trans-cuchulainn - Tumblr blog

[trans-cuchulainn]

the worst part about this one is that the plot is mildly compelling, such that i am reluctant to abandon it, but also the prose sucks and the pacing sucks and the characterisation sucks, so i'm resenting the experience of reading it, which is not a great relationship to have to a book 😔

another library book, another disappointment

[trans-cuchulainn]

there's a lot of bad writing advice on this website but the way people explain POV regularly drives me nuts

[trans-cuchulainn]

another library book, another disappointment

[trans-cuchulainn]

obviously the most important reason to get parchment correct in your novels, other than to spare me personally any further sufferings, is as an act of spite against JKR, because SHE used the term wrong (or at least thoughtlessly), and you're better than JKR, aren't you?

yes. you are. now go do parchment research and write me some sexy historically accurate scribes, thank you

[trans-cuchulainn]

don't know what I was dreaming abt last night but I woke up with thee phrase "The Sicilian iPad" clearly in my head. thee emphasis on these words was such that it implied this was an important and dramatic object like a coveted or influential art piece

[trans-cuchulainn]

reading about guinea pig habitats and it's telling me guinea pigs need regular social interaction or they get sad but they also need a place to retreat to when they're overwhelmed and they don't like loud noises and honestly i think i might be a guinea pig

[trans-cuchulainn]

oh it was diane duane again

[trans-cuchulainn]

look if i get pwp (parchment without plot) out of this i honestly won't be mad about it

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

[trans-cuchulainn]

i wanna learn to weave both for Research Purposes and also because i think i would find it calming but i do not know how/where to learn this smh

[trans-cuchulainn]

The one bizarre thing to me about textiles is that warp-weighted weaving is at least 6500 years old, but our oldest knitted artifacts are only ~1000 years old, and crochet 200 years old. Even though you need less equipment to knit (two sticks) or crochet (one hook) compared to warp-weighted weaving (frame, loom weights, batting, heddles). Why the big gaps between these inventions? And why did each one appear and spread when it did?

[trans-cuchulainn]

in this context it meant

a) everything written was in the same language that the characters spoke, with no mention of any of it being in latin or a more formal register, and

b) they wrote letters in casual spoken language with no formal structures or greetings or anything to acknowledge that this was a different form of communication and not, like, an email, despite those letters being written on parchment and sent between noble families via messenger

(because those letters were all assumed to be private, ephemeral, and to be read silently by the recipient only, like a modern letter or email, and not an expensive endeavour that would likely be read aloud in the presence of others and thus should probably involve some polite and formulaic greetings at the very least)

it's not that nobody wrote simplistic notes to each in the vernacular, of course, but they probably wouldn't be doing it on parchment, bc that's expensive. if it's not intended to be a formal lasting record -- and therefore requiring formal language -- it would make a lot more sense to write those kinds of notes on a wax tablet or similar; then the recipient can melt it and write a reply and send the tablet back and you haven't had to murder a sheep for it

even leaving the materials aside, written language has mostly been a fair degree more formal than spoken language which is why language change in written records typically lags behind what people were actually saying. i'd say it's fairly recent that people started writing exactly as they speak, so writing a letter in the exact same colloquial register as the rest of the dialogue was sufficiently aggravating to warrant a spot on the bingo chart

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

[trans-cuchulainn]

there's a deeply infuriating Tumblr glitch where it just shows you the first ten or so notifications in your activity page in a constant loop so you're scrolling and seeing the same tag comment every five seconds and i gotta say nothing invokes rage like an innocuous comment that you've had to read 15 times while trying to check if someone responded to something (and still haven't managed to get past it)

[trans-cuchulainn]

i keep having dreams about being trans. i had one a couple of nights ago that involved having to go to court about an unrelated issue but a major cause of stress was the fact that my paperwork all listed me as female but dream me had been on T long enough that this was likely to cause problems (inc people accusing me of pretending to be a woman so if I went to prison it would be a womens prison even though nobody was expecting me to go to prison). and i was having to repeatedly explain to people in the dream that i literally could not update my paperwork because there is no legal acknowledgement of nonbinary people in this country, it didn't matter whether I wanted to or not, it was simply not possible even if i did, etc. and they were like 'but surely you want a GRC if you're actually trans' and i was like. well. no. but also the point is i couldn't get one even if i did !!!

and then in last night's dream i was talking to another trans person about my unwanted facial hair, which was much more copious in the dream than in reality, and they were helping me to shave it, and somebody saw us and assumed i was a trans woman shaving to pass and was banging on about this deception, which was wild bc it meant they'd been calling me he/him as an attempt to misgender me but they'd got the wrong end of the stick. anyway something came up like 'why would you need period supplies' or something like that, idr what but it was something gendered, and dream me yelled 'because I'm a trans man you nitwit'. and then had to explain what that meant to a kid who had got the words muddled around. but the whole time dream me was internally going 'except I'm not, am I?'

and yes dream me did specifically call them a nitwit. i wasn't allowed to swear in this specific environment. there were children there

anyway i think i'm experiencing some Gender Anxiety

it's also really stupid anxiety because i spend a lot of time going "shit i must be wrong and i'm not a trans guy after all" and then three seconds later i go "well duh i never said i was a trans guy in the first place, that's literally what being nonbinary means". like my gender might be none gender left boy but somehow I kept forgetting the none gender part and focusing on the left boy and wondering why that didn't feel right. like no shit buddy that's not your fucking gender 🤦🏻

[trans-cuchulainn]

[trans-cuchulainn]

[trans-cuchulainn]

Demographic of people in the Witcher fandom iirc convinced there's such a thing as 'lute oil' which best as I can tell is incorrect

[trans-cuchulainn]

we still get immediately shoved out of our immersion in tv shows or films when The Girl find a dead body and immediately shrieks - we just don't find it realistic because we're pretty confident most people would gasp rather than shriek (i.e. sharp inhale rather than sharp exhale) and it also feels unnecessarily (and predictably) misogynistic too, as men encountering corpses almost never do the same on screen

also of course please do tell us if you've actually encountered a corpse unexpectedly, because tumblr is absolutely a place where some people have done this thing and we love a good anecdote

suddenly imagining "burst into song" as a potential response