Anyway here is an itemised list of the reasons why I’m loving Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries so much:
Miss Fisher is obviously a badass but also she’s not young! She’s Of A Certain Age and she still lands the absolute hottest dudes. The hottest dudes. The hottest dudes
It’s the Carousing Good Guy trope but a lady!
Her lady-loving doctor friend Mac wears the most wonderful suits and she is amazing and I want to kiss her
What kind of a name is Phrynie. It’s absurd
Super old-school anti-procedural. Like Jonathan Creek but without all the British cringiness. Like Star Trek but instead of space stuff it’s murders and instead of space it’s set in Australia.
I didn’t even know Australia had a ‘20s until I watched this show. Upon closer study, it seems plausible
Miss Fisher is absolutely ruthless, clever, dangerous, insightful, and willing to go to any length to solve her case - including playing any number of fanciful parts, scaling large buildings, getting herself nearly poisoned to death, and otherwise putting herself in physical and emotional danger - and she does all this without having to sacrifice her love of pretty things. She scales those buildings in beautiful hand-tooled Italian heels. She is always impeccably, gorgeously dressed, and doesn’t ever change that about herself, even when she starts being taken more seriously by the police force or when she is doing serious detective work like interviewing wicked murderers or hunting for the man who killed her sister. Miss Fisher is only ever entirely herself.
She adopts strays like no one’s business.
There’s something very appealing about the story of a woman who has seen terrible, gruesome things, decided afterwards to dedicate her life entirely to pleasure, and then (almost despite herself) ended up becoming a philanthropist and a den mother and a doer-of-good. I have seen this story many many many (many, many) times from a male perspective, but not so often from a female viewpoint, and Miss Fisher does it without ever begrudging what she’s become. She’s infinitely more graceful than every other good-guy-against-his-better-judgment story I’ve watched or read.
oppressors paint famous radicals as soft pacifists because they know quiet rebellion (read: quiet acceptance of the system) won’t get us anywhere. if you manage to convince someone that their hero was peaceful and kind even in the face of oppression, you manage to squash rebellion before it can rise up.
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.“
That Gal Gadot has never ‘supported the Palestinian genocide’.
Does not have a rifle with the notch marks of all those she’s killed.
And has stated outright that she believes in coexistence.
She worked as a fitness instructor, never seeing combat during her mandatory stint in the Israeli army (IDF), and the only thing she said was that she wished luck to her former colleagues in the army (you know, the equivalent of ‘Support Our Troops’) and specifically wished them luck against (and condemned) Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. Her tags then went on to note #stopterror and #coexistance.
You don’t have to like her, or Wonder Woman, or DC, but if you could keep the antisemitism out of it, that’d be great.
draw women in post-apocalyptic world settings with armpit hair, leg hair, bushy brows and pubic hair ya cowards,, draw brown women/women with dark thick hair with arm hair and happy trails and sideburns and mustaches i’m sick of seeing silky smooth soapy clean make up wearing post apocalyptic dolled up women next to stinky sweaty crusty men with dirty nails and sweaty clothes and sweaty greasy hair and 3m long ugly beards
or, if you must depict women maintaining that shit, at least be interesting about it. I can actually buy someone shaving/putting on makeup if that’s their way of coping, something they do to tether themselves to the past or an ellusive feeling of normalcy. So show me the EFFORT put in, yeah? Show that woman risking a zombie horde because she spotted a fucking tube of scarlet lipstick and christ she hasn’t seen that color in five years but it’s what she wore on her first date with her now-dead husband. Show me the girl who is quietly starting to fucking lose it but covers it up with fanatical commitment to her appearance because if she gets these eyebrows right, maybe no one will notice how she stares at things that aren’t there.
I find it completely plausible that some women would go to incredible lengths to maintaining their appearance, because they’ve been socialized all their lives to caring about it, because it’s a part of their identity. So show me how that part gets negotiated with once the world has gone to hell.
Catch me in your local bunker doing a smoky eye with the ashes of my former life.
One of the visual images that still sticks with me is from the 2000 TV show Prairie Quest, when modern people simulated homesteading in the 1870s. They all got kind of bushy and hairy as they dealt with an extremely limited supply of clean, warm water or good soap. One of the women hated the feeling of hairy legs while she slept, so as an act of love and care, her husband had her prop her legs up on the kitchen table while he carefully shaved her legs with a hunting knife.
… that is honestly fucking adorable and kind of hot and I am totally stealing it for a post-apocalyptic setting.
You start a game of DnD with a blank character sheet. Your DM has them all. You only discover stats and things as they become relevant.
Like, “I rolled 7 on my constitution check” “You get a +2 bonus so that’s a 9.” *Hurriedly marking it down*
Or
“I would like to ask the innkeeper if there is anything weird going on in the area” “Dragonborn are rare in these parts, so she is suspicious at your approach.” “Wait I’m a DRAGONBORN?!?”
It would be absolute chaos but for a one-shot I feel it would be fun. Maybe all the characters have amnesia and they have to figure out what they can do from scratch.
not to get mad nerdy but I just discovered tabletopaudio.com and I’m fuckin losing it
this person (people?) goes about making 10 minute long loopable ambient noise tracks for every imaginable setting (docks, taverns, forests, airships, spaceships, office buildings, sewers, EVERYTHING) and has over a hundred tracks to offer, and on top of that if none of them suit you there’s a huge feature called soundpad where you can mix and match from their set of hundreds of individual sound effects and music clips to make your own ambient background track
holy shit dudes
I did a little further reading on his about and the guy running this is just a dad with two kids who like playing tabletops with him and he had the composition and musical training to start making soundtracks for his games then decided to spread that to the world for absolutely free, he even welcomes you to use his tracks in your works (podcasts, videos etc) and is open to being hired for custom tracks
I love the Han Solo comparisons that everyone made for Cassian during promo for Rogue One and then it totally bait and switched that Jyn was actually the vest-wearing, mercenary asshole who reluctantly joined a noble cause and got a crush on a rebel with pretty brown eyes and a stick up their ass.
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.
Do you ever just sometimes marvel at the fact that the aesthete culture of the likes of Oscar Wilde has found new life in Millennials? Like there is an established subculture of the “deeply shallow” (to quote @dionysae ) who find real meaning in the look, feel, and texture of our worlds. We have this amazing talent for finding uniform beauty in different vibes and we have no shame in organizing our lives around that vibe pursuing the feelings and values said vibe stirs up in us. Like the “live and die for the aesthetic” meme is funny by it’s not a lie; we are the inheritors of a great tradition of building personalities and commentaries out of sublime, carefully cultivated Looks. Art for art’s sake is back in a Big way folks.
u wanted prompts: steve takes it upon himself to stand outside planned parenthood clinics and fight people who attack and harass pp
Listen, I see and observe your ‘Steve’ up
there, but I raise you Forty Percent of the Marvel Universe because I am bitter
about the current direction of the whole comics thing at the moment. *Max Rockatansky voice* I guarantee you, a
hundred and sixty days out, there’s nothing but salt. Anyway, if you’ve read my Claire Temple AO3
fic that may or may not get more stuff added to it when I feel inspired, this
is technically that universe, but prior knowledge IS NOT REQUIRED, okay good
let’s do it. Also I believe that movie
canon only applies to me when I feel like it so everyone is in New York and the
Avengers live in the Tower, no one is dead and everything is F I N E. I dunno, this is only like the first half of
a much longer thing that covers this whole day and, if I had my way, would be a
full-blown elaborate media fic with tweets and Trish’s show and
everything. But here, it’s real long, so
I left it alone. It’s on AO3.
Steve got the call pre-dawn, just as he was leaving the Tower for his
run.
“Captain Rogers,” FRIDAY said politely from the ceiling, “you are
receiving a call from an unknown number with a New York City area code.”
“If it’s a reporter, let it ring out,” Steve said, knotting his running
shoes.
“Reporters do not have your personal cell number, Captain,” FRIDAY said,
and there was a trace of genteel condescension in the artificial voice this
time that made Steve grin down at the floor.
“Where in the City?”
“Hell’s Kitchen.”
Steve frowned, straightening up.
“That might be Daredevil in trouble.
You better put it through to my phone.
Thanks, FRIDAY.”
“Of course, Captain,” FRIDAY said.
Steve’s top-of-the-line, not-on-the-open-market-yet, Jesus-Cap-does-your-shit-phone-even-text-here-let-me-replace-it
StarkPhone rang, a jaunty tune that sounded distinctly like the National
Anthem, and even more distinctly like the foreboding of Bucky getting his ass
kicked.
“Steve Rogers,” Steve answered, hitting the green button and raising the
phone to his ear.
“Um…hi, Captain Rogers,” the voice on the other end said
hesitantly. “This is Claire Temple, I
don’t know if you remember me, but–”
“Of course I remember you, Miss Temple,” Steve said, grinning. “You pulled a piece of rebar out of my chest,
hard to forget a first meeting like that.”
She laughed, the same slightly worn chuckle he remembered from her. “And it’s just Steve, please, ma’am. I think once you’ve been up close and
personal with someone’s lung tissue you can probably skip the ‘Captain.’”
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.
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.
Chapters: 1/? Fandom: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Captain America - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Steve Rogers & Justice Characters: Steve Rogers Additional Tags: Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, One Shot Collection, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, aggressively progressive Steve Rogers, other tags will to be added as pertinent, Bananas, RIP Steve’s Publicists TBH Summary:
Steve Rogers wakes up in the 21st century and there are some very specific expectations for how this relic will respond. Steve never did do well with being told how to live his life.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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
If humans had a third hand what do you think it would be called? If you could play any instrument without practicing, what would it be?
First one: This? The greatest question. Okay so like obviously if it was a hand that sprouted from like right above your sternum, it would be called the middle hand, seeing as we already have the right and left hands (fun story, you know that phantom limb thing that happens with ADHD, among other things? My brain used to really stubbornly spit out ‘middle eye’ as A Thing I Had when I was younger, it was weird). On the other hand (ha, I’m a riot), if it was another hand below either your right or left hand (wouldn’t it be interesting if it was genetically dictated which side you had your third hand on, like handedness is genetically dictated or which thumb is on top when you lace your fingers) I imagine you would still have a ‘dominant’ hand. Like, one of the three would be more dexterous than the others. So maybe you’d have like “Yes, this is my left hand, and this is my right hand, and this is my prime hand.” WHICH WOULD BE RAD. Also, if you had two pairs of hands you could have your ‘prime’ hands and your ‘off’ hands, so like ‘prime left’ and ‘off right’ and yeah, this was a good question.
Second one: ANY. I have very limited patience for learning instruments because I can’t read sheet music for shit (I have tried, I have made an effort, I have spent years on it, but nope, brain won’t do the thing). I can sing! But IDK I played the flute for a while, which was fun, and I’ve always wanted to be able to play like a harp or a lap harp, or the guitar. I would really love to play either of those. (I recognize that the flute and the harp are both really delicate instruments for someone like me but I like them, okay. At least the guitar fits The Aesthetic.)
um. this is oddly specific, but have you by any chance read familiar by achievingelysium? its altean!lance and its like solid langst, so [shrug]. just wondering. sorry i know its weirdly specific but i do have Reasons for asking.
I have not! I haven’t read a ton of Voltron fic (although I recommend the hell out of the Let The Spectrum In series because it’s just…real good) because…well, I just dragged myself out from under my thesis, and off the top of my head I don’t recall any Altean!Lance fics. I think this is possibly because my response is always “????? 10000 years where?” but then again I get literal at weird moments.
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.
