What if a lot of alien species didn’t actually evolve as pack species, and just adapted to living in communities out of necessity? So they can still work and live together, but they don’t have all the little instincts humans have that help them work in a group.
And they are freaked out by us.
We all wear the same clothes. It’s not a uniform— we just somehow all seem to like roughly the same outfits. We fit in so naturally with the people around us that you can use a human’s clothing to tell what country and what time period they are from. Aliens have no idea how we know what clothes are appropriate— they end up having to hire humans to act as fashion consultants after several incidents where diplomats showed up wearing mismatched clothes from various time periods and countries and looking totally ridiculous.
And what about yawning? Aliens who work on human ships say they never fully get used to hearing one human yawn and then having the whole room start yawning along with them. Or telling a joke to one human and seeing humans who say they don’t find the joke that funny cracking up anyway because “their laugh is so infectious!” It’s a common practical joke to tell new nonhuman crew members about this horrible disease humans get, where they feel tired and have an uncontrollable urge to open their mouths. It’s deadly, they say, and very contagious.
New safety procedures have to be worked out for the humans because, on the one hand, you don’t have to go around telling each individual to leave. Humans will just follow the mob. On the other hand, though, you have to be careful not to spread panic, because if one human runs, they all will, and they’ll trample anyone who isn’t fast enough to stay ahead.
Aliens hear humans tell their kids not to give into peer pressure and just get really confused. “Why would they do it if they don’t want to?”
“Because their friends are telling them to do it!”
“But why do it just because they’re telling them to do it?”
“Because they’re their friends!”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
When aliens see earth movies about people being indoctrinated or turned into zombies, it takes them a while to realise that these are horror movies because, from their perspective, that’s just what humans are like.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Anonymous asked: Captain America would kick Wonder Woman's ass just sayin
As someone who loves my son Steve Rogers, I have to say that he could never kick Diana’s ass, like literally, and also he would never do that, because Steve Rogers would grow up idolising the mysterious hero from WW1, and would probably swoon if he got to meet her, would call her “ Your Majesty” unironically, until Diana has to literally punch him to make him stop, and even then, he’d call her “Ma'am” with the utmost respect, and also he’d follow her to Hell and back without blinking.
@next-great-adventure AND THEN THEY WOULD START A PODCAST
They would meet in Vichy France, and after he settled down around her they’d be fine. She’d call him Steven (because it still hurts a little to say Steve). She would teach him the Shield move, and when she called for it in battle he would crouch down with his shield raised, waiting to feel the impact of her boots, then launch her forward – at a line of panzers, across battlements. He would take half a minute to watch in awe as the dust billowed around her landing, watch her upend tanks and pulverize fortifications. Then he’d sprint after, taking out machine gun nests and artillery, and the Wehrmacht would have another tale of the two Allied soldiers with shields who they could never, ever defeat.
I so love the idea that little Stevie Rogers read about and idolized the mysterious superwoman who aided the Allies in the Great War.
I love “Patriotic Leotards” as a friendship OR a romance. Or as a mutual admiration society long before they meet in person.
I’m officially taking it as canon now that the reason Steve knew how to properly launch Natasha at the Chitauri is cuz Diana taught him, and no one can tell me different.
Imagine Peggy introducing them though. After Steve gets his round shield and is messing around trying to figure out how to use it, Peggy says, with a sly smile on her face, that there’s someone he needs to meet who can help him out.
Like, Steve at first is thinking this tall, dark haired woman with the maybe greek??? accent is just one of Peggy’s friends in the SSR. Competent and skilled but a normal human. At least until she takes his shield, hefts it without any sign of strain, and then whips it across the target range and decapitates a practice dummy. She and Steve spend a good three hours working out how to get the shield to come back to him, they bounce it off defunct tanks and walls and Ms. Prince may or may not have accidentally/on purpose split the tank’s gun in half with one shot.
Later the conversation turns to how Ms. Prince is a dear friend of Peggy’s mother, Etta Carter nee Candy.
This just keeps getting better. Reblogging especially for that last headcanon.
ETTA CARTER.
OMFG YAAAAASSSSSSSSS
This is just an idle thought brought up by what will doubtless be obvious circumstances, but: trauma recovery isn’t linear and that’s hard.
Like, you can have whole years of relatively good success and then just bottom out for no particular reason, and it sucks, because it feels like… It feels like, on the one hand, maybe you conned yourself into thinking you could ever be improving and therefore you’re terrible, or, alternatively, maybe you conned everyone into thinking you had problems to begin with and now you’re just acting the part for sympathy. And on top of that elaborately pointless circle of self-loathing, the part of you that knows you aren’t lying about any of it is just screaming in rage because look at all that progress down the drain.
Like, for various reasons I have some pretty hardcore PTSD wrt dentists, and I improved a lot over the last few years. Dentists and I will never be on good terms and exam chairs will almost invariably set me off, but I could sit still through a whole appointment and keep my breathing mostly regular, which is honestly as good as it might ever get. And I had years of that, of ‘as good as it’ll get.’
And then with no warning my latest appointment was a train wreck. I spent two days almost totally useless before the appointment even started. At the appointment, I almost threw up when something was placed in my mouth, and I almost started crying about halfway through, and I was hyperventilating so badly I genuinely thought I was going to pass out in the chair. Nothing I could do had any effect. And like…that’s still a lot better than what used to go down when I went to the dentist (I don’t remember almost six years of dental appointments because I was so out of it, but I know there was one time where I physically attacked someone when they tried to bring instruments near my teeth, and another where I ran away), but God, I felt like a fucking failure. Like I said: all that fucking work for all that fucking progress, and it was like I’d NEVER EVEN TRIED.
Now, I’ve hit this sort of badness before, where the bottom just kind of drops out of all my hard work (um…one time a dentist put me on laughing gas to try to calm me down, and we all learned that it’s possible to OD on nitrous oxide, needless to say that Did Not Help and instilled an even more virulent hatred of Spongebob than I had before). So I was able to kind of nip that one in the bud and point out to myself that, hey, I was able to speak during the appointment and neither I nor the dentist was injured, so it’s a net win. But…like…I feel like no one talks about the way that you can be doing better, you can be doing a lot better, and then you can still just…lose it.
And it doesn’t mean you’ve lost progress on your recovery, or that you have to repeat all the same work as before. It’s just that piecing yourself back together is hard, it’s exhausting, and sometimes your brain just gives out at the worst possible moment, like a muscle that’s been overworked, and it sucks, but it’s not the end of the line. Do what you have to do to take care of yourself (if you’re me, drink some gin and watch some movies) and get some sleep if you can, and then take a deep breath and look at the situation again. Have some compassion for the younger self who was subjected to that trauma, instead of beating up on them for being affected by it. People have emotions, it’s what makes us people, so try not to crucify yourself for feeling deeply and being scarred by the experience.
Guillermo del Toro: So I wanna do a movie thats a Cold War era “dark take” on The Little Mermaid, but gender-swapped
Doug Jones, putting on a latex suit: Say no more
Guillermo del Toro: This is my Liz Sherman/Abe Sapien Cold War AU fic
Doug Jones, pulling mask over his face: I was born ready
(via unpretty)
(Source: cuzyouwanttotakemypicture, via thebibliosphere)
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
(via notanightlight)
So I’m watching Hellboy and I’m realizing…
In the movie, unlike the comic, the masquerade is still intact, the general public doesn’t know about the supernatural, and Hellboy is a cryptid on a level with Bigfoot (but, like, in cities and wearing a coat).
BUT he’s not just a cryptid, he’s a a cryptid that everyone refers to by the correct name, to the extent that there’s a comic series about him.
Basically what I’m saying is that at some point early in his career Hellboy was presumably stopped by a bystander with a question like “who the fuck are you” and he took a second out of his busy monster-huntin’ schedule to introduce himself.
what do you get when you mix alcohol and literature?
tequila mockingbird
F. scotch Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
(via littlestartopaz)
[video]
I was talking to a friend about Etta Candy, and various ways fic could explore her awesomeness, whether as The Best of Secretaries or adventures in other professions, or, hell, Etta Goes to Themyscira…
And then I was seized with the vision of Etta turning up on Themyscira and meeting a thousand Amazons who have had ALLLLL ETERNITY surrounded by other Amazons with hard, scarred, warrior bodies, and having… quite a large number of them… react all like…
WHO IS THIS UTTERLY NOVEL VISION OF FEMININE LOVELINESS AND HOW CAN I PERSUADE HER THAT I (AND PERHAPS MY WIFE) SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE FOR INTRODUCING HER TO ALL TWELVE VOLUMES OF CLIO’S TREATISE ON SEXUAL PLEASURE IN THE FORM OF AN EXTENDED SERIES OF PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATIONS.
…So, you know, do with that thought what you will?
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)