Cultures/creeds for a gonzo transhuman fantasy setting constructed entirely from repurposed Dungeons & Dragons tropes:
A community of serial reincarnationists under a permanent enchantment that causes them to eventually reappear in a new young adult body with personality and memories intact any time they’re killed, whether through violence, disease or old age. The exact form the new body takes is random, and is as likely to be an animal as a humanoid; their cavalier attitude toward death is tempered by a strong cultural expectation to learn how to live with whatever body you end up with, so it’s not uncommon to encounter – for example – a respected member of the community who
currently
happens to be an owl. Socially they tend toward agrarianism, though they have no particular objection to urban living; in their ethos, a sprawling city differs from a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam only in scale.
A mob of undead skeletons obsessed with the transitory nature of existence. Their culture is dominated by short-lived art forms, like sand paintings, improvisational music, and elaborate wooden sculptures which are burned on completion. They’re able to freely swap bones with each other, or replace them with suitably prepared substitutes taken from non-undead skeletons or carved from wood or other dead organic matter, and it’s not uncommon to encounter a skeleton with none of their original bones remaining; pondering the resulting ship-of-Theseus problem with respect to personal identity is regarded as a fun intellectual exercise, but it doesn’t actually bother them. Alone among the creeds, they never directly produce new members; every one of them is a former member of some other creed.
A society devoted to the pursuit of knowledge by transforming life forms through experimental wizardry. They regard experimenting on others – even animals – as horrifyingly unethical, and as a result, each of them uses their own body as a testing ground. Individual members range from mostly human with only a few odd physical quirks, to entities not readily recognisable as life, let alone people. While novel transmutations are always self-directed, they’re willing to perform the most thoroughly tested and proven procedures on others with informed consent, a service that comes in high demand. Likewise, interventions to rescue other members of the creed from experiments gone awry are permitted, though only after careful deliberation – after all, perhaps your neighbour meant to spend a year as a rock!
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
Just wanted to add that the suffix -ster was originally specifically feminine, a means of denoting a lady known by her profession. Spinster = female spinner, baxter = female baker, webster = female weaver (webber), brewster = female brewer. If one of the ladies named Alys in your village was known for selling her excellent weaving, you might call her Alys Webster (to differentiate her from, say, Alys Littel who was rather short, and Alys Bywater who lived near the pond).
This fascinates me for many reasons, but especially in the case of modern families with last names like Baxter or Webster or Brewster. What formidable and well-known ancestresses managed to pass on those very gendered names to all their descendants, when last names were changing from personal “nicknames” into indicators of lineage among the middle and lower classes? There’s a forgotten story of a fascinating woman behind every one of those family lines.
theory: “mamma mia!” (2008) and “kingsman: the secret service” (2014) take place in the same universe
my evidence?
colin firth.
in “mamma mia!”, which is arguably set in the 90s, he plays:
an englishman named harry
whose last name is not known
who demonstrates an affinity for aliases (”harry headbanger”)
who lives in london
who works as a banker which sounds fake
isn’t “spontaneous”
is gay
in “kingsman: the secret service,” where the main story is arguably set in 2014, he plays:
an englishman named harry
whose last name is now revealed to be hart
who demonstrates a penchant for aliases (”galahad”)
who lives in london
who is actually a secret agent…which he has to lie about and tell people he’s some boring job like a banker
can’t afford to be spontaneous bc he’s a secret agent and if he doesn’t plan things out he will probably die
tells a random woman that he’s gay (among other things) (he’s implied to be lying but literally nothing in the film indicates that anything in the line where he says that is not true)
CONCLUSION: Harry from “Mamma Mia!” and Harry from “Kingsman: The Secret Service” are the same person. The opening scene (before it jumps to “17 years later”) of Kingsman takes place, at most, a few years apart from the events of “Mamma Mia!” Also, Harry Hart is gay. Thank you for your time.
If that’s true, why wasn’t Kingsman a musical? Everyone sings in the Mama Mia world?
It’s always a struggle to keep my apartment clean and free of excessive clutter that makes it impossible to find things that I actually need. One recurring problem that contributes to this is that I’ll frequently see objects — mostly but not exclusively some sort paper with writing on it — that I don’t actually have any need for as physical objects, but that
Contain information that I think I may need or want in the future, and/or
Remind me of people I don’t want to forget, and/or events that make me happy or proud to remember
and that I fear forgetting otherwise. This is exacerbated by my OCD, and the autistic traits that it overlaps with, which greatly increases the number of things that I feel like I might need to know, that I worry about forgetting, or that I feel a sense of guilt about the prospect of literally or figuratively discarding. It’s also exacerbated, on the other end, by my ADHD, which makes it genuinely more likely that I will in fact forget things if not prompted by physical reminders.
And a solution I’ve found, just within the last year (I’m 31) that doesn’t “fix” the problem to the extent of making cleaning and decluttering as easy for me as it is for the median neurotypical, but that helps a lot is this:
Ask yourself if a digital image would be just as good.
And if it would, snap a picture with your (or someone else’s) digital camera or smartphone. If you don’t have either, and can’t borrow either from someone who does, scan anything that’s flat and not physically gross with a scanner — often, libraries will have one or more available for public use. And then save copies of those photos in two or more physically separate locations (which may just mean “on your hard drive and also on Google Drive, Dropbox, or some other cloud storage solution”). Now the physical object can be junked, recycled, or given away, and the information it contained is actually less likely to be destroyed than if you simply kept the object without taking photos.
A digital image will not always be just as good. I emphatically do not want to make the blanket assertion that any and all physical objects that you have no need for other than to look at them should be junked in this fashion, especially when addressing an audience that contains a bunch of fellow autists. This is not something you should do in every possible case where you could. I’m just saying, ask the question. Doing so has helped me a lot.
Also, stimulant ADHD meds help with cleaning a lot. Both in overcoming compulsive difficulty throwing things out (at least for me) and in getting up the oomph to do it in general. And treating any depression you might have, whether that’s with a light box, dietary changes, exercise, talk therapy, anti-depressants, behavioral changes that improve situations that exacerbate your depression, or (as for me) all of them together. But that’s another topic.
P.S.: This should go without saying, but in some tumblr communities it doesn’t: If this is helpful to you, or you think it might be helpful to someone who follows you, go ahead and reblog it. You don’t need to be attention-deficient, obsessive-compulsive, depressed, or autistic. Sharing information and ideas is good. If you worry that being helpful will cause people to criticize you for not “staying in your lane,” ask yourself who died and made them the Department of Transportation. And if people do that, ask them. I can tell you the answer right now: Nobody. Just because someone claims moral authority doesn’t mean they actually have it.
Plot Designing 