@b I accidentally left vanilla extract out of a cake I made a week or 2 ago because I half-assed the mise en place. I wondered why the cake tasted a little flat, then I walked back into the kitchen and saw the bottle still sitting on the counter, unused, exactly where I'd placed it so I wouldn't forget it.

It happens.

For comparison, I was a big fan of Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel trilogy, and that's a fantasy series that took place on the literal goddamn Moon.

So I'm not just complaining about fantasy shit because I don't like fantasy shit. At least Pierce doesn't have obvious and glaring anachronisms like fireworks in Middle Earth and then a father and son named Ham and Sam in the first six pages of her fantasy vampire novel set on the Moon with a protagonist who has mauve skin and fights a guy with actual wings like Icarus.

Page 6 mentions fireworks.

So now there's a China somewhere adjacent to Middle Earth and there's a Silk Road mercantile exchange.

That means gunpowder, but no one's figured out how to build a cannon or firearm yet.

Presumably the charcoal and sulfur can be procured by trading with dwarves. Saltpeter would have to be procured, probably from large supplies of nearby guano.

The alternative is some fuckup fantasy timekeeping gimmick, where Middle Earth is on the Flerp-Derpian Revised calendar and it just so happens to have a month called September, which is bullshit.

Tolkien spent how many years crafting languages and songs and history and lore for this bullshit fantasy land of his. But then he bitches out before page 2 on picking a birthday.

"Dates? Who cares about dates? Fuck it. Um... September 22. Send it to my editor," he said. Then went back to jacking off over a curly accent mark he'd just drawn over a W.