Maps and meals
Dec. 9th, 2012 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethGoogle maps is awesome. You can use the streetview to see what's up the top of mountains. Or to go along the route between them. All the climbing, none of the sweat. Or cold. Or sleet. Or mountain rescue people.
Britain is sort of short on the middle of nowhere. Even if you're as nowhere as it gets, you can still see somewhere from there. Plus we've left roads and houses all over the place. I was thinking post apocalypse by a few hundred years things would get empty, but I've been looking around websites and some of the big stone places in the Pennines are centuries old and meant to last against raiders and basically are farmhouse shaped castles, and they have a tendency to not fall down. Unless people take them apart, which usually happens so they can reuse all the pieces, those things will be standing for a very, very long time. Like castles, which will only get a bit more ruined. Mostly places get knocked down and taken apart, they don't as much just fall down and vanish. A few hundred years into a post zombie future there would still be a lot of leftover architecture.
I wonder how long it takes the roads to get unusable? I know the Roman roads stayed in use for... well, forever, in some cases, they're still there kind of under the new ones, as far as I've read. Those were proper good roads. Took a long time to not be useful any more. And while the newer tarmac roads keep turning into big potholes, that's because of traffic as well as weather. Left to themselves, they'd crack up some, but there'd be recogniseable road for a while. Somebody has probably researched how long.
I don't know, part of me wants to set my epic fantasy in the far future, add zombies, maybe melt the ice caps so the sea eats Blackpool and suchlike. Then make the map in a fantasy map style and you end up with someplace that looks familiar yet foreign, but you can still use google maps to figure out where your characters go next. On the other hand, that leaves the possibility of getting things wrong. Where's the fun in writing fantasy if you can get things wrong? So the other way to use all this research is to read it, sit for a while to see which bits I remember, then go *handwave* and make up a totally new place that just kind of coincidentally could greatly resemble flooded Britain in certain respects. That way only the interesting bits remain.
But if you make up a new world from scratch, you have to make up layers of archaeological time from scratch too. If you already know that an area has some standard issues dungeons around, or, in non fantasy terms, that Nenthead is a mecca for mine explorers, then you can get inspired. And you already know what they were mining for. And sometimes there's really cool stuff, like an underground canal that was built to drain off the nearby mines and goes really a long way under the mountains.
I was going to try and erase religion and make new stuff, not the sort of fantasy with many gods getting in fights, more like trying on the Star Trek with scientist philosophers who just happen to have to cope with an undead invasion after the fall of civilisation. I feel that an undead invasion would do permanent things to ones worldview. Belief in a benevolent god and an afterlife would get complicated.
But a lot of place names and architecture would have traces of the Before all over it, or at least sound like it did. Like, I started looking at this bit of the map because there's an Eden river in an Eden valley that gives its name to the Eden district. Wiki reckons the name comes from the Celtic for water or rushing, but nobody's going to read that and think that. So do you keep the religious sounding name, rename everything Rushing Water, blur the syllables into something? All of which are likely to turn it into a different river somewhere else, since calling your water 'water' was quite common. Connotations layered on all of them.
Using actual geography gets weird and doesn't quite fit the plot, but then again inspires bits and pieces. I know when I set things in Norwich I know exactly where the chase sequences go and where the fight scenes are, so maybe if I know a real place really well then it'll fit because the inside of my head already has that shape. I don't know as I want to go get to know places up mountains really well. It sounds cold and likely to run out of puff. Plus if there's like a thousand people around it's smaller than college... okay, that's the tempting bit, to get away from all these confusing loud people. BUT, what if they're not people I could get along with? There wouldn't be a different set of people to go talk to instead, there would only be the one set of people in reach. I already have to go to Norwich to attempt a social life. And then there's food. Dereham's really quite well stocked with all kinds of everything, compared to a lot of these places, and Dereham hasn't got much food I can eat. Not enough different food to have a different menu for different days of the week. I have to go up to Norwich for that too. And while I rather like having a lot of same same things, there is a limit.
If you break civilisation or go back far enough, a lot of the food goes away. Nobody would have a row of fruit juices like Sainsbury's does. Only people who happen to live in mango country would be drinking mango juice. I'm really glad I live here-ish and now-ish.
If I try and describe what my characters have to eat I'd have to research medieval food. If it's post apocalypse medieval though then it'd get complicated. Medieval stir fry? Fusion food with local parts. But spices are seldom local.
I wonder if it's easier or harder to be a medieval vegetarian? Buddhist monks managed fine. And there wasn't so much big slabs of meat cooking as there is now, because they had to grow it all and look after it and make sure it survived the winter and it was a whole lot more bother to just kill a bit of it than it is now. I like chickens, they make eggs, very good to eat. And then a roast chicken when the eggs run out. I wouldn't eat that bit but I can see how it's efficient.
I can also see how fantasy stories ended up with stew. See 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'. Everywhere you go, stew. Is good because anything could be in there and you don't have to think about it much. Is bad because your readers would get as bored of it as your characters, and a little local flavour would be nice sometimes too.
... I just wandered off to look up when baked beans were invented. Apparently the beans come from America in the 1520s and the sauce varies regionally so if I go travelling I might have to specify 'in tomato sauce', because some places put pork in it. I'd have to specify vegetarian beans. *blinks* Other places just bake the beans, no mushy tomato based stuff involved. Putting them in a can with tomato sauce probably happened in the 1800s, but I found a bunch of different dates. Heinz baked beans started as a luxury import in 1886 via Fortnum and Mason. Only now the US beans are different than the UK beans so some UK beans get sent to America. There's contradictory information on how they were cooked before convenient tins and factories were involved, but mostly it says they'd cook overnight. So, either beans for breakfast would be most common, or people out camping wouldn't be eating their beans at all. *blinks* I know how to do baked potato with a camp fire, that seems easier, but also it takes a lot longer than a microwave so I'm not used to thinking in terms of food that takes that long. Eggs are quick, you can fry them or boil them and they're very quick. But you'd have to bring a chicken...
Okay, hungry now. Will post and get breakfast.
Britain is sort of short on the middle of nowhere. Even if you're as nowhere as it gets, you can still see somewhere from there. Plus we've left roads and houses all over the place. I was thinking post apocalypse by a few hundred years things would get empty, but I've been looking around websites and some of the big stone places in the Pennines are centuries old and meant to last against raiders and basically are farmhouse shaped castles, and they have a tendency to not fall down. Unless people take them apart, which usually happens so they can reuse all the pieces, those things will be standing for a very, very long time. Like castles, which will only get a bit more ruined. Mostly places get knocked down and taken apart, they don't as much just fall down and vanish. A few hundred years into a post zombie future there would still be a lot of leftover architecture.
I wonder how long it takes the roads to get unusable? I know the Roman roads stayed in use for... well, forever, in some cases, they're still there kind of under the new ones, as far as I've read. Those were proper good roads. Took a long time to not be useful any more. And while the newer tarmac roads keep turning into big potholes, that's because of traffic as well as weather. Left to themselves, they'd crack up some, but there'd be recogniseable road for a while. Somebody has probably researched how long.
I don't know, part of me wants to set my epic fantasy in the far future, add zombies, maybe melt the ice caps so the sea eats Blackpool and suchlike. Then make the map in a fantasy map style and you end up with someplace that looks familiar yet foreign, but you can still use google maps to figure out where your characters go next. On the other hand, that leaves the possibility of getting things wrong. Where's the fun in writing fantasy if you can get things wrong? So the other way to use all this research is to read it, sit for a while to see which bits I remember, then go *handwave* and make up a totally new place that just kind of coincidentally could greatly resemble flooded Britain in certain respects. That way only the interesting bits remain.
But if you make up a new world from scratch, you have to make up layers of archaeological time from scratch too. If you already know that an area has some standard issues dungeons around, or, in non fantasy terms, that Nenthead is a mecca for mine explorers, then you can get inspired. And you already know what they were mining for. And sometimes there's really cool stuff, like an underground canal that was built to drain off the nearby mines and goes really a long way under the mountains.
I was going to try and erase religion and make new stuff, not the sort of fantasy with many gods getting in fights, more like trying on the Star Trek with scientist philosophers who just happen to have to cope with an undead invasion after the fall of civilisation. I feel that an undead invasion would do permanent things to ones worldview. Belief in a benevolent god and an afterlife would get complicated.
But a lot of place names and architecture would have traces of the Before all over it, or at least sound like it did. Like, I started looking at this bit of the map because there's an Eden river in an Eden valley that gives its name to the Eden district. Wiki reckons the name comes from the Celtic for water or rushing, but nobody's going to read that and think that. So do you keep the religious sounding name, rename everything Rushing Water, blur the syllables into something? All of which are likely to turn it into a different river somewhere else, since calling your water 'water' was quite common. Connotations layered on all of them.
Using actual geography gets weird and doesn't quite fit the plot, but then again inspires bits and pieces. I know when I set things in Norwich I know exactly where the chase sequences go and where the fight scenes are, so maybe if I know a real place really well then it'll fit because the inside of my head already has that shape. I don't know as I want to go get to know places up mountains really well. It sounds cold and likely to run out of puff. Plus if there's like a thousand people around it's smaller than college... okay, that's the tempting bit, to get away from all these confusing loud people. BUT, what if they're not people I could get along with? There wouldn't be a different set of people to go talk to instead, there would only be the one set of people in reach. I already have to go to Norwich to attempt a social life. And then there's food. Dereham's really quite well stocked with all kinds of everything, compared to a lot of these places, and Dereham hasn't got much food I can eat. Not enough different food to have a different menu for different days of the week. I have to go up to Norwich for that too. And while I rather like having a lot of same same things, there is a limit.
If you break civilisation or go back far enough, a lot of the food goes away. Nobody would have a row of fruit juices like Sainsbury's does. Only people who happen to live in mango country would be drinking mango juice. I'm really glad I live here-ish and now-ish.
If I try and describe what my characters have to eat I'd have to research medieval food. If it's post apocalypse medieval though then it'd get complicated. Medieval stir fry? Fusion food with local parts. But spices are seldom local.
I wonder if it's easier or harder to be a medieval vegetarian? Buddhist monks managed fine. And there wasn't so much big slabs of meat cooking as there is now, because they had to grow it all and look after it and make sure it survived the winter and it was a whole lot more bother to just kill a bit of it than it is now. I like chickens, they make eggs, very good to eat. And then a roast chicken when the eggs run out. I wouldn't eat that bit but I can see how it's efficient.
I can also see how fantasy stories ended up with stew. See 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'. Everywhere you go, stew. Is good because anything could be in there and you don't have to think about it much. Is bad because your readers would get as bored of it as your characters, and a little local flavour would be nice sometimes too.
... I just wandered off to look up when baked beans were invented. Apparently the beans come from America in the 1520s and the sauce varies regionally so if I go travelling I might have to specify 'in tomato sauce', because some places put pork in it. I'd have to specify vegetarian beans. *blinks* Other places just bake the beans, no mushy tomato based stuff involved. Putting them in a can with tomato sauce probably happened in the 1800s, but I found a bunch of different dates. Heinz baked beans started as a luxury import in 1886 via Fortnum and Mason. Only now the US beans are different than the UK beans so some UK beans get sent to America. There's contradictory information on how they were cooked before convenient tins and factories were involved, but mostly it says they'd cook overnight. So, either beans for breakfast would be most common, or people out camping wouldn't be eating their beans at all. *blinks* I know how to do baked potato with a camp fire, that seems easier, but also it takes a lot longer than a microwave so I'm not used to thinking in terms of food that takes that long. Eggs are quick, you can fry them or boil them and they're very quick. But you'd have to bring a chicken...
Okay, hungry now. Will post and get breakfast.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 09:27 am (UTC)the River Irthing is a major tributary of the River Eden. It used to be on maps as the Ard, or the Arden.
Sliding that name down river a bit seems like it would fix my religious connotations.
But Arden is two places in Scotland and one in Warwickshire by the Avon. Shakespeare used the Forest of Arden in As you like it, but he'd stirred his local Arden with Ardennes.
Ardan, Ardin, Ardon and Ardun are mostly places, but not in Britain.
... I quite like changing Eden, the nice place, to Ardon, the place that's a bit hard on travellers now...
no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 03:39 pm (UTC)First you soak the beans overnight, then you dumped them in a pot when you got up. Then you went to church for half the day, you'd come back home and had a hot meal, then you went back to church for the rest of the day.
So not so much for breakfast ( because they need exposed flame to cook, and it's not a good idea to have exposed flame when you are sleeping ) but lunch. And supper, because you weren't allowed to work on the sabbath, and cooking is work.
...I'm blanking on whether salt pork was added to the beans or not.