Saw Eternals Last Night - Really Cool Film, Greatly Enjoyed It, Anything With Ricard Madden Or Gemma

Cats and train miniature

I saw this, went 'cool photo' only to realise it was in fact a painting. This is actually insane

Lo so, siete a bocca aperta. L’opera è di Darian Rodriguez Mederos, classe 1992, artista cubano di cui sentiremo parlare ancora.

via Jacopo Veneziani 

Omar, so sick of this bullshit, making Andhera teleport just to tell Rue how in love Hob is with them:

Endless ACOFAF

Unmute !

it’s really august huh… like 8 whole months have passed……….. disgusting

Was I theoretically aware of how tall Aabria Iyengar is? Yes. Had I truly processed it until seeing this image? No.

The person who first discovered that coconut could be eaten must have experienced depths of hunger many will never know.

One of my personal nitpicks for historical fantasy is a lack of servants, staff, subordinates, and... idk... subjects? Like, their absence is not... a total dealbreaker for me, depending on the situations the characters are in and whether or not I can just assume that other people are there in the background... but so many of the protagonists in historical fantasy stuff are higher-ranking (very often royalty), and/or have busy jobs, and/or have enormous houses that would necessitate having at least part-time staff.

Like, girl, you should have a maid! WHERE is your chaperone?! WHO is driving this carriage?! Where are your footmen? Are you trying to imply that a WEALTHY DUCHESS is taking a CAB?! You know that you probably have tenants, right? Where is your steward?! Where is your lawyer? Your accountant?! (Like, yeah, you're not going to have your lawyer living in your house, but you HAVE one, right???)

Or, man, you're supposed to be a military commander and you don't even have a single secretary?! Where is your SQUIRE?! (In the spirit of historical fiction, I am jumping wildly across time periods with every sentence here.) Man, I know you aren't looking after your own boots. Where are your GUARDS?! Who set up this tent for you?! Who is looking after your horse?! Who is making and carrying the incredibly valuable maps people are recklessly stabbing daggers into?!

SOMEONE has to be scrubbing these floors and delivering the mail and cooking the meals, and they're probably all DIFFERENT people! My dentist has at least three different receptionists and we can't even get ONE for our court wizard here? A sorcerer's apprentice to take notes? Sherlock Holmes can get away with just having a housekeeper and taking taxis, sure, but your character is supposed to be a KING?! Why is he answering his own front door? He's going to get assassinated.

Like, yes, I understand that a lot of servants in certain places at certain times were supposed to make their labor invisible, but there have always been servants who still had to interact directly with the masters of the house?! Yeah, there are potentially really messy ethics here, class divisions are bullshit, but I don't think ignoring the reality that humans have ALWAYS been doing work for other humans (even if it's just having a collective cooking pot for the group and the cook not necessarily being subservient to anyone) is better than just including some servants and employees? Because a complete absence of them, especially where logically for the worldbuilding there MUST be servants, often makes me think that your main characters just don't care enough to notice the "lower class" people or know their names.

Also, even Frodo Baggins had a gardener and Samwise Gamgee might be the best damn character in the story?! Sam saved the world?! Servants are PEOPLE. Servants are often the funniest and most interesting characters, tbh, with the most to say about a society and its workings, and also the joke of some romantic scene being carefully orchestrated by a stage crew of servants frantically diving into bushes to stay out of sight never gets old to me. Team work makes the dream work!

I don't want to gatekeep historical fiction, especially not historical fantasy, because the worlds don't necessarily have to conform to our own and may have magic and characters are often in very unique circumstances, but... sometimes I pick up a story and it's like... "Author, please tell me that you know there is a difference between a butler and a valet?!"

Excellent - mine came out denser than expected but I'm worried my self raising flour isnt actually self raising. My partner is going to have to eat plenty of honey cake I guess

this evening's activity has been making a honey cake inspired by the latest chapter of @hypnotisedfireflies story, where Joel and Tess try wedding cake flavours. I read it this morning, finished my classes, and dragged my partner to the shops on the way home for ingredients.

cake notes: somehow needs more honey, despite having almost 400g of honey in the cake you see above. this may be because I didn't use the really nice honey, but that is like £10 a jar and I don't have the budget to recipe test with that. recipe testing is also potentially a generous statement here given I just winged it. and then had to go to the shops again because I forgot icing sugar the first time. oops.