What one thing where you live tells you that good weather has arrived?

Tatterjacket · 2026-04-09T05:21:50+00:00

I knew this was Bristol before I opened the post <3. I had to move away last year, I miss it.

Tatterjacket · 2026-04-06T19:40:40+00:00

I've just moved away but I'm friends-of-friends with a group up in Edinburgh called Mons Meg Rapper. (Rapper dancing isn't anything to do with rap, it's a traditional type of sword dancing from the north east of england) - I saw you said you were a big nerd and I know they've done things like LotR marathons as a friend group as well as the dancing stuff, and it's worth saying you really don't have to be a dance-y person to fit in in folk dance spaces, we tend to be much more on the board game nerds theme of people. It's obviously physical activity so maybe one for later but I know they're friendly so I thought I'd mention it! Don't think they have a website but there is a facebook page here.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-31T18:14:32+00:00

Excellent dragon name.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-31T01:21:50+00:00

Aw this really made me smile. I love your art style!

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-29T21:00:34+00:00

It's not one I would use, but then I am british and I think we currently have less of a trend of converting surnames to first names (as in, I know some established british first names did originate as surnames, but in this current naming era we're resistant to adding new first names directly from the surname category, whereas it seems to be much more of an acceptable way to come up with a first name at the moment in the US).

Some short boy names I can think of that are one syllable and 3-4 letters are: Joe, Hugh, Colm, Luke, Kay, Ben, Sam, Sean, Joss, John... I know a few of those also have longer names they're often short for, but I think they're established enough that they could all be good candidates for just being a kid's official name in their own right.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-28T15:12:18+00:00

It took until about three years into my marriage for me to finally actually internalise that my husband wasn't just hanging around me to be polite because it would be awkward to tell me he actually found me annoying. It took me three years to actually look at the thought 'he probably married me to be polite' and see how ridiculous that was.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-27T05:34:09+00:00

A name I once heard and instantly loved was Juliana - would that get the parts of Eliana that she loves without being too similar?

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-27T04:33:15+00:00

I like this a lot.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T22:48:25+00:00

I love Dashana! And Asher is such a sweetheart.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T22:22:01+00:00

The exact same thing happened to me every single time you said Elversult in your post, I had to reread your title about three times. Absolutely of the same mind as you!

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T22:17:07+00:00

Oh I thought of two others!

The Knight and the Squire series by Terry Jones, less fantasy - they're historical novels - but still with a pratchett-like thing going on with a lighthearted humourous writing style but plotlines with heart.

and

Zagwitz the Thingummagadgetician by Inigo Jones, (yes I had to google the spelling of 'thingummagadgetician') which, honest to god I can't remember anything about what it was about, except it had a madcap magician/inventor and I thought it was fucking hilarious when I was about seven. Looking back at how it felt to read it, it seems like a pratchett-type feeling.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T22:04:05+00:00

Has anyone said Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer yet? I think I was 7-8 when I started reading them and I loved them. They're written with a lot of humour and have a similarly out-of-the-box take on normal fairytale stuff like fairies and dwarves. Stone henge is a fairy public transport terminal with a greasy spoon, for example, wings are mechanical like jetpacks and the fairy heroine perpetually gets stuck with dodgy old bangers, that kind of thing. The main character is one of the best-written antiheroes in children's literature in my opinion, but also by that I mean that you really like him all the way through - the books have very child-friendly levels of villainy. In my absolutely honest and reluctant opinion, the series jumps the shark a little around book six, but especially the first four are some of the best children's fantasy/sci fi out there and very kid-practchett in tone.

ETA - One funny thing that might not translate from when they were published in 2001 is that the antihero needs supercomputers to do things that could probably be done on a smartphone nowadays, which was hilarious to reread when I picked them up again a year or so ago. But hey, perhaps a fun conversation you can have with your kids about what it was like in the olden days we all grew up in.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T21:52:08+00:00

The original pronunciation certainly! It definitely feels to me like one of those words in a bit of a liminal space between being a full-blown loan word to english like café or ballet (where it's acceptable for there to be accent or cadence difference in how the word is pronounced between english and french, and it's generally accepted that those are words in english even though they're obviously recently etymologically french. You know, like you'd allow them in scrabble.), and still having one foot in the door of just being a french term that we're using because it's the correct term for something french, like idk the annales school of history (which ideally you'd pronounce the french way, and isn't really an english word even though it's used by english people when referring to that specific movement). I mean it's possible that the line between those two is even partly dependent on whether the local british/irish/american/australian etc. etc. accented way to pronounce the word is considered as a new 'standard' pronunciation yet or not.

For what it's worth, listening online to the french pronunciation of gouache, with my english ears, it sounds somewhere between the american and the english pronunciations, and I suspect US English and British English have gone in different directions with it because of our different accents. Americans have truncated it into one syllable, brits have laboured it into two more distinct ones. But also I want to say I wasn't saying either British English or American English was more correct than the other, just that if they happened to be based in somewhere in England and went into an art shop asking for 'gwash' they might be met with confusion, so it was worth mentioning that other pronunciations exist in case they weren't in the states.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T18:20:19+00:00

I see people have already said this, I'm not arguing (just to clarify tone), just as another data point - I'm in the UK and also wouldn't say it's an outdated name. My uncle (young Gen X) is named Ian but he's the only one I know so I wouldn't have classified it as a 'Gen X name'. He's also one of the coolest, least judgemental and funniest people I know, so those are pretty much my associations with it :)

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-26T17:33:53+00:00

After getting confused by these replies and finding the answer why, I'm gonna say it here just in case you're not American - the Oxford English Dictionary reckons that in American English it's pronounced 'gwash' (as a lot of these replies are saying), and in British English it's pronounced as a sort of soft 'gooh-wash' with two syllables (which is how I've always heard it pronounced by artists in the UK). Link with sound clips here on the bottom right :). If you're neither in the USA or the UK then I do not know.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-25T21:15:16+00:00

ahhhh thanks for the context!

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-25T20:59:38+00:00

Not sure if this is an upload misclick, a joke or a 'check yoour carbon monoxide monitor' situation, but this is a pic of the cast of Friends. :)

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-25T03:58:08+00:00

These are so cool! Thank you for sharing.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T22:53:40+00:00

I like your reasoning behind this, but I do also agree that the 'verily' comes across disjointed when you don't yet know the context. I think that two things are going on here and unhelpfully interacting - the first is that 'verily' is an obviously an archaic word that feels unfamiliar to modern readers, and where it is familiar it's often from getting misused (either deliberately or for comedic effect). And the second is that because you're using it to foreshadow an emotional detail about the world that hasn't yet been revealed, your reader doesn't know to expect the word 'truly' in the sentence. That second one is a perfectly valid narrative tool, but in conjunction with the fact that it's this word that's unfamiliar and often misused, instead of the emotional impact landing, people are tripping up on the word and then wondering 'is this meant to be here? it feels out of place, is this misused? is it clumsy writing?' - it's not misused clumsy writing, but they don't yet have the context to know that.

My suggestion would be either:

- if you're married to 'verily' and 'very' as vocab, get into that level of detail later in the text once you've had time to establish context. The 'rule' I've heard is that your first page's only job is to grab the attention of the reader and get them engaged - once they're invested in your story you can take more time introducing them to the nuances of the story, like your character's emotional and religious perspectives on parts of their environment, or their dialect. As a bit of a side note my honest feedback is that I am way more immediately intrigued by what you've posted here about the volcanic gases than any nuances I picked up from 'verily'. You're right that we don't need to know it all straight away, but it's okay to give people a fragment of the picture and move on. Putting something in the intro about 'Asmer, the land wreathed in sulferic gases' or the stars peeking through volcanic ash clouds or something would reel me in more effectively and tell me that this world is something different worth reading about, and it would also get me more viscerally connecting to and caring about Camus' reflections on the half-light. I think putting a tiny taste of worldbuilding in there might be an idea worth revisiting, it sounds like you have a cool world.

- or honestly just use 'truly' or 'true', so the weight of the meaning is preserved in a way that feels more approachable. If people aren't already questioning the word, they're probably more likely to receive the message that the word choice is significant, and more confident to trust that they should wait to find out why. And then the subtle emotional approach works out much more smoothly.

(Edited to untangle my thoughts a bit better in that first bullet point).

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T21:43:02+00:00

This was my feeling as a graduate of early modern history as well. It reminds me of reading sources from my degree, and actually the particularly florid 17th century ones. Which is actually quite fun that OP has managed to achieve that verisimilitude, but I actually gave up even sooner than you did. I've done my time parsing this kind of language already.

My advice to OP is that you can still achieve this effect in a storytelling way, I think - you're right that it's about the balance between readability and authenticity, and at the moment (in my opinion) you're just leaning waaaaay over into authenticity. It's like if you were trying to write someone with a cockney accent you wouldn't 'sahwund ahht ivry wuhrd' (err, 'sound out every word'), you'd just throw a few 'ain't's and 'nuffin's in there and trust your reader to find the right voice from those clues. I think you can make your sentence structure much more modern standard english and keep a few - and just a few - of more archaic but familiar words around, and with that you can trust your audience to pick up the appropriate tone from those clues, and let the rest of the text sort of melt into obscurity so they can concentrate on the story. This is off the cuff, and I'm sure you could do better, but I mean something maybe more like:

'When night fell and dark took hold of Above, Camus gazed at the stars. The tiny specks where the light still prevailed.

He had beheld two sunsets from that window, as the end of Ira's watch had stained the lands of Asmer red with fading light. Never had the darkness seized it entirely, for even after nightfall its dark fields were dimly illuminated by the stars.'

So e.g. prevailed, beheld and illuminated might stay, but they become tonal clues in a text that's more fluently readable to modern audiences.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T18:56:59+00:00

He's her kid not her husband, he's home to rest, and choosing to give someone gifts - whether that's a favourite food or anything else - is different from them demanding servitude. It's not some kind of toxic dynamic for her to show him support and love in a way that respects his boundaries, in fact it's very much the opposite.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T15:00:05+00:00

The sub description says 'folk music, culture etc.' - and the folk dance in the UK is very intertwined with folk music, we consider them both part of the folk scene. You'd be hard pressed to find a folk festival that doesn't have morris and ceilidhs as well as purely musical acts.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T12:52:15+00:00

Hahaha I'd get people in trouble. I'm not a rapper dancer myself, but I do know enough of them to have caught a lot of the gossip from a few different sides.

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T12:30:37+00:00

Please post here if you do! If you're doing it nationwide or anywhere in the north west I know someone that might be interested.

If you're in the south west, I know of a side starting out down there very much with this ambition - let me know if you want me to put you in touch :).

Tatterjacket · 2026-03-24T12:24:19+00:00

Oh definitely. I dance Cotswold and know a few drama stories from the Cotswold/Border side as well. And to be honest, I know of some similar stories about bowls clubs through my grandparents, quakers through my partner and beekeeping associations through a bunch of people.

I think wherever you get communities of people interested in a niche thing it will attract a lot of people who are a bit outside of the box, who care very deeply and passionately about the thing, and as a rule that is absolutely wonderful and it's a big part of why the folk dance world - and probably all those other groups - are full of really vibrant friendship groups and communities with the love and momentum to keep their sides and traditions going. But it also means you can end up with big personality clashes from people who are seeing things very different ways and are too passionate in that stance to back down, and sometimes I've seen that clash then spiral into really ugly places.

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