Francesca, 27. Not active very often.
This blog is mainly A Song Of Ice And Fire and video games. I also write poetry if you rummage around my "poetry" tag.
People are hesitant to believe you when you say that the most drama-filled community is like…the knitting and fibre arts communities.
Like, I am not someone who even knows how to knit, but these people are crossing more than stitches, they are getting in lifetime beefs, claiming to have invented basic patterns that have existed for 100s of years, having about 100 Fyre festivals per tax season, some extremely serious cultural appropriation issues, racism, threats, legal actions and multiple faked deaths.
These people are wild, I swear. They may all act like they are just in permanent grandma mode, yet what are knitting needles rather than ready-made shivs?
Fandoms come and go, but fibre arts are forever, and some of these people are clearly carrying the grudges of their ancestors. You don’t know the fable of power corruption until you see someone with 3k followers letting all that imagined fame go to their head and accuse some random store of stealing their design, I swear. This community is full of dropped stitches, and everybody snitches.
It’s not always even directly interpersonal.
One time in the LiveJournal knitting community someone complained that a yarn was so expensive that it must’ve been spun from god’s pubic hair and the next day there was a smoking crater where the group had been.
first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line
second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all
third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below
fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?
fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves
sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it
seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him
eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night
ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him
tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk
eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important
twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go
thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme
fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader
fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that
sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why
[ID: The poem “Imaginary Conversation” by Linda Pastan in its entirety, as it appears on Poetry.org (link here). It reads:
“You tell me to live each day / as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen / where before coffee I complain / of the day ahead—that obstacle race / of minutes and hours, / grocery stores and doctors.
"But why the last? I ask. Why not / live each day as if it were the first— / all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing / her eyes awake that first morning, / the sun coming up / like an ingénue in the east?
"You grind the coffee / with the small roar of a mind / trying to clear itself. I set / the table, glance out the window / where dew has baptized every / living surface.”
literally who didn’t win tonight. conheads (stood up for himself) willa enjoyers (just said fuck it), kendallgirls (saw him cry), comfry haters (he dropped her in a heart beat), tomgregs (self explanatory), shivgirls (looked really hot), romangirls (stayed sturdy on his siblings’ side), tomgirls (obvious), people who think its funny when logan is homophobic, evil tomshiv enjoyers (anticipating the best 4d mind manipulation we’ve seen yet), we ALL got a slice of the pie
The influences that I chose to use were gothic influences of all periods. I chose those, plus a lot of high fashion. And another sort of idea that I brought into it was using fabric manipulation, which is kind of, at the moment, quite a high fashion, relevant technique, but it has actually been used throughout history, which relatively means just, sort of, pleating, draping, smocking, different ways of creating flat fabric into a textured fabric without the addition. So, it creates sort of an architectural shape and visually creates an interesting surface to the costume.
