i didn’t wanna reblog this just cos it doesn’t deserve to get seen but:
a) dwarves don’t share the gender binary that humans use, heterosexual versus homosexual is meaningless to them
b) gnomes have such a predilection towards illusions that gender is primarily based on presentation. because of consistent interaction with humans, they tend towards visually hetero relationships just for sake of public ease but gnomes all know gender is an ilusion
c) halflings are super community oriented. they would be incredibly accepting of homosexuality because frowning on someone for liking a particular gender is counter to community building
d) goblins don’t believe in sexuality they believe in food
e) orcs are 100% butch lesbians and bears. they are totally gay with a small side of being attracted to muscles and soft hairy bellies “but if they’re all gay how do they reproduce?” magic rituals motherfucker it’s a fantasy world
f) tieflings never have a predominant culture and tend to ascribe to human values, with a bit of “i’m already an outcast, so anything goes”. i don’t wanna say tieflings are super gay just because there is a lot of baggage that comes with the evil demon race being super gay but tieflings are super gay
g) dragonborn carry a lot of draconic values, one of the most notable being vanity. if a dragonbron is gay, they will literally be the embodiment of that “move, i’m gay” video. taboo my ass just try to stop that dragonborn, they’ll show you the meaning of flaming
bottom line here is really that if you thought the dnd races were straight you were so wrong. i am going to find you and rub my gay ass on your player’s handbook
I am so tempted to go ahead and take a nap in a few minutes, even if it’s only a couple of hours before I need to be back up to do stuff. Hesitant, but I did only get like 3 hours of sleep earlier.
One of the nicer cultural things about being married, honestly, which I really wish was available to everyone, is that you can teamwork the shit out of everything to compensate for mental illness and nobody thinks that’s weird.
Like, if you have your roommate/best friend/parent/sibling/etc make a phone call for you because phone calls are terrifying, or cook you dinner because you can’t get through all the steps of cooking pasta today, or handle your finances because you don’t trust yourself to spend money responsibly, or keep a calendar for you because you forget things, or whatever, people will act like you’re being incredibly childish and you need to grow up and do things on your own and not demand other people coddle you and so on… But if your spouse does those things, that’s fine and normal.
My favorite quote about marriage is, “Marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police.”
Guessing there must have been an update, even though I am very sure I set this app to no auto-updates.
Because I suddenly started getting a bunch of these annoyance notifications on things that weren’t even reblogged from me. I had just reblogged some version of the same post with commentary.
The first time you see how cashew nuts grow, you’re gonna think somebody’s posting a joke picture or a weird art installation.
ok but you say this….then don’t give us pictures
LOOK AT THESE RIDICULOUS THINGS
And it gets even weirder!
The shell of the nut itself:
contains a resin that’s so toxic just touching it causes burns to the skin, similar to poison ivy. Which is why cashews are never sold unshelled, because processing them requires safety measures like this:
How humanity ever figured out to eat this nut is beyond me.
In case you ever wondered why cashews are so expensive. Now you can wonder why they aren’t more expensive.
All I saw on the top pic was angry face on the middle cashew.
all i saw on the top pic was angry face on the middle cashew
Oh my. When I just ran across a Cheesequake placename, given the location I figured it was probably kind of like Chesapeake. Yes, it does look that way, with something like “area of land”+description in common.
That is still one of the funniest Manglicized placenames I have ever seen, as written. With a pretty good sample to choose from. Cheesequake.
(Including one favorite closer to my neck of the woods, Peaks of Otter. With no cute mammals involved, but otali/otari depending on dialect: roughly high places. So, basically Peaks of Peaks! And again with the official story through that link: “American Indians passed through the area while hunting and European settlers began to call the region home in the mid-1700s.” Classic code for “it’s really unceded land, so we’ll just pretend nobody even lived there until some British people showed up” 😬)
Then, out of placenames but back to Manglicized Algonquian words and food associations, there’s another personal favorite: “hoecake”. Nope, absolutely nothing to do with hoes, and only a coincidental resemblance to cakes when filtered through enough faulty pattern matching.
The word that got Manglicized to “nokechick” ( for “no-cake”/“hoecake”) to begin with apparently started out referring to the roasted corn flour used to make the quick travel food pancakes colonists encountered. Hopefully not on agricultural implements, unless they were really desperate and didn’t mind some dirt 😅 But, the English folk etymology is apparently more fun.
There isn’t really an analogue for “witchcraft” in the western sense in Hinduism. Many of the Sanskrit words that could be translated as “witchcraft” just refer to the practice of yoga (the spiritual/religious kind, not the fitness kind) or could be translated as “illusion,” “psychic powers” or simply “creation.” One of these “witchcraft” words evolved into a generic term for “magic,” so that could be close (in the sense that it’s used in the Hindi translations of Harry Potter novels), but that’s also in modern Hindi and so rather detached from Hinduism specifically (because Hindi is spoken by much more than just Hindus and not all Hindus speak Hindi). The closest thing to western “witchcraft” might actually certain types of “folk Hinduism” which could be viewed as a kind of sympathetic magic in a religious context, but I would be careful of claiming that those practices are somehow the Hindu equivalent of witchcraft, because then you’re dealing with marginalized groups inside marginalized groups, which is fraught.
Since the character is American-born, it could change things, depending on the nature of witchcraft in your universe. Check out this old answer here about the Patil twins in Harry Potter for an example of what I mean: Hinduism and Magic: offensive?
Just take that with the caveat that, just because I couldn’t recall any Hindu groups getting twisted up over it then, doesn’t mean that no one would. There seem to be Hindu groups that will get hot and bothered over anything these days, but I (and others) believe that they’re missing the point of what it means to be an inherently pluralistic religion.
I’ve noticed a lot of Indian women tend to keep their hair long, is there a cultural significance to it? They’re American born so I’m not sure how that changes things.
We open that portion of your question to Indian followers.
–Mod Nikhil
Hair length is associated with femininity and one’s position as a woman in traditional Hindu society. Some Hindu women are forced to shave their heads upon the deaths of their husbands to indicate their retreat from the social sphere. Selling one’s hair (a common practice today; many wigs worn by Jewish women to synagogues and hair sold as hair extensions come from India) is often seen as the act of desperation that a woman would only engage in to save her family from poverty. I keep my hair long both because I did traditional Indian dance as a child and out of respect for my rather traditional family.
Just as an addendum, I should emphasize that there are types of yoga that are distinctly bad and would be more analogous to what westerners think of when they think of “bad” witchcraft like curses. Protections against these are often still used today even though younger generations have probably forgotten them, given how common they are. Bindis are an example, as is the practice of adding a smudge of dirt onto the face of a baby to dissuade evil forces from claiming that child before they have had a chance to grow up. “Bad” yoga pop up in Hindu mythology and folklore repeatedly involving corrupt sadhus, rakshasas, asuras etc. Given that, as mentioned above, Hinduism is a pluralistic religion, many of these stories could easily be interpreted as a dominant form of Hinduism at the time attempting to bismirch the reputation of a local religion.
When you’re thinking of your characters, you also need to consider the dimensions of religion and caste. I notice you mention looking into Hinduism specifically, but please remember that Indian ≠ Hindu, I can only speak for Hindu traditions, but don’t forget that Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Jewish people, Zoroastrians and Buddhists are all also present in India and members of all of those religions have migrated to the US at one point or the other. Each of these religions have their own stances on witchcraft which have to be taken into consideration. Finally, within Hinduism, there are differences between castes as to the types of rites and yoga that would be acceptable, so please be mindful of that as well.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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