kit . 30s . they/she . genderqueer . pansexual . polyamorous this blog is a dumping ground of whatever I like [ bluesky . ao3 . rambles . my art ] I'm just a cat on the internet
❝Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.❞
─Thomas Merton
if you ever find yourself thinking “wow I scraped the bottom of the barrel with my energy with that and came out okay!” that’s the devil talking. you did not come out okay. you borrowed energy from the future. you will repay it if you don’t rest and replenish the borrowed energy first.
this one took off quickly - are you guys ok
WIZARD PSA: Chronomancy might be weird and confusing, but one of the few solid rules of the discipline is keep your promises. Time is a library, and you don’t want to meet the librarian.
They should add “On Horseback” option to Google Maps. For writers.
“Hevoslinja” (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words ‘skilless in riding and afraid of animals’ at the start.
The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they’ve took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.
Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son’). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.
Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.
For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.
By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it’s several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.
The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would’ve also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they’re trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it’s said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.
also it’s not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!
the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn’t cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:
and that’s not all! here’s a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):
“Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka’s Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways.”
it’s quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” the exorcist said with a
shake of her head. (She personally preferred the term incorporeal entities
removal specialist, but it was impossible to advertise with.) “It
was common knowledge your place was infested by the time you bought
it.”
“Haunted,”
the tired young man corrected. “I have ghosts, not bedbugs.”
“Good
thing too,” she winked. “I wouldn’t know how to get rid of the
latter for you.” She gave him a reassuring nod. “But your problem
I can solve. Give my team twenty-four hours, or twelve if you’re
willing to wait until the next full moon, and we’ll have your house
cleansed top to bottom. Tell you what. If it turns out there’s more
than four in there, I’ll give you the bulk discount too.”
“There’s
six,” the young man replied. “But I do not want the whole
house cleansed. I only want you to remove three of them.”
The
medium-turned-businesswoman looked up from the form she had wanted to
hand him. “Excuse me?”
“I
don’t want the whole house cleansed, I don’t want it to be
spiritually uninhabitable.”
“You-”
She gaped. “Why on earth wouldn’t you want to sweep the hole
house?”
Even
through the fatigue on his face the young man looked indignant.
“Because there’s kids in there!”
Her
lips moved silently around unspoken words. “There’s…”
“Kids
in there!” he repeated. “Children! Three of them. Two little ones
and their older sibling, I think. They haven’t talked to me yet.”
“Sir,
you’re talking about ghosts,” she emphasized.
“I’m
talking about children,” he said stubbornly. “And I’m not
throwing them out. They’re more scared of the others than I am!”
He shook his head. “No, the wailing one in the attic and the two
who keep scratching at the windows and leaving wet footprints on the
carpet definitely need to go, there’s no reasoning with them. But
the kids stay. If you can’t guarantee their safety during your
procedure I will find someone else to help me.”
Never
in her twelve years on the job— “Well,” she said
hesitantly, looking at her potential client rather more nervously
than before. “I suppose I could call in a colleague to…I presume
some sort of personalized ward would do it.” She crossed her arms.
“But this is highly irregular! It means a custom job. I won’t be
able to give you a reliable estimate of the price, and it’s
certainly going to cost you!”
The
young man smiled the smile of a man who had very recently bought a
twice cursed, triple haunted house both willingly and gladly. “We
all live under the spectre of capitalism,” he said wryly. He
dragged the form towards him and began to fill in his address. “The
kids stay. Whatever the costs.”
people have this tendency to believe that fandom discourse exists because people in fandoms are Stupid Nerdy Losers, but in fact fandom discourse exists because anytime you get a group of more than 100 people together, they will start creating interpersonal bullshit. fandom is not special in this regard
Adding to that, the fact that those more than 100 people are getting in a group online, not IRL.
Which, as everybody knows, tends to break usual social barriers and makes everybody just a tiny bit more intense in their interactions with one another.
I like how there’s a category of careers (cowboy, pirate, spy, princess) that have a very specific historical and political context that they get stripped of for the entertainment of children
As someone who works at a nautical history museum where we regularly have field trips come where all the kids are dressed in pirate costumes…
This kinda thing makes my life so much more difficult than it needs to be.
hey did you know people have been like ‘ugh I hate MODERN FASHION why don’t women dress like women any more’ for literally hundreds of years
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While making queer historical romances, I ended up researching how gender lines might plausibly be blurred in historical fashion and what the 'limits’ might be before the wearer was really pushing scandal.
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But I’m also interested in going FURTHER back, because even in the same culture and location, clothing we think of as very gendered nowadays often totally reverses. (Big surprise: pink and lace aren’t actually biologically linked to your junk.)
Anyway, I just unlocked a blog with some highlights and fun bits from the research I did, where these pictures are from! Read for: women in trousers, boys in heels, and offensively soft 1763 boys who turn out to be 'improperly’ bold women
When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.
Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.
Tip for mymutuals who engage in bladed armed combat
signal boost
This is true for plenty of other things too!! When you’re learning anything that involves moving your body, don’t forget that quality of movement is more important than speed!
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
THEYRE LYING JUMP AT YOUR OPPONENT JUMPSCARE JUMPSCARE BACK FOOT FORWARD AND LEAP AT THEM!!
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