An AU with Rey as part of the First Order, based on this photoset by the immensely talented @greyjoyss. In case you were curious, this is why I ask for short prompts, because this is SUPER LONG and got WILDLY OUT OF HAND. Crossposted to my AO3 here.
She
isn’t a Skywalker—or maybe she is. She
can’t remember, so does it matter? She
is herself.
Her
mothers scream when she’s born. Her
human mother screams in effort and pain.
The other screams in ecstasy, and somewhere in the galaxy the last
Jedi’s flesh-and-blood hand shakes as the Force writhes with the birth of a new
sun. To the eyes of the minimally
Force-sensitive nurse, the baby girl is wreathed in starlight, her wide and
tearless eyes wandering over things unseen.
I just saw an AU gifset that used the AOU “language!” joke in all seriousness and like
guys
Steve Rogers curses worse than a sailor, he can strip the paint off a ship’s hull and you know why? he was in the ARMY
he’s great at holding it in but trust me, that kid is mentally saying FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR BULLSHIT SUCK MY STAR SPANGLED DICK at Pierce, at Ross, at the Red Skull, literally everyone
2. Start with any other
sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t
imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from
school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor
Day.”
3. Then you’re done.
I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child
who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five
years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.
The word “scenario” is related to the Latin word “scena” which means “scene,” but in Latin the “c” made the [k] sound. Over time, the [k] sound was dropped but Latin based words retained their “sc” spelling. So, technically the “c” is silent and the “s” is not. It is still included even though we don’t say it. This happens a lot in English where the pronunciation of older words have changed, but the spelling has remained relatively the same. Now, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Have a nice day.
I’m not even going to lie, I judge people, and I judge them hard. if I see a person with some wacky ass clothes on or a girl wearing bright blue eyeshadow up to her super thin arched sharpie looking eyebrows ya I’m judging them because I personally don’t agree with their choices, but I keep my mouth shut and keep my damn opinions to myself because I’m not a piece a shit who wants to put others down. it’s perfectly okay to not agree with someones choices, but there is absolutely no reason for you to tell them that you think what they’re doing is wrong or to tell them that you don’t like how they look or dress or act. THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR IT. stop talking shit and then defending yourself by saying “oh well i’m just stating my opinions!!! freedom of speech!!!!” you’re not just innocently stating your opinions, you’re being a jerk.
Somewhere in the Leverage universe, there is a conspiracy theorist trying to prove that a certain minor league baseball player, a Canadian hockey player, and an American country music singer are all the same person. They have a file with various news printouts, and keep trying to upload them to a website, but every time they do, the site mysteriously crashes, threads go missing on discussion boards, and all electronic records of this man have simply vanished.
Three years later a man comes to Portland and settles down in this brewery, cuz somebody said it wasn’t a half-bad place to get food. And then he sees the chef.
Turns out he’s a half-decent researcher and very good at finding people who desperately need help, and he eventually gets hired as a “marketing associate” for the pub.
The order’s wrong. He gets a job offer from Leverage International, that’s why he goes to Portland in the first place.
He doesn’t understand why they picked a brewpub for the interview (and what the hell is up with the house beer? Weird name, weirder flavor, but the server just smiles and says it’s an acquired taste and he may want to start acquiring it…), until the chef is his second interview of three.
“I wasn’t even looking for a job,” Bobby said, checking to make sure his charging cords were all secure in the flap of the laptop carry-on case as they pulled up to the airport drop-off zone. “I’m still not sure it’s not a scam.”
“Lot of effort to go to for a scam,” his sister pointed out, deftly flinging the car across three lanes to try and get a good spot at the curb.
“I mean I guess even if it is a scam they paid for my flight out to Portland. I hear it’s a nice town.”
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……
