Avatar

Rambles and Fandoms

@ace-and-ranty / ace-and-ranty.tumblr.com

Hi everyone! My name's Laura, or just Lau. This blog has no theme except for stuff I like. Expect WLWs, social justice and random rants when I Must Express My Feelings ;) 29yo | ace lesbian | white | cis
Avatar

SPECIFY WHICH SPECIFIC TYPE OF CREATURE TO THE WIZARD IN THE TAGS BELOW, IF APPLICABLE, OR ELSE HE WILL DECIDE RANDOMLY. YOU GET ONE SHOT AT THIS.

What I like most about wearing glasses is that trees never loose their appeal to me. I swear nothing is as badly affected by myopia as trees. You go out wearing your glasses, and you’re in awe all over again that leaves exist. It’s amazing.

Golden Enclaves/scholomance spoilers

Speaking of Ibrahim and Yaakov. When El asks how Yaakovs doing and its obviously extremely painful to Ibrahim because they cant safely live together. The Dubai enclave opening up to anyone with the mana to help immediately. Waiting waiting waiting and then Yaakov is there, and he brought his slow-moving older relatives and theyre last in and El starts faffing around with chalk to give them time and then theyre there and theyre hugging and they made it and they can live here together now and be safe and be in love and Ibrahim hadnt even known if he'd got the text yet I absolutely bawled my eyes out.

And when Yaakov ran out the scholomance wearing his worn tallit 😭😭😭

There are so few good Jewish characters in general, and he's queer and he gets his happy ending with his "supposed to be his enemy" lover the both of them and they mean so so so much to me!!

Ibrahim and Yaakov are best stealth romance. When they kiss?? When they forget to hide because the gym almost killed them?? And they just forget and they kiss in front of everyone, and El looks at them, looks at this unbridled display of affection and has a fit because she realizes she can’t let her classmates die, she can’t, she just can’t stand it.

We need everyone's help right now to protect the rainforest and Indigenous People

The Amazon Rainforest is under a massive threat. I know you've heard this a million times, but this is different. There is a piece of legislation that will decimate the rights of Indigenous people of Brazil, who have been protecting the rainforest. It's unfathomably bad. It has majority support. And they're voting tomorrow. As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

The thing you can do—and I know this sounds overly simple—is sign this petition—and tell your friends to do the same: SIGN HERE.

As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

Again, this bill has majority support. You may be wondering, why will a petition signed by people who don't live in Brazil make any difference? Because it will give those opposing it political air cover. It will show the world is with them.

But we need a LOT of signatures.

Please do this simple act and spread the word.

Avatar

I'm a "multiple interpretations of a character are valid" person until I see an interpretation that explicitly contradicts canon and then I start chewing on the drywall.

Me: "they are fictional characters and you can have whatever thoughts or interpretations you like! You may be close to the creators intent, you may not! What does it matter! There is joy in the exploration alone"

Also me: blorbo would not fucking say that

“This character is multi-faceted and has many valid interpretations of them, but there are also aspects of them that are so set in stone that if you take them away, you’re basically talking about a totally different character.”

The bathroom subplot in Hidden Figures is dumb for many reasons, but the top one I can’t get over it is... 

Why did her boss vandalize the colored bathroom sign? In a building that, as far as we all know, only has black people in it? How does that fucking help Katharine, you eedjit? You absolute buffoon? If you want a physical symbol to show she is welcome to use the bathrooms at your building ---which is what she actually needs--- then you should be smashing the “whites only” sign at your building

What the fuck are you breaking a bathroom miles away for. What the fucking hell does that even mean.

I’d like to tell you a little story today about why a lot of problems need social workers, not cops.

a long long time ago…like 2010, I worked 2nd shift (2pm-10pm) in a homeless shelter. I worked on a floor specifically for men with addiction and mental health problems. For most of the shift, I was the only staff working. Most of the time, the job was chill to the point of being boring. My job was to do the little things that needed doing, and be always ready to respond if shit went down. Most of the time, nothing much happened.

So one day I’m sitting at my little desk, trying to get up the motivation to organize the food pantry a little bit, and I head SCREAMING.

By the time I’m on my feet, one of the residents was in view. Dude was 6ft 4, with a shaved head, and a SOLID build. He was screaming down the hall, and in his raised fist he had, I shit you not, a blood-covered meat cleaver. He was spattered in blood all over. I knew the man- I knew all the residents. He mostly kept to himself. Sometimes he’d talk to me about his hallucinations and paranoid delusions. (no question these ones were delusions, kids. Man eating pythons can not fit in a half inch radiator pipe.) He had a history of getting pretty worked up.

Switch the camera around 180 degrees. I was 120 lbs and 5ft 4 on a good day, and all by my self. Totally unarmed.

Ask yourself- what would an armed cop do in that situation- alone, with a huge man running at them with a huge bloody knife?

I’m not gonna pretend for one second that my fight and flight instincts didn’t kick in. The ancient parts of my brain that exist to protect me from danger by fleeing or killing something saw this and screamed a great big NOPE.

But by this point I had like 8 years of other training, to. De-escalation training. Training on keeping a cool head in a scary situation. Training that reminded me that I was responsible for the safety of the other 17 men who called this floor their home.

Training that told me that this man was my responsibility, not my enemy.

In short, the opposite of what many police departments train their officers in. They are trained to view people as hostile, to treat their beat like a war zone. To act immediately. I wont say none of them have de-escalation training, but I will say it’s a bit of a useless add-on when they’re taught to go with their gut feeling of whether or not a situation is dangerous.

Because my gut sure as hell perceived a danger.

Anyways, I didn’t run, and I didn’t attack. I rooted my feet and I asked him what was going on.

That was when I saw that he was weeping. He was terrified.

He had bought a new cooking knife off the tv- he liked cooking, and had been looking at it. But one of the side effects of his meds made him clumsy, and he’d dropped it. He’d sliced open the back of his knee, where there’s a huge vein or artery or something- and was bleeding a LOT. 

He was understandably alarmed at the river-like quantity of blood gushing out of him, and had run to the nearest help- me.

In his rush and his fear, he’d just forgotten to put the damn knife down.

The other residents had, thankfully, all stayed in their rooms, because a month before I’d got on several people’s cases for coming out to defend me- with the very best of intentions- during a previous incident. Their motives were good, but de-escalating a situation when other people are ready to throw hands is WAY harder. I’d told them to keep their buts in their rooms unless I actually called for help, and God bless them, every single one of them had done it.

This is the point when I called for help. One of the residents got the first aid kit. One called an ambulance. One gave me the literal shirt off his back because our damn first aid kit didn’t have a tourniquet so we ripped the shirt up to make one.

We helped calm the poor injured guy down, and he got a few stitches, and everybody was proud of how we’d come together to help each other out.

Nobody was hurt beyond that one initial injury. Nobody was traumatized. If anything, the guy who’d been hurt was happier, more engaged with the rest of us, having seen that everyone here would take care of him when he was in need. He hadn’t had much care given to him in his life.

So when you see meme’s of “lol what are those social workers gonna do NOW huh?” please remember that 1) we’ve been out here doing this work ANYWAYS and 2) We’ve been doing it unarmed and level headed, which is better than the cops.

Now, does social work ALSO need reform? Does social work ALSO contain racism and ableism and every other social evil? You bet! Just look at…like anything to do with CPS to look at how these systems break down.

But do not use social workers de-escalation training as some kind of “gotcha” to prove we need armed and militant enforcers on every damn corner. And please don’t let others do it, either.

A better way is possible.

Avatar

the funniest thing in the entire pirates of the caribbean series is definitely that one scene in At World’s End where they have parlay but davy jones is part of it, and rather than have him stand in the shallows or something they get a big bucket of water and have in stand on it on shore

who thought of that idea? who thought “put davy jones in a bucket of water” and had the guts to suggest it aloud? and then who went “hey that sounds like a great idea!”

at some point someone told davy jones their idea was for him to stand in a bucket of water and he agreed to it

*stands majestically in a bucket*

ok but notice the trail of buckets behind him meaning he walked from the ocean through three other buckets of water before he got into the one hes standing in

Avatar

It’s even funnier when you consider how he must have figured all this out in the first place.

Some folks are asking “well, if he can avoid the no-dry-land curse simply by standing in a bucket, doesn’t that ruin his whole motivation?”, but he’s not on dry land here.

The parley takes place on a sandbar - which, for the unfamiliar, is a temporary “island” of sand deposited by breaking waves, unconnected with the shore, that spends most of its time submerged, being exposed only at low tide.

What Jones is doing here is rules-lawyering his curse. Can you imagine the trial and error he must have gone through in order to determine that this would actually work?

“Okay, do islands count as dry land? How about parts of the shore below the high tide mark? Reefs? Shoals? What if I stand in a pool of water on a shoal? Does it have to be seawater, or will any water do? Does it have to be a natural tidepool, or can it be something artificial, like a bucket?”

What I am saying is that there must have been a process.

Pretty sure that this implies that the reverse - a bucket of sand, floating on the water (big bucket with just a bit of sand), would qualify as dry land. That’s absurd, so I’m pretty sure that his lawyer pulled a fast one over the curse governor.

Avatar

It may be absurd, but the text of the film bears it out. Davy Jones can sense the presence of his heart while it’s at sea, but not while it’s on land (indeed, that’s why he buried it on land in the first place: to break his connection with it) - yet placing the heart in a simple jar of dirt conceals it from Jones’ awareness just as surely as burial on land does, even if the jar is on a boat at the time. Suitably prepared vessels filled with dirt absolutely count as dry land for the purpose of Jones’ curse.

Then the reverse should also be true. If he buried it in a jar of water, no matter how far inland it is, he would be able to sense it. So by this logic, any container of seawater counts as not dry land, ergo, the bucket is a perfectly viable loophole.

Avatar

Not necessarily. It’s traditionally a lot easier to accidentally get whammied by a curse than it is to weasel around it - I figure that’s why he’s using multiple layers of indirection here. He’s forbidden to set foot on dry land, but it’s technically not dry land (it’s a sandbar, a non-permanent landform exposed only at low tide) and he technically didn’t set foot on it (he’s standing in a bucket of water). It’s entirely possible that either one of those things alone wouldn’t make the grade.

okay but this all raises one further, very important question: if it’s specifically “dry land” he’s forbidden from, what about wetlands. can Davy Jones fight you in salt marshes? can he throw down in a peat bog?Swamp Battle?

This is the quality content I come to Tumblr for.

could he step on land if his shoes are wet?

No matter how ridiculous PotC gets I will love it. Especially when it results in conversations like this

Avatar

What if he crawls around on his hands and knees, with his feet raised slightly into the air? Can he walk on his hands? Can he ride around in a litter or a wheelchair?

can he be in a wheelbarrow?

What if he flies over dry land? Like in a hot air balloon, or in the claws of a giant bird?

Avatar

What if he’s carried by two swallows using a strand of creeper?

European swallows or African swallows?

this whole thread reads like a conversation between these two:

In fact im not entirely sure that it wasn’t their idea in the first place

It always gets me that. Like. If capitalism wasn’t so absolutely wretched, people could afford to not be the best at their chosen sport.

Right now is so evil, because if you’re not the best, tippy-top, ultra mega bitch of your sport, it’s impossible to make money as a professional athlete. Sometimes not even then, by what I hear! If the fight for survival wasn’t so awful, you could have athletes on all levels of performance, but because the system is what it is, you’re either the best of the best, always, or you’re out. Isn’t that awful?

Had a dream that I was reading a book called The Tiger, about a living city that slowly digested its inhabitants. The title annoyed me because the city was clearly not an ambush predator, but a passive hunter like a jellyfish or sundew. No one knew they were being digested—life in the city just wore them down little by little, and fate always seemed to conspire to keep them there. The book was ambiguous about whether the forces of economic instability and social injustice were supernatural qualities “the tiger” generated to subdue prey or natural occurrences that had attracted “the tiger” to settle in that city as its hunting ground.

wait fuck this was an ABBA dream wasn’t it

The concept of a hard-hitting surreal political horror novel based on an ABBA song is great. Thank you brain keep up the good work.

A friend is worried that people on Tumblr have an increasingly negative perception of adult sexy concepts, especially since we tend to call the attacking bots "pornbots". So I made a poll. :)

(Please reblog if you're also curious what the community thinks.)

wait im curious

this is excluding special circumstances (after going swimming, after doing a hairstyle with lots of product, before/after getting your hair done, etc)!

Of all the things to be peeved by, but that Watership Down quote always makes me feral, because it is such an awesome quote, but I hate, hate, hate that it uses “enemies” twice.

“All the world will be your enemy, prince with a thousand enemies”?? Dude?? DUDE?? That is the kind of shitty repetition you fix right away upon editing! How about “All the world will be against you”? How about, “prince with a thousand foes”?? DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT REPETITION, IT SUCKS AND IT RUINS YOUR QUOTE.