To balance out all the stupid disclaimery crap that the Internet now necessitates, have a picture of a medieval gay assassin on fire.


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Some book recs:

-Erotica, Love and Humor in Arabia: Spicy Stories from the Book of Songs by Al-Isfahani is a great, and all-too-brief selection of anecdotes from a giant medieval Persian book on life in the great cities of the time. A lot of the stuff was eye-opening even for me, and it was great to see numerous stories of the great lady singers ( Read more... )

One of the challenges of writing medieval (and non-Western) fiction is when you yourself have done so much research that you have a level of understanding about a given period/culture that your audience doesn't. And then you run the risk of creating cognitive dissonance in readers when they can't (at least immediately) visualise something having ( Read more... )

So I went and 'shopped more Indian wedding outfits onto these guys because it's the closest you'll get to decent photo references as to what they would've actually worn at medieval Persian courts ( Read more... )

-*Blink* I had no idea "black" and "white" come from the same etymological roots in English (or at least the offline iPhone app version of Wiktionary seems to think so).


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Forgive me if I've mentioned it before--I honestly can't remember--but I'm still torn about this idea of a spiritual Jaffar/Princess fic I want to write. One where she has a spiritual crisis about what she sees as Jaffar's polytheism, the way any religious medieval person would, and is seriously worried about whether her husband would be cast into ( Read more... )

Have tried to dodge emos very hard today, hence I have been cooking Persian all day. Made Mirza Ghassemi and Khoresht Fesenjan (the latter for the first time) and I had to basically pound half a pound of walnuts in a mortar by hand (I don't own a food processor) and now I want to die. Unless my arm falls off first ( Read more... )

what the FUCk ( Read more... )

Ladies and gentlebeings, it is my honour to present to you some of Ja'far ibn Yahya al-Barmaki's parents' favourite dishes, collected from Annals of The Caliphs’ Kitchens. (Psst... you can download a PDF of the book hereThe first three are cold pullet (pullet=tiny chicken) dishes to be served as appetizers. I really hope I can try that first one ( Read more... )

Jaffar the bridegroom. ♥

Click through for HQ.


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