Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

bogleech:

While sick in bed I kept thinking, or rather my brain kept thinking with or without my input, about the sheer overwhelming volume of fiction human beings have produced, like the number of myths, legends, novels, comics, games, movies, plays, original characters and even dreams and imaginary friends felt so vast and all encompassing that it seemed to dwarf all of our other achievements as a species and the sheer immensity and pointlessness of it all felt almost terrifying until suddenly my foggy mind was like “whoa, whoa, wait, WAIT A MINUTE….THAT’S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!! WE’RE THE STORYTELLER PLANET, THAT’S OUR THING IN THE UNIVERSE!”

So that turned into all these scenarios where for whatever reason most other sentience races could have technological power beyond our comprehension but still no knack for concocting even rudimentary child-level fiction and are so easily entertained by any shit we can make up that it’s basically our superpower

Humans end up paying their way across the galaxy just making things up as they go along and even our worst most garbage pieces of media become an almost priceless commodity.

You’re cornered by a tentareaver from the bloodstar or whatever and she’s all “SO, EARTHBEAST…TELL ME ONE OF THESE FAMOUS FICSHUNS OF YOURS AND I’LL CONSIDER SPARING YOUR LIFE”

*sigh*…okay, once upon a time there was a tentareaver…

“WAS SHE OF THE FLESHRENDER CASTE????”

….Yes, the most beautiful fleshrender in her whole clusterhive.

“TEE HEE”

shamrockjolnes:

nonbinaryspacedust:

Star Trek Beyond is already the best Star Trek reboot movie and it hasn’t even come out yet

#…… i thought it just did eyyyyyyyyy (x)

NICE GIF USE KID

anon-omis:

To all of you writers who produce 5,000 word chapters, kudos to you.

To all of you writers who produce 1,000 word chapters, kudos to you.

To all of you writers who do multi-chapter fics, kudos to you.

To all of you writers who do one shots and dabbles, kudos to you.

Original works? Kudos to you.

Fanfiction? Kudos to you.

Just started writing? Kudos to you.

Been writing for years? Kudos to you.

Write stories that you don’t share but look at fondly because you love it? Kudos to you.

I am a firm believer that no one type of writing is better than another. The love and energy you put into your work is what matters. You all deserve kudos. So just know that if you feel like no one is reading or no one cares that I am, and I do.

Keep up all the great work you brilliant people.

thehypnobunny:

the-late-adopter:

shitifindon:

drethelin:

ozymandias271:

what does “men who adhere to strict gender binary” even mean tho

NO ONE adheres to the gender binary! NO ONE FITS THEIR GENDER ROLE PERFECTLY! THAT’S THE POINT! AARRRGGH! 

NOOOOO OOOOONE…. ADHERES TO THE GENDER BINARY LIKE GASTON!

Originally posted by clarabellecow

when I try to hear this in my head my mental voice is incapable of pronouncing it fast enough to fit the timing of the line

“noooo oooone… adjksjfksfjslenry like Gaston!”

and when I try to fit it to one of the longer such lines, my mental voice becomes too confused about conflicting scansion to continue

no one’s droll like gaston
no one’s swole like gaston
no one fits his assigned gender role like gaston

I’m especially fond of the paaaatriaaarchy
My what a guy that gastooon

fifty-shadesofgay:

hedgehog-with-a-bl0g:

“It’s their job to do that. You don’t have to say thank you”

can we please have more aggressively polite memes in the world???

haberdashing:

tag meme:

• but
  
• her
• aim
• is
• getting
• better

kvrtaclan:

tag meme

• mm
  
• wife
  
• scream
  
• smol
  
• hold
• heart

hakunindo:

dwelldreamer:

I never understood why a girl is always suppose to be that ride or die chick that stays with a man and helps him build and become the man she deserves but a guy is never told to stay with a woman while she finds herself. A guy will always look for that perfect woman but we are suppose to settle for a building project?! Fuck that.

I so wholeheartedly love the generation of women coming up in this world. The realization that you are all stars of your own story and not a supporting actress in a mans is so important.

blueelectricangels:

disease-danger-darkness-silence:

lesbiancyborg:

i want to know more about charlie weasley’s friends. who the hell agrees to SMUGGLE A DRAGON across international borders on two days notice? who are these people that are willing to accept a dragon in a crate from a couple of small children, no questions asked? i need to know more, tell me about the antics of these mysterious flying dragon smugglers.

ESPCAD.

European Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Dragons.

Like PETA but with less grossness and more punk activism. And fire breathing dragons so like no one really fux with ‘em.

speaking as a biologist, i can guarantee i would show up without question to smuggle an endangered species that would otherwise be destroyed across national borders to a sanctuary on two days’ notice.

like. if a small child showed me a box containing a juvenile alligator snapping turtle and was like “you need to smuggle this across the continent to kansas or else it will be destroyed” i would be like “sure, would you like me to send you a postcard, small child”

ericfvckingharris:

Growing up in an abusive household is a fucking trip dude……If you’ve never had someone angrily wash a dish at you or fold a sock in your direction then how are you gonna understand why I get nervous when you quietly do the laundry, or why I ask “are you mad at me?” when you set the bag of groceries down too hard? It’s a totally different way of living and it impacts you long after you’ve left the situation.

tumdrake:

…….when will anything go as hard as ‘everytime we touch’ by cascada……such a bop…..changed a nation…..beatles who??? 

sonneillonv:

mazarin221b:

wordsbetweenthelines:

pilferingapples:

mswyrr:

madamedevideoland:

pilferingapples:

thehighestpie:

the-siege-perilous:

wellblunttheknives:

pigffoot:

i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and

the narrator just said 

“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”

fuck 

#but wow let me tell you about how the american civil war changed the whole culture of grief and death  #because before that people died at home mostly  #where their family saw them die and held their body and had proof they were really dead and it was a process  #but during the war people left and never came home their bodies never came back there was no proof  #people died in new horrific ways on the battlefield literally vaporized by cannonballs or lost in swamps and eaten by wild animals  #and there were NO BODIES to send home  #and people simply couldn’t grasp that their son or father or husband was really gone  #there are stories about people spending months searching for their loved ones  #convinced they couldn’t be dead if there were no body they were simply lost or hurt and they needed to be saved and brought home  #embalming also really started during the civil war as a way for bodies to be brought home as intact as possible  #wow i just wowowow the culture of death and grief and stuff during this time period is fascinating and sad  #history  (via souryellows)

#quietly reblogs own tags  #also the civil war was when dog tags and national cemetaries became a thing  #and during the war there was n real system in place to notify families of the deaths  #like they’d find out maybe from letters from soldiers who were there when their loved one died nd stuff  #but there was no real system  #and battlefield ambulances were basically invented because so many people died on the battlefield when they could have been saved if they co  #…could have been moved frm the battlefield to a hospital  #like there was this one really inlfuential dude whose son died that way and he became dedicated to getting an ambulance system in place  

I’m not doing this in the correct tag-style, but.

IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones.  People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.

(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.

cool (ghost) story, bro.

reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”

a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*

the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance

very good stuff

Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*

Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale  lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war - how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.

Link

reclusiveq:

transformativeworks:

upagainstabookcase:

I want to take some time to think about Soulmate AUs in broader social and historical context. (I’m sticking to the ‘first words written on your body’ version of those aus)

Thoughts on Society:

• In a soulmate universe there would be distinctly less homophobia because queerness would be both normalized and no one would be able to argue that it isn’t natural. (Not that there wouldn’t be any because people are assholes). 
  
• Religion would be structured differently - destiny would be seen as an incontrovertible subject. “Of course you have a destiny and a place in God’s plan, just look at those words on your arm.” What words were written on the arms of Messiahs and prophets?
  
• Scientists attempting to explain it through genetics and physics. 
• The culture of introductions would be essential. What you say to new people would be built into the culture of what is polite and it would change society by society. 
• Societies with strict verbal introduction rules that limit the finding of soul mates (because what would disrupt strict social stratification than princes discovering that their soul mate is a maid). 
• Societies where people craft personalized introductions and use the same line like a personal signature each time they meet someone new.  
• First day of school or college or a new job being almost all meeting rituals.  
• Special festivals that are dedicated to meeting new people and talking to them. Pilgrimages for young adults to go town by town to meet as many people as possible. 

Pop Culture

• Massive online databases full of those first words. 
• Books dedicated to the first words of famous people. 
• Analyses of your words (a la astrology: because you have the word ‘time’ in your words it means…)
• Matchmakers who promise they’ll find you Your Soulmate! 
• Imagine the shipping debates around TV shows: “Her words haven’t been revealed yet! So she could be his match!” or “They revealed his words in season 2 so we know his match isn’t Fred!” 

Interpersonal:

• Imagine the pressure to find your match 
• People who claim children raised outside of matches are more destructive and less well adjusted and at a disadvantage
• “If you have sex outside a Match you will catch chlamydia and you will DIE”
• Special marriages for matches. 
  
• Support groups for those who find their Matches late in life. 
• Imagine the family pressure in some families to never meet anyone unapproved by the family. “Your father speaks to everyone first!” 
  
• Different marriage systems 
• Flexible ones where every non-match marriage is considered voidable if a soulmate match is found. Imagine being the person left behind by someone you love and trust because of words on their skin. 
• Or a system of different marriages where people have different partners for different contexts: This is my household wife June and my Match wife Alice her household husband Larry and we all make it work. 
• Or systems where you can’t legally marry unless you can both show your words and prove you are a match. 
• People who lie about it to avoid the social pressure inherent in finding your match. “Of course my husband and I are a match!” Or teens who lie to their parents that someone is their match because their parents disapprove of their new date. 
• Parents who worry like hell about their kid’s words. 
• People who fall in love with the “wrong person” because this social system means that there is literally a wrong person. But they truly fall in love. Who try and scratch off their soulmate words from their skin because FUCK destiny, we’re making our own. 
• Imagine how broken you would feel if you were asexual/aromantic and you didn’t have words. 
  
• Imagine having words that you hated. Imagine having words on your skin that were a slur or an insult or a threat and knowing that someday you will meet someone who will say that to you and they are someone you are supposed to love.
  

It fascinates me because the idea is so much bigger than just meet-cute scenarios and fluff fics. It would change society from the ground up. 

I want to write the one in bold a little bit. 

I would love to read in-depth discussion about each of these ideas. Sadly, there’s not much available. What does exist, though, is discussion about fannish tattoos, which are voluntary physical marks of things we value. Transformative Works and Cultures has a couple of interesting articles on this topic by Bethan Jones, which you can read here and here.

Growing up believing that the words have to be spoken out loud, in person, to you, but discovering it was that person you met online that one time.

living400lbs:

daji-ruhu:

systlin:

daji-ruhu:

artistickacchi:

daji-ruhu:

pretty-boy-jon:

ooswinssouffle:

appropriately-inappropriate:

rukafais:

graveyardhorse:

korrakun:

my favorite college experience is when i had a 7am class and the kid next to me literally poured a monster energy drink into his coffee said “i’m going to die” and drank the whole thing

i knew a guy who brewed his instant coffee with monster instead of water. three cups in two hours. i think he ascended to the astral realm

the survivability of the human race never ceases to amaze me

TABI ANECDOTE

My final year I lived with engineering masters students. One night, I’m finishing up my final paper, I’m juuuust backing up my final copy, and my housemate’s cat knocks a vase over onto my laptop.

Which wouldn’t be a problem except my cable had been chewed on (thanks Kobe), so the wiring was exposed. Circuits short out, I fling myself back to avoid electrocution and by the time we get the situation handled, my laptop AND my external hard drive have been fried by the surge.

I mean, fried. Like, they-are-vaguely-smoking fried.

I start to cry, because there goes fifty percent of my final grade.

Ahmad just goes “it’s okay, we will fix”. I’m like “how the fuck do you propose that?” And he’s like “I have spare laptop.” “THIS IS DUE IN THE AM!”

And he looks me dead in the eye and goes, “I said I will help. Go get the laptop.”

So off I go. By the time I make it downstairs, there’s this chemical /reek/ in the kitchen. I go in and there he is, methodically crushing caffeine pills with the bottom of a glass on a ceramic plate, periodically dusting the powder into a cooking pot. Meanwhile, his coffee pot is chugging away on the counter.

As I watch, he takes the coffee pot, empties it into the cooking pot, lets THAT come to a boil and dumps in some of his Turkish coffee, AND the remaining caffeine pill powder, which by now is starting to look uncomfortably like coke.

He lets that steep, and by now the coffee/burning smell is so strong it’s woken up all six of the other housemates, who have all come downstairs and are vacillating between staring at my laptop and at this concoction with undisguised horror.

He pours this sludge into a mug, stirs in about four /tablespoons/ of sugar and slides it my way.

I figure that I’m probably dead either way regardless, so I suck it back, filtering the grounds through my teeth as I go.

I’ve had three sips when it hits, and I feel my heart trip on a beat. I must have gone white cause he nods, all pleased, and points me at his laptop.

Long story short, I got an week’s extension, didn’t sleep for five days, had a conversation with my BLINDS in SPANISH, and got a B+, with a note that it was an “engaging read and well-written, when intelligible”.

To this day, coffee any stronger than a pale off-beige makes my chest hurt.

I honestly thought he was going to drink the coffee and perform was magic on the laptop but.. nope. even better. Honest to god, I really want to know how that conversation with the blinds went. 

Bruh. BRUH.

This is so real. LMFAOOO

I’m concerned for all of you. You at least shortened your life by ten years.

I hate to use a Mad Max reference but WITNESS ME. -chugs monster and takes midterms-

My minor is in Chemistry. 

I collect chemistry glassware. 

I figured out how to triple-distill and vacuum-extract coffee to raise the caffeine concentration 20-30x. 

The first time I sampled a mug of the end product, I didn’t sleep for 2 days and was convinced that I could feel air molecules. 

Now I drink it in shot glasses. 

THE GATES OF VALHALLA ARE OPEN. WITNESS ME. 

I AM SCREAMING YOU ARE AWAITED

I CANNOT STOP LAUGHING. 

littleredloki:

So, after listening to the Hamilton soundtrack for like the fifteenth time I decided to look up Hamilton’s last words. I’ve never realized how accurate the characterization was until I read, essentially, “He kept talking for hours after getting shot. Nobody knows his exact last words because he wouldn’t stop talking. The man with so much to say refused to go quietly.”

…I want to be surprised.

ariadneodair:

Why Hikaru Sulu being gay is so important:

- Star Trek is a huge cinematic franchise. It is huge. It has thousands of fans of all different ages. This is a huge, huge step for diversity in wide spread cinema.

- The writers says Sulu will have a husband and a daughter. Not only will he be happy, he will have a family, he will have a KID. Considering how bleak LGBT representation has been this year alone, having a happy little girl with two Daddys is incredible.

- Science fiction does not tend to be an area where we have LGBT representation. 

- Sulu is a main character. He has been an important part of the series and is a major badass.

- John Cho is Korean- American, so not only are we having LGBT representation but POC - LGBT representation! 

- Star Trek have announced Sulu’s sexuality before the film is even out. So therefore giving a big fuck you to any homophobes who now won’t go see the film. Zero fucks given.

- And best of all: the original actor who played Sulu came out in 2005 as a gay man - Sulu being gay is paying respect to real life events. How cool is that?

ifitgivesyoujoy:

i just realized something: think about padme amidala’s public image. nobody knew she was married. nobody knew who anakin skywalker was at all–he was just some random jedi trainee, and by the time anybody would have started paying attention to him in the public eye, they would have known him as darth vader. to the public, anakin became a faceless villain who always was who he was, no fall from grace needed.

so, padme. i’m sure she had supporters across the republic. i’m sure her time as queen of naboo was EXTREMELY well-documented, and honestly, based on her rotation of outfits, she was probably a full-on celebrity. she was young and brilliant and a passionate defender of her people, and even though the empire seized power in the end, i wouldn’t be surprised if the rebellion decades later directly descended from the ideals of her followers.

but think about the circumstances of her death from the outside. people probably knew she was pregnant by some unknown father, of course, but this is a universe with robot doctors–saying “she died in childbirth” would probably be like saying “she died of the common cold” today. not something that happens, especially for a celebrity politician with unlimited resources. and there must have been a child, but what happened to it? did it die too? as a media narrative, it’s flimsy at best, ESPECIALLY considering the timing of her death.

padme amidala, the woman who ruled a planet at 14 and sat stony-faced while every other senator cheered on palpatine’s rise to power, died under mysterious circumstances just as the government she’d defended crumbled. from the outside, it seems pretty obvious that she was assassinated.

if this was a universe that at all made sense, padme amidala would have been a household name among republic loyalists. her tragically short life, her noble self-sacrifice for the ideals she believed in, would have been LEGENDARY. when the rebellion rose, she would have been the name on everybody’s mind–do it in her honor, people would have said. finish the fight she started.

i know we can’t go back in time and change the original trilogy, but the sequel movies? come on. don’t tell me darth vader is the only looming icon in this franchise.

goddessofidiocy:

i’m honestly really emotional about the sulu reveal in star trek because finally, finally, we have a character in a major mainstream film that isn’t a its-so-hard-being-gay-we’re-cheating-on-our-spouses-its-so-scandalous-and-sad oscar-bait drama. finally, hollywood might be recognizing that gay people can exist in universes other than sad, reality-laden ones that end in tragic death. we’ve taken the first step, into sci-fi, and it’s an incredible feeling.

now, all we can do is hope that other major studios take the hint.

itarille0797:

thebaconsandwichofregret:

ugly-bread:

dragon-from-the-burning-mountain:

anidragon:

moshingtothesherlocktheme:

Well uh…

1.) one or both of people you see as a “straight couple” could be pan/bi/poly/ace

2.) one or both of them could be trans or non binary

3.) you could be misgendering someone

4.) They could be there to give moral support to a queer friend or family member who didn’t want to go alone.

Number four is important

5. They could be there because they support the cause stop fucking gatekeeping

6. They could be there in memory of a loved one, don’t forget Pride used to be a memorial as well as a celebration. I know a good number of straight people who go to Pride to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have died because they want to remember them as they lived, happy and joyful and surrounded by a community that loved them.

ALL OF THE FUCKING ABOVE.

clarkent:

someone: so how are you-

me:

captaincrusher:

ncc-1337:

Hopefully Sulu being gay will mean that Lucasfilms will feel like they have to one up Star Trek and add more gay characters. A chain reaction of making every character LGBT+ just because of rivalry.  

This is the space race we want.

greenmaskedmarauder:

geneva-pnw:

I just want everyone to see how unrealistic some expectations are.

#let’s be real it’s not really happening from Halloween to Easter