Quote from: tgirlamg on June 13, 2025, 09:20:45 PMAnnika...
I also had a re-occurring dream from about age 6 to around 13 about being killed in war... always the same short dream on a fairly regular basis of a painful hit to my chest in a muddy place at night... I used to be aware of the dream sometime when it started but, couldn't stop the inevitable conclusion... sometimes I would cry out from the painful end to it and my parents would hear me...
Onward,
A💕
That is horrible. For both of you. I have never had a dream about being fatally shot and wow I never want to. That must be so jarring. I have been shot, a long time ago in the military. Although it was only a graze and decidedly non-life threatening... and an accident. I can't even begin to imagine what that must feel like.

Quote from: Lori Dee on June 15, 2025, 10:47:16 AMI was never a huge fan of fantasy fiction (I'm a sci-fi geek). I was introduced to playing Dungeons & Dragons, and enjoyed that. We would have weekend marathons, playing non-stop from Friday night into early Sunday morning. I found and bought the complete collection of Tolkien, but I had a very hard time getting into it. Then I discovered Dragon World.
Dragonworld (August 3, 2011)
by Byron Preiss (Author), Michael Reaves (Author), Joseph Zucker (Illustrator)
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it opened my mind to fantasy fiction. I still find Tolkien hard to read, but I enjoy the movies.
Yeah I totally get this, Lori. Tolkien is
very hard to get into if you read the Lord of the Rings books. The first, I would say forty percent of the first book,
The Fellowship of the Ring, is extremely slow and meandering. And contains a lot of stuff they just cut out of the movie entirely. You start to wonder if there's even a point to it. Stuff that really is only worldbuilding and lore related. I can see why they cut it out of the movie. It does gather pace... but that doesn't do much to help someone who isn't really interested after the first two hundred or so pages, lol.
The thing I'm probably most sad about is that they also cut most of the poetry and songs out of the movies, too. Again I can see why. If they kept everything in, each movie would be double the length of the extended editions and there probably wouldn't have been enough money in the world to shoot them.
I will have to look into Dragonworld. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the DragonLance series of novels. They were set in the Forgotten Realms world, which is what a lot of DnD is set in. It was kind of like a campaign in book form.
I don't know what it is but there are very few sci-fi works I can get into. One notable exception is the "Culture" novels by Iain M. Banks. But I think that's only because in that universe, people can (and do) change their gender and sex at will. And one story is about this guy, who became a girl to have a baby, then changed back again. I read this before I came out and it utterly fascinated me.
Quote from: davina61 on June 13, 2025, 09:37:34 AMYes treating someone with a poultice, a young person and her mother. From my gran parents when I had a sore that refused to heal a leaf from a mallow plant worked!
There is so much knowledge lost to the world about natural things that worked for thousands of years. And only very few people alive who still know about them, all over the world.
...
In boring Lauren real life news... it's been obnoxiously, unbearably hot here in my little corner of the UK. And is set to hit 29 Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) this weekend. I'm dreading it. My house, like very many houses in the North of the UK, is full to bursting with insulation because traditionally it's been rather a lot colder and our government would rather have people living in house sized arctic sleeping bags than pay them to put the heating on. So my house is like an actual oven most days and it's excruciating. Did I mention I hate Summer?
Oh, and I got to travel on one of the fancy new all-electric buses that have been rolled out where I live. They're very cool! Very quiet, and very accommodating as far as disabled access goes. Although I don't have the faintest idea how you'd power a double-decker on batteries. They must have veritable armies of Duracell Bunnies on treadmills underneath them.
Travel for me, even just locally, is normally quite complicated and awkward. But this was nice.