johnbierce - Tumblr blog

[johnbierce]

Bad idea: Age gap discourse but in a fantasy land where there's multiple races who have vastly different lifespans and life styles.

Is it wrong for a 27 year old human to date a 140 year old stone elf, considering most stone elves don't get out of diapers till their 30s?

Is it wrong for a 80 year old dwarf to date a two year old fire wisp, when fire wisps only live up to 5 years (between the eruptions) and have memories of their past lives, so in a way they're "born" at age 400,000+? That octogenarian dwarf is way younger than the fire wisp that's only physically younger than some of the socks the dwarf has!

Is it wrong for a chronomancer who was never born to date, well, anyone? They are zero years old and infinity years old and negative one hundred and seventeen years old all at once. They look like an old human, sure, with the long white beard and the wrinkly skin, but as far as anyone can tell, they've always looked like that. We've seen the cave paintings.

Is it wrong for a 30 year old lizardman (that's old in lizardman years) to date a human who is 60 years old in biological years (because of aging spells), 26 years old in lived-experience years, but only 13 years old in calendar years? (ie, they were born 13 years ago, but spent some of that time in sideways timelines, so they've lived more years than have passed in their home timeline?)

Is it wrong for a 12,000 year old dragon date a pile of 400 kobolds when kobolds only live like 10 years on average, but reach full maturity in one year? And if you disagree, can you do anything about it? You do know what happened to the last policeman who tried to arrest a dragon, right? Their city is still smoldering, 50 years later.

Is it wrong for anyone to date the time worm? It's the same age, every year. So the age gap can only intensify. If you start dating the time worm when you're both the same age, when do you break it off because you've become too much older than them?

And most confusing of all... What about the fairies? They could be anything between a thousand and a day old, they would lie about their age either way, and they can look like whatever they want. There's fairies we know for a fact have been around since the founding of The City of Towers, who met the silent mother herself, and also look like they're at most ten years old. Is it wrong to date them, or just really uncomfortable for everyone who sees it? And on the other side there's fairies who are "born" (hatched? They come from plants, I'm not sure what the verb even would be. Seeded? Sprouted, maybe) this week who are already appearing like middle-aged men and dancing with widows in what looks like a scheme to run off with her fortune but they never take the money, because what would a fairy want with worthless metal discs? Maybe fairies have a hive mind or genetic memory or reincarnation with full memories, they'd never tell you or give you a straight (or consistent) answer anyway.

Stone golems are really the only inter-race dating situation anyone can agree on. They're unthinking & unmoving solid rock during the day, so those hours don't count. Thus their "real age" is a nice even half of their true age. So if you meet a stone golem who was dug out 30 years ago, watch out: that's a 15 year old, and if you're a 25 year human, that's too young for you, even though their dig-date is five years before your birth-date.

[johnbierce]

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

[johnbierce]

"Here are your tortured poets. All from Mahmoud Darwish to Dr. Refat Alareer to Khaled Juma, these are tortured poets. Tortured by longing for a home they can never return to, tortured by the world they were born to for BEING BORN. Palestine, home to the tortured poets department." [@/folkoftheshelf on X. April 20th, 2024.]

[johnbierce]

This Friday's meme is: the perfect being

[johnbierce]

Nature is healing

[johnbierce]

The third book in my series has released today!

Hello everyone! I'm announcing my third novel, The Abjurer, by me (Tobias Begley). It's a Queer Progression Fantasy novel with strong influences in Magical Academia, Sword and Sorcery, and Epic Fantasy.

This is the novel's description:

Evan Tailor needs to kill an Archmage.

If he can survive a party first.

With the Silver Queen calling in her debt, Archmage Roark's oaths binding him into assistance and silence, and new classes pulling at Evan from all sides, this year is not turning out to be the peaceful and prosperous introduction to abjuration magic that Evan had hoped for.

"There are so many excellent things I could say about The Enchanter, about how fresh its conflict is, how much fun the magic and setting are, but, in the end, the most important thing I can say about it? I stayed up late reading it until my eyes hurt, and then kept reading it anyways." – John Bierce, author of Mage Errant

"Deeply creative and intricately imagined, The Enchanter is a masterclass in crafting fantasy with a gentle but vibrant heart.” – Phil Tucker, Author of Bastion

"I wish I'd come up with the system of unique arch-stars myself." – Sarah Lin, Author of the Weirkey Chronicles

Art by the lovely Luminita Pham: https://www.instagram.com/luminitapham.art/?hl=en

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTYQ5RT6

[johnbierce]

the reef guardian 🦈

[johnbierce]

[johnbierce]

Meet me in the mud.

[johnbierce]

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_

[johnbierce]

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

[johnbierce]

Oh lord I'm binging Marxist theory again

I say it's because my next series is socialist sword and sorcery, but that's just an excuse hah

[johnbierce]

as an autistic jew, passover is objectively the best holiday because it’s a dinner party with a script that everyone has to follow

[johnbierce]

[johnbierce]

*Monkey paw curls a finger*

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

[johnbierce]

Fun fact, if you look up the authors of a lot of those generational warfare books, like, say... a Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America? Guess what? It's written by Bruce Cannon Gibney, a freaking venture capitalist. The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole Millennials' Economic Future? Written by an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal, capitalism's second most prominent cheerleader, only behind (arguably) the Economist. This isn't to say that ALL of these books have authors like this, but it's pretty damn common. (Many of the rest just jumped on the bandwagon for sales.)

Generational warfare, like racism, sexism, transphobia, etc, is strongly driven by the capitalist/rentier classes as active class warfare! It's divide and conquer of the working class!

Yes, us Millennials and our Gen Z younger siblings have it fucking rough. But, uh... Honestly, so do our parents? The majority of Baby Boomers in America, for instance, do NOT have the financial resources to retire! It's not a particular generation being screwed over, it's the whole working class!

[johnbierce]

It's important to drink a lot of fluids when you're sick so that your body has the raw materials to generate gallons of snot.