Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win
Month
There are heartwarming parts of Animorphs. There are funny parts of Animorphs.
There are no happy parts of Animorphs.
MY LOVE BUFFY SUMMERS. For this ask meme. Also, buckle up for fucking Buffy/Angel hour, folks, I don’t truck with Buffy/Spike.
A: what I think realistically
Buffy’s classmates…listen. They’re not as oblivious as the adult population, because…obviously they’re not, they’re the rising generation of kids who go to school with the Slayer, even the most obtuse of them will pick something up eventually. They don’t really know, either, and more to the point they don’t altogether want to know. But they can kind of…tell.
No one challenges Buffy. Ever. Buffy is a hunter of hunters, a killer of killers. Even though they don’t know, something deep down in the mind of even the densest high school student looks at her and quails in fear, looks at her and says strength and danger and protection and fear all at once in a mad jumble.
Willow and Xander go from being regularly shoved around to not even touched. People still talk shit for a while, sure, but by their senior year, the entirety of Sunnydale High would rather be shanked with a pencil and die quick than go toe-to-toe with Buffy Summers.
And God have mercy on you if you lay a finger on her little sister, because Buffy won’t.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Early during that rocky first few months, Giles foolishly told Buffy that she should dress more practically. Out of sheer spite, she went slaying in stiletto heels and club dresses for two weeks until Giles had to reluctantly eat his words.
Angel was planning to come talk to her, but listen. He’s only human. Sort of. He has limits. Buffy kicking back on a mausoleum in a little black dress with blonde hair loose over her shoulders and six-inch heels while she juggles holy water vials with the careless ease of someone with total confidence in her skills–that’s his limit. He’s calling it right now. He leaves, feeling mildly shellshocked.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
SWEET GIRL, Death sighs, sliding through the motionless candle flames of the cave. The Slayer is weeping into her hands, horrible ripping sounds as she stands with the water of the pool lapping at her feet. She is dressed all in white, and so is Death, and they could be twins. The Slayer is still afraid of Death, this time. IT IS NOT YOUR TIME YET.
“Thank you,” the Slayer sobs, and Death rests a bone-pale hand on her shoulder to press her back into the body in the pool.
***
The next time, it’s been a few years, and the Slayer–the Slayer, Death always thinks of her, even though there have been two, one gone through Death’s own hands and the other very close now, since last time–isn’t afraid of Death anymore. They are friends, well-known and often met. Almost twins. She’s not dressed in white, she’s dressed in her own blood and vindication and black, and she’s sitting on the foot of a hospital bed.
DEAREST, Death croons, sitting down next to her and stroking her hair with a hand while she lets her fingers hover just above the hand of the body in the bed.
“I can’t die,” the Slayer says, looking at the unhealthily white skin of the body in the bed. Even the golden hair looks washed out. “The Ascension is tomorrow and I have to be there. And–and he’ll never forgive himself.”
I HAVE MET LIAM, Death says, somewhat disapproving. HE WAS RATHER QUESTIONABLE.
The Slayer almost smiles, but tears break over her lashes instead. “I’ve heard.”
Death allows, HE HAS IMPROVED TREMENDOUSLY.
“I won’t die here,” the Slayer says, iron-clad. “You can’t take me.”
Death laughs. ALMOST I BELIEVE YOU COULD STOP ME, DEAR GIRL. BUT IT IS NOT YOUR TIME YET. And Death presses her back into the body, and the Slayer clutches gratefully at Death’s wrist before she goes.
***
It is longer, before the next time, and this time the Slayer does not resist, throws herself weeping into Death’s arms and lets herself be held close to the thin body under the white cloth, and buries her tears in Death’s neck.
DEAREST CHILD, Death whispers, YOU HAVE FOUGHT FOR SO LONG. COME WITH ME, AND YOU CAN REST.
***
Death has never considered mutiny before, but seeing the Slayer torn back into life almost brings it to mind.
***
They meet again, and again, and the Slayer smiles when she sees Death and they talk like old friends, like family long parted.
“How is Tara? How is Jenny? Tell me about Cordy, is she doing all right? Did you see my mother, is she okay? How is your work? Is it my time?” The Slayer asks her questions like there’s nothing to fear, and Death tries to keep a mental list, tries to check up on all her loved ones so that the Slayer can be assured of their wellbeing. The Slayer’s list of loved ones is long. Death hates to have to tell her, when the soul of Liam has passed through Death’s hands again, and always makes sure to let her know when it is restored.
LOVE, Death says quietly, every time, at the end of their talk, DO YOU WANT TO REST?
“No rest for the wicked, didn’t you hear?” This is always the only time that the Slayer’s eyes glisten, her lips tremble. “I still have so much to do.”
LET THE OTHERS DO IT, DEARHEART.
“Maybe next time,” the Slayer says, looking away, as ever, to hide the tears threatening to slide down her cheeks. “Maybe next time I’ll rest.”
Death takes her face in bone-pale hands and kisses her forehead, a benediction. They are almost twins. YOU ARE THE BRAVEST OF YOUR KIND, SWEET GIRL. And Death presses the Slayer back into her body.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Honestly, AU where Angel/Cordelia doesn’t get shoehorned in and there’s no super uncomfortable Spike/Buffy plot and we get 100x more active pining. Deliver! My! Mutual! Pining! Thanks!
In slightly more seriousness, though, (not that I’m not TOTALLY serious about that mutual pining thanks) you know how there’s that one time where Buffy accidentally demonstrates to a room full of morons that she can toss a dude over her shoulder like a paperweight? In my heart of hearts, Buffy is shyly approached the next day by a girl who’s regularly harassed by jackasses and Buffy accidentally becomes the mentor to a bunch of random girls for how To Beat Up A Creepy Dude 101. At work, Buffy walks other girls back to their cars on the regular, and she’s sort of surprised by how many of the people who try to mess with them are just…creepy dudes, nothing supernatural, because…like…very few people are suicidal enough to try shit with Buffy and her standard for comparison is like 99% vampires and 1% miscellaneous other.
Unrelatedly she and Angel are soulmates and they probably have a weird psychic pseudo-sire bond because of the bite on her neck and at some point a vampire asks her about it and she’s like “Well, I saved a master vampire from dying.”
VERY relatedly to the above, Angel is an actual master vampire and gossip is faster than wildfire and word Gets Around that the Slayer (because, much to Faith’s bitterness, Buffy is always the Slayer), one time saved Fucking Angelus from death. The entire supernatural underworld simultaneously explodes with elaborate conspiracy theories, chief among them that the Slayer is actually a vampire. Buffy hears about this after a really long day and the vampire who lets it slip is very confused when the Slayer sits down on the ground and laughs until she cries. Not confused for long, though. She stakes him before he can be confused for too long.
Can I ask what book it was so I can avoid it with all my being?
Orpheum, by D.S. Murphy. It’s kind of a shame, honestly, the magic had the potential to be really cool, I was all buckled up for some good brain candy nonsense but nooooo fucking ‘gypsy fortune tellers’ fucking spare me.
I’m gonna do them all, I’m sorry, I am. For this ask meme.
A: what I think realistically
Natasha didn’t just wake up one day clean and free to wander into the arms of SHIELD. She doesn’t have the scar from it anymore–it was a long time ago, and a woman in her line of work has to get some laser treatments–but Clint shot her through the shoulder when he caught up with her, and it was her response that saved her life.
He couldn’t kill someone who stared him in the eye and said, plain as day, “Go ahead and do it then. Save all those people from me.” Pause. Bitter laugh. “Save me from me.”
Natasha beat him to a bloody pulp the first time they sparred, for disobeying.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Natasha, most of the Avengers believe at first, is effortlessly classy, humorless, and overall terrifying.
They are wildly unprepared for Natasha’s prankster streak–through a combination of dizzying logic and sweet-talking, she gets JARVIS on her side and convinces him to kill all the systems in the Avengers Tower. While Tony is hammering away at his keyboard, trying to find the problem, JARVIS asks, totally deadpan, “Would you like to play a game?” Tony shrieks. Natasha gets it all on camera.
They are likewise unprepared for the first time Natasha and Clint actually stay there for an extended period of time, which includes Natasha, dressed in a shirt she stole from Clint and comfy leggings, sitting crosslegged on the floor and eating cereal at 2 AM while watching old Burn Notice reruns and critiquing the spy shenanigans out loud, regardless of who’s in the room.
It doesn’t come as a shock to them when Natasha goes through an entire week of addressing Clint by increasingly elaborately incorrect codenames. At first it’s “Duck-guy” or “Crow-man” or “Goose-face,” but by day six she’s calling for “Ruby Throated Hummingbird” over the comms. He walks into the debrief and sits down next to her and goes “Hey, Tarantula” and genuinely fears for his life for the next forty-eight hours.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
The Red Room recruiting nine or ten year olds? Nah. Natasha–Natalia–neither of those then, but Natasha-Natalia-Anja-Laurel-Cara-Kristen-Hana-Jessamine and a hundred other bloodstained girls all the same–was four years old when her family’s home burned to the ground. She killed for the first time at five. She was pitted against another child, then, and a knife was put in the room, and whoever lived, left. She went on a mission for the first time at fourteen. Failed. Accidentally killed the target before extracting information. Punished. Another mission a year later. Perfection.
First wiped at sixteen.
Natasha believes she was wiped perhaps twelve times–not after every mission, like the teacher she barely remembers (blue eyes and hard jaw and numbness–Yakov? she doesn’t know), but often enough to keep her controlled. Her last mission, before she was brought into SHIELD, was supposed to be a routine recon to a hospital in Sao Paolo which was thought to be funneling drugs. A children’s hospital. Competition for a major contributor to the Red Room.
It was far worse. Natasha-Natalia-Mila couldn’t leave those children–some of them barely alive anymore, some of them twisted by experiments into…desperate things–to their fate. She knew about desperate things. She made sure they all died cleanly before she burned the building to the ground.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Natasha is in love with Clint Barton, her hypercompetent loser of a partner who lives in Bed-Stuy with a dog and his…trainee? Sidekick? Mini-me? Don’t bring no AOU nonsense into my house.
In all seriousness, comic ‘canon’ is such a moving target that you can justify almost anything, and I basically abandon MCU canon whenever it suits me. That being said, heADCANON THAT NATASHA BELIEVES SHE’S A MONSTER BECAUSE SHE FUCKING MURDERED A LOT OF PEOPLE AND NOT BECAUSE SHE’S INFERTILE WHAT THE F U C K.
Nope, nope, I swear to Christ, I’m going to come up with something that’s not about AOU, I am, I promise, oh my god, um.
Natasha and Vision are good buddies because Natasha had to fumble her way through how to have Genuine Human Emotions a little bit at first (not how to have them, just how to…deal?) and is happy to explain to Vision when he’s confused.
You’re darn right I can do John Wick! For THIS meme!
A: what I think realistically
John didn’t get into trouble as a kid. John was a well-behaved student, known for being intelligent and quiet and unremarkable. John never got into fights and no one ever questioned where he got bruises, because no one ever noticed. When John left high school, he joined the military and did a four year tour with very little action. And then he fell off the fucking map. He still has living family. They believe he’s dead.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
John definitely calls in, like, life debts to get people to watch his dog while Shit’s Going Down.
“I need a favor.”
“John,” the smiling English assassin says, “after that time in Bulgaria you know you only need to ask.”
“I need you to watch my dog.”
There’s a long pause, but the assassin’s smile doesn’t crack. “Does he have a name?”
“…no.”
“Okay.” John is a weird dude, even as assassins go. The English assassin rolls with it like a champ.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
For the record, I don’t have any friends who have seen John Wick except for the people who have asked me about it on here.
That being said: John hasn’t been to visit his wife’s grave since he buried her. At first it was because he physically couldn’t make himself do it. Those first weeks were such a grey haze of…weight, more than anything else–even the air seemed too heavy to breathe–that he couldn’t leave the house. Even with Daisy, it was all he could do to get up and take care of her. Going to the cemetery…no way.
And then once Daisy was dead…John was busy. John was fighting. John was killing. John had a purpose and damned if he was going to turn away from it.
He was planning to go see his wife’s tombstone the morning after he got home. Instead his house gets blown up and he loses everything of hers that he still owned.
D: what would never work in canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
You’ll never tell me that John’s wife wasn’t a world-class thief. Like, she is to the thief world what John is to the assassin world. They called her the Wraith, and her Interpol file is almost as thick as his, but instead of being a trail of mercilessly efficient kills it’s a laundry list of precious paintings and jewels and artifacts stolen from uncrackable safes and impenetrable museums.
They met while she was stealing a Picasso from one of John’s targets. A classic story: girl meets boy, boy murders target, girl takes painting, girl breaks into boy’s safehouse with champagne. “To celebrate our mutual successes,” she says, and John is gone.
Instead of making a deal with the Devil, she stole the most cherished statue owned by a leading member of her own High Council, and ransomed her freedom back with it. She would have been free for all her natural life–and, John supposes, she was.
It’s just they both expected her natural life to be a lot longer, is all.
Oh my god where do I start. (I guess I should say there are spoilers ahead) I’m just gonna give you a walk through on my emotions as the show went on. So there’s the opening scene with all of those skeletons on piles and bats and shit outside of Draculas castle and Lisa fucking just stabs one mid flight like a total BADASS. Right then I knew I would love her with all of my heart. Then when I first saw Dracula my first thought was “this boy is TALL” and then I saw Lisa and Drac together and that’s honestly all I needed. Seeing them together made me so happy. THEN THE NEXT SCENE LITERALLY RIPPED MY HEART OUT AND STOMPED IT INTO THE DIRT. Lisa just wanted to help people with science and medicine but the church was like “NO WITCHES, ONLY MEN CAN DO THAT” and in that moment I hated the bishop and everyone involved in the church and Lisa’s death. Then when she literally screamed don’t hurt them, they don’t know what they’re doing, I COULDNT HANDLE IT. Pretty much I started crying instantly. Then it shows Drac at his house and when he started crying when he found out Lisa was killed I just wanted to reach in and hug him. Then he showed up in the flames that KILLED HIS WIFE, THE ONLY PERSON WHO HELPED HIM NOT TO TOTALLY HATE HUMANS, and told the people to get out in a year or they would die. When he goes back to his castle we get to see a peek of Alucard and I screamed. Then a year passes and NO ONE BELIEVES HIM. And they’re all shocked when he releases the demons of hell??? What did they expect???? Anyway, flash forward to the bar where Trevor is introduced. I instantly fell in love with him and I would honestly probably die for him and he’s an animated character. BUT I LOVE MY DRUNK BOY SM. So basically every scene with him in it I LOVE. He’s a snarky, sarcastic, asshole and everything I need in a protagonist. He had the best one liners in the history of EVER. Then he meets the leader of the speakers and fights off the two catholic guys and honestly WOW the animation is beautiful in the fight scene. Anyway he’s like not at all interested in what people have to say but he’s willing to listen to a little of what the speakers have to say, and they listen to him. So when he goes to find the list speaker just to save them it shows he’s not just all gruff and tough, this boy has a heart. Then he KILLS A CYCLOPS AND THIS SCENE WAS SO AMAZING, THE ANIMATION, MEETING SYPHA, EVERYTHING! Speaking of Sypha, I love her. She calls things how she sees them, and she can do MAGIC, LIKE HOLY SHIT. So they fight the demons later right, but there’s the one with Blue Fangs that goes into the church and absolutely DESTROYS the bishop before eating him. I was so proud of him, literally said “you’re doing amazing sweetie” as he ate the bishop. AND DUDE, TREVORS WHIP IS SO BADASS. The demons exploded and I was just in awe of it all. Then when Sypha and Trevor fall into the catacombs and find Alucards coffin I literally got up and had to do a little happy dance break type thing because EMOTIONS WERE HAPPENING AND I COULDNT HANDLE THEM. Then Alucard pops out and starts fighting Trevor and I’m like “god this is the ship I didn’t know I needed.” THEN WHEN THE PROPHESY IS MENTIONED??? I LITERALLY THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO D I E. I can’t wait for season two to happen because I’ve honestly rewatched season one seven times.
I usually have two or more sets of headcanons with characters
Headcanon A: what I think realistically
Headcanon B: what I think is fucking hilariousyou forgot
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends#option D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
new game: send me a character and i’ll give an example of each
That feeling where you start reading a book with the expectation that it will be fun YA garbage with cool weird magic and bastardized Greek mythology, and halfway through you hit a twenty page chunk of UNRELENTING racist bullshit about “gypsies”.
I must cleanse my soul.
Oh so at the Buffy panel at Awesome Con James Marsters talked about how sometimes Spike would be in a scene and he’d just have no idea why Spike is there and the script didn’t explain it, and so he just made up motivations and he said he basically just made up 90% of the time that he was there to kill Xander and forgot/changed his mind
Me too
is it just me or is ‘just dont let it bother you’ possibly the worst advice ever given
It’s the absolute worst fucking advise. Stand up. Talk to them. Tell them to stop. And when that doesn’t work just do what
@words-writ-in-starlightdoes and get the fists a swinging
*bows* thank you very much
Hey y’all, for 600 followers here is some weird urban magic.
He blinked at the tiled ceiling, crossing into wakefulness from something…not. There was a clamor of noise buffeting him, just outside the half-drawn curtain hiding him—a tiny besieged encampment against a hurricane in the hall. The sheets crackled hard against his hands, more like paper than cloth, a sharp smell making the bone between his eyes ache, and it took a long moment before he could sort out the overload and look around. From where he sat, he could see two more beds, one in the room across the hall, curtain half-closed like his own, and one in his own room—a hospital, maybe. He didn’t entirely recall what the word entailed. Didn’t recall much of anything, now that he thought about it. He blinked away the concern and propped himself up on one hand to get a look around at the other residents. Kids, he noted. Very young. Younger than him? He wasn’t sure.
Across the hall was a boy, smooth-cheeked and round-eyed. He had one arm exposed to the shoulder, one sleeve cut away entirely, and halfway down his upper arm, the flesh turned abruptly into brass. The metal threaded itself into the higher tissue, and the boy clutched his arm across his chest in numb shock. The girl in the next bed over was sobbing, the blank sound of someone crying in an effort to soothe themselves, tears leaving glistening trails down the glossy porcelain of her cheeks. Her eyes, when she blinked, were bright and lively, her black hair tumbling in thin dreadlocks around her face, but there was a chink as a bracelet knocked against porcelain—her hand, rubbing across her eyes.
He raised his fingers to touch his own face, but there was no metal or porcelain there, only the warm give of skin. A touch of stubble on his jaw—older than these soft, scared children, then, but no lines, so still young enough—and chapped lips, but all living, perfectly human. He looked down at his arms, sweeping fingers up from the thin skin at his wrists to the curve of his shoulders where they met the paper of a hospital gown. He kicked away the sheet and performed a similar check, up the sinew-and-bone line of his legs, then tugged the hospital gown away from his neck and looked down. All skin over muscle, blood racing at the crease of his elbow and the hollow of his throat.
Far from simply being entirely human, there didn’t seem to be a mark on him. He wondered why he was here. Hospitals were places for the terribly ill or grievously injured, that much he was sure of, and he didn’t seem to be either one. If the noise outside was any indication, they hardly had the staff to spare for him.
littlestartopaz replied to your post
Cause you were opinionated on medical equality. I just remember there was a spam of them when Tumblr suggested you. If i never mentioned that.
THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH
So. you ever read the comic The Dreamer by Lora Innes?
HOLY SHIT NO I HAVE NOT BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR ASS I’M ABOUT TO, HOLY FUCK I’M R E A D Y
IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT I HAVE A BUNCH OF NEW FOLLOWERS
IN FACT I HAVE LIKE 600 FOLLOWERS NOW
HI Y’ALL
So, since I blatantly and egregiously failed to notice when I hit 500 people, now I’m going to post some new original stuff.
In 1804, today’s the day when Vice-President Aaron Burr fatally shot Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
Fuckin Heck Yeah
Bye Bitch
WHO WANTS TO GIVE ME $50000
why stop there….. you find this umbrella for a weirdly low price at a yard sale being run by a person wearing a shitty wizards hat. the label says FOR “WEATHER” and when you ask what that means they pretend not to hear you
you try to return it the next day but the entire plot of land has become an applebees. there hasnt been a yard there in almost 30 years, the waitress tells you
Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do to fix the situation for you–there’s nothing more insidious than people who are supposed to care unconditionally telling you that you’re guilty of the crime of existing. It sits in your heart and eats at you, like something living, more than any other cruelty I’m familiar with. Combined with the idea that you’re supposed to be in some way ‘better’ than the people around you–more intelligent, more socially adept, more well-spoken, more normal, whatever–it’s toxic like nothing else. I know that it probably feels like everything you do and everything you are is a personal failing of your willpower and your strength, right now, and I want you to take me seriously when I say it is not.
It’s not. You are not failing the test of being human because of your looks, because of your gender, because of who you love or what you enjoy, because of what you do or don’t believe. No matter what kind of abuse the people who claim to care about you heap on your shoulders, they are wrong about this. Your brother and your sister aren’t failures because their brains are wired up differently than the ‘norm’, and you’re not a failure because you’re nonbinary, or because of the way you present.
And because I know a thing or two about being the family failure while also being touted as the family genius, let me add: you’re not responsible for why your parents adopted you. You aren’t beholden to their idea of a ‘successful’ child, and nor are you selfish or monstrous because your parents were arrogant enough to write your siblings off. You are, ultimately, far more the person you choose to be than the person your parents make you, and your parents cannot force you to become like them.
And it’s hard to remember these things. I’m not going to lie to you. You said you were tired–oh, sweetheart, this globe-sprawling clan of people who have come out of terrible families, we’re all tired. But we’re none of us failures because we’re tired. We’re none of us weak, or broken, or monsters because we’re tired. We’re alive, and goddamn, some days that is good enough.
It’s taken me years to settle on this, and trust me, there are a ton of days where I still struggle with it, but here is my one piece of advice I can offer you–and a weak and paltry thing it is, in the face of a situation like yours, but it’s all I have for you, my dear one. The world is not an exam. No one can give you a pass or a failure on this, no matter who you are or what you do or how your brain works or whatever. You are succeeding by the mere fact of being alive.
so…
s/o to any teachers who follow me, if I wrote a couple of very passionate letters about how much specific college professors and an elementary school teacher meant to me because they gave a shit about my ass and sent them, would that be weird? good weird? unacceptable?
So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
‘But surely you have records of volcanic activity doing tremendous damage to human settlements.’
‘Yep. Pompeii is legendary. Entire cities went. Towns buried under lava, peoples’ brains boiled in the first rush of heat, loads more killed by falling pumice.’
‘ah, good, they learned their lesson and didn’t build there again.’
‘…well…’
‘Are you seriously telling me this volcano is legendary for killing several urban conurbations and you built on top of it AGAIN?’
‘In our defence it hasn’t actually done it since.’
‘What about earthquake-prone areas? Tell me you’re at least vaguely sensible about those.’
‘Oh yeah. After the first major earthquake that flattens a city, we build them better.’
And then the aliens learn what it means to “facepalm” despite not having palms per se….
Aliens: Well at least you’re not immortal. Your planet is teeming with predators and disease what’s your average lifespan; 30-40?
Human: 70-80.
Other Human: My grandma was 102 before she died.
Alien: A FUCKING CENTURY? What killed her a stiff breeze?
OH: nah, cancer and liver failure. She smoke til the day she died and drank like a fish.
Alien: wait like…spontaneous cellular mutation and IMBIBING Poison? Surely these aren’t common!
Humans: …er…
Aliens: HOLY SHIT DUDE.
SPACE AUSTRALIA
@archmagenutblastok like these are interesting and all, but i want to know what the aliens do that make us go wtf. like ones that regularly go do repairs on their space ships without putting on a suit because they can release the air bubbles in their body and the radiation doesnt really bother them. they just put on like a fucking sweater and go repair the cracked ship window. they have to take breaks to go warm up and all, but over all its nbd. but then you stick them in like a pond and they’re just like abort abort its too much im dying
>“Human, forgive my asking…”
>“Is it about the mountain climbing?”
>“We…do not understand your reasoning behind scaling su-”
>“Yeah, it’s the mountain climbing. What do you want to know?”
>“The mountains on my world are roughly concurrent with yours. But we didn’t scale their peaks until after we developed short-range space travel. The first things to go there were probes and drones.”
>“That’s a shame. You could have been up there long before that.”
>“But you…no offence, but your people haven’t even mastered atmospheric travel before attempting to climb your mountains.”
>“So?”
>“So? Many of you died trying to climb them. From faulty, primitive equipment, the weather, don’t get me started on your blasted weather patterns, the weather turning against you, not to mention a sheer lack of insi-”
>“Your name was…Sulp Niar, is that right?”
>“It’s not just Sul…yes, that is part of my name.”
>“Listen, Sulp. I know you and your friends think we’re stupid, crazy, stupidly crazy as a species.”
>“I-I would nev-”
>“I will admit, we’ve done more than our fair share of stupid on our planet. Some of our stunts were bad enough to leave some scars on her. But let me ask you something. How long did it take for your species to advance from early flight to entering orbit?”
>“…one hundred eighty-two cycles.”
>“Humans managed that in under seventy ye-cycles.”
>“Seventy cy-”
>“And a hundred cycles after we developed submersible water vehicles, we managed to land in the deepest trench, the lowest spot, on our planet. Give or take.”
>“I can’t…no other species has accomplished such things.”
>“And I bet no other species has experienced the losses to achieve them. One time, a man tried to use a hot air balloon to travel to the north pole, in the Arctic.”
>“But that doesn’t…there’s no way that would have worked.”
>“It didn’t. He disappeared shortly after liftoff, crashed a few days later, and tried walking home while the ice flowed against him. We found his remains almost thirty years after the fact.”
>“He was a fool. He should have known better than to try that.”
>“No, that man’s a hero. He tried something new, something that inspired people in the future to still try, to this day. His remains were taken back home and giving the utmost respect, despite his failure. Sulp, there was another man, who tried to scale our tallest mountain.”
>“Did he fail, too?”
>“Honestly, we don’t know. He disappeared trying to make a rush for the peak, just before a snowstorm hit. We found his body almost seventy years later. He fell, and his axe bounced off a rock and killed him. We never found the camera he would have used to photograph his success, and his wallet was missing a photo he would have placed on the peak.”
>“Where are you going with this?”
>“Before he made his last attempt, someone asked him why he bothered to scale Mount Everest. What is the point, he asked. Just like you’ve done earlier.”
>“And…what did this human say in return?”
>“He answered with three words. Three words that inspired us to look beyond what we cannot do, beyond what we won’t be able to do for a while.”
>“What were they?”
>“Because it’s there.”BECAUSE IT’S THERE
*emerges from cave, shamefaced* Right, so, does anyone remember that this AU exists? Because I swear to God I didn’t forget, I just only now have had the time. I actually have a bunch of prompts for it, not all of them are going to get written based on…like…my inspiration level, but also this series is alive again, so like. Yep. Here is some Jefferson. Full disclosure, I dislike Jefferson and think his economic plan was some racist bullshit, so…that is evident.
To all you newcomers, I do recommend reading the other stuff, even if you could probably figure it out.
So, the academic affairs office holds out longer than their predecessor. Not by much, but by a little. It takes two full weeks for Alex to hammer through his petition to be allowed to take more than max credits—and it’s quite a petition. Angelica takes one look at the twenty-page, double-sided, single-spaced letter to the dean of academics and disavows any involvement, and John grins fondly, remarking that the dean has no idea what he’s gotten into.
The dean, incidentally, has lived his life with pleasantly dim memories of Philedelphia with cobblestone streets and a vague impression that he knows the unfortunate teacher annually strong-armed into teaching History of the American Revolution. He recalls very little else of his time in the Continental Congress—indeed, at gunpoint he couldn’t have identified what exactly he was doing, back then.
He has a blindingly vivid flashback upon looking at the first page of the letter—the pamphlet, really—and immediately feeds the entire thing through his shredder.
“Jake,” he says, sticking his head out of his office to look at his secretary.
“Yes, sir?”
“Approve whatever Hamilton’s request was before he sends anymore letters. I’ve seen enough for several lifetimes.”
“You got it, boss,” says Jake, whose past life was a blissfully unremarkable farmer in the Italian countryside and who therefore has no idea that his boss is sparing them all a lot of trouble.
Now, the reason this matters is because Alex walks into his Econ 101 class for the first time two weeks into the semester, takes one look at the lesson outline the grad student wrote on the board, and makes a sound of absolute incoherent horror.
“Oh my god,” Alex says faintly, frozen in place two steps inside the door. He was never an especially religious person, but he’s wondering if maybe the universe is punishing him for past crimes. He’s not saying one way or the other if he deserves it, but this seems excessive. “Jefferson is haunting me from beyond the grave.”
ROMAN SENATOR CATO THE ELDER FAMOUSLY ENDED ALMOST EVERY SPEECH WITH THE PHRASE “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST,” OR “CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED.”
IT WAS HIS BELIEF THAT THE ONLY WAY TO ENSURE ROMAN SECURITY WAS TO COMPLETELY ANNIHILATE THE CITY OF CARTHAGE. THE ABSURD PART, HOWEVER, WAS THAT CATO EVEN USED THIS PHRASE TO CONCLUDE SPEECHES THAT HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH CARTHAGE WHATSOEVER.
HE WOULD MAKE A SPEECH ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE COMPLETELY AND END IT WITH “ALSO, IT IS MY OPINION THAT CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED.”
FOR THOSE KEEPING SCORE AT HOME, THE ROMANS WOULD EVENTUALLY RAZE CARTHAGE, SALT THE EARTH IT STOOD ON TO PREVENT ANYONE FROM REBUILDING, AND ENSLAVE THE ENTIRE POPULATION, BECAUSE THE ROMANS WERE APPARENTLY NEVER LOWKEY ABOUT ANYTHING
JUST AS A QUICK ASIDE WHEN I GOT TAUGHT THIS IN MY ANCIENT ROMANS CLASS, NINE PEOPLE INCLUDING MYSELF ENDED UP CONCLUDING OUR ESSAY ON THE NEXT TEST WITH THIS PHRASE, WHICH MY PROFESSOR COMMENTED ON TO THE WHOLE CLASS
ALTHOUGH SHE ALSO GAVE THE WHOLE CLASS A WARNING ABOUT USING FORMAL LANGUAGE IN ACADEMIC ESSAYS BECAUSE ONE STUDENT WHO SHE WOULD NOT NAME (IT WAS ME) REFERRED TO JULIUS CAESAR AS “A DICK.”
THEDAS, THE WORLD OF VIDEO GAME SERIES “DRAGON AGE,” WAS ACTUALLY NAMED BASED ON AN ACRONYM FROM THE BIOWARE FORUMS: “THE D.A.S.” WHICH IS SHORT FOR “THE DRAGON AGE SETTING.”
FOR EVERY ONE OF THOSE “WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING” MESSAGES YOU SEE IN THE REBLOGS I GET SIX IN MY ASK BOX AND TWENTY “I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW I READ YOUR FACTS IN TERRY CREWS’ VOICE” MESSAGES AND FRANKLY IF I GET TOO MANY MORE I’M JUST GONNA HAVE TO SHUT DOWN MESSAGES COMPLETELY
Listen, I know they’re making a third one to close the trilogy and I’m pumped as fuck for it but that being said I’m going to be spectacularly disappointed if it doesn’t end with John as the manager of the Continental.
I have a lot of disjointed half-thoughts about this, but it basically sums up as: BUT THAT’S HOW STORIES WORK. John breaks the ONLY LAW in the underworld when he kills someone on Continental ground, he renders himself an outlaw among this community of outlaws, and like. Outlaws and kings are members of the same category, those who are not bound by the rules, IDK man I didn’t take a class about homo sacer but my roommate did and I absorbed a lot of it by exposure? @lathori be proud of me. Basically what I’m saying here is please make it a thing that, in the process of being a badass and saving his own life, John reveals that Manager Wednesday (I think his name is actually Winston but my feelings about American Gods have intersected with my feelings about John Wick and therefore he is Manager Wednesday, an inveterate con artist and liar who low-key has supernatural abilities and enjoys the Absolute Belief that his people have in his authority and power) is forging Krugerrands or whatever and takes over. OR, arguably even better, Manager Wednesday either dies (good! kill everyone John cares about, I want to see him suffer, Keanu Reeves does a good Suffer) or just…retires. Like, the only way to retire is if you just disappear and the only way to just disappear is if you have the power to make it happen.
Or, arguably THE BEST, Manager Wednesday owes John an old favor for saving his life and just kind of promotes him. I am JUST SAYING that it would be a really quality twist to have the end of the movie be a brief conversation between John and Manager Wednesday about how much John sacrificed to Get Out and how much he’s right back where he started, and then Manager Wednesday leaves and John watches him go and sighs and starts to stand…and stops. There’s a Continental key card left on the table, with a single gold Krugerrand on top of it. John takes it to the front desk and asks which room it gets him into, and he’s simply told “top floor”, and he takes the elevator up, battered and exhausted but alive and he’s going to find one more answer before he sleeps for a million years. The elevator doors open and John (plus his dog, kept safe by friends who Did This For John when he asked) walks to the only door in the antechamber, and opens it with the key card. It’s Manager Wednesday’s penthouse suite, impeccably made up and cleared out of all personal possessions, and there’s a piece of stationary laid on the pillow under another Krugerrand.
John, the note says, no one ever really talks about what makes a manager, so I’ll tell you. We’re the ones who can manage, no matter what goes wrong.
I’ve cleared it with the others. Welcome to your new life.
Um…you’re correct, that is a loaded question, and ultimately my answer boils down to ‘because I’m confident in my own ability to tell right from wrong in the real world’ but sure, we can do this.
First of all, I don’t have any personal issues centered around incest, which, like, I tend to think is the important part of this? Obviously, if you’re uncomfortable with a relationship in a piece of media, please choose to take care of yourself and not engage with it. Ex: I have the show Rick & Morty comprehensively blacklisted because I can’t deal with it. I don’t have any of those issues with the Borgias so…thus, I watch it.
Second of all, it’s history. Like, okay, I know this is a pretty fragile argument, but it’s pretty much accepted historical fact that there were some…interesting familial dynamics happening with the Borgia family, as with many of the powerful families in Italy at the time. And I generally believe that if you’re doing a messy part of history, you need to deal with the fact that it was messy.
Third of all, I just care a lot more about whether a fictional relationship is interesting than whether it’s the picture of mental health and moral purity. Like, I’m sorry, I just do. The Purity Olympics that this blue hellsite likes to get into exhaust me, I have unfollowed people for it when I got too tired of watching the discourse scroll down my dash. I care infinitely more about how interesting and complicated the relationship and the emotions are. Even the ships that are genuinely pretty good and harmless, I generally care about them in terms of complications. Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley is my jam, but I would be WAY less interested if they weren’t both child generals in a war they were born into and victims of possession and traumatized and scared and courageous and forced to fight separately in order to win. The very first thing I said about Diana/Steve Trevor was “why are we even here if he’s not torturing himself with guilt for staining the purest soul he’s ever known with war”. I’ve always been someone who loves stories for their messiness, because it makes the characters and their relationships more interesting. And by far the most interesting available permutation of Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia’s relationship is the one in the show, where they’re so bent and misshapen by the pressures and demands of their father’s nation-spanning chess game that the only way they really know how to love is with each other.
Fourth and finally, this is the kind of complicated morally graphite stuff I grew up on. The five other people on the internet who’ve read the Kencyrath know what I’m talking about, but more than that, this is always the kind of story I’ve loved. For all else that it is, Harry Potter is a story about a profoundly traumatized kid and the grim reality that sometimes there is no one else to fight except for you. The Hero and the Crown is a story about how sometimes being good at something won’t change the fact that you’re not good at the right thing and you might have to beat that into people. Jesus Christ, Animorphs brings up the question of whether or not it’s morally okay to commit a war crime. A lot. The characters commit war crimes. A LOT.
Basically, I’m an adult with the ability to make my own decisions about right and wrong who enjoys grim and messy relationships because honestly life is grim and messy. If you yourself, anon, are not comfortable with the incest in the Borgias, then you are more than welcome to not engage with it.
I think my favorite part of the Castlevania Netflix series is that everyone agrees that Lisa is the purest cinnamon role and Dracula is perfectly justified in killing everyone.
For some godforsaken reason, I don’t think anyone has ever written an AU where the Animorphs are the Inquisition Inner Circle SO I DID IT MY DAMN SELF.
Featuring: Dalish mage Inquisitor Tobias because his life sucks, Commander Rachel, Seeker Jake, Qunari warrior Ax, spymaster Marco, and Ambassador Cassie.
fun fact about american history: george washington was apparently so sexy that when he was 17 he went swimming a river and some girl that had a crush on him stole his clothes and watched as he walked around naked looking for them
aaron burr, the guy who shot alexander hamilton and also the second vice president of the united states, tried to start an empire out in texas
marquis de lafayette literally had to sneak out of france to come aid america and while some versions of the story claim that he disguised himself as a commoner, other versions say he dressed up like a woman
literally all the founding fathers had daddy issues, specifically alexander hamilton who refused to even befriend george washington initially because he didn’t want to grow close to someone who had the potential to become a father like figure to him
thomas jeffereson kept a bust of alexander hamilton in his house at monticello for no reason other than the fact that hamilton was his sworn enemy and he felt as though he needed a very expensive bust of his sworn enemy in his house
I love all of this please keep going.
they didn’t let hamilton try this one course of study at king’s college because it was so intense that it made one student literally get sick and have to go home for months on end and that student was james madison
the marquis de lafayette was such a popular figure in america that ladies wore gloves with his portrait on them, and he would refuse to kiss their hands in greeting because he found it to be excessively narcissistic to kiss himself
Random Headcanon: The bit where character A walks into a room and finds character B entangled in some utterly ludicrous situation, and after a long, awkward pause, B calmly states “okay, I can explain” is a popular trope in both human and Vulcan comedy, albeit for totally different reasons.
What would the reason be for Vulcans?
One of the major genres of Vulcan comedy consists of long, complicated explanations or debates establishing that something absurd is, though a series of unlikely contrivances, actually perfectly logical. The moment of comedic catharsis arrives when the audience realises that some seemingly innocuous assumption they’d made about what’s going on is wildly incorrect.
I’m apparently Vulcan.
Oh my god, let me talk to you about my very favorite Alleirat city: Dase, the city of stone, called by her own people and all those with sense the jewel of the east.
Perched on the easternmost coast of the Alleirai continent, Dase (pronounced dah-SEH) is the biggest city in terms of population if not physical size, and presides over the finest harbor in the world (the southern coast, with their sprawling river delta, politely begs to differ, but look, they’re wrong, okay, good talk). Beyond her size, Dase’s claim to fame is her towering four-hundred-foot coastal cliffs, and the semispherical harbor the ancient citizenry excavated straight into the stone wall with a combination of magic, explosives, and sheer determination. The harbor is massive, able to comfortably house even the tallest ship without scraping the mast along the ceiling and protect quite a number of vessels in the event of a storm. The city itself was originally built almost entirely out of the excess stone removed from the harbor, and as further expansions have been executed under the eye of the city stone workers, the buildings have been expanded since then with the same material, either taken from expansions to the harbor or knocked off another part of the cliff. Dase mostly gets expanded up rather than out, since it’s approximately a half-circle facing against the cliffs on one side and there’s a city wall hemming it in along the curve, but it’s still sizable, about three miles in radius. It’s also the place where Crispin and Brenneth grew up and lived until things went badly–Brenneth used to own a smithy on the blacksmith’s row that’s still standing, and her old sword is mounted in the audience chamber of the gothkenla (like a city hall crossed with a citadel, literally ‘city center’).
Because I have no impulse control, here’s a brief excerpt of Brenneth and Crispin returning:
“Welcome back to Dase, the jewel of the East,” Crispin said, switching fluidly back to Alleirai and raising his bound hands as if presenting me a gift. I turned, and looked, and all my exasperation with Crispin drained away to be replaced by the sun-warm, dizzy ecstasy of being back.
Dase was less beautiful and more striking—all its beauty was in strong lines and hard angles, like the cliffs it commanded. It was tall, about three or four stories on average, and built almost entirely out of the hard silver-grey stone of the cliffs, with wide windows cut into the walls and the sun turning it into a labyrinth of brilliant light and impenetrably dark shadows. The air smelled of salt at the cliff face, but the city wind itself could change on a dime, bringing the scent of the farmlands from the inland fields. From our angle were the places where Kal Dase—Dase Below, the subcity of tunnels—could be accessed were invisible, but we could see where the stone was ragged enough to be scaled to the eaves of the roof level. Shadows moved, quick as starlings, overhead, thieves about their business in Lai Dase, Dase Above.
…From above, the city would look like a ragged half-circle, butting right up against the edge of the cliffs with an absolute disregard for the potential drop on the other side. At what would be the center of the circle, if it were complete, was the gothkenla, the city center—the citadel building where the gothed lived, received audiences, passed judgement, and completed all their other duties. City-side of the kenla was a sprawl of empty space that spread all the way to the cliff, serving as the central marketplace and, occasionally, execution grounds. The ten major streets radiated out from the city square, a nest of alleyways interconnecting them, and led all the way to the city limits. Every sector had its own markets, its own hierarchies and systems—the city in miniature, divided up by class. The path to the cage, sardonically marked Drop Alley with a wooden sign, butted up against one of the major throughways, the one that ran immediately cliff-side. Unless they had moved everything around rather a lot, which I imagined would be a challenge, the kenla was about an hour walk from where we stood, depending on foot traffic.
But so, as you might imagine, food in Dase tends toward fish for meat and depends on her protectorate lands for kestho (the main grain grown in Alleirat, a very hardy, adaptable plant that produces dense breads that taste sort of like…rye?) and other farm products. The ten city sectors often have smaller markets to service day-to-day needs, with the large market outside the gothkenla being a once-or-twice-a-week thing for more variety, but that’s, like, raw cooking material.
Since street food is generally stuff that can be acquired and cooked with a minimum of effort and expense on the vendor’s part, I’m guessing that smoked meats (maybe venison/other wild-hunted meats in seasons where they’re plentiful and therefore cheaper, chicken/beef if a vendor could get a good deal, most commonly fish) play a big part. I’m kind of thinking of a kabob-like situation, with chunks of smoked meat served on a skewer with whatever suitable vegetables are in season. Spices and seasoning would be easy, it’s a trade city and you can make spices last a long time if you know what you’re doing, so please assume that all of these are very flavorful.
Straight-up fruit vendors are also a pretty common thing, especially in the richer parts of the city where the fruit is nicer and possibly imported (maybe from the west where apples do better, or the south where everything does great, or even the Outrigger Islands where more tropical stuff can be found). Fruit vendors also do phenomenally well in the hostel district where there are always sailors who miss real fresh stuff and are willing to shell out of their wages accordingly. Like, the fruit vendors in the hostel district charge more than they maybe ethically should but the sailors don’t care enough to try to change it.
Oh, and bread stuff, that should fill out the basics. Since kestho grain doesn’t easily grind down into really fine flour and tends to be very dense, fluffy pastries aren’t really a thing like they are here, but miniature loaves of bread (like, the size of two fists) with various things baked into them are a hit. You can go with meat/veggies for savory or (often dried) fruits for sweet–they’re often baked as an easily transported ration, too, although not so elaborately. Kestho loaves with meat and hot Island spices do a booming business on the training grounds and as a traveling ration for the city guard, because they’re quick and easy to eat with protein and carbs for energy and a good kick. That specific combination is actually called a soldier’s meal, because they were the original kestho loaf cooked by soldiers during the ancient pre-unification wars.
I wrote this on a bus with no dinner in sight and now I’m ravenous and I could murder a soldier’s meal with like some strawberries after, Jesus this was a bad idea.
Bulgaria just appointed a facist and neo-Nazi, Valeri Simeonov (who is also Deputy Prime Minister), to lead their council on how to “deal” with the Romani people in Bulgaria.
Valeri Simeonov literally talked about creating modern concentration camps, and in 2016, when speaking of Bulgaria’s Roma minority, he told the parliament: “They are brazen, feral, human-like creatures that demand pay without work, and collect sickness benefits without being sick. They receive child benefits for children that play with pigs on the street, and for women that have the instincts of stray dogs.” His party has literally called for the demolition of “Gypsy ghettos” and for Roma to be instead isolated in closed reservations that could “generate income as tourist attractions”
Asides from this Ilian Todorov from the far-right ATAKA party (ultranationalist, racist, especially antisemitic and anti-Roma, xenophobic, especially anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish) is now Bulgaria, Sofia’s regional governor.
The opposition party, Yes Bulgaria, warned that this “toxic national-populism” can only divide society and “heighten the risk of stirring up ethnic enmity” when we have already long gone past the “risk” stage as proven by recent submissions of the European Roma Rights Center and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee – Both reports detail recent violent events which include mass attempts to storm Roma neighbourhoods, an increase in hate speech, failures by the authorities to deal properly with racially motivated hate crime, as well as incidents such as the brutal assault in April by police of a Romani father and son outside the village of Bohot in Pleven province. The son sustained serious injuries, but his father died at the scene of this assault. The authorities justified the police action by claiming that the men were found in possession of stolen pesticides and had resisted arrest.
The former vice-deputy of the ATAKA party, went on TV to praise the police for “neutralising the two thieves,” for sending a clear message, and spreading the kind of fear that will cause “all crooks and thieves to lay down.”
The situation of Roma in Bulgaria is worsening. And if those events listed are not enough already Roma are still racially segregated in education and housing, being forcefully evicted and having their properties demolished as well.
(The source with links to the reports is here.)
Please sign this petition to the EU Parliament asking them to step in and remove Valeri Simeonov and Ilian Todorov from their positions of power
https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-help-romani-people-in-bulgaria
https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-help-romani-people-in-bulgaria
https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-help-romani-people-in-bulgaria
AHHHH ALL VERY GOOD AND HELPFUL QUESTIONS TBH.
Me, upon receiving this ask: Wait Jesus Christ did I ever figure out how power is passed on.
Turns out the answer was “I half-assed the fuck out of it” so anyway now I have a real answer.
Right, so, it’s important to know why Alleirat politics works the way it does, so buckle up for a real fast history lesson. Alleirat, way back in their ancient history, operated as a bunch of city-states run by variably decent lordlings who were perpetually at war with each other–think of Germany during the waning Holy Roman Empire (circa ~1630), not Renaissance Italy. Each city state was centered around the largest local city, and the immediate countryside was allied closely with the city in question. So, once Alleirat exhausted their armies (literally, like, okay, when you’re throwing armies of magic users around like snowballs there’s a huge death toll, they literally started to run out of armies), they drew up unification treaties as a way to solve the Gordian knot of blood feuds and bitterness they’d landed themselves in. This is their version of BC/AD, by the way, things are measured before/after unification, which was some four thousand years before Brenneth and Crispin came for the first time (this number may be subject to change later if I feel like it). In order to protect the newly unified country (named after the continent so as not to give preference), they mostly did away with the hereditary title thing, but they ran into an issue: smaller villages and farms had depended on the protection and help of the bigger cities, which relied on the villages and farms for food and raw materials. Not to mention that the old alliances between city and country ran bone-deep–colorism had a pretty short life in Alleirat, but they’re still working on the very real prejudices against people from other cities–so they couldn’t be gotten rid of entirely.
The balance they struck was the protectorate system, which largely preserved the pre-unification lines of alliance by formally denoting protectorate lands of each sizable city, but also protected the citizenry by laying down clear responsibilities that each has to the other. For example, the great eastern city Dase has a sizable protectorate that pays taxes to the Dase coffers and generates a majority of the farmed food (Dase being…like 90% rock), while Dase provides the farms with protection from both natural and human threats with her city guards as well as manufacturing that the smaller villages wouldn’t be able to do. Dase, like all other cities holding their own protectorates, is run by a gothed, which literally means ‘city servant’, an office subject to reelection by popular vote every eight years and falling somewhere between a prince and a governor as far as power goes. The gothed appoints a given number of advisors (there are ten in Dase, five from the city and five from the protectorate) who represent the interests of their district–if the district feels ill-represented, they can petition the gothed to remove the advisor in question from office and appoint a new one. The gothed is also responsible for selecting a representative to the Unified Council, which is sort of like a senate and which makes the small handful of decisions pertinent to the country at large. The list of things the Unified Council is responsible for is significantly shorter than, say, our Congress because the protectorates have much more hands-on management from their gothedan.
Incidentally, if the gothed dies while in office things can get real interesting. In theory, a new gothed can be promoted out of the ranks of the advisors, but if proof of corruption is revealed in the chaos, all of the advisors are required to be removed from office. The guards in each city (more like a small occupying army, called the lathan) take loyalty oaths to the city and citizens, not to the political figures of power, which means that technically they have the power to arrest any sitting politician as long as they have evidence. Furthermore, there are several functioning criminal bodies in any given Alleirai city, most pertinently the White Touch, a dubiously legal organization of flesh workers whose work covers everything from facial reconstruction (illegal) to assassination for hire (SUPER illegal). The Touch has been known to work in tandem with lathan before, in order to take down politicians. It’s a risky business, being a corrupt politician in Alleirat, far more so than on Earth.
There are some capital P Problems with this system, among them that it takes approximately forever to get things done and also it’s not very adaptable to a crisis–the logical issues you run into when a goodly percentage of your population might be looking at a several century lifespan. Also, money talks, as in our world, also a problem. That being said, the only real requirement to be gothed or to be appointed as such is literacy, and Alleirat has decent literacy rates, so there are and have been plenty of gothedan who were craftspeople, soldiers, farmers, or even minor criminals (the definition of ‘criminal’ is flexible and also Alleirat doesn’t believe in incarceration pretty much at all) before their election to office.
And as for the response to Brenneth ‘Worst Plan Ever’ Fireheart and her highly terrible plan, well.
Seanan McGuire / Mira Grant (via
)
(chuckle) Persistence in research pays off.
(via dduane)
#somewhere there is a CDC employee #who is both all out of fucks to give #and experiencing a mild level of perpetual background anxiety about maybe being complicit in the future zombie apocalypse #like I’m just imagining this one specific person fielding all of seanan’s phonecalls #maybe two a day over a period of weeks #and progressing from bemused politeness #to genuine amusement #to steadily escalating panic #’what if she’s not really a writer?’ #’what if I’m actually helping a supervillain??’ #’oh god I’m not paid enough for this’ #’I LIKE VIRUSES NOT THE GENERAL PUBLIC’ #’PLEASE TAKE ME OFF PHONE DUTY OH GOD’ #lowering their head gently into their cupped hands with the phone braced between ear and shoulder #’ma’am-’ #’ma’am we really don’t recommend-’ #’ma’am, no, that wouldn’t-’ #’ma’am please I really think-’ #’don’t… don’t do that-’ #and then she just STOPS CALLING #and after three days of radio silence this person starts discreetly checking the news for x-files-style stories about zombies #getting shit from their colleagues for their sudden fascination with trashy newspapers and trying to play it off #’HAHA YOU GUYS YOU’RE SO FUNNY’ #’YEAH ZOMBIE RACCOONS, IT’S TOTALLY HILARIOUS’ #’WHO WOULD EVEN DO THAT AM I RIGHT?’ #’IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’VE GOT US ON THEIR SIDE’ #’HAHA’ #’HAHAHAHAHA’ #*nervously wipes sweat from forehead*
(via redshoesnblueskies)
something i think about a lot is what if alien species have less biodiversity on their planets. like if they’ve got maybe 20, 25 species of bugs, total. so they come to earth and they’re like “whoa.” or they’ll like be like walking down the street and they’re like “ok what’s that” pointing at a st bernard and you’re like “oh that’s a dog” and they’re like “whoa, neat, i’ve heard about dogs.”
and you walk for a while longer and then they point at a yorkie and they’re like “what’s that?” and you kind of have to be like “…that. that’s also a dog.” and they’re like “wait, really?” and you’re like “yeah.” and it takes them a while to absorb this but then you just keep walking.
and like you’re going for a while and somebody’s walking their bull terrier and you’re like trying to walk faster hoping your alien friend doesn’t see but no dice they’re like WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT and you’re like “that. that is a dog” and they let out an anguished wail
and like every time after that they see a weird four legged creature they’re like “that BETTER not be a goddamn dog” and half the time you gotta wince and be like “actually,”
yknow the more jk rowlings world falls apart in america (race relations, international history, population, etc) the more i like to think that america just straight up doesnt have the statute of secrecy. european countries are falling over themselves hiding magic but come to georgia and theres a drunk redneck wizard wingardium leviosa-ing the shit out of a tractor to the delight of his drunk redneck muggle buddies in a walmart parking lot.
wizard on muggle violence is prevented by virtue of there being like a 50/50 chance that muggle is packing heat. muggle on wizard violence is prevented by knowing that wizard can give you boils spelling LIL BITCH on your forehead if you try to start something.
america is the weird redheaded stepchild of the magic world.
im not gonna stop reblogging this until this is the next Hot Fanon
english muggles come back to england and suspicious wizards meet them at the airport.
‘did you witness any strange or inexplicable acts while you were in america?’ they demand.
the english muggles just laugh in their dumb fucking faces. mate, it’s america.
what’s the difference between a werewolf and an animagus?
english wizard: *two hour lecture on legal history*
american wizard: six beers
@jumpingjacktrash congrats ive read hundreds of comments on this dumpster fire of a headcanon and yours is the best
thank you my patronus is a monster truck
replied to your
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This was ….. Amazing! Can we have more? * holds up bowl ala Oliver Twist
Sephie opens her eyes and the woman is still standing over her, but the asphalt is…cold. And dry. It’s dark, no rosy dawn colors fingerpainted across the sky, and the woman is dressed all in white–different white, not, thick swathes of cloth like burial shrouds draping down her arms and falling to puddle at her feet like water. Sephie thinks something might be on fire to provide enough light to see, but the light is pale and wan rather than being warm and golden. The woman is leaning on her scythe, and her eyes glint like the blade when the light catches them, metallic and sharpened to a cutting edge.
“You’re awake,” the woman says without looking down, and it doesn’t sound like she’s asking.
Sephie sits up and it’s easy, blissfully easy, no pain or tacky blood sticking to her skin. She’s wearing something unfamiliar, a plain dress in the same white liquid cloth that the woman is wrapped in, leaving her arms bare, and when she presses a hand against the floor, she thinks it’s stone. Marble, maybe, with only a trace of gloss, stretching away in all directions until it meets the walls, where it seems to merge seamlessly into the vertical climb to the cave-like ceiling, dripping with stalactites. The throne at the far side of the room is plain, barely more than a chair with a table beside it, both apparently sculpted wholly out of the floor.
“I’m not, though,” Sephie says, and it’s only by speaking that she realizes her voice works. It’s strong and firm and not at all lifeless, and Sephie closes her mouth, gathers her will to stand.
“You know,” the woman muses as Sephie considers the matter. The stone is very hard–if she tries to stand and falls, she might hurt herself. Or, of course, she might not. She doesn’t know if it’s currently possible to hurt herself. “I expected a great many things when I went on my sabbatical, but you were not among them.”
“I’m sorry,” Sephie says as she pulls her legs beneath her and nudges the dress out of the way. “I think.”
The woman looks down at her at last, startled, almost distressed, and says, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. My sister may have some adjusting to do, but you wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t quite attached.”
“Your sister,” Sephie repeats as she rises cautiously to her feet. She doesn’t know if it’s that her mind still expects her body to be broken or simply that it’s been a very long day already, but she wavers dangerously, and the woman puts out a hand that Sephie catches hold of at once. The hand is long-fingered and delicately calloused and pale–unhealthily pale, deathly pale, Sephie had always thought, and she bites back a titter now. Deathly pale! The hand is also strong, and the arm attached to it equally so, and the smile on the woman’s face is warm enough to make up for the cold stone still chilling Sephie’s bare feet. “I’ve met your sister.”
“Yes,” the woman says. “We fought in your coffee shop. Or, rather, my sister came to yell at me in your coffee shop. She has some strong opinions about my sabbatical.”
Sephie nods, slowly, and realizes that she’s still clutching awkwardly at the woman’s free hand. The long, strong fingers hold her own in a grip as firm as stone, though, and so instead of trying to let go, she holds on tightly and asks the obvious question.
“Am I dead, then?”
“That’s correct, Persephone,” the woman says, apparently delighted.
“And this place is?”
“The audience chamber.”
Sephie nods again, even more slowly than before, and looks up at the woman. It was less noticeable with the counter between them, but the woman is a full head taller than she is, her masses of white curls storming down her back like a crashing wave. The scythe does not reflect light, for all its perfect polished shine, and the letters on it are in a language Sephie has never seen and yet seems to be a textual equivalent of a long-forgotten tune. She can read them anyway, for all that they try to skitter from under her eye, and thinks of a Latin phrase she heard once.
“And…” Sephie takes a deep breath with lungs that do not breath and listens for her heart that does not beat and thinks to herself–with neurons that do not fire–that she is hardly even surprised. “And who are you?”
The woman smiles at her, and gives a small twist of their hands so that the grip is less awkward, and raises the knuckles of Sephie’s hand to her lips. The touch is electric–quite literally. It kicks through Sephie’s chest like the time she let a finger rest on the prong of a plug as she touched it to the outlet, her vision flaring brightly for a moment until the woman’s lips leave her skin.
“I have many names,” the woman says as she lowers their hands again. “Many of them forgotten, some of them remembered. You can call me Death.”
I’m still watching Liberty’s Kids because REASONS and I watched an episode with Baron von Steuben, and I get why they didn’t include this in a kid’s show, but this dude is THE BEST PART of the winter at Valley Forge.
LET ME TELL YOU WHY, WITH ABUSE OF CAPS LOCK AND BAD LANGUAGE AND IRREVERENCE.
Okay, some background. Baron von Steuben was a Prussian baron who shipped his ass over to America in 1777 in order to help Washington whip the bunch of random farmers, miners, tradesmen, etc who formed the Continental ‘Army’ at the time into shape. He reached Valley Forge in early 1778 (after almost getting his own soldiers ARRESTED IN BOSTON because he accidentally outfitted them in red coats, honestly this dude’s life is just PRIME HISTORICAL COMEDY MATERIAL, someone get the fuck on that) and immediately made a name for himself as a complete–but effective!–wackjob. He would go outside in the middle of winter in full military dress and have all the soldiers (many of whom were lacking a coat and boots at the time, because the goddess of efficiency Martha Washington had not yet made her presence known) run drills from sunup to sundown, whereas most military commanders of the day were Pointedly Uninvolved in the messy day-to-day shit. He also continued the trend of having commanders who were still learning English (Lafayette spoke almost no English upon his arrival, for example), because when von Steuben reached America he spoke zero English and had to write all his orders in French and give them to either HIS aide de camp to translate or the aide Washington periodically lent him (fun fact: Lt. Colonols Hamilton and Laurens were his usual lent-out aides because they both spoke French).
NOW YOU HAVE SOME BACKGROUND AND WE CAN GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
I’m watching Turn and I’ve just finished the set of episodes on Valley Forge and honestly can someone just point me towards literally any media that includes the Pantless Party.
THESE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS IN A NUTSHELL.