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Anonymous asked: I told my dad that I'm nonbinary and now he won't stop saying shit like"I raised you better than this"and"where's my little girl gone"and"you were supposed to be the normal child" (i was adopted because my parents wanted a successful child and my sister has asbergers and my brother has a reading disability and a stutter) and he keeps making comments about God when he has been divorced twice and I dont even believe and I don't know what to do and this has been going on for months and I'm so tired
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?
SPACE AUSTRALIA @archmagenutblastSo 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.
ok 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
(via human-aliens-collection)
Anonymous asked: so i'm assuming that all the reincarnated ham crew look like their musical actors, which, awesome. but i was thinking about jefferson, who was a racist fucker being reincarnated as a black man. like. how would that even go down?
*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.”
(via factsinallcaps)
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.”
words-writ-in-starlight asked: Definitely my favorite part of this blog is when people ask 'why are you shouting' in the reblogs because I love irony. Also I love inane bits of trivia and was also told that I had a knack for it, so like. *fist bump* You go my buddy.
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
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Anonymous asked: i am here to ask about these legion john wick feelings. your timer begins now. do not disappoint.
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.