Apparently My Musical Tastes Have A Predilection For Dirtbags. Nightstalker, From Athens Greece.

Zoinks, Scoob...I can taste their fear.

Kung fu exorcists

Apparently in China peach wood (Along with the rest of the plant) is believed to have properties that repel evil spirits, a little similar to silver in European legends or iron for both European fae and West Asian/Middle eastern Jinn. Taoists sometimes keep swords made of peach wood because of this. This made me realize something. If you took a peach wood stick, and attached studs to it of both silver and iron you'd end up with a club or staff (or mace, flail etc.) that would have the weaknesses of many kinds of supernatural creatures while still retaining effectiveness as a normal weapon (peach is a hardwood and silver's poor edge retention doesn't matter for studs). You could even keep adding new stud materials to get something ridiculous that affects over 120 catalogued folkloric monsters. Since you just need a few little studs you could even get some really expensive materials like meteoric iron (a thumb tip sized meteorite can still cost like 10-20 bucks I think). I could somewhat feasibly make a weapon that affects every monster ever thought to walk the earth, from vampires and werewolves to jinn and jiangshi and even mankind.

Did you ever learn or maintain a skill set you either weren't supposed to or would be seen as anachronistic? And do so because it's interesting or fun? Like for example I'm teaching myself how to use a boatswain's pipe right now. Not because I'm a reenactor or anything, just for the funsies. I've taught myself how to pick locks, I'm slowly working on radio stuff with an eye to get a ham radio license one day, learned how to fight with a tomahawk and big knife, maintain the skill of orienteering regularly, amongst others.

Never know what's going to be useful when.

Just a bit of realism for you: at certain times of the year, Hobbiton would absolutely reek of poo when they were fertilizing the fields. Like, a smell so thick it would inundate everything. A poo smell.

There's another contributing theory that the large brim, pointy hats of the stereotypical witch closely followed the hat worn by alewives. Not the stinky fish that washes up on the shore, but women who were the brewing industry from medieval times until about the 18th century. These women would brew up batches of ale and beer at home, and then sell them come local market day. They wore the hats to stand out in a crowded market. Women ran brewing until it started to shift from a cottage industry towards industrializing, and the dude brewers started a whisper campaign to impugn the quality of the alewives' product. Alewives were also known for their herb knowledge, necessary for things like hopping beer or using germander if hops weren't available.

speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.

I dunno why, but since around 2007 or so, I'm not quite sure, the mark of a modern horror movie is somebody vomiting. Usually within the first act, quite violently and with all the sound effects.

I wonder if this is the replacement for the ACES suit. Time to look things up!