"they followed me home dad can i keep them?" alskdfjlaksdjflk MILES

hes very "you kneel before my throne unaware that its built upon lies" but like. "dont they realize my throne is built upon lies?"

Also, his sacred honor is involved, so now he has to make them true, very inconvenient. This is what happens when nobody knows who you are, like they think they do on Barrayar.

hate when mummy movies use Imhotep as the big bad. He was an architect. Imagine a mummy movie but the mummy is Frank Llyod Wright. And he was buried at the House On The Rock. Ok nevermind that would be a sick ass movie.

OMG, FLLW would absolutely be a restless corpse if he were buried at House on the Rock. That place is everything he despises, a monument to American bourgeois accumulation of tasteless stuff and agglomeration of incoherent details.

The mummy's curse is really the pervasive mold that lives in the shag carpeting.

you and me baby we wear nothing but flannel

so let's do it like they do on the cw channel

The tumpet 🎺

It's Tumpet Tuesday. Bwaaa.

“My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer's tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it's "your job" and your wife should "get up." What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out, but despite this— despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright, cold morning of his wife's one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband.”

- Lindy west; the witches are coming

"Ah yes! I am here to annoy you!"

The Lindy West reading hits differently when read in Bert's voice, and followed by Ernie's laughter.

Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

Me living on a limestone aquifer: So like, water. That's just what water is.

how does the water from yon limestone aquifer taste? if i may so inquire

Like calcium.

Bad. Not exactly gritty but does coat your tongue. Will create a film when boiling something mildy acidic like tea or tomato soup.

Very good for your teeth though! That calcium is going straight into your bones!

It will also make your fancy teas taste Very Incorrect.

It will also kill your coffeemaker every couple of years. But when you replace with the same model, you wind up with a good collection of spare carafes and filter baskets.

(Yes, you can descale your coffeemaker. No, you can't do it often enough.)

As an occasional visitor to Star Wars fandom, here are some things I would like to see come out of Rogue One:

- the fic about the reactions of the Empire’s IT and records management departments when they learn that some trigger-happy general just literally blew up an entire unique archival repository of key bureaucratic data - the comic about the first time some maintenance technician tries to repair something on the Death Star and the guy’s like, ‘where’s the documentation?’ and their boss is like ‘um, well, funny story about that….’ - the in-depth analysis about various mistakes the Empire makes in the original trilogy and how they operate in context of an organization that has just, I repeat, LITERALLY BLOWN UP ALL OF THEIR OWN BACKUP DATA. Of course it’s easy for any random hero to impersonate a Stormtrooper! THEY DESTROYED ALL THEIR OWN PERSONNEL FILES.

Rogue One, or, Why All The Empire’s Librarians and Archivists Joined the Rebellion

@earendils @butneverstoptrying

Rogue 2 plot summary: a bunch of Imperial waste management techs go AWOL and steal the Death Star plans back from the Rebels because how else are we supposed to get the dianoga out of the pipes when we have literally no idea where half of these ducts go or what they’re for

they complete their mission but in the end decide not to delete the plans from the main Alliance computers after they’ve made their copy because ehhhhh what if we never had to fix anything on that piece of shit again, what if that, it’s insured right?

This also explains why none of the bridges or giant pits in the floor have railings: literally no one knows if they’re supposed to be there or not, and once someone tried to drill into the floor to install some and destroyed the main air circulation wiring for half the station, now everyone just has to be real careful all the time

It also means that when they built the second Death Star in ROTJ they had to start entirely from scratch, yikes

in the end they decide not to delete plans from main Alliance computers because their heist crew contains one records manager who’s like ‘look, we’re SUPPOSED to have redundant data backups, this way we’re not even paying for the storage!’

Paging @fahye because PUBLIC SERVANTS

this post has made the rounds amazingly on my dash and now it’s LITERALLY CALLING MY NAME. pour one out for that tfa fic I was writing about della calrissian, disgruntled member of the new republic capital electoral commission, just trying to do her job and not get involved with the rebellion AGAIN. never doubt my commitment to space bureaucracy.

I LOVE PEOPLE!

(Seriously, who’s up for a zine/anthology/cooperative AO3 series (group? tag? IDK) around the theme of various public servants sabotaged the Empire, joined the Rebellion, or avenged the besmirchment of their domains. #public servants of the empire, or the like.)

I love the way the glaring fucking design flaw that’s been pointed out since New Hope came out (your flying doom-planet that you’re going to use to subjugate the galaxy will explode entirely into so much space-dust after a love-tap from a single-pilot fighter if it’s in the right place? were you people high when you designed this?) just got shutupshutupohmygodshutuped away with Secret Rebels Sabotaging Things.

And it explains so much else, about everything, doesn’t it?

No guardrails over fucking bottomless pits? Some rebel sympathizer on the allocation committee line-itemed half the safety shit right out of the budget.

Helmets with no peripheral vision because fuck you, that’s why? The woman who designed them got conscripted into the job, and the only thing that makes her smile is watching those douchebag noncoms crash into each other in Y-intersection corridors.

Nobody notices there being extra stormtroopers running around? With the way Lieutenant Bob keeps dicking with the schedule, nobody can say for sure there shouldn’t be purple flying monkeys manning the security checkpoints.  He’s run three Emperor Inspection Drills in as many weeks, and just three days ago he put the entire unit on duty at once and left the overnight shift “TBA.” He’s doing more to tank morale than Vader’s temper.  Coincidentally, Lieutenant Bob’s homeworld got hit with a punitive tax hike six months ago, and people are literally starving in the streets.

The guy who checks itineraries and rosters for incoming shuttle flights believed the hype about joining up and seeing the Galaxy.  Turns out fuck literally every actual thing about this job, from officer infighting to civilian casualties to Vader’s last-minute order to have every surface in his on-board suite kitted out with fucking lava lamps, of all things.  Like, they’re in space.  He gets that, right?  They can’t just stop by SpaceMart and pick up stuff like that.  His boss is a dick and he was up all night making lava lamps out of cooking oil and food coloring, and you know what?  The last thing he wants to do right now is check the manifest on the next delivery of cooking oil.  He’s had enough with cooking oil.  He took five showers when he got back to his quarters, and he still smells like fucking canola.  The Wookie and the guy who hasn’t shaved in a month and the guy still picking half a tumbleweed out of his hair can blow up the entire fucking station for all he cares–he will help them plant the explosives, if it comes down to it–so long as they don’t make him talk about the cooking oil he’s signing off on as being delivered.

i promise: however big you think this wave will be, it is bigger

That wasn’t a joke. I aimed my estimate high and then added some.

The wave was bigger.

I like to imagine that, thousands of years ago, humans still stood a (reasonably) safe distance from the ocean during weather like this to watch the waves, hooting and cheering when the spray came closer than expected and left them drenched

The trick: there's as much of that wave below the water, as above. But as it comes to shore, there's less space below the water. So the whole height of the wave gets progressively transformed into energy coming onshore, and BOOOSH!

‘beyond the scope of this paper’ is a dear friend to me. I Am Not Fucking Talking About That

I love it so much, we used to use it with every doctoral advisee we could, "outside the scope of this paper" does not mean "I don't care," though it absolutely can; often enough it means "don't fucking get me started, I have got to finish this very specific thing that is not that, and if I talk about that, I never will."

I feel like all the "they broke weird al" "weird al got serious we're so cooked" comments about the killing in the name cover are missing the point. that is not a broken man. comedy is politics. comedy has always been politics. weird al has been satirizing politics for a long time because he knows the court jester can say to the king what other people can't. by doing a serious cover of an explicitly anti-establishment song that his gen x and millennial audience knows by heart when he's built his career on parody, he's saying this can't be satirized anymore and he's saying it in a very deliberate way that his audience will understand. those aren't the actions of a broken man, they're the actions of a man who is trying to tell you something. are we going to listen?

Born of a polka man, but not a broken man.

Merry Christmas! I give to you: P*E*A*N*U*T*S! I have a few non-Christmas/New Year P*E*A*N*U*T*S that I’m saving for later. I rushed to finish these last night and this morning because I NEED my Christmas M*A*S*H post !! Interesting how they can never get the medical supplies they need but they do have 4 fake beards…

(Finally I have Colonel Potter Peanuts for all of you Potheads out there <3)

These are all available from my inprnt, which is linked in my pinned post!

One of the funny things about LotR is that almost every people in it professes to disbelieve in the supernatural, but because they live in a fantasy world their baseline for "natural" is so jacked up. The Rohirrim are like, yeah, there's a wizard in this tower and ancient tradition that we have no reason to doubt says this mountain is full of ghosts, but walking trees? Short people? I don't think so. Galadriel is like, "Listen I heard you describe what I do as magic and look I just gotta clear some things up, okay." Gondorians are like, yeah, of course the Enemy has spectres of men who lived long ago and never died and can now fly above us and incapacitate us with just their voices. This is just a fact of life, okay? But shut up about this magic weed that makes comatose people better. That's an old wives' tale. Royalty? Press X to doubt.

The people group in Tolkien's work who seem most receptive to magic and least restricted by their own notions of what it can do actually seem to be the hobbits. And they use it to avoid meeting people they don't want to talk to

“I remember” is more romantic than “I love you”

Some people say that there are no stupid questions, which is blatantly false. Of course there are stupid questions, and if you have one, you had better ask it, before you go and do make a stupider mistake. Stupid questions are more important than intelligent ones. I’m willing to bet more people die because of stupid mistakes than because of intelligent ones.

An intelligent question will direct the asker all by itself, in ways that genuinely pursue the right idea. Intelligent questions take time to form, thought and consideration, and that is already the best path, and helps to distinguish better from worse answers.

But a stupid question arrives with such certainty and clarity that if left unasked, you will not go looking for answers; a stupid question often frames its own answer, and is the shortest way to a stupid action.

People with questions they worry are stupid, are usually not possessed of stupid questions. The uncertainty, the desire to ask, these are signs of thought, signs a stupid answer has not seized hold. Concern for making a mistake is the beginning of wisdom.

one of The Many problems with how the general public conceptualizes addiction and recovery is that "rock bottom" makes a really good narrative beat, it's a nice and dramatic second act low point in your classic three act structure to give a character something to make them reevaluate and get their life in order, and the human brain sure likes holding on to Fun Narratives, so even well-intentioned people who don't consider themselves to believe in punitive measures get it stuck into their heads that thee way that people get sober is by experiencing some kind of reckoning of harsh consequences (losing a job or home, overdosing, being rejected by loved ones, getting desperate and feeling driven to do something really awful to keep using, etc). when, if you think about it for like two seconds, basically no one in the world is going to juuust about survive their own personal worst case scenario and think "wow, now would be a really great time to give up my only coping mechanism and voluntarily induce a medical emergency for the next several weeks," that kind of thing is far more likely to just immediately make everything Much worse.

I once saw a parenting blog or something that was written with a very earnest and measured tone seriously give the advice "if your teen is struggling with addiction and won't respond to anything you do then your best move would be to kick them out and cut them off so they run out of other options more quickly" and I just sat there in a kind of mute horror for a few minutes afterwards. like. no that's actually how you kill people. if a child is already in the midst of a mental health crisis, and you then deliberately engineer the situation to give them a second crisis, that is how you kill someone. I cannot stress this enough.