I know there are a lot of people terrified of a Trump presidency for a lot of reasons, but some of the most vibrant horror I’m seeing is coming from young queer people. These people were in middle school or grade school when Obama was first elected, when Glee came on with its revolutionary act of portraying a blatantly Disney-saccharine gay love story. RuPaul and Ellen are huge tv stars, Sulu owns Facebook. RENT is a musical theatre standby performed in high schools. Marriage equality and bathrooms have been their biggest fights. So this? Looks like the apocalypse.
It’s not. Within my lifetime, a president laughed at hundreds of thousands of people dying of AIDS. Within my lifetime, that was a death sentence, not a footnote on a Grindr profile. Within my lifetime, “transsexuals” only existed as cruel punchlines. The only trans guy I had even heard of at 19 was from a movie about him being murdered. Ellen was a pariah who had lost her show for coming out. Being gay was career suicide if you were anything but a hairdresser. It was automatic dishonorable discharge from the military.
This is not saying Trump couldn’t undo a lot of that. But not all of it. And even if, EVEN IF he did? Queer people survived. Flourished. Got to where it is now. And where it is now includes a younger generation who will not go back, and in another 20 years, will be the CEOs, the senators, the governors, the president.
If you don’t give up.
Don’t you fucking dare give up.
i’m scared and angry and tired because yeah, i marched in the 80′s, when people threw rocks and bottles at the pride parade, and i thought we were fucking DONE with that.
but don’t for one second think i won’t fight again if they make me. don’t for one second think i won’t fight to my last breath.
trump voters are an extinction burst. the last diaper baby tantrum of straight whites who are terrified that the loss of their privilege means they’ll be treated the way they’ve always treated others. if we hang on through this, if we keep fighting, we will prevail.
so quit planning your fucking suicide, kidlets. let uncle jesse show you how we do it when we’re fighting against The Man under threat of death, not sending anon hate to shippers. you think you can’t do it, but i did it when i was your age, thinking all the while that russia was gonna nuke us any second, and i’m still here.
don’t get me wrong, babies, i wish you didn’t have to see this. i’d protect you from it if i could. i tried to protect you from it. but assholes persist. so i’m taking the old sword down from over the mantel, and i’m gonna show you how to take a swing.
when i say “unfollow me if you support trump” im not saying it ironically. no, seriously, if you support trump then i dont want your disgraceful ass to be in any way associated with my blog. get out.
i’m seeing a lot of people reblogging suicide hotlines and this is just a reminder that this is a suicide help line that works like a text-based instant messenger for people who may need to talk to someone but have trouble/are uncomfortable making phone calls
Never don’t reblog this. There are so many people who have such bad anxiety about phone calls. This can save so many lives
Also helpful if someone is in a situation they may not feel like talking out loud about their problems is a viable option (for instance if they live with a douchecanoe who would mock them for seeking help)
I was up until almost four last night with terror. I stopped watching the polls at two-thirty, and I have yet to make myself watch our “illustrious president-elect’s” acceptance speech. I feel as if I’ve been diagnosed with something terminal–my heart is pounding and my head is spinning and my hands are shaking so hard I’m having trouble writing.
Let me tell you some things that you may not be aware of.
I am a person who gets into shouting matches when I see hijabi girls mocked or shouted at in the street.
I am a person who believes that Black Lives Matter.
I am a person who once shut down an entire classroom to fight with someone grandstanding about how “homosexuals are going to hell,” and I am a person who almost cried when the one trans kid in my school came up afterward and hugged me and said that no one had ever protected him before.
I am a person who was raised Jewish and aches for the anti-Semitism I see on the street and directed toward my friends.
I am a person with no ties to most of my family’s history except that we were Romani and we fled to this country under a false name for the capital crime of striking a soldier.
I am a person who has survived six sexual assaults and remembers every single day that the statistics for being raped go up after each assault.
I am a woman who, until this morning, was reasonably confident that–while it might be hard and people might try to stop me–I would be able to get a safe, legal abortion if I ever needed it, I am a woman who believed that no one would use my gender as a reason to stop me from having a voice.
I am fucking QUEER. I cried when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, I kiss girls and boys and everything in between because people are beautiful and I don’t see why I shouldn’t revel in that, and until this morning I believed that I could marry anyone I wanted.
Let me be perfectly clear. If you voted third party because “your conscience demanded it” and you “just couldn’t vote for Hillary,” you have condemned us to this. Your devotion to your ideals is laudable. Your complete disregard for the actual lives that will be lost is not. You bear responsibility. Congratulations on voting your conscience. I’m sure it’s a great comfort to you this morning.
If you voted to “Make America Great Again,” you have voted for a racist, misogynist, xenophobic monster. You have told everyone who ticks even one of these boxes that you do not care about them, that their safety, their well-being, their inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness, does not matter to you. You have told the world what America is really made of, what our ideals really are. I am appalled that I share a country with you. You have gone down in history for this. Imagine what future generations will say about you.
TL;DR: I’m here, I’m queer, and I genuinely do not think I’ve ever been so angry and terrified in my life. If you voted for Donald Trump, I cordially invite you to unfollow me immediately and never speak to me again.
After all. I’m a dyke bitch who supports people of color and immigrants and believes that locker room talk is a real threat. If you voted for Donald Trump, you probably don’t want to talk to me either.
On the other hand, if you’re like me, do not go fucking gentle. Stand up and fight for those who cannot fight for themselves, defend your right to be a human being. I have your back.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
I just died
I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”
no but people who don’t like pacific rim because it wasn’t logical or scientifically accurate like
yes
we know
we don’t care
it is an homage to that genre. the original godzilla was a dude clearly in a rubber suit stomping cardboard tokyo and we were supposed to just accept that. pacific rim is a movie where a government council sat around like “what are we gonna do about these giant aliens coming from the ocean?”
“let’s build equally giant robots to punch them in the face”
“yes perfect” and like, that was of course the logical response because it’s friggin cool
mako didn’t use the sword because she had to wait until the perfect cinematic moment to do so
this movie is a love letter to painfully dumb action movies, but it is also one of the smartest movies i’ve ever seen. it’s just telling a story in a different way. instead of having audience vehicle main character explain everything to us, the movie shows you a world and asks you to accept its premise, and then lets you discover the story yourself.
this movie glorifies platonic love and familial bonds, this movie is about how we as people are stronger together, that it’s not one lone hero guy who can save the world, but the unity of all of us. it’s about the sheer unmitigated gall of humanity- “fuck this noise, we’re canceling the apocalypse!” it’s about the stupid dumb loud optimism that looks at the world and wants it to better, demands it be better, and does so with fists of steel.
it’s bombast and noise and i love it to bits so shut up and sit down and let me enjoy my giant robots punching giant monsters in the face okay?
this is such a good post…..such a good post….pacific rim stayed truer to the kaiju movie genre than 2014 godzilla did
Unlike Godzilla, Pacific Rim doesn’t try to be serious even when it’s being serious. Characters have names like Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. The film requires you to believe that the best way to battle a giant monster is to build an even larger robot to fight that monster.
Much of the Act 2 drama derives from inter-pilot tension airlifted from the Val Kilmer scenes in Top Gun. It’s the polar opposite of the Godzilla school of drama, where everyone is a total professional who has absolutely no personal goal besides Saving The World. In Pacific Rim, Idris Elba is Rinko Kikuchi’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and two of the last Giant Robot-pilots in the world frequently get into sneering fights over who’s the bigger badass, and Charlie Day is a scientist.
So, for all these reasons, Pacific Rim is a movie that I’ve heard perfectly smart people describe as “stupid” or “silly.” The problem with this line of thinking is that, really, that every blockbuster is pretty “silly,” in the context of Things Adults Should Care About. Godzilla is not less stupid than Pacific Rim just because people frown more. […]
The difference, I think, is that Pacific Rim glories in its own silliness. There’s a flashback scene where Idris Elba rescues a little girl, and when he emerges from his giant robot, the sun shines upon him like he’s the catharsis in a biblical epic. There’s a moment when one giant robot swings an oil tanker like a sword. Then it grows a sword out of its wrist. Then it falls from space to earth.
There are real complaints to make about Pacific Rim, I guess, all of them fair and most of them pedantic. I know a lot of people who have issues with the story. (“Why didn’t they use the wrist-sword earlier?” is a popular one.) Conversely, I don’t really know anyone who minds the story in Godzilla, possibly because everything stupid that happens is prefaced by Frowning Watanabe saying “This is why the stupid thing that’s about to happen makes sense.” Godzilla wants so badly to make sense. Pacific Rim wants so badly for Ron Perlman to wear golden shoes.
”—Darren Franich, “Entertainment Geekly: A call for an end to serious blockbusters” (via rahleighs)
Do not assume Hillary will win. Do not assume other people will vote. You know what they say about assuming. It makes us citizens in a dystopian nightmare.
*squeak* YAY MORE ASK MEME. Y’all should send me more questions because YAY ASK MEME.
8) favorite genre to write
I already said this here, but it’s short so *throws confetti* FANTASY MOTHERFUCKERS
14) do you make playlists for your current wips?
HahahaHA yeah. Wow yeah. Not for fics, but my original works get HUGE playlists on Spotify, which then get subdivided by character or pairing or whatever. The Polaris playlist is like…seven hours long, with subsets of playlists for Seb/Jun Li, Lessa/Max, Lessa and Max individually, Marshal North, Marshal North and her wife, and one just titled Music for the Dead for the wakes and funerals at Polaris. The Falls the Shadow playlist (actually the Gunmetal Revelations playlist, because FtS is the first in a trilogy) is twelve hours long, with subplaylists for Sam/Michael, Oz/Kit, Billy/Colin, and the archangels and Lucifer. I go HARD AS FUCK on the playlist thing. And as usual you can blame the fuck out of @twistedangelsays for all of that, because prior to her encouragement I was too sheepish to make myself playlists for novels that didn’t even exist.
I’ve seen this post a whole bunch of times but something only just clicked-
Early on during the introduction to Les Amis, Grantaire is described as not understanding exactly what he feels for Enjolras, bar knowing it’s a fascination. Hit by a coup de foudre at the very last second, Grantaire finally realises that what he’s feeling for Enjolras is love.
*runs around flapping arms* So many people did the thiiiiing, I love it!
7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?
Um…depends on my mental state that day. If I’m having an ‘up’ day where I’m in good mental shape and the anxiety et al are chill, I’m really enthusiastic about it. Because, God, guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, I love my writing, it is my whole heart, and I basically live in a constant state of “SOMEONE COME YELL WITH ME ABOUT THIS NOVEL THAT DOESN’T EXIST BECAUSE I HAVEN’T WRITTEN IT YET.” On the other hand, if I’m having a ‘down’ day, or a slightly precarious sort of day, I’m not embarrassed per se, but one disinterested remark or sarcastic comment can put me into a spiral that can last for a long time. I’ve abandoned whole universes without a backward glance because of stuff like that. There was this one universe that I created as an assignment for a science class that ended that way–we were supposed to create superheroes based on the four major biomolecules, and the whole class turned in crappy comics about, like, ‘Daring DNA’ and ‘Lady Lipid’ or whatever, but naturally I created four real people and gave them superpowers/secret identities and wrote up whole justifications for why their powers and personalities and places in the group fit each biomolecule and handed in twenty pages of origin story and action figures, and I got a D on the assignment. The teacher actually failed me at first, but raised it because “at least I knew what the four biomolecules were” and even though I had an entire novel and universe plotted out, I scrapped the whole thing and never touched it again.
8) favorite genre to write
*throws confetti* FANTASY, MOTHERFUCKERS.
10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?
In…what sense? In the positive sense, all my characters kind of haunt me, more so if I finished their novel or one of their novels. Like, they’re real people, my head is a pretty cluttered space with all the people up there. In the negative sense, the characters in the novels I’ve abandoned kind of…loom. Like that novel I mentioned up there? Fucking haunting me.
Just here to say I reallyove your writing. You da bombdotcom👌👌
Oh my god, oh wow, you’re so nice. Thank you!!! I…suck at accepting compliments, so pretend I said something witty here.
I used that gif of Tamaki blushing as a response to a compliment once already in the last like week or two, but that’s like. My default response to compliments. Covering my face and retreating like *shoop* I’m dead. Is it etiquette to use the same gif in response to every compliment I ever receive?
I love ask memes, I really do, they’re very soothing. From this!
3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?
I start on page one and write until I get to the last page. Every once in a while, when I’m bored and/or distracted and/or need motivation, I’ll do what I call ‘writing ahead’ and write individual scenes or events ahead of time and then integrate them later, but if I write ahead at length, it’s something that’s taking place immediately after the writing that I’m caught up on. I just really hate having to meticulously go over the stuff I’m integrating in to make sure it’s all contiguous and everything.
5) character you were most surprised to end up writing
6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now
Um…I dunno. It might have been kind of interesting to make Sam Lightworth a lesbian, but I like the dynamic of “tall snarky angry dude crumbles all over tiny lethal wicked-eyed girl with the fate of the world in her hands” that I ended up with in FtS. I just…have a lot of things that I write and generally I get pretty committed to the way things are, because my characters are very real to me. Altering them after the fact feels kind of like a betrayal.
1. DEMAND condom use 2. Hold your partners accountable for what happens in the bedroom. None of this “baby I can’t control myself around you” or “I just wanted you so bad” bullshit. 3. Coercion is real and it’s very scary and hard to identify in the moment. Establish a dialogue with your partner. Be clear on what you both want. Be clear on what you don’t want. Your boundaries should ALWAYS be respected. 4. Sex can be really emotionally and physically over-stimulating the first few times; don’t be afraid or ashamed to ask your partner to slow down, take a break, or even stop. 5. Focus less on pleasing your partner and more on exploring your partner. Everyone’s body is different and there are no “tricks” to better sex. Chances are, if you psych yourself out worrying over how well you’re “performing” then nobody’s going to have a good time. 6. Ask questions, offer suggestions. Despite what porn has probably taught you, talking during sex isn’t weird or taboo. Your partner isn’t a mind reader. They don’t know what feels good to you. [Pro-tip, a looot of people without clitorises aren’t fully aware of just HOW sensitive a clitoris is. They can be a little rough with them. Tell them to chill!!!!] 7. Your sex life is YOUR business. Don’t ever feel ashamed of how many or how few sexual partners/experiences you’re having. Do what you want, touch the people who want to touch you back, forget the rest. 8. DON’T FAKE YOUR ORGASMS!! Don’t fake your orgasms!! DON’TFAKEYOURORGAMS!! If your partner isn’t getting you there, let them know! Tell them how!! 9. There is more to sex than orgasms. Sex is a really cool way to establish intimacy and trust, to have a fun time, to relieve stress, to explore a person’s body and bring them pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, orgasms are really cool and good, but your sex life is going to be a lot better if it doesn’t revolve around them. 10. LEARN ABOUT YOUR BODY!! This goes for everyone, but ESPECIALLY if you are a person in possession of a vulva, you have been discouraged and even actively kept from vital knowledge about your anatomy! Do some google searches, buy a human sexuality textbook, masturbate. 11. Virginity is a useless concept. It’s completely okay if your virginity is something important to you and I’m not trying to belittle that idea. Just, for the record, in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal. Literally nothing about you changes just because you bumped uglies with someone else.
This has been a public service announcement from your friendly internet poet.
Talking about sex when not being sexy is the best first step to having sex. Don’t talk about it to turn on your partner, just discuss it casual. Talk about your thoughts and feelings, what you think you want, what scares you, what interests you, etc. Like anything you can think of. It makes the act easier and can help you establish boundaries before the act starts. Try doing it on a phone or over text so you know sex won’t start. Sometimes the distance helps you be honest.
i like how positive this post is and how it isn’t gender specific <3 <3 <3
Honestly my favorite part about this post is that from the time I uploaded until now ive never gotten hate for this we all agree the orange man needs to go
Somebody actually put “post this in the south and see what happens” Bitch, this is a website. They can read it in the south.
I am from the south and I agree the angry cheeto needs to go.
5) character you were most surprised to end up writing
Whenever I end up writing someone genuinely nice, I’m totally baffled. Like, okay, in my Falls the Shadow novel, one of the Four Horsemen is named Kit (Famine) and she’s just flat-out a genuine sweetheart. Will Hargrove, from my unfinished novel Emrys Ascendant, is Too Nice for any of this supernatural shit to be happening to him. Or Lessa, from Polaris? Like, yes, she can murder a dude with lightning, but also cartoon birds probably braid her hair in the morning.
10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?
Background noise, always background noise, I hate silence, I build incredibly expansive and intricate playlists for my various novels. And if I’m around people, they have to be background people–I write really well in coffee shops, libraries, ice cream stores, that sort of thing.
15) why did you start writing?
I always told stories, you know? I was really into playing pretend as a kid, and I started memorizing fairy tales and folklore as a very smol bean. And then when I was like eight or nine, my beloved aunt (sarcasm) told me that I was too old to play pretend and I needed to stop living in my own world and get my head out of the clothes and grow up. I was a pretty messed up kid, so naturally I took this as gospel, but I still had stories to tell, so I started writing them down. Flash forward a decade or so and I’m putting out about a novel every 18 months.
20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?
Both! When I have a few hours I can scrape together without feeling like I’m volunteering to have more dirt shoveled down onto my coffin (literally fuck college so much), I can write straight through that whole time period without trouble. If I have a whole day, I’ve been known to forget meals or sleep or water. On the other hand, I also carry a notebook and scrawl down bits of scenes and conversations whenever I’m sitting and waiting for things. Whenever I’m talking to someone who says something like “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I don’t have time” my response is usually “No one has time, you usually make time.” I mean, I sure as hell don’t have time to write novels, I just kind of do it anyway.
25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of
Okay I know this is more than a few sentences but I am!!! Literally so proud of this!!! It’s from a story I just now started about…um, basically a story about how I never got over my smol bean rage about the whole “Getting kicked back into the real world as a kid again after growing up in Narnia” schtick.
“A
drink for the Wanderer,” I said, switching from the bland notes of English to
the hard lilt of Alleiran and pouring out a dribble of scotch into the northern
mug. “To fire, to travel, to lies and
battle. Bring us home alive and send us
out again.” The familiar benediction warmed
something cold in my chest, left me trembling on the dangerous edge of
tears. “Bless your servant, Wanderer, for
I am far from home and have no war to fight.”
The last part of the prayer was personal, individual. I had been making the same simple request for
years.
I
passed the bottle across the table and he took it, tipping it not quite far
enough to pour scotch into the southern mug.
“An empty cup for the Lady of Stars,”
he said in Alleiran, subdued. “To storm,
to sky, to the fallen light. Raise us up
and let us fly.” He paused and let out a
breath that shook, closing his eyes as if he couldn’t stand to look at me
during the personal prayer. His prayer
had been the same as long as mine had. “Bless
your servant, Lady, for I have done great harm that cannot be repaid. Watch over my sister as she walks between
days, where the living cannot go. Grant
me clarity, guard my sanity, show me a bright path.” He opened his eyes and offered me the bottle,
adding quietly, “Save us from the past.”
I’m usually pretty particular about the sorts of traits that get assigned as humanity’s “special thing” in sci-fi settings, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for settings where the thing humanity is known for is something tiny and seemingly inconsequential that it wouldn’t normally occur to you to think of as a distinctive trait.
Like, maybe we have a reputation as a bunch of freaky nihilists because we’re the only species that naturally has the capacity to be amused by our own misfortune.
Alien: Why are you happy? You’ve been seriously injured!
Human: *struggling to control laughter* Yeah, but I can imagine what that must have looked like from the outside, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Alien: …
Captain XXlr’y: First Officer Jane The Human, your olifactory protuberance is severely damaged! Why is this a matter for mirthful celebration???
First Officer Jane The Human: A SPARKLY LITTLE POMERANIAN THING WITH A GODDAMN UNICORN HORN CHASED ME STRAIGHT INTO A WALL! OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? I RAN STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL.
Captain XXlr’y: Yes I just observed this sequence of events! It was terrible!
First Officer Jane The Human: OKAY WHO GOT THAT ON CAMERA, I WANNA SEE.
Captain XXlr’y: So you more fully understand that this is a situation you should never get into again?
First Officer Jane The Human: SO I CAN SEND THE VIDEO TO MY MOM!
Captain XXlr’y: For… for the solicitation of maternal concern…?
First Officer Jane The Human: NO, BECAUSE SHE’LL THINK IT’S HILARIOUS TOO.
viewings of the ancient human art based seemingly entierly around purposefully inducing misfortune are a source of constant xeno-anthropological arguments. As near as anyone can discern, these acts are some kind of core human performance form- so meaningful to their culture that recording these acts was very nearly the first concern on the invention of moving visual media.
Somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that these aren’t just recordings of accidental happenstance, but carefully choreographed, practiced, and refined to such a degree that there are nearly species wise recognizable symbols and routines performed.
There are thesis’ on ‘large wedding cake destroyed’, and hotly argued debate on the purpose of ‘Jackass’
Reblogging this again to suggest a different view of humanity, one where it’s not that we find injuring ourselves to be hilarious is the “defining quirk”. No, this one’s got to do with why you always want a human engineer or programmer (or both) if your ship’s going to be within two parsecs of a human.
Humans break things. They don’t mean to, and it can’t just be their curiosity – other species are curious, but they don’t break things like humans do. Humans make things stop working by trying to do things that they were never meant to do in the first place. I should know, I’ve seen it firsthand – one of the stubborn little bastards decided he was going to get the holodeck to show him an outdated media format called a “Vee-Ay-Chess”, and he spent twenty chrons trying to fix it after it started belching black smoke – and then he was at it AGAIN! And don’t even get me started on how he almost wiped our nav computer to try and play something called “Wolfenstein”.
But the scary part is, for every time it fails, there’s three times it works. There was a time when our warp drive broke down. You know, it was a Caledon Industries model, they’re cheap but they like to break. The problem was that it was a Tritium Reactron Fitting, and it got wedged in the back. Like, “take the ship apart and put it back together to get the fitting out” wedged. We were convinced we were going to be stuck for a few days before our signal got noticed.
And then the human – same one who broke the holodeck twice with his Vee-Ay-Chess crap and almost wiped all our nav data with his Wolfenstein game – he goes into the engine room and begins calling over the intercom for random tools, trash, parts of other things that were working just fine. He spends maybe twelve chrons in there, and when he comes out, he tells us to fire up warp. It sails us right to the nearest star system, no problems. And then the chief engineer takes a look at what he’s done. It looks like – I kid you not – it looks like the entrails of a Galthan Wingbeast. One that got splattered by a bomb.
Says he “jury rigged” it, whatever the hell that means, and we should get it replaced before it breaks again. And that’s why I never go anywhere without a human anymore.
If a cat or dog is eating vegan meals, they’re doing it out of their own free will, just saying. Give a dog a piece of Tofu turkey and they eat it, i didn’t force them to eat it, so.
Give a dog anti freeze and they’ll eat it. Feed a dog rat poison and they’ll eat it. Give a dog grapes, nuts, chocolate, beer, etc. They’ll eat it. They don’t know that it’s dangerous for them. As their caretaker you are responsible for knowing better, not them. If you deprive your cats or dogs of meat, especially cats, you are actively killing your companion in the slowest way.
I once adopted a kitten who was being systematically starved by his previous human who insisted in feeding him vegan food. He was so excited when he got meat-based cat food from us that he gorged himself until he puked. He was left with digestive tract issues for years because of his previous human’s neglect. Do not do this. I don’t care what you believe in personally - cats are carnivores (not omnivores), depriving them from meat is cruel and animal abuse.
VEGAN DIETS KILL CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS
Say it with me, kids: obligate carnivore means no vegan diets ever.
sometimes i think about the fact that Dreamworks was working on the Prince of Egypt and Shrek at the same time and would apparently send people to work on Shrek instead of the Prince of Egypt as a form of punishment
the night i posted this i couldn’t find a source and i’ve been wondering ever since if maybe it was just some kind of fucked up fever dream or something. but no, it’s real:
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.
That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’,
you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains
and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know,
is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!
Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it?
This is the single most mind blowing fact I’ve read on tumblr, every day is a school day-thank you.
Nice history lesson!
My daughter and I were just discussing this very subject.
“If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the older generation’s major sources of economic and spiritual well-being, like home ownership, cars, even sex. They’d rather pay to “access” music and movies than to buy them, and they don’t aspire to steady jobs (long live the gig economy!) or vacations. Their lifestyle choices are informed either by an admirable anti-consumerist streak or by a lazy reluctance to be weighed down by success and owning stuff. They’ve even killed the napkin industry
None of this is true. The idea that these “trends” in consumption are driven primarily by cultural preferences, rather than a faltering economy and ever-rising costs of living, is difficult to believe, but that’s the prevailing narrative. Business Insider’s story blaming millennials for a slump in the sales of paper napkins is a perfect example of why that interpretation is absurd. The article contends that, like eating cereal, buying paper napkins is too much work for millennials. Similarly, The Washington Post has pointed out that young people have found ways to make the paper napkin’s rival, the paper towel, look chic on social media, the only thing they really care about. Neither article mentions that millennials are the first cohort in American history to enjoy lower living standards than their parents. Not buying napkins is a pretty painless way to save money.
Which explanation seems more likely? Do we use Zipcar because we are ideologically committed to sharing, or because car ownership is still out of reach for a lot of people and renting piecemeal is the next best thing? Does a married couple decide to live with roommates because of our generational “openness to communal living” or because people in New York face impossible rents? Do people stop using napkins because of unshakeable cultural convictions, or because they’re a waste of money? If the new generation were really waging war on their forebears’ way of life, I doubt they’d start with the disposable table settings.”—The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | New Republic (via brutereason)
Earlier today (November 6, 2016) at about 1:00am the clocks were set back an hour!
You did not lose time, dissociate, or hallucinate. Clocks on your laptop and smartphone (as well as most TVs I believe) will be set to the correct time, but any clocks that plug into the wall will have to be reset to the correct time. This is why the clocks in your house are set to different times.
I just didn’t want anyone to be concerned or panic when they woke up today!
I would HIGHLY recommend bringing two forms of ID [a gov. i.e. your license or photo ID AND your voter ID] with you to poll. Some states have voter ID laws, and in other states you need your ID if it’s your first time voting at that particular location.
Avoid any trouble, don’t wear any pins, tshirts, etc. for a particular candidates. Some areas consider it passive electioneering.
You CAN NOT vote via text, online, etc. Anyone advertising otherwise is lying.
The only person to ask you for your ID should be the individual working the polls sitting at a table inside the building in question. If anyone else asks you for your ID or gives you a hard time, they have no authority to do so and should be avoided.
You CAN NOT take a photo of your ballot/voting machine/etc. Take a cute photo with your “I Voted” sticker after and call it a day.
Most importantly, stay safe, be smart and VOTE VOTE VOTE
me: i don’t really care about all these disney live action remakes disney:
me:
I’ve always wondered why the people in the town thought Belle was so weird and more importantly how does a bookshop stay open if it only has one single regular customer who is also not wealthy? The only explanation is that there must be something else about Belle that is considered to be odd or strange that was never addressed or thought of in the animated film.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out - but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears - she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 - so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions - nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party - a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride - are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue - one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew - whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. \o/ goddamnit.
FUN TIDBIT! The Presidency is NOT the only thing on the ballot next Tuesday.
You’ll find other people like senators, representatives, chairmans…..Sheriffs?(probably?) JUDGES!
ALL OF THESE are AS important if not moreso than the presidential vote. These are the people ACTUALLY running your city and your state.
There’s also a handful of laws that are going through! Prison Reform, GUN CONTROL for you weirdos that seem to think you’re gonna get invaded by the British (Fun fact: they don’t have guns either calm down Jedediah), Marijuana reform/legalization, school funding. ALL SORTS OF THINGS!
By saying you aren’t going to vote you’re giving up your say in THESE THINGS AS WELL.
Don’t be an ass. Go and vote if you’re able to. It takes literally only a few minutes and you get a lovely sticker.
reverse hades/persephone, where the young daughter of summer uses plant magic to ensnare the lord of darkness and keep him prisoner in a beautiful garden above ground. Eventually, enchanted by her cleverness and wild youth he agrees to eat six pomegranate seeds and stay with her for half of every year.
It’d be even funnier if the other gods show up all “Persephone, hey, you got the lord of death in there so no one’s dying anymore and the world is getting too full—” “Not my problem”
This would of course lead to a word in which there is no winter, but people can only die for six months out of the year. Which is a heck of a setting for all kinds of story.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
