I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
i call all my friends after 20 years of no contact and invite them to visit me at my house, which is a farm in the middle of nowhere. they approach the farm gates and i appear looking like this
..go on…….
i lead you into the barn where i live and offer you snacks and refreshments. it’s a bowl of minnows and 3 caprisun pouches
accept the capri sun, cautiously refuse the minnows
i tell you that it’s fine, leaves more for me, but you can tell im a little hurt. we watch cutthroat kitchen in silence, i seem to be attempting to drink my caprisun through my gas mask, but im failing miserably. you say nothing.
i say nothing
at one point i go into a shed and bring out more caprisun pouches and a single triscuit for you
a gryffindor villain that looks down on others for not having their courage or their strength; believing in survival of the fittest and it’s the duty of the strong to cull the weak
a ravenclaw villain with so much knowledge of strategy and tactics and potions or poisons that they could carry on being a dark wizard for their entire life and even their loved ones would never know
a hufflepuff villain used to being overlooked, and that’s why they’re so successful; they find what they need before the ‘heroes’ can and their power base is so solid because they have an extremely loyal rapport
what i’m saying is giving all your villains the same background for the sake of ‘we need evil people’ is super boring
this is from three years ago but someone just liked it so i read it back again and
Thought about “Humans are space orcs/space fae”. There was a line talking about how theres a human working on a ship but no-ones entirely sure if they’re meant to be there, but they didn’t want to like offend the terrifying space orc.
What if the “drifter” archetype continues into space? Like maybe we negotiated for free travel with one of our allies, but because humans come from a death world and are terrfiying, and because humans can be oblivious, we just assume we can board on any ship going anywhere, nbd?
like not as stowaways. we’re not hiding. Like those wolves and wild dogs in russia that use the railways. Are YOU going to tell a wolf they shouldn’t be riding the train?!? Thought not.
Captain Diii did not become aware of the… problem until her ship was a full half-cycle out from the resupply station. She was halfway through a standard sweep of the ship, to be sure it was all in good order, when she came across a sort of cocoon constructed of light, sturdy fabric strung up in the end of service corridor alpha. It was not blocking access to anything of even minor importance, it simply was not meant to be there. It had no use she could discern, but it had no place aboard Captain Diii’s ship.
“What is the purpose of this?” Captain Diii asked the young technician assigned to the sector.
Their mood-spots cycled to anxiety-orange as their feet shuffled in discomfort. “The human called it her ‘hammock’ and said it would be out of the way there?”
A human. On Captain Diii’s ship. Her spots flashed from fear to anger to consternation and settled on worry. This had never before happened to her. She’d only been captain for two annuals, and she operated so far from any of the major travel hubs she had hoped she would not have to deal with this.
The problem had started after the war. The terrifying human ‘marines’ had been key to repelling the Kkoin invaders, with their wild recklessness and near-indestructibility. They had put an end to the war very quickly, and the terms of alliance in exchange for this service had been seen as extremely generous. They asked for transportation, mainly, since human FTL drives still lagged behind galactic standard. It had been assumed that by this they meant transporting goods and perhaps colonists by arrangement, but the wording had been ambiguous in translation.
That did happen, but in addition humans would simply… step onto ships going where they wanted to go. And stay. Who would dare contradict a human? Any one of them could turn deadly at a moment’s notice. Their hardiness and ferocity was legend. As of yet, no way of repelling them had been 100% effective. Their comfort range was massive, so keeping a ship hot or cold did not help. Scents designed to be maximally unpleasant to the human sensory array dissuaded some, but others would simply laugh and joke about them as they boarded anyway. It seemed they could acclimate to even the most noxious of scents within a few cycles.
Some humans would uproot their entire families and head for another planet, seemingly on a whim. Other humans would then go visit these families, and go back home, or not. Some humans traveled from planet to planet and station to station to satisfy their near-endless curiosity. Some traveled because to travel and see new things gave them pleasure, and then returned to their homes seemingly refreshed.
Such a strange species.
Captain Diii had been certain she had assigned someone to guard the ship and tell any hopeful humans that there was no space for them if they tried to board. Captain Diii did not have any facilities for humans aboard her ship. She hurried to the nearest communication pod and signaled for her second in command, Taa, to join her.
Taa already had anxiety flashing on her mood spots when she arrived.
“Taa, were you not assigned to inform humans that there was no space?” Captain Diii asked.
“I did, Captain!” Taa protested. “But she answered that she did not need much and walked right past me! What could I do?”
“And where is she now?” Diii asked.
“The kitchens. She… she said she wanted to be added to the duty roster, and that she enjoyed food preparation?”
That was another thing about the humans. They almost all wanted to work on the ships they boarded. Often they threw duty schedules into disarray by simply volunteering themselves to do tasks. At least this one seemed to know to ask the officer in charge of duties.
Diii found the human in the kitchens, as expected. She was very tall and thin for her type, of the morph ‘all bones’, if Diii was remembering the mandatory human-culture lessons that had been recently been added to ships-captain certification classes. She seemed to lack the jiggling bits that were so disconcerting on some humans. She did not reek of artificial fragrances as some humans did, instead scented pleasantly of human natural musk. Her head-covering stands, ‘hair’, was a friendly violet. Diii was certain this was not a natural coloration for the species. Her loose cloth coverings were earthy browns and creams, reminiscent of a child’s camouflage.
The human turned to look at Captain Diii, and showed her white-bone teeth in the body language ‘smile’, a gesture of friendliness and pleasure. Now that she was turned, Diii could see that half of the human’s head was shaved, and an array of electronics were installed directly in her skull. It was testament to their extraordinary healing powers that augmenting themselves with inorganic parts was commonplace in human culture. The humans had the technology to make their implants invisible, but some chose to make them visible because it looked ‘bad posterior’, which was somehow a good thing and aesthetically pleasing to them?
The human’s implants lit up, showing the exact blue of happiness, as she straightened up to give the human ‘salute’–a greeting to a superior. “Captain Diii? It’s good to meet you. I’m Elizabeth, but you can call me Zizi.”
Captain Diii could not help but be somewhat charmed. She must have the latest language-translation chip, Zizi’s speech was near perfect, and that she had something that functioned nearly like mood-spots was comforting. Her chosen name, as well, was easy to pronounce and nonthreateningly low-status.
“A greeting, Zizi,” Captain Diii answered carefully. “May I inquire your purpose aboard my ship?”
“Oh, I’m just a drifter,” Zizi said. “I just love traveling, you know? I heard the moons of Sigma7 were gorgeous, so I’m working my way that-a-ways.” Zizi’s pseudo-mood spot lights switched to anticipation before cycling back to happiness. “I’ll be off your ship at the next supply depot, if I can find someone heading more that direction.”
Ah, the ‘drifter’ type. Captain Diii had heard of them. ‘ship-hoppers’. An entire sub-class of humans who wandered the galaxy simply because they did not want to do anything else. They were famously the most difficult to dissuade from boarding a ship, and most likely to board from strange ports and going strange directions. Clearly it was not Taa’s fault she had been unable to keep Zizi out, and Diii signaled brief apology toward her.
“I won’t be any trouble,” Zizi continued. “I can set my hammock up anywhere to sleep, if it’s in your way?”
“The location you have chosen is… acceptable,” Captain Diii allowed. Zizi’s hair’s constant show of friendly had her own spots heading toward that color in automatic prosocial response. It was somewhat disconcerting. “I will leave you to your work,” Captain Diii said, retreating, and Zizi smiled and threw another quick salute before turning back to the food on the stove. Her implants showed concentration and curiosity, and then Captain Diii was outside the room with her again.
She turned toward Taa, who was still concerned. “I have heard that ships with a human listed on their crew roster have a 30% lower chance of being targeted by pirates?” Taa volunteered.
“Yes, yes,” Captain Diii mused. The risk was very low to begin with, especially for a ship like hers that did not haul valuable cargo, but anything that lowered it further could not be all bad. “It is not your fault in any case, Taa. Nothing could have prevented this human from boarding.”
Taa relaxed some, and Captain Diii returned to her inspection of the ship. Then she went to the helm and transmitted her updated crew roster to the main control base, encrypted only very lightly.
It certainly would not be bad to be known to have a human aboard.
Anybody in the mood for another Zizi story?
.
Crew satisfaction with meals increased by ~12% when the human drifter Zizi was working in the kitchens. She had the same base ingredients to work with that were aboard any ship, but her inventiveness with seasonings leant an artificial sense of variety to the meals.
Who would have thought to add sourleaf to a puddingfruit custard, or sweet red spice to a savory stew? And yet the combinations were delicious. When questioned, Zizi claimed to cook ‘by feel’ rather than following recipes. Most curious. Captain Diii’s favorite invention of Zizi’s was a thing she called ‘chai’, a rich spicy infusion in sweetened hot water. She said it was for relaxation, and Diii was not the only one who found themself sipping on a warm cup in the lounge at the end of shift.
Zizi was often in the lounge when she was off duty. She integrated with the crew very easily, making friendly overtures and playing games. She was already a master at Snap and Shuffle, the most popular games among the younger crew, and she also had a ‘pack of cards’, worn rectangles of stiff paper with drawings on them, and taught a few of the crew the human games ‘go fish’ and ‘texas hold ‘em’.
Zizi was even willing to help in duties that were not her own, if requested. When a hard-to-reach relay fuse burnt out, the engineers enlisted the reach of her long arms to replace it without having to take the wall apart. When Lucu, the youngest of the cleaning staff, injured their graspers and was barred from duty for five cycles, Zizi was one of the volunteers to perform their duties, and did so will skill and efficiency. When the algal vats in the air purification and reoxygenation plant needed turning, Zizi joined in, uncomplaining despite the heavy work.
All in all, having a human aboard was not as bad as Captain Diii had
feared. It was, in fact, entirely pleasant–though that had more to do
with this individual human than humans in general.
“You have many skills, human Zizi,” Captain Diii praised. Both she and Zizi were off their duty shift, and enjoying a cup of ‘chai’ together. Her mood spots were showing a mild violet to match the human’s hair, both of them happy to be sharing friendly companionship.
Zizi rubbed at the back of her neck, ducking a bit and her pseudo-mood-spots showing faint embarrassment. “Well, I’m a jack-of-all-trades, and you know what they say about those. Master of none.”
Ah, yes, Captain Diii had heart of the jack-of-all-trades subtype of human, able to achieve proficiency in a great number of skills. No wonder Zizi was so versatile and creative! This only confirmed to Diii that what she had discussed with Taa was the correct course of action, and her mood spots headed toward both excitement and worry.
“In another three cycles we will reach the supply depot,” Captain Diii began. “You have proven yourself a valuable member of the crew, and all would be sad to see you leave. We as a ship extend to you an offer: will you contract as a paid crew member for a full annual?”
The human Zizi blinked her eyes at Captain Diii several times, which body language she did not know how to interpret. “You’re offering to hire me?”
“Yes. I can offer standard wages and a private space in the crew quarters.” Captain Diii said. Taa had recently pair-bonded with two of the engineers, moving them into her rooms, so there was an available berth. It was not much, but it was all Captain Diii could offer.
“Wow, that would be perfect!” Zizi stated, before Diii could become too worried about her response. She bared her teeth in a wide smile, mood implants lighting up with joy. “I love this ship, and I was about out of money too, haha! Thank you so much Captain, I accept!”
Captain Diii’s mood spots flickered to joy as well, answering Zizi’s happiness with her own. She was absolutely certain she had made the correct decision. Zizi was certainly good for the ship and crew.
And maybe, if they were lucky, having such a high-quality human aboard would keep lower-quality humans from taking up residence.
