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

lokisweboflies:

roane72:

Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time, “I’d love to write a book someday.”

Someone–Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword–once said they’d like to say to a brain surgeon, “Boy, I’d love to do brain surgery someday.”

We treat “the ability to put words into a sentence” like it’s just the same as “the ability to form a coherent narrative that engenders a variety of emotions within the reader and puts them in a scene and shows them what they didn’t see before”.

And that’s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I’m an artist.

Writers are constantly devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don’t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book. 

This goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would’ve hoped fandom would know better.

***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***

sopranish:

owlmylove:

bedabug:

making a new password like
me: beefstew
computer: sorry password not stroganoff

oh my god

*slowclap*

@littlestartopaz

codenamemaximus:

codenamemaximus:

If this gets 50 notes I’ll tell you guys how I ran an underground sex ed class and helped put a pedophile in jail during second grade

Okay, so my mom has always been super open about health stuff and when I was just starting elementary school she got me a bunch of those American Girl books about your body and your feelings and they were really informative and truthful and I really liked them. One day I was talking to a friend about one of them and we started reading it and she was asking a ton if questions and seemed really excited and interested by it and I answered questions and explained stuff. We talked about the books during recess and eventually more girls joined in until we were a group of about 10-15 seven year-olds talking about puberty and sex and a lot of things that most adults don’t The thing about those books is that they look really innocent with cute drawings and there are chapters about brushing your teeth and stuff; but what most people don’t expect is that there’s a lot of health stuff about puberty and mental illness and drugs and a lot of really important stuff that everyone should know. The teachers didn’t care because the books looked super innocent and they thought were talking about proper brushing habits or something. We’d go sit down and read a chapter and I’d add some other stuff that my mom had told me and then we’d just talk and ask questions. It was kind of like group therapy but with sex ed. This was all okay until one of the boys saw a page with a ton of boobs on it (the page was demonstrating a breast exam) and he told the teacher. So they found and I got suspended and I wasn’t allowed to bring any more of those books into school. 

Closer to the end of the year, one of the second grade teachers was revealed to be a pedophile when one of his students said that he tried to touch her inappropriately and then three other girls came forward with the same story. After he was arrested, the girl told me that she said what he did because we had talked about what to do in that exact situation. Because of our group she knew that she probably wasn’t the only one and she knew that it was wrong for him to do that and that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she told someone and that she probably wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t read those books.

I started doing it again the next year. No one stopped me. 

bramblepatch:

direhuman:

spinosaurusregina:

Why do people show dungeon masters as wizards in art and stuff? They’re clearly bards. Chaotic evil bards, often.

you think a bard can figure out the 3.5 grapple rules

A bard knows when to bend the rules of their chosen medium in service to the story. No satisfying narrative has ever resulted from trying to follow the 3.5 grapple rules.

alliecat-person:

words-writ-in-starlight:

ladysugarquill:

words-writ-in-starlight:

Okay but a serious question.

Is there literally any canonical evidence for Jake being a history buff, or is that just a headcanon that bb!me got really committed to?

Like, I am fine with either one and I will not be moved on this matter, Jake is a history buff, but seriously, which one is it.

He never explicitly mentions liking/studying History, but he can name half a dozen battles (several of which I, a decade older, don’t remember) off the top of his head in book 17, and knows the specifications of an aircraft carrier aT LENGTH, SERIOUSLY SO MUCH LENGTH on that one Ax book. 

I’d say well-supported fanon.

*fist bump* Thank you my friend, you’re a champ.

Also in #33 he goes off on a rambling monologue that suggests he knows military history and has deliberately been studying famous leaders.

I know there are other examples. At one point he talks about how General Sherman revolutionized warfare, I think. (#31 or 47? IDK.)

I’d say Jake deliberately studying military history out of necessity (not passion) is cannon.

All right, awesome, I knew this couldn’t be something I’d made up wholecloth.

littlestartopaz:

jaclcfrost:

what you said was very sweet and means a lot to me but i am incapable of properly responding in any way besides “thank you so much aaaah” because i do not know how to accurately express the exact level of my gratitude to where you completely understand how much what you said meant to me without me getting even more emotional and looking like a fucking nerd: an autobiography

@words-writ-in-starlight

ladysugarquill:

words-writ-in-starlight:

Okay but a serious question.

Is there literally any canonical evidence for Jake being a history buff, or is that just a headcanon that bb!me got really committed to?

Like, I am fine with either one and I will not be moved on this matter, Jake is a history buff, but seriously, which one is it.

He never explicitly mentions liking/studying History, but he can name half a dozen battles (several of which I, a decade older, don’t remember) off the top of his head in book 17, and knows the specifications of an aircraft carrier aT LENGTH, SERIOUSLY SO MUCH LENGTH on that one Ax book. 

I’d say well-supported fanon.

*fist bump* Thank you my friend, you’re a champ.

lovlae:

wishing all of my muslim followers a beautiful and peaceful ramadan!

stardustfromvelaris:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

leontarius:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

waiteverybodyhide:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

devilshornrandom:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

mentallydobious:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

that-obnoxious-roommate:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

mentallydobious:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

hermionously:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

oceanstops:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

nightowlett:

humans-are-seriously-weird:

Hey all! Some of you are asking about the bear incident. I will tell you in due course, but for now ill give you a teaser

It involves a bear, a tree, and a lack of pants

Well I’d be worried if the bear was wearing pants…

To clarify. Im lacking pants

hopefully you’re fully equipped with as many pants as you need at this point in time, i’d be much more worried if you didn’t have any pants at all.

To clarify AGAIN: AT THE TIME OF THE BEAR INCIDENT I WAS LACKING PANTS

CURRENTLY I HAVE MANY PANTS AT LEAST 2 OK

Okay but did the tree have pants

THE BEAR HAD NO PANTS I HAD NO PANTS
AND THE TREE HAS MY PANTS OK

YOU WERE ROBBED BY A TREE???

…..maybe…..not exactly

As a non-native speaker I always wonder: pants as in two long tubes of fabric that go down to your ankles or pants as in the underwear.
Please tell me it’s the latter

I mean at that point it was both

A tree panty thief… i always knew trees were suspicious…

Wait, how does the bear fit in??

DAMMIT YOU GUYS

I WAS GONNA GIVE THIS ONE TO YOU LATER WITH PROPER THOUGHT AND WRINTING BUT NO YA’LL HAVE NO CHILL

BUCKLE UP FRIENDS YOU’RE IN FOR A WILD RIDE

Ok so i’m twelve. little twelve year old Rekina. I was a scout for most of my life, so the forest is like home to me ok. In a city i get super turned around, can’t find my way around to save my life 

but drop me in a forest? man ill have an entire camp set up and find my way out in less than a day ok im wilderness survivor exrtordinare

So i’m out camping with my troop. We’re big kids now so the adults dicthed us for our very own solo three day hike

let me just say that my troop didn’t like me. I was the quiet nerd kid who read alone in my tent and kicked everyones aass at lighting fires, when they all were sneaking in booze, peeping on girls, and failing to light fires

So one afternoon while i’m out hunting for supper (a task no one has succeeded at, they just wanted me out of the way. fools) i discover i severly have to pee. So i got ahead and prop mysef agaisnt a tree as you do

Now, when you’re a girl, you don’t get the lucury of just whipping it out and pissing on a mushroom ok you have to remove all clothing from the lower half and squat agsint a tree like a weight lifter

so im doing my thing, my pants around my ankles, when i hear the bushes near by rustling

Those fucking boys i swear im going to kick their asses if they’re spying on me

but im midstream and you don’t just stop midtsream ina  forest cause then you drip all over your under wear and its not fun

I get two more seconds of peaceful pee time 

BAM the bush fucking explodes 

i scream, and almost fall over because my legs are getting tired ok peeing in a forest is hard work for women let me get an amen

But its fine, i look over and it isn’t one of the boys

it’s a baby bear no threat to me

I continue about my buisness. 

wait

baby bear =

mama bear

Sure enouogh the second i think that she rears up from behind the bush

now this thing is gigantic im talking would knock an nba player away from the hoop and get a slam dunk with out even trying ok

huge

I don’t move. I;m racking my brain like ok what did the manual say to do what would indiana jones do shitshitshitshit well ok as long as it doesn’t see me im safe ill just wait for it to go away and make no noise

she looks over and roars

had i not already been peeing i would have pissed my pants

I was caught, literally, with my pants down.

I think its time to beat a hasty retreat i threw the manual and indiana jones out the window

id like to say i calmly made my escape, floating like a graceful ballerina

didnt happen

i waddled away like a psychotic penguin screaming and flailing and being decidedly ungraceful ok i would have made Mumble proud for how my my little feet were moving i was like a penguin tap star

I booked it, desperaty trying to pull up my pants so i can at least die not looking like Bert from mary poopins doing his ridiculous little dance

so im running for life, a big ass knife in my hand and i know i won’t be able to stab this thing 

or out run it

or out last it

i couldnt out anything it

but im good at climbing

I beeline for this massive oak and scramble up that thing like a penguin, squirel hybrid. I prop my self up on one f the high branches, stilling trying to pull up my pants, but that’s kind of hard while your ass is being tickled by fire ants

lets just say i took the short cut down

I plummeted face first out of the tree, screaming like a banshee

The bear screamed back andd ran away because when i say banshee i mean banshee ok i have the shriek of a dolphin on helium

suddenly im not falling. 

A branch had snagged my jeans and now i was dangling maybe ten feet of the ground by my pants

in a true, rekina, cliche move, i slip from the branch and crsh the ground completely unharmed (except for my bruise dignity) and somehow managed to not stab myself with my knife on the way down

on small problem

i left my pants in the tree. 

The branch had flung my three layers of pants three different ways

my underwear fluttered to the ground beside me like the graceful ballerina i wish i was

my long underwear was twisted around a branch not far above my head

and my jeans had been freaking rocketed into one of the highest branches, the bough too thin for me to climb

i so i put on my now fire ant infested under wear (after doing my best to clean them and quickly snag my long johns because i know one thing for certain

i still see baby bear

mama is coming back

I high tail it like i have never high tailed before ok i was hauling ass outta there

I sprint for a good minute or so when suddenly a brown blur shoot from he bush and im thinking oh shit ima dead man  so i do the only logcal thing because im going down fighting aint no bear gonna find me curled on the ground

i lashed out with my knife like a frickin knight in shining armour except im not a knight

and im in my under wear

and it wasn’t a bear

in my amazing survival stab the beast reflexes i didn’t notice how low to the ground i was aiming

i had stabbed a water rat

you can bet your ass im not wasting that meat

I scoop it up, its blood splatterd all over my face and strut back towards camp

i roll in there pantsless, covered in blood, dirt, and fire ant, grinning like a maniac

“I found supper”

none of the boys ever peeped on me again

How are you even still alive

I wish i knew

Mother fucker this is exactly why the aliens are never going to attack earth. A furious monster attacked a human youngling while as vulnerable as possible and the youngling not only survived, it also climbed a tree half naked, scared the monster away, and caught dinner for it’s pack members with a blade. Not to mention we’re all just chillin’. Laughing about a terrifying near death experience.

Story of my life bro (literally)

@dannyaches

american scouts are freakin hardcore man…

Pal i be canadian we hardcore 🇨🇦 🍁

@space-australians

alexandot:

“Is it actual clowns or people dressed up as clowns” is such a dip into the modern human psyche where we all just collectively know that “clown” is a species

since1938:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

casting Ricky Whittle as Shadow was actually a genius move because in American Gods, the novel, it gets a little grating how every woman Shadow meets wants to bone him, we get it, he’s very masculine and attractive with minimal effort, whatever. but in American Gods, the show, you’re looking at Ricky Whittle and like…. you can’t even question it. you’d do him. I’d do him. we’d all do him. Shadow’s universal bangability instantly makes sense when he’s Ricky Whittle. 

I don’t even go here and so I googled him and yes 10/10 agree

gendersnaps:

bigbigtruck:

hippity-hoppity-brigade:

scribefindegil:

And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.

not what i expected from a post that began with “speaking of pronouns,” but an a++ show of the versatility and surprise daily available on tumblr dot com

are you telling me Pippin says “y’all”

“can you pass the mead fam”

ekjohnston:

drst:

greenbergsays:

One of my favorite things about Leverage is when a bad guy points a gun at Eliot and there’s that moment of,”well, this is gonna be awkward for you,” that crosses Eliot’s face.

They always make a point to give us, the audience, that moment of knowing too.

it’s a very distinctive moment.

slyrider:

dalekteaservice:

radioactivepeasant:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
  
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous. 

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy. 

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel. 

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet. 

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra. 

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.

Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species. 

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

@words-writ-in-starlight

Every single time I read this I tear up a little. This is the best of us, guys, the part we like to think of as the soul of humanity. God I hope this is the part of us that holds out a hand to another planet someday.

ladyloveandjustice:

#points if you go into how their parenting styles work together and what they fight over #how they balance each other out #are they coparenting or is it a divorced parents scenario #if the latter who do I stay with on the weekends #yes this is good

jumpingjacktrash:

saffronheliotrope:

jumpingjacktrash:

mx-delta-juliette:

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, something truly nasty escaped Earth. They call it giardia, a microscopic organism that their Planetary Protection Officer called “pretty dumb” and “not too bad, really, a week of digestive upset and then it’s over.”

Yes, Earth has a Planetary Protection Officer. They have a Planetary Protection Office, and have had one since they were sending probes around their own solar system. Doctor Ma-et had found it a bit silly, like a child concerned about the cleanliness of their toys, until she learned that the job of the Planetary Protection Office had always been protecting other worlds from Earth.

Keep reading

i love this so much.

i love this individual piece of writing, and i also love the narrative tumblr has been developing around Crazy Primates From The Death Planet Just Want To Love You. it feels so real and so US. it feels like maybe if genuine contact happens, this is how it’ll go down.

we’re too young, as a species, to do any galactic business of our own. we’re barbaric and awkward, still fighting amongst ourselves for resources. we’d probably make the galactic powers very nervous. but the thing is, there is nothing more dangerous to a human than another human, and hasn’t been for centuries, and this is on a world where half the ‘habitable’ environments regularly kill people and the rest only kill people on occasion with floods and stuff. we make buddies with our predators, we make our diseases brew us chemicals and fuel. we turn everything to our own use, and would bloom through the universe like a horrible all-consuming plague – except that we already sorta did that a little bit on our own planet, we were THAT powerful, and we learned not to.

we are the infant titans who, having seen our siblings eaten, swore to protect instead of consume. we police each other – and ourselves – at the deepest levels, down to the bones of our spirituality. even the most vicious warmonger knows, KNOWS, in their heart of hearts, that what they do is not right, and will not be allowed to go on.

more advanced species didn’t have to learn this lesson, because they weren’t violent to begin with, or learned it a long slow way under the tutelage of older powers. and here we are already, these holy fools, who hold death itself in our hands, and have the hunger for infinity in our eyes, and they ask us what we plan to do with this power, and we say: “where can we help?”

“and also, can we pet your dog?”

I love this so very much, both the fic and the commentary. As much as I love Star Trek and always will, its utopian vision of humanity as a distinguished part of the galactic UN, everybody-just-learning-to-get-along seems a little impossible at times like these. This picture of reckless, a little bumbling, ultimately good-hearted and good-doing humanity seems somehow more plausible, and gives me some real flickers of long-term hope.

a further thought on my previous thought:

if humans are the one species so toxic we learned by experience not to be a hegemonizing swarm before we developed time travel, and survived it… that means anyone who starts trying evil empire shenanigans now is NEW AT IT.

imagine a relatively little-known species suddenly gets to acting real hincty, breaking treaties and taking stuff and breaking stuff. the galactic council is horrified. the humans are like “oh they’re just being little shits, smack ‘em on the snoot.” the galactic council respectfully suggests the humans volunteer to be the ones doing the smacking. the humans point out that yeah, that is what they were doing.

the first ones to show up are, as always, the helpers. maybe this change in behavior is due to some disease or disaster. but nope, it turns out to be a nasty ideological vector, and the humans know from long experience that this one does not go away on its own, but fighting it from the outside makes it last so much longer.

so the next ones to show up are a different kind of helper: military advisors.

galactics: what are you doing??? you’re making it worse!

humans: worse? or BETTER???

under clearly delined circumstances and non-allegiances, so as not to break any interplanetary laws on behalf of humanity, these vicious masters of war teach the upstarts how it’s done. from the warp-tech version of village-burnings to mutually assured destruction, with defcon settings and terror alerts in all the spaceports, in under a generation. the upstarts have gotten much better at war, but only in their own space, and they are learning how it is that a whole species can be tired.

galactics: ok, we think we kinda see what you’re up to, but it’s awful and we wish you would’ve just made them stop fighting.

humans: you can only do that to forces that understand they’re in trouble. when we first got there, they were still having fun.

galactics: we don’t understand.

humans: right. the sick thing is, war is fun. that’s the disease. you can’t fight fun with bigger, better fun. you have to run ‘em around their own back yard until they work off the rush. only then can they look at their own mess and wonder what cleanup’s gonna be like.

galactics: it makes a weird kind of sense. so is that it, now? are they done? are they… cured?

humans: hahahahahahaha no. they’re just finally starting their treatment. now we send in the economists.

mysticalcoffeequeen:

kinghispaniola:

sonoanthony:

cookcrack09:

sonoanthony:

ya niggas underestimate hugs…. like you don’t know how much girls like a good full blown hug, both hands wrapped around her while her head lays on your chest and then ya pull away and you smile at her and continue with your day… girls be in class 20 minutes later thinking about that hug fam 

How do you know?

This post has 36k notes for a reason my guy

Lmaooo

I only see truth

lindsayraindrops:

charliemayart:

Imagine Enjolras as Beauxbatons champion, and Grantaire wondering how they’re going to fit the whole of France under the lake for the second task

#no one is more shocked than R when he gets kidnapped and put under the lake

elodieunderglass:

jacquez45:

sinesalvatorem:

wayward-sidekick:

wayward-sidekick:

so you see, humans evolved to be bipedal on account of how our ancestors transitioned from the forest environment to the savannah environment, and in the savannah environment bipedalism was more adaptive because it provides better thermoregulation and allows you to carry things, but most of all because bipedal locomotion is highly energy efficient and energy efficient locomotion would have been very strongly selected for on account of how time budgets are a limiting factor on home range which is a limiting factor on diet quality and breadth which is really quite important

my lecturers have been very clear and very insistent that bipedalism evolved first and then allowed tool use, tool use did not spur a transition to bipedalism, the fossil record is Clear On This Point

and what I do not understand is: if bipedalism is so completely wonderfully energy-efficient and optimal, why are there so few bipedal things? How come lions and gazelles and giraffes and buffalo aren’t bipedal? Why aren’t other savannah species selected for energy-efficient locomotion too?

I am sure there is a good explanation for this but my lecturers have still not provided it and I must know please god just somebody explain this to me or I will die of curiosity

Reasons Why We Have Bipedal Apes, But Not Bipedal Lions, According To My Biological Anthropology Supervisor:

You know when creationists talk about how an eye couldn’t possibly evolve gradually, because half an eye is useless and a waste of resources and worse than no eye at all?

They’re wrong about eyes; a single photoreceptor cell (usually just an evolutionary ‘tweak’ away from a regular epidermal cell with biochemistry that happened to be photosensitive) is actually useful and great, and more is better. If you imagine breaking a modern wing in half and attaching it to a bird, “half a wing is useless” sounds true, but it stops sounding true when you realise that halfway to a wing doesn’t look like a modern bird wing but broken in half, it looks like a slightly enlarged membrane between a limb and your body that gives you just an extra half second of glide time when you jump.

But there *are* adaptations in this class of things, where it’s great if you have full-blown X but shitty to have half-baked X. As you might imagine, they are quite rare, because as the creationists correctly observe, if half-X is maladaptive there is no path to arrive at X through gradual adaptation to an environment. And yet bipedalism is of this class. How?

Well, you wanna know what it looks like to have enough bipedal foot structure that you decide to go adventuring around in the savannah on two feet, but you haven’t got the pelvic structure to make it efficient yet? YOU CAN’T RUN. You are literally incapable of moving faster than a kind of slow awkward lope. Your back kills all the time because your bones are all pointed the wrong way and your back muscles are trying to keep you upright. Your ankle and leg bones take far more pounding than they were ever optimised before and occasionally shatter. You’re unbalanced and ungainly and frankly sort of pathetic, and at very high risk from predators (to repeat: RUN AWAY IS NOT AN AVAILABLE STRATEGY).

Why would anything go through a long gradual process of getting much shittier and then eventually getting better, since evolution can’t plan or foresee? WRONG QUESTION. Whoever told you evolution was a slow gradual constant drift was a dirty rotten liar, just like all your other teachers from when you were twelve. More commonly, evolution involves long periods of relative stability where the organism is pretty much as adapted to its niche as it’s going to get, and then something changes and there’s a very rapid response. Or it involves successful populations dispersing widely over a landscape, then becoming distinct reproducing populations which lost genetic contact with each other and diverging, and then there’s an environmental change and they reconnect and sometimes they happily interbreed and sometimes one of the divergent branches drives the others extinct and disperses itself widely and rinse and repeat.

What happened was, basically:

Hi we’re early hominins and we just love hanging around in trees and we’re proud to say we’ve been hanging around in trees now for a couple million years and we haven’t changed a bit, slightly bigger skulls aside, we’re basically just per- what the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? WHERE DID THE TREES GO?? WHY IS IT SUDDENLY SO DRY???? oh my God I can see nothing but grass and I am having to walk around on my hind legs all the FUCKING time and FUCK FUCK FUCK THAT’S A LION FUCK PANIC RED ALERT oh okay we’re bipedal now I guess, that was quick, oh well, all fine, carry on

Somehow we survived when a change in environment pushed us into a new ecological niche. The selection pressure was strong enough to make us acquire a really quite extensive range of mods to make bipedalism work, but not strong enough to make us dead.

Of course, “strong pressure to adapt somehow” doesn’t necessarily mean “strong pressure to adapt in this specific way we know is really good”. Early hominins who lived before the forest shrinkage have been shown to have a few bipedal adaptations. We weren’t sure what the hell they were doing with them, so we looked at chimps. Turns out chimps display short-distance carrying behavior - as in, picking up an object and carrying it. They don’t carry tools and can’t move far bipedally, but what they do do is pick up a valuable resource like a choice bit of prey and haul it off with them, away from the group of moneys fighting over the rest of the prey. So before the forests collapsed, there was a mild selection pressure to be able to use only your hind legs for a short stretch so that you could carry something in your arms, and when they collapsed, individuals good at that behavior were better at surviving the savannah and evolution just slammed its foot on the gas pedal until you get obligate bipeds.

So, a species that wasn’t forced into a rapid niche change like that, wouldn’t evolve an initially-painful thing like bipedalism. What about all the other species that made the same change as the same time as us? Eh, many went extinct, that happens a lot with ecological change, but the ones who survived didn’t do bipedalism.

Points to those who said it was about evolution having different starting points to build on, y'all were correct. No matter how awesome and efficient and optimal bipedalism is, evolution only cares about whether the next tiny step in some random direction increases or decreases how many offspring are produced. Evolution “looks” for the NEAREST solution that counts as a solution, not the best solution.

For a species of monkeys that were forced to spend less time in the forest and range wider and already had some variable locomotion abilities, evolution went for bipedalism. Bipedalism may have enabled the future awesomeness of humans with its efficiency and head stability and what have you, but evolution made it happen just because it was the local maxima - its awesomeness is a lucky side effect.

But where monkeys used short bursts of bipedal movements to carry things, another species might use something more convenient for them - say, a lion might pick up and carry things in its mouth, and if there was a selection pressure to be better at carrying the lions might end up with bigger mouths, but “become bipedal” is very unlikely because half bipedal is worse than no bipedal at all.

Basically, monkeys had the preconditions for bipedalism, nothing else did. (Note that this does not make monkeys special - the ancestor of any species with an unusual adaptation, from giraffes’ long necks to penguins’ Arctic-water-proofing feathers, was a thing that had the preconditions for that adaptation when nothing else did.)

Bipedalism didn’t happen because it was awesome, it became awesome because the range of adaptations it supports turned out to be a package that turned into, well, us.

…Notice that we are not actually the only bipedal species. Notice what they mean when they say things like, “Bipedalism leads to the ability to carry things leads to tool use leads to bigger brains”. On a naive reading, it means “bipedalism is a part of the tech tree and once you’ve bought it you can get hands optimised for holding tools”, and if it says this then you are right to be confused as to why perfectly good bipedal emus do not also have spears and control of fire.

When you realise that evolutionary studies is so full of ridiculously many caveats and preconditions that lecturers just omit them and assume you know they’re there, you start interpreting what they say more like, “In a species that already dabbled in just a tiny bit of bipedalism, bipedalism was the only way to go when the niche changed, it was way better for the new niche then the old way of locomotion, and given the likely presence of some proto-tool-like behaviors like throwing rocks or poking things with sticks, it created an adaptive opportunity to better fit this particular environment by improving on the tool behaviours using the new physiological advantages.”

Also god I learned a lot in that hour. Why does time spent *not* talking to biological anthropologists have to be a thing? Talking to biological anthropologists is the BEST.

Epistemic status: my recollection of a conversation an hour ago between me and an academic in this field, any misunderstandings are because I’m an undergrad who didn’t get what he was trying to say.

THIS IS SO COOL

(Why do I not live on a university campus D:)

SO YES and also, I’m going to pull out my Vaclav Smil* for a second here.

Human locomotion is not particularly energy efficient! It takes us more energy to walk or run than it does for most mammalian quadrupeds, but our energy use curves look pretty different from theirs. 

If a horse goes for a trot, its trot (like all its gaits) has a U-shaped energy curve. It costs more to trot at slower speeds, goes down to a most-efficient pace, and then comes back up. At a certain point, it crosses over the energy curve for the horse’s next gait, and the horse will (left to its own devices) start to canter or gallop.

Human WALKING has a U-shaped curve like that, but human RUNNING does not, and that is damned strange for a mammal. Our friend Smil says: “the energetic cost of human running is relatively high, but humans are unique in virtually uncoupling this cost from speed”. That particular aspect of things is a direct side-effect of bipedalism: we can vary our breathing in ways that quadrupedal animals (who have supporting legs all attached to their breathing apparatus) cannot. Basically, we are the evolutionary equivalent of cartoon characters who can spin their legs really fast. So we aren’t as efficient at running as a horse who is going at its optimum pace, but we can speed up and slow down and it won’t cost us much, which is not true of the horse.

Not incidentally, this is why many humans practiced (or still practice) persistence hunting. If you are less efficient than that delicious antelope, but you can make it run at its least-efficient panic speed while you trundle along at a nice constant rate, you can exhaust it.  

* Smil, Vaclav (2007-12-21). Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (MIT Press). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition. 

I’m so glad OP came back and corrected themselves, I was sitting on my hands reading the first part! Omg those lecturers. I mean they’re getting minimum wage but still. Bless their hearts.

The lecturers conflated tool use and tool making. Tool USE is observed throughout the animal kingdom. Tool MAKING is said to be primate-specific (we ignore corvids in this scenario.) note that this isn’t hominid-specific, though. Tool MAKING is not a function of bipedalism; it’s a function of having your hands free. These are two very different things. Now, it’s certainly true that tool MAKING - in the form of shaped bones, flints and stones - postdates bipedalism in the fossil record, but we must note

1. A shaped blade of grass or a shaped branch counts as a tool, and does not reliably fossilise;
2. Behaviour is notoriously bad at fossilising;
3. Scientists must acknowledge the biases of the fossil record in geology and paleontology, so don’t think that anthropologists are going to be allowed to get away with it.

So tool-making, like bipedalism, is something that popped up occasionally in our lineage and is still practiced by our living relatives. It became fixed in our lineage, and is distinctive to hominids, but it was not dropped on us by the Hand of God. Very very few things are.

We also note that birds are bipedal, and are something of the original biped. We are kind of hipsters in that sense. (BEHOLD! THE MAN!)

But, you see, birds generally don’t have HANDS.

When you’re looking at something like bipedalism and asking yourself “what does this say about humans?” Then look at other animals, and see what they’re doing. And then come at it from a different angle. sometimes the answer isn’t the feet. Sometimes it’s the hands.

naamahdarling:

brightlotusmoon:

vaspider:

mad-maddie:

shithowdy:

do stuff while waiting for other stuff

like that sounds intuitive and vague but so much of the day is spent in a period of wait and if you struggle to motivate yourself to do things then this is the best time

waiting for your water to boil? bag up your garbage. waiting for your coffee to drip? wipe down your counters. roommate taking up the bathroom? scoop the cat box. waiting for your food to cook in the microwave? do however many dishes you can while it’s in there. 

waiting is the perfect time to do a limited amount of something for yourself where you would be otherwise just standing around doing fuck-all

THIS IS REALLY HELPFUL!

I actually turn this into a game!

“How many chores can I do while the water is boiling for my tea?”

“Can I put away the dishes and wipe the counters before my lunch finishes reheating?”

“Can I sweep the floor AND change the laundry while the dogs are out back?”

You can totally do this! If you make it like a game, also, you will get better at it, and you can be like ‘yes, now I put away the dishes AND wiped out the sink before my water boiled, I am a level 2 Adult!’

YES

There is a certain level of functionality required for this that I at my worst cannot muster, however, this is a GREAT tactic for getting small things done when you are doing sort of okay or better. I do it all the time when I’m feeling all right.

This is especially good if you’re like me and you suffer from on-the-spot mind-numbing boredom while waiting for stuff.  Like, once I’m on my feet and moving around I can (usually) stay functional, but God I bore fast.  Thus, I do stuff while I’m waiting for other stuff.

pervertsofcolor:

straight-beat:

tomboykink:

pervertsofcolor:

Met a cute girl. She gave me her STI results and said she was “clean”.

I hate that phrase so fucking hard.

I have family with various medical conditions and it doesn’t make them dirty. I’ve also had partners with STIs and you just have to be tested often, use protection and be a little creative. I am negative for STIs and I keep copies of my paperwork but I didn’t even tell her that cuz her response pissed me off so bad.

Now she stopped talking to me. I guess, I’m dirty too? The fuck?

The language you use matters.
Your status is either negative or positive.

THANK YOU.

Related rant: I’ve had people flip out at me because I say STI status isn’t an instant dealbreaker as long as we can have an honest conversation about it and what precautions need to be taken. Like, not only is there the shame on people who have them (hence the “dirty” language), but if you don’t immediately reject and ostracize anyone you know who has or had ever had one, you’re a bad person too for not beating up on them? What the hell.

I had a long-term relationship with somebody with HSV2 and when I went to get specialized testing after we broke up, the doctor grilled me on our safer sex practices and then told me that honestly he’d do the tests but he already knew I didn’t have it (and I didn’t). I’ve had several conversations with my sexual health providers related to this - that “just never get within breathing distance of somebody who isn’t ‘clean’” is fallacious and shameful.

Meanwhile, I guarantee you that people are walking around with STIs that are undiagnosed or that they don’t tell people about because of the stigma. My most recent ex-boyfriend lied to me for like 2+ years about an unprotected one-night stand he had with some random person while heavily intoxicated because he was so invested in the image of himself as a person who would ~never do that~ until it turned out there was a very real possibility that he might have something incurable as a result. It turned out to be a false positive, but I got slapped with the emotional labor of coddling him through his shame because he was too self-centered to admit he’d done something to put me at risk.

Hell, when I found out my first girlfriend ever was sleeping with other people and lying to me about it, her defense was that it was cool that she didn’t want to talk to me about it because “lesbians don’t get STDs anyway.”

My ex, who gave me chlamydia years ago (which incidentally my doc referred to as “the strep throat of STIs”), was so insulted that I asked him to get tested before we slept together. His exact words were “the girls I’ve been with aren’t the type to get STDs.” I lit him up, because wtf does that even mean, and he got tested, and by that I mean he FAKED HIS TEST RESULTS because that was easier and less shameful somehow than going to the doctor.

It’s not about STIs. It’s about consent and respecting people enough to be honest with them.

I never even knew the word “clean” could be perceived like that. Damn.

I’m reblogging this because I recently had a partner send me fake STI results and it feels like complete bullshit. Because of this, I got checked out at Planned Parenthood last week. I’m negative for STIs yet I feel lied to. If people could/would openly talk about health concerns then this wouldn’t happen. Please have real conversations about safer sex with your partners.

zamaron:

the one thing about american gods that i’m
liking is that all the gods who are supposed to be black are black AND dark skinned. like i shouldn’t be happy over a tv show meeting basic casting requirements but still it’s nice.

elodieunderglass:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

elodieunderglass:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:

Why are dogs dogs?

I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.

Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense

Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.

The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”

The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”

The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”

These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive.
So why is dog-sorting intuitive?

Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.

To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.

If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.

This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)

In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!

On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as

* pointy
* Specific!! Squawking noise!!
* The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye
* Patriotism?!?
* CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD

Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)

So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as

* four legs
* Meat Eater
* Soft friend
* Doggo-ness????
* Walkies
* An Snout,
* BORK BORK

Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.

And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.

Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.

So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,

* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.)
* Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.)
* Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.)
* Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!)
* Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!)
* Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type)
* Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.)
* alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a …
* DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space!
* Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game.
* Best doggo.
* PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.

And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!