Tag: <span>history</span>

Tag: history

For more of my Stars Fall Out research, I started looking up historical forms of birth control for something I can bend to fit my story. This is not that thing:

During the 16th century, Canadians began using the combination of beaver testicles with moonshine. They ground the beaver balls to fine powder and then added very strong alcohol to the mixture. People would then drink this, with the alcohol helping to forget that they were drinking beaver testicles.

15 of the Craziest Birth Control Methods from Ancient Times

I’m the lightest lightweight ever, and it would take an entire jug of wine for me to forget I was drinking beaver testicles. This is because no amount of alcohol would make me forget drinking beaver testicles; you’d need to straight up smack me over the head with the wine jug and concuss me for me to forget that.

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Here are a couple things I’ve learned about while doing worldbuilding research for Stars Fall Out:

The Roman month of Mercedonious. Learning more about the history of intercalation (inserting extra days into the calendar, such as in a leap year), provided the inspiration for me to fix a story problem. I have a section of Stars that, timing-wise, felt weird in relation to the rest of the story. I decided to run with the weirdness; I made them intercalated days called for on the authority of one of the Grand Oneiromancers. One of those “can you believe this law is still on the books?” kind of things.

I also learned how to convert between different number base systems. I’ve always thought it would be cool if we had a base 12 system rather than base 10, so I gave one of the cultures in my story a base 12 system, and another base 9. Now I’m trying to make it as hard as possible for them to change currency, which is adding some nice color to a scene in the bakery when a guy comes in with imperial money.

Also, history of the number zero. Unrelated, for my purposes.

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Lying about… artist Ellsworth Kelly

When I bought Ellsworth Kelly stamps at the post office, I lied and pretended I knew who he was. The clerk expressed his surprise that they’d put out the Kelly stamps so quickly–he’d died fairly recently.

“Oh, that’s true,” I said.

In college, the teachings of Socrates inspired me to stop pretending I knew things in order to look smarter. Instead, I decided to just ask. I might look ignorant, but it would be better for me in the long term.

Asking is better than looking something up online later; you get a human perspective that’s missing from Wikipedia. Sometimes, also, you realize that other people don’t always know what they’re talking about.

Since I didn’t ask the clerk, I had to look up Ellsworth Kelly myself.

Kelly led a long life, made tons of art, and passed away in 2015. The single awesomest thing I learned about him? He was part of a WWII unit called “The Ghost Army,” which deceived the Germans into thinking there were allied armies where there were none. PBS made a documentary about it–I know the next documentary I’m watching.

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