Keep Calm and Read a Book

Hi, Mom, Dad. I wanted you to meet someone.

This is your grandson. We haven't named him yet, but we narrowed down a few choices. Winry doesn't really like my ideas, but that's okay. I know we'll pick the right one. I don't know how she can tell, but she says he looks like me. I sure hope not, because it turns out I got your giant honker of a nose.

I wish he could know you the way I did. Well, maybe not the way I knew Dad, but… you know what I mean. The next best thing is me telling him all about you, I guess. The good things first, obviously.

Dad, Granny told me how nervous you were to be a father. I laughed and told her "no shit" because… well, yeah… but I understand why now, I guess. Better, anyway.

I'm terrified. More than ever. My first round of being responsible for someone else turned out pretty fucking poorly. That's hard to beat, though, so… I guess I'm already doing okay? Yeah. Just gotta move forward from that… and I'm gonna try my damnedest to do it right this time.

Anyway… this is him. My son. You would've been great grandparents.

I miss you. Both of you.

All I need is for someone to gently cup my face and tell me I'm not as doomed as I feel.

reblog to gently cup your mutual’s face and tell them they’re not as doomed as they feel

frog phone

Gold Ring with Hidden Fold-Out Key. Dated ca. 1880, presumably Austrian origin. The rectangular ‘gem’ has an engraved scroll decoration and is framed either side by spread acanthus leaves.

(Source: collections.imm.hu)

i know it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: a big, big part of maintaining your confidence & self esteem as a creator is fully embracing the concept of “you don’t have to be good like them.  you can be good like you.”

for example, i’m not someone who’s particularly good at coming up with complex, elaborate plots or incredibly unique ideas.  it’s just not how i choose to write.  and it would be easy for me to look at someone with an elaborate, super unique plot & decide that because i don’t write like that, i’m not a good writer.  after all, unique plots are good, and my writing lacks those, so my writing must not be good, right?  well, no, actually.  i just have different strengths, like taking a simple premise & digging super deep into its emotional depths.  that’s what i do well & it isn’t any better or worse than people who do elaborate world building or come up with really creative and unexpected plots.

your writing is never going to be all things to all people.  it just isn’t.  inevitably, you’ll have to make creative choices that favor certain aspects of writing over others.  there is truly no getting around that & it’s honestly a good thing, because it means you’ve developed your own style.  but you’ll always encounter other creators who posses strengths that you don’t.  it doesn’t mean one is better than the other or that your writing isn’t good enough. 

comparing yourself like that would be like taking a piece of pizza & a cupcake & going “oh no, that cupcake is so sweet & my pizza isn’t sweet at all.” or “gosh, the garlic crust on that pizza is delicious and my cupcake doesn’t have ANY garlic.”  obviously your pizza isn’t sweet.  obviously your cupcake doesn’t have garlic.  a food can’t have every single delicious flavor at once.  the cupcake is good like a cupcake.  the pizza is good like a pizza.  so you don’t have to be good like them.  you can be good like you.

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”

Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)

All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.

it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking

Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.

*INHUMAN SCREECHING*

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

@cervinesatyr

That first Polish-language encyclopedia was right about dragons. "It is hard to defeat a dragon, but you have to try." That is in fact a definition of "dragon" that cuts to the heart of the matter and covers all the essentials.

A dragon is something that A) is very hard to defeat and B) must be fought. That's it. That's all you really have to know when approaching the subject.

show, don't tell:

anticipation - bouncing legs - darting eyes - breathing deeply - useless / mindless tasks - eyes on the clock - checking and re-checking

frustration - grumbling - heavy footsteps - hot flush - narrowed eyes - pointing fingers - pacing / stomping

sadness - eyes filling up with tears - blinking quickly - hiccuped breaths - face turned away - red / burning cheeks - short sentences with gulps

happiness - smiling / cheeks hurting - animated - chest hurts from laughing - rapid movements - eye contact - quick speaking

boredom - complaining - sighing - grumbling - pacing - leg bouncing - picking at nails

fear - quick heartbeat - shaking / clammy hands - pinching self - tuck away - closing eyes - clenched hands

disappointment - no eye contact - hard swallow - clenched hands - tears, occasionally - mhm-hmm

tiredness - spacing out - eyes closing - nodding head absently - long sighs - no eye contact - grim smile

confidence - prolonged eye contact - appreciates instead of apologizing - active listening - shoulders back - micro reactions

You know what I’m tired of seeing in fantasy novels? Conveniently kind strangers. The ones who take in the hero when he passes out on their doorstep and take care of him for an indeterminate number of days until he regains consciousness in a nice fluffy bed. Give me wary strangers. Strangers who are too afraid to help, who want nothing to do with a hero on his quest. Give me strangers who’ll stitch up the hero’s wounds and then run away as soon as he’s conscious. Give me strangers who pick the hero’s pocket so he wakes up with only his clothes on - and only some of them at that. No more conveniently kind strangers, okay?

But I wanna BE a conveniently kind stranger…

#plot twist: a whole novel about a conveniently kind stranger patching up random heroes and listening to their stories #‘how nice’ she says as Sir Hughton tells her about his dragon-slaying business #‘my’ she responds as The Masked Marauder denounces tyranny #‘would you like some more tea?’ she asks the lonely poet who has just told her his tragic backstory #and they all leave in the end #but she stays #and makes tea #and talks to strangers #and feeds the wanderers on her doorstep and patches up the heroes passed out and bleeding in her turnip patch #and nothing momentous ever comes of it but she is GOOD and she gives hope #and that’s worth living for even if no one bothers to thank you for it (via praise-the-lord-im-dead)

Yes, absolutely, all the way!! See here. ^^

Oh my god this is great. You’re all great people.

The conveniently kind stranger gets invited along sometimes. Because years of heroes crashing at her house has also caused the Henchmen Troops to attack there. And so she defends her house and her injured heroes. And so sometimes they ask her along. “We could use someone like you” But she always declines. She gets a reputation. “If you ever need someone to take care of you, knock on the door with the red paint and the turnip patch.” And the hope and kindness she gives matters. Because heroes come to her with optimism crushed after tough losses and dead friends and after their Beloved Peasant Village has been burned down. And she helps them along, a little bit at a time. And then one day, one of the villians has heard about her too many times, and sends an actual force to take care of her once and for all.

But many of those heroes never forgot about her. And they might not have stayed, and they may not have thanked her,

But they do come back

Well there goes my heart…

I like to think that there is a villain out there, someone at the end of his rope, who has also lost things and places and loved ones and who just needs to talk to someone or he will combust. And in desperation he goes to the person who has foiled his plans time and time again just by being kind.  He fears that he is asking too much, but the sign says she will give aid to anyone.  He stands there in front of the door, hand on the knocker, frozen.  He should just leave.  This was a ridiculous idea.  Like all his ideas.  He should go.  A hero might turn up at any minute, and the last thing he wants to do right now is fight or take a life.  He just wants to feel like someone else cares about him, just wants to feel the calming touch of a hand on his shoulder.  He starts to turn away, but the door opens, and so does the life of the villain.  For who can be touched by grace and be untransformed? 

This keeps getting better and better

#reblogue #…and then the villain takes the candlesticks and starts a new life#as mayor of a small town (via @pilferingapples )

People still whisper about the Chosen One who defeated the Great Evil of the Kingdom, all alone, and then disappeared forever. They say she protects the Kingdom to this day, but that’s just a rumour. After all, the Chosen One it’s been decades since someone saw her.

The Kind Stranger always smiles slightly sadly when she patches up a hero rambling about how great the Chosen One was. She’s heard the stories - everyone has. It always sadden her that the heroes who idolise the Chosen One are the ones who insist on going alone, without help or support. They’re the ones who die recklessly for their cause, leaving before they’re healed and without the food she offers.

“The Chosen One never needed help,” they tell her imperiously, “And neither do I.”

Then they leave. Sometimes they die. And the next hero comes to her door.

The Kind Stranger knows that it’s true. The Chosen One never needed help. But she wanted it, desperately wished for a helping hand on long dark nights of travelling or while patching up her own wounds. She wished that rather than people staring at her in fear and wonderment, one of them would offer her a home-cooked meal and night on their hearth. No one ever did. After all, all most people don’t get involved in heroes business. It’s dangerous.

The Kind Stranger knows what that kind of loneliness can do to someone as well. How it eats them from the inside. Years of seeing only destruction, the only hand not helping but hurting - that can destroy hope. It can make you forget what you’re fighting for. And the Kind Stranger knows that if that happens, heroes become villains. No hope can make you terrible things. Heroes who lack kindness can do terrible things. She did terrible things.

So the Kind Stranger covers up the dragon-fire burns and scars from wargs’ claws that she had to patch up herself. She puts the skills she learnt to good use and patches up the young men and women at her door, her hands steady and skilled even in her old age. She gives them all a home cooked meal and a place to remind the heroes of home - just for a bit. She remembers what it’s like to loose everything and so tries to remind the heroes what they are fighting for.

The Kind Stranger equips them with exactly what they need to complete their quest, and no one ever questions how this old woman knows the exact length of rope needed to cross the Dark Canyon or what herbs will prevent the a Southern Tree Rat bite from festering.

She completed her quest years ago and she had done it completely alone. And that had destroyed her more than any villain could. So she stops it from happening. No more heroes will be completely alone anymore. And they’ll live and do good things. Kindness breeds kindness and she knows from experience that is what will truly beat evil in the end.

They say the Chosen One watches over and protects the Kingdom. She does. Just not in the way anyone quite expects.

When you learned your mother was a goddess, things finally seemed to fall into place. The other demigods laughed at you, the only child born to the goddess of the hearth, Hestia. But your power was so much more than they could dream of.

Being born to a goddess was something I never imagined to have happened to me, and really, least of all to a goddess of virginity, so really, Hestia as a mother? I didn’t believe that.

But dad told me he had been at the oven with papa and they had stoked the fire, they poured wine and sacrifices bread and oil and meats to the flame, and begged the goddess to let them have family together to gather in this home, a family to gather around a hearth and to love.

And listen to their prayers she did, sculpting me from embers and ash and blowing life into me with a spark from her flames, kissing my forehead once before she left, leaving me forever with her mark on my face.

That’s what dad told me, and now it all makes much more sense.

I never ran out of s'more stuff, ya know? Even if I had definitely just used up my last chocolate for a cake, there’d be a new perfectly preserved package of it in my cupboard. Marshmallows empty cause of my hot chocolate? No silly, there is still some left in the box somehow.

I also play the guitar, at the campfires I always played and lead the chorus, but never do my fingers turn to blisters, and I never need to rest my voice.

It also explains why I have always been at home anywhere and with anyone, I could sit down, and I was home where I was and the people with me would be my family.

Other demigods mocked me, I am the child of the goddess of the home, of the hearth, a cooking deity they’d call her.

It was…rude, but it was fine, I could deal with it. I didn’t have a cabin full of siblings, but whoever stopped by was family, right?

And it was totally fine to leave me behind when they went into battle, I am no good with weaponry, but I could still follow them, grab some food for them, they’d be hungry after all the fighting.

And they seemed almost concerned when I ran onto the battlefield barefooted and in my hoodie and sweatpants and apron, rushing towards a dragon and a son of Thanatos.

Their screams were scared when the useless child of a goddess ran onto the battlefield, and this boy actually tried to hold me back, even if his arms were shattered and his skin was scorched.

They were shocked when the battle ended with me.

They would’ve known I can’t get burned from all the times I’d stumbled into the campfire or spilled tea.

They should’ve known I can make anyone and anything calm down quickly enough.

They should’ve known I can protect anyone behind me by raising my hand.

A hearth does not burn, it warms and nutures. A family calms and cares, not aggravates. A home does not abandon, it protects.

I am the son of Hestia, and my mother gave me the ability to be a hearth anywhere I went. It is safe with me, for anyone.

I ended wars before, this one was no different.

Beautiful 

You are constantly mocked for having such a weird superpower by all the other heroes. “The power to make anything into perfectly cooked soup”… One day, a massive meteor is barreling towards earth. As all the other heroes are panicking, you wait perfectly calm, at the impact zone, bowl in hand.

Strong bond

(via)

@eurphrasie​  That felt rude.  Since when is fantasy not literature?!

You know, It’s kind of fitting that It was Sir Terry Pratchett himself who answered this question in an interview, just going to paste this up real fast:

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

Have to say I agree with the man.

It’s the casual death threat for me

Clever Illustrations by Danish illustrator HuskMitNavn 

-

“I can’t believe it! You played us like a fiddle!" 

"Oh please. Fiddles are actually hard to play. I played you like the kazoos you are.”