royalslayer asked: im gonna fuckin die that ficw as the besT
I AM RIDE-OR-DIE ON THIS EXACT VERSION OF STEVE ROGERS OKAY
Also, I am very serious about this being how the PR folks find out that Steve Rogers is, in fact, NOT the benign and lovable (if slightly bigoted) grandpa they expected to yank out of the ice. Bucky finds the footage of this interaction eventually and laughs until there are literally tears streaming down his face.
maelace asked: Okay, for Steve Rogers prompts: Steve is leaving the grocery store and hears some guy yelling at the little Girl Scouts selling cookies about how Feminism Is Ruining This Country and Girl Scouts Are Evil for Supporting Abortion and Lesbians. (Because this actually happens, it happened to me when I was a kid. And once you are like 13 you are allowed to sell without an adult, so me and my friend were alone).
Ahahaha yeah, good times, been there, done that. Right, so, I’m picturing this as like a month or two after Avengers, while Steve is still Figuring Out the 2000’s. Also featuring: Steve swearing like a Brooklyn kid who went into the Army, and my weird obsession with time-displaced super soldiers who are angry about bananas. WARNING: 100% WISH FULFILLMENT. Some general assholery and Steve losing his temper a little under the cut because…this is longer than I meant it to be.
Steve was sure it would shock any number of people, but his biggest problems with the 21st century weren’t the televisions, phones, or coffee makers (thank you, Stark). There was a learning curve, but it was reminiscent of the learning curve after he’d gotten the serum—hell, he’d gone from a colorblind, partly deaf asthmatic with more chronic illnesses than you could fit on a chart to a walking talking superhuman. The whole world had been brighter, louder, and faster-paced than Steve had ever been remotely prepared to deal with, so he went onto stages and into battles until he adapted. The 21st century was brighter, louder, and faster-paced than the forties could have dreamed, so Steve got on his bike and went to tour the country without help. By the time he got back, he was pretty sure he could manage technology well enough to Google shit like ‘what is Facebook.’
(Google was good. Steve fucking loved Google. All the answers were on Google. Including answers to questions he never needed answered, but he had gotten better at choosing his search terms.)
No, Steve’s biggest problems with the 21st century, other than the obvious fact that it wasn’t his century, mostly revolved around money.
Example: who in their right goddamn mind paid seven dollars for a pound of apples? Had anyone ever heard of affordable bread? What the fuck was happening with the price of potatoes—potatoes, for the love of God.
“Inflation’s a bitch,” a passing college student said in dry amusement, obviously picking up on his bitter muttering. Steve’s scowl deepened and he put the apples in his cart.
For the first time in his life, Steve actually didn’t have to worry about money—apparently seventy years of back pay totaled up to a significant amount of cash—but that didn’t mean that he didn’t wince as he did the math for his food. If this was usual for one person, what the hell were families paying? Bucky’s family had been Bucky, his ma, his dad, and all three of the girls, plus sometimes Steve. How was a family of seven affording this food? He added it to his mental list of things to Google, along with what is wrong with bananas.
Bananas. Of all the things for the future to fuck up, fucking bananas were weird bland not-bananas now. Steve had never had strong opinions on bananas before, but live and goddamn learn, apparently.
Anyway. The money thing was why, upon entering the grocery store, Steve hadn’t paused at the table set up just inside the door, save to read the sign hanging in front of it—it was good to see that the Girl Scouts had survived. Nonetheless, he could bake cookies his own self and probably get a better net value than six bucks for a tiny box, thanks. To be polite, he’d waved a little to the girls at the table, both wearing green sashes and winning smiles as they did a slow but respectably steady business, and then he’d gone on his damn way like a civilized human being.
But God forbid that other people could do the same. Steve checked out with his apples and cereal and soup ingredients (and no bananas), put them in pair of reusable grocery bags, and started for the door just in time to hear raised voices.
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive.
So why is dog-sorting intuitive?Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy
* Specific!! Squawking noise!!
* The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye
* Patriotism?!?
* CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BADThen the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs
* Meat Eater
* Soft friend
* Doggo-ness????
* Walkies
* An Snout,
* BORK BORKAnything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.)
* Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.)
* Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.)
* Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!)
* Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!)
* Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type)
* Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.)
* alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a …
* DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space!
* Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game.
* Best doggo.
* PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
(via elodieunderglass)
(Source: stzamericangods, via johanirae)
Dear Everyone on AO3:
I would like to introduce you to a little friend I like to call the AMPERSAND. &! Hello Mx. Ampersand! How are you doing today?
You can USE this AMPERSAND on AO3 tags to indicate a PLATONIC RELATIONSHIP that is important in your story! Isn’t that nice? That way you can indicate that the relation between two characters is important even though they are NOT BANGING. For example, when they are RELATED. This is helpful, because if you do not, the result is what I like to call SCHRODINGER’S INCEST, where you can’t tell if the fic is happy fluffy family times or not until it is already TOO LATE.
Sincerely,
One Who Has Seen Too Much
(via lupinatic)
“hey karli did you ever make any more of those weird motivational animals?”
well friendThis is beyond glory
(via primarybufferpanel)
Husband was looking for me all round the house so he could show me something he’d made but he couldn’t find me so he just shouted really loudly, “Fantasy and Sci-fi are the same genre!” and the rational part of my brain doing laundry was like “I’m not responding to a meme, wait where am I going—” as I ascended up the basements stairs like the wrath of god, and he just turned like “there you are” and I’m SO MAD THAT IT WORKED
this delights me
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
PLEASE VOTE TO HELP GET RID OF RACIST STATUES IN A BLACK TOWN!
Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy aka the side that defended slavery in the American civil war. During segregation, all these disgusting statues honoring slave-owning traitors were put up to look down on all of us like “remember, white supremacy!” on a street that’s always been predominately black. OUR LOCAL NEWSPAPER IS VERY CONSERVATIVE, AND THEY’RE HOSTING A POLL ON WHETHER THE MONUMENTS SHOULD BE TAKEN DOWN. RIGHT NOW, THE RACISTS ARE VERY AHEAD.
PLEASE VOTE IN THIS POLL! This is THE newspaper in the city, it has a HUGE impact on swaying local government. PLEASE HELP GET THESE RACIST STATUES OUT OF A BLACK TOWN!
NO is winning by a long stretch. FUCK THAT
No is about 4000 votes ahead rn please take 2 seconds to vote YESin favor of tearing down monuments built to glorify white supremacy. You dont have to enter any personal information or anything, just vote and hit submit.
Update: NO is only about 400 votes ahead of YES. This does not require you to share personal information, it’s literally one question and a ‘vote’ button. So like. Go for it.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
marmolita asked: mini-prompt: I know you've got a way to do Borgias cannibalism. I KNOW you can work it in somehow.
The end of the world arrives two years into Pope Julius’s papacy, with Lucrezia pregnant in Ferrara, Micheletto suffering in the Castello St Angelo, and Cesare plotting escape from a very tall tower in Spain. In very short order, the rule of law is overthrown, the Pope is fled to France, and all the dead have risen.
Lucrezia’s husband dies in the first wave, throat ripped out by his own manservant. She keeps calm, arms herself, and orders a solider to see if dead men burn as well as live ones. They do, as it turns out. She fortifies the Castle Estense against the town in a matter of hours. In some obscure way, she is in her element: pregnant and radiant and ruthlessly practical. She is a Borgia: perhaps she was always meant to reign in hell.
She takes in the surviving townsfolk and orders that the ornamental gardens be immediately disposed of, and all the vegetables in the storerooms planted. She orders a constant watch on the walls, men armed with flaming arrows and muskets. Within a month she’s retaken the town, although she keeps the walls shut. Within six months, word has spread that Ferrara is a safe haven, although the Borgia bitch who rules over it will kill a man at the slightest provocation, not just for infection: for theft, for rape, for spoiling water. Her men are frighteningly loyal. It’s whispered that she keeps the dead away with spells. Soon Machiavelli is her vassal, and da Vinci, and the former bishop of Milan.
They cannot hold the outlying farms. The dead roam freely in the countryside. Lucrezia has over two hundred mouths to feed, and only a few vegetable gardens to do it with.
Machiavelli is the first to propose it, and da Vinci decides how it must be implemented, but Lucrezia makes the decision. Her children will not starve, and neither will her subjects.
She is the queen of hell. There will be meat on her table.*
Micheletto is locked in a cell when the dead rise, which saves him. He might have died of thirst anyway, but a man is eaten alive not three feet from his cell, and when the bloodstained thing has had its fill and left, Micheletto tugs the corpse closer, steals the man’s dagger and picks the lock.
All of Rome is a charnel house.
It’s remarkable how easy it is, really, adjusting to the new world. He already trusted no one. He already knows how to part a resisting man’s head from his body.
He wastes several weeks making his way to Forlí, but when he arrives he finds it a graveyard. Cesare Borgia had destroyed the walls on his word, and the city had no time to rebuild. He chases a walker out of his mother’s house, observes the smashed pots and the bowl of soup left rotting over a cold fire-pit. There’s a brown stain on the floor, but no body. It’s little comfort.
It’s another month before he reaches Ferrara.
He finds the duchess of Ferrara in the kitchens, a fetching smear of blood high on her perfect cheekbone, supervising the cookery of a feast-day supper. A man’s leg rests on a wooden table, skinned but still visibly human, surrounded by bunches of thyme and rosemary and bowls of skinned potatoes. None of the kitchen servants appear fazed, although more than a few of them cast him suspicious looks, hands tightening on their knives. No one trusts strangers these days, especially not those still covered in the dust of the road.
“Micheletto,” Lucrezia gasps, her eyes filling with tears, and flings herself into his arms. It’s the first time he’s heard his name spoken aloud since the world ended; his own eyes sting briefly, Lucrezia’s fine golden head pressed into his neck, a relic of the world as it was.
She makes him the captain of her guard, and he sleeps in her bed. They don’t speak of it, and it’s only sleep–she clings to him because he feels like the last living connection to her family, and he has always found it difficult to resist giving the Borgias what they want. It should be a terrible scandal, but the world has ended, heaven is barred, and the children of Ferrara eat human flesh. Lucrezia Borgia can take whomever she pleases to bed.
So by day Micheletto kills demons for Lucrezia Borgia, and at night he eats at her table, plays with her son and infant daughter, and lets her pull him down into the duke of Ferrara’s bed. She rests her hand over his heart like the mere fact that it beats is a sign that Cesare is alive, that Micheletto’s return means Cesare’s too, that his worthless life is a thin thread stretching somewhere out to Cesare in the monstrous dark.
He isn’t happy, but this isn’t what he thought hell would be like, either.
*long drawn out gasp*
HOW WAS I NOT AWARE OF THIS
Vodka Tia Moran