Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win
May 30
Anonymous asked: Okay, so, now that you're suffering and probably in need of a person to rant to: what are the Foxhole Court books about, I am curious and also overly optimistic about how much free time I'm likely to have this summer.
and secondly /fuck/ where do i start
Basically the foxhole court books (which is actually called the all for the game series) is basically a trilogy about
Well
A game and a team that plays it? God i don’t know how to describe it
But it’s not quite a sports book and it’s not quite a thriller
It’s suspenseful
But the MAIN THING TO UNDERSTAND is that the characters are absolutely incredible. The characters and their interactions are what make everything worth it. They are fantastic.
I’m going to type this with as much seriousness as i can possibly muster
I have read many, many hundreds of books in my life
these were at the fucking top, and Andrew Joseph Minyard is my #1 favorite book character ever
So basically
1) a really interesting (and made-up?) sport that is written really well even for people like me who don’t like sports
2) incredible twists and turns and surprises; a great plot and excellent writing to back it up
3) CHARACTERS AND THEIR INTERACTIONS
4) Andrew Joseph Minyard
also! If you’re planning on reading them, get them all at the same time. (I got all of them on my kindle for $1.98 cause i had some coupon things? but i don’t think the regular prices are much more) They flow right into each other like one big book. Having all three is a necessity in my eyes; it took me two and a half days, i was so caught up. Couldn’t put them down
so
yeah
there is my rave review. :) EVERYONE SHOULD READ THESE FANTASTIC BOOKS
lil-gay-nerd-deactivated2017071 asked: You should really write a book about your life. In the meantime, tell us all a story, please?
the summer that i was about thirteen or fourteen, my mother decided to buy a la-z-boy for my stepdad, skip, for their anniversary. she did this because my mother loves giving presents and my stepdad loves sitting down.
she needed someone to help transport the chair from the furniture store back to our house. my brother was, at the time, at Sports Camp For Young Boys Who Want Girls To Kiss Them, and skip was obviously out of the question, so her only option was me.
me at 13, a self-portrait:
pigeon-toed
desperately physically unfit
favorite snack was mozzarella cheese. no garnish. just…… balls of mozzarella cheese
in my “i only listen to blink-182 and my favorite color is linkin park after dark nailpolish,” phase
SO OFF WE WENT.
the chair was in a big furniture warehouse, like a schewels or something. my mother, a woman who never goes into a situation without a to-do list and a plan of action, knew immediately what she wanted.
it was a broad recliner, taupe-ish, with a retractable foot rest. it was the everest of chairs. once you sat in this chair, you were never getting up. you would have to be brought your meals. your loved ones would bid you adieu, sadly, waving from the living room. “we’re going on a family vacation,” they would tell you, and you would say, “there is nothing left for me but the warm embrace of this chair, and death.”
“mollyhall, help us move this,” my mother said.
“us?” i asked. “as in, the three of us? we are moving this chair?”
i looked at the Everest Chair. i looked at my mother. i looked at skinny mcdimples. i gestured at my own noodle arms, and at skinny mcdimples’ everything.
“uh,” i said, pointedly.
“we can DO IT,” my mother insisted.
“uh,” repeated skinny mcdimples, this time with urgency.
“LISTEN,” said my mother, drawing herself up to her full height of a whopping 5’5”, her voice dropping about 6 octaves to decibels typically only heard in whalesong.
“WE CAN LIFT THIS FUCKING CHAIR.
I AM.
EXTREMELY.
STRONG.”
THAT’S MY SECRET. I AM ALWAYS FUCKIN’ PUMPED ABOUT FURNITURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
skinny mcdimples and i quickly snapped into action, because nobody wants to fuck with a 5’5” hulk woman with a love of leisure seating. my mother lifted the whole front of the Everest Chair, running high on adrenaline and self-righteous fury, while skinny mcdimples and i struggled desperately with the back half, shooting one another frequent, panicked looks.
by the time we got it out to the car, poor skinny mcdimples and i were sweating bullets, hands slipping all over the suede, sending up desperate pleas to the lord jesus to keep the Everest Chair from crushing our bodies the way it had crushed our spirits.
my mother lifted the Everest Chair with one hand and tossed it into the bed of the truck.
“see?” she asked. “i told you. piece of cake.”
“piece of cake,” skinny mcdimples and i agreed, in between bouts of vomiting from exertion and crying.
i think about skinny mcdimples sometimes. how is he doing? is he still working at the furniture store, or did the trauma of the Everest Chair send him into a downward spiral that led to a career 180? did he realize that if he can lift the Everest Chair, he can lift everything? is he a pro wrestler now? did he marry? does he ever think of me, thirteen, chubby as hell, clinging desperately to the back of the Everest Chair and hissing, “i’m gonna die, we’re all gonna die here,” under my breath?
SKINNY MCDIMPLES, WHAT BECAME OF YOU?
we pulled out of the parking lot. i was too physically exhausted to do anything but curl up in the passenger seat and—
thump.
thumpthump.
thumpthump. thUMP. THUMP.
“what is that? is something knocking?”
KNOCK KNOCK.
WHO’S THERE?
HUBRIS.
IT’S YOUR OWN
GODDAMN
HUBRIS,
MOM.
we pulled over.
i bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.
the Everest Chair sat rocking in the truck bed, knocking against the back window every time a breeze rolled by.
“you can sit on it to hold it down,” said my mom. she had a wildness in her eyes.
a sweet, jolly-looking old man in a pickup truck not dissimilar to our own pulled into the parking lot where we were throwing down with the Everest Chair. he leaned out of the driver’s window, his santa eyes sparkling. “do you ladies need help?” he asked. “i have some bungees in the back if you need ‘em.”
there it was!!! our chance for salvation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my mother’s face darkened. her lips went white. she seemed to expand outward, like the size of her rage with this chair and her tragically useless daughter could not be contained by the human body. her voice sound like the way the sky looks just before it dumps so much water on your house that you have to immediately start bailing water out of the windows with buckets when she said—said, not shouted, because her rage had gone far past shouting:
“WE DON’T NEED ANY FUCKING HELP.”
yes, we did!!!!!!!
we did desperately need help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“wait,” i whispered fruitlessly as Santa Man drove hastily off. my mother turned back to the Everest Chair. she tossed a tarp over it, and stretched a single bungee across its girth.
one bungee cord and a tarp?
ONE BUNGEE CORD?
AND A TARP?
“there,” she said. “piece of cake.”
“look, i don’t want to be the one to bring this up,” i said cautiously as we got back into the truck’s cab, the Everest Chair still thumping merrily. we both ignored it so steadily we made thetell-tale heart guy jealous. knocking? what knocking? HAHA, EVERYTHING IS FINE. AFTER ALL, WE USED ONE BUNGEE CORD. AND A TARP.
“bring what up?” my mother asked.
i swallowed. “um….how are we going to get it inside the house?”
****
6 HOURS LATER, AT THEIR ANNIVERSARY DINNER:
“i love my new chair!!!!! did you have it delivered?”
“mollyhall and i did it ourselves,” my mother said, taking a cool sip of wine. “it was a piece of cake.”
Anonymous asked: Rey and Poe teaching Finn how to shoot, "Guys I already know how to shoot a target, I was a stormtrooper," No, you learnt how to miss a target, you're not a storm trooper anymore so you should be able to hit a target now."
*rapid-fire shoots literally ALL THE TARGETS dead-center*
“They’d check our blasters to make sure we’d fired them, but they couldn’t check to make sure we’d actually hit something,” he says, looking at the blaster again and then just shrugging. “Also, I had the top score in my class every session.”
The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine; what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.
going into summer people, take a good long look at it because you know if you can, you’re going to the beach, or the pool, or whatever body of water is nearby that people swim in. be smart, be safe.
I’m a
sucker for ships where Person A is damaged and Person B is their salvation, and
when you look closer, you find that Person B is damaged, as well, just in a
less obvious/volatile way, and Person A is their salvation right back.
In the musical of my life after I’m long gone, my wife Vanessa is going to be the one who steps forward as the hero. Vanessa is not particularly fond of musicals—she only likes good ones. She is not effusive in her praise, or boastful. But when I looked up from that Chernow book and said “I think this is a hip-hop musical,” she didn’t laugh, or roll her eyes. She just said, “That sounds cool.” And that was all I needed to get started. As I fell in love with the idea of a love triangle between Eliza, Alexander, and Angelica, she said, “Can you have Angelica rap? That would be cool.”
I am someone who is so averse to travel that I wrote a whole musical about not wanting to leave my block in Washington Heights. It was Vanessa who booked us trips and time away from New York. “You don’t get any writing done here because life keeps popping up.” Thanks to her, Hamilton was written in Mexico, Spain, Nevis, Sagaponack, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic—long trips where Vanessa would take me there and then leave me alone to write while she explored. She is my first audience, and she’s a tough audience, so I know if I impress her I’ve cleared the highest possible bar. She’ll come home from work and say, “Your king tune was stuck in my head all day—that’s probably a good sign.” This started out as a note trying to explain how my wife really is the ‘best of wives and best of women,’ but I’m trying to get at something more important—this show simply doesn’t exist without Vanessa. It’s a love letter to her.
”
— Lin-Manuel Miranda on the role of his wife, Vanessa Nadal, in the creation of Hamilton. From the annotated libretto in Hamilton: The Revolution (via darrenburr)
In Germany we don’t say “I don’t care” we say “Das ist mir Wurst” which roughly translates as “This is sausage to me” I think that’s beautiful.
no you don’t understand we actually do say that
i crashed my car into a bridge
THIS IS SAUSAGE TO ME
We also say “That’s not my beer” for “That’s none of my buisness” and I think that’s beautiful
is germany even real
My roommate dated a German. When I was making dinner one night, he asked my roommate, “this food… does it taste?”
At our confusion, he explained that in Germany, food either “tastes” or “does not taste”. Which he then said he supposed said something about German food.
To be fair we do say “it tastes good” and “it tastes bad” and many variations thereof, but when we want to be succinct, then yes, it just tastes or doesn’t taste.
Other fun turns of phrase in German include:
“Ich versteh’ nur Bahnhof” = “I only understand train station” for when you’re confused
“Hast du Tomaten auf den Augen?” = “Have you got tomatoes on your eyes?” for when someone’s not seeing the obvious
“Auf die Schippe nehmen” = “Take someone on a shovel”, basically means to take the piss out of someone
“Du gehst mir auf den Sack” = “You’re walking on my sack” for when you’re pissed off
the world is beautiful
also there’s two more variations of “Du gehst mir auf den Sack.” (btw by sack we mean testicle. yeah.)
“Du gehst mir auf den Senkel.” = “You’re walking on my shoelace(s).”
“Du gehst mir auf den Keks.” = “You’re walking on my cookie.”
ALSO WE HAVE THE WORD “DOCH” (basically means yes, but in response to someone saying no) AND IT IS A FUCKING TRAGEDY THAT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS NO EQUIVALENT
I MISS ‘DOCH’ SO MUCH you basically have to settle for “does so” or “yes it does” or something not half as succintly defiant
I also miss “aneinander vorbei reden” = “to talk past each other”, meaning when people are completely missing each other’s points / talking about two different things. It’s such nice imagery.
And we call stupid people “Hans Wurst” = “Hans Sausage” (no matter if you are boy or a girl)
Yeah, if we are surprised we say “Holla die Waldfee” = “Holla the forest fairy”
Seriously though, how do children grow up without “doch” und “trotzdem”?
Holy mackerel I love this soooo!!
Also we have “noch in Abrahams Wurstkessel sein,” or “to still be in Abraham’s sausage pot”, which is basically saying you haven’t been born yet. As in, when Carter was president of the US, I was still in Abraham’s sausage pot.
I know “noch als Quark im Schaufenster liegen”, “to be still on display in the shop window as curd cheese” for not having been born yet.
Or there is the slightly less icky “mit den Mücken fliegen”, “to be flying with the mosquitoes”, or something my uncle says in his dialect: “Sternle putze”, “to be cleaning stars”.
Let’s not forget fremdschämen - to be ashamed/embarassed on behalf of somebody else.
Or our wonderful alternatives to calling somebody “Wimp”: Schattenparker, Turnbeutelvergesser, Warmduscher… (somebody who only parks in the shadow, somebody who forgets their gym bag, somebody who only showers with warm water… the list is endless)
I wish i had a context for this. But I really dont.
I was all ready to “um, actually” this, but, um, actually there’s about 3-4 grams of iron in a person, which x400 is 1.2-1.6kg, which is a smallish but not unreasonable sword. So. Math checks out.
How would you extract the iron, though? The more practical solution would be to kill a mere hundred men, then mix 1 part blood with 3 parts standard molten iron, imo. Cheaper and faster, while still retaining the edge that only evil magic can give you.
Or, you could just make the sword of iron, and then use the blood to temper the blade.
1.2 to 1.6 kilograms is a perfectly reasonable large sword. Your average longsword was 1.1–1.8 kg and I don’t even remember if that’s including the weight of the hilt, guard, and pommel or just the blade. Your more classic “knight sword” was a mere 1.1 kilograms on average; the blood of 400 men is more than enough.
This is using the comparatively crappy metallurgy of medieval Europe and their meh iron swords. Move east to, say, contemporary Iran and make a scimitar using high carbon steel (~2%) for a .75 kilogram blade and you only need the blood of about 225 men.
So putting my thoughts in on this… because how could I not.
So you’ve exsanguinated your 400 guys to get the iron for your sword. Cool. But now you have 400 bodies lying around.
Why not put those to good use and cremate them. Use the carbon from those 400 bodies (you won’t need all of them) and now you can make a nice mid-high carbon steel sword.
Now you have a sword forged with the blood of your enemies AND strengthened with their bones.
“high fantasy math” - the tag I should have expected to write some day.
