Micheletto decided to pledge himself to Cesare Borgia in under sixty seconds for a variety of reasons, most of which were reasonable, like:
1) Working for the pope’s son is a better gig than working for a cardinal who may or may not succeed in killing the pope and then staying in favor once a new pope is anointed
2) Probably it would pay better
3) Cesare seems wayy more competent than Orsini, since Orsini hired Micheletto specifically to do this poisoning thing that Micheletto’s kind of doubtful about, which has resulted, obviously, in Cesare catching Micheletto in the act
4) and Micheletto absolutely values competence, and would rather work for someone who knows what the fuck he’s doing and won’t send Micheletto on assassination trips likely to get him killed.
5) This particular assassination attempt is doomed anyway, so why not make the best of things
Headcanon B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Micheletto decided to pledge himself to Cesare Borgia in under sixty seconds because:
1) Cesare looked at him like this:
grinning and breathless and visibly having fun, almost as fast as Micheletto and just as cruel.
2) Cesare kept grinning at him when he shoved Micheletto into a wall with his hand on the back of Micheletto’s neck like he was a fucking dog
3) and Micheletto, an obvious masochist and brutally stupid romantic, fell in love instantly.
4) While I think this is fucking hilarious, I also absolutely believe it’s true.
Headcanon C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
There’s a world where Micheletto chooses Pascal instead of Cesare.
He’s happy, in that world.
Headcanon D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Micheletto, the most A Poet a person can possibly be while being absolutely illiterate, ghost-writes the poems of Pietro Bembo while living in Ferrara as Lucrezia’s personal bodyguard/secret pet assassin, Cyrano de Bergerac style. As in, he sits there and brusquely, scowlingly dictates these lush gorgeous love poems to Bembo, who writes them down and sends them to Lucrezia.
Anonymous asked: "lost the cover art lottery" excuSE YOU I LOVED THOSE COVERS
TRUST ME MY TEASING COMES FROM A PLACE OF TRUE AND UNDYING LOVE.
But also you gotta admit that some of them (…anything where they morph a bug on the cover, I am talking about the ones where they morph bugs, and also the one where Tobias morphs a Taxxon) are. Questionable.
it’s been a long six hours
Right, so, today I learned that the MCAT’s labeling system is trash and the thing labeled “practice test” is actually supposed to be the ultimate final step before you take the MCAT proper and it’s modeled exactly like the test and the thing labeled “sample test” is the practice for the practice test but it didn’t say that literally anywhere at all so the point of this is that I accidentally took the MCAT today.
Anonymous asked: "Jake, I just told you I didn't want to know." An iconic line tbh????? I just snorted. Amazing.
Oh damn
Anyway this is a fucking Delight, I’m grinning so hard my cheeks hurt, I’m so thrilled with this.
Anonymous asked: Why the hell did Rachel have a picture of Tobias? ( Also, Tobias??? Just.. Tobias??? Tring to make the best out of a bad situation Tobias???? Coming into this I thought Marco was going to be a favourite but my heart is breaking for this boy.(halfway (?) through Book 3)
Right, so, welcome to my kingdom of fairly elaborate headcanons about Rachel’s very quiet, mostly ignored crush on the shiest, most anxious bully target in school. She never talks about it to anyone, really. Not even Cassie knows. The laws of middle school are pretty absolute, and Rachel runs in radically different circles from soft-spoken Tobias, new kid Tobias, everyone-knows-his-uncle-hates-him Tobias. Shows-up-at-school-for-breakfast-with-ill-fitting-clothes-and-bruises-from-bullies Tobias.
Rachel’s a tough kid, but even she’s not sure if she’s tough enough for that.
All the same, though, she drops a whisper in Jake’s ear–Big Jake, her gentle giant of a cousin–and suddenly the bullies start to back off, under threat of seeing Jake’s easygoing smile appear over Tobias’ shoulder with a “Hey, guys. What are we talking about?”
Tobias never knows. Rachel never tells him.
That’s not the point, though. By the time Rachel decides that fuck everyone, she’s so fucking over this, if she wants to go hold some dumb skinny dork’s hand she’s gonna do it and fuck the haters–well, they walk home through a construction site. She does hold Tobias’ hand, but it’s because he’s crying so hard he’s shaking trying to be silent, and the Andalite, the dying Prince Elfangor, is screaming in their heads and God, what else can she do except hold onto Tobias and pray?
The next day, Rachel looks across the circle of her friends and meets Tobias’ eyes, soft and light brown flecked with gold in the sunlight. She’s never been close enough to see the glints of precious metal there. His jaw is set hard, no trace of his nervous smile, and he’s standing up straight for the first tine in her memory and the two of them are immediately, viscerally agreed. They are going to war. The others can stay or go, but Rachel and Tobias. They are doing this, because this is what they are. Who they are.
They go to war and it’s worse than anything Rachel’s ever lived except for how it’s not and the next day Tobias….
Tobias isn’t at school. He’s invisible. He blends in with the crowd. That’s what Cassie tells her, tries to reassure her. They might have just not noticed him.
Rachel would have noticed him, she thinks.
So.
The point is.
When she finds out that those soft gold-brown eyes and that nervous smile and those bony stubborn shoulders are gone for good, Rachel goes and finds the one place that might have a picture of Tobias. He drew, you know, pretty well, and she goes to the art teacher and lies her ass off about looking for pictures of the after-school art club. (She knows that Tobias was at home to sleep, almost nothing else. Everyone knew.) The art teacher is an easy mark. Rachel is a sweet kid, a top student, a good girl. Rachel walks away with a small collection of photos, and finds one that’s mostly Tobias, looking shyly up at the camera that had interrupted his work. Brown eyes flecked with gold, a nervous smile. She can’t stand the thought of forgetting what he looks like.
What he looked like.
She keeps the photograph.
That or after she learned more about his living situation after he was a hawk she subtly found out his old address and stormed over to beat the living shit out of his uncle. She snagged the photo from his possessions on the way out.
Anonymous asked: Why the hell did Rachel have a picture of Tobias? ( Also, Tobias??? Just.. Tobias??? Tring to make the best out of a bad situation Tobias???? Coming into this I thought Marco was going to be a favourite but my heart is breaking for this boy.(halfway (?) through Book 3)
Right, so, welcome to my kingdom of fairly elaborate headcanons about Rachel’s very quiet, mostly ignored crush on the shiest, most anxious bully target in school. She never talks about it to anyone, really. Not even Cassie knows. The laws of middle school are pretty absolute, and Rachel runs in radically different circles from soft-spoken Tobias, new kid Tobias, everyone-knows-his-uncle-hates-him Tobias. Shows-up-at-school-for-breakfast-with-ill-fitting-clothes-and-bruises-from-bullies Tobias.
Rachel’s a tough kid, but even she’s not sure if she’s tough enough for that.
All the same, though, she drops a whisper in Jake’s ear–Big Jake, her gentle giant of a cousin–and suddenly the bullies start to back off, under threat of seeing Jake’s easygoing smile appear over Tobias’ shoulder with a “Hey, guys. What are we talking about?”
Tobias never knows. Rachel never tells him.
That’s not the point, though. By the time Rachel decides that fuck everyone, she’s so fucking over this, if she wants to go hold some dumb skinny dork’s hand she’s gonna do it and fuck the haters–well, they walk home through a construction site. She does hold Tobias’ hand, but it’s because he’s crying so hard he’s shaking trying to be silent, and the Andalite, the dying Prince Elfangor, is screaming in their heads and God, what else can she do except hold onto Tobias and pray?
The next day, Rachel looks across the circle of her friends and meets Tobias’ eyes, soft and light brown flecked with gold in the sunlight. She’s never been close enough to see the glints of precious metal there. His jaw is set hard, no trace of his nervous smile, and he’s standing up straight for the first tine in her memory and the two of them are immediately, viscerally agreed. They are going to war. The others can stay or go, but Rachel and Tobias. They are doing this, because this is what they are. Who they are.
They go to war and it’s worse than anything Rachel’s ever lived except for how it’s not and the next day Tobias….
Tobias isn’t at school. He’s invisible. He blends in with the crowd. That’s what Cassie tells her, tries to reassure her. They might have just not noticed him.
Rachel would have noticed him, she thinks.
So.
The point is.
When she finds out that those soft gold-brown eyes and that nervous smile and those bony stubborn shoulders are gone for good, Rachel goes and finds the one place that might have a picture of Tobias. He drew, you know, pretty well, and she goes to the art teacher and lies her ass off about looking for pictures of the after-school art club. (She knows that Tobias was at home to sleep, almost nothing else. Everyone knew.) The art teacher is an easy mark. Rachel is a sweet kid, a top student, a good girl. Rachel walks away with a small collection of photos, and finds one that’s mostly Tobias, looking shyly up at the camera that had interrupted his work. Brown eyes flecked with gold, a nervous smile. She can’t stand the thought of forgetting what he looks like.
things linguistics has taught me: do not fuck with the welsh
Seriously though do not. This is welsh nationalism in a nutshell.
So like, 150 or so years ago, nobody cared about Welsh. Not even the welsh. But then, one day, some folks got sick of paying the tolls at toll gates. Citing bizarre biblical precedent, they dressed up as women and started seizing toll gates, at which point the (also welsh) gate owners went “WTF?” and called in (english) magistrates to resolve the dispute.
The English Magistrates looked at the situation and went “WTF?” and commissioned an inquiry loosely titled “WTF is wrong with Wales??”
Well this commission did a ton of work and looked at schools and politics and people on hillsides raising sheep and all that jazz and came to the thrilling conclusion: What’s Wrong with Wales is that Ridiculous Backwards Language they all speak there.
There was a moment of dead silence, broken only by the loud scrape as Wales, collectively, as a nation, in a fit of unity not seen since the castles came to subjugate the native tribes, pushed back its chair, stood up slowly, and said “what you just say bout me?”
And folks who’d never heard it spoken started teaching their children Welsh, and the old sheep herder on the hill became a cultural icon, and the rioters and the gate owners high fived each other and said “suck it, England!” (only in Welsh this time).
And now Welsh is a protected language, there’s a strong Welsh nationalist movement, with its own flag and spelling conventions, and there’s a Welsh channel on television (which is doubly impressive when you remember that Britain only has like three channels).
And that is how the Welsh saved their language from extinction by sheer force of spite
I find spite very, very motivating; did/accomplished many things out of “Oh, yeah? Just watch me!”. If you are demotivated… you should try it!
Anonymous asked: humble request: rey or phasma, ur choice, for the headcanon meme
Heck,
how about some Rey feelings. Please
observe that I have literally never given a fuck about the extended universe
for more than long enough to Make Things Worse, and I have no idea what Rey’s
canonical backstory is in the New EU.
A: what I think realistically
So…this is what I started following
Wilde for, way back in the day, but Rey has definitely eaten a dude before,
right? Like, she grew up a feral desert
orphan child and has definitely killed a couple people to protect herself and
her home and her food supply, and.
Well. Supposing it was a sort of
being whose flesh isn’t toxic to humans…that’s a lot of food. Your average human runs about 40,000
calories, if you eat whatever organs are edible (not all, but a good
number) and make appropriate use of the bones.
That’s literally almost a month of
food for a skinny nervous abandoned teenager. More if you ration it.
Rey feels worse about losing some of the
meat because she was learning how to cure it than she does about any other part
of the situation.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Rey has never had a last name. Neither has Finn. Finn comes into the Dqar base unconscious and
bleeding out and who the hell else is going to put themselves down as people to
contact in case he needs something (in
case he dies, they do not think) except Rey, who Finn came back for, and
Poe, who came back for Finn. So through
some confusion with medical staff Finn is officially down as Finn Dameron
because…well, Poe’s not going to tell them they can’t, okay? Poe has a big extended
family back on Yavin IV, they won’t mind one more, and honestly just Finn is starting to look a little
lonely, flapping out in the breeze without any other names on it. The guy can pick a last name when he wakes
up, but for the moment, Finn Dameron it is.
Rey is informed, after she’s had four
ribs and a mild concussion repaired, that they’ll need her last name so that
they can record the concussion and make sure future doctors know about it. This takes a remarkable amount of explaining
about the point of medical records,
followed by a lengthy but competently recalled list of every notable injury Rey
has ever sustained.
“Thank you, Rey,” the medic says dryly,
noting down the last of them. “And a
last name? You can just pick one to fill
in, for now, and change it later if you need to.”
“Dameron,” Rey says offhandedly, because
last names are about family and family are the people who come back for you and
honestly that’s about the extent of Rey’s understanding on the matter.
By the time Rey’s back from hunting down
Luke from some backwater corner of the galaxy, the entire Resistance knows that
Poe Dameron gave Finn his jacket and Rey his droid (temporarily, he did get it
back, but no one seems willing to listen) and the both of them his last name. As far as Rey is concerned, corralling Finn
and waiting for Poe in his quarters is nothing short of the obvious solution to
everyone’s problems.
Rey is a feral desert child whose
knowledge of bureaucratic nonsense is limited at best and nonfunctional at
worst. She mis-files a couple of things
a week, and usually it’s caught by the actual administrative staff, but how
were they supposed to know that she didn’t understand that she’d accidentally
filed all her documents with two spouses.
She does live with Finn and
Poe, she protests when it comes up, and they are her family, and they aren’t
related, she just eliminated options until there was only one left!
To Finn, who grew up in a world where
marriage barely existed as a concept and certainly wasn’t something he was
familiar with, this seems perfectly legitimate.
To Poe, who is literally the last person on base to find out when
Leia very dryly hands him an anniversary present and says “I hear you got
married this time last year,” this prompts a lot more questions.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Do you ever think about Rey as a little
girl, trying not to cry because it wastes
water and she has so little water left, and sitting out under the stars as
she wonders why she wasn’t good enough?
Why she wasn’t good enough for her parents to stay? Why she wasn’t good enough for them to take
her with them?
Why she wasn’t good enough for them to
love?
Because if you ever think about that,
let me raise you one up. Do you ever
think about Rey as a young woman, holding an ancient weapon in both hands and
trying to drive back a ragged blade of scarlet light, trying not to fall into
the crevasse opening below her feet, trying not to die here, at the hands of this wild-eyed creature behind that
terrible mask, this monster who killed the only person who had really, truly
offered her a place in the world (do you
want a job)—and do you ever think about how, in total desperation, she
reaches out to the Force and begs I am
not good enough for this, please save me anyway.
And the Force comes to her call with the
force of a sun being born and answers oh,
wild girl, newest heart, thing-with-teeth-and-starlight-eyes, you are just as good
as you choose to be.
And Rey opens her eyes and throws the
monster away from her and, prowling forward with her teeth bared and starlight in her eyes, makes a choice.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
Right, so, we all pretty much know that
Rey is probably going to be Luke’s daughter because ultimately Star Wars is the
story of the Skywalker family more than anything else. But honestly I think if I had total creative control here I would go
with that one suggestion that has drifted past once or twice about Rey being
the Force’s second attempt at balance, another Force-child meant to repair the
damage wreaked in the wake of the last.
Her mother was not a Skywalker. Her
mother was no one of note. Her mother
was not equipped for a child like Rey. Rey
was born and the Force shook, and Rey
cried and the Force soothed her, and Rey laughed and the sun’s light was less
brutal. Her mother ran when Rey was
seven.
Rey had no control over it, of course. But alone, scaling the gutted hulk of fallen destroyers
and battlestars, Rey always seemed to find the last valuable items, waiting to
be ripped from the walls and control panels, and she never stumbled, never fell
into the depths below her, never quite
got severely injured. Once, she found a
ship wrecked on the sand and followed a tug that anchored somewhere under her
breastbone, and found a door that had jammed shut in the crash. No one had ever tried to open it.
When she pried the door free, Rey ripped
out the hyperbaric chamber beyond and managed to rig up a sledge behind her
speeder, and took a dead relic of a dead man who had once been the Force’s own
child, unknown father-twin-cousin-self
to Rey, to be traded for food. It had
earned her an entire month’s portions, and the quick-rise bread and the protein
bars tasted strange on her tongue. Like
cannibalism, almost. Eating one’s own
kind to survive.
The first time Rey uses the Force—intentionally,
with anger and willfulness and desperation behind it—Luke and Leia almost have
a mutual heart attack. The sunburst of presence,
the supernova, is familiar but unspeakably foreign, a gravitational pull like a
supermassive star that draws the world behind it and how dare anyone question.
The first thing that flickers through
Luke’s mind is an impossible Father? On Dqar Leia feels a fierce lurch of Ben, you fool, don’t you dare—
When Rey fights with her saberstaff,
white light a deadly halo around her hands, she could almost be another Jedi,
at the height of his power and honor and glory long ago. But Rey has never allowed anyone to dictate
to her, and perhaps this is why the Force left her alone, to raise herself and
learn her own limits. Rey is a killer,
certainly. Rey will do what has to be
done for the survival of herself and her people, now that she has people. But no one has ever told Rey to feel nothing,
to abandon her heart, and Rey’s heart holds the whole of the Force in its
folds, her blood pumping starstuff and power.
When she stands again the First Order,
against the Knights of Ren and their captain, against generals and armies and
machines, against Snoke, the last of the Sith Lords, the outcome is
foregone.
