The Mortal Temples

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
antiquariansam-blog
depizan

Woah. Timothy Zahn, are you me?

I often hear the argument that having major characters die is more realistic than having them always come through unscathed. Of course it is. But I personally don’t want my fiction to necessarily be “realistic” – I want my fiction to be entertaining. For me, that means watching engaging characters I care about get into and out of dangerous predicaments, working and thinking together in order to defeat the bad guys. While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or impossible situation they find themselves in. If I want realism and the deaths of people I care about, I can turn on the news.

–Timothy Zahn, interviewed by TheForce.Net, 2008

allthingshyper

Tim Zahn just summed up my entire issue with adult movies and fiction

I do not want to get invested in a character just to have them die or be violated or whatever, I don’t care that it’s dramatic. It’s not fun, it just leaves me angry and frustrated that I wasted my time on this media.

elodieunderglass

Oh that’s GOOD. 

forthegothicheroine
zachweinersmith

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Just a few reviews for our kids' book! More info here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/bea/

forthegothicheroine

I strongly recommend this book! Not only does the poetry really, really work, but Mr. Grindle is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a comic.

beartrice-inn-unnir

Seconding this recommendation! It’s gorgeous and great fun to read aloud with others.

hey wait! bea wolf so many amazing kennings
oldshrewsburyian
oldshrewsburyian
Exit Hector, Again and Again: How Different Translators Reveal the ‘Iliad’ Anew
Over the years, some 100 people have translated the entire “Iliad” into English. The latest of them, Emily Wilson, explains what different a
nytimes.com

Emily Wilson has written about her approach to the battlements scene in Iliad 6 and I am not emotionally ready for her translation (complimentary.)

EMILY WILSON HAS A TRANSLATION ON THE ILIAD COMING OUT IN SEPTEMBER?? HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS? the iliad translation emily wilson I also really want to know the explanation behind her move to Strange One over Dear One for δαιμόνιος also the perfumed dress choice so psyched
kareenvorbarra
its-your-mind

Say what you wanna about the legacy of vox machina across exandria, but fucking NOBODY is haunting the narrative like Percival “I made the world’s first gun (with help from a demon (and then the idea was taken and copied by an unethical scientist who sold the plans and spread the invention worldwide, leading to artillery-based warfare))” Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski “my family’s estate is the sole-exporter of an extremely rare substance with untold magic-enhancing power (and when control of our home was taken from us by force that powerful substance made it into the hands of dangerously unethical magic users determined to use it to increase their own considerable magical power (and also to experiment on young and impressionable mages to attempt to increase their power artificially))” de Rolo III

percy de rolo critical role vox machina
forthegothicheroine
mothers-and-fuckers-of-the-jury

the traveling trinkets wagon is in town :) pick your purchase.

a small glass jar full of dried rose petals

incense cones and a small stone bowl to burn them in

an oracle deck wrapped in a scarf, no box to be found

a silver candlestick holder with one black candle resting in it

a star shaped woven basket of rocks

a chunk of quartz a little larger than the size of a human heart

a piece of driftwood that looks like an eye

a red paisley curtain with a few odd stains

a smooth, polished ball of amethyst

a jar full of what looks to be fortune cookie slips of paper

there is no guarantee the trinkets are not cursed. choose at your own risk. reblog to keep the trinket shop traveling.

s-leary
thoodleoo

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been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before

thoodleoo

had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes

atii-uqaulahaluanngilutit

Thank you for this post, I will be showing it to every boomer who ever complains about how the kids these days are butchering the language.

foone

Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren't going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.

So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it's an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis... And it's the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.

I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.

He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).

But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.

BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can't not see once you realize it's there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein's monster we call English

So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.

Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because "copulation" is Latin and "fucking" is germanic. Same goes for "feces" and "shit", "vagina" and "cunt", and so on.

Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, "cow" vs "beef", "sheep" vs "mutton", "deer" vs "venison".

It's the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it's just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.

Why? Well, think about it. You've got a class system. You've got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it's cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it "beef", since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a "Cow" because he speaks something like German.

English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it's really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.

BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call "top" vs "bottom". We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.

The Romans didn't think "gay" was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use "cinaedus" as an insult, and the closest term we have is "cocksucker". Except they didn't really imply the homosexual nature of that insult... For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. "cocksucker" or "pussylicker", it's all the same. Similarly they had "irrumo, irrumare", which means "to make someone suck your cock", which is an expression of dominance. Again, it's not about the possible homosexuality: it's the topping.

And similarly, they had "pathicus", an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it's not about homosexuality, as that's fine: it's about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.

The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.

fickdichistwarum

The bit about English having two sets of words is a linguistic phenomenon called a stratum. English adopted a wide array of Norman and Latinate terms - many of the more technical and clinical terms were actually adopted directly from the Latin used by scholars, which is why you'll also see them in other languages like German - which settled themselves in as a formal stratum. It also has a couple of others with more restricted uses, eg. a Greek stratum mostly used for science and an Italian stratum mostly used for music.

This is not something unique to English or even European languages. Thai has an extensive Indic stratum stratum drawn from Pali and Sanskrit that dominates formal vocabulary in a similar way to English's Romance stratum. Bahasa melayu has both an Indic stratum and an Arabic one, covering domains such as government and religion respectively. Japanese has an extensive Classical Chinese stratum, preserved in the on-readings of kanji.