IF YOU NEED TO CALL 911 BUT ARE SCARED TO BECAUSE OF SOMEONE IN THE ROOM, dial and ask for a pepperoni pizza. They will ask if you know you’re calling 911. Say yes, and continue pretending you’re making an order. They’ll ask if there’s someone in the room.
You can ask how long it will take for the pizza to get to you, and they will tell you how far away a dispatcher is.
This is okay advice but not 100% accurate. Pepperoni pizza is not exactly a secret “code” among law enforcement.
We have gotten calls like these using other topics as a disguise. Do what you can safely to express to the dispatcher you need help. They cannot just hang up on you unless the issue has been cleared. If you absolutely cannot talk or are too scared, call and put the phone down or in your pocket so the dispatcher can hear. If possible try to at least say your location because they don’t always get correct information about your address when your call populates.
Dispatchers are trained to pick up on unusual situations and to go with them to get you help.
A’IGHT PARTNER OF A 911 DISPATCHER HERE: Pizza isn’t some secret code, but dispatchers are trained to pick up if someone is having to lie on the phone about who they’re calling. The most important thing is to give them an address. They can send cops to an address, and yes, ordering pizza is a good way to get away with giving your address away on the phone.
Important information to note: locating where you are isn’t like Hollywood portrays it. Dispatchers/police can’t just pinpoint your location within seconds. It’s a long process that isn’t always allowed (they literally have to go through your cell phone carrier company and sometimes the carrier says “no you can’t pinpoint this person”).
most dispatch centers in the US, including the one i work at (boulder, colorado), have text-to-911 service these days. so even better than calling, just send a text to 911 (!!! IMPORTANT !!! include the address/location of where you are IN THE FIRST TEXT YOU SEND so that if you become unable to use your phone after that first text, we at least know where to send help). if the dispatch center in your area doesn’t have a text service, you will receive an automated text back saying something along the lines of “The 911 answering point in your area does not support text-to-911. Please call 911 instead.”
in that scenario, where you end up needing to call but still can’t make it known that you’re calling 911, there are plenty of things you can do to communicate that you need help depending on the exact circumstances.
if there is a person with you who is threatening to harm or kill you, and your call to 911 would only make things worse, try to call as discreetly as possible. with smartphones these days, you don’t even have to unlock your phone to call 911. simply get your phone to the unlock screen where you would enter your passcode and there should be a button at the bottom of your screen (sometimes at the top) that says “Emergency Call.” just hit that button and you’re good to go. also keep in mind that you can do this from phones that haven’t even been activated yet (just be aware however, that if you’re calling from a deactivated phone, and the call gets disconnected somehow, the dispatcher will NOT be able to call you back like we can with activated phones because there is no phone number attached to a deactivated phone).
from there, after you’ve pressed the emergency call button, if the person threatening you is yelling at you, simply keep an open line. your phone’s microphone is more powerful than you think, and can easily pick up someone in the same room yelling at you. if you’re able to do so without dramatically escalating the situation, yell back at them, and try to throw in some details about where you are. also try to throw in details of whether or not there are any weapons present (guns, knives, baseball bats, golf clubs, whatever).
the biggest thing we care about when taking a 911 call is the address/location. if you’re not in a building, give an intersection. if you don’t know the roads you’re on/near, give a landmark. a big building. a strangely colored building. a specific grouping of buildings together. we’re trained to be extremely familiar with the landmarks in our jurisdiction, and usually those landmarks will be in our computer system as well.
also, just be aware that if you call 911 with an open line and we don’t hear anything, we will hang up and call you back immediately, so make sure to answer the next call you get. this can actually help you out because it can be an excuse to step out of the room to take a phone call. if you can’t step out of the room to answer when we call you back, try to at least answer the call and give us something.
now, if you’re calling 911 in a situation where you can call us just fine but can’t talk because someone might hear you, try whispering. if you can’t even whisper, press a button on your phone. if we hear even something that tells us there’s a person on the other end, we will make every attempt to ask if that person can hear us before we hang up and attempt a callback. a common method of communicating with someone who can’t talk is to have the caller tap on the back of their phone, or press a number on the keypad. if this is the method of communication the dispatcher is using with you, they’ll usually use a “tap once for yes, twice for no” method. pressing buttons on your phone’s keypad makes an audible beep sound to the person on the other end, i.e. the dispatcher. once a “tap once for yes, twice for no” dialogue has been established, the dispatcher will ask you yes or no questions. just try to answer them to the best of your ability. again, the most important thing is an address/location. also, if it’s at all possible, call from a landline, not your cell phone. thought landlines were useless? think again. landlines are required to register to an address, so if there’s a landline available, use it, don’t use your cell phone. that way, if you can’t tell us where you are, it’s fine because we’ll already have an address.
i feel like i should make some kind of a master post about this stuff in the future.
I hate you so much. As per our conversation, you absolute heathen: Borgias Star Wars AU Cesare as Leia Lucrezia as Luke Micheletto as Han Fucking go. I hate you so much.
This is the first of two Star Wars AUs, this one is mostly because I profoundly wanted an AU where Cesare was literally a prince of an entire planet and also I wanted Lucrezia to have a lightsaber. I am currently working on another one for @wildehacked in which everyone is in the much more obvious position of being Sith.
Cesare doesn’t expect a rescue, as he sits in
his cell, back to the wall and one leg stretched out in front of him with the
other bent close to his body. The
ceremonial robes of Alderaan are heavy, uncomfortable at the best of times and
these…these are not the best of times.
Deep red cloth rubs against his skin, raw and tender from a few rounds
with a torture droid, and he ignores it.
He told them nothing—he has no profound alliance to the Rebellion, but
the image of the great and terrible Darth Sixtus wading through the endless
dunes of Dantooine had amused him, and after their young general turned their
weapon on Alderaan…
Well.
Cesare is (was) hardly beloved of his people, raised by the stern and
austere Viceroy of Alderaan, della Rovere, but that was his planet, and after
it was gone, he denied the Empire information out of sheer spite. It had been worth it, to see the towering
dark figure of Sixtus storm out of the room in a rage.
Still, though. His planet is gone, and they didn’t love
their distant prince, and the Rebellion trusts him only on the weight of his
adopted guardian, who was well known in the right circles for his totally
ruthless devotion to the cause. Cesare
sent away the information he had been told to care for with the droid, a PA-L0
unit more willful than was good for it.
It might make it to the Sforza woman della Rovere had intended it for,
or it might not—either way, it is out of his hands. The Rebellion won’t expend the manpower to
send a rescue mission, and the Empire has a new planet-killer to play with. He’s confident he won’t live long enough to
find out whether PA-L0 made it or not.
It’s something of a surprise, then, when
alarms go off and his cell door opens to admit the shortest Stormtrooper he’s
ever seen.
Cesare silently arches an eyebrow. Princes grow up in the public eye, especially
on bustling Core worlds like Alderaan, and Cesare prides himself on the ability
to show no response to any disaster.
He’d had to cultivate it, after the second time he was caught with
someone who, perhaps, should have been off-limits.
“Are you lost?” he asks dryly, and the
Stormtrooper reaches up to wrestle off their helmet, and Cesare’s mouth snaps
shut in surprise.
It’s not the hard-faced man he expected. Instead it’s a woman, a girl, really, with a
youthful face and hair like sunlight pinned up in a knot, and she smiles at
him, perfect tiny teeth a string of matched pearls behind her pink lips. She looks about his own age, maybe
younger. There’s a sharp tug, like a
cord anchored somewhere in Cesare’s spine is pulling him toward her, and he has
the sudden inexplicable urge to brush her hair back, the wayward coils of spun
gold escaping around her face.
“I’m Lucrezia Borgia,” she says, dimpling at
him, and he tries to assemble words to reply.
“I found your Paolo unit. I’m
here to rescue you.”
Cesare has made worse snap decisions in his
life than take a rescue wearing the face of an angel, he concludes in under a
second. They run.
They find another false Stormtrooper, and
this one is far more like what Cesare expected, a man with eyes like stone and
a dispassionate expression under the smudged blood on his cheek. Lucrezia calls him Micheletto, and Cesare
snatches a blaster off a dead Stormtrooper to toss at him.
“My lord,” Micheletto says with a slight
incline of his head.
“This is Cesare della Rovere,” Lucrezia says,
as if Micheletto doesn’t know who he is.
“He gives your orders now. Take
us back to the Condottiere, and we’ll
find Caterina on the way.”
They do find Caterina. Just in time to watch Sixtus cut her
down.
“I knew her brother,” Lucrezia says coolly as
they crowd into the cockpit of Micheletto’s ship, the Condottiere. It’s a bit of a
wreck, but he pilots it like a master, as skillfully as he had cut down any
Stormtrooper in their path. “He was an
unpleasant man, to say the least.” She
fingers the silver hilt at her hip—a lightsaber, she tells Cesare quietly, apparently
once the possession of her father. “You’ll
forgive me if I don’t shed any tears over her corpse.”
“Of course,” Cesare says, and she smiles at
him, and he takes it like a blaster bolt to the heart.
Some other highlights…
Lucrezia brings down the Death Star, her eyes
closed and her X-Wing guided by something at the center of her chest, something
cold and bright as a Tatooine moon. When
she lands, laughing and giddy with triumph, Cesare snatches her up around the
waist and spins her around, and he smiles at her, and she thinks idly about
kissing it off his lips. Micheletto
smiles his faint smile and kisses her cheek like she’s a lady of status. Lucrezia gets an award. Micheletto, a killer and a criminal and a
bloody hand for hire, insists that he should not, and Cesare does not argue
with him.
Cesare finds the leader of the Rebellion, an
ex-Senator named Machiavelli, very much to his liking. It is common knowledge that Machiavelli has
something of an affection for the ex-Prince of Alderaan (it’s something Cesare
asks himself often—is he still a prince at all, if he has no planet?), and
Cesare is not above leveraging this to his purposes.
Lucrezia kisses Cesare on Hoth, after she
almost dies in the cold, her skin still flushed from the incredibly hot shower
she just took, and he clutches her to him like she’s as ethereal as
sunlight. Her golden hair hangs around
them like a curtain, in her quarters, and the red lines her nails trace over his
shoulders and chest sting bright and clean, and Cesare thinks that he has never
loved someone like he loves this woman.
Cesare kisses Micheletto in an asteroid
field, during an argument, and again on Cloud City, where an old acquaintance
turns them over to Sixtus, and it’s harsh and bloodied and hungry. They fuck in dark corners, still half-dressed
and breathless, and Micheletto swears allegiance like he’s praying to a god,
like Cesare is a force of nature, like Cesare is the Force. Cesare leaves bruises shaped like
finger-lengths and the curve of his lips, and they’re still there when
Micheletto is frozen in carbonite by Darth Sixtus.
Lucrezia spends all of thirty seconds
training with a withered old Jedi named Orsini before she rushes away again,
not even pausing at his warnings as she takes flight for Cloud City. When she arrives, there are terrible
revelations about her family—Darth Sixtus, once Rodrigo Borgia, a power-hungry
general from the Clone Wars. On the Condottiere, she cries into Cesare’s
shoulder, her severed hand aching, and he kisses her tears away, her sunlight curls spilling over them
both.
Cesare saves Micheletto. He does not care to be asked why he takes
such a risk for a man he professes to be a simple instrument.
Lucrezia, with a new silver hand like a piece of art, discovers that there is another
Borgia—there was a third, an elder brother gone missing as a small child,
before the Death Star was destroyed, but the young general died with his weapon
and now there is only one. Her twin
brother, Cesare Borgia, Prince of ex-Alderaan.
“But I will say the most drunk I’ve ever been was when I had moonshine, and it wasn’t the first time I’d ever had it, but I’d never had a lot of it ‘cause my step-dad was like ‘here’s a pinch of moonshine’ and I was like ‘I don’t like this’.
But I drank a bunch with my neighbor and then we ate, it was peach moonshine and they had a peach soaking in it, and we ate the peach. And what I remember from that night is literally not a damn thing. But I woke up the next morning, there was dirt in my bed and I had stolen a hymnal from a nearby church.
So the lesson here, kids, is please drink responsibly. Don’t break and enter into the house of the Lord.”—Molly (@ofgeography) on responsible drinking, from the most recent episode of Wait Wait What’s Icing? @waitwaitwhatsicing (via thatwasfunwhileitlasted)
I saw a post that was like “mutuals =/= friends” like whoa okay I always thought of mutuals as low key friends but that’s fine let’s make people more insecure of their relationships than they already are
Bruhs, if we are mutuals you are 100% at least low-key level friend to me.
I follow you = acquaintance
Mutuals = low-key friends
I’ve replied to your posts at least twice = high key friends
I actually use the message system to talk to you = I really really like you and probably talk about you to people irl all the time
IF YOU NEED TO CALL 911 BUT ARE SCARED TO BECAUSE OF SOMEONE IN THE ROOM, dial and ask for a pepperoni pizza. They will ask if you know you’re calling 911. Say yes, and continue pretending you’re making an order. They’ll ask if there’s someone in the room.
You can ask how long it will take for the pizza to get to you, and they will tell you how far away a dispatcher is.
My flat-mate’s date for the night was almost as drunk as her. She had passed out in her room and locked the door. He refused to leave because he wanted to have sex. He also demanded food because he was dealing with “whiskey dick”. He didn’t like the lack of food in the fridge. I called 911, did the stuff stated above, and he was getting PISSED about how long the “order” was taking. He took my phone, demanded they “hurry the fuck up”. Police arrived two minutes later, arrested him, and helped me file a police report. Pressing charges wasn’t necessary because he had warrants on him from THREE different states for the very thing he planned to do to me. Several months after this happened one of the officers informed me he was charged with two felonies because he crossed stay lines, and will be serving no less than 35 years in prison. The officer ripped into my flat-mate about her bringing home complete strangers, while drunk, knowing full well this shit could happen.
This was 14 years ago.
Do the pizza order, do it as calmly as you can. The dispatcher I spoke to said things like this:
“If he’s drunk say you want mushrooms.” I said I want extra mushrooms.
“If he’s threatening you with sexual assault say you want onions.” I said I want onions.
She went like this with different toppings and sauces for a description of him, like pineapple if he’s blonde, black olives if he’s tall, extra large if he’s tall, etc.
They’ve heard this sort of coded call before. They’re trained for it. They will understand what you’re saying. Order the pizza.
hello i hope you’re eating and drinking and sleeping in all the required amounts. dont die.
Anonymous said:
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF MAKE SURE YOU EAT HAVE YOU EATEN GO EAT SOMETHING (DRINK WATER) (BE SAFE AND DONT DIE) YOU CAN DO IT
Anonymous said:
DO THE WORK YOU CAN DO IT *CHEERS YOU ON AGGRESSIVELY, BUT IN A GENTLE FASHION* (THERE IS NO NEED TO REPLY TO THIS)
I don’t know if these were all the same person checking in once a week or what but y’all have really been keeping my going through the last push on my thesis and I’m going to go through my inbox and actually clear out all of these messages because they’re sweet as hell.
Just to expand on this post about calling 911 and asking for a pizza to secretly ask for help:
The post is based on a Super Bowl commercial, which itself was based on a Reddit post that’s never been verified as true.
There is no actual pizza code with toppings and shit that dispatchers are trained in. If you come across someone who has heard of the commercial, they might understand. If you come across someone who’s never heard of it, they might think it’s a prank call and hang up on you.
A piece of actual advice to help you in this situation is to dial 911, then hang up without speaking, then turn the phone off. 911 will attempt to call you back, and when they’re unable to reach you, they’ll dispatch a unit to your location under the assumption that you need help and your call was interrupted. This will work 100% of the time, whereas the pizza trick will only work if the dispatcher has heard of the commercial/urban legend.
Also, the toppings thing was a complete and total fabrication and whoever wrote that should be ashamed of themselves, tbh.
If you’re on a cell phone, the dispatcher DOES NOT KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. You do need to find an excuse to give them your address, and ordering food is the best excuse. A 911 dispatcher will not just hang up if they think you might be prank calling them, they’ll ask you if there’s an emergency and you can say “yes,” and say your address and whatever else you need to say to keep your cover (like a pizza order). This doesn’t rely on any code, it relies on the fact that 911 dispatchers are trained to send a unit no matter what—as long as they know where to send it.
This is actually a huge problem with 911 dispatchers, they DO NOT KNOW YOUR LOCATION
It seems like a basic thing you would expect an emergency service to be able to figure out, but they DON’T, THEY CAN’T, UNLESS YOU TELL THEM
When I was in a car accident and had to get my mom to the hospital last year, it took 5 minutes just for me to confirm with the 911 dispatcher that they knew where I was, and even then I watched while they whizzed past the street where we were waiting. The most crucial thing first responders have to know in the case of an emergency is where you are. Don’t skip this information, please.
So today started out dumb, but this afternoon was AWESOME.
I’m on the porch attempting to construct a railing for the stairs when I notice a weird noise. Like, a kind of droning or buzzing? And it’s getting loud. So I investigate. It’s coming from the neighbor’s yard.
It is a metric fuckton of bees. I have never seen so many bees in my life. It is a fucking swarm of bees, and I have been reading about bees because I got a wild hair a few weeks back about wanting a hive of my own, but haven’t yet convinced Husbandthing, and there is suddenly a SWARMING HERD OF WILD HONEYBEES IN THE NEIGHBOR’S YARD.
I see postings on the neighborhood page all the time for feral swarm collection, but I also know the guy in the house across the alley just set up a hive. “Hey I think your hive escaped,” I text him.
He calls me back about three minutes later. Turns out, the swarm he was supposed to get never came; the company went out of business and his order got cancelled, and he’d found out HALF AN HOUR AGO. And he says he’s got a friend who is a professional beekeeper, and he’s going to go pick her up and would it be okay if they came and got this swarm please please please?
So Bee Neighbor and Professional Beekeeper show up and immediately don bee suits. Apparently there is fierce competition for feral swarms, and the swarm in the neighbor’s tree is HUGE, and also twenty feet off the ground, and Bee Neighbor wants them very badly.
The tree the bees are in is in a yard belonging to neither of us, so we go knock on the door, but there’s no answer. I knock on the house adjacent to it, but that guy’s not home either. Finally, I text the neighbor on the other side of me to see if he’s got contact info for the property owner, who is incredibly shy and in three years has never made eye contact. No luck.
So…we trespass. We get my extension ladder, and Bee Neighbor climbs the tree while Professional Beekeeper stands on the ladder and walks him through the swarm collection. Turns out, you just shake the swarm into a box, and as long as the queen makes it into the box, the rest of the swarm will eventually follow. Bee Neighbor has never collected a swarm before (this is, in fact, his very first swarm of bees ever) and it takes the two of them the better part of an hour in the tree trying to shake the swarm into the box.
Bees eventually get into the box. Bee Neighbor gets out of the tree without dying, and Professional Beekeeper examines the swarm and makes pleased noises. At this point, the box is the neighbor’s driveway, and about two thirds of the swarm is still milling around the box all confused. Since the neighbor isn’t home and we can’t contact him, he risks coming and parking right in the middle of a huge cloud of bees. Professional Beekeeper doesn’t want to move the box too far away, because we risk the milling bees losing the queen’s scent and never going into the box. An equidistant point between the current location and Bee Neighbor’s yard is the top of my recycling bin.
So they put the box of bees on my recycling bin, and I text Husbandthing.
Now I have a box of bees that I am babysitting. They’re being all lazy and dopey and bumbling around. I think I might be in love. Bee Neighbor will pick the box up later tonight and put them in his hive, and then the bees will be MY neighbors too!!
THIS HAS BEEN THE BEST DAY EVER
#beekeeping #also we left a note on the absent neighbor’s door #hi sorry we trespassed #but as you can see from your security cam footage #there was a giant cloud of bees #and we came and got them #we figured you did not want a yard full of bees #and we will love them #yours very sincerely #the friendly neighborhood bee team [Tags by @sacrificethemtothesquid]
Do you think the animorphs could have win the war if Eva had not been taken by the Yeerks?
Eva’s right about Marco: he’s a sweet kid, even to the point of delicacy, and he has no understanding of the vileness of the world. He’s never tasted death, never watched one parent disappear while the other decayed. The world has not yet made him hard, has not honed the sharp edges of his mind into razors and armored spikes.
This time around, when they’re all standing around arguing in Cassie’s barn, Marco becomes first the one to agree with Tobias. “Think about it, man,” Marco says, grinning at Jake. “Turning into animals? Saving the planet? It’s like something out of a comic book.”
“Our parents would kill us if they knew,” Jake says slowly.
“That’s why they’re never gonna know,” Marco says, laughing. “How about it, huh? We rescue Tom, we kick butts, and depending on how that goes we’ll talk more later.”
After the mission goes more wrong than they ever could have imagined, after they learn what hell looks like and lose a fight against the being who rules that hell, Marco misses nearly a week of school. His parents are worried, of course, but neither of them can get a straight answer out of him. Marco keeps his trap shut, because he knows this much: if Tom could be a controller, then anyone could be.
Still, Marco loves his friends, and he can’t let them face danger alone. He helps them infiltrate Chapman’s house, and the construction site afterward. He goes with them to take down the yeerks’ supply ship, grumbling the whole time about how they’re all gonna die. He rescues Ax, and does his best to stifle the nightmares that follow their encounter with the sharks. Each time he gets home, he’s met at the door of his house by Eva, who is growing steadily more concerned and doesn’t know what to think of his increasingly-flimsy lies.
He says to Jake, “This is going to be my last mission,” and this time he means it. They barely make it out of that mission alive, and even then only because of the grace of Visser One (whose human host is a young engineer named Allison Kim) and her ongoing conflict with Visser Three.
Marco quits; Jake doesn’t try to stop him. Marco agrees to stop morphing entirely, and so he walks home—and straight into an intervention.
Eva and Peter don’t know whether Marco has joined a gang, started taking drugs, fallen in with the wrong crowd, or what. All they know is that the withdrawn silences, the nightmares, and the free-falling GPA are all recent developments. They have questions, and they’re not letting him get away without answers. They tell him that they’re here for him, but also that they are going to leave town to go spend some time in Eva’s sister’s cabin in the woods for the next five days, and he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
“Actually,” Marco says, “five days in the middle of nowhere sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all year.”
Even this kinder, gentler version of Marco is still Marco: he watches both his parents carefully for the next seventy-two hours, and can hardly believe the relief he feels when they go that entire time without leaving their tiny corner of nowheresville long enough to access a yeerk pool.
When those seventy-two hours are up, Marco sends a mental apology to Jake (who, although Marco doesn’t know it, is starving out a yeerk of his own at that very time) and then starts answering his parents’ questions. He tells them where he’s been going lately. Why he and Jake have missed so much school in the past two months. What the nightmares are about.
Eva and Peter think he’s crazy at first, because they’re God-fearing suburban Americans who have never once considered the possibility of aliens outside of sci-fi. They start to listen a lot more closely, however, once he morphs a wolf in front of their eyes and then changes back.
When the entire family gets home and Marco discovers that his best friend spent three days as a controller in his absence, he immediately rejoins the team. Peter disapproves sharply of Marco continuing to fight. Eva asks Peter, tears in her eyes, what choice they have in the matter. It’s not like the human authorities are doing anything to combat the yeerks. It’s not like they can fight back themselves. And so they get in the habit of sending Marco out the door (or a window) any time Jake or Cassie calls, always begging him to let them know he’s safe the instant he can.
Funny enough, though, they do find ways to fight back.
Eva listens to their description of the Veleek in careful detail, then she loads Jake and Cassie and Marco into the back seat of her sedan and instructs them to take turns morphing. For nearly six hours she barrels up and down Highway 1 at speeds which leave Marco shrieking in terror at the turns, playing keep-away with the tornado monster until at last Visser Three calls it home in exasperation.
Peter simply hands over his laptop to Ax and asks for help in “fixing” his code for the long-distance communications array. Ax does one better and helps him design a program which gets them a permanent connection between the andalite home world and Marco’s own living room. He stops by to call his parents twice a week, and once a month gives carefully-edited reports on the resistance to the andalite high command.
At first, Eva nudges Ax into staying for dinner after his twice-weekly calls home, on the grounds that she’s never in her life seen someone eat her cooking with that much enthusiasm. However, it’s not long before she convinces him to bring Tobias by as often as he can. It does them a lot of good, even though neither one of them will admit it outright, to have a safe place to get inside when they need it.
Eva doesn’t love it, but she starts doing a lot of the kids’ homework as well. She always does her best to quiz them on Algebra concepts or history dates when there’s time, but she also understands that sometimes the war has to take priority.
Peter installs an air mattress on Marco’s floor on a semi-permanent basis, and gets in the habit of lying to Jean. Because Jake’s just a kid, at the end of the day, and there are a lot of times at the end of the day when he’s too wrecked or exhausted from yet another mission gone bad to face the thought of lying to his family.
Eva dislikes David right from the moment Marco first brings him home, but she keeps that opinion to herself. She sits patiently through the entitled little brat asking her where she’s from (implying, of course, that “San Diego” cannot possibly be the full truth) but also tells him that if he even thinks of borrowing their phone without permission she will make him regret it for the rest of his life. With effort she ignores his repeated attempts to undermine her authority (she’s not his real mom, as he feels the need to remind her constantly) but when she catches him stealing money from Peter’s wallet, she snaps and grounds him on the spot.
David immediately morphs into a lion, unsheathing hooked claws as a growl builds inside his throat. It takes a force of will Eva didn’t even know she had, but she stares him down without flinching. Cold sweat is running down her back, but there’s not even a trace of a tremor in her words when she orders him to demorph now, young man, in her best Mom Voice.
Miraculously, he listens. He sulks about it all afternoon, whining to Peter and to Marco (neither of whom is remotely sympathetic), but the fact is that he can’t bring himself to kill a human. Not yet, anyway.
When David disappears two days later, Eva asks Marco only once what happened. He tells her in two or three halting sentences, and afterwards she hugs him until he finally stops shaking. She explains what happened to Peter, and neither one of them ever brings it up again.
Marco’s house becomes the natural convergence point for all their meetings. It’s only three doors down from Jake’s house, a five-block walk from Rachel’s, and close enough to Cassie’s usual bus route that she has little trouble getting there. They don’t really converge there for the location, though. They come for Peter’s willingness to cobble together a fake Bug fighter distress signal on the fly, for Eva’s no-nonsense questions about whether they’re sure it’s a good idea to attack Joe Bob Fenestre’s house before they know what they’re getting into. They come for the cinnamon cookies that Ax eats by the trayful and the links to forum discussions about the latest yeerk activity.
It might be a cliche, but the truth is this: at Marco’s house they are safe. And in that small bubble of safety, they have freedom. The freedom to talk openly about new morphs without fear of being overheard. The freedom to come and go through the sunroom skylight that Eva leaves open at all times. The freedom to be vulnerable and scared and not sure where they’re going with this war. The freedom to be kids, and to ask an adult for help.
Eva talks to Rachel for nearly three hours about her own parents’ divorce, and what it was like to realize she’d probably never see her dad again. Peter keeps a stock of paperback novels in the living room, never minding when Tobias tends to return them with talon marks in their spines. Eva teaches Ax how to cook cinnamon cookies and churros, chicken fajitas and western omelettes. Peter becomes ever more convincing when assuring Walter and Michelle on the phone that Cassie is simply a delight to have around as she and Marco help each other with homework.
Marco kills Visser One, and Allison Kim along with her, one sunny afternoon in May. Visser Three witnesses the whole thing, not lifting a finger to intervene. The kids have gotten in the habit of telling Peter and especially Eva absolutely everything, but this is the one thing Marco can never bring himself to tell.
The war ends eventually. Maybe it’s not better, or worse, than it would have been if Visser One had chosen a different host. They take longer to figure out how to defeat Visser Three without Eva’s insight to the way yeerk leadership works, but they get there in the end. Tom dies. Rachel dies. James and Kelly and several thousand humans and hork-bajir and taxxons die. Seventeen thousand yeerks meet a terrible icy death in the vacuum of space; Eva finds out about it later and can’t bring herself to disapprove.
One week after Rachel’s funeral, Eva is watching Marco’s latest NBC segment when she hears a knock on the door. Muting the TV, she goes to answer it and finds Jake on her doorstep once again. This time he’s got a backpack over one shoulder and a worn duffle bag with the name of a basketball team that rejected him tucked under the opposite arm.
“Hi,” he says softly, voice hoarse as if from tears. “Things with my parents are kind of a mess right now, and I was just wondering…”
Eva pulls the door open all the way. “Of course, honey. Stay as long as you’d like.”
Some way to stop seeing bowler hats or glowing cigarette butts from the
corners of his eye. Sometimes he swore he could smell them, unwashed
bodies muted with mud, a godawful stench really, but his godawful stench. His men.
“And he did indeed look very fine. You’re still better.” He rocked up onto his toes and kissed Bucky’s cheek. “Go tell ‘em Mister Stark approves and appreciates the rush job.”
Thankfully, Pepper simply laughed instead of taking offense. “Good heavens, your mother is almost as bad as mine! I didn’t even know she read the New York papers until she called and asked me all about you after the gala. Next thing I know she’s going to be unearthing the hope chest she started for me when I was sixteen.”
“Jus’ go to the tenth floor,” he said, he said, slurring a little; vodka always went to his head, along with whiskey, tequila, and scopolamine. “I can get you the right sort of gun.”
“These are special, aren’t they?“
Steve raised his eyes to meet Buck’s, then, and
he held Buck’s gaze for a long, still moment before he nodded and turned away.
He carefully laid the two pennies in the exact center of the big table, side by
side, two bright glints in that dark expanse.
“Yes, Master,” Harold says. “Forgive me, Master.”
He lets John take some of his weight, walking down from the stage. A bittersweet feeling: trust John doesn’t deserve.
There’s a wry expression on Arthur’s face as he watches the
two of them leave, Merlin hanging on Cenred’s arm. He hates himself for putting
Merlin in this position.
Unbeknownst to him, someone else is also watching them leave
from across the room, and the smile playing on her lips signals doom.
“There is no such thing as dignity in death. Their brains
have stopped functioning, everything they are, were or ever could’ve
been is already gone, all that’s left is a rotting pile of meat.”
He gave his sister a disturbed
look and watched her cringe, aware of her own morbidity.
“Sorry, that
was… insensitive.”
Nothing about him particularly was in disarray, but he felt rumpled. The stain on his shirt, garishly red under the fluorescent lights, had already set but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
There were more difficult things to deal with now.
“You
are not among the plethora of the faceless. I know you may not have wished it,
and perhaps I am partially to blame for the circumstance, but your involvement
with the auxilia has undoubtedly caused many to notice you as an individual.
All it takes is a particular person recognizing you as a man with an identity
and your value alters its state.”
More vultures moved in, and a flock of gulls gusted away with the wind. In the corner of Will’s eye they appeared a great winged cloud, flapping and calling to each other. The stranger closed his sketchpad and stood, his feet meeting sand as he walked away.
Dessert was passion fruit mousse and chocolate ganache tarts, served with a selection of cheeses and sweet wines. It was well past midnight, and when he was accosted by the ruckus of guests falling, uproariously, into the swimming pool fully clothed, Will Graham decided abruptly that he had had enough.
He showed himself to the kitchens.
Thomas touches the tips of his fingers to his jaw, just beneath his ear. The barely-there contact sends a stubborn shiver of yearning through his chest. “We have never been able to keep each other safe,” Thomas says quietly.
Micheletto’s gaze flicked down to follow the path of
Cesare’s hand, then looked back to his eyes, patient.
Cesare pressed his lips together, considering. He needed…he didn’t know what he needed.
“What would you ask of me, my lord?” Micheletto asked
quietly.
Hey just thought I'd let you know that the Eurovision Song Contest actually has a really deep history. It was started as a way to unite Europe after WW2 and it worked! People send their support to other countries by voting for their year's entry. Over the years it has become a bit flashy or tacky, but the core idea of unity still stands! I know this mightn't make much sense to you, but this song contest is actually a really big deal to some people 😊
My dude, I think you’ve got me wrong here, I think Eurovision is fantastic. I’m thrilled that it’s a thing. The history of it is amazing. I’m even MORE thrilled that y'all get so much genuine delight out of it, because I’m a big believer that just because something is campy or absurd should by no means decrease people’s enjoyment of it.
That doesn’t make it less bizarre to see that stuff start to scroll across one’s screen like an annual reminder of the capacity of the human animal for Weird Performance and Questionable Costumes.
a. hamlet and horatio are having a badly-hidden affair from the start. they’re trying to keep it secret and act like they’re Just Guys Being Dudes
they’re terrible at it. every time they make eye contact they forget the ends of their sentences and get distracted
(this canonically happens in the text - ‘give me that man / that is not passion’s slave, and i will wear him / in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / as i do thee. — something too much of this.’ you can’t tell me they didn’t get distracted by making out and have to reluctantly drag themselves back on track during this sentence)
play opens with a montage of them making out in corners of the castle corridors and having to jump apart any time people walk by
this also explains why horatio’s apparently been in denmark since the funeral but he and hamlet are talking like they haven’t seen each other in forever when the play opens
b. ophelia is also really gay and she and hamlet are pretending to date in order to get their various relatives off their backs.
hamlet and ophelia lying on the floor taking turns to drink soda out of the same bottle, writing the world’s fakest love letters to each other and laughing so hard they’re crying
‘nonono wait ive got it, “doubt truth to be a liar but never doubt i love”’ (wheezing) ‘WHAT’ ‘idk?? straight people like that stuff?? do they?’ ‘you’re asking me??? your guess is as good as mine dude’
‘IM PUTTING THE WORD ‘BOSOMS’ IN IT’ ‘NOOOOO’ ‘IM DOING IT’ ‘my father’s going to have to read this you’re the WORST’
c. ophelia knows that hamlet is pretending to be mad - she doesn’t know why, but he asks her to help him out. this means that all of their confrontations are as melodramatic and extra as possible, interspersed with moments of frantic conspiratory eye contact.
ophelia, pulling out all the stops, ‘FATHER i have been SO AFFRIGHTED hamlet came with his DOUBLET UNBRACED and HELD ME AT ARMS LENGTH and STARED AT ME….. all this after i stopped encouraging his love…. what can it MEAN!!’ ‘mad for thy love?’ ‘….idk i can’t say for sure but yes definitely that’s what it is and you should probably go tell claudius that now’
the ‘get thee to a nunnery’ scene becomes way more enjoyable if ophelia’s in on the plan and is helping to convince claudius that hamlet’s mad
basically ophelia deserves more time being happy in this play
and if she gets this, then things get REAL SAD REAL QUICK later, because then hamlet kills polonius, and she starts to wonder if she really knew him - was she right to trust him? had he been using her? had he really been mad; should she have noticed; could she have stopped him? she HELPED him, what if she made things worse by playing along? and now everything’s gone to shit and her father is dead and she’s desperate and alone
whys zenyatta the new “uwu hes such a cute cinnamon roll” character on tumblr now
it took me a second to realize you were talking about overwatch cause at first i assumed you were talking about the retired racehorse.
why do you know a racehorse by name
Listen you, Zenyatta fucking dominated a few years ago when she was racing. She’s one of, if not the greatest racehorse in my lifetime. She won 19 consecutive races on her 20 race career. (She came in second in her final race. Lost by a few inches. Mike Smith, her jockey, broke down crying afterwards and blamed himself for the loss.)
Watching her was an incredible, exhilarating experience. Seriously look up any of her races on YouTube. She was an amazing closing finisher. She’d be dead last until the very end before just blowing past her competition and leaving them all in her dust at the last moment.
She also had serious fucking personality. Before each race she would prance and paw at the ground, like a human athlete limbering up before competition. The most star quality I’ve ever seen from a horse.
I am literally the most casual horse racing fan you’d ever meet but yeah, I know Zenyatta by name. Also I have not a fucking clue who this Zenyatta character tumblr likes is. So you know, to each their own.
Good morning everyone! In case you have crept FURTHER into the sensory deprivation tank which is everyone’s only source of peace these days: last night Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Comey found out about it on TV, bc Tromp is a lunatic who loves a spectacle. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
A few sample call scripts, slightly adapted from Indivisible:
FOR HOUSE GOP:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. It’s the kind of thing autocrats do. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT??] The American people deserve to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and what our elected leaders are doing to prevent it from happening again. Will [Rep’s name] stand up for [his/her] constituents by supporting an independent investigation into Russian tampering in our elections, and co-sponsoring the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 356)?
FOR SENATE GOP:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. It’s the kind of thing autocrats do. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT??] The American people deserve to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and what our elected leaders are doing to prevent it from happening again. Will [Senator’s name] stand up for [his/her] constituents by co-sponsoring Senator Cardin’s bill, S. 27, which would create an independent investigation into Russian interference?
FOR DEMOCRATS IN BOTH HOUSES:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because [SCREAMING] IT’S ON FIRE!! IT’S ALL ON FIRE, DUDE! HELP!!!!!!! HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!
no, just kidding, hahahaha. FOR DEMOCRATS & GOP-ERS WHO HAVE COME OUT IN SUPPORT OF INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT.] I just want to thank [elected’s name] for speaking out and I ask him/her to keep fighting on behalf of his/her constituents and the American people.
Please remember that one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of autocracy is the feeling of hopelessness. People who believe their voices are not useful don’t speak up. People who believe the war is over don’t fight back. But your sense that there’s Nothing You Can Do About All This isn’t an objective truth. It’s a weapon being actively deployed against you by an administration that wants you to stop caring. As MC Lyte once said, Fuck that motherfucking bullshit. Kiss my motherfucking ass.
after u call, u can come to my inbox and i will tell you what a BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL RUBY you are, because you are one, and i love u.
[sleepy hollow gets cancelled two days after orlando jones debuts on a new tv show written by one of the best fantasy writers of the century and calls out the horrific reality of black people’s lives]
Every year I am abruptly reminded of exactly which blogs I follow are run by people who live in Europe (or Australia, or a small handful of other pertinent countries) when they all go simultaneously batshit insane.
Mr. Hamilton asks her to marry him so often it becomes a game. “Marry me, Miss Barlow,” he’ll say when they step together in a dance, smiling at her as the dance separates them.
“I couldn’t marry you today,” she’ll reply when the music joins them again, and his palm presses lightly against hers. “You will note the stormclouds.”
“The rain would not do,” Mr. Hamilton will agree, hers for a few more measures. “Perhaps next week, when the weather clears?”
“Certainly not,” Miranda will say, and caress his thumb briefly with her own, risking the scandalized eye of Lady Heyward. “I could never marry under clear skies.”
2.
James books their passage under the names of Mr. and Mrs. McGraw, and although she understands the necessity–she won’t be parted from him, any more than he’ll be parted from her, and not even the relaxed atmosphere of a merchant vessel bound for Port Royal will allow Mr. McGraw and Mrs. Hamilton to share a cabin–she hates it. James is not her husband, although she’s never loved him more than she does now, the way misery loves grief.
She’ll never have a husband again.
1.
Miranda refuses to marry Mr. Hamilton twice at the opera with the Dudleys, much to their amusement, but she takes his arm and arranges things so the two of them are side by side in the Dudleys’ box. He murmurs softly to her for the duration of the play, clever and wicked by turns, and she had him only the day before, on his knees in Duke R––’s library, but she’s already desperate to have him again.
“Oh, marry me, Miranda,” he says with amused frustration when the night is over, but the conversation is not. “Come home and talk with me until we’ve put Caccini thoroughly to bed.”
“Perhaps tomorrow, Mr. Hamilton,” Miranda says gently, and hopes that her eyes are promising him what she cannot, in their company–that she will give him whatever he likes in private, but she is clever enough to recognize the jaws of marriage, its unyielding bite. She has a few years yet before she must step into the trap.
2.
On the ship from Port Royal to Nassau, no one cares what their names are, or who shares her bed. She lies in the living dark of the ship at night–the men at watch walking above her head, the groaning communion of the ship and sea an endless chorus–and smooths her hand over James’s hair, mindless and repetitive. He’s awake, but quiet, his breath warm on the bare skin of her stomach.
The last thing Thomas said to her was Take care of James.
“I love you,” she says to the man in her bed.
1.
“I would never trap you,” Thomas swears in her bed, tender and relentless. “Would you trap me?”
“Never,” Miranda says, pressing a brief kiss to his knuckles. “But it would not be the same. You would always have power over me.”
He looks at her, very serious. “Would you like power over me?” he asks.
2.
James Flint murders a man at her word, and then returns to her, like an animal at the end of its chain.
He tells her that Alfred Hamilton begged for his life. He tells her that her mother-in-law was there on the ship, too, and he did not spare her. His voice shakes in the telling, and she kisses him for it.
Thomas died alone, in a cold, dark place. Captain Flint is bloodstained and grim in her arms, and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.
1.
Thomas gives her a ring, a household, the promise of a title, and a small bundle of letters that would ruin him utterly if they fell into the wrong hands. He places them in hers with terrifying ease. “Come live with me,” he says, grinning like he’s won, like she’s won, like they’ve triumphed over an enemy together, “and be my love.”
A year into their marriage, Miranda throws the letters into the fire.
2.
James comes home after a two month voyage and kisses her clumsily at the door, purple shadows under his eyes. She manages to get him to take off his boots before he falls into bed, but he’s too exhausted to remember his belt, or his coat. He’s asleep almost as soon as he lies down, and she sits down beside him, feels a rush of affection so strong it feels like fury.
Oh, she thinks, looking down at the wounded face she knows as well as her own. You are all I have in the world.
The affection dims under the weight of the thought.
My favorite thing about Victor Hugo is that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a huge eyesore on the verge of collapsing and was planned to be demolished but Victor Hugo was like “hey :( I like that building” and wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame to save it. and it worked
In the book he described the cathedral in the state it was in but also in comparison to what it looked like in the 15th century before it got all fucked up in the French Revolution. His book got translated into a fuck ton of languages and was distributed all around Europe. Tourists who were fans of him would go to see it while in Paris and were appalled to see just how bad of shape it was in and it started to become stain on paris’ reputation.
So finally the king funded the Hella expensive restoration which I imagine was one really fucking gnarly project, the structure it’s self being the tip of the ice burg because of how many religious artifacts and statutes and junk that had been ruined.
So thanks Vicky that’s one hell of a beautiful tower.
So you’re telling me that we still have the Notre Dame Cathedral because of fanfiction?
A Wisconsin mall Santa decided to handle one of the naughty list members early this year when a young girl told him her Christmas wish was for her stepdad to stop molesting her. He and four of his elves attacked the guy, who was waiting nearby, and pummeled him unconscious.
An eyewitness recalled, “Santa didn’t say nothing. He just grabbed the back of the guy’s skull and headbutted him REAL hard.” The witness continued on to say, “Then Kringle got on top of him and just started pummeling him. He was laughing and screaming ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! Motherfucker!’
Dick Grayson is Rromani. Making him into a genocidal fascist is not only an insult to his character but to the Rroma. This is in no way acceptable. It is antiziganist and incredibly disrespectful on so many levels.
He is one of, if not the most iconic Rromani characters and him being made a fascist follows the decision by marvel to have Wanda Maximoff join hydra, a nazi organization. These are blatantly antiziganist and follow a dangerous trend in recent media that threatens the safety of minorities. We are being demonized and being made to be the perpetrators of fascism, of genocide, of Nazism. I have had enough and it is time the creators knew this.
if you are gadje please reblog this. The Rroma will not stand for this. Neither should you.
So me and @alexkablob watched Rogue One and I think I can put into words what resonates so much this time. I realize other people have said this already more eloquently than me but…
While everyone I’ve seen agrees that R1 is fucking gorgeous, the main thing I’ve seen from people who don’t personally like it is that the total party kill is too dark, too depressing, it doesn’t feel like Star Wars exactly; that Star Wars is about hope and good triumphing over evil despite the odds. And look, Rogue One is heavy. You don’t have to personally like that, that’s fair.
But there is one thing that I have to contest. Because….Rogue One is about hope.
The good guys win.
They win. They pass hope like a baton, bloody fingers to sweaty palms, sprinting forward and trusting that someone will manage to slip it into their hand before it’s too late.
The message of Rogue One, the reason I adore it for its quietly unflinching look at sacrifice, isn’t the dark-and-gritty People Die In War, Don’t Be Naive. Its message is…look. Look at humanity. Look at what we do, what we are capable of. The beauty of hope, the love and the faith we have for one another. Look at what courage and compassion accomplish. All the hatred, all the brute force in the galaxy can’t match that simple, silent strength. The Empire fails.
A dark, gritty movie would be: the Empire wins. Or the Rebellion wins but the cost was too high, it wasn’t worth it. Rogue One says, yes, it was.
That soft rising music over the entire end of that relay race, from the moment the plans beam out. It’s quiet, and sad, and solemn–and triumphant.
It says: it’s over. It’s done. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right. You’ve done enough. Breathe. This was worth it.
ok so ANOTHER thing I love about Leverage is how seriously it DOESN’T take Eliot Spencer
because Eliot Spencer, taken at face value, is an absolutely generic white action movie/video game hero, right? has a Troubled Past, beats up armies of goons, cracks wise, hits on ladies, etc.
except that this show’s narrative turns every aspect of that character type into a punchline! not necessarily at his expense - but it goes out of its way to avoid the kind of reverence most testosterone-charged action media give White Male Badasses by sidelining him, refusing to let him play the hero, and making him comic relief most of the time, even when he’s being a Badass
in fact the only times the narrative does treat him with any sort of reverence?
is when he’s being kind. (which he does on a far more regular basis than most other characters of his type)
and that? actually makes him an interesting character
It’s always very telling to me that the two times his violence is given a non-joking, single-minded focus are the two times he has a loaded gun in his hand with the intention of using it. And what sells those scenes is Christian Kane’s acting, and John Rogers’ and Dean Devlin’s willingness to let the acting make the scene, and not music or filmography or anything else. Christian Kane’s emotional depth as an actor amazes me more every time I see him in a role, and his ability to convey more with a still face and speaking eyes than most actors can with their entire bodies would be unbelievable if I hadn’t seen him do it over and over.
The first time was with Nate and the Italian in the warehouse at the end of the Big Bang Job, when he tells them to go, and he picks up loaded guns without immediately emptying them. Nate, as well as the audience, know instantly that something is different, and the solemnity of that moment as a precursor to the (admittedly amazing and over-the-top) fight sequence is fitting. Following the fight sequence with the perfectly acted and filmed moment between Eliot and Chapman made it one of the best sequences in the show.
The second is in The Last Dam Job, when he threatens Dubenich and says that he’s thinking of saving his friend (Nate) a bit of trouble. At this point, we’ve seen him kill before. Once. And the quiet, as well as the shaking of his hand on the gun, makes the moment equal parts touching and terrifying, which I never thought I would say of a scene like that.
John Rogers and Dean Devlin created a masterpiece of a show with Leverage, primarily because they were willing to write a cool story with all the tropes, and then either subvert or hang lampshades on 90% of them.
also: check with ur partner fairly often to see if ur making them uncomfortable. and when you do this you should Encourage them to speak up like “it’s absolutely okay if you’re uncomfortable, just lemme know i will not be at all upset, it helps me adjust my behavior,” etc.
like just asking “am i making you uncomfortable” doesn’t cut it. because to lots of abuse survivors, to speak up means to be punished, and abusers Frequently tell their victims it’s okay to criticize them but get really angry/defensive/self-righteous when you actually do. you gotta make a good faith effort to make sure your partner feels safe enough to tell speak up abt their discomfort, otherwise it doesn’t rly work or count imo
Yeah, I had and still have a huge problem with this, even with trivial shit.
“Are you okay?” *PRESSURES ME*
“Y-yeah?”
Yeah, no. No, you have to make it obvious that you are HAPPY when they tell you they are uncomfortable.
