is this the ORIGINAL?!???
oh holy shit i didn’t even know where this meme came from

OH MY ACTUAL GOD THE ORIGINAL
ORIGINALS ON THE ROLL

This is sacred ground.
apparently the same guy also made this meme too
that was the SAME PERSON?
I have literally never seen this before omg!
He just sits his ass down on all those buttons that could or could not be firing lasers into space
If we can’t invent a touchscreen that recognizes an ass-dial by the 24th century, we really have no business being in space at all.
Happy 10th anniversary to by far the most viral reblog I ever made. I still see screengrabs of this on my own facebook dash like, once a month.
The thing about parrots is that they will fuck with you for fun. On the outside a parrot is a small flying dinosaur with bolt cutters on its face. On the inside a parrot is a toddler with a GED who you might have unwisely trapped in your house. Humans are usually the most entertaining thing in a parrot's environment (aside from other parrots).
My parrot knows all the words for his favorite foods: peanut, berry, carrot, and noodle are the most frequently requested. I often demonstrate how good he is at naming foods when I have guests over by saying, "Ripley, what is this?" And Ripley, seeing a roasted, unsalted peanut in my hand, will answer, "a peanut." He does this for many foods, multiple times a day, knowing that if he answers correctly I'll give him several of whatever he can name.
I also offer my houseguests a chance to participate, holding a treat about a foot away from Ripley and asking him what it is. Ripley is always very gentle when treats are involved. But for the past few months, when someone he doesn't know attempts this trick with him, he deliberately gets the answer wrong.
"What is this?" my friend asks Ripley as she holds out a peanut. He confidently answers, "a berry." We laugh. "No, what is it!" she tries again. "A berry." She laughs.
I hand her dried cranberry. "What's this?" she asks, holding it up. Without hesitation Ripley answers "a peanut." She holds up the peanut again. "What is it!!" "A berry," he answers. Both my friend and my parrot laugh. Apparently this joke is worth more to my bird than getting the treat.
I think a part of ART that is so underrated by the fandom sometimes is how much affection it shows for the people it loves. It's big and intimidating and mean sometimes and has no sense of proportionate retribution, but it's also very open about how much it loves its crew and Murderbot. It's not really just a hair-trigger angry ship, it's deeply protective of the people it houses in its hull.
And I wonder how much of that is informed by, or contributes to, the fact that it's a research transport that also goes directly into corporate territory and it and its crew protect and shuttle slaves and indentured servants and other disenfranchised people out.
And to do something like that, it's no wonder that it's so willing to take down anything that challenges it.
I mean. Imagine if your job was to protect your humans and you lived in a universe where everything is being slowly eaten by massively imperialistic mega-corporations who want you and everything you stand for wiped off the face of existence. You have to learn how to Fight the Hell Back.
#sometimes i think about how like art's job. its entire job. is to keep its crew safe while they are attempting to dismantle a violent system#a system that reliably shows no regard for human life#i don't think the fear in network effect is a one-off thing. it's probably actually art's worst nightmare coming true#and unlike murderbot it can't keep people safe by 'performing its function'#it has to arm its pathfinders. it has to petition (probably) for a debris deflection system#the inherent helplessness of being made without a way to defend you or the ones you love most#while the ones you love are fighting against an inherently violent system#like yeah. i'd start bombing people#i also think about how its bestie is uniquely created to be good at the only thing it can't do: protect its crew outside its hull#which is making me think about the conversation between art and seth about mb joining the crew#mb voice: they don't want me to join :( who wants a rogue secunit :( art probably bullied them into this :((#art: SETH PLEASE this is a person i trust as MUCH AS ME to keep you safe and it has LEGS#PLEASE!!#the murderbot diaries#tmbd#pov you're art and jealous of your friend's legs
get peer reviewed
i’ve been peer reviewed!!
How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)
after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while
read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.
you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.
anyway after that i wrote a lot.
i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.
and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.
the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?
read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.
ended up making the funniest possible two item goodwill purchase entirely by accident
"oh i'm just practicing"
why is it labeled drinkware
It is criminal to hide this in the tags.
You know technology literacy is dying because I saw this meme with 76k likes
F11 the full screen button? You’re scared of the full screen button? F10?? It opens the menu bar???
Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖
If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you
Never stop learning+ Never stop sharing what you learned
it's cold outside pass me the pieter bruegel the elder
yeahg
When everything feels hopless we cannot forget that progress is not just possible but being made, healing is possible and happening.











