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

dalekteaservice:

radioactivepeasant:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
  
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous. 

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lemonbird asked: IMPORTANT QUESTION. Vampires aren't suppose to enter a premise without being invited right? What if a hermit vampire was living in his falling apart old castle and some fuck bought it as a "fixer upper", would the vampire just glitch out on to the lawn or would he be okay since he lived there before?

thebibliosphere:

Okay so this would depend on where you are in the world, and whether or not they had squatters rights (can’t be evicted and can apply for legal ownership of place once they have been there for X amount of years) but I mean, the dude owns the place, even if it is a run down mess he was still there first and there’s probably some ancient land ownership law which can’t be overwritten by modern laws (you find all sorts of weird things are still technically legal cause no one bothered to update the books since 1645) so basically whoever just bought this castle to turn it into a modern fixer upper, congrats, you also just bought yourself a vampire and he’s not going anywhere.

(Also now I kind of want to write this where a family buys it to turn it into a hotel/wedding venue and the kids find the vampire in the attic and he ends up being the weird uncle who gets roped into hilarious wedding related shenanigans?? Like 

“Okay yes fine, you can host weddings here, but registrar only, no religious ones.” 
“But Theolodious, why?”
“Really Sharon, really, do I have to spell it out for you. Really.”

*

“We really should increase the lighting for photographs, what about skylights?”
“No.”
“But—”
“How about I just set all of you on fire while you’re trying to sleep.”

*

“Please, for the love of god, please don’t let people throw confetti or rice, I’m begging you.”

*

“Okay what’s our final head count for the night?”
“107.”
“Are you sure?”
“Did I fucking stutter Steve?”

*

“Uncle Theo, why does the groom have “help me” on the bottom of his shoes, why is everyone laughing?.”
“Because small one, humanity has failed collectively as a species and heteronormativity is a constructed lie designed to oppress over half the population for not conforming to arcane and chauvinistic ideals put in place by dead scholars who have long since turned to dust and have no place influencing modern society.”
“…”
“Permanence is an illusion.”

*

“Madame, flattering as your offer is for a quickie, you’re not my type.”
“What is your type then?” ;) ;) ;)
“O negative.”

*

“Whoo, what a day, I could eat a horse.”
“Same.”
“…”
“…well obviously I’m not going to.”

*

“Theo…are you…are you crying?”
“Yes.”
“You big softie, I never thought someone like you would cry at a wedding.”
“…I’ve lived a long life, Sharron. People come and go, the christening you bless will be the funeral you mourn in less than a century. But people keep saying “I love you”, that has to count for something.”

pipistrellus:

feynites:

minesottafatspoollegend:

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.

Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.

The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.

The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler - or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.

But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:

Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!

Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!

Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!

Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).

And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.

#i love this discworld novel

(Source: sweetbabyraysgourmetsauces, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

Anonymous asked: I would love more howling commando hijinks!

buckykingofmemes:

oh, how to pick just one…

well, here’s a story about a plane. one steve did not actually jump out of. 

a rare tale indeed. 

if youve ever been in the military–any branch, really–you’d know that everyone in every branch thinks their branch is best. this is not a new thing, and it was certainly going strong during wwii. mostly it just meant that if a bunch of marines wandered into an army bar there would be a fight, but honestly it was all in good fun, just a way to blow off steam. 

so of course there was a friendly rivalry between us howlies and the pilots we hung around with. most of the pilots and crews we knew were transport guys, not bombers, but we got around more than most units and wound up spending a few weeks stationed near the 97th bombardment group. the 97th was made of b-17s, these huge bomber planes called flying fortresses–and they earned the name, those birds were basically the tanks of the sky. they ran a 10 man crew, and we got friendly with the spectacular idiots of the Pistol Packin Mama. as you can tell from the name of their plane, the were exactly the kind of guys who would get along with a group of people called the Howling Commandoes. 

but rivalries being what they were, pranks happened. 

the pistol packers fired the opening salvo. merrifield, Mama’s copilot, was probably the mastermind behind it; he was a good tempered guy who never passed on a pun. which was why for the first prank, the pistol packers stole all our underwear. haha, commandoes. 

such an affront could not stand. we put shoe polish on the rims of their headsets, and they came off mission with black rings on the sides of their faces. they hid dead fish in our barracks. we salted their coffees. 

the usual nonsense. 

but then we came back one night to discover that every one of our footlockers had been painted with ‘EAT IT.’ 

and that, my friends, sparked a whole new wave of stupidity.

morita was the genius behind our retaliation. during wwii, VD was a major concern, and condoms were widely available for any soldier who wanted or needed them. each of us went separately and got as many as we could get our hands on. steve’s face was red enough he couldve been used to flag down a plane.  the quartermasters probably thought us howlies were about to host the biggest orgy camp had ever seen, but by the time each of us had contributed to the stash, we had some 300-odd condoms. 

so that night we went and broke into the airfield. we were highly skilled troops, it wasnt that hard. gabe mumbled something about using our skills for evil, but soon enough we had found the Pistol Packin Mama, all glorious 104 feet of her. 

she’d taken a few hits  on their last run, and was awaiting maintenance before she went up again. luckily for us, the repair crews were a little swamped, and it would be a few days before they got to her. so we climbed aboard and set to work. 

anything we could fit a condom over got wrapped. joysticks, armrests, controls–all of it got covered in latex. the remaining 250 condoms we inflated. theres nothing more manly than a bunch of soldiers sitting around in a bomber blowing up condoms. and after about four hours of macho dick balloon making, we were near ready pass out from lack of oxygen. but we’d also managed to about half-fill the Mama with condom balloons. 

our work done, we sneaked back to the barracks and fell asleep. 

as i understand it, merrifeld realized he’d forgotten a lucky picture of his girl inside the Mama, and went back to pick it up. he opened the hatch and a rain of condoms descended on him, which attracted attention from pretty much everyone else nearby. the pistol packers got crap about it from everyone for weeks. eventually, they came to us and declared truce. as a gesture of good faith, steve offered to do some nose art for them. 

so steve painted the Pistol Packin Mama. and how a man who cant ask for condoms without his face turning the color of a stoplight can paint a larger than life half naked lady on a plane calm as you like, i will never understand. 

sentient-teapot asked: "Accidentally capture the wrong base"? .....tell us more? Please?

buckykingofmemes:

this was before we got agent agent back as our handler, and part of the reason why he finally turned up for work again. 

so the thing about clint is that hes 1. not a good listener and 2. hes deaf. mostly. these are separate issues because being mostly deaf doesnt stop him from understanding what people are saying most of the time, it just means that you have to be sure he knows youre trying to communicate with him before you say something. (and also that you should make sure your mask doesnt cover your mouth so he can lipread, but whatever.)

we had this agent—incredibly boring guy in the worst sort of way–who’d requested clint, nat, and i for an op. nat and i were supposed to hit two of the leaders of a crime syndicate while clint got the third. easy peasy, kill some guys, free some hostages, small country liberated, total cakewalk. but the agent running the op and the briefing took FOREVER. he was talking us through like none of us had ever overthrown a country before, explaining every minute detail. nat and i could just kinda zone out and let things wash over us, picking up the pertinent details, but clint cant really do that. his hearing aids help but they weren’t perfect, so he also had to be kinda lipreading just to keep up. which takes a lot of focus for incredibly boring info. naturally he zoned out too.

which was how he missed the fact that his guy was not actually staying in his incredibly fortified base-slash-villa. his hostages were, but he wasn’t. 

luckily, they covered this in the briefing packet we were each provided with, which was a mere 362 pages. 

so obviously none of us actually read it.

we poked through, got blueprints, guard schedules, alarm systems and so on, but didnt bother with most of the rest of it. 

they dropped us in the air over each of our respective targets, clint last. i had the cliffside resort, nat had the downtown headquarters, and clint had the base-villa. nat and i handled ours like pros, of course, corpses everywhere, and clint did too–mowed right through the security, got the hostages, and then called in that his syndicate leader wasnt there, what the hell, who gave me this bad intel.

which was when he was informed that the big bad wasnt IN the villa, he was on the ISLAND ACROSS from the villa, and that hed been supposed to covertly infiltrate the beach house there and quietly capture him. ideally without ever setting foot in the villa; he was just supposed to steal a boat from the villa docks and not get spotted by security. 

unfortunately, clint had blown up all the watercraft at the villa’s docks to keep syndicate members from escaping. which meant he still had to get to the island and capture this guy, but now there were no motorboats left. and if this syndicate jerkoff got away, fury was gonna have his hide.

and thats how clint wound up launching a one-man amphibious assault on an international crime syndicate from a paddleboat.

and also why clint reads his briefings now. 

cinderella: redo

shanastoryteller:

so i was watching cinderella while doing my nails and waiting for them to dry which was clearly a Mistake because now i can’t help but think -

the evil stepmother was always evil, okay. say her abuse of her own daughters was different than that of cinderella’s - but it was still abuse. giving them impossible expectations, telling them they were never good enough, never pretty enough, never smart enough. and then she gets married, and anastasia and drizella are ecstatic because this man seems kind and warm and maybe just maybe he can temper their mother, maybe with him around she won’t be so cruel. so they’re on their very best behavior in the beginning, they do just as their mother taught - they trot out their best upper court manners in an attempt to get their new stepfather to like them. but it just comes off as cold and snooty and they’re trying, they are, they’re just bad at it. and they see how he is with cinderella, the smiling girl their own age, and they are jealous. they don’t mean to be, they try not to be, they know it isn’t becoming of young ladies. but she gets hugs and kisses and affection and they get rulers slapped on their hands when they reach for desert and sharp jabs to their sides when they slouch and - soon they hate cinderella, not for anything she’s done, but for what she has and they dont

but then her father dies. and it’s all a tumble of things and cinderella is crying and they’ve lost their only chance at escaping their mother’s clutches and it’s terrible. and everything settles and there’s no reason to be jealous anymore but resentment is hard to let go of and they don’t know what to do. they’re only kids too after all. and they’re so terribly bad at comforting people, they can do flowery words and know all the right bows but cinderella is so sad and they just don’t know what to do with that, because they’re supposed to be sisters but they’re not even friends

and slowly but surely their mother starts abusing cinderella, starts making her a maid in her own home, and she’s their mother, what are anastasia and drizella supposed to do? she rules them with an iron fist, and cinderella doesn’t even like them anyway, it’s none of their business.

except one night anastasia crawls into her sister’s bed in the middle of the night and wakes her up. “i was thirsty,” she explains, eyes wide and shiny, and they’re bad at this with other people but drizella has no problems with pulling anastasia into her arms. the younger girl clutches her sister and continues, “i was thirsty and i went down to the kitchen to get some water and - and cinderella is still up! she’s doing the dishes, and she should be asleep, mom is going to make her make breakfast in the morning and -” she cuts herself off with a hiccup and whispers, “it’s not fair.”

“life isn’t fair,” drizella says, echoing one of their mother’s favorite phrases. but her sister is staring at her with wet eyes, and it’s not like their mother is likely to get up before sunrise anyway, she hates waking up, so she pulls herself and anastasia out of bed and off they go.

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they-told-me-be-seen-not-heard asked: I would kill for more howlie stories. Particularly the one where everyone dressed up as women. Please? I have coffee, bacon, and a genuine grenade (not sure if it still works) from 1942. (Ps pls embarass the golden retriever known as the Star Spangled Man as much as you can. It's funny.)

buckykingofmemes:

well, us howlies were willing to do downright stupid stuff for even stupider reasons, so it never took much effort to talk everybody into doing something really really dumb. usually i was the one trying to keep everyone for getting their stupid selves killed, but im proud to say that this particular occasion was all my doing.

so its july 1944, and nazis are still occupying paris. we were sent in to pick up some crucial info from a resistance informer in the heart of the city. but at this point we were already starting to be recognizable, so we needed to disguise ourselves to get through the city. the higher-ups hadnt been specific on how exactly to conduct this particular op, so, left to our own devices, we naturally concluded that we should dress one of the most overmuscled commando squads in the allied forces as women. 

we were good at special ops, not logic.

i think whoever suggested it was joking, but in typical howlies fashion, we took things waaay to far, and soon enough we were sourcing dresses and wigs. dum dum and pinky and gabe and jaques and falsworth and morita had to shave their mustaches off. dum dum cried. 

morita managed to get his hands on some makeup–he refused to tell us where from–which was great, until we realized that none of us had any idea what to do with it. but then steve admitted what exactly he’d been up to with the ladies of the star spangled show. turns out that aside from hauling their luggage everwhere, he’d also been on hair-and-makeup duty nearly every night. i guess the ladies decided to put his artistic skills to use, because the man knew his way around a blush brush. (the rest of us were not sure what a blush brush was.)  even in 2017, he can still do a contour like nobodys business, because he apparently decided that was something worth knowing. so steve did our makeup, and all of us learned how to do lipstick. more useful combat skills for the howlies dossiers. 

falsworth had a friend who ran a really fantastic underground drag show, so he negotiated wigs in return for promising to send steve over to help with a show sometime. we did not tell steve about that promise until later.  gabe found the dresses, and i dont know where he got them, because they were somehow big enough for us. 

except for steve, who has the waist-to-shoulder proportions of a pizza slice. he got stuck halfway into a dress–caught with one arm in, his head and other arm out–with his fully-made-up face slowly turning redder and redder. all of us tried, but we could not wedge steve into that dress. 

so instead we put him into a wheelbarrow full of garbage. 

the rest of us–the worlds burliest but most well-made-up ladies–set off in groups of twos and threes through occupied paris. happy sam pulled the short straw and had to wheel along the stevebarrow, which not only stunk but was heavy as hell. the nazis working the checkpoints must have liked their ladies large and muscular, because we made it through to the drop point with no problems, aside from falsworth getting a little to in to the flirting. steve kept griping, but we kept telling him garbage is quiet steve, shut up.

we made it to the drop point, this big old house on  rue des grands augustins, one of those huge mansions. but what we’d carefully avoided telling steve was who exactly the house belonged to, because his birthday was the next day, and this–aside from being a crucial intelligence mission–was his birthday present.

the house belonged to pablo picasso.

so we all slipped in through a side door, and when happy sam and the steve barrow finally caught up with the rest of us, happy sam turned it over sideways and out tumbled a very irate, still made-up steve in his captain america costume. 

he was pissed as hell until he realized who exactly the weird little guy covered in paint was, and then he blushed so red i thought he’d cook the makeup right off his face, and he started stammering like that time in first grade suzy miller said he was cute.

anyway, he and picasso got along like a house on fire, and the rest of us enjoyed some proper french cooking while they babbled art at each other and scribbled in each other’s sketchbooks. picasso drew steve a portrait of himself, which is why one of steve’s battered stained sketchbooks is valued at 700 thousand dollars. it’s because halfway through theres a bunch of picasso sketches, and a little painting of captain america wearing makeup in a heap of garbage.

not that you can really tell, of course. cubism. 

the-knights-who-say-book:

the-knights-who-say-book:

the-knights-who-say-book:

the-knights-who-say-book:

the-knights-who-say-book:

fantasy book with witches and wizards and magical people but all magic has a price, like

main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?

powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this

main character: [horrified gasp]

fortune teller: and speak up when asking your question, these are my cards so they share my partially-deafness

other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?

fortune teller: no, asshole, i was born with it. i got seeing the future for trading in my ability to wink

there’s a legend in this fantasy land about a powerful enchanter who traded their ovaries for the power to create earthquakes. the grumpy semi-sentient force of nature who negotiates these magic deals had thought it was pretty great one, sure to make the recipient of the deal regret making it soon enough (after all, the point is having to suffer a bit in exchange for magic, because life sucks even in magical fantasy kingdoms)

however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy

“fucking humans messing with the system,” it was quoted as saying

actually, cheating the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature out of the suffering it hopes to inflict with the magic deals is a time honored tradition in Magical Fantasy Kingdom, which is primarily made up of sassy little shits. most of the kingdom’s mythology is made up of trickster figures

there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible

there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight

there’s the monarch who offered to trade in their power to destroy people with only their words for the seemingly much less valuable power to turn one grain of rice into two grains — only for the GSSFN to realize later it had gotten the ruler’s cutting sarcasm in payment for a power that could end a famine

every year the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature gets visits from tens of jewish witches and wizards solemnly offering to give up eating all foods that come from pigs or eating meat at the same time as dairy in exchange for the powers they want

“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER” says the GSSFN, who has frankly had enough of this shit

(via ifeelbetterer)