(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) When it comes to beautifying our bodies, we haven’t stopped at the visual. For millennia, people have sought to improve the way they smell, too — for a whole host … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Downtime note: Because of BVC’s recent site difficulties, the last two New Worlds essays, on how to fight a duel and (changing tacks completely) tattoos were hosted on my own … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Welcome back! If you missed last week’s New Worlds post due to the BVC outage, you can find it here on my own site, discussing “codes of honor” — chivalry, … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Honor a powerful concept, both in the real world and fiction. We love knights who cling to their ideals, and villains who spit upon the concept gain an extra patina … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) The last time we had a bonus essay, I railed against monolithic worldbuilding: settings where there is only one religion that everyone practices in exactly the same way, or only … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) To wrap up this discussion of time, let’s leap back from the micro level of seconds and minutes and hours to the extremely macro level — which is to say, … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Beyond the question of how time gets measured is the issue of how people interact with it: how they conceptualize it and use it to shape their daily lives. The … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) If you want to measure time more specifically than just “daytime” and “morning” and “around noon,” you need something to measure it with. This is easier to do at night. … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Here in the United States, most of us are preparing to “fall back” — setting our clocks back one hour on Sunday, as daylight saving time comes to an end. … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) In the Scottish border ballad “Thomas the Rhymer,” there’s a sequence of verses where the Queen of Elfland shows her human companion three roads: one “narrow road / so thick … Continue reading
