The way we perceive time and history is so weird I get so tripped out when I think about how Cleopatra lived closer tot he iPhone being invented than she did to the Great Pyramids being built. Or how Stonehenge would have already been ruins when Jesus walked the earth or how Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire or how Anne Frank and MLK were born in the same year like man this it’s all so crazy
“Are you really going to vote for Clinton just because she isn’t Trump?”
Yes? I would literally elect Chef Boyardee because he isn’t Trump.
My dear Americans:
When we here in Canada had our last election, we made a massive effort to vote strategically. There were even groups here who (since we don’t elect our PM directly but rather elect a ruling party) were literally going around making sure everyone knew who in their voting area was most likely to beat the Conservative candidate so that we WOULD NOT GET HARPER.
At the time I explained at length to many people how at that point, @tkingfisher‘s beagle Gir would make a better PM than Harper. Then I paused and thought, “hey, she lost a dog … relatively recently? In the last year? Was that the beagle? I can’t remember. … anyway it doesn’t matter, because her beagle would make a better PM than Harper even if said beagle were dead.”
You, my dear Americans, are now in this same position. Gir, all by himself with no advisors, would still make a better President than that POS, even if he were dead (the beagle, not that jerk; I am not sure that life or lack thereof would make much difference to that jerk’s presidency).
You are not voting for anyone at this point. You are voting against Trump.
Do not be a fucking moron and end up with Trump because you didn’t vote against him. Because Gir, even if dead, would make a better president. Do not mistake politics for a lifelong statement on your values. You will not benefit anyone or make any kind of statement by doing something that makes that piece of crap more likely to get elected, and every vote not cast for his best competition (that is, the person most likely to beat him, whoever they are!) is something that makes his election more likely.
Do not do this, my darling Americans.
Ideals are great. But so is long-term strategic thinking, and all of you young Americans reading me have many many years left of voting and doing your best to bring change and improvement to your country … unless you are foolish enough to let that jerk win.
In which case we all lose.
So please don’t be fucking stupid. Whoever the not-Trump nominee is, vote for them. Even if you don’t like them. Because you are not voting for whoever that is; you are voting against That Jerk.
Okay? Okay.
^^^^^ SERIOUSLY I’ve hear some people (relatively well-educated people, too) say that they’d vote Trump over Hillary because they actually think she’d be worse. Let me explain something, hun. Clinton might not be the world’s most model candidate, but she has decades of policy experience and is intelligent and educated. Her main problems are some unfortunate past decisions (which any politician of her tenure will have), and that she seems to lack some charisma. El Trumpador, on the other hand, is a deeply unsuccessful and dishonest businessman who makes lewd comments about women– including his own daughters– and is overtly racist. Are you fucking kidding me? The man can’t even handle a hotel chain; how the hell do you expect him to handle the most overpowered country on the planet? Would you be able to sleep at night if you knew that if something happened, that bleached baboon’s ass would the the one in the situation room? That’s not to mention the bigotry! Please take the election seriously.
@ people who think Hillary is somehow worse than Trump: stop being deluded. Hillary may be not the ideal presidential candidate and she may touch all of your alarm buttons but /please/, if you can’t see the difference between her and the orange creep, I don’t have a lot to say to you. Vote strategically. If Bernie doesn’t become the democratic candidate, please use your common sense and vote for Hillary. Voting for Hillary =/ compromising your progressive beliefs. It means saving your country from the disaster that would be president Trump.
Yeah, like…I legitimately loathe Hillary. I think she’s horrible and have for years. I can’t stand her as a person, or as a politician and in most elections I would have a similar reaction of my chosen candidate being ‘not Hillary’ whoever that may be….but in this election that’s not the case. You can’t even begin to compare her and Trump, so much as she disgusts me, I’ll have to vote for her if it comes to that.
Today has not been a good day so I’m not at my usual optimist level, but tbh if it’s that hard for /me/ to stomach voting for Hillary? I can’t imagine that she’d actually win if it came down to her and Trump, because I hate him an extreme amount and for people who don’t, he’s probably gonna seem far more palatable than her.
ADHD is sitting in the dining hall with my friends and being able to tune into every other conversation besides the one at my own table.
ADHD is having a thought, opening my phone to follow through with it, and completely blanking on why my phone is now unlocked.
ADHD is procrastinating a 10+ page paper because something tells me I just can’t work on it right now, or I have way more time and there’s no reason to do it.
ADHD is making too many ridiculous connections in my head, then losing the conversation because I just went on such a different train of thought.
ADHD is being able to invest myself in 4 hours of tv/movies but not being able to sit down and do 5 minutes of necessary paperwork.
marvel:
the inhumans movie will be a metaphor for oppressed people. it's going to be a very interesting movie, very different from anything we've done before.
me, in an x-men tshirt, blogging about x-men, with an x-men movie on in the background:
what
The problem with shipping a niche ship: you read all the fanfiction in one afternoon and if you want some more you have to write it yourself.
The problem with shipping a popular ship: 16,835 results on AO3. You start playing with tags and sorting through it, full of determination, confident that with so many fanfics you’re bound to find something you’ll like. Two hours, 30 instances of awful writing, 8 squick-outs,13 wtf AUs and 157 just plain uninteresting later you have to rush back to the canon to even remember why you liked the ship in the first place.
do u ever feel like you’ve accidentally tricked certain people into thinking you are smarter and have more potential than you actually do and do you ever think about how disappointed they’ll be when you inevitably crash and burn
Yes. It’s called Imposter Syndrome! It’s incredibly common (REALLY common), especially among women.
Imposter Syndrome is a state of mind in which you are convinced that your successes and accomplishments are either just because of luck or circumstance, or that they don’t exist at all and that you’ve just fooled people into believing you’ve accomplished something. It’s very stressful because you’re also convinced that people are going to discover that you’re a fraud.
One way to avoid “being discovered” is to outwardly downplay and devalue your accomplishments. This way, you’re telling people to expect less of you so they won’t be disappointed in you later on.
Another way to do this is to avoid taking on professional/academic projects that might help your career. If you’re convinced you’re going to be found out as a fraud, you’re not going to try to compete with a qualified coworker for the same high-profile client, are you?
And then, of course, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you never try to move upwards (because you’re convinced you’d fail), people will stop providing you with opportunities to do so. If you downplay your accomplishments, people will believe that your accomplishments aren’t so great and will treat you that way.
And what’s so frustrating is that, well, you’re NOT a fraud. You haven’t fooled anyone–there’s no lie being told. You really DID do all those great things. You really ARE capable. It wasn’t luck or chance or circumstance–it was you!
If the original post describes how you feel, I urge you to look up Imposter Syndrome and start treating yourself better!
So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
Incidentally most of the banks in Lost Souls-verse are run by vampires
The counting thing always seemed symptomatic of OCD, to me. Do medications work on vampires? If one bit me, would he be able to chill out on the counting for awhile?
Okay but that’s a whole other layer. Because it’s generally accepted that, while normal meds/drugs don’t work on vampires, they WILL get some kind of transmitted effect if the person they chomp on has something in their system.
So are there, like, helpful college students on anxiety meds who are making bank by donating blood to vampires every other weekend? Are there, like, therapists who give vampires counseling and then set them up with a human ‘meds buddy’ who’s willing to donate the occasional pint?
In the same vein as other ‘things humans do that aliens might be weirded out by’ what if human pattern recognition skills were the thing? Like the ability to see a cloud resolve into a dog, or faces in wall patterns. Stuff that evolved from predators having camouflaging abilities, or let’s face it, bugs that can look basicaly like a leaf to prey ON.
Imagine an alien being super confounded by a human being like ‘oh, that control board looks like a face’ and it’s just this big grouping of random lights and line but no ALL the humans on board think it looks like a FACE and theyve started NAMING it. And it just seems so confusing- is there anything on this flat painted wall? ‘No of course not’ HOW IS THERE AN OF COURSE NOT. What about in that galaxy? And the human squints and stares at it and says ‘yeah, it looks like a cat.’
And they an draw out what they’re recognizing in the lines but it’s just so strange.
And then an enemy develops ‘cloaking technology’ that’s based on camouflaging and are so angry that every single human is able to point it out because it’s a completely obvious moving shape to them.
or: alien species are introduced to leaf insects, tigers, and that one octopus that imitates a coconut and freak the heck out.
god I love this kind of post
The Girrami had never known deception until they started expanding into the greater galaxy. They did not like it. The closest word in their home language for deception translated roughly to “speaking before having all the facts”. It had taken time to learn that other races would outright hide information, or worse, speak untruths for their own ends.
It was fortunate, the Girrami thought, that they had resources that the race who called themselves “Humans” desperately needed for medical supplies. The fact that the Girrami had (in line with their overarching philosophy of sharing what was needed) offered these resources freely, without (as the Humans would say) “strings attached”, had made many the Humans quickly warm to the Girrami, and in turn, freely offer the Girrami advice on how to better negotiate.
Human: “Honestly, that was almost embarrassing to watch. Tell you what, you said that you had contact with the Farop?”
Cappa Girrami: “Yes. We have had… difficulties in our dealings with that race.”
Human: “Yeah that must have been like watching puppies walk through a meatgrinder. Those guys are total assholes. Tell you what, your medicine saved my little boy, so I’m willing to do a little quid pro quo. Are you people familiar with the concept of a corporate lawyer? Because I am willing to offer you my services for cheap. No, don’t thank me, this will be my pleasure.”
Humans sometimes had the most odd and upsetting turns of phrase. But once the Girrami started contracting these… lawyers and businesspeople to conduct major negotiations, many of their dealings with other races did seem to be flowing a lot more smoothly.
It did however make the Girrami wonder just how it was that the humans had become so adept at sensing deception. It seemed natural to them to start learning to “lie” and detect untruths from an early age.
And then the Girrami scientists were invited to observe a collection of specimens kept in a “natural history museum” and suddenly it all made sense.
Girrami Scientist 1: “Wait, what is that!?”
Human: “It’s a stick insect.”
Girrami Scientist 2: “And that?”
Human: “A leaf insect.”
Girrami Scientist 1: “…your insects practice deception?”
Human: “… I guess you could call it that? It’s a form of camouflage.”
Girrami Scientist 2: “What is this…’camouflage’?”
And then the Girrami realised that the Humans came from a planet where deception was so endemic that even plants practiced it.
No wonder the Humans were so good at detecting it.
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
As a child, you and your best friend made a pact to go on an real fantasy adventure. After growing up, starting your separate lives and families, and losing touch, one day he/she bursts into your office, throwing you a sword and insists you accompany them.
i’ve been thinking about why exactly i’m so attached to the story of icarus, the boy who’s been used again and again to teach us a lesson about hubris; the boy we were told as disobedient, as prideful, as reckless, as ignorant; the boy we’ve been warned to never follow, as if we did, we would end up burning our own wings and drowning in the sea along with him. i looked at the various texts and translations about his story, searching over and over for what it was that made me so drawn to it.
and then it hit me: icarus was told to not fly too high, nor to fly too low. he was told to remain in the middle, to follow his father’s path of flight—because daedalus knew of what it was like out there, of how cruel the world can be to dreamers, and he wanted his son to be wary of it. it reminded me of how parents are like nowadays (or, really, are like since the beginning of time): of how they say “dream big, but not too big”; of how they tell children to not get their hopes up too high; of how they remind their child to be realistic; of how they warn and they caution and they forcefully plant our feet on the ground and make sure our roots grow thick enough beneath it to hold us firmly down.
it’s understandable, if not twisted, the way they’re protecting us. because while it’s true, most of the time it leads to crushed dreams, dampened hopes, watered down ideas. it leads to the acceptance of things as it is, and not of things as they could be; it steals our idealism and turns it into doubt, into disbelief, into hopelessness.
maybe that’s why i’m very fond of icarus; because the thought of having this boy reach for the sky, for the sun, for the exhilaration of his freedom by going through such extreme lengths tells me a story of hope, not hubris. it tells me the story of a boy who was willing to risk everything for what he desperately wanted, it tells me the story of a boy who had the nerve to grasp at the liberation he craved, it tells me the story of a boy who loved so much he let himself be consumed by its violent, brutal wake.
and if icarus dared enough to chase after his dream, then let me burn along with him.
Everybody in the world has a superpower that compliments their soulmates superpower. When together, both their powers increase in strength exponentially. You have the most useless power ever, when one day……
But what if Anakin isn’t ignoring Kylo Ren? What if that great pull Kylo feels towards the Light is Anakin Skywalker desperately trying to save his grandson from his own fate, the way his wife and son tried to save him?
what if Anakin is literally constantly standing behind Kylo Ren, sputtering with ghostly frustration, going, “No! No! No! Do not do that! Do NOT do that! oh for fuck’s sake.”
This is almost certainly what is actually happening.
“Ben if you skewer my son-in-law with that lightsaber then SO HELP ME”
“Ben Solo your mother is blaming me for this, get your ass home and apologize now or I swear-”
And Yoda and Obi-wan are watching, shaking their heads. “Now you know how we felt,” Obi-wan says.
Yoda agrees: “A bitch, karma is.”
I love this. So many people can just totally see Anakin trying to strangle Ben from the afterlife.
The Waynes, being a noble and ancient house, do have a family motto– it’s dignified and Latin, and it’s on the family crest– but the current generation has decided that the family motto is actually “talk shit, get hit” and frankly, Bruce doesn’t know how to handle that
“Could somebody please remind Tim of the family motto” “Talk shit, get hit, Timothy” why are his kids like this?? Translating it into Latin doesn’t make it legitimate, but nice try
Tim and Damian have one of those “It has been __ days since our last incident” dry erase boards hanging in kitchen. They have never hit double digits, and they are not ashamed.
You know those people that spoil the movie halfway through because they figured out what’s going to happen? Bruce. And because he does that, all of his kids try to beat him to the punch. The Detective Clan has been permanently disinvited from all superhero movie nights. (Especially Dick. He’s the worst offender.)
Since Duke is entering the batfamily– and living in the Manor– with very little knowledge of the existing members, odds are most of his information about the other kids will come from Damian. Please. Imagine that trainwreck.
Warren and Tyagi demonstrated that buying common luxury items wasn’t the issue for most Americans. The problem was the fixed costs, the things that are difficult to cut back on. Housing, health care, and education cost the average family 75 percent of their discretionary income in the 2000s. The comparable figure in 1973: 50 percent. Indeed, studies demonstrate that the quickest way to land in bankruptcy court was not by buying the latest Apple computer but through medical expenses, job loss, foreclosure, and divorce.
Giving up a latte or another such small extravagance in this environment wasn’t going to be enough. Yet the personal finance shills continued to tell people their problems were mostly of their own making.
This strikes me as being directly related to those jackholes who are enraged when someone poor has some small or relatively small luxury: they think this is how economics work.
I’m tired of feeling guilty for every tiny indulgence that makes me feel human.
This makes me remember a story a friend of mine told me.
He was in a college course for learning financial stuff, like how to invest wisely and shit like that because he was working for the local library system in their accounting department and had to be able to advise employees on how best to use the new investment options the library was offering.
So, the professor tells the class that they should ALWAYS be saving at least $25 per paycheck into a savings account even when it’s hard because that is the only way to get into the habit of saving and also the quickest way to having emergency cash, but it was better to do at least $50.
Not terrible advice, certainly, but… My friend said there was no way he could do that. The professor scoffed at him about high dollar luxuries like coffee shop drinks or name brand food or clothes or a computer or using the bus instead of a car.
Now, my friend did not own a car; he bike rode everywhere. His wife used the bus. Both he and his wife worked. He did not buy name brand food; he got cheap store brand food in bulk and only bought what he already knew would be used in his meal calendar planned for two months at a time. He brewed his own coffee at home. He kept his electricity usage to a minimum and taught his wife and children to do the same. His kids weren’t indulged with sweets or many toys. They didn’t buy candy or hobby items. They got the free local TV channels which they honestly only used to track weather on a salvaged TV they got from a friend. They only got new clothing when their kids grew out of the old or something of theirs was too worn to patch or repair and always from thrift shops. All their furniture was secondhand and usually picked cheap from garage sales. They made the agonizing decision to purchase a home instead of renting because the net savings over all were justifiable because the house payments were cheaper than renting. They budgeted for a total of ten dollars to be put in the savings account per month, not per paycheck.
My friend and his wife planned their expenditures down to the cent at least two months in advance to make sure they could make it. They constantly researched to find the absolute best value of every item they bought. Thankfully, my friend had the analytical mind for that kind of planning. No purchase ever went unremarked upon or without heavy consideration, no matter how small. They spent wisely and stretched every dollar as far as it could go.
My friend brought in a hand written copy of his budget (because he didn’t have a computer or printer and paper was an expense he built into the budget so he could do the planning) and showed it to the professor the next day in front of the class and asked, “Where do I squeeze out $25 per paycheck?”
The professor hemmed and hawed as he went through the budget. He kept starting to say something on one line or another and then would stop himself and go to the next. Sometimes he would say shit things like “where is your gas column?” “We don’t own a car.” He spent about twenty minutes staring at my friend’s carefully planned and managed budget and could not see a single place where it could be improved.
“I guess you can’t,” the professor said and was apparently so bitter about being wrong that my friend had to keep from laughing at him even though the entire experience had soured him something awful.
People who are not struggling do not understand how money works for poor people and just assume we are horrible at managing it instead of realizing we just don’t have any. Luxury items aren’t killing us; low wages and a shit economy are.
You could have told me that this was written by Victor Hugo himself and it’s so accurate I probably would have believed it despite the reference to an appliance a century before it was invented
1. I died. MEANS: I am overwhelmed. NOT: I am deceased.
2. OTP MEANS: One True Pairing.
NOT: One Time Password.
3. Mom/Dad MEANS: Role Model.
NOT: Mother/Father.
4. I hate this. MEANS: I freaking love this.
NOT: I deplore this.
5. Slay. MEANS: Show ‘em how it’s done.
NOT: Murder.
6. Thanks for ruining my life, see you in hell. MEANS: You mean so much to my life. I’ll never leave this fandom.
NOT: A series of insults.
7. Adhkydvkvecibggrxavjnxjxsz MEANS: A state of wordless excitement.
NOT: An aneurism.
Also, 8. Rude! MEANS: This gave me a lot of feelings I didn’t ask for. NOT: Discourteous or impolite.
And, 9. How Dare You? MEANS: You are amazing, this is amazing! NOT: And express of indignation.
10. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! MEANS: You made my heart hurt, but it’s a good hurt. I love you! NOT: I hate you and wish harm on you and your animals.
11. Was that necessary?? MEANS: Why did you remind me of that painful bit of characterisation/canon? NOT: You took that too far/That was needlessly painful for the sole purpose of reactions.
