Parents meme: Alanna the Lioness and Natsume Takashi (from Natsume Yuujincho) Alanna: fighty, heavy sense of justice, does what she wants. Takashi: kind to a fault, accepts (almost) everyone. Takashi is the hands on, quiet parent. Growing up he seems like kind of a push over, but he doesn't humor pushing boundaries in his own quiet way. A parent you know will never be against you. Alanna teaches you how to fight and stand firm. Stand for what you believe and do it even if society is against it.
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
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
ALL THE BEST PARTS OF THE EARLY SEASONS OF SPN, WITH THE BRIGHT LIGHT AND SNAPPY PATTER OF BUFFY, AND WYNONNA ON TOP LIKE A CRANKY, HARD-DRINKING, LEATHER-CLAD CHERRY.
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.
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.
Listen, IDK if I’m on my own here but I’ve just started Wynonna Earp and Wynonna and Dolls need to touch faces (and maybe other things).
My reasons for this include:
The sheer density of the snark in the first episode (and every episode come on y’all)
The way Wynonna struggles with sentences when she sees him shirtless
The way Dolls defends Wynonna when someone talks shit about her being a lost cause
The sparring match in Episode Six!!!! My dudes!!!!
Wynonna reaching out to check Dolls for a fever with her usual disregard for personal space
Wynonna shouting and shaking and waving a gun around and generally being manically worried about Dolls when he gets taken
The way they’re always just…a COUPLE inches too close for it to be normal
Dolls being just tall enough to bow his head over Wynonna when they’re talking while she tips her head up to smirk and scowl as they stare at each other at a hand’s breath distance and slide sarcastic comments across the space like chess pieces
HOW HAPPY WYNONNA IS WHEN HE TELLS HER ‘GOOD JOB’
The way that they’re strongly reminiscent of Scully and Mulder in that they are at their most intensely erotic when doing something intensely businesslike and not at all appropriate for that level of connection
The way that every once in a while they are perfectly in sync and totally aggravated about it
Anyway.
TL;DR: Xavier Dolls and Wynonna Earp need to kiss, or at the very least someone needs to direct me to literally any decent fic including that event
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.
I AM RIDE-OR-DIE ON THIS EXACT VERSION OF STEVE ROGERS OKAY
Also, I am very serious about this being how the PR folks find out that Steve Rogers is, in fact, NOT the benign and lovable (if slightly bigoted) grandpa they expected to yank out of the ice. Bucky finds the footage of this interaction eventually and laughs until there are literally tears streaming down his face.
Okay, for Steve Rogers prompts: Steve is leaving the grocery store and hears some guy yelling at the little Girl Scouts selling cookies about how Feminism Is Ruining This Country and Girl Scouts Are Evil for Supporting Abortion and Lesbians. (Because this actually happens, it happened to me when I was a kid. And once you are like 13 you are allowed to sell without an adult, so me and my friend were alone).
Ahahaha yeah, good times, been there, done
that. Right, so, I’m picturing this as
like a month or two after Avengers, while Steve is still Figuring Out the
2000’s. Also featuring: Steve swearing
like a Brooklyn kid who went into the Army, and my weird obsession with
time-displaced super soldiers who are angry about bananas. WARNING: 100% WISH FULFILLMENT. Some general assholery and Steve losing his temper a little under the cut because…this is longer than I meant it to be.
Steve was sure it would shock any number of people, but his biggest
problems with the 21st century weren’t the televisions, phones, or
coffee makers (thank you, Stark). There
was a learning curve, but it was reminiscent of the learning curve after he’d
gotten the serum—hell, he’d gone from a colorblind, partly deaf asthmatic with
more chronic illnesses than you could fit on a chart to a walking talking
superhuman. The whole world had been
brighter, louder, and faster-paced than Steve had ever been remotely prepared
to deal with, so he went onto stages and into battles until he adapted. The 21st century was brighter,
louder, and faster-paced than the forties could have dreamed, so Steve got on
his bike and went to tour the country without help. By the time he got back, he was pretty sure
he could manage technology well enough to Google shit like ‘what is Facebook.’
(Google was good. Steve fucking
loved Google. All the answers were on
Google. Including answers to questions
he never needed answered, but he had gotten better at choosing his search
terms.)
No, Steve’s biggest problems with the 21st century, other
than the obvious fact that it wasn’t his
century, mostly revolved around money.
Example: who in their right goddamn mind paid seven dollars for a pound
of apples? Had anyone ever heard of
affordable bread? What the fuck was
happening with the price of potatoes—potatoes,
for the love of God.
“Inflation’s a bitch,” a passing college student said in dry amusement,
obviously picking up on his bitter muttering.
Steve’s scowl deepened and he put the apples in his cart.
For the first time in his life, Steve actually didn’t have to worry
about money—apparently seventy years of back pay totaled up to a significant
amount of cash—but that didn’t mean that he didn’t wince as he did the math for
his food. If this was usual for one
person, what the hell were families paying?
Bucky’s family had been Bucky, his ma, his dad, and all three of the
girls, plus sometimes Steve. How was a
family of seven affording this
food? He added it to his mental list of
things to Google, along with what is
wrong with bananas.
Bananas. Of all the things for
the future to fuck up, fucking bananas were weird bland not-bananas now. Steve had
never had strong opinions on bananas before, but live and goddamn learn,
apparently.
Anyway. The money thing was why,
upon entering the grocery store,
Steve hadn’t paused at the table set up just inside the door, save to read the
sign hanging in front of it—it was good to see that the Girl Scouts had
survived. Nonetheless, he could bake
cookies his own self and probably get a better net value than six bucks for a
tiny box, thanks. To be polite, he’d
waved a little to the girls at the table, both wearing green sashes and winning
smiles as they did a slow but respectably steady business, and then he’d gone
on his damn way like a civilized human being.
But God forbid that other
people could do the same. Steve checked
out with his apples and cereal and soup ingredients (and no bananas), put them
in pair of reusable grocery bags, and started for the door just in time to hear
raised voices.
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!
I would like to introduce you to a little friend I like to call the AMPERSAND. &! Hello Mx. Ampersand! How are you doing today?
You can USE this AMPERSAND on AO3 tags to indicate a PLATONIC RELATIONSHIP that is important in your story! Isn’t that nice? That way you can indicate that the relation between two characters is important even though they are NOT BANGING. For example, when they are RELATED. This is helpful, because if you do not, the result is what I like to call SCHRODINGER’S INCEST, where you can’t tell if the fic is happy fluffy family times or not until it is already TOO LATE.
Husband was looking for me all round the house so he could show me something he’d made but he couldn’t find me so he just shouted really loudly, “Fantasy and Sci-fi are the same genre!” and the rational part of my brain doing laundry was like “I’m not responding to a meme, wait where am I going—” as I ascended up the basements stairs like the wrath of god, and he just turned like “there you are” and I’m SO MAD THAT IT WORKED
PLEASE VOTE TO HELP GET RID OF RACIST STATUES IN A BLACK TOWN!
Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy aka the side that defended slavery in the American civil war. During segregation, all these disgusting statues honoring slave-owning traitors were put up to look down on all of us like “remember, white supremacy!” on a street that’s always been predominately black. OUR LOCAL NEWSPAPER IS VERY CONSERVATIVE, AND THEY’RE HOSTING A POLL ON WHETHER THE MONUMENTS SHOULD BE TAKEN DOWN. RIGHT NOW, THE RACISTS ARE VERY AHEAD.
PLEASE VOTE IN THIS POLL! This is THE newspaper in the city, it has a HUGE impact on swaying local government. PLEASE HELP GET THESE RACIST STATUES OUT OF A BLACK TOWN!
NO is winning by a long stretch. FUCK THAT
No is about 4000 votes ahead rn please take 2 seconds to vote YESin favor of tearing down monuments built to glorify white supremacy. You dont have to enter any personal information or anything, just vote and hit submit.
Update: NO is only about 400 votes ahead of YES. This does not require you to share personal information, it’s literally one question and a ‘vote’ button. So like. Go for it.
mini-prompt: I know you've got a way to do Borgias cannibalism. I KNOW you can work it in somehow.
The end of the world arrives two years into Pope Julius’s papacy, with Lucrezia pregnant in Ferrara, Micheletto suffering in the Castello St Angelo, and Cesare plotting escape from a very tall tower in Spain. In very short order, the rule of law is overthrown, the Pope is fled to France, and all the dead have risen.
Lucrezia’s husband dies in the first wave, throat ripped out by his own manservant. She keeps calm, arms herself, and orders a solider to see if dead men burn as well as live ones. They do, as it turns out. She fortifies the Castle Estense against the town in a matter of hours. In some obscure way, she is in her element: pregnant and radiant and ruthlessly practical. She is a Borgia: perhaps she was always meant to reign in hell.
She takes in the surviving townsfolk and orders that the ornamental gardens be immediately disposed of, and all the vegetables in the storerooms planted. She orders a constant watch on the walls, men armed with flaming arrows and muskets. Within a month she’s retaken the town, although she keeps the walls shut. Within six months, word has spread that Ferrara is a safe haven, although the Borgia bitch who rules over it will kill a man at the slightest provocation, not just for infection: for theft, for rape, for spoiling water. Her men are frighteningly loyal. It’s whispered that she keeps the dead away with spells. Soon Machiavelli is her vassal, and da Vinci, and the former bishop of Milan.
They cannot hold the outlying farms. The dead roam freely in the countryside. Lucrezia has over two hundred mouths to feed, and only a few vegetable gardens to do it with.
Machiavelli is the first to propose it, and da Vinci decides how it must be implemented, but Lucrezia makes the decision. Her children will not starve, and neither will her subjects.
She is the queen of hell. There will be meat on her table.
*
Micheletto is locked in a cell when the dead rise, which saves him. He might have died of thirst anyway, but a man is eaten alive not three feet from his cell, and when the bloodstained thing has had its fill and left, Micheletto tugs the corpse closer, steals the man’s dagger and picks the lock.
All of Rome is a charnel house.
It’s remarkable how easy it is, really, adjusting to the new world. He already trusted no one. He already knows how to part a resisting man’s head from his body.
He wastes several weeks making his way to Forlí, but when he arrives he finds it a graveyard. Cesare Borgia had destroyed the walls on his word, and the city had no time to rebuild. He chases a walker out of his mother’s house, observes the smashed pots and the bowl of soup left rotting over a cold fire-pit. There’s a brown stain on the floor, but no body. It’s little comfort.
It’s another month before he reaches Ferrara.
He finds the duchess of Ferrara in the kitchens, a fetching smear of blood high on her perfect cheekbone, supervising the cookery of a feast-day supper. A man’s leg rests on a wooden table, skinned but still visibly human, surrounded by bunches of thyme and rosemary and bowls of skinned potatoes. None of the kitchen servants appear fazed, although more than a few of them cast him suspicious looks, hands tightening on their knives. No one trusts strangers these days, especially not those still covered in the dust of the road.
“Micheletto,” Lucrezia gasps, her eyes filling with tears, and flings herself into his arms. It’s the first time he’s heard his name spoken aloud since the world ended; his own eyes sting briefly, Lucrezia’s fine golden head pressed into his neck, a relic of the world as it was.
She makes him the captain of her guard, and he sleeps in her bed. They don’t speak of it, and it’s only sleep–she clings to him because he feels like the last living connection to her family, and he has always found it difficult to resist giving the Borgias what they want. It should be a terrible scandal, but the world has ended, heaven is barred, and the children of Ferrara eat human flesh. Lucrezia Borgia can take whomever she pleases to bed.
So by day Micheletto kills demons for Lucrezia Borgia, and at night he eats at her table, plays with her son and infant daughter, and lets her pull him down into the duke of Ferrara’s bed. She rests her hand over his heart like the mere fact that it beats is a sign that Cesare is alive, that Micheletto’s return means Cesare’s too, that his worthless life is a thin thread stretching somewhere out to Cesare in the monstrous dark.
He isn’t happy, but this isn’t what he thought hell would be like, either.
name ur politically correct ship that no one ever questions
…is there even such a thing in Borgias? Um…I think not. How about my ‘supported by canon’ ship, which is Cesare/Lucrezia.
now name ur trash ship
CESARE/MICHELETTO. But like specifically in this really complicated power dynamic where Cesare’s emotions are all tangled up with his overwhelming need to prove that he’s in control of something, of anything, and God, Micheletto offers up his throat to the knife as sweetly and obediently as a lamb raised for the slaughter and Cesare loves that equally as much as anything else. And Micheletto loves Cesare like a man worshiping his god, inextricable and helpless and sacrificial, a love that’s all about loyalty and penance and going to his knees and blood on the altar.
and ur really trashy im-going-to-hell ship
Cesare/Micheletto/Lucrezia, in which Cesare loves Lucrezia and Lucrezia loves Cesare and Micheletto loves Cesare so much (see above) and he would die for Lucrezia, at first because Cesare loves her and later because Micheletto is loyal to her himself (he does not want her the way they both want Cesare, and cannot love her the way he loves Cesare because there is only space in his heart for one love like that, but they find a common ground in Cesare and Micheletto would do a great many things to keep Lucrezia’s lily-white hands clean of blood), and Lucrezia’s children calls them both Uncle and Micheletto is bemused by this while Cesare is pained and it’s just all really complicated and awful and yeah, no one is really at ease but they’re happier than they could ever otherwise be.
This ship gets 100000% messier better when you add the fact that both Cesare and Lucrezia are married to the mix. Because can you imagine the deals and maneuvering that have to be done in order to keep the balance copacetic.
who is your cinnamon roll fave who everyone loves
Oh, Paolo, my poor boy. And also Djem. All these people Juan “Fuck-ass” Borgia has killed. Does Lucrezia count, or does she lose Cinnamon Roll status after she commits cold-blooded murder?
who is your sinnamon roll fave who everyone loves to hate/hates to love
…I don’t…I don’t even know. There is no fandom to speak of, so I’m not sure who would fall into this category. Giulia. Rodrigo/Alexander VI.
who is your trash fave who is so problematic they probably have hate tumblrs dedicated to them
EVERYONE. ALL OF THEM. ESPECIALLY MICHELETTO AND CESARE. BUT TBH YOU DON’T WATCH THIS DUMPSTER FIRE OF A SHOW FOR THE CINNAMON ROLLS.
what is ur guiltiest guilty fave fandom
This one?????
what is the fic you want to write/read but can’t because it is too full of Sin
Oh my buddy my dude it’s all here? Like, there is no fic I can think of that’s more sinful than the show.
…oh wait, no, AU where Cesare and Lucrezia happen sooner and she sneaks into the confessional and sucks him off while he’s wearing his cardinal’s vestments, and the whole fic is heavily laden with imagery of Lucrezia as both Madonna and supplicant and also of Intercession and some complicated feelings about God, and Cesare being very VERY conflicted about his sister’s glorious golden hair spread across the blood red of his vestments.
There, I hope that was gratifying for everyone.
what is the most sinful fic you have ever read/written
I swear TO GOD that I am still writing that one porn fic with Micheletto and Cesare and scars as heraldry and the giving of orders and sexually tense removal of vestments.
what is the worst thing you want to become canon (character death, trash-ship etc)
Literally every single thing in this post, but tbh all my darkest desires are fulfilled within like the first two episodes when Micheletto takes a cat ‘o nine tails and hands it to Cesare and looks him dead in the eye as he says, “So whip me, my lord.”
what is your most sinful headcanon
Cesare has always had a powerful preference for blondes, the more golden their hair, the better. He has a recurring dream about a beautiful woman sitting above him on a bed of gold cloth, her hair falling around them both as she kisses his lips and he fucks her. His preference for fair-haired women is common knowledge. The fact that it stems from a dream about his sister is not.
Furthermore, I definitely agree with Wilde that Cesare has definitely had a dream about fucking his sister’s hair. Cesare has a thing for his sister’s hair.
As for Cesare/Micheletto, c’mon now, we can all agree that they’ve fucked while he was wearing his vestments more than once.
what is your cutest headcanon
Um…when they were younger, Lucrezia taught Cesare how to braid her hair. He still remembers, it’s A Thing. I also recognize that this is not so much ‘cute’ in light of the previous answer.
what is your heart-breakingist head canon
THE END OF THE MOVIE SCRIPT????
Oh, and obviously the fact that none of the Borgias really believe in God (they observe the traditions, but even the Pope doesn’t really have faith) save for Cesare, who believes with all his heart in the prayers and sacraments he says every day, and believes with all his heart that he’s going to Hell, and sides with his father and his family anyway. I find that very tragic.
what is ur crackiest crack ship
Cesare/Good Sense, tied with Lucrezia/Consistent And Prolonged Happiness
what is ur marginally less cracky crack ship
Cesare/Craftiness, which is tied with Micheletto/Religion, because you want to talk about people who definitely believe in God and definitely do terrible things anyway and basically just have a profoundly complicated relationship with religion and kind of approach murder as a religious connection not unlike that of a confessor to a supplicant, Micheletto’s your boy. CAN YOU TELL THAT I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS A L O T.
what is ur favourite ridiculous au
Um…this Temeraire AU from @wildehacked. (Incidentally, in the Black Sails Temeraire AU, Miranda would be a dragon and Flint is her captain’s beloved and when her captain is cruelly ripped away from them both, she and Flint escape because Miranda can’t stand another captain and Flint just needs out and it’s all very terrible. I digress.)
Also, I’m really a sucker for daemon AUs! I have no idea what this one would look like except that Micheletto would have a hunting hound, the kind of rangy mixed-breed creature whose jaws can crack bone and whose loyalty stretches beyond the grave, and everyone believes that Rodrigo Borgia/Alexander VI has a white dove. (The snake he keeps quite literally up his sleeve is a melanistic asp. Cesare thinks this is funny, in a bitter sort of way.)
Fic where all of the Avengers are trying to teach tech stuff to Steve (especially Tony who just gets so annoyed at his apparent tech incompetence) but he just seems super hopeless at it until one day one of them stumbles across a youtube account that’s filled with a series of videos titled ‘How Long Can I Keep My Friends Convinced I Have No Idea What Technology Is’ and it turns out he’s been gaming them for YT hits for months.
“How do I make the Google do the thing” has over 30 million hits alone.
It works even better if you put it in a universe where they all have secret identities, so rather than Captain America conning, say, Hawkeye, it’s just some super built dude who for some reason (probably that he’s blond) is vastly underestimated by his equally anonymous friends. A debate rages constantly in the comments about whether that guy IS Tony Stark or just a ringer.
a. Steve’s username is brooklyn1917 and the top question he keeps getting is “Are you really Captain America?” The other question is “Please tell us if you’re actually Chris Evans.”
b. Steve eventually makes a video to address these two questions. Except he basically spends the video laughing for like five minutes and then just smiles this ACTUAL LITTLE SHIT GRIN and then goes, “No, I’m not Chris Evans.” It drives his fans into a frothing frenzy.
c. After the “How Do I Make Google Do The Thing” debacle, the next most popular videos are “How Do I Get My Email Through YouTube?” and “Why is My Email Not in My Mailbox Outside My Door?” There are varying reactions among the Avengers for this. Natasha’s “I’m Going to Kill You Very Slowly™” Face is terrifying. Clint’s “There Is Not Enough Coffee In the World” Lament is priceless. And Tony…. well. Tony’s Rant is Lord of the Rings Epic with Fan Fiction thrown in.
d. Thor is the first person to figure out that Steve is a Little Shit™ and totally joins him on the Trolling.
e. Bruce was the one who actually discovered the YouTube channel. He was promptly bribed into silence by copious amounts of Sarah Rogers’ Patented Chocolate Fudge Magic Brownies™.
f. Bruce’s favorite video is the Instagram Saga, in which Steve Rogers Has Everyone Else Convinced That He Thinks This Is Really a Telegram Service.
g. Currently, Sam Wilson is about to be bribed into keeping silence and to aid and abet any and all shenanigans.
h. Peter Parker is one of Steve’s number one fans and is responsible for feeding Steve more ideas in his YouTube comments.
If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.
You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging. For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds. Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.
in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk
I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.
Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.
Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to. Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.
(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)
Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.
Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.
Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:
We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea. People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
SPACE WHALES
THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
“What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
Plus, no need for work songs in space? Tell that to all my colleagues who’ve come up with little ditties they’ve sung under their breath while at the computer.
“The Printer Song” and “I Will Fucking End You, Google Chrome” are my favourites.
Do you have any thoughts about David and Jonathan?
The David cycle (can it be called a cycle? Or is it more a saga? Or just a multi-generational family tragedy?) is deeply underrated from a literary point of view. It’s one of the longest stories we have of a single life in the Old Testament aside from maybe Joseph? It’s got it all; mad kings, prophecies fulfilled, self-sacrificing princes, supernatural feats, and a shining peasant king at the center with enough charisma to burn up anyone who gets too close to him and a relationship to God so intimate that he is referred to as God’s son. And the Davidic fall from grace is just….brutal, and he’s so aware of what’s happening through a lot of it. Like his devotion to God just grows more ferocious even as the bodies pile up around him, and David’s laments for his children and Jonathon are heart-wrenching. They still wreck me.
Jonathon is honestly one of the most honorable, good, and wonderful men of the entire Old Testament. His filial loyalty to his useless father and his adoring fealty of David never waver; even when Jonathon’s birthright is stripped from him, even when those warring loves quite literally kill him. Like, everyone I know at seminary is still upset about the death of Jonathon. Reviews on David as a human are mixed, but everyone still mourns the firstborn son of Saul.
So yeah, I get glassy eyed about the love between David and Jonathon and its potentially romantic nature like everyone else on Tumblr, but there’s….a lot more there. And that relationship only haunts readers so much because of how well the author captured these two reckless, hard-loving, blood-stained boys with the world on their shoulders.
my boyfriend and I sometimes struggle to be on the same page when it comes to comforting- often i just want to vent and don’t need advice, whereas validation confuses him and he wants a plan of action
to counter this, we’ve come up with a system where we ask: “do you want advice, empathy, both or neither?”
if it’s just advice, i know to go straight to action points and not spend time on fluffy words
if it’s just empathy, he knows i want to be reassured and comforted and that’s all
if it’s both, it’s time for advice that recognises how hard the situation is and is perhaps gentler in nature
if it’s neither, just a hug is really good
i recommend trying to use this in your lives! it makes sure you’re giving and getting what you need, and reduces the risk of resentment or similar
just remember that I, a registered nurse with a bachelors degree, accidentally glued a patient’s foreskin shut over his penis and had to call a urology doctor to come help me get it to retract
I had to send a page that said “I glued the patient’s penis shut. send help.”
The urology resident said, “Wow. I’ve never seen anything like this. Let me go ask someone else.”
It’s been like 5 days since this happened and I’m just sitting at the nurses station with some coworkers and the urology resident walks by and says “hey! Glue any penises shut lately??” And keeps on walking
THEN ALL MY COWORKERS WERE LIKE WHAT JUST HAPPENED
and so yeah, that freaking doctor exposed me and went on his way
Guys, I’m not going to ask for your prayers - I myself am not religious, but I am going to ask you to signal boost this. Marawi City in the Philippines has been invaded by ISIS, they are bombing the city and a school zone, and setting detainees free from prisons.
They say that this is a jihad, but anyone who even has a small understanding of Islam knows that Islam is not violent.
This is terrorism.
The world needs to know.
Update 1: They’re exchanging fire from both sides. Electricity is down. Friends are reporting that ISIS members are spotted in the schools and are giving them a few minutes to evacuate before they take over. Filipino media is silent.
Update 2: Christian teachers are being held hostage.
Update 3: Hospital staff being detained, ISIS flag has been raised in the city hospital. The fighting occurred not in the outskirts of Marawi, but on its streets, around the city hall and public market.
I’m sorry, I’m stringing together what information my friends are still giving me. I don’t know how long they can keep this up - a lot of them are saying that their phones are dying.
Update 4: Armed Forces of the Philippines telling people to go underground, airstrikes coming. Mortars are being prepared too.
UPDATE 5: The Philippine President and his family are in Russia. The Palace remains silent. The military is trying to invalidate ground reports to cover up their fuckups.
UPDATE 6: Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines are not responding or have deployed extremely delayed support, according to the Marawi City Mayor in a phone interview.
UPDATE 7: CNN Philippines has a livestream covering the entire thing, eyewitness reports are in, Military is still saying “we’re in full control” when that’s obviously not the case.
UPDATE 8: reports in that terrorists are targeting cell towers now.
UPDATE 9: GENERALS POINTING FINGERS AT EACH OTHER INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY TRYING TO HELP PEOPLE.
UPDATE 10: ARMED FORCES STILL LYING ABOUT THE SCALE OF THIS ATTACK. THEY SAY 15 MEN, WHEN ALL CORRESPONDENTS ARE SAYING THERE ARE AT LEAST 200.
UPDATE 11: generals trivializing the situation, saying “they don’t feel like it’ll last the night,” when people are literally saying that the fighting still continues. CNN just cut their livestream, will be back in 30 minutes, most are being left in the dark about what’s going on.
at this point, i’m at a loss for words. most friends have stopped updating 30 minutes ago. sporadic updates remain.
i am terrified. our country’s history with martial law is dark, and i never thought i’d live to see this day.
oh my gosh … Guys, spread this around. Be informed.
Oh god guys please someone do something. Please spread this make people known of this !!! Please bring awareness and if you are religious please pray to whatever god and I don’t care if your are atheists or not but you have hearts and please use them please please spread this I don’t know what the hell is up there but whatever you are please save us from this hell
On the one hand, I want to write a whole bunch of crossovers where the Animorphs meet characters from other universes.
On the other hand, every single one of them would basically be “[insert character here] is confused and alone and the world is probably ending way worse than they ever expected; the Animorphs are having a normal day.”
Can we normalize the idea that women can have deep voices? please??
Especially for trans women who feel gross or out of place for their deep voice.
Please, break the standard that all women have high pitched, perfect, feminine voices.
My car got towed on NYE, so after unsuccessfully trying every number programmed into my phone, I called my dad’s ass up at 2 AM to pick up myself and my friends to go get my vehicle out of impound (my dad is awesome. More on that later.)
Included in my group of friends was my friend Anna who had recently come forward as trans. She had very recently started presenting as a woman, and was pretty insecure in it, and had never met my father previously, so it wasn’t as though I had time to brief him on the situation. Anna was pretty shy during the whole ride, tucked in the back and letting her friends talk over her. She only spoke up after I had gotten my car back, thanking him for helping out.
The next day, I called to thank him for that night, and he asked me who was the girl with the deep voice. At first my heart sink in my guts, but without missing a beat, he started raving about how he LOVED her voice. He listed off a few actresses from his day who had had very deep voices, and how he adored it, and that kind of slow sultry speaking had been fading more and more as pop culture pushed for childish voices in women.
Your deep voice is gorgeous trans friends (and cis friends too.) it is warm and low and smooth like honey and perfect in every way. It is smoldering and evocative and absolutely beautiful.
