shut somehow.

Been thinking of fantasy lately, as relating to the Arcanth setting, and I figured out what's been bugging me about elves.

I've been doing a bit of a dive into fantasy genre, with rereading some of the old Drizzt books, watching some Tolkien essays and watching Frieren with a friend of mine lately, I discovered I don't actually mind elves having long arse lifespans, contrary of what I've said before.

However I DO mind elves having long arse lifespans when it shows absolutely nowhere in said elves, and that what I ACTUALLY dislike is treating elves as something extra special while stripping them of the inherent Otherness of being elves and just make them look and act like just some normal guy who just happens to have pointy ears.

You get to either have awesome special magic elves who live long and act distinctly very Other, OR you get elves who are basically just some guy who lives next door, but looks weird and other, but like, if you're gonna give them endless lifespans they better act in a way that marks them that way, and in any case I will be very disappointed if your elves look like normal-humans-with-pointy-esrs especially if they act just like everyday people. Why would you even bother making them elves in the first place if they weren't in any way Other??

I am still in the process of figuring out what this means for Arcanth-setting elves specifically. I think I want to do my elves more down to earth, vibe-wise, and don't really want to go the route of making them feel ancient and ageless (I am more okay with them having long-ish lifespans than I did before, though still not to a degree of practically immortal, as that's not the feeling I want for these specific story characters I have in mind), so to get the amount of Otherness I crave to see in elves I'm probably going to be leaning more on the visuals and making them LOOK different. I did consider making basically all elves to be part human to get the effect (ageless ancestors, maybe some still roaming around, but most "modern" elves actually being mixed heritage), though I haven't yet made any specific decisions on what degree exactly.

No idea how I'm gonna get the effect in practice, but I think it's still something to know what I want! (This would be so much easier if hominids weren't my artistic weak point, but hey, you learn by doing! Never gonna get better at drawing unless I do the actual drawing part.)

Thank you for indulging my half asleep rambles here. Going to bed now.

Did some further thinking on this.

So I do, in fact, like stories where elves are ancient/ageless/magic and therefore Other, and how they interact with other peoples, where they contrast and bring perspective and narrative spice due to that.

I, however, do not want to write that kind of story.

So yeah, going back to my original elf concept of pointy hominids with weird physical adaptations that make them look and function different, but aren't tied to the level of Otherness and separation that would follow from the ageless kinds of elves.

There's still physical differences that make them somewhat other, but not Other with a capital O, but more of my own brand of bullshit of more biological rather than magical kind of otherness.

Also because I realized that the existence of the ageless brand of elves would also change how the magic system worked and it was getting A: more complicated to handle and B: the whole setting started to morph more and more towards the same, familiar kinds of high fantasy settings I've already spent several decades reading before.

So yeah, I'm back where I started, but I guess wiser and with more perspective.

The elves of Arcanths setting are pointy, nocturnal hominids with weird pigmentation quirks (gray color and temperature sensitive albinism), tapetum lucidum, and are genetically incapable of bulking up muscle mass the way many humans can, making them wiry even in the best of circumstances, and really grumpy in cold environments.

Also mixed ancestry with humans tends to happen pretty often, because that's just how humans are.

HOW.

DARE.

I knew the episode was going to be big when the first things I saw this morning were a post from the one blog I follow specifically for Critical Role updates saying something along the lines of how they were going to sleep after that, saw the hashtag trending on number one spot here, so I just went NOPE and logged off untill I had time to sit down for five (5!) hours.

Holy fuck tho.

This game's intense!