Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

anarchetypal:

so i’m riding the elevator up to my apartment when the emergency phone in the elevator starts ringing 

and i just stand there for a second because this thing is like thirty years old and has never rung or even been used from what i know

but eventually i answer it thinking maybe something’s wrong with the elevator?? it’s an emergency phone it’s probably an emergency??? i dunno

except i shit you not it’s a telemarketer 

a telemarketer that’s as confused as i am when i finally interrupt him mid-spiel to inform him he has the wrong number and then interrupt him again to explain further that “uh, no, seriously, this is an elevator phone. i’m standing in an elevator. talking to you. on the emergency phone. i really think you got the wrong number”

“oh,” says telemarketer guy.

“yeah,” i say.

there’s some mutually-confused silence.

“so, this is my stop,” i say. “i gotta go.”

“oh,” says telemarketer guy.

“good luck,” i add, because telemarketer guy seems like he’s having an existential crisis. and then i hang up on him, because he’s having an existential crisis and won’t actually end the call, and because again i’m talking on an elevator emergency phone and, you know, this is my stop, i gotta go.

(via johanirae)

Anonymous asked: For the headcanon meme Uhura?

For THIS headcanon meme!  (You thought you were free.  You were wrong.)  I’m kind of picturing AOS because that’s what I watched most recently with Uhura.

A: what I think realistically

Nyota Uhura grows up speaking three languages fluently—English and Swahili, because her family speaks both, and a German dialect, because her cousin’s husband speaks Swahili like a three-year-old and doesn’t seem to be getting better at it.  He dotes on Nyota, calls her little star and swings her up onto his shoulders to ‘scare’ his wife and Nyota’s mothers as a monster with two heads, and he thinks it’s the greatest thing in history when she starts translating for him.  She’s six years old when she goes to a museum and meets the curator, who is a Vulcan woman of superlative brilliance.  The woman greets her family with a formal Vulcan phrase and is visibly taken aback—something of an accomplishment—when Nyota carefully, cautiously sounds out in imitation, tonk’peh, dif-tor heh smusma.

“Very good,” the Vulcan woman says in English, arching an eyebrow.  “But the correct response is sochya eh dif.”  Nyota parrots it back, and the Vulcan woman offers her a salute.  Nyota comes back the very next day and plunks herself expectantly in front of the woman’s door, and more or less bothers the woman into agreeing to teach her the language.

Nyota, talking to her teacher, learns about Star Fleet, where she can learn every language in the galaxy (“that is quite impossible–”  “EVERY language in the galaxy,” Nyota insists) and spend her entire life speaking them as a job.  She never looks away from the stars again, and she remains in touch with her teacher, until finally it’s Nyota who offers the lessons, in the grammar of Russian and the guttural tones of Klingon.

Nyota’s teacher, very formal at all times, is the one who begins calling her ‘Uhura.’  Nyota knows that her name means star, but to her, Uhura means linguist and she holds it tight with both hands.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Uhura and Jim are actually great friends by the end of the Enterprise’s first year, once he feels less like he has to prove himself at all times and once she gets past some of her ingrained horror about his casual disregard for the rules when he thinks it’s necessary.  (The first time Uhura sees herself observe a rule and then toss it aside because, well, this is more important, she has this moment of total exasperation because He Has Infected Her.)  Jim speaks not a few languages himself, and more to the point he’s actually not the trash can she assumed him to be.  He doesn’t harass his subordinates, he would clearly die for any of them, and even though at first she’s convinced he’s going to drink on the job and sleep with everyone on the ship, there’s no sign of it.  He drinks sometimes with the rest of the alpha shift command crew, but never to excess, and she’s pretty sure Jim would rather take a phaser shot to the chest than risk his crew by sleeping around—it’s like command has turned him into a real person rather than the caricature he worked so hard to project and goddamnit she likes that person.  No one is more shocked and aggrieved than Uhura herself.

Uhura is also rational enough to date a Vulcan, so after two months she huffs out a breath and plops her tray down at his table during breakfast (Jim eats in the mess hall with the crew, rather than a private mess, because he likes to know his people, damn him).  She has the same stubborn look in her eye that once strongarmed a Vulcan into agreeing to teach her language to a small human child.

“Um,” Jim says, wary, “hey, Uhura.”

“You’re going to stop hitting on me,” she tells him, pointing at him sternly with her fork, “and I’m going to stop treating you like an asshole, and then we’re going to be friends.”

Jim stares at her.  “Okay?”

“So,” she says, lowering her fork to gesture at his PADD, “what are you reading?” He tells her, seemingly too bemused to do anything else, and she scoffs.  “Please.  If you want the really weird Vulcan literature, I can hook you up.  You haven’t lived until you’ve read some of the Pre-Reform homoerotic star-crossed lovers nonsense I read during my tutorial on the Pre-Reform dialect.”

Jim laughs until he’s wheezing and flushed, clutching the edge of the table as the mess hall looks at him in mild alarm and Uhura smirks in satisfaction.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Uhura never becomes a captain, although innumerable promotions are offered to her. She loves her languages too much. She believes, after seeing Kirk and Sulu and even sweet Chekov taken by their ships and never return, that this is the reason she and Spock end up as the last living members of that first bridge crew.

She kind of wishes, sitting at the monument to James Tiberius Kirk and thinking about how he would have hated having his middle name on the thing, that she had taken the captaincy.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

LET!  NYOTA! UHURA!  HAVE!  A! BIG!  FAMILY!

Listen I literally could not care less about what canon says, Nyota has like three siblings and a bunch of cousins and her grandmother and her two moms and her aunts and uncles and they all adore each other to little bits and pieces.  

Nyota’s sister is dying to know about Spock from the first moment she hears about him, and the poor guy is totally overwhelmed the first time Nyota brings him home to celebrate [insert slightly ridiculous reason that the family came up with on the spot because Nyota was on Earth and they were excited].  They immediately adopt Spock, he’s really kind of alarmed about it.  

Nyota brings Jim to meet her family one time too (and McCoy because his wife has his kid currently) when it’s his birthday and he just desperately does not want to deal with Star Fleet and the Kelvin and the whole hero thing, and they all love him too.  

Basically give me Nyota Uhura who travels the stars because she loves them too much to stay on the ground, but who has very real ties to Earth because those are her people.  She’s met by the quintessential embarrassing family whenever they make earthfall.  Her cousin (the one who still sucks at Swahili) has a sign. Her sister and her twin brothers have a banner.  She’s going to murder them all but also she can’t stop grinning.

lucreziaborgia asked: fave lucrezia borgia anecdotes?

felicedellarovere:

i don’t have many of my sources with me rn so this is entirely from memory - so forgive me if i get any of the sourcing wrong

• the fact that her second wedding was ENTIRELY unicorn-themed
  
• christopher hibbert describes her and sancia as “giggling like schoolgirls” and, at one point, interrupting mass bc they were gossiping and i just love that so much i love female friendships in history
  
• on the other end of the spectrum…. fucking isabella d’este’s husband after it was WELL ESTABLISHED that isabella hated her…. when will your faves ever be so #petty
  
• lucrezia wasn’t a clotheshorse in the way that isabella was by ANY means, but some diarist - i think it was sanudo but i’m not 100% - said that when she arrived in ferrara to meet the d’este court she wore a white dress with black velvet musical notes embroidered all over it that wrote out a song composed for the occasion and i would have loved to see that!
  

vanillaroselatte:

tumblr put this update out and i think some of you might need to be reminded that just because someone is online doesnt mean they owe you a response. sometimes socializing is hard and people arent in the mental state or mood to talk and you need to respect that

(via windbladess)