So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia
Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”
Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:
1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.
2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)
3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.
4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)
5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.
“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?” “Those worthless rocks? Yeah.” “80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”
“I’m telling you, they terraform for fun!” “Don’t be ridiculous” “No, seriously. Some of their most celebrated cultural loci are built on swamps. They have an entire city that is literally in a body of water. Not, like, an artificial pontoon city, they literally sunk the foundations into water. For Grilp’s sake, they build elaborate structures out of frozen water AND THEN SLEEP IN THEM.” “Dear Thilak. Think we could get them to terraform our moons?” “Psh, they’d probably pay for the privilege.”
Eventually, it occurs to someone that humans are the perfect terraforming shock troops, as it were. They think it’s fun to be sent to horrible planets! They’re really good at surviving and then taming them! All you have to do is sit back and wait until the planet is habitable, and then move there yourself! It’s genius.
It only takes one try before the reality of the situation sets in: human definitions of ‘taming’ and ‘habitable’ are woefully incomplete.
“Why did you not eliminate the venomous plant life?” Grahssk’ti moans, clutching one limb.
“Those?” The human laughs. “Why bother? They’re not that bad. And they eat the mosquitoes.”
Grahssk’ti shudders. The ‘mosquitoes’ are… not to be mentioned. Just one swarm of them caused a landing shuttle to crash three planetary daylights ago.
“And the acid storms? Why did you not warn us of them?”
“I mean, they’re annoying,” the human says, shrugging, “but we figured the cool sunsets made up for it.”
Grahssk’ti flails helplessly. “What about the ten-meter tall Fanged Death Bringers? They can eliminate an entire settlement in under an hour!”
“They’re so cute!” the human says, brightening. “Have you met mine? Her name is Spot!”
So, you mentioned there are different type of magic users in your Alleirat story. Any chance we could get a break down of the different types?
GODDAMN
RIGHT YOU CAN
So I
suppose the thing that bears mentioning that the way magic works in Alleirat is
that a magic user (called a ‘worker,’ except for those who use fire magic) has
inherent ability for a mode of using magic—they can channel magic in fire, in
water, in plants, in metal, whatever, but they can’t do magic in anything else. Someone who can channel magic through living
plants can’t do the same with thread or water or fire, and they’ll never be
able to learn. So this can get REALLYspecific
really fast—someone might specifically be a silk worker, for example, or a
bronze worker. It’s more common,
however, to specialize into a wide category, like ‘weather’ or ‘metal,’ so I’ll
cover a few of the more common and/or pertinent ones.
Fire
magic, obviously. Fire magic is revered
as blessed by the Wanderer, the Alleirai god of fire, battle, and lies. Brenneth, the main character, is a smith,
which—in this universe—means that she’s specifically a broadly trained
blacksmith with the ability to work in fire magic. (Fire magic users are called fire smiths, not
fire workers.) This is pretty much what it
says on the tin, with one major exception: unlike most fantasy universes where
a mage can summon and throw fireballs, this is mundane fire, which means it needs fuel. A fire smith of sufficient power can project a pillar of fire, but it’s
incredibly short lived and impractical as a weapon. Combat fire smiths generally carry small
grenade-like packages that splash flammable oil over their target, when they
can then ignite with ease.
Brenneth is something of an exception to this
rule, because her trademark is something called white fire—white in Alleirat indicating death/deadly. White fire isn’t actually white in color, but
it’s the colloquial name for dragon fire, which needs no oxygen and no fuel save
for the magical power and anger of the wielder.
Brenneth earned her title of Fireheart by her preferred fighting style
of igniting her sword with white fire—she refuses to teach this trick to anyone
on the argument that it’s a dangerous technique with the potential for mass
destruction, and she expects it to die with her.
Weather
magic, also obviously. Weather magic is
revered as blessed by the Lady of Stars, the Alleirai goddess of storms, stars,
and fallen things. Crispin is a powerful
weather worker—and a fallen thing, and yes I am very pleased with that goddess. Again, pretty much what it says on the tin,
although to varying degrees. Some
weather workers expend themselves completely bringing down a single lightning
strike, others—like Crispin—can rally hurricanes and still be standing. Crispin is one of only a very few weather
workers in history to be powerful enough to summon winds that are sufficiently strong
and precise to carry him. Much like fire
smiths, combat weather workers often use an aid to direct their magic—it’s
energetically taxing to aim lightning strikes, more so the further from one’s
self the strike is going, so many weather workers carry rapiers. They strike the rapier, which is close to themselves
and strongly conductive, and then direct the charge at their target.
Plant
workers are also pretty much what it says on the tin, with the exception that a
lot of plant workers have actual plant heritage—briatan are tree-people, descended from the universe-equivalent of
dryads. The briatan are more powerful, but less precise than pure human planet
workers. Isla Akekrei, generally known
as Krei, the daughter of Brenneth’s old right hand woman and Brenneth’s new
military ally, is briatan and a
powerful plant worker—akekrei means oak.
Krei, like many briatan plant
workers, has tattoos in various plant-based inks on her arms, which she can
manipulate and move around at will, and, also like many plant workers, she
wears cuttings of vines and other plants on her person, which she can use as
weapons. You know that scene in Sky High
where Layla flips out? Yeah, like that.
Flesh workers,
ironically, are probably the most feared people in Alleirat, save Crispin
himself. Flesh workers channel magic
through living flesh, which means they’re the magical healers in-universe. However, a flesh worker is equally capable of
healing a mortal wound or of clapping
their hand to someone’s chest and making their heart explode, making every bone
in their body shatter, or flaying them alive.
The moment blood stops moving through the body, a flesh worker’s power
is no longer capable of affecting an individual, but up until that point… As long as they have skin-to-skin contact, a
flesh worker can do pretty much whatever they want, no matter how
physiologically improbable it is. The
only thing they really can’t do is
reattach a completely severed limb.
Incidentally, this is the most common kind of worker overall—and again,
there are degrees—and the most common type of worker to go full dark side. There’s a whole cadre of flesh worker
assassins because, shocker, they’re the best at it.
Death
workers, on the other hand, are viewed in a similar way to healers in most
fantasy universes—people literally cannot fathom
a death worker going dark side. Death
workers are basically a variant on necromancers, with the ability to see
spirits who’ve become trapped on the “wrong side of the day” (Alleirai religion
says that spirits exist between days/on the other side of a day, and keep watch
on their loved ones) and raise the dead as…puppets, I guess. It’s very rare that the latter ability is
used, and generally death workers are sort of like grief counselors/priests,
responsible for performing funerals and speaking to the bereaved.
That being said, death workers are fearsome in combat. There are stories from back when Alleirat was
a bunch of small warring city-states, millennia ago, about death workers at
war, and this is how they usually go.
Two armies have been at war for years, and one,
City-State A, is finally losing. They
know that if City-State B wins the war, they’ll sweep in and slaughter everyone
left in City-State A, burn their cities—the traditional Sack of Magdeburg-esque
situation. So, a powerful death worker
who’s been serving to ensure that all the spirits of the dead are safely on the
other side of the day goes to her lord.
“Lord,” she inevitably says, “I have the power
to end this war, here and now.”
Her lord demurs, because what she’s offering is
horrific in the Alleirai culture—you never
ever tamper with a dead body except to put them to rest in the manner
specified by the dead person. This is a
capital crime.
“I will do this, and you cannot stop me,” she
says. “So bring in all the guards and
tell the camp to go to sleep, and I will save us, and then I will die for what
I’ve done.”
Her lord agrees, because what other choice is
there? And the camp goes to sleep, and
the death worker walks out onto the battlefield, where the bodies of the dead
are neatly laid out and waiting to be laid to rest. She stands in the middle of the dead, and she
reaches out her hands, and all around her, they stand and take up weapons and
march toward the enemy lines. There is a
single night of battle. Every enemy
soldier who falls is raised to march in the death worker’s army, and there are
always more dead bodies to drive forward.
The sun rises.
The camp wakes. The enemy lines
are decimated, littered with dead bodies, and some distance away, somewhere
with a clear view of the entire battle, the death worker lies dead.
The worker wreaking havoc as a weapon of a
lordling when Brenneth and Crispin come back to Alleirat? A death worker fallen through from Earth
named Hoshiko, with no friends, no support, and a conviction that she’s going
insane. ILY Shiko, I’m sorry I’m mean.
hi, i just wanted to pop by and say that things we lost in the fire is an amazing fic! not many people can successfully write angst in fics without turning the character into a pathetic woobie drowning in wangst and manpain but you do it incredibly well! you're a super talented writer and i hope you have a wonderful day!!! :D :D :D
THANK YOU SO MUCH, oh my God I’m so glad you think the angst thing is going well. I have a POWERFUL aversion to the woobie trope and I LIVE IN FEAR, okay, IN FEAR. I’m so thrilled that people seem to be of the opinion that Grantaire is a well-executed character in ‘things we lost in the fire’, I’m??? I’m not a supremely coherent recipient of compliments, not gonna lie, but THANK YOU SO MUCH.
of course! :) i'm kind of a weenie when it comes to this sort of stuff so i tend to hide behind the anon button because interacting with other humans is terrifying, even over the internet, but today seems to be a good day cause i'm not panicking at all so feel free to publish the ask! :D
My buddy, I feel you so hard, I basically live behind the anon button. But thank you so much for your permission, I love getting to collect people’s responses to my fic!
Okay guys, for writing/general reference, a bit about what a ‘blacksmith’ is and isn’t:
A blacksmith is a generalist, a person who uses tools and fire to work iron. Some blacksmiths work more specifically, so you get, say, an architectural blacksmith, who focuses more or less exclusively on things like gates, rails, fences, or an artist blacksmith, who makes wacky sculptures or what have you. These days, though, that’s a pretty blurry line. ‘Blacksmith’ is a pretty damn broad term, but it’s nowhere near broad enough to cover everything encompassed in ‘metalworker’, which is how I often see it used. There are a LOT of different skills for working metal, and no one knows them all. Some other terms:
A farrier shoes horses. They may make the shoes, or they may buy them and then size them, but they actually do the shoeing. Unless the blacksmith is also a farrier, they don’t know shit about horses’ hooves and are not qualified to deal with them and probably don’t want to.
A blacksmith works IRON (or steel), usually almost exclusively. They might work with bronze or do a bit of brazing, but those are really separate skillsets. If you work, say, tin and/or pewter, you are in fact a whitesmith. You could also be a silversmith or a coppersmith, and so on.
Knifemakers and swordsmiths have their own highly specialized and fairly complex specialties, and usually a blacksmith wouldn’t mess with that unless they want to pick up a new skillset or if they’re really the only game going for a long way around. By the same token, a swordsmith might never have learned the more general blacksmithing skills. They’re not the same thing is what I’m trying to say here. Likewise armorers. There’s overlap but it’s not the same thing.
If you make metal items via molds and casting, you work at a foundry and are a foundryman.
Look, when metalworkers and individual shops and masters were the height of industry, this shit got REALLY specific. There were people who spent their whole lives making pins. Just pins. Foundries specialized and made only bells, only cannon, only cauldrons, etc. This is scratching the surface, I just wanted to make the point that ‘blacksmith’ is not the same thing as ‘magical muscly person who knows how to do everything related to metal’.
FOR ALL MY BITCHING, I REALLY DO LOVE MY THESIS, SO.
I’m a pre-med major, but I discovered over the summer that I really, really hate research. Which I pretty much knew already but now I have proof, so. But the point is that when I picked my thesis topic I said flat out that I would do an experimental thesis when Satan built a snow fort, and the guy in charge of the pre-medical studies division was my Orgo teacher so he knew not to fuck with me. (Teachers tend to fall into one of two categories with me: they get angry about butting heads with me nonstop OR they come to terms with the fact that it’s kind of like trying to corral a hurricane and thereupon give up.)
So I thought about what I could stand doing for a full year and decided that things I like include:
Medicine
History
Military history
Weird facts about old battle tactics
Things that make other people’s eyes bug out when I tell them
And subsequently I am writing my thesis on the development of battlefield medicine through American history and I’m gonna title that bitch Only Mostly Dead.
one thing that’s always bothered me about most people’s depiction of Holmes’s usage of cocaine is that most people in Victorian England were only just beginning to realize how badly it affected people???
like tbh I feel like a better modern equivalent would just be Holmes dumping a five hour energy into his fifth cup of coffee while Watson, a trained medical professional, stares at him in horror
so last week I was walking downtown and a girl leaned out her car window and yelled “YOU LOOK LIKE A PRINCESS” and today a girl walked past me on the sidewalk and said “I love your socks” (they have birds on them) and I suggest we replace all cat-calling with girls complimenting each other on the street because honestly I have never felt more pretty or into girls in my goddamn life
Catcalling is a compliment when women do it
no, complimenting isn’t catcallng because it’s actually trying to make the person happy as opposed to deliberately harassing someone as a power trip
one of the best moments of my life was biking past this group of late-teens girls and one yelling “I LIKE YOUR BIKE,” and i smiled and waved, and another yells after me “and you’re pretty!”
women supporting other women is pure and will always be a good thing; men harassing people because they feed off of asserting dominance over people without power will always be trash
If men want to yell things like your socks are cool and I love your hair, that would be well appreciated. But instead they’ll just bark at me from their cars.
I am totally here for people of all genders replacing catcalling with gentle drive-by compliments.
For real I once had a guy on the street tell me he liked my boots and I just said thanks and he smiled and said “you look nice, have a nice day!” That was fine. That’s a compliment. I’m down for that.
The following week a guy pulled up to me in a car and told me he “would love to see that mouth around his cock”, wolf-whistled, then drove way. That is not a compliment that’s sexual harassment and it made me feel unsafe. I am floored by the number of people who apparently can’t tell the difference.
Here’s a good rule of thumb I would suggest: if you wouldn’t say it to your mother, don’t say it to a random woman on the street.
Disney/Lucas Film: *mute af on the actual nature of baze and chirrut’s actual relationship despite multiple reviews, viewers, and critics reading the onscreen relationship as that of a couple*
do you guys think cassian andor had to undergo spy training—well. not really “training” so much as a week locked in a room with an imperial torture droid, a nonsense sentence he was given in lieu of actual rebellion intelligence.
(the tricky tradoshan takes twice the twi’lek’s toys, see, senator mothma? he remembers. And he remembered all those years ago, his mouth tasting of blood and everything swimming before his eyes; barely able to stand straight, but he said it perfectly, every syllable crisp, even imitating mothma’s core accent—
thank you, commander andor, mothma had said, and he’d grinned, before then unceremoniously passed out.)
do you think that the rebellion was short on imperial torture droids, so they just used a security droid with an augmented intelligence subroutine.
i.e., the only imperial droid they had around: k2
do you think cassian startled the first time he saw That Droid (as he’s taken to calling it, at least in his head) in another context—some mechanic tinkering on his casing, the droid quiet and obedient. It was staring straight ahead, though it cocked its head when it saw cassian staring.
ah, commander andor, the droid said, when cassian drew closer. I am k-2so. I did not have the opportunity to mention it, before.
yeah, I was pretty busy screaming, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
cassian watched the mechanic for a minute. She was clearly not doing more than patching up some rust, ensuring joints were lubed. you know, it seems unfair, he said, after a minute. the droid was still staring at him. you get to rummage around in our heads, but we don’t get to poking around in yours.
well, if you would like, the droid said after a long moment.
but cassian just grins, and grins, and then laughs when k2 says, that is not true, there is still a 92% chance of my delivering a painful electric shock to any new member of the rebellion.)
I always hate it when people are all “so do you go to school, or are
you working, or” and I either have to
make up some lie, or
eventually get
around to “I am not working because of depression/anxiety,” and
subsequently have to deal with whatever bullshit-riddled and completely
unsolicited opinions on mental illness this stranger feels obligated to
share with me.
So my therapist was like, “You don’t have to do either.
You can just say you haven’t worked in a while because you’re recovering
from an illness.”
I tried it when the home inspector was here today, and it fucking worked.
He was like, “oh, I’m sorry, are you doing better now,” and I’m like
yeah, and don’t worry, it’s not contagious, awkward laugh, and we moved
on.
MY THERAPIST. IS A GENIUS. Because it is an
illness, so it’s not a lie to say that, and it’s also none of his
business to know specifically what it is, and I clearly don’t want to
give more details, so we should move on from this topic. MYTHERAPIST IS A GODDAMN GENIUS.
Dude I needed this. I never know what to say when people ask if I work because I’m severely disabled and don’t work.
Also, if you’re like me and you get super anxious about putting someone in this uncomfortable position, my mom (after getting past a stint of being in this position) came up with the alternative “So what fills your days” because it’s a lot less…interrogatory, I guess.
Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
ok a followup from my irony post: one of the things i love most about steve rogers as seen in the mcu is that he doesn’t do the thing that ‘feels right’ or looks most virtuous or american or whatever, he’s not sentimental, he knows what hell is like because he has been there and it’s called the western front. he grew up sick and poor and irish catholic when there was no kindness for those things in the american narrative, he is not the kind of guy who thinks everything will turn out okay if you just believe in yourself.
he doesn’t do what he feels is the right thing, he does what he decides is the right thing. and sometimes it feels terrible, and has terrible consequences. at no point in ‘civil war’, for instance, does he seem to think his decision is The Right Choice and tony’s is Wrong. he knows there was no right answer, only two wrong ones, and he picked the one he could live with. and people bled for it.
i wouldn’t say he’s a ‘logic’ character, he’s not that trope, but he is secretly, subtly, ruthlessly thoughtful.
so when he does something like, say, become a fugitive from the entire world within minutes of hearing there’s a shoot-first order out on bucky, it’s not that blind emotional panic that drives so many heroes. it’s as cold and unstoppable as a glacier.
an emotionally driven hero has, inherently, a sense of entitlement about the outcome of their choices. if you believe in your friends, if you tell the truth when you ought to lie, if you refuse to take the kill shot because heroes don’t kill, things will definitely turn out okay in the end somehow. and of course the narrative always supports this, because that’s the genre, that’s the trope set. there’s no room for a counterpoint in their universe.
and then there’s captain fucking america.
look, i’m sleep-deprived and haven’t planned this post out at all so it’s probably kind of a mess, but what i’m getting at here is that the ‘golden boy’ of superheroes, the star spangled man with a plan, this corny, schmaltzy, old-timey character, isn’t light because the darkness hasn’t touched him. he’s light because he set his jaw and marched into the darkness and he set it the fuck on fire.
I am ONE AND A HALF EPISODES into Borgias and that scene where Micheletto hands Cesare a whip and orders him to torture him is so??? Do I ship this? Is this a thing I ship? "So whip me, My Lord" I? This show was such a quality rec on your part, I love it.
OH FUCK I KNOW.
The way he SAYS it, too, 70% matter of fact, 30% You Can Do Anything You Want To Me, Literally Anything, Do It, I Dare You.
IMAGINE HEARING ABOUT THE DUDEBRO LIVING NEXT TO U IN THE DORMS “yah dave dropped out cuz he built a fucking person”
victor frankenstein was a little bITCH and he had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year and then he was like “lol these bitches ain’t got nothing on me” and he just got an apartment and stopped going to school so he could build a person. i don’t think he even formally dropped out, he just kind of disappeared and nobody even questioned it because that’s what you expect when some cocky asshole comes to class like “i know more than everyone in this school and one day i’m going to prove it by ending dEATH ITSELF”
fucking bullshit victor, come home and eat some goddamn soup you wussass teenager
fucking trashass motherfucker 19 year old sin machine
go get ur liver pecked by birds u mess of a human being
i am never going to let the world forget that victor frankenstein spent 90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else. actual quote from emo kid victor frankenstein “my only solace was silence - deep, dark, deathlike silence” like HOW EXTRA
You’d almost think Mary Shelly was taking inspiration from someone she knew….
Leave Lord Byron alone
Lord Byron deserves what he gets and he knows it
This is the kind of discourse our world needs
For your morning reading pleasure. Just try eating breakfast whilst giggling over this.
Ego sum perlaetus ti lectito "Secrete Historium"! Est unum mi gratus libri. Loquor de libri, ego habeo duo libri de "Winnie Il Pu." Mi finis est ut lego illis.
Habebatis tu adipisci mi ultimus nuntius? Ego empticius verus Latine dictionarium nunc. Est a MCMXLVIII! Ego spes mi Latine emendo.
Corculum! Nuntium ultimum tui accipiebam, sed occupatissima sum–thesem scribo. Aliquando ultra lassa sum, Latineque laboriosus est. Et librum tuum optimum esse puto! Aliqua in domo mea, “Harry Potter et Philosopi Lapis” Latine habeo, sed lego non diu.
Si vis, modicum Latinum te docere possum? Ego etiam discipula sum, sed scriptos Ciceronis Virgilisque legere possum, et grammaticam Latini scio.
So far 2017 has been the worst. My dad is in the hospital and has a ripped kidney my dog ran away and she is a tiny dog and we dont even know if shes alive and I haven't slept since the first and I have the worst headache and I dont know what to do
Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I wish I could fix it for you. At the very least, I can offer some tricks that work for me when I have a migraine, try and fix at least part of it?
Take a Benadryl with some caffeine, if both of those things interact well with your system. Benadryl is an antihistamine and caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, so they help with swelling. This might be the only time I recommend someone mixing an upper and a downer.
Put on a tight hat. I have no science to support this, but it works.
Sit somewhere dark and quiet (obviously), but if you’re like me and you don’t like silence, some familiar music can help because you know the rhythm well enough not to startle yourself.
I know some people recommend, like, peppermint oil dabbed at the points where the pain is worst? I’ve never tried this, but hey.
I can also tell you that, if you’ve gotta damage an organ, the reason for having two kidneys is because they get damaged a lot. The hospital is the best possible place for your dad, but on the other hand I know that’s not helpful, because it’s still your dad who’s hurt and that’s so, so hard.
As for the rest of it…God, it’s so terrible when everything is falling apart around you. When things are going to shit because you made a mistake or a bad decision, at least you can pinpoint the why, you know? When it’s just because everything is going wrong all at once, it’s like everything spinning apart around you with no ground left to stand on. You’re gonna live through this, baby, even though I know it might not seem like it, and you can totally feel free to come into my inbox whenever you want to talk, okay?
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
Me on an ordinary day: Albus Dumbledore is a dynamic and complex character who was crucial to the victory against Voldemort and spent practically a century tirelessly fighting the prejudice and evil in his society. However, he is also flawed, and there is great value in analyzing his morality and his relationship with the concept of “the greater good.” In his youth, he made wrong choices with dire consequences and consciously avoided the corrupting influence of power thereafter, which, in terms of narrative, serves to prove he was not omniscient or infallible. That revelation in Deathly Hallows also contributes to an underlying message in the Harry Potter series about the importance of questioning established authorities, including our heroes.
Me when someone ignores the insights about humanity to be gained from analyzing Dumbledore’s character and instead paints him as a self-serving, manipulative asshole:
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
Finn does a lot of reading, when he wakes up. He burns through article after article of history, of linguistics, of culture. He may be strapped down to a bed and fresh from a bacta tank, but he wants to learn more about what it means to be human, and more about what it means to be this human. About the choices he’s made.
In the first 48 hours, Finn comes to learn two particularly important things.
One: that surnames mean where you come from, mean legacy.
Two: that there was a man called Bodhi Rook, and that he was very, very brave.
Later, after he’s finally discharged from med bay, he has to fill out paperwork. Registration, medical history, next-of-kin sort of stuff. Most of it he has to leave blank. He hovers over one little box in particular. Family name. He hesitates. Poe has already offered him his. The admin assistant leans over the desk, nonplussed expression on their face, and suggests he just pick one at random. Neither feels quite right. Neither feels like a history, or like a legacy.
He takes a breath, puts pen to paper, and writes Finn Rook in a wobbly but determined script.
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.
So I’ve been planning a fic for a while and I
was gonna just write it here but then I realized that HA this is an ask and you
seem too nice for me to dump a few (like maybe ten) thousand words in
here. So instead here are some
headcanons for the fic I am writing where Max is the immortal unaging fey
avatar of the desert who fetches up at people’s doorsteps and loses himself in
months and lonely years without water or company, and is delighted to find
Furiosa, who is growing into the immortal unaging fey avatar of green places
and oases.
Max doesn’t stay places, he leaves
places, and Furiosa knows someone who leaves when she sees them. So it shocks the hell out of her when she
gets a Fury Boy (the name wasn’t her idea, it was the Dag and, well, they had
to call them something other than War
Boys) rushing up to her and insisting that there’s a bike coming toward them,
and it’s the road warrior who fought on their side. And she meets Max when he pulls up through
the Wretched—not Wretched anymore, just people, people who look better than
ever with Capable and Cheedo piecing together a cistern for the water—and he
offers her the faint shadow-smile she remembers as he brings his (wrecked) bike
to a halt. He’s loaded down with a small
bag of seeds, an assortment of weapons, and a sheepish expression.
She takes herself by surprise as much as him,
when she strides forward without a pause and presses their foreheads
together. His eyes are as blue and
burnished as the scorched sky overhead.
He comes back…not often, but not rarely,
never gone for more than a year or so.
Furiosa flatters herself that he’s glad to see her, when he returns, and
her heart tightens when he begins to initiate the gentle forehead-touch of the
Vuvalini. (The third time he comes back,
they have found another underground current, and they have enough water for a public
bath. She worries that Max might have
drowned himself, after the third hour of him sitting in the water, but he’s
still breathing. He tells her, in his quiet,
stilted way, that it’s the first time he hasn’t been thirsty in he doesn’t know
how long, and she wonders about that.
She wonders how he’d known that, a hundred and sixty days out, there was
nothing but salt.)
People start to trickle in, drawn by the
siren-call of water and food, because
with the Wives—the Sisters, now—in charge, there is more than enough. And Furiosa begins to hear stories, about how
the Road Warrior saved people or killed tyrants or, more often than not, was
dragged into a fight not his, quite against his will, and did the right thing
anyway. Here’s the thing, though. Some of the stories are recent, just months
or years past. Others…well. She talks to a child, who claims that her
grandfather was a child when he knew Max.
But Max can’t possibly be much older than she is, and she’s…Furiosa
doesn’t really know. She tries to count
back in her head, but… The Dag’s
daughter Angharad is walking well, talking well, maybe seven years old. When did that happen? Shouldn’t Furiosa be greying, shouldn’t there
be lines at her eyes and aches in her joints?
The next time Max comes to the Citadel, she
asks him how old he is. He tells her, in
his quiet way, less stilted now than when they met because he’s more at ease
with her, that he doesn’t know. But he tells her that
he had a child, once, and they played in grass, and he and his wife had all the
sweet clear water anyone could want.
Furiosa goes out on a mission. She runs out of water in a sandstorm, and she
waits to die.
She strides back into the Citadel two weeks
later, and her throat is not even dry.
She drinks, and it’s good, but not necessary. Max is there, and while everyone else marvels
over the fact that she’s alive,
little Radi—Angharad who is not so little, who is thirteen now and as mad and
gifted as her mother—touching her unlined face in wonder, Max watches her and
nods. He doesn’t need to marvel, doesn’t
need to question, because he has stood in her place and felt time trickle by
like water, like sand in a clenched fist.
Furiosa remembers being a little girl,
screaming for the loss of her mother and her arm and her innocence, and wishing
that, if nothing else, she might live to see victory. She has.
And it seems she will live to see a good deal more. She leaves the Citadel more and more, and she
never grows thirsty, never grows tired.
She has an impossible talent for finding water, for finding places where
seeds will take root, and Max trails after her like a desert wraith. (She’s not sure how long it’s been since they
met, when she kisses him. But his breath
is as hot and dry as the wind under the sun, and she is growth and water and
life to his desert, and he melts under her touch.)
She leaves for good, when Radi is old enough
to take her place as Fury, the Citadel’s Road Warrior, and she and Max
wander. They will not die. The desert has been fed for too long to be
taken by the green places, but life is tenacious and neither will Max’s desert
swallow Furiosa’s green places whole. It’s
an uneasy truce, between his and hers, but it stands.
Okay so I'm super into weird, sort of fucked up interpersonal/political(/sexual?) dynamics so NEEDLESS TO SAY a lot of what you've said about Borgias sounds pretty up my alley, but can you give me a rundown before I sit down and burn through three seasons? Also, is it on Netflix, and if no, where can I find it?
The Borgias is AMAZING, ON NETFLIX, AND FULLY AND 110% MY JAM, but that said it is super niche and I am super niche which is why I love it so. I will attempt to give you the rundown objectively!
Things the Borgias contains: -crazy renaissance political intrigue -apparently the marketing slogan for the show was “the original crime family”, which is 100% true. There’s a very heavy mafia family vibe, and it’s not just because they’re Italian. -brother/sister incest. Incest between consenting adults, but incest all the same. (Also, to be fair: the incest Vibes start when Lucrezia is still fifteen, although the characters don’t do anything about it until years later.) -very graphic violence. Think Game of Thrones and Hannibal? (Although with a few exceptions I think the violence skews more GoT than Hannibal.) -multiple graphic rape scenes. They’re not filmed super grossly, in that awful Game of Thrones way, but they’re still graphic rape scenes. -non-graphic yet still deeply disturbing medieval torture! -three (3) canonically queer characters, one of whom is in a major supporting role -so much murder -so. much. murder. -queer sex scenes, although you have to wait a while for them -sex scenes featuring Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia, which is AMAZING -sex scenes featuring Jeremy Irons, which is less amazing, even as I actually really love his lecherous pope -for a while, Luke Pasquilano being often shirtless -Giulia Farnese’s legs, which are Quality Legs -a badass warrior queen who at one point throws her dress up and threateningly flashes her map of tasmania at her enemies
I feel like this is more or less the objective rundown? The unobjective rundown goes like this:
The Borgias contains: -MICHELETTO CORELLA, LIGHT OF MY LIFE -CESARE BORGIA, FIRE OF MY LOINS -LUCREZIA BORGIA, MY SIN MY SOUL -DECADENT AND LUSH CATHOLIC ICONOGRAPHY (IE PEARL-STUDDED CRUCIFIXES AND BLOOD-RED CARDINAL’S VELVET AND GIMME THEM GOLD COINS GIMME THEM COINS) -GOOD PEOPLE DOING TERRIBLE THINGS FOR LOVE -BAD PEOPLE DOING TERRIBLE THINGS FOR LOVE -GOOD PEOPLE BETRAYING THE PEOPLE THEY LOVE BECAUSE OF THEIR TERRIBLE AMBITION -BAD PEOPLE BETRAYING THE PEOPLE THEY LOVE BECAUSE OF THEIR TERRIBLE LOYALTY -EVERYONE BETRAYING GOD AND DESPERATELY WANTING GOD AT THE SAME TIME. THEIR FAITH AND THEIR TERRIBLE LOVE LIVES FOLLOW SIMILAR TRAJECTORIES. -LUCREZIA’S SMALL SHARP ODDLY FRIGHTENING PEARLY TEETH -CESARE CALLING MICHELETTO “MY SWEET ASSASSIN” -MICHELETTO BENDING OVER A LITERAL RACK AND CALMLY ORDERING CESARE TO BEAT HIM -CESARE’S OVERWHELMED AND HUNGRY EYES -LUCREZIA’S SULKY MOUTH AND CHILD’S HANDS AND EQUALLY HUNGRY EYES -PEOPLE SO TERRIBLE THAT WHEN THEY ARE GOOD, THEIR GOODNESS SEEMS TRANSCENDANT -I HATE, I LOVE, I DON’T KNOW WHY IT HAPPENS, BUT I BURN.
if a girl is making you uncomfortable, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY IT.
fucking crush the stereotype that men are always supposed to “want it”
It’s really such a sad idea. I remember once with my ex, I was kissing him when we were in bed, and it started getting more heated, but I could tell it felt different. I stopped and asked if he wanted to carry on, and he said yes, but I knew him well. I had to ask again before he admitted he wasn’t really feeling it at the time. It just made me feel so bad and so upset for him. I think there’s more pressure on men to be sexual. Men love sex, they’d never want to turn it down, if they do it’s unmanly, it’s gay, it’s girly. It’s something ingrained into them from such a young age. It’s terrible and wrong. They think they have no right to not want sex.
Not all men have sky-high sex drives. I doubt any man in the world wants sex 100% of the time. It’s fine to reject it in any situation, whether a planned one night stand or a committed relationship. It’s fine to change your mind before or halfway through.
Men, it is FINE for you to not want sex, and it is FINE to say no if you want to. In fact, please do. It’s not guaranteed the other person will be able to sense your discomfort.
All of this. It’s always okay to say no, or wait, or maybe not right now or whatever it is you’re feeling.
Forever reblog.
It is always okay to say No, for any reason, and at any point.
the first time chirrut touches bazes face is before they even start dating and when hes done he kinda laughs and says “i didnt need to do that. i already knew you were handsome” and baze doesnt sleep for 3 days bc hes still thinking about it
Short opinion: This is one of those books where the only thing more terrifying than the alien invasion is the planet the aliens are trying to invade.
Long opinion:
Although it’s not my favorite of the series, this book has a lot of really cool moments, both light (Marco referencing the Ramones, Cassie’s dad making her pick up the skunk, GRAPE JUICE) and dark (Cassie’s panic after killing the termite queen, everyone’s near-death in the logging camp battle). This plot also nicely resolves the question of why the yeerks aren’t doing more to find the “andalites” allegedly living in the area through showing that, although humans might destroy forests and shoot skunks, humans also do a lot to protect their own planet.
Another thing I love about this book: Marco and Jake’s interaction. It only gets mentioned a few times in this book (and comes up again a couple times later in the series), but one of my favorite Little Things from the series is Marco and Jake’s ongoing Batman vs. Spider-Man debate. I am really fascinated that Jake argues in favor of Batman and Marco is so in favor of Spider-Man, given that Jake is a tactician who fights primarily through quick hit-and-run attacks (like Spider-Man) whereas Marco is a strategist who fights by thinking ahead of his opponents and coming up with creative ways to have them solve his problems for him (like Batman). Maybe it’s a matter of mutual respect for one another’s abilities, or a tendency to discount their own abilities. After all, Marco tends to describe his strategic perspective as “simple” and “clear,” whereas Jake continuously underestimates his impact on the team no matter what it is.
Then again, maybe Jake is such a fan of Batman because Bruce Wayne is (like him) a pensive, privileged justice-fighter focused on working hard to teach himself the skills he needs to be effective at his job. And maybe Marco sees himself in Spider-Man, since Peter Parker’s a goofy kid who gets thrown into a situation way over his head and spends the next several years flailing around trying to rise to the occasion. Or maybe they just played too many arcade games. Maybe they just need to watch this.
The other scene from this book that I really love is the one where Jake finds Cassie after she falls asleep in skunk morph protecting the baby skunks and he yells at her for being careless. She tells him she wants out of the war and that humans suck so much they might as well get taken over by yeerks; Jake calmly shuts her down when offers to go explain to Tom that he deserves to be enslaved by the yeerks according to Cassie’s philosophy. Cassie tells Jake that she’s saving the baby skunks no matter what, to which Jake responds that in that case they’d better recruit the whole team.
I love this scene for a couple different reasons. For one thing, it’s refreshing to see Cassie being wrong for once. In the series as a whole and in this book in particular there are several moments where she makes relatively dumb decisions that end up working out for her anyway (trusting Aftran, refusing to help with Taylor’s plan, letting Tom’s yeerk take the morphing cube, letting Aftran infest her, etc). In this instance, however, Cassie nearly gets herself trapped in morph over some baby skunks, and she risks her friends’ lives when just a few minutes ago she was angry with Tobias for killing to survive. She’s wrong, and both she and Jake acknowledge it.
This scene is also one of the many reasons I ship Cassie and Jake: they call each other out on bad decisions and resolve their differences of opinion through talking things out. Jake is wrong to dismiss Cassie’s concerns about the logging permits, as he freely admits later in the book. Cassie is wrong to tell Jake that the fight doesn’t matter in a universe this brutal when (unlike him) she doesn’t have any loved ones on the line in this war. They discuss their differences of opinion and resolve them.
Not only do they discuss their disagreement openly, but they also both make concessions. Cassie agrees that she needs to be a lot more careful in the future, especially with morphing time limits. Jake agrees that (even though he doesn’t see the point) they’ll “save the lousy skunks” (#9). They listen to each other and find a solution. It’s a pattern that comes up several more times over the course of the series: Jake and Cassie are the only ones willing to tell each other when one of them is wrong, but always do so in a way that avoids polarization or passive aggression. (Rachel and Tobias do not do nearly as well with this kind of conflict resolution when the circumstances arise, but that’s a whole other can of yeerks I’m not going to open here.)
Jake and Cassie might not have a perfect relationship—it doesn’t even survive the war, and its passion pales in comparison to what Rachel and Tobias have—but they also have a healthy relationship. Jake mentions a few times that the only time he feels able to drop the whole “I’m the leader, I feel no pain” act is when he’s alone with Cassie. Cassie agonizes over every major decision they make but also never stops trusting that Jake knows what he’s doing when he makes a tough call. Their arguments don’t have a single winner, and involve both of them openly confronting each other with their own points of view. They work to understand each other, since there are a lot of things they do not have in common, and that work might make for less melodrama but also makes for better communication.
Final note: the motif of Visser Three doing dumb shit and none of the human-controllers in the immediate vicinity who must know better correcting him comes up here. It’s another one of those Little Things that K.A. Applegate uses to speak volumes about why the yeerks lost the war just as much as the Animorphs won it. This book shows that it’s a bad idea to behead subordinates who disagree with you, because then you end up surrounded by sycophants who never once mention that you just dyed yourself purple for no reason.
