dragonlady7

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I'm certainly sorry if it came across that way, but the disability I thought it was mostly about was ADHD, which I do have (well, probably, I don't know how to pursue a diagnosis), and which was the only disability specifically mentioned in the original post, and as part of that there's sometimes this problem where you get stuck in a loop of something where you can only do it if it's one way. So that's who I'm meaning to address-- if you think you can only drink water if you have your water bottle because that is the routine you have, I'm saying, there are other options. If you have a disability where you can only drink out of a bottle, which I apologize, was not a thing I had really thought about, then this is indeed a wildly inappropriate answer.

No, I surely do not intend that people who can't take my advice should take it, and I'm sorry, I forgot that this is the era of the Internet where we don't have context, we don't just talk to people who know us, and we therefore can't assume good-faith intentions by speakers anymore. I know that also sounds condescending but I genuinely do mean it-- I was fully flabbergasted within my own assumed context, and did not think of other contexts there. The post did not mention special water bottles for disablities etc., or anything of the sort, so I didn't pick that up. I don't know if that's ADHD of me or what, because again, diagnosis beyond reach (you have to have executive function to pursue it, it turns out, and I'm using mine up not dying of other things apparently), maybe it's just me missing the point like I generally do.

So, yeah, no, if you can't do a thing, then you shouldn't do it, whatever lifehacks you can do to manage your conditions you can do, you should do them, and I suppose a note to my future self, if a post seems really wildly weird to you, you're probably missing the fucking point of it, but this note will not do me any good because I will forget it when I next need it (after dwelling on it in every quiet moment between now and then, of course, because that is the way).

So, cool, how many of my other notifications are people also mad at me for missing this same point? Let's find out. (Your picture was not posted)

literary critique?

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hm idk if i’d call that a theme so much as a narrative tic.

Probably it’s my kink for unreliable narrators coming out. I want it to be obvious to the reader, but not to the other characters, how stoic my various POV characters are.

It’s not something I’m doing on purpose and I’m not sure it adds anything to the story that I do it so much. I do like characters that try very hard, in general. The tension throughout much of Trust with Keira and Lambert both wanting the same things, and yet each convinced the other doesn’t want the same thing– that’s what I’m after, and it requires the characters to be in control of themselves so they can keep that facade up at all.

In real life I’m very poor at controlling my emotions and not speaking impulsively, so it’s probably some very poorly-disguised projection on my part, really. (Your picture was not posted)

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Ha, I don’t know! I know I feel like most times when I encounter ageless Elves in a canon I definitely feel like I’ve given the repercussions of that worldbuilding more thought than most authors except Tolkien, who gave too much thought to literally everything.

I wasn’t prolific in the Silm fandom but I did read all of the Histories of Middle-Earth, and at one point actually transcribed a bunch of the Fall of Gondolin because it was a library book and I didn’t have a scanner. So.

I only have one Silm fic on AO3, which the dear hearts at Open Doors transferred for me because I’d lost my henneth-annun login by then and I did not have a fair copy of the thing on my hard drive. Cool Waters is notable for being one of the first fics I ever had beta’d, by none other than a_tehta https://tmblr.co/mJ5S_zBHhrMemgM4Jv5ZPFw who I was delighted to realize is still around under that pseud, and my beta was like “you… mention teeth in this thing a lot is that meant to be a theme” and then we had an extremely lengthy discussion about what teeth would be like for an immortal person, and wound up cutting almost all of the mentions of them from that fic, but I definitely carried this weird energy with me into the Witcher fandom because

you can’t have ageless characters and not address what happens to their fucking teeth with normal wear and tear ok

anyway. Thank you for asking, and thank you for reading. :) (Your picture was not posted)

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Haha my worry is not about not being compliant with Witcher canon but rather uhhhhhh perhaps uhhhh revealing too much of uhhhh coughs nervously some dark corners of my id cough

I mean, standard erotica-writer disclaimer: I’m into stuff in fiction that I’m not into in real life, whatever sex I may or may not have in my actual life has little bearing (not none! but little) on what kind of sex I write about, and so on, and so forth. Really dudes, I’m not out here making boys somewhat-masc-aligned people cry all the time. But maybe uh. Maybe that needs to happen a lot fictionally. Don’t judge me.

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Oh, that’s a good question! and gah, Tumblr keeps glitching and losing my progress on this, so it won’t be as comprehensive as I want.

So anyway. I don’t really know, and I’m only an amateur historian and avid reader, and all this is fictional so everyone should do what they want, but all that said, I’m going to ramble on about what I think is possible or likely or just plain fun to imagine. 

I don’t know if canon gives us much information on what the population was like, how many would be there at once, during the peak of operations of the… facility, for want of a better word. I have the impression that there’s a nearby-ish village that Vesemir has some kind of standing relationship with during his solo time there (but IDK if that impression is canon or fanon or what, I’m terrible at recollecting my sources); likely at its peak there was more of a population nearby, and possibly there could have been a fairly close relationship with that population– i.e., trading with the nearby civilians for supplies, and possibly having some crossover of population, maybe even people willing to do work at/for the keep. It wouldn’t have to be a self-sustaining compound, is my point there.

Which is good, because while having a kitchen garden kind of thing, to grow some of the more perishable stuff the population would want to eat– and the more specialty stuff, herbs and the like– would be feasible, but the thought of attempting to somehow have enough of a labor force to clear, maintain, and work large fields of land to directly support a mountainside castle seems prohibitive. The people who lived there were specialists, not laborers, so it makes a great deal more sense for them to buy in the large stores of grain and other supplies they would need to eat. 

So, yes, I’d imagine they’d have things like a flock of chickens for meat and eggs, and some small amounts of livestock, and a few patches of vegetables and herbs, maybe a bit of orchard around, but it wouldn’t be enough to subsist on, only to supplement– and it would probably be largely focused on the specialty stuff, for distilling and making potions, that they’d prefer to directly produce so that it meets their particular specialty standards. So they’d likely buy in provisions, for the most part– which also, incidentally, could be a good way of explaining the Witchers’ canonical insistence on being paid in coin. If they produce nothing concrete to trade, then coin is important. 

I think the logistics of having individual returning Witchers be collectively responsible for provisioning the keep is also difficult– if people don’t come back consistently every year, it’d be hard to work that out. Like… you could say if you come back bring enough provisions to keep yourself over the winter, but it almost makes more sense to just buy that in bulk, especially if there’s already a standing population. And there’d always be someone coming home injured or having been unable to provide well for themselves, and you’d just be at risk of not having good stocks of everything you needed and maybe having too much of some things and not enough of others. So probably, the Keep had a quartermaster, and probably, the Witchers who were on the Path would contribute financially, that just makes the most sense to me. (I mean, of course they’d also bring stuff they wanted, but that’s more like, the extras and luxuries and specialty stuff they prefer, rather than trying to haul home a barrel of flour or whatever.)

It just makes sense that when the Keep was populated, so was the surrounding area, and there’d’ve been regular supply runs managed by the full-time residents.

Of course, when there’s only the four of them left, you probably would figure on bringing provisions back with you individually to support yourself; it’s a lot less annoying, as the person in charge of cooking, to be dealing with four different sets of provisions than to be trying to scrape together food for 300 people out of 100 different people’s ideas of what to shop for. 

 IDK if that was what you were looking for, but that’s my thought! I bet there are some books out that would talk about the nuts and bolts of how a, say, medieval keep was provisioned, that would offer a lot more concrete inspiration– might be worth looking into institutions like abbeys as well. There’s a rich vein of inspiration there. 

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b) Requires a significant investment of time & trust such that he’s unlikely to be willing to get it from paid or casual encounters, which would also lead him to mentally build it up as ‘romantic’ (2/3)

….

if there was a third ask I didn’t get it so I am In Terrible Suspense!!!!!

I can only assume this is about the tawdry romance novels on Geralt’s bookshelf?????

I am DYING here, what was the punchline???????????

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No, the truck does not have a parking brake!

I should mention that despite the fact the truck has license plates on it, I highly doubt it’s actually road-legal. Last year a brake caliper froze up going over the Petersburg Pass, and they managed to get it repaired and it passed state inspection but I do not understand how. It’s an automatic and the gear shifter doesn’t actually point to the gear it’s really in, and the frame is rusted out so bad the trailer hitch ripped off it two years ago, and in all sorts of ways it is very much a farm truck and NOT a street-legal vehicle. Oh yeah the gas line rusted out so you can only get a gallon into it at a time… So anyway. I mean, compared to past farm trucks (the one you had to hold the door closed with your arm as you drove it, the one that only drove in reverse, the one with the snapped frame so it tilted into a V and you had to climb up to get into it, the one with the hornet’s nest in the ventilation system, the Jeep that didn’t actually have a clutch… I could go on) it’s doing great but to expect it to have a working parking brake is kind of, well, something you’d only do completely sans context. 

msilverstar replied to your post “a farm accident”

Wow could have been so much worse! I was expecting four new cars to be toast!

OH yeah, Sister got a bit shaky thinking about what could have happened. She saw the employees’ cars there and thought about asking them to move– but Wednesday is the really busy CSA pickup where we all have to go put our cars somewhere else, and Saturdays are more sedate, so she decided not to bother with it, and boy is she glad she didn’t. The Subaru is probably fine and she might not bother repairing it, and the Toyota, well, that employee admitted he’d been saving up for a newer car anyway because it was in such bad condition, and having an insurance payout might actually be helpful because its trade-in value was likely to be zero. 

But the truck directly next to the Subaru was, like, on an order of months old, and in flawless condition, and that would have been an absolute nightmare.

(And, worst, if there hadn’t been cars there. Oh my gosh, if there hadn’t been cars there. Oh we can’t even think about what might have happened. The ditch slowed the truck a bit maybe but it would definitely not have stopped before it hit the building.)

thesacredreznor replied to your post “a farm accident”

Woah! I’m glad no one was hurt.

So are we and that’s really the important thing.

That poor apprentice is on chores this whole weekend so she’s got to keep going back out in that truck, too. She took it over by the barn and hosed it out really thoroughly, gave it a good cleaning, and it’s actually looking better than it has in a while. Just, more crunched, a bit. The Incredible Flying Chore Truck… 

We’d been joking that we should have a Wall Of Fame showing previous apprentices and maybe having a couple of notable things they’d done, and she was like “oh no I’m gonna be that girl who threw the truck at some cars” and we were like “listen that doesn’t even rate on the Weird And Dumb Shit Apprentices Have Done Here” which to be fair includes some real howlers that BIL himself did. It’s a hard job and sometimes things you think are gonna work great Really Don’t.

missbuster replied to your post “a farm accident”

Holy crap. I broke my parking brake once and then never fixed it until after my master cylinder exploded on a mountain and I crept into a town so I didn’t have to brake but this is way more exciting

I once drove a 1994 Plymouth Voyager minivan 215 miles with no brakes, on the Thruway, but I had a working parking brake, and let me tell you stopping a minivan with the parking brake (foot-operated type) was not fun.)

Middle-Little sister told us a story of how she found out the e-brake on our older sister’s high school Jeep didn’t work, the hard way, with a snowbank, but she’d never had to admit that to anyone before because there’d been no damage.

It all could have been so much worse, and it’s terrifying to think of.

We delayed telling BIL about it– he was at the farmers’ market and there was nothing he could do– but after everything was fixed, Farmsister texted him a quick rundown so he wouldn’t be blind-sided. She realized that the state troopers that had come to generate the incident report so we could submit that for insurance had been visible from the road, and had been there for like an hour, so everyone going to the city of Troy from points straight east was all buzzing with “there were cops at Laughing Earth!!” and the word was bound to get to him one way or another– and in fact one person had solemnly told the apprentice there with him that they were sure everything was fine, and BIL was like ?? so it was best we notified him.

His reaction was, It is absolutely not the apprentice’s fault, it’s my fault if anything for having no better option than that shitty truck, also I will spend a few hours on the phone with the various insurances and figure out whether property or automobile is the way to go with the claims, don’t worry, I’m good at paperwork, which is practically a love letter. 

He was mostly just glad our dad had viewed it as a fun logic puzzle, and confirmed he too probably would have used a similar method, with the jacks. But he would not have viewed it as a logic puzzle, he would’ve considered it a huge pain in the ass. 

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HA

I think it’s really funny that in the games when they want you to follow a scent trail of course it’s got to be depicted visually so it’s this weird red cloudy trail in midair. 

I researched elephants intensely at one point for an original novel I was writing with genetically engineered woolly mammoths in it and they also have incredible senses of smell, but they can use their trunks for that, and often do, they’ll put their trunks right on the ground and whuffle back and forth to warm up the thing they’re trying to catch the scent of. Humans don’t have trunks, though. (I had a great scene where the protagonist is trying to find someone she’d hooked up with the previous night and her mammoth sniffs her clothing where she’d embraced him and is like “oh I can definitely find that guy” and leads her straight to his window in a kind of warped version of cinderella’s slipper.) (listen I can call my own shit great if I want, I’ve been having a hard day.)

(It’s always funny to be in a particular fandom and then do some self-analysis and be like Hm I Have Written This Exact Trope Before. What Does This Say About Me As A Person?)

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(cont) completely and allow me to actually read again! something about your voice when writing just, like, keeps from getting snagged on any of the million things that can kill my reading comprehension, even in your wee precious flower prince geralt write ups. i just wanted to say THANK YOU, i enjoy your writing immensely, your stuff is allowing me to read more than i ever thought i could again and it’s bringing me a lot of joy when i need it!

Aw, thank you!!!

I can’t read as much as I used to either, so I totally feel you on this– I’m one of those people whose ADHD manifested in childhood by letting me hyperfocus on books but now that I’m grown I a) don’t have the time and b) have sort of decompensated under the pressures of adult life taking up so much brain all the time and feel like I’m overall dumber than I used to be so like. I know I’m surely nowhere near where you are but I definitely, concretely sympathize with the problem. 

I am so delighted that this has worked for you, and thanks for telling me. :) 

IDK if it’s gauche to answer this publicly, let me know if you didn’t want that, but I’m going to because it made me so delighted and also wasn’t something I’d really thought about so directly before in terms of readability and such. I’ve always wanted to have a kind of transparent style– like, I want people to remember the story not the language so much– so I’ve been trying to become sort of authorially invisible in the actual language as much as possible since I first started really paying attention to my own writing [sophomore English in high school! 1995, baby] but it’s interesting to consider it this way too. Thanks so much for writing to let me know!

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HA. Well, I figured that was it, because if it were anything more elaborate they’d mention it.

Says a lot about him, I suppose. 

I’ve had a number of replies/reblogs confirming that’s the game/book canon for sure, so.

But I wonder how many viewers of the show will just never… consider that. I mean, to be fair, the timeline’s so screwy it’s perfectly likely that if you don’t dork out and Google it, you’d never really understand that it’s been something like, what, seventy years? Fifty at least? between the earliest scenes and the last. Since nobody ages– and like, ok Geralt doesn’t, Yennefer’s unchanging, but Jaskier is supposed to age twenty years at least and they made zero effort to change his appearance, not even changing the style of his dress or his hairstyle at all, and that’s seriously confusing. (Having Yennefer comment on his crow’s feet is a reasonable approach except I looked it up and literally two years are supposed to have passed between those scenes, so like– not super effective, there.)

I get not putting age makeup on him, that’d look corny, but at least give him different hair or something. Yeesh. 

Anyway. Good to know that Geralt is a fucking dork who can’t come up with names in the TV show too. 

If I were going to write fanfic in this fandom it would definitely be about Roach, but I am not convinced I actually want to take the time to do it. We’ll see, LOL.