bandit king of lunch and string

early teens, i'm not sure exactly. he's quite healthy and vigorous, he's got plenty of time left.

 

i image searched 'brown tabby maine coon' and was like "look hermes, you have so many twinsies!" and he bit my finger and swaggered off. hermes is the only hermes. accept no imitations.

 

seebs and i worked out a way stalemate doesn't have to have the 'surprise genderflip causes gayness, gods angry about it' thing going on, but i was a bit concerned over the whole... gay marriage at a 1600's tech level thing. all the cultures i'm stealing bits from, marriage was a union of families and fortunes, not an expression of love. a marriage with no chance of children would be considered Not A Marriage, and even if the two kings did all the right things, it'd still be viewed as pantomiming marriage in some kind of weird political theater production, not actually being married. i wasn't sure how to get past that.

like, i don't want to do the thing where The Past Is Always Bigoted, and i've got female characters in positions of power, including the military, and the 'race' people get bigoted about has nothing to do with skin color, for instance. the fact that gareth is so mixed-race he couldn't even name the nationalities of most of his ancestors isn't a problem because he's brown, it's a problem because Were They Noble Or Common This Is Important. and someone goes and digs up 'proof' that his mother is a long-lost princess of fantasy aksum or something, because being a filthy rich merchant queen isn't good enough. but no one cares that she's black. they only care if she's royal.

but having gay marriage be an accepted thing in a culture where marriage is a legal codification of inheritance didn't work for me.

once i got to really thinking about it, though, i realized that i could leverage the culture i already had in place in czinsistan, where the Succession By Trial Of Arms tradition already provided for power and property being transferred without a blood connection. i should look into the viking holmgang (sp?) thing. if we've got a cultural acceptance already in place for non-bloodline transfer based on duels, i could easily roll that up with appointed successors being reasonably common -- which i was planning to bring up re svetlana, when casimir makes her his apprentice. she wouldn't automatically inherit just based on being the old overlord's daughter, though it gives her the right to challenge. but casimir wants to set a precedent of stability, and once svetlana turns out to be smart and talented, an outgrows her teenage explosions, he trains her to be a better overlord than he was. that needs to be legally codified in some manner so she doesn't get mob-challenged right out of the gate.

that being the case, it would make sense for there to be a tradition of non-childbearing unions. possibly something like the real-world laws for civil unions, where the two parties don't have to be eligible to marry -- in fact, siblings or parent-and-child can get a civil union for business or medical reasons, though that's kind of obsolete now that business law and medical insurance has adapted. so there could be a precedent of two men or two women signing a document declaring that their fortunes are joined, their properties are unified, and their chosen successor will inherit the lot.

with that in place, no one can really stop a couple of absolute monarchs from calling their union a marriage, and treating it as one in all the showiest ways.

i am very happy with this conclusion. i like my brain. it does good work.

 

This is pretty much what I was looking for, thanks!

I have been picking up some things, so I think I'll be fine. Lol

 

my allergies are going so hard today. hermes is also having an allergy attack. we are runny eye buddies.

 

@seebs got me a heart shaped box of heart shaped chocolates that are filled with more chocolate. it's the most recursive gift!

 

this song is svetlana's theme now. particularly this bit:

Maybe I should stop praying for a miracle
and savor every morsel that I've been served
It's all up to me
If I want to sit at the head of the table

 

so i feel kinda shitty but i'm also really enjoying reading and listening to music. i'm old. quiet evenings are good. was thinking of going to bed early but maybe i'll stay up a bit and keep reading this confusingly british but otherwise very nice stucky fic.

edit: oh my god, is this british writer sneering at 'american food'? seriously? and claiming what americans call a biscuit is 'just a badly made scone' despite obviously never having eaten one, and sorry pal your information about sausage gravy is straight up wrong, not that i even like sausage gravy, and not that that's anywhere near the only thing you eat on biscuits, but wow, no, sausage gravy is not 'curdled hollondaise', fucksake.

and i was really liking this fic, right up until they made bucky british and had him being contemptuous of all things american. why would you do that?

 

!!!! that's adorable, thank you!

 

i have a weakness for stucky h/c where bucky's prosthetic makes his back hurt and steve gives amazing backrubs, but it also makes me unspeakably jealous.

seebs can't give me backrubs because reasons. i need a massage therapist. there doesn't appear to be one in town. driving up to the city for one would do more harm than the massage could fix, at least in winter. so here i am, stuck with back cramps that sometimes get so bad it feels like i'm lying on knotted socks, and no one can do anything about it.

so i read about bucky getting his muscle cramps fixed, and i feel mixed feelings, and that is my life.

 

100% snow! no artificial flavors or colors! just good old fashioned precipitation, like grandma used to make!

 

here you go:

now you owe me bribes of cute bugs and bears. :D

 

barb, patting her knees and making dog calling noises: come on, come on, whosa good boy then --
me: you can't assume, seebs might be a good girl today.
barb: whosa good girl? whosa good girl?
seebs: *rolls eyes and follows barb*

the empirical approach :D

 

he is, but don't worry, he dies in a fire. :D