I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT PLATO WON THE GOLD MEDAL IN THE OLYMPICS FOR WRESTLING THREE TIMES. THIS PUTS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THINGS. I ALWAYS IMAGINED PLATO TO BE FRAIL AND MISSHAPEN BUT HE MUST HAVE BEEN FRICKEN RIPPED. I WONDER IF ARISTOTLE EVER FELT ANXIETY ABOUT GETTING PHYSICALLY (I.E. NOT JUST METAPHYSICALLY) DISMANTLED BY PLATO. PLATO WAS PROBABLY PISSED OFF BY AT LEAST A HANDFUL OF QUESTIONS ARISTOTLE ASKED HIM. ARISTOTLE WAS A LITERAL GENIUS TOO. IMAGINE PLATO LECTURING AND WRITING ON A BLACKBOARD AND ARISTOTLE THROWING A COMMENT OUT THERE ABOUT SOME COMPLEX MISSTEP IN PLATO’S LOGIC AND PLATO’S CHALK JUST SNAPS AND ARISTOTLE’S TESTICLES SUCK WAY BACK UP TO WHERE THEY DROPPED FROM, THEN PLATO IN A BLUR APPEARS BESIDE ARISTOTLE SITTING AT HIS DESK AND HE PICKS HIM UP AND SUPLEXES HIS MACEDONIAN ASS.
given the content of a lot of Plato’s conclusions I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Plato responded to a lot of reasonable criticisms with “Fight me” and that was the end of it.
We’re not actually sure whether Plato is his real name! Some people speculate that, because Platon means “broad” in Greek, this was actually his wrestling nick name. Basically, it’s like Dwayne Johnson became a famous philosopher and everyone still called him “The Rock”.
Can we have a movie about Plato starring Dwayne Johnson?
You can’t convince me that wouldn’t be the best thing ever.
I didn’t know I needed this until now. If someone can write a decent screenplay, and we get enough people to talk about it, maybe he’ll actually see it and we can kickstart the shit out of it
Plato’s name is literally just the Ancient Greek for ‘Swol’ how is this the real life
Do you think Victor Hugo actually intended Enjolras and Grantaire to read as in love with each other?
I think it’s very unlikely Hugo didn’t at least intend Grantaire to be in love with Enjolras. And since I’m way too passionate about this, let’s make a non-exhaustive list of my favorite “#nohomo” brick moments :
“Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras”
“No one loves the light like the blind man”
Hugo writing on actual paper that Grantaire and Enjolras are part of a whole, two sides of the same coin and that Grantaire can not live without Enjolras (spoiler alert : He can’t)
Comparing them to Orestes and Pylades because ~~alphabetical affinities~~. Notice he says here Grantaire is “an unaccepted Pylades” because Enjolras “disdained this sceptic”. We’ll come back to this later
“Grantaire, in the presence of Enjolras, became someone once more.”
Grantaire saying of Enjolras : “What a fine marble"
Now bear in mind that all of the above happen in the scope of TWO PAGES. TWO PAGES that are used to highlight Grantaire’s love and admiration for Enjolras. Call me delusional but that’s not insignificant
Grantaire being described as “soft” and “gentle” whenever Enjolras is involved
“I believe in you”
19th century blowjob euphemism #gentlemanbrojob
“Grantaire, will you do me a service?” “Anything.”
Grantaire “eyes intently at Enjolras” and “whispers in his ear” in the scope of 3 lines like wow man personal space much
Remember that Orestes and Pylades business? That Grantaire wasn’t accepted as Pylades? Well, not only does this comparison comes back in the chapter in which they die, but Grantaire gets accepted as Pylades by his Orestes
Now let’s switch to French for a minute because this is very important to me. That holding hands thing? In French, it’s specified that Grantaire “regarda Enjolras avec une inexprimable douceur” or “se tournant vers Enjolras avec douceur” depending on your version. The first one literally translates to : “Grantaire looked at Enjolras with an ineffable softness”. That in itself is a huge red flag but that’s not all. Let’s talk about the word “douceur” for a bit. In French, using the word “douceur” isn’t meaningless. You don’t specify “avec douceur” unless you really want to focus on the feelings of your character. It seems very unlikely as a sign of friendship, considering all the above.
I’m pretty sure Hugo knew where he was going with that. Plus, let’s not forget all the homoerotic greek figures thrown in from time to time. Hugo was one cultured man. One reference can be called a coincidence but the thing is… there are way more than one. Hugo was also very ahead of his time, morally speaking, so I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that YES, he did intend Grantaire to have deep amorous feelings for Enjolras
I wish people would stop saying “It’s July. Well done for wasting half a year.” Did you make someone smile in the past six months? Did you stroke a cat or throw a stick for a dog? Did you learn a new fact or teach someone a new joke? Did you laugh, cry, scream or sing in the past six months? Because if so, congratulations for not wasting your time at all.
tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”
it’s also possible he was acting off of the lessons he learned in the abusive dursley household. that’s why he does a lot of his so-called “hero complex” shit. he takes a lot of personal responsibility for other people bc he learned growing up that “no one’s here for you, no one will help you, you will not catch any breaks”. he helps bc if he didn’t, who would? certainly not the dursleys, and that’s what he grew up with.
he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself - i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.
maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.
people characterize these aspects of harry as a “hero complex” or a “stupid nobility” or a “lack of common sense”, but i don’t agree with that. i can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.
it’s called “complex ptsd” and if you get out of the abusive situation before you’re old enough to understand how fucked up it was, like Harry did, you don’t end up with the classic flashbacks so much, just atypical behavior patterns and a high risk of other shit. That’s why Harry is so fucked up by everything that Umbridge does, it’s because he’s being retraumatized in his safe space.
That was always how I interpreted Harry’s behavior, because I’m also prone to the same sort of reactions. It’s not about mistrusting a specific person or a specific group of people, it’s about the automatic bone-deep assumption that no one will help. Personal example: I don’t trust authority figures, even the ones I know and like on a personal level–I reported a sexual assault to a teacher a year and a half ago and I had a worse panic attack about that than I did about the assault, ever. The assault was business as usual. Telling an authority figure about it, giving someone that kind of weapon to use against me, was fucking traumatic, my roommate had to come with me and I had to sit down on the ground outside the building before I could walk. Harry Potter example: he doesn’t tell anyone about Umbrige because he assumes that not only will they do nothing, they might use it against him–if I hear literally one more person bring up the fact that he didn’t tell McGonagall, I will have an aneurysm. It’s not that he doesn’t think McGonagall cares about him, nor that, in the Triwizard Tournament, he thinks Dumbledore would let a kid die. It just doesn’t even occur to him that someone else might help. When someone suggests that he go to McGonagall about Umbrige, his response is basically “wait, what?” Once he’s out of the second task in the Triwizard Tournament, and the adrenaline’s clearing, he does sit back and go “why did I do that, Dumbledore would never have let her get hurt.” He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing in the moment, he just sees a threat and resolves it because no one else will help.
It’s not…personal, okay? It’s just the learned knowledge that no one is going to get you or anyone else out of a situation, so you have to do it. Every time.
And as long as we’re on the subject, this is part of the reason I dislike Snape pretty hardcore. I mean, I have a litany of sins for Severus Snape, which ends with ‘you can die like a hero but that doesn’t make you a good man’, but this is one of them. He treats this impulse of Harry’s as an attention-seeking behavior, not just a ‘saving-people-thing’ but something entirely motivated by some perverse desire to be in the spotlight. And he punishes him for it. He repeatedly penalizes Harry for trying to save people. And let me tell you something, from personal experience, the more people punish you for this, the stronger the impulse becomes. It’s a self-feeding cycle. Because, says the little voice in your brain, if they’re punishing me for helping, that means they wouldn’t have helped, so that means that it had to be me. Because better they punish you, right? Better you pay for helping someone because you would have paid for something anyway, right?
I’m not saying it’s a healthy mentality, but I’m also not going to condemn it as an unhealthy one, because sooner or later you might actually be the only person who will help. You might be the only person available. And if nothing else, this mentality does teach you to keep a cool head in a crisis.
NEVER FORGET THAT IF PRESIDENT OBAMA HADN’T PUT JUSTICES ELENA KAGAN AND SONIA SOTOMAYOR ON THE BENCH, WE WOULD NOT BE CELEBRATING LEGAL GAY MARRIAGE TODAY. THE SPLIT OF THE VOTE WAS 5/4.
3. U.S. READERS REGISTER TO VOTE HERE AND PLEASE SHARE!
As a long-time Indiana resident, it should say something that so many other people that live in Indiana are happy about Pence becoming Trump’s running candidate only because that means he can no longer be our governor.
He’s had so much of a negative impact on Indiana’s education, culture, and how we all work together.
Pence has already tried to ruin our state. Don’t let him ruin the entire country.
my friend just texted me “it’s not acceptable that trump feels good about himself and you don’t” and i think it’s the most motivational thing i’ve ever read
W: Do you like more general prompts, or more specific ones?
As I believe we’ve established, my writing operates on a very strict rule: the less specific a prompt is, the faster it gets out of hand. Do I like general prompts like “Hamilton Star Wars AU” that I can write about at length? Absolutely. But I also really don’t have time to do a lot of them, so perforce I’m going to say ‘specific’.
X: A character you enjoy making suffer.
…all of them. Ever. Specifically? Um…nah, I’m going to stand by that. The more I like a character, the more I want to see them cry over the bodies of everyone they’ve ever loved. One of my most beloved original characters actually has that exact experience in the canon plot of her novel, and everyone I killed for it were characters I adore. No one is safe.
Y: A character you want to protect.
I’m going to assume that it’s perfectly feasible to both like making a character suffer and want to protect them, so…yeah. Wanda Maximoff is the first one to come to mind, also Kurt Wagner, Jean Grey, and Warren Worthington III, John Laurens (I can include historical characters, I do what I want), Grantaire, Enjolras, Cosette, Eponine, Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff…Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls…the Animorphs if anyone gets THAT reference…Aerin Dragon-Killer, which is even MORE obscure…Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, Colossus…this list could go on.
Why do so many people assume that liking Eponine means you want her to end up with Marius? Like, no, I want Eponine to end up with supportive parents and a nice flower garden
Let’s play a game. Type the following words into your tags box, then post the first automatic tag that comes up. you, also, what, when, why, how, look, because, never
do you ever get so annoyed at everything that you start to get pissed off at even little things like a spoon clinking against a bowl or sounds of people talking
I think it’s called sensory overload. It’s really common in people with anxiety
it can also be a result of sleep deprivation, stress, or ever dehydration !!
this week the senate will vote on whether or not to give the fbi warrantless access to your browsing data. this is extremely dangerous and a violation of privacy. not only would the fbi be able to essentially hack into your computers and internet service, but they might also hack into ones overseas. anything on your computers, they’ll be able to have access to. this is an extremely dangerous power the fbi is trying to get, and it CAN be stopped, but only if you guys are willing to put forth the effort.
how do you stop it? first, get the word out. twitter, tumblr, facebook, just get the word out by either making your own status or sharing this link.
secondly, call your senators. on this website, just enter your phone number and it will give you a script to read off of. it will take you less than 30 seconds, trust me. you can also tweet them, send them emails, etc. all the contact info is on this site here. they will listen. dont know who your senators are? go here and scroll to the bottom. it lists all the senators and who you can call. also, you can tweet at them or send them an email. (all the links in this paragraph lead to the same source)
guys, it is extremely important this bill not get passed. PLEASE reblog this and at least tweet at them? you dont even have to think of anything to type. you literally click the tweet button and it does it for you. please, guys, please.
guys!!! please do this and at least tweet your senators!!!
u can even send a complaint through the website. COME ON GUYS THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
If men stopped working…the world would continue on.
If women stopped working, then things would get ugly.
What?
there has been an instance where this happened. it was 1975 and icelandic women decided not to work for one day.
working as in cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, doing chores and so on, not only “not showing up to your workplace”. women did nothing that day, except showing up in reykjavik and protesting for gender equality, equal pay and equal representation in parliament, you know, cool stuff.
you know what happened? havoc. men were left with food to cook and children they never took care of to pick up from kindergarden and entertain for the day. they went en masse to the food shops buying sausages because they could cook nothing else, they had to bond with children they never spent more than a couple hours a day with. they struggled combining their work day and the domestic tasks they had to sort out. and this just for one day.
iceland in 1975 stopped working and things indeed got ugly. so ugly that women in the following decades became woke AF and soon it happened that women became president, took half of the seats in parliament and achieved one of the best living environments in the world.
Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.
Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.
“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”
“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”
This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.
People understand the truly important things.
DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.
This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.
my family is from a town in Ireland where everyone has the last name Ryan. literally like everyone. so they differentiated families by calling them by their professions, right?
Marquis de Lafayette’s last political act was resigning as commander of the National Guard because he refused to order the Guardsmen to fire on the rebels of the June Rebellion–the very same June Rebellion of Les Miserables fame
i was babysitting a little boy and girl once and the boy asked me if i had a boyfriend and i said “no!! but i have a girlfriend!” and he said “like a friend thats a girl?” and i said “no like a boyfriend but they’re a girl instead of a boy! we still do couple things but we’re just both girls” and he said, without missing a beat, “oh ok! are you gonna marry her?”
like it’s literally that easy for kids to understand
the cutest part of this was when afterwards the kid said ‘so i could have a boyfriend if i wanted to?’ and i said yes, but to be careful because some people are mean to boys who have boyfriends and he pushes up his sleeves and goes ‘well then i’ll beat them up! if i wanna have a boyfriend i’m gonna have a boyfriend!!! i’ll even marry him if i wanna!’
I believe in aliens but not like in the conspiracy theorist sense more like in the “the notion that in this infinitely-huge universe our planet is the only one with life on it is fucking absurd” sense
when did we replace the word “said” with “was like”
When it occured to us that “said” implies a direct quote, while “was like” clarifies that you mean to communicate the person’s tone and general point without quoting them word for word.
I was listening through Hamilton today, as you do, and it occurred to me that there’s probably a parallel universe out there in which Washington suffered a bout of insanity and answered the question of “Treasury or State” differently.
I am ready to bet that this hypothetical alternate America with Secretary of State Hamilton and Secretary of the Treasury Jefferson didn’t make it through the first five years.
i just imagine jim kirk joking about his death sometimes bc maybe his humour’s a bit twisted like he’ll be acting super happy and say something like “i’m positively radiating!” and suddenly every single person in the room snaps their heads around and glares at him bones would probably punch him tbh
F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
This conversation, from this untitled Sam/Steve/Bucky friendship ficlet.
“It’s Captain
America, Barnes,” Clint said, a laugh hidden beneath the deadpan. “He doesn’t need taking care of.”
Bucky stopped and
gave the plane at large a pitying sort of look.
“You poor sonsabitches, you fell for it.
You fell for the spiel. Let me
tell you somethin’, when I say I left for five minutes, I mean five goddamn
minutes. I turn my back on this little
shit, last time I’m gonna see him before I go off and get my ass shot at by a
bunch of dickless Nazis, and he runs off and signs up to be a guinea pig for Stark. I wasn’t even out of the city, I was a hundred yards
away.”
“So
compared to that, this seems like a much better plan, don’t you think?” Steve
asked, grinning.
BECAUSE I FELT LIKE BUCKY NEEDED TO GET THAT OFF HIS CHEST, AND I AM PROUD TO HAVE BEEN A PART OF IT.
I’m also very proud of literally all the dialogue in this untitled Rogue/Remy ficlet, but I couldn’t pick a favorite bit.
-Beliving that none of your friends actually want to be your friend and they hate being near you
-Hating normal things because they were used to mock you
-Having to seek constant validation for your existance
-Remembering particular insults you’ve been called for years and will probably never forget them
-Beliving you’re too ugly for anyone to ever love
-Not wanting to go to a new school/further education because you know the same thing will happen there
-Having your parents tell you that you’re only being ‘teased’
-Having people wash their hands in disgust if they accidentally touch you.
Remember, you don’t have to feel all of these to understand
-Having people say you like someone as a way to gross that someone out -Never quite trusting anyone. -Having people ask you out as a dare -”They’re only making fun of you ‘cause they’re jealous!” -”He’s only mean to you ‘cause he’s got a crush on you!” -Having to deal with bullshit ‘zero tolerance’ policies
-”hey, my friend thinks you’re cute!”
This. I dealt with almost all of this bullshit all my life and it still haunts me today…
-being unable to process genuine acceptance and compliments when you finally get them -fear emotional intimacy will result in betrayal
- being hyper aware of specific body parts you got bullied for & intensively hating them even when its been like 10 years
- never really missing your childhood or wanting to go back
- just straight up thinking youre below everyone and have less worth and having that issue so ingrained to your very being that you never even realise how big of an issue it is
Seriously, though, I’m not sure how I’d describe my style, since I tend to vary it depending on how I want the story to feel. Something like things we lost in the fire, my Les Mis Avatar AU, is supposed to feel very different from, like, this, my First Order Rey AU. I guess my style is very character-driven–I perceive my characters (and other people’s characters, in fic) as very real people, so I try to model the feeling of the story after the way the POV character thinks. Which is how I end up with things like the Hamilton Star Wars AU, which has A LOT of commas and run-on sentences because…Alexander Hamilton.
R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) who you consider an influence?
Oh buddy. Oh buddy buckle up. First and biggest nod goes to Robin McKinley (GO READ HER STUFF IMMEDIATELY), who I aspire to be when I grow up. Robin McKinley taught a very scared and very lonely kid who had just been told that she was too old for playing pretend that there was still magic in the world, and I’m always going to owe a massive debt to her for that. If this was a ‘pick one’ sort of question, it would be her. JK Rowling, obligatory honorable mention, Lions for the Cup. PC Hodgell, who is better at sweeping world-building and not-cliche battles between Good and Evil than anyone I can think of off the top of my head (see my rant about her tragically unknown series here). Neil Gaiman, who balances the creepy with the daily with the mystical in a way I desperately envy. The innumerable mediocre authors I trucked through in my school libraries, who taught me what NOT to do, which is just as important as what to do. For fic authors… @notbecauseofvictories, because her Tumblr fics showed me that it was okay to be messy and wild and just…happy about what I was writing at a time where I kind of needed it. @determamfidd because Sansukh was, like, fucking life-changing, buddy, I am living a post-Sansukh life right now. The author of the first fic I ever read (no idea who it was, but it was a Buffy fic with a rewrite of Season 3, and I was PRETTY CONCUSSED at the time, so the fact that I even remember the plot should earn me brownie points, it was a great fic and I should find it again). Um…I can think of maybe twenty more people, published and otherwise, off the top of my head, but I think this massive block of text is long enough, yes?
S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?
Um…many. I’m a sucker for soulmate AU’s, I really am. I am also pathetically weak for mutual pining, particularly the whole “X person will never love me back and it’s okay I’ll just sit here and quietly pine away because I WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY” thing. It’s probably a good part of the reason I like Enjolras/Grantaire so much, the Enjolras/Grantaire tag on AO3 is here for you and all your pining needs. Those are probably the two biggest ones, although I’m also weak for size difference because I’m FIVE GODDAMN FEET TALL and everyone I could hypothetically date is a fucking giant.
