Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I wish i had a context for this. But I really dont.
I was all ready to “um, actually” this, but, um, actually there’s about 3-4 grams of iron in a person, which x400 is 1.2-1.6kg, which is a smallish but not unreasonable sword. So. Math checks out.
How would you extract the iron, though? The more practical solution would be to kill a mere hundred men, then mix 1 part blood with 3 parts standard molten iron, imo. Cheaper and faster, while still retaining the edge that only evil magic can give you.
Or, you could just make the sword of iron, and then use the blood to temper the blade.
1.2 to 1.6 kilograms is a perfectly reasonable large sword. Your average longsword was 1.1–1.8 kg and I don’t even remember if that’s including the weight of the hilt, guard, and pommel or just the blade. Your more classic “knight sword” was a mere 1.1 kilograms on average; the blood of 400 men is more than enough.
This is using the comparatively crappy metallurgy of medieval Europe and their meh iron swords. Move east to, say, contemporary Iran and make a scimitar using high carbon steel (~2%) for a .75 kilogram blade and you only need the blood of about 225 men.
So putting my thoughts in on this… because how could I not.
So you’ve exsanguinated your 400 guys to get the iron for your sword. Cool. But now you have 400 bodies lying around.
Why not put those to good use and cremate them. Use the carbon from those 400 bodies (you won’t need all of them) and now you can make a nice mid-high carbon steel sword.
Now you have a sword forged with the blood of your enemies AND strengthened with their bones.
“high fantasy math” – the tag I should have expected to write some day.
Pledging allegiance to a witch who saved you. Inspired by the
魔女集会で会いましょう hashtag on twitter.
Someone translate or explain the hashtag there please? 😬
First four characters: Witch(es) gathering.
Can’t read the rest of it since it’s in hiragana, and Chinese (which I do understand) and Japanese (which I don’t) only share the traditional/kanji script.
One day, that “secret family recipe” will just be that recipe their ancestor looked up online years ago and everybody liked.
I found out one of my family’s “secret recipes” is on the back of the pudding box. Uncle Rich bakes up some lies.
While researching his book The Nordic Cookbook, chef Magnus Nilsson found that every family in Sweden has a special, unique family recipe for pickled herring passed down secretly from generation to generation. He got about 200 of these. They were all exactly the same. He traced the origin point back to a popular cookbook published in the late 1960s. I think the moral of that story is everyone’s grandma is a liar.
Guys, I can top this.
It’s time for the tale of Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese.
My Great-Grandma Mary was famous in her family for her macaroni and cheese. By all accounts it was an amazing mac and cheese- a baked casserole-style concoction of perfectly cooked elbow noodles and creamy, lusciously cheesy sauce. Because Dad loved it so much, it was always, without fail, sitting bubbling and golden in the dish set out on the dinner table just as he and his family arrived for visits, a testament to grandmotherly love and culinary mastery.
Fast-forward a couple dozen years.
My mother had never made macaroni and cheese. At the time she married my dad, she was a very good cook. She’d been cooking since she was about six or seven and had outstripped both her parents’ abilities in most areas. So when Dad started raving about Great-Grandma Mary’s macaroni and cheese, she did what any loving newlywed would do: she attempted to make macaroni and cheese.
According to all reports, it was an unmitigated disaster.
The sauce broke. The noodles turned to mush. The entire concoction was, in a word, inedible. Dad took one bite and spit it out. Horrified that her husband would do such a thing. Mom took a bite- and spat it out. It was vile. Mortified, Mom threw out the remains and vowed to obtain Great-Grandma Mary’s secret recipe.
Not long afterwards, they went and visited Great-Grandma for the holidays. As usual, there was the macaroni and cheese, laid out in golden splendor upon the dinner table when they arrived. Mom was finally able to sample the famous macaroni and cheese and pronounced it quite as good as Dad’s stories made it out to be.
After dinner, she cornered Great-Grandma Mary and spilled the whole debacle about her failed attempts to recreate Dad’s favorite dish, and begged Great-Grandma Mary to share her secret.
Great-Grandma Mary smiled and brought her and my father into the kitchen. Rather than reaching for a cookbook of family culinary wisdom, or into the pantry for a secret ingredient, she went to the freezer, opened it, and, as Dad looked on in horror, drew out a family-sized box of Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese.
“I have a casserole dish just this size,” she said. “I just pop it in there, sprinkle a little extra cheese on top, and nobody knows the difference.”
You would have thought someone had just stolen Dad’s teddy bear.
To this day, nearly twenty-seven years later, we still refer to Stouffer’s as ‘Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese’.
FantasyBoudicca 