I was born in the exact right generation I love being an unmarried woman in my twenties with my own bank account and no children

This getting reblogged with “and my thirties” “and my forties” “and my fifties”

And to think that it takes very little to make a child happy....

Off topic but this is too good not to share with the world!

That poor excavator operator: DON'T FUCK THIS UP DON'T FUCK THIS UP

[Video Description: a child runs up to a construction site on the side of the road with a big (relative to the child) dump truck toy. they are greeted enthusiastically by the workers on the site, and put down the truck before being pulled away by their parent. the excavator then pulls up a little bit of dirt and puts it into the dump truck toy. the child is jumping up and down, visibly delighted. end description.]

*sends out email I've been putting off* ah finally :). ah that's a weight off my shoulders :). ah I can relax an-- *receives response to email* what the fuck. what the fuck. what the fuckkkk

#fuck we’ve entered turn based combat (via @philologicalbat)

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

You can begin this process at any time, regardless of how old you have become.

“So basically my couch has electricity and I use it to charge my battery powered doorbell”

“Okay that makes sense”

Now explain it to a Japanese samurai from the year 1218

"do you know how waterwheels grind up grain in a water mill using the force of running water? We found a way to create a huge source of force that runs all the time and can transfer its force over long distance. I can tell you in more detail, but that's the basics. Now that is a chime that has a mechanism that one can press instead of having to open the door to let you know that you are waiting to be let in. It requires the transferred force to make the mechanism work and that wire is how we transfer the force to the chime."

i love these sort of posts because they feel like a vision of a kinder and more thoughtful world that I wish more than anything was the mainstream instead of the exception

Dara O'Brien has a bit in one of his standup shows about being transported in time and explaining modern technology

And what I love about it is the bit isn't "haha people from the past don't understand modern technology" it's "haha we don't really understand technology or how to explain it"

And Dara isn't uneducated about this stuff He has a degree in science

But a lot of us wouldn't be able to explain

i'm not going to sit here and call anyone a bad person for not sharing fundraisers on their tumblr blog because i don't think anyone is obligated even a little bit to use social media as the avenue by which they attempt to do good in the world. but something i do think is incredibly crass is the amount of blogs i see who insist on having long bios or pinned posts telling you they will never ever do this and block anyone who asks them to. you know you can just keep your mouth shut and quietly proceed with your regular blogging right? you don't have to announce you are going to block anyone who asks you to help. you don't need to talk about how really you just have too many problems to be able to be concerned with the suffering of people objectively much worse off than you. you don't need to subtly or not-so-subtly perpetuate the unsubstantiated dehumanizing racist talking points about how these people are probably all spambots anyway. you can just choose not to make yourself look like a complete asshole yknow?

“Man, why do all these comic book chicks have daddy issues?”

Tony Stark’s character arc is driven by ambivalence toward his father’s legacy.

Bruce Banner’s powers are the literal, physical manifestation of his alienation from his own capacity for violence due to the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands.

Thor… man, do I even need to explain it?

A better question might be: why are daddy issues only contemptible when it’s a woman having them?

According to color theory, brown has more positive connotations than negative. Brown is associated with nature, stability, and warmth. Also a rich neutral tone goes well with most decor.

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Jo in Little Women: "I find it poor logic to say that because women are good, women should vote. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country."

Hello, I did a thing

how do you just get up and deal with the fact that there’s a last time for everything. there was a last time you sat on your dads shoulders and there was a last time your mom tucked you into bed. there’s going to be a last time you kiss your sister on the head and there’s going to be a last time you hug your best friend. there’s going to be a last time you feel exactly as you feel right now and there’s going to be a last time that person says i love you. i need to lay down

Iain Thomas, The Light That Shines When Things End

yknow when you can tell that someones opinion on the homeless is dictacted by the fact they seem to imagine every homeless person just like. spawned in the back alleys of a city as a fully grown scruffy hobo with no life goals other than scrounging enough pocket change for a hit of Drugs™ . like you suggest that perhaps a homeless person was not always homeless and probably had a life and a childhood like the rest of us and they blank like they genuinely didnt consider it. like they forgot thats a human being too.

You can cut past like 90% of gender essentialism by shifting from "men are like X because they're men, and women are like Y because they're women" to "people are held to different standards, given different amounts of criticism, grace, encouragement etc based on positionality and they change and grow as a result."

"Why not make female heroes more feminine so girls know you don't have to be masculine to save the world" is misguided. The target audience of heroic adventure genre is not children who actually save the world in a literal sense, it's children who want a cathartic outlet for the struggles and injustice they face. And one of the most common types of injustice that many girls and children assumed to be girls are subjected to is forced feminization.

we have to start telling little boys they don't have to be masculine

The best shot of the year

Those in the notes worried about this being AI, it's not - her name is Pan Xiaoting and she's a badass billiards pro