PSA: never put stickers on your helmets (unless you have checked with the manufacturer) because the adhesive can weaken the structure!
One day my health teacher in middle school just like … didn’t show up for class. And so of course we were all “oh if he doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes we’re legally allowed to leave”, giggling about it and all the bullshit. He did eventually show up, ten minutes into the class time. He looked haggard as fuck, sweating all over, hair messed up, beaten to hell and back. We stared at him and were about to ask what in the world happened to him when he stopped in front of his desk and smacked his bicycle helmet down on it.
His helmet had this odd discolored patch on it. Like, white against white, but … weird? It’s then that I realized his helmet didn’t have a discolored patch, it had a patch missing. A big chunk of his helmet had just been shaved away, the curve of the helmet gone and sanded flat by whatever it had been scraped against. And running through that patch, from one side of the helmet to the other, was this big crack, like the whole helmet had split like an eggshell.
Our teacher took a couple deep panting breaths and then told our class: “And this,” he took another deep breath, “is why you always wear your helmet”.
And that’s the story of how an entire class of middle school students took helmet-wearing very seriously for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
I know I’ve seen this before, maybe even reblogged it before but this is on of my favorite things. Humans need their own language, sometimes regional ones as well. Maybe small towns of any local group don’t speak common very well, they didn’t have to. Making your world linguistically diverse adds value to different player races languages and spells that let you read and speak other languages it also adds to some great RP opportunities as players and NPCs struggle to understand each other. Imagine an eager fruit seller that only knows a handful of words in common. “I buy fruit to you! I am bowgin fruit!” Holding hand up with 3 fingers “coin! Coin!’
I have another idea that could be explored; humans are more likely to be merchants, adventurers, or to take up other traveling professions, so they get around a lot. Because of this, they have contact with lots of other races. Because these races need to understand the most common traders, and because members of those races would inevitably join them (permanently or temporarily), the human language becomes a trade language as well, or at least the basis for one, similar to Esperanto.
These worlds often have humans being the most common peoples and all other people being huddled in certain places with little variance in culture. In Forgotten Realms, humans are divided into various ethnicities like Mulan and Illuskan and possibly also have separate languages too but I’m not sure.
i always thought of a king sized bed as being a bit bigger than a queen, but now that i have one, i can tell you that a king sized bed is an absurdity. i can sprawl out, and my husband can sprawl out, and the cat can sprawl out, and none of us are touching. i reach out in the night, and find only pillows and plush walruses. i reach further and eventually find his elbow. he rolls over the comforters to try and find me. “i have crossed oceans of bed to be with you,” he says. there is a vast expanse of bed untouched, unmapped, unexplored. the cat is still trying to sleep on my face.
This is the opposite of a creepypasta
There are different types of king size bed. This sounds like an Alaskan.
ok so there’s a game me and my friends play called “don’t get me started” and basically someone gives another person a random topic and they have to go on an angry rant about it and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us at parties and car rides so I highly recommend playing sometimes with your friends
I love this idea. We used to do things like this in Improv.
Related game: “THINK ABOUT IT.” You’re given a random topic, and your job is to build it into an epic conspiracy theory, the crazier the better. You end your rant with a serious face and the command that your listeners “Think about it.”
Another related game: Illuninati. Similar to Think About It except you are given 2 completely different topics and you have to connect them to each other in a wild conspiracy rant
for years i’ve been thinking i fuckin imagined pink insulation. every fucking attic of every disgusting human abode i’ve visited has fucking yellow–YELLOW???–insulation
see, insulation and i, we go waaaay back.
i. i was a wee child. an innocent soul. and my new bedroom had a tiny attic. exciting! and the insulation was pink! and fluffy! and therefore obviously . harmly . because that is what all the social cues were t elling me fuck you..
and one day i discovered
i discovered. a. tunnel
that led from my tiny attic
to my sisters’ bedroom’s tiny attic
and that tunnel
i. i spelunked it
and yeah anyway it was midnight and i jumped out of my sisters’ attic and they screamed unholy murder and it’s been 15 years they still haven’t forgiven that anyway
anyway i got micro glass inside every fuckin patch of skin and spent 2 weeks crying in the shower waiting for the pain to fade thank you for reading my post
i can still feel the horrid little tingles
i remember writing this but honestly for a year now i assumed that was a hallucination
Moonlit Spires 