SURVEY QUESTION: what is your personal favorite cold sandwich to make at home. alternatively, what is the fanciest sandwich you make
on the topic of sandwiches i like a lot of things but i think if you want sandwich info you can’t get better than sandwichtribunal.com. a theoretically infinite list of exant sandwiches and detailed descriptions and explorations and new research of their history, development, preperation method, and flavor. really delightful passion project by mostly one guy who just really, really likes sandwiches, with a couple of guest pieces by fellow sandwich enthusiasts
a great place to start is this article on the history of the club sandwich, an article that took the author months of independent research through tons of old cookbooks and magazines and newspapers. he ends up making basically every example he can find, moving through time on a sandwich train. it’s a really fun read!!!!
I was wondering where this spike in views on the old Edible History of the Club Sandwich page came from. Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you like that post! I’m pretty proud of it
Why You’re Writing Medieval (and Medieval-Coded) Women Wrong: A RANT
(Or, For the Love of God, People, Stop Pretending Victorian Style Gender Roles Applied to All of History)
This is a problem I see alllll over the place - I’ll be reading a medieval-coded book and the women will be told they aren’t allowed to fight or learn or work, that they are only supposed to get married, keep house and have babies, &c &c.
If I point this out ppl will be like “yes but there was misogyny back then! women were treated terribly!” and OK. Stop right there.
By & large, what we as a culture think of as misogyny & patriarchy is the expression prevalent in Victorian times - not medieval. (And NO, this is not me blaming Victorians for their theme park version of “medieval history”. This is me blaming 21st century people for being ignorant & refusing to do their homework).
Yes, there was misogyny in medieval times, but 1) in many ways it was actually markedly less severe than Victorian misogyny, tyvm - and 2) it was of a quite different type. (Disclaimer: I am speaking specifically of Frankish, Western European medieval women rather than those in other parts of the world. This applies to a lesser extent in Byzantium and I am still learning about women in the medieval Islamic world.)
So, here are the 2 vital things to remember about women when writing medieval or medieval-coded societies
FIRST. Where in Victorian times the primary axes of prejudice were gender and race - so that a male labourer had more rights than a female of the higher classes, and a middle class white man would be treated with more respect than an African or Indian dignitary - In medieval times, the primary axis of prejudice was, overwhelmingly, class. Thus, Frankish crusader knights arguably felt more solidarity with their Muslim opponents of knightly status, than they did their own peasants. Faith and age were also medieval axes of prejudice - children and young people were exploited ruthlessly, sent into war or marriage at 15 (boys) or 12 (girls). Gender was less important.
What this meant was that a medieval woman could expect - indeed demand - to be treated more or less the same way the men of her class were. Where no ancient legal obstacle existed, such as Salic law, a king’s daughter could and did expect to rule, even after marriage.
Women of the knightly class could & did arm & fight - something that required a MASSIVE outlay of money, which was obviously at their discretion & disposal. See: Sichelgaita, Isabel de Conches, the unnamed women fighting in armour as knights during the Third Crusade, as recorded by Muslim chroniclers.
Tolkien’s Eowyn is a great example of this medieval attitude to class trumping race: complaining that she’s being told not to fight, she stresses her class: “I am of the house of Eorl & not a serving woman”. She claims her rights, not as a woman, but as a member of the warrior class and the ruling family. Similarly in Renaissance Venice a doge protested the practice which saw 80% of noble women locked into convents for life: if these had been men they would have been “born to command & govern the world”. Their class ought to have exempted them from discrimination on the basis of sex.
So, tip #1 for writing medieval women: remember that their class always outweighed their gender. They might be subordinate to the men within their own class, but not to those below.
SECOND. Whereas Victorians saw women’s highest calling as marriage & children - the “angel in the house” ennobling & improving their men on a spiritual but rarely practical level - Medievals by contrast prized virginity/celibacy above marriage, seeing it as a way for women to transcend their sex. Often as nuns, saints, mystics; sometimes as warriors, queens, & ladies; always as businesswomen & merchants, women could & did forge their own paths in life
When Elizabeth I claimed to have “the heart & stomach of a king” & adopted the persona of the virgin queen, this was the norm she appealed to. Women could do things; they just had to prove they were Not Like Other Girls. By Elizabeth’s time things were already changing: it was the Reformation that switched the ideal to marriage, & the Enlightenment that divorced femininity from reason, aggression & public life.
For more on this topic, read Katherine Hager’s article “Endowed With Manly Courage: Medieval Perceptions of Women in Combat” on women who transcended gender to occupy a liminal space as warrior/virgin/saint.
So, tip #2: remember that for medieval women, wife and mother wasn’t the ideal, virgin saint was the ideal. By proving yourself “not like other girls” you could gain significant autonomy & freedom.
Finally a bonus tip: if writing about medieval women, be sure to read writing on women’s issues from the time so as to understand the terms in which these women spoke about & defended their ambitions. Start with Christine de Pisan.
I learned all this doing the reading for WATCHERS OF OUTREMER, my series of historical fantasy novels set in the medieval crusader states, which were dominated by strong medieval women! Book 5, THE HOUSE OF MOURNING (forthcoming 2023) will focus, to a greater extent than any other novel I’ve ever yet read or written, on the experience of women during the crusades - as warriors, captives, and political leaders. I can’t wait to share it with you all!
Seconding Katherine Hagar’s article, Endowed with Manly Courage
Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
My mum is an avid tree lover and when I told her what you wrote she practically melted and told me to thank you for teaching her :)
baby trees: mother please feed us
matriarch trees:
This is a pretty accurate breakdown of how forests work and you can read Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree to learn more about it
I remember watching a Planet Earth episode on succession in the rainforest after a great tree falls. It was all about plants competing for space and sunlight. I doubt its contents were wrong, but the level of cooperation that goes on in forests I never learned about continually amazes me.
This is getting rambly, but I’m having a train of thought, so let’s follow it.
Evolution is a process involving millions of organisms spread across time and space and any organism’s ability to personally outcompete everything around it has far less weight than the ability of everything around it that shares its genes to survive on average.
In moral philosophy, the Original Position is a thought experiment created by John Rawls asking you to design a society without knowing what role in that society you will fill. Since you might end up at the bottom of the class structure, you would be incentivized to structure things such that those at the bottom still have it pretty good.
A tree’s DNA does not know what will happen to the tree over its life. It could be the tree on the right or the tree on the left. It’s evolutionarily advantageous for trees to naturally help other trees even though that costs them some of their own nutrients because the trees that are helped put down seeds and reproduce and they’re the same tree, archetypally, the tree on the left and the tree on the right started from practically identical seeds and either is equally capable of passing on the pattern of “tree which helps other trees.”
This is not rigorous. I am not an arbologist or an evolutuonary biologist. But it’s interesting, how politically charged the idea of the survival of the fittest is, and how what fitness actually looks like in nature doesn’t really fit that narrative.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean “fit” like this:
It means “fit” like THIS:
Or in other words, an organism’s survival is dependent on how “fit” it is for its environment.
In the right environment, anything can be an advantage. Being strong or smart can be a detriment—a big brain and big muscles take up a lot of energy to sustain.
Furthermore, competition between two species doesn’t always (or even usually) drive one of the species to extinction. Competition drives adaptation.
If there are two species of seed-eating birds that rely on the same resources to survive, it doesn’t mean one of them will go extinct. It often means that they will both evolve more specific preferences in seeds they like to eat, and when, and where, so they don’t have to compete anymore.
This is how you get species that occupy hyperspecific niches where they only eat the leaves of one single plant, or something.
Anyway, trees:
We are discovering more and more that the classic view of nature as made of individual organisms competing for their own interests is misleading.
70-90% of all land plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi that live on their roots. In many cases, the fungal hyphae literally penetrate inside the plant cells to exchange nutrients and resources with them.
The mycorrhizal network, as it is called, links every tree in a forest. Basically every tree is linked to multiple species of fungi, and many fungi link to many species of tree. The mycorrhizal network allows nutrients and chemical signals to move between trees. Using their connection to the network, some trees can survive in completely dry soil by linking to fungi that get water by breaking down ROCKS.
And this symbiosis is OLD. It’s so old, that the earliest fossils of land plants, from 400 million years ago, are attached to seemingly identical fungi to the ones that form symbiosis with plants now.
Suzanne Simard, one of the main researchers of mycorrhizal networks, coined the term “Mother Tree” to refer to the very old trees that support young trees via the mycorrhizal network. She picked this anthropomorphic language intentionally—to challenge our understanding of trees. They communicate. They sense and respond to their environment. They engage in behaviors. And yes, one of those behaviors appears to be parental care.
You think of yourself as an individual, but you could not survive without the teeming multitudes of microbes that live in and on you. Your cells contain mitochondria that have their own DNA, relics of a time when they were their own individual organisms.
Lichens, as you probably know, are a symbiosis between at least two organisms, a fungus, an alga, and sometimes microbes of other types (I forget which). They are their own distinct organism made of multiple very different organisms working together.
It is becoming more and more helpful to view forests as enormous super-organisms with collective interests and a high level of coordination.
The fact is that trees thrive around other trees. Most tree species seriously suffer alone. It is ideal for most trees to live as part of a forest.
The very nature of a forest is far more cooperative and interconnected than the old models can do justice to. A deciduous forest redistributes a HUGE amount of nutrients every year when leaves fall to the ground. Every tree feeds the other trees. Nothing is wasted. Arguably, trees regularly engage in matriphagy. Soft, crumbly decomposing wood is an ideal substrate for sprouting young trees. When I’m in the forest and need to sample some mycelium-rich dirt, I find a large dead tree and dig right around its base. When a tree dies, the mycelium flourish right around the base of the tree; decomposers break the old tree down into rich, fertile soil.
Landscaping and lawn care forums and websites cause me pain, because the average person is so eager to wildly overwater, overfertilize, and generally over-manage their backyard in the mistaken belief that “too much competition with other plants” is the problem with every plant.
Very barren, empty environments (like overmanaged lawns) are very extreme. The term “Extremophile” is subjective and relative to human preferences, but I can make a pretty good case that dandelions, crabgrass and other plants that flourish as lawn weeds are extremophiles.
The fluctuations in temperature and moisture, extreme soil compaction, and absence of a healthy mycelium network in the soil in a manicured lawn makes conditions incredibly harsh. Most plants cannot handle being blasted from leaf to root with sunlight all day with 0 shade from other plants, and growing in soil with no other plant roots. Most plants cannot thrive without the shelter, nutrients, and cooperation that a community of plants provides.
Forests create fertile, stable environments that allow for a huge diversity of plants to grow. Every participant in the ecosystem is critical to the survival of the others. Ecosystems are so, so, so much more interconnected than popular science usually portrays.
one thing about orpheus and eurydice is you guys are all like “i’m different i wouldnt turn to look at her” because you are all familiar with the story of orpheus and eurydice. but orpheus wasnt familiar with the story because he was in it lol.
“i wouldn’t look back bc logically if she’s not there it wouldnt help to look and if she is there looking back would cause me to lose her” cool so has love never made you stupid and insane
another thing thats interesting is i think most people assume its a walk of reasonably short length that you have to resist looking back. but we dont know how long that walk was. its out of the underworld, time could work very differently. could be days. could be months. could you walk for months without looking back to see if your love is okay? i dont think you could
exactly. like oh you’re not going to look back? have you never lost a love? there is so much looking back.
Remember, don’t just vote for your fave! Consider who is the SCRUNCHIEST, MOST MISERABLE, and has made the WORST CHOICES.
Harry will literally pass out if he smells the gum his ex wife used to chew. He is the most pathetic little meow meow please I need this harrysweep I need the harrysweep
most annoying breed of author is actually someone who doesn’t respect a genre and sets out to subvert it.
I don’t think you’re ‘subverting’ anything just by stripping a genre of its classic modes of storytelling, sorry. yeah, you could just admit you thought that that specific subset of storytelling had nothing useful to say. you should probably shut up while you’re at it too, yeah.
You have to engage with and show you understand the tropes and genre involved before you can attempt to do anything interesting with them. “What if this lady stabs people” is admittedly great but there is a reason cinderella doesn’t usually stab people in the more traditional versions, and the answer is more than just misogyny.
People often seem to get so caught up in the idea of subverting something that they forget that they need to make a satisfying story out of that subversion. Same with deconstructions and all other forms of storytelling that aims to play on the readers’ expectations. It’s easy to do things no one expects or that is entirely out of line with the genre, but if that’s all you do it’s not very impressive.
(Side note, all of the above is why I think a lot of modern serial fiction has major plot issues. A bigger focus is placed on surprise and subversion than telling a story that’s satisfying.)
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a story satisfying, but I am often reminded of something Howard Tayler, the creator of Schlock Mercenary said about how he tries to create twists or surprises. To paraphrase: once he gets between one and two thirds of the way through the story, he asks proofreaders to tell him two things. 1) What promises has the story made the reader so far? 2) How does it seem likely to fulfill those promises? Then he tries to figure out a way to tie up all the loose ends that isn’t one of the obvious ones.
I don’t know if that method works for everyone or for every story, but ever since hearing it I’ve been stuck on the idea that stories are full of promises. It’s part of the idea of Chekov’s Gun, honestly: the gun must fire in the third act not just because it would be extraneous to include if it wouldn’t, but because by highlighting the gun the reader will be unsatisfied if nothing ever comes of it. Not making use of the gun at all isn’t subverting anything, it’s just bad writing.
But every genre has its own sorts of promises. Romance readers aren’t there for stories without a Happily Ever After. Mystery readers don’t generally want the case to go entirely unsolved in the end. Thriller readers probably don’t want stories that are almost entirely fluff. Horror readers might be miffed about a story where the only scary thing happens in the first ten pages and the next two hundred are a fairly standard Romance calling itself a Horror and not a Romance. Almost no one wants “It was all a dream, no, really, none of this mattered in any way because it wasn’t real and no one remembers it or was changed by it” and even the people who do probably agree there’s more ways to mess that up than get it right.
And if you aren’t willing to put the work in to make sure you know what the implicit promises of your genre are and why they are what they are? You probably aren’t going to tell a satisfying story, and it’s also probably going to be far less original than you think it is. Because goodness me do the people who think they’re revolutionizing [Genre] all seem to have the same ideas about what that revolution should look like and no intention of trying something actually new.
So, Dwarf Fortress had deep financial system at one point.
Dwarves had currency and made wages and paid for food and housing and could invest their money.
A few dwarves early on would come into money then invest more than the rest which started a snow ball effect. A few dwarves made infinitely more money while the rest dropped into poverty.
Impoverished dwarves needed constant employment to afford food and housing. So you had to keep them working constantly or they’d be evicted and starve.
One favorite tactic players had was to build room full of levers that didn’t do anything and assigning all the unemployed dwarves to endlessly pull the levers. In this way they were “doing a job” and make wages enough to live.
The deep economic system of Dwarf Fortress has long been removed due to every society unavoidably becoming a depressing mess of starving dwarves doing meaningless busywork.
