kino-san-chan reblogged
do u ever walk from a social interaction like damn. this is why i keep my mouth shut most of the time
kino-san-chan reblogged
A post of mine from several months ago about the Perlesvaus self-rearranging forest just wandered across my dash again and made me think about it some more, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.
Perlesvaus, for those who don’t know, is a 13th-century French Arthurian romance. It’s intended to be a continuation of Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, but it’s mostly known for being completely batshit when it’s known at all. (There’s an old book on Arthurian texts that dedicates a chapter to Perlesvaus and repeatedly speculates that the anonymous author had Something Wrong With Him. This is the longest scholarly treatment of Perlesvaus I’ve been able to find & read.)
Anyway, there’s an odd worldbuilding detail in the text. See, it’s a Thing in chivalric romances that the questing knights happen upon castles & lords & damsels & such that are unfamiliar to them and have to be explained. You know, “this is the Castle of Such-and-Such, where the local custom is as follows. It’s ruled by Lady So-and-So, whose character I shall now describe to you.”
This is a genre convention that largely goes unquestioned, but it’s a bit odd if you think about it. All these knights are at least minor nobility. They don’t know the other nobles in their region? They don’t know what castles are where? Don’t they have, like, diplomatic relations with these people or at least attend the same tournaments? Even if they’re all fully committed to the knight-errant lifestyle and don’t really engage in courtly diplomacy, you’d think they would share information with each other and get the lay of the land. But instead, to use TTRPG terminology, it’s like they’re all on a hexcrawl that was randomly generated just for them to have these adventures.
The author of Perlesvaus decides to address this. In what’s kind of a throwaway paragraph late in the text, he explains that God moves things around so knights always have new quests to do (and, presumably, is also making sure they always arrive at the right narratively-significant moment). So the reason they’re always encountering people & places they have no knowledge of is because those people & places really weren’t there yesterday. They didn’t know about the Castle of Such-and-Such because it’s normally a thousand miles away and the forest path they followed to get there used to lead somewhere else.
And I think that would be a really interesting thing to stick into a novel or a TTRPG or something. When a knight rides into the forest with the intent of Going On A Quest, at some point they go around a bend in the path, cross an invisible barrier, and wind up in the Forest of Narrative. This is a vast forest with no set geography, filled with winding paths and populated almost entirely with questing knights, damsels in search of questing knights, friendly hermits, strange creatures, and allegorical set-pieces. Then, at the narratively-appropriate time, they cross back over the invisible barrier back into the regular world, and find themselves wherever the Narrative has decided they need to be. This could be a different country, a different continent, or a different world entirely.
Whether anyone involved is actually aware that this is how it works is… optional, really. Though if it’s not a Known Phenomenon, the people whose jobs it is to handle trade & diplomacy & god forbid, maps, are going to end up tearing their hair out in frustration.
I’m taking this opportunity to be the thousandth note on my own post.
#history#arthur#amazing that this idea is THAT old#bound by the narrative but in its most litteral sense#i am alsways slightly mad when history documentaries ans such go like 'the legend of arthur is this'#because it's both purely fictionnal in the first place and a multitude of variations existing over time
kino-san-chan reblogged
sequel to this post! i just had to draw the rest of the chapter 2 girls
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it's high time!! …we slay that princess
(the other chapter 2 princesses can be found here!)
kino-san-chan reblogged
hey good news
there's a specifically designated role in the naked mole rat ecology for "guy who runs off into the wilderness and fucks their way into a stranger's house"
Y'all have no idea how absurdly strange naked mole rats are as creatures They're cold-blooded mammals that live in a eusocial structure with a queen and drones, similar to ants, bees, termites and no other mammal on the planet. They barely need to breathe, with a respiration rate low enough to let them thrive in burrows with 2% oxygen, and survive with 0 oxygen whatsoever for about 20 minutes with zero lasting effects.
They live for over 30 years, which is absurdly long for a rodent, don't grow frail with age, and are basically immune to cancer because their telomeres just never shorten.
Naked Mole Rats are rodents that attempted to evolve into bugs, failed, and unlocked the secret to immortality in the process.
Also Naked Mole Rats are eusocial, meaning that there is one reproductive female (the queen) while the rest of the colony raises her offspring. The way the queen keeps other females from being reproductively viable is by consistently pissing in the water supply, providing pheromones that prevent other member of the colony from fully developing their uterus!
kino-san-chan reblogged
being alive is great because there are so many different vegetables you can sauté. but then there are also the horrors
with faith and perseverance, one day we will sauté the horrors
kino-san-chan reblogged
Izutsumi
kino-san-chan reblogged
I am very aware that Shinigami aren't actual mythological beings in either Shinto or Buddhism (closest thing being the Yamaduta), but what are the earliest mentions of them in Japan? Is there a Chinese equivalent of them?
Yamaduta is more a Hindu term than a Buddhist one. A quick survey of De Gruyter's and Brill's sites shows a fair number of cases it appears in vedas (in a pretty narrow sense, as a designation of Yama's two dogs), puranas and upashnidas (ex. in the story of Nachiketa) and that's about it. According to Marc Tiefenauer (Yama and Hell Beings in Indian Buddhism in Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism Online) there are Buddhist examples too, but they don't exactly seem common. And I can't think of a single specifically Japanese source indicating any greater familiarity with this term let alone incorporation into everyday religion or into pre-modern fiction. The oldest cases of the term shinigami being used are from the Edo period; Kyōden Santō, an eighteenth century writer, used it as a fanciful designation for a vengeful spirit of a hanged person in one of his works (English translation can be found in The Straw Sandal or The Scroll of the Hundred Crabs (Mukashi-banashi Inazuma-byōshi)). There's a handful of other similar sources but none of them have anything to do with the modern use of the term. That seems to only go back to Japanese adaptations of Godfather Death by Brothers Grimm, which in the Meiji period entered the repertoire of rakugo performers. Elements of this story pop up in Shigeru Mizuki's portrayal of shinigami (skeletal appearance, the candle motif) which is essentially a fusion of western grim reaper and the nameless clerks populating paintings of Buddhist hells; however I am not aware of many works which would really go with that. It's essentially a generic fantasy term first and foremost. I've only ever seen ZUN use this term the way Mizuki did, actually.
Since equivalences arguably require actual theology to develop around a figure I don't think it's really possible to speak of a "Chinese equivalent". I suppose the closest thing to an accurate answer would be "whatever the default translation of the name of eponymous character from Godfather Death is".
kino-san-chan reblogged
kino-san-chan reblogged
Staff tweets for dunmeshi ep 12! {Farcille Edition}
Episode 12
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kino-san-chan reblogged
Drawing in mspaint? Cool, impressive, But whenever I see that, I think about the person who makes their art in power point Every time I see them it boggles me
niceferatu
Y'all if you like this PLEASE check out @lylahcomorbid she paints in Microsoft Word and it looks AMAZING
I can barely put an image and text into word what magic is this
Gonna have to complete this group with Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 80 year old Japanese artist who makes his paintings on Microsoft Excel: