A Door on Other Time

[A Door on Other Time]

[duskforged]

Worldbuilding Questions

Since it's Worldbuilding Wednesday, I've decided to write up a bunch of questions that might work for participants might work in WBW. Admittedly, much of these are oriented towards fantasy and non-Earth societies and cultures, but! Still useful.

I was heavily inspired by this list by the SFWA.

1. What is considered a normal family unit in your culture(s)?
2. What sort of magical creatures exist in your world? (Dragons, fair folk, spirits, etc)
3. What does a right of passage look like in your culture(s)?
4. How does someone propose marriage in your culture(s)? How long do they stay engaged, and what marks the marriage?
5. What weather-based customs exist in your culture(s)?
6. What customs surround death and burial? Are the people of your culture(s) even buried?
7. What distinguishes a formal dinner from a casual one?
8. What foods are considered taboo in your culture(s)?
9. If your culture is largely unable to get safe, clean water, what is considered a good substitute?
10. Are any gestures considered rude or vulgar? Why?
11. What is a way to show respect? To whom is it owed (parents, teachers, rank superiors, etc)?
12. When a visitor comes by, how are they greeted and treated? Is there special ceremony?
13. What is something your culture never talks about when talking to an acquaintance (e.x. religion)? What is something they always do (e.x. asking after the health of someone's family)?
14. What is considered courteous to gift to a visitor, if any?
15. How are people with magical talent treated?
16. How intertwined is magic and science, and how does this effect the views of it?
17. What is the calendar like? What celebrations are there?
18. What is the best way to get around? What's the cheapest?
19. Do many people own pets, like cats and dogs? What about magical pets?
20. How is war declared by a certain culture?
21. Does your culture have a concept of sin? If so, what do they consider a sin versus virtue?
22. What's a major historical event that changed the course of the culture forever?
23. If your world has magic, how did it get there? Was it always there? Or did it come about through other means (science gone wrong, melding of a separate plane of existence, etc)?
24. What is one major flaw or loophole in the law? Have people taken advantage of it?
25. How would a state of emergency be declared? Who can do it? Under what circumstances can it be declared?

[A Door on Other Time]

[beardedmrbean]

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Jim Butcher still at large.

[A Door on Other Time]

[fuggivaboutit]

do people making tv shows and movies know they can make jokes that aren't in any way related to sex and that not every scene has to be leading up to another sex scene or scene where someone is naked

[tlaquetzqui]

I like dirty jokes, though not in everything and not as the sole form of humor, but dirty jokes have to actually be jokes. “Hey, a sexual concept exists!” is not in fact a joke. A dirty (or mean or grossout) joke has to also be clever, or ironic, or something.

The way humor is theorized to work is you interrupt an aversion response, and the laugh is the thing that restores your equilibrium. Something being sexual, or mean, or gross—or weird or stupid—triggers the aversion. But it needs another element to interrupt it and trigger the laugh.

[A Door on Other Time]

[manathistle]

white people will see a menu and order from it

[the-doom-report-late-edition]

So true 💯💯

[tedoculus]

Once at my last job my coworkers decided to do a group delivery for lunch. And I was in a foul mood and I'd never eaten from this particular chinese restaurant so I just clicked sesame chicken, whatever. And then I found out that my other three white coworkers were ALL ALSO GETTING SESAME CHICKEN and it made me so angry and I demanded to change my order before they clicked send and they were mad at me and I was like we are not ordering 4 containers of sugar chicken! It's disgraceful!

[syphabelnyades]

have you ever considered that maybe sesame chicken is just good and sometimes people just all have the same taste in food?

[tedoculus]

The United States has a meat consumption problem. If you look at the most popular and "palatable" Americanized dish from any ethnic food tradition you're going to find the one that is primarily about seasoned meat. No "weird" vegetables allowed! And any vegetables that are present must be easy to treat like a garnish, something just there to provide some color. It isn't just embarrassing from a culinary point of view, it's also an extremely privileged attitude from an economic and environmental point of view.

I was embarrassed of my lazy choice, and when we were all collectively making the same lazy choice it didn't make me feel better about my choice it made me feel worse. It is absolutely a me problem; I am part of the problem and I am ashamed.

[manathistle]

good God it's sesame chicken from Lucky Bamboo China House who gives a shit

[tlaquetzqui]

The only reason anyone else does not eat as much meat as the US is it’s more expensive in many places. But I cannot count the number of manga where someone tells another character “you need to eat vegetables too” or “stop hogging the meat from the buffet tray/potluck”. One of the two main French words for “food” as such, viande, literally meant meat till a couple centuries ago.

Human brains got as big as they are because of meat. There are only two calorie-sources that efficient that we can easily obtain, and you need to get smart from eating meat before the other—grain—becomes viable, because only agriculture can produce grain on much of a scale. There is one primate more carnivorous than us (tarsiers), and they are obligate carnivores, like hyenas.

[A Door on Other Time]

[punishedpoisonwater]

if i google gluten free recipes. i want gluten free recipes. not vegetarian nonsense

[fuggivaboutit]

i was outta eggs one day and wanted a chocolate cake so i looked up eggless chocolate cakes and they were all like weird health conscious blogs and crap and not just like a sane person who was once in the same situation as me :/

looking online for recipes can be like wading through sewage to find a nugget of gold

[tlaquetzqui]

I’ve had more success just looking for ‘substitutes/substitutions for X in recipes’. Then it’s going to be about swapping out the one ingredient and not screwing everything up, not some weird alternative lifestyle.

[A Door on Other Time]

“Calling people pedophiles is the right’s version of calling them Nazis!”

To some extent, sure.

But point me to the out and proud Nazi scifi writer, who also wrote multiple graphic revenge-torture novels about killing Jews, who was made an SFWA Grandmaster to near universal acclaim, just ten years ago. The way card-carrying NAMBLA member Samuel Delany, author of multiple scat-snuff pedo porn novels, was.

Point me to the movie where real Jewish actors were really subjected to weeks in a concentration camp, and the entire media defended it as satire, social commentary, or empowering—the way they did with Cuties, a film where dozens of real eleven-year-old girls twerk in multiple extended sequences (and dozens more had to do it for the casting process).

Please point me to a recent action movie, based on a real incident, about killing Nazis, that was widely panned as Bolshevik propaganda…by critics several of whom then turn out to be members of neo-Nazi groups. The way that Sound of Freedom has been denounced as QAnon conspiracy pandering, and several critics saying so have turned out to be members of “MAP acceptance” groups.

Not all paranoia is created equal.

[A Door on Other Time]

[foone]

Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

[A Door on Other Time]

[divinestrike]

gonna say something controversial and it’s that carrot cake is fucking delicious and possibly the best cake flavour 

[tlaquetzqui]

But fake cream cheese frosting is a desecration of the holy.

[A Door on Other Time]

[gsirvitor]

[tlaquetzqui]

Correlation, causation, etc—lot of other economic shifts happened since the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, lmao.

[A Door on Other Time]

[pers-books]

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

– Annie Proulx

[tlaquetzqui]

“The decline of American prose since the 1950s is nowhere more apparent than in the decline of the long sentence. Today anything longer than two or three lines is likely to be a simple list of attributes or images. [Annie] Proulx relies heavily on such sentences, which often call to mind a bad photographer hurrying through a slide show. In this scene from Accordion Crimes (1996) a woman has just had her arms sliced off by a piece of sheet metal.

She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking.

The last thing Proulx wants is for you to start wondering whether someone with blood spurting from severed arms is going to stand rooted long enough to see more than one bird disappear, catch an insect, and reappear, or whether the whole scene is not in bad taste of the juvenile variety. Instead you are meant to read the sentence in one mental breath and succumb, under the sheer accumulation of words, to a spurious impression of what Walter Kendrick, in an otherwise mixed review in The New York Times, called ‘brilliant prose’ (and in reference to this very excerpt, besides).”—B. R. Myers, “A Reader’s Manifesto”

[A Door on Other Time]

[pornoslavia]

[requiemforadeathmask]

We can easily learn about Hamilton's life, career, and death thanks to the modern internet. Wanna talk a founder a founder America actually forgot? That would be John JayJr. He went to send some mail one day in 1829 and was never seen again

One of our founders is a literal missing person and nobody talks about it.

[tlaquetzqui]

Yeah seems like that should get at least the occasional “Weird, huh?” mention.