1. DEMAND condom use 2. Hold your partners accountable for what happens in the bedroom. None of this “baby I can’t control myself around you” or “I just wanted you so bad” bullshit. 3. Coercion is real and it’s very scary and hard to identify in the moment. Establish a dialogue with your partner. Be clear on what you both want. Be clear on what you don’t want. Your boundaries should ALWAYS be respected. 4. Sex can be really emotionally and physically over-stimulating the first few times; don’t be afraid or ashamed to ask your partner to slow down, take a break, or even stop. 5. Focus less on pleasing your partner and more on exploring your partner. Everyone’s body is different and there are no “tricks” to better sex. Chances are, if you psych yourself out worrying over how well you’re “performing” then nobody’s going to have a good time. 6. Ask questions, offer suggestions. Despite what porn has probably taught you, talking during sex isn’t weird or taboo. Your partner isn’t a mind reader. They don’t know what feels good to you. [Pro-tip, a looot of people without clitorises aren’t fully aware of just HOW sensitive a clitoris is. They can be a little rough with them. Tell them to chill!!!!] 7. Your sex life is YOUR business. Don’t ever feel ashamed of how many or how few sexual partners/experiences you’re having. Do what you want, touch the people who want to touch you back, forget the rest. 8. DON’T FAKE YOUR ORGASMS!! Don’t fake your orgasms!! DON’TFAKEYOURORGAMS!! If your partner isn’t getting you there, let them know! Tell them how!! 9. There is more to sex than orgasms. Sex is a really cool way to establish intimacy and trust, to have a fun time, to relieve stress, to explore a person’s body and bring them pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, orgasms are really cool and good, but your sex life is going to be a lot better if it doesn’t revolve around them. 10. LEARN ABOUT YOUR BODY!! This goes for everyone, but ESPECIALLY if you are a person in possession of a vulva, you have been discouraged and even actively kept from vital knowledge about your anatomy! Do some google searches, buy a human sexuality textbook, masturbate. 11. Virginity is a useless concept. It’s completely okay if your virginity is something important to you and I’m not trying to belittle that idea. Just, for the record, in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal. Literally nothing about you changes just because you bumped uglies with someone else.
This has been a public service announcement from your friendly internet poet.
Talking about sex when not being sexy is the best first step to having sex. Don’t talk about it to turn on your partner, just discuss it casual. Talk about your thoughts and feelings, what you think you want, what scares you, what interests you, etc. Like anything you can think of. It makes the act easier and can help you establish boundaries before the act starts. Try doing it on a phone or over text so you know sex won’t start. Sometimes the distance helps you be honest.
i like how positive this post is and how it isn’t gender specific <3 <3 <3
Honestly my favorite part about this post is that from the time I uploaded until now ive never gotten hate for this we all agree the orange man needs to go
Somebody actually put “post this in the south and see what happens” Bitch, this is a website. They can read it in the south.
I am from the south and I agree the angry cheeto needs to go.
5) character you were most surprised to end up writing
Whenever I end up writing someone genuinely nice, I’m totally baffled. Like, okay, in my Falls the Shadow novel, one of the Four Horsemen is named Kit (Famine) and she’s just flat-out a genuine sweetheart. Will Hargrove, from my unfinished novel Emrys Ascendant, is Too Nice for any of this supernatural shit to be happening to him. Or Lessa, from Polaris? Like, yes, she can murder a dude with lightning, but also cartoon birds probably braid her hair in the morning.
10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?
Background noise, always background noise, I hate silence, I build incredibly expansive and intricate playlists for my various novels. And if I’m around people, they have to be background people–I write really well in coffee shops, libraries, ice cream stores, that sort of thing.
15) why did you start writing?
I always told stories, you know? I was really into playing pretend as a kid, and I started memorizing fairy tales and folklore as a very smol bean. And then when I was like eight or nine, my beloved aunt (sarcasm) told me that I was too old to play pretend and I needed to stop living in my own world and get my head out of the clothes and grow up. I was a pretty messed up kid, so naturally I took this as gospel, but I still had stories to tell, so I started writing them down. Flash forward a decade or so and I’m putting out about a novel every 18 months.
20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?
Both! When I have a few hours I can scrape together without feeling like I’m volunteering to have more dirt shoveled down onto my coffin (literally fuck college so much), I can write straight through that whole time period without trouble. If I have a whole day, I’ve been known to forget meals or sleep or water. On the other hand, I also carry a notebook and scrawl down bits of scenes and conversations whenever I’m sitting and waiting for things. Whenever I’m talking to someone who says something like “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I don’t have time” my response is usually “No one has time, you usually make time.” I mean, I sure as hell don’t have time to write novels, I just kind of do it anyway.
25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of
Okay I know this is more than a few sentences but I am!!! Literally so proud of this!!! It’s from a story I just now started about…um, basically a story about how I never got over my smol bean rage about the whole “Getting kicked back into the real world as a kid again after growing up in Narnia” schtick.
“A
drink for the Wanderer,” I said, switching from the bland notes of English to
the hard lilt of Alleiran and pouring out a dribble of scotch into the northern
mug. “To fire, to travel, to lies and
battle. Bring us home alive and send us
out again.” The familiar benediction warmed
something cold in my chest, left me trembling on the dangerous edge of
tears. “Bless your servant, Wanderer, for
I am far from home and have no war to fight.”
The last part of the prayer was personal, individual. I had been making the same simple request for
years.
I
passed the bottle across the table and he took it, tipping it not quite far
enough to pour scotch into the southern mug.
“An empty cup for the Lady of Stars,”
he said in Alleiran, subdued. “To storm,
to sky, to the fallen light. Raise us up
and let us fly.” He paused and let out a
breath that shook, closing his eyes as if he couldn’t stand to look at me
during the personal prayer. His prayer
had been the same as long as mine had. “Bless
your servant, Lady, for I have done great harm that cannot be repaid. Watch over my sister as she walks between
days, where the living cannot go. Grant
me clarity, guard my sanity, show me a bright path.” He opened his eyes and offered me the bottle,
adding quietly, “Save us from the past.”
I’m usually pretty particular about the sorts of traits that get assigned as humanity’s “special thing” in sci-fi settings, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for settings where the thing humanity is known for is something tiny and seemingly inconsequential that it wouldn’t normally occur to you to think of as a distinctive trait.
Like, maybe we have a reputation as a bunch of freaky nihilists because we’re the only species that naturally has the capacity to be amused by our own misfortune.
Alien: Why are you happy? You’ve been seriously injured!
Human: *struggling to control laughter* Yeah, but I can imagine what that must have looked like from the outside, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Alien: …
Captain XXlr’y: First Officer Jane The Human, your olifactory protuberance is severely damaged! Why is this a matter for mirthful celebration???
First Officer Jane The Human: A SPARKLY LITTLE POMERANIAN THING WITH A GODDAMN UNICORN HORN CHASED ME STRAIGHT INTO A WALL! OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? I RAN STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL.
Captain XXlr’y: Yes I just observed this sequence of events! It was terrible!
First Officer Jane The Human: OKAY WHO GOT THAT ON CAMERA, I WANNA SEE.
Captain XXlr’y: So you more fully understand that this is a situation you should never get into again?
First Officer Jane The Human: SO I CAN SEND THE VIDEO TO MY MOM!
Captain XXlr’y: For… for the solicitation of maternal concern…?
First Officer Jane The Human: NO, BECAUSE SHE’LL THINK IT’S HILARIOUS TOO.
viewings of the ancient human art based seemingly entierly around purposefully inducing misfortune are a source of constant xeno-anthropological arguments. As near as anyone can discern, these acts are some kind of core human performance form- so meaningful to their culture that recording these acts was very nearly the first concern on the invention of moving visual media.
Somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that these aren’t just recordings of accidental happenstance, but carefully choreographed, practiced, and refined to such a degree that there are nearly species wise recognizable symbols and routines performed.
There are thesis’ on ‘large wedding cake destroyed’, and hotly argued debate on the purpose of ‘Jackass’
Reblogging this again to suggest a different view of humanity, one where it’s not that we find injuring ourselves to be hilarious is the “defining quirk”. No, this one’s got to do with why you always want a human engineer or programmer (or both) if your ship’s going to be within two parsecs of a human.
Humans break things. They don’t mean to, and it can’t just be their curiosity – other species are curious, but they don’t break things like humans do. Humans make things stop working by trying to do things that they were never meant to do in the first place. I should know, I’ve seen it firsthand – one of the stubborn little bastards decided he was going to get the holodeck to show him an outdated media format called a “Vee-Ay-Chess”, and he spent twenty chrons trying to fix it after it started belching black smoke – and then he was at it AGAIN! And don’t even get me started on how he almost wiped our nav computer to try and play something called “Wolfenstein”.
But the scary part is, for every time it fails, there’s three times it works. There was a time when our warp drive broke down. You know, it was a Caledon Industries model, they’re cheap but they like to break. The problem was that it was a Tritium Reactron Fitting, and it got wedged in the back. Like, “take the ship apart and put it back together to get the fitting out” wedged. We were convinced we were going to be stuck for a few days before our signal got noticed.
And then the human – same one who broke the holodeck twice with his Vee-Ay-Chess crap and almost wiped all our nav data with his Wolfenstein game – he goes into the engine room and begins calling over the intercom for random tools, trash, parts of other things that were working just fine. He spends maybe twelve chrons in there, and when he comes out, he tells us to fire up warp. It sails us right to the nearest star system, no problems. And then the chief engineer takes a look at what he’s done. It looks like – I kid you not – it looks like the entrails of a Galthan Wingbeast. One that got splattered by a bomb.
Says he “jury rigged” it, whatever the hell that means, and we should get it replaced before it breaks again. And that’s why I never go anywhere without a human anymore.
If a cat or dog is eating vegan meals, they’re doing it out of their own free will, just saying. Give a dog a piece of Tofu turkey and they eat it, i didn’t force them to eat it, so.
Give a dog anti freeze and they’ll eat it. Feed a dog rat poison and they’ll eat it. Give a dog grapes, nuts, chocolate, beer, etc. They’ll eat it. They don’t know that it’s dangerous for them. As their caretaker you are responsible for knowing better, not them. If you deprive your cats or dogs of meat, especially cats, you are actively killing your companion in the slowest way.
I once adopted a kitten who was being systematically starved by his previous human who insisted in feeding him vegan food. He was so excited when he got meat-based cat food from us that he gorged himself until he puked. He was left with digestive tract issues for years because of his previous human’s neglect. Do not do this. I don’t care what you believe in personally - cats are carnivores (not omnivores), depriving them from meat is cruel and animal abuse.
VEGAN DIETS KILL CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS
Say it with me, kids: obligate carnivore means no vegan diets ever.
sometimes i think about the fact that Dreamworks was working on the Prince of Egypt and Shrek at the same time and would apparently send people to work on Shrek instead of the Prince of Egypt as a form of punishment
the night i posted this i couldn’t find a source and i’ve been wondering ever since if maybe it was just some kind of fucked up fever dream or something. but no, it’s real:
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.
That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’,
you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains
and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know,
is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!
Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it?
This is the single most mind blowing fact I’ve read on tumblr, every day is a school day-thank you.
Nice history lesson!
My daughter and I were just discussing this very subject.
“If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the older generation’s major sources of economic and spiritual well-being, like home ownership, cars, even sex. They’d rather pay to “access” music and movies than to buy them, and they don’t aspire to steady jobs (long live the gig economy!) or vacations. Their lifestyle choices are informed either by an admirable anti-consumerist streak or by a lazy reluctance to be weighed down by success and owning stuff. They’ve even killed the napkin industry
None of this is true. The idea that these “trends” in consumption are driven primarily by cultural preferences, rather than a faltering economy and ever-rising costs of living, is difficult to believe, but that’s the prevailing narrative. Business Insider’s story blaming millennials for a slump in the sales of paper napkins is a perfect example of why that interpretation is absurd. The article contends that, like eating cereal, buying paper napkins is too much work for millennials. Similarly, The Washington Post has pointed out that young people have found ways to make the paper napkin’s rival, the paper towel, look chic on social media, the only thing they really care about. Neither article mentions that millennials are the first cohort in American history to enjoy lower living standards than their parents. Not buying napkins is a pretty painless way to save money.
Which explanation seems more likely? Do we use Zipcar because we are ideologically committed to sharing, or because car ownership is still out of reach for a lot of people and renting piecemeal is the next best thing? Does a married couple decide to live with roommates because of our generational “openness to communal living” or because people in New York face impossible rents? Do people stop using napkins because of unshakeable cultural convictions, or because they’re a waste of money? If the new generation were really waging war on their forebears’ way of life, I doubt they’d start with the disposable table settings.”—The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | New Republic (via brutereason)
Earlier today (November 6, 2016) at about 1:00am the clocks were set back an hour!
You did not lose time, dissociate, or hallucinate. Clocks on your laptop and smartphone (as well as most TVs I believe) will be set to the correct time, but any clocks that plug into the wall will have to be reset to the correct time. This is why the clocks in your house are set to different times.
I just didn’t want anyone to be concerned or panic when they woke up today!
I would HIGHLY recommend bringing two forms of ID [a gov. i.e. your license or photo ID AND your voter ID] with you to poll. Some states have voter ID laws, and in other states you need your ID if it’s your first time voting at that particular location.
Avoid any trouble, don’t wear any pins, tshirts, etc. for a particular candidates. Some areas consider it passive electioneering.
You CAN NOT vote via text, online, etc. Anyone advertising otherwise is lying.
The only person to ask you for your ID should be the individual working the polls sitting at a table inside the building in question. If anyone else asks you for your ID or gives you a hard time, they have no authority to do so and should be avoided.
You CAN NOT take a photo of your ballot/voting machine/etc. Take a cute photo with your “I Voted” sticker after and call it a day.
Most importantly, stay safe, be smart and VOTE VOTE VOTE
me: i don’t really care about all these disney live action remakes disney:
me:
I’ve always wondered why the people in the town thought Belle was so weird and more importantly how does a bookshop stay open if it only has one single regular customer who is also not wealthy? The only explanation is that there must be something else about Belle that is considered to be odd or strange that was never addressed or thought of in the animated film.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out - but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears - she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 - so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions - nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party - a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride - are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue - one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew - whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. \o/ goddamnit.
FUN TIDBIT! The Presidency is NOT the only thing on the ballot next Tuesday.
You’ll find other people like senators, representatives, chairmans…..Sheriffs?(probably?) JUDGES!
ALL OF THESE are AS important if not moreso than the presidential vote. These are the people ACTUALLY running your city and your state.
There’s also a handful of laws that are going through! Prison Reform, GUN CONTROL for you weirdos that seem to think you’re gonna get invaded by the British (Fun fact: they don’t have guns either calm down Jedediah), Marijuana reform/legalization, school funding. ALL SORTS OF THINGS!
By saying you aren’t going to vote you’re giving up your say in THESE THINGS AS WELL.
Don’t be an ass. Go and vote if you’re able to. It takes literally only a few minutes and you get a lovely sticker.
reverse hades/persephone, where the young daughter of summer uses plant magic to ensnare the lord of darkness and keep him prisoner in a beautiful garden above ground. Eventually, enchanted by her cleverness and wild youth he agrees to eat six pomegranate seeds and stay with her for half of every year.
It’d be even funnier if the other gods show up all “Persephone, hey, you got the lord of death in there so no one’s dying anymore and the world is getting too full—” “Not my problem”
This would of course lead to a word in which there is no winter, but people can only die for six months out of the year. Which is a heck of a setting for all kinds of story.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
why do nice girls always go for the assholes i dont even like pegging
No. Just. NO. I am so sick of this bullshit stereotype being both perpetuated AND played out. No.
um
Saying nice girls go with the assholes is the biggest stereotype in relationships of all time
uM
We don’t go with assholes, we go with the people who give us attention at the right time and ignore us at the right time and it just so happens to be the people who don’t care about us and it’s stupid a/f
This post represents tumblr
Okay but like that’s the most true stereotype ever… so many dumb nice girls date douchebags lmao
ARE YOU SERIOUS
The problem is not that nice girls date assholes, it’s that nice girls *knowingly* date assholes and then have the nerve to complain and ask “why can’t I find a nice guy?”
Douchebags always date douchebags. The kicker is douchebags have 0 self-awareness that they are douchebags so in turn they complain that “they can never find a nice guy/sane girl.”
Holy fuck man not you too
So many non-comprehending mother fuckers
Pure comedy gold.
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
This post is a perfect example of what people mean when we talk about how nobody on this godforsaken website has any fucking reading comprehension skills
one thing I want to say today relates to my current job. (As you guys know, I’ve left off working in science labs to work an office job in sci comm. My role is kind of … nebulous and involves a lot of “oh, Elodie can help you with that, she does weird stuff. Train Elodie on that.”)
Because it’s an office job, the mentality is for everyone to present their workflows as incredibly difficult and skilled, requiring a lot of training and experience to do properly. Which is fair enough! These skills are difficult!
“Elodie, today we are going to train you to use… A HIGHLY COMPLICATED AND DIFFICULT WEBSITE INTERFACE. You will need to take a lot of notes and pay careful attention, because it is extremely advanced. ARE YOU READY”
“… This is Wordpress.”
“…No it isn’t! it says something different at the top. And it’s very complicated, it’s not something you can just know already.”
“Nah son, don’t worry, it’s Wordpress. I mean, God knows I don’t blog much, but I can manage me a bit of Wordpress, it’s cool.”
“No. You can’t. Don’t worry, it’s very difficult. Now sit still and be trained on how to upload a photo to Wordpress.”
“All right.”
—-
“Elodie, do you think that you can MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA? It is INCREDIBLY HARD and may involve THE HASHTAGS”
“… I think I’ll manage.”
—-
“Elodie, can you put a HYPERLINK in a thing? Think about it before you answer.”
“Is it like a BBCode kind of thing, with the boxy bracket things, or do you want it in HTML, with like angley bracket things?”
“It is a button that you press that says HYPERLINK.”
“I can do this thing for you.”
—-
“Elodie, can you write a punchy summary that will make people want to click on a special link that says “read more” to read all of the text?“
“Probably?”
—-
“Elodie, this is how to use TAGS on CONTENT. TAGS on CONTENT are important because - because of THINGS. Things that are too arcane and mysterious for anyone below the level of Manager to know.”
“Cool, I can tag stuff for you.”
—-
“Elodie, this is obviously a ridiculous question, but can you edit videos?”
“Not very well, and only if you want to make it look like there is sexual tension between characters from different forms of visual media, or perhaps to make a trailer for a fanfiction? Which is not necessarily a good use of my time and I’m not sure why I felt it was so cool to do to begin with…”
“What?”
“Actually, upon further reflection: no. No. Nope. I can’t edit videos. They’re completely beyond me. Not in my wheelhouse. Hate videos. Hate them. No innate skill whatsoever.”
“That’s what we thought”
—-
“Elodie?! You can use PHOTOSHOP?!”
“Yeah, I mean, I usually just use Pixlr. It’s free, it’s online, it’s powerful, you don’t have to download anything…”
“but you are not a GRAPHIC DESIGNER!!”
“Er… no.”
“Next you’ll be telling us you can MAKE AN ANIMATED PICTURE.”
“I mean, I haven’t really done a lot of it since Livejournal, and they weren’t that good anyway, but yeah… I can do you reaction images.”
“THAT IS WITCHCRAFT”
“Yes. Definitely.”
—-
What I’m trying to say is: a lot of people talk a lot of crap about what we Millenials do on the Internet, because there is NO CAPITALISTIC VALUE in the screwing around we do with our friends. “Ughh why are you ALWAYS on the computer?” our parents whined.
“How did you make the text go all slanty like that?” our bosses wonder.
We have decades of experience in Photoshop. We know how to communicate; we can make people across the planet care about our problems. We know how to edit media to make two characters look like they’re having the sexual tensions. We can make people read our posts, follow us, share our content. We run and manage our own websites - and make them pretty. We moderate conversations, enforce commenting policies, manage compromises, lead battles, encourage peace, defend ourselves from attack, inspire others, and foster incredible levels of communication.
We produce our art. We advertise our art. We engage with others through our art. We accept constructive criticism and dismiss destructive trolling of our art. We improve our art. Our art gets better.
We narrate our stories.
All by ourselves. Our pretty blog backgrounds, custom-edited themes, tasteful graphics, punchy content, clever gifs, our snappy putdowns and smart-ass text posts, even our familiarity with fonts and composition - all of these skills we’ve casually accumulated for fun/approval are MINDBLOWING LEVELS OF COMPETENCE IN THE WORKFORCE.
When these skills are sold to you - when they’re packaged and marketed, and when you pay to consume them and have the Elders rate you on them - they are incredibly valuable. They are Media and Communications degrees. They are marketing internships. They are leadership workshops. They are graphics design modules. They are web design courses. They are programming courses. We are good at this shit; we have it nailed down.
You can’t put “fandom” or “blogging” on your CV, but you deserve to. You should get this credit. You should claim this power and authority.
Claim these skills. They are valuable. They are important.
Everything you have ever done is a part of your powerful makings.
I want to second what elodieunderglass has to say here, because it’s so true. You want to buff up your resume or your LinkedIn page?
-if you know enough html to do <i>this is italic text</i>, then you understand HTML and can pretty much call yourself a Junior Developer
-if you ever wanted to customize your LJ or tumblr and copied someone’s CSS code and then went in and tweaked font color and added your own header image? You understand CSS and again, you can put Junior Developer in your LinkedIn title.
-if you can use twitter and tumblr and put hashtags and regular tags on stuff, you’re a Social Media Manager. If you can get people to follow you and comment back, you have Demonstrated Social Media Efficacy.
-if you can use Photoshop (or Pixlr!) to make five million pictures of Natalie Dormer really pretty, you are a Photo Editor.
-if you can migrate some of your Photoshop skills to InDesign, you are a Production Editor with demonstrable skills in Layout For Print Publications
-if you want to look even more impressive and pick up an easy job that mostly involves googling bits of code to copy and fuck around with, go play on CodeAcademy and get yourself qualified in not just HTML and CSS, but also JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and others. Again, this makes you a Software/Applications Developer.
The only reason you’re given the impression that these are jobs for really smart brogrammers with masters degrees in computer science is because scary jargon keeps people out. Look stuff up, and you’ll find out you already know a ton of this material. I promise you, you’re more qualified for tech/developer jobs than a lot of the people actually working at firms that focus on those kind of jobs.
^
Often in my job people ask me if I can do something, and if I respond with, ‘No, but I’m sure I could find out how,’ they look at me like my head just rotated 360 degrees. One thing about being on the internet in this age is that you have experienced how you can just google something and you’ll probably find a youtube tutorial.
Don’t know how to use the Puppetwarp in Photoshop? *20 minutes later and some cursing included* Okay, now I do.
Don’t know how to knit? *ten minutes later* totes pro.
A lot of people bag our generation but there’s so much to be said for the sheer amount of information we’re used to absorbing and parsing. Don’t underestimate that, either!
OK entry-level kids, listen. ‘I don’t know how to do this but just give me 20 minutes’ is probably the most important, career-advancing thing you can say at your workplace because not only does it show that you’re adaptable and proactive and any number of dumb buzzwords that happen to be popular in The Industry these days. BUT If you build up on it over time, it will also pretty much make you indispensable, which is so important in an unstable job market.
Consider this: unless you get a job with a super-successful startup where your boss is like 25, chances are you’re going to land in company where the higher-ups are in their 40s-50s, thus belonging to that particular generation that habitually puts down millenials for having No Experience of Real Life. Except in a workplace environment this means they expect that they have to train you on every single little thing, aka waste time and resources on you, aka see you as a soooort of useful nuisance who’s there to do the little menial jobs no one else wants to do. This is where the last to come first to go thing comes from really.
What your crusty 50+ y/o bosses don’t realize is that ‘being on the computer’ all day, you inherently develop a thing called rapid skill acquisition. Yeah, it sounds fancy (so fancy you can put it in your CV) but most of the time, as the previous comments point out, it just involves Google and YT tutorials. You’ll be surprised how many highbrow professionals don’t actually do this, b/c they reached the top and feel like they have a secure position and basically fall so behind on things that a 20 y/o intern can out-skill them, or quickly learn to out-skill them any day of the week. Most likely they’re not aware of this. And no, it’s not as out there as it sounds. Consider you’re talking to people who think you need training to use Wordpress. Imagine what telling them you can use a blogging platform to create an easy to update professional looking website for fucking free will do to them. Imagine telling them you can make gorgeous graphics from scratch, update the company logo or design some rad business cards. THERE IS SO MUCH YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT THEY DON’T KNOW CAN BE DONE.
A couple of years ago I interned for a research centre where I did this all the time. Three weeks in they called me to sign an employment contract that tripled my pay and I got to go everywhere with them and meet important people in my field, it was great. My 23 y/o brother, who doesn’t have a single solitary hour of formal training in PR/marketing or IT in his degree, interned as marketing assistant for a small IT company and was so quick to catch on that they hired him after the internship and by the end of the year he’d already helped increase their turnover. Eight months, unpaid internship included, and he made them more money! That kid is never going to get fired!
Also learn some programming/web design. Seriously. I see these self-taught 16 y/o kids making gorgeous Tumblr themes from scratch and I’m like. You are al fucking wizards. Not even out of highschool yet and you’re pretty much set up for a job that potentially pays in the 6 digits.
You are smart and you are creative and you are amazing! You need to be brave and confident and capitalize on that because you’ve got what it takes and more. Fuck the jargon, you’ve got the skills.
this is some great stuff to read
This patched my tired sadbrain abit. I learned how to crochet from YT.
I told my boss that I was looking up on youtube how to fix my computer and I was probably going to do it this next weekend but I was a tiny bit nervous because I haven’t taken apart a model like this before so some things are different.
She was like, you can do that? What?
Every time I use the Internet in any meaningful way to make my job easier (like creating color coded spreadsheets for ordering and inventory and menus etc), she just is so confused. She’s almost 60, by the way.
The first time I was like, I’m gonna just make a spreadsheet, she was like, just give it to A (who is 21), she’ll type it up for you. I was like, no? Why would I write it out on paper and then type it up?
I am highly underestimated. Often.
Often in my job people ask me if I can do something, and if I respond with, ‘No, but I’m sure I could find out how,’
^^I was an English major. I am now a Software Specialist in the IT Department simply because of the above ^^ words cannot describe how far this response and attitude will get you.
I laughed out loud at “may involve THE HASHTAGS” and am now feeling much better about my day. Also my freelancing.
I was also an English major and now I am a Verification Engineer™ who says things like “baretailed the service logs for the inbound router and they’re not throwing an error but the SQL table isn’t updating” like a boss. Because I can Google. And I used nearly exactly that “I’m sure I could find out how” answer in my job interview.
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
nat, clint & tony are all highly trained defensive drivers. riding with them is like being in a car chase, but they know what theyre doing so its actually pretty safe
dr banner drives like hes 90: super slow and cautious, but with occasional really terrifying bits of road rage. tony likes to make him drive convertables so that if he hulks out he wont have to do it through the roof of a car
steve…im not sure if anyone ever really taught steve how to drive or if he just figured it out on the fly. either way no one wants to ride with steve because he’s 1. a terrible driver and 2. probably going to get his vehicle exploded sooner or later
thor and vision dont drive.
wanda drives like a russian; which is to say, however the fuck she wants, and everyone else better make room for her. its a good thing she has magic powers or she’d probably have died in a car accident by now.
it turns out i can drive anything like an expert. literally anything. two months ago one of tonys competitors released a ‘top secret’ jetpack prototype and i already knew how to pilot it. no idea how or why
in exactly one week the entire english speaking world can stop seeing american election coverage 25 hours a day for the first time in two years like + reblog to weep tears of pure joy
You’re not even American. IMAGINE HOW BAD IT IS FOR US
no sorry im trying very hard to ignore your country
Not being American must SUCK during this election cycle, and I’m not being sarcastic here, I mean??? Like, you guys have to put up with all the stress and anxiety we dump onto the internet and the TV and literally every other media available, and like. It’s not even your country. Trump would rapidly become everyone’s problem, but if he gets elected it’s nothing y’all outside the borders can STOP (although who wants to go thousandsth-ies on an assassin with me?), and fuck. The anxiety level must be high. I am so sorry on everyone’s behalf.
i still can’t believe it’s already fucking november like october literally felt like it lasted 4 minutes where has this year gone why is the progression of time so mind boggling to me what the fuck
honestly the real horrifying thing about the US election is seeing Trump/Pence signs crop up around your neighborhood and its like you’ve been in a sleeper cell all these years
you are holding a thing. its in your hands. you look away for five seconds. you are no longer holding the thing and you cannot find it anywhere. you did not move from your spot. you do not know how this happened
you are scrolling down a website. you see something nice and you decide to read more about it. you scroll up to look into it. you see something nice. you decide you want to read more about it. you forgot the first thing you were going to search. you scroll down in hope to remember. you see something nice. you decide you want to read more about it.
there is a tear in one of your favourite outfits. you decide you can fix it. you grab the sewing supplies and put them down while you research how to do it. an hour passes. you wonder why there are sewing supplies by your bed.
where are your glasses?
there are three cups on your bedside table. you venture into the kitchen. you decide you want some water. you bring it back to your room. there are four cups on your bedside table.
youve had a towel around your shoulders for the past three hours. you are going to shower.
you’re watching a movie. you pick up your phone to have something to do while you watch the movie. you pause the movie. two days pass. you still havent finished the movie.
repeat to yourself so you wont forget, you think. repeat repeat repeat repeat. you no longer remember anything else but it. you look to the side. blue is a nice colour. what were you thinking about?
your leg wont stop shaking. it has a life of its own. you are not in control.
2016 started off with a tumblr witch stealing bones from graves and it set the tone for the whole year, so if 2017 starts off with anything worse, I’m just going to wrap myself up in pretty but comfortable clothes, lie down in a comfy place, and wait for death to take me
If you’re abled and you know someone who is disabled, please be aware that we need abled people to say, “we can’t do that if X says they can’t do it,” or, “Of course you can go home if you’re not well enough,” or, “Stop badgering them, if they say no they mean no.”
The pressure on us to perform to abled standards, socially, romantically and professionally is STAGGERING.
Don’t speak for us, but if we say we can’t do something, stand with us. Don’t let other abled people try to strongarm us into doing something we have stated that we cannot do.
I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:
On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.
On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?
well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country.
raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.
anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids.
It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???
I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.
(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)
I mean, isn’t “we didn’t kill them when they ate our garbage” basically how we ended up domesticating dogs?
Are we accidentally sorta domesticating crows and squirrels?
(Some rats have already been domesticated–pet rats and wild city rats are the same species, sure, but city rats do not like direct human contact and pet rats would quickly die if let loose)
THE IDEA THAT WE’RE FAIRIES TO RACCOONS IS MAKING ME GRIN.
so you know the rule in fairylands where you cant eat or drink anything or you’ll have to stay there forever? does like.. .eating out/sucking dick count
holy f uck jane
its a serious question
well like, the whole thing is that you cannot have consumed anything belonging to the fey realm. so, yes, probably, you would be stuck there. the same would apply if you just straight up ate a fairy.
new question: would deepthroating count in this case even w/o swallowing
no. temporary doesn’t count, otherwise fairies would all be running about sticking their hands in your mouth to get human servants.
you gotta digest it.
so like??? if you puke afterwards?? maybe it doesn’t count?
huh! i wonder how long is enough time for it to be legit. like whatever goes through your stomach immediately condemns you no matter if you throw it up later?
Well Persephone only ate 6 seeds so she only stayed 6 months, so maybe if you spat out most of it you’d just be condemned to the occasional day “BRB got go pay the two day toll for fellating a fairy.”
“you wanna come over for the weekend?”
“oh man im so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now i have to keep coming back to do it again– its a long story”
“you what now”
i can hardly believe this isn’t already the plot of an Oglaf comic
now that u said it im really surprised as well
what the fuck did i just read
Why ISN’T this an Oglaf comic yet?
I’m so happy that i’m not the only person who thinks of questions like these. I love you all so much.
I’m not convinced by this, actually!
Like, this analysis treats it as a substance problem, i.e. “edible matter from fairyland has properties that, if ingested, physically prevent you from being able to return to the real world.”
But OTOH, a recurring theme throughout fairy stories is that they’re all about…rules and exchanges and agreements with really steep interest rates:
“I’ll do you this favor, but if you don’t guess my name you’ll have to give me your first-born child.”
“You’re gonna be real good at everything but when you’re 16 you’re gonna prick your finger and die.”
“You loaned me $2 for the bus when I looked like a beggar, so now here’s a literal pile of gold and shit.”
Not to mention that in Childe Rowland, one of the central “if you eat food from fairyland you’re stuck there” stories, Rowland manages to retrieve his siblings despite them all presumably having chowed down on fairy food – all it took was beating the Fairy King in a swordfight and threatening to chop his head off.
The takeaway, I think, is that the food thing a matter of implicit exchange: if you get your grub on in fairyland, you’re accepting their hospitality and eating food that they own. This means you owe them, which the fairies can magically leverage to prevent you from leaving.
(You can probably get around this by explicitly agreeing to pay for your meal before you sit down to eat. From what I remember, fairies don’t seem capable of pulling a “Haha, we had an agreement but you’re fucked anyways!” maneuver, so if they agree to let you leave they might even be forced to helpyou leave.)
Which brings us to the matter at hand: if you blow a fairy you’re doing them a favor! They owe you.
And…they’re a fairy, so if you didn’t agree to terms beforehand they might not repay you in a way that’s ultimately helpful or safe, but it certainly doesn’t seem like they’d be able to, like, pat you on the head and be like “Thanks, you’re really good at this buuuuuuut also you’re stuck here forever now.”
Instead, what seems more likely is…I dunno, showing up to your wedding years later and giving you a beautiful white horse that always comes when called, while loudly praising you as truly deserving it for giving them them simply the best oral they’ve had in years.
Or they feel obligated to show up at your house a couple days a year. So, like
“you wanna come over for the weekend?”
“oh man I’m so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now he always comes by over memorial day weekend and helps me out with minor home repairs.”
“you what now”
This is my favorite act of intellectual bugfuckery on this entire website, when I die I want someone to print this out and place it in my grave with me so I can cherish it forever.
my fave overheard on campus moment of all time was the two guys who sat behind me in pop culture theory
as class was starting one of them was like “so… do you want a blowjob after this” in a rly bored voice, and then the second guy was like [pause][dejected sigh] “yes”
