one of the most frustrating things about humans is you can take a group of humans and you can say, ‘look, it’s incredibly important for people to be nice to each other’, and the humans will think, ‘yes, it is important for people to be nice to me’, and then the humans will all viciously fight over which of them the others should be nice to.
Every time someone tries to explain the metaplot of Supernatural to me, it basically ends up sounding like redneck Dragon Ball Z. I’m sure there’s some nuance I’m failing to grasp here.
Care to elaborate on that?
…I’m not even offended, just absolutely curious. From the stuff I’ve seen and heard about Supernatural I can’t see the connection.
Mostly, I get the impression of a show that doesn’t know how not to escalate.
Every threat’s gotta be quantitatively bigger and badder than the one that came before. Every deus ex machina’s gotta be shinier than the last one. Every season’s gotta end with a massive eleventh-hour powerup for our heroes, only for the next season to raise the stakes enough to put them back in the underdog position.
It’s like, you beat the Devil himself? Well, now you’ve gotta fight the Devil’s cousin Phil, who has conveniently gone entirely unmentioned up until now, but he’s totally twice as evil.
That last paragraph was literally supposed to be the most ridiculous hypothetical example I could think of, and people are messaging me to say “his name was Metatron, not Phil”. I can’t even make fun of this show.
People now are like, “Your right to free speech doesn’t mean you can express an offensive opinion”
Like what the fuck does right to free speech mean, then?
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
- I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
- Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
- A whole swarm of older women - and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs - all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
- At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
- “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
- Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
when you go from a bad situation into a better one you may collapse exhausted and unsure what to do and full of grief, you may need time to regain the ability to do things as yourself or motivated by anything other than terror, you may need time to process or mourn or fall apart in ways you could not before,
and people may use this as proof that the old situation was better for you, proof that you need to go back, and it is not proof that it was better for you or proof that you need to go back
!!!
It’s so incredibly common to “fall apart” when you’re finally safe. You no longer need to stay so tightly coiled in on yourself, you can finally leave survival mode and process your trauma. You’re not holding yourself up by sheer terror anymore and suddenly the damage that terror has done to you becomes immediate and obvious.
This is so important. Don’t go back. Things are already getting better, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
oppressive jokes aren’t meant to just put down people they target. they are meant to help oppressors bond with each other.
don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to make such jokes when “there’s no one around to get offended”. don’t tell me to let it fucking slide.
i know why a man makes a misogynist joke when trying to blend into a company of other men. i know why white people make racist jokes about their coworker who is a PoC, and how it’s going to affect their work.
