Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library.
After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies.
People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose.
Also consider: a library has a duplicate book, and wants to hire mercenaries to transport it to a library that doesn’t have a copy of that book. The most well known mercs in the world show up to volunteer for the job because they haven’t read that one yet.
Concept: a CRPG where instead of doing the dating-sim thing, the game just asks you during character creation if you have an established relationship with any of the recruitable NPCs, and the story adjusts itself to accommodate whatever you tell it, because your character is a person who lives in the world and has a history within it, not a cipher who sprang into existence fully-formed during the tutorial mission.
(And yes, it’ll accept any recruitable NPC as an answer to any relationship question, no matter how unlikely. Is the mysterious ninja assassin who doesn’t become playable until act 3 your childhood friend? Is the thousand-year-old alien decapod you encounter lurking amid the ruins of an unexplored world your grumpy ex? Are you boning the eight-ton warbot? Anything is possible!)
Concept: a fighting game where all the characters are just David Bowie’s various stage personas.
(Come on, who wouldn’t pay money to see Ziggy Stardust dragon punch the Thin White Duke?)
The story mode could be a biographical telling of David Bowie’s life as told through an action fighting game. You’d go through each one of his personas as the game progressed, fighting monsters and villains relevant to his life and music at the time. For instance, the Thin White Duke era would end by fighting the living embodiment of cocaine. The last part of the game would have Bowie in his meta years fighting all of his previous incarnations of himself (just like he did lyrically and sonically through his music on The Next Day and Blackstar).
Let’s also talk about characters. Considering all of the different famous costumes he wore, each Bowie persona could have different skin changes just like with Super Smash Bros. On top of that, imagine all the of the unlockable characters that you could have. They would be other musicians that worked alongside Bowie and even some that he influenced. You could have Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan (who would ride in on a T-Rex, I’ve decided), Freddie Mercury, Trent Reznor, and Brian Eno.
This isn’t a typical tumblr-let’s-make-this-thing-exist idea. This would actually have potential to be a very humorous and heartfelt tribute to Bowie’s life as well as a rockin’ fun game.
It still makes me sad that this is one of my least-reblogged “concept” prompts, because this is honestly one of the best followups I’ve ever received. Especially the bit about the final chapter of the story mode being Bowie fighting and killing all of his stage personas until only the old man remains – like, that has layers.
Suppose there was a species that was very peaceful, very good at diplomacy and just generally very nice— but they also happened to look really terrifying to humans. Sort of an opposite to that ‘humans are cute space orcs’ thing— species X is perfectly friendly, but just happens to look like they walked out of a human horror movie.
We don’t blame them for it, it’s not their fault (and we’re slightly too afraid to talk to them about it anyway) we just quietly avoid ships where they are stationed and stay away from areas where they live and, over time, it just becomes accepted that, for whatever reason, you don’t put humans and species X together. Captains turn down human applicants if they’ve got a member of species X on their crew and visa versa. They barely notice that they’re doing it, it’s just how things are done.
Then one day a human crewed ship breaks down in species X space so that one of their ships picks up the distress signal. Being such lovely people, they offer to help and the humans can’t think of a good enough excuse to refuse.
The repairs take about a week and, the whole time, the species X crew members are loving the human ship. It’s so spacious, you barely even see other crew members! (They don’t realise that all the humans are constantly ducking out the way whenever they see them coming.)
The humans, meanwhile, just spend the entire week in Hell. The species X crew members like to take shortcuts through the ventilation shafts, so you can constantly hear them skittering around above your head; the ship is full of this low key but very distinctive smell— rotting meat, the smell of death (apparently they give it off when they’re happy); half the crew have goosebumps, despite the temperature controls working perfectly.
The ones working in the engine room directly alongside the species X crew have it hardest though, they can’t run away— and it’s very hard to relax and do your job when, suddenly, you hear this noise above your head and a hairless, milk white creature with no eyes and a huge mouth filled with razor sharp teeth and long gangling limbs with fingers and toes that look human but like they’ve been stretched, leaps silently with catlike grace from the rafters, lands right next to you, flicks out a forked tongue, holds out a long taloned hand and asks “can I borrow your spanner?”
Ok yes I agree but you’re forgetting the type of human that loves creatures like that they’d probably fangasm upon netting species X and/or do their best to get one as a mate.
There’s an Arthur C. Clarke book that has a very similar premise, unfortunately to link it would be to spoil it X|
You know, in a horror movie, everyone always responds with a flight response when they see the monster. But that’s not the only thing that happens when people get scared. I want to see someone choose the fight response. I want to see a character turn around to see the killer right there, scream in terror, and start punching them in the face repeatedly.
The first time I ever got to participate in and enjoy a scary thing of any kind was a zombie LARP set up like a haunted house. I can’t do regular haunted houses or even scary movies because my fight or flight response is permanently set to DESTROY THREAT ON SIGHT. Restraining that impulse is incredibly taxing and leaves me with a overwhelming sense of helplessness, not fun at all. But in the LARP they gave us foam weapons and armor, put us in a spooky maze with gruesome zombies, and told us to go to town (within reason.) It was AMAZING, highly recommended.
yeah, i have always been ‘run toward the screaming’ guy as well.
also, as someone who has lived in suburban and rural areas a lot, i always roll my eyes when poor ol’ dumb farmer bob sees something out in the cornfield and promptly sets off to find it, possibly with a rusty old double-barrel under his arm.
look, if you think it might be a coyote stalking the chickens or a bear digging in the garbage, you don’t sneak up on it. you turn on all the outside lights (and yes, your random kansas farm does have floodlights that cover the whole area around the barn and outbuildings, and they’re bright as hell), wake up somebody else for backup or stay on the phone with animal control, and make a shit ton of noise the whole time you’re investigating. bang doors. whack empty oil drums with a 2×4. you’re not trying to catch a spy, you’re trying to spook a wild animal out of wrecking your stuff.
of course, your horror filmmaker can then have the grumpy farmer, satisfied there’s no coyotes in the barn, stomp back to the house, only to get chainsawed in the kitchen or whatever. but at least he wasn’t acting like ‘omg i heard a noise’ was an unusual or insurmountable difficulty on rural land, for crying out loud.
and i dunno how common this is, but – ok, you know the thing where someone thinks their friends are playing a prank, and they hunch around going “guys this isn’t funny” until they get jumped? i know i’m not the only one who reacts to such a situation, instead, by announcing “sing out or find your own way home, jackass,” and firmly marching to the car and locking myself in, turning on the engine and the lights. in my case it was a graveyard, which meant when i turned on the high beams i could very easily see mister spooky prankster hunching ‘behind’ a headstone like he was taking a dump. i laid on the horn. he fell over.
like, i’m a good sport, but this is a public outdoor space at night, hobos sleep here. no, i’m not going to play naked victim when i’ve got a two ton hunk of metal at my disposal.
i figure, once upon a time, when horror stories were new, people didn’t really spend a lot of time contemplating how they’d defend themselves or escape from a threat. but it’s all in the collective consciousness now. you could be stalking the blondest, bikiniest camper in the whole spooky woods, find her flooding her engine in the most helpless of stranded panics, and still not be sure she wouldn’t react to your gruesome visage by pulling a tire iron out from under the passenger seat and whacking your face off.
a sad day for monsters, my friends. horror is turning into adventure and there’s nothing the monsters can do about it.
Idea for a game show: it’s a cooking competition with no recipes, just a lil old granny judge telling the contestants how to make dishes that have been passed down in her family from generation to generation. All the contestants have to follow along as she talks, and her instructions are super vague. There are no actual measurements, just things like “Add the basil. How much, you ask? Just enough.” or “Put it in the oven until it’s done.” Every week it’s a different judge with recipes from all over the world until the finalists must face the Ultimate Grandma™
“-now a pinch of salt.”
“One fourth of a teaspoon or one eight of a teaspoon?”
A lesbian couple gets a shocking surprise one day when God (played by Laverne Cox) shows up at their door. Upset at how humans had turned her message of love and acceptance into a message of hate and discrimination, she decides it’s time to send Jesus back to earth and wants the lesbian couple to raise Jesus. Hilarity ensues.
No need for homophobic or transphobic jokes when you can have exchanges like “Ma’am your son turned the water fountain into wine again and got all the other students drunk” “Jesus Christ.” “….. I’m not sure if that’s suppose to be you responding to me or you requesting to speak to him.”
Also jokes about infinity-“Ask your mom”.
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
Mom #1: “Oh, I don’t know, sweetie. Ask your mom.”
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s?”
Mom #2: “I don’t know, have you asked your mom already?”
Kid praying: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
God: “Have you asked your moms already?”
OH MY GOD YALL ARE KILLING IT
Title: Jesus, Mary & Josephine
FUCKING YES
I kind of don’t care if I’m going to hell. This is hilarious, and I would watch it.
this totally made me think of this post
He found them gambling and there was no table to flip
And there are no jokes or anything at Christianity’s expense, and some of the (what we now call) LGBT stuff in the Bible can be included, like the centurion and his servant are their next door neighbors or something.
Plenty of jokes at the expense of Mainstream “Jesus loves everyone uwu but if you are in any way different from me you deserve to die” Christianity tho
In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.
in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.
in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.
just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.
as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.
one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.
so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.
Concept: one of those fantasy settings where elves and dragons and whatnot have ridiculously long and complicated names, except instead of “hello, my name is [thirty-seven syllables with way too many apostrophes]”, it’s “hello, my name is [four-minute guitar solo]”.
(Of course, that’s just when the dragon in question is speaking a human tongue. In native draconic, the whole sentence would be like that: a series of polyphonic growls that just happen to resemble overdriven guitar riffs. In this milieu, the genre of music we’d recognise as “heavy metal” is actually draconic poetry performed by human musicians, with the human vocalist providing a loose translation. According to dragons, human instrumentalists’ “pronunciation” is typically quite poor, with a few notable exceptions.
The native languages of elves, meanwhile, are similarly musical, perhaps in emulation of dragons themselves; though their tones lack the bone-rattling harmonics of draconic speech, they rely on changes of pitch too rapid for the human vocal apparatus to emulate. For a human, your best bet at producing elvish speech is usually an acoustic guitar, though when portability isn’t an issue, a piano may be more flexible. Efforts to replicate the elvish tongue via accordion have typically not been warmly received.)
Wait, what about harps tho?
Certain ill-informed stereotypes notwithstanding, harps are actually a traditionally dwarvish instrument, not an elvish one; attempting to communicate in elvish using a dwarvish instrument would be something of a faux pas.
(Dwarves are not, themselves, tonal communicators. Rather, the primary difficulty humans face in speaking dwarvish tongues lies in that much of their speech is below the range of human hearing. This is believed to be an environmental adaptation; speech in the range that humans are accustomed to quickly becomes muffled and confused by echoes in cramped stone tunnels, but subsonics carry clearly for great distances. Indeed, the popular image of dwarves being prone to muttering or grumbling to themselves stems from their habit of taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of their speech is inaudible to humans to converse in front of them without being “overheard”.)
what about flutes?
Also, I disagree. In order to have your sound travel well underground, it needs to be deep. Dwarves use bass.
Dwarves are big on harps because dwarves are into chamber music.
*ducks*
(As for the remarks in the notes about what instruments other fantasy species would “speak” with, well, as I’m picturing it, they wouldn’t. The whole notion of being able to speak via musical instruments depends on a very particular set of assumptions: i.e., that the language family in question is structured so that pitch and emphasis are the primary semantic units, while articulated phonemes are either inessential for conveying meaning, or else wholly absent. Having one or two species that this is true for is a neat idea; uncritically applying it to every species is taking a neat idea and beating it to death with a stick.
I think it’s more interesting if each species has a completely different language barrier; so, for example, while elves are pure tonal communicators, dwarves use articulated phonemes just like we do, but their voices are too deep for us to hear properly, as outlined above, and halflings… oh, maybe let’s run with the fact that extremely good manual dexterity is one of their traditional shticks and propose that their languages depend much more heavily on hand gestures than ours do – to the extent that if you can only hear a halfling, you’re getting less than half of what they’re saying!)
Further to the last bit: halfling spoken languages have lots of filler words that basically mean “refer to what my hands are doing” – much like when a modern English speaker says “like so” while gesturing to indicate the shape or size of a described object, but with a great deal more descriptive nuance. The upshot is that, to someone who doesn’t pay attention to the gestures or can’t follow them, halflings speech is indecipherably vague.
(And yes, this does mean that it’s nearly impossible to eavesdrop on two halflings having a private conversation, because the overhead component will typically boil down to “you know, the thing with the stuff”.)
just moving along like everyone else 