gailyinthedark - Tumblr blog

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[gailyinthedark]

Personality test, is 80f/26c too hot for you?

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Another personal hygiene genius....

[gailyinthedark]

ab. 1580-1610 Jerkin

suede (deer?), cotton, linen, silk

(Germanisches Nationalmuseum)

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do you ever find yourself thinking about merlin's lil' boots? well you are now

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GUINEVERE. DID. THIS.

Other descriptions:

For size comparison:

This is a pebble. For Arthur and Guinevere.

[gailyinthedark]

Any storyteller at all: Do you want to hear a story about a guy who was never meant to be king, but ended up having to take the throne? And it was hard.

Me: Oooooooh?

The storyteller: And not just hard in itself - there was sinister plotting beneath the surface, and interpersonal stuff was complicated too.

Me: Oooooooooh!

[gailyinthedark]

the first four sentences of this happened irl before I realized how much like a bit it sounded

[sidles up to you in a dark parking lot]

Hey. Do you want elbow patches. Yeah I noticed the elbows of your sweater are worn through, I can fix that for you. I got tapestry yarn, loads of it, all different colours. Price? Depends on what you're offering. Homemade cookies? Yeah, I can work with that. Bring 'em tomorrow, same time, same place. Love you too, man. Love you too.

[gailyinthedark]

A post of mine from several months ago about the Perlesvaus self-rearranging forest just wandered across my dash again and made me think about it some more, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

Perlesvaus, for those who don’t know, is a 13th-century French Arthurian romance. It’s intended to be a continuation of Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, but it’s mostly known for being completely batshit when it’s known at all. (There’s an old book on Arthurian texts that dedicates a chapter to Perlesvaus and repeatedly speculates that the anonymous author had Something Wrong With Him. This is the longest scholarly treatment of Perlesvaus I’ve been able to find & read.)

Anyway, there’s an odd worldbuilding detail in the text. See, it’s a Thing in chivalric romances that the questing knights happen upon castles & lords & damsels & such that are unfamiliar to them and have to be explained. You know, “this is the Castle of Such-and-Such, where the local custom is as follows. It’s ruled by Lady So-and-So, whose character I shall now describe to you.”

This is a genre convention that largely goes unquestioned, but it’s a bit odd if you think about it. All these knights are at least minor nobility. They don’t know the other nobles in their region? They don’t know what castles are where? Don’t they have, like, diplomatic relations with these people or at least attend the same tournaments? Even if they’re all fully committed to the knight-errant lifestyle and don’t really engage in courtly diplomacy, you’d think they would share information with each other and get the lay of the land. But instead, to use TTRPG terminology, it’s like they’re all on a hexcrawl that was randomly generated just for them to have these adventures.

The author of Perlesvaus decides to address this. In what’s kind of a throwaway paragraph late in the text, he explains that God moves things around so knights always have new quests to do (and, presumably, is also making sure they always arrive at the right narratively-significant moment). So the reason they’re always encountering people & places they have no knowledge of is because those people & places really weren’t there yesterday. They didn’t know about the Castle of Such-and-Such because it’s normally a thousand miles away and the forest path they followed to get there used to lead somewhere else.

And I think that would be a really interesting thing to stick into a novel or a TTRPG or something. When a knight rides into the forest with the intent of Going On A Quest, at some point they go around a bend in the path, cross an invisible barrier, and wind up in the Forest of Narrative. This is a vast forest with no set geography, filled with winding paths and populated almost entirely with questing knights, damsels in search of questing knights, friendly hermits, strange creatures, and allegorical set-pieces. Then, at the narratively-appropriate time, they cross back over the invisible barrier back into the regular world, and find themselves wherever the Narrative has decided they need to be. This could be a different country, a different continent, or a different world entirely.

Whether anyone involved is actually aware that this is how it works is… optional, really. Though if it’s not a Known Phenomenon, the people whose jobs it is to handle trade & diplomacy & god forbid, maps, are going to end up tearing their hair out in frustration.

[gailyinthedark]

@gailyinthedark (2004)

stage and film portrayals of joan of arc

condola rashad (saint joan, 2018) / renée jeanne falconetti (the passion of joan of arc, 1928) / jean seberg (saint joan, 1957) / ingrid bergman (joan of arc, 1948) / milla jovovich (the story of joan of arc, 1999) / diana sands (saint joan, 1967)

[gailyinthedark]

Gerard Mas makes sculptures of Renaissance women with a modern twist - Recently exhibited in Bruges. Medieval girls with attitude! 

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my special little giraffe

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Do you think you can outstyle this guy. Do you

[gailyinthedark]

Land cryptids: We think it was probably a wolf with mange.

Sea cryptids: So it turns out there really is a creature of the abyss with glowing skin and fifty-foot barbed tentacles that somehow evaded reliable documentation for several thousand years, but we're going to act like these two cases are equivalent because anecdotal descriptions of its appearance have historically been somewhat inaccurate.

[gailyinthedark]

[sidles up to you in a dark parking lot]

Hey. Do you want elbow patches. Yeah I noticed the elbows of your sweater are worn through, I can fix that for you. I got tapestry yarn, loads of it, all different colours. Price? Depends on what you're offering. Homemade cookies? Yeah, I can work with that. Bring 'em tomorrow, same time, same place. Love you too, man. Love you too.

[gailyinthedark]

sorry for finding it hot when people's hair goes grey. as if im wrong

[gailyinthedark]

everyone keeps warning lancelot about the sword bridge. for 80 pages everyone he meets tells him hey lancelot look out, you’re going to have to cross the sword bridge. and it’s like oh, what’s this gonna be? what’s he going to have to face when he gets to the sword bridge? what’s the challenge? and he gets there and it’s just a really long sword. serving as a bridge.