gay subtext is nice but u kno what’s better? explicitly gay characters

Imagine twelve year old Harry not even knowing how awful his childhood with Dursleys had been until he gets to the Burrow.

Imagine him seeing Percy asleep with a book on his lap, and being baffled that a kid might feel comfortable enough in his own home to be so vulnerable in the living room. 

Imagine Molly coming up to the attic to say goodnight to Ron and Harry, and Harry glancing at Ron when he hears her footsteps, trying to figure out what they had done wrong that day.

Imagine him asking George who does all the house chores, and thinking it’s a joke when George answers, “we all do.” 

Imagine Ginny pestering Arthur with questions over the Daily Prophet, and Harry trying to shoot her warning looks to stop it! but then Mr. Weasley looks up and patiently answers every single one. 

Imagine Bill popping in for a visit one evening and Harry being floored when Bill stops to chat with him. 

Imagine Fred chasing after Harry in the yard, playfighting, but Harry actually begins to run for real fear of being hurt. 

Imagine Molly burning something on the stove my accident and tossing it, imagine Harry mentioning to Ron, offhandedly, “she could’ve given that one to me, it’s what I eat at home when I mess up dinner” and not knowing why Ron is horrified.

Imagine Harry seeing what a normal, functioning family looks like, and realizing the absence of love in his own life. 

“What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron’s, however, wasn’t the talking mirror or the clanging ghoul: It was the fact that everyone there seemed to like him.” – Chamber of Secrets

Watch: Michelle Obama’s speech on the Trump tapes should be required viewing for all Americans

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now

holy shit over a million notes. Thank you all so much

Still love this

Chills and tearing up from this

favorite post on tumblr

we made it

https://instagram.com/p/BF6mUDDPI30/

If you have an official diagnosis, you may be able to go to the campus disability services and see if they can help you get placed in a single. I had a situation where my mental health was being negatively impacted by my living arrangements on campus and was able to receive different accommodations by speaking to someone in residential services. Good luck!

  I was so tall.

You were older then.

Can we talk about Susan Pevensie for a moment?

Let’s talk about how, when the war ends, when the Pevensie children go back to London, Susan sees a young woman standing at the train platform, weeping, waving. 

First, Susan thinks civilian; and second, she thinks not much older than me.

Third, Susan thinks Mother.

They surge off the train, into their parents’ arms, laughing, embracing. Around them, the train platform is full of reunions (in her life, trains will give so much to Susan, and take so much away).

Over her mother’s shoulders, Susan sees Peter step solemnly back from his father so that Edmund can swoop in to get his hair paternally ruffled. She meets Peter’s eyes across the space, the way they saw each other over battlefields and tents full of the wounded, in negotiations and formal envoys.

She has always seen Peter when others only saw the king, only duty embodied in a young man’s slight, noble features. Susan can see him now, the way he looks at their father. Once, parents had meant protection, authority, solidity. But Peter’s shoulders are slender, are steady, will be weighed down every moment of the rest of his life. She can see it in him, the unreasonable hopes he had that as mighty a figure as a father might take some of that weight from him.

Their father has one hand on Lucy’s round cheek and he is weeping, for all he is pretending not to. He’s a good man, a portly one, thinner than when they left, but Susan can see the loss in the slope of Peter’s shoulders. This good man cannot lighten the king’s load; he only adds one more responsibility to the towering pile. Susan crosses the space to take Peter’s hand. He inhales and straightens his spine.

“You’ve all grown so much,” their mother says.

Edmund is too young to register, but older now than he was at his first war; Lucy, who had been so young when they had left, grew into herself in a world filled with magic. All of them, they have responsibility pressed into their shoulders, old ropes they can’t even grasp for. No one is asking them to take that mantle on their shoulders, and that’s the hardest part. You get used to the weight. You build your world around it, build your identity into the crooks and crannies of the load you carry.

Can we talk about how much the gossipy young girls who cluster in the schoolyard must feel like children to her? And Susan has forgotten about being a child. She is the blessed, the chosen, the promised. Susan has decades on them, wars, loss and betrayal, victory and growing fields, the trust of her subjects. It was a visceral thing, to have all those lives under her protection and to know that her subjects slept safe, peacefully, on dark nights. Here, on this drab concrete, her people are untouchable, indefensible; her self is vanished, her kingdom gone; she can feel the loss like a wound. She has lost her power, but that trust, that responsibility remains. It circles her ankles, trips her in the school hallways.

She barely speaks to her schoolmates. The first few years back, guilt lives in her shaking hands.

For a long time Susan doesn’t want to be tied down to anything (she doesn’t want anything tied down to her, because she has, it seems, a pattern of disappearing). Peter pours himself into schoolwork and extracurriculars. He wakes and works, excels in his steady way, like he owes someone something. 

Lucy befriends wayward girls like they were shy dryads, sly naiads. Lucy walks the playground with all the bright, sprightly grace of a girl who could find worlds in the backs of wardrobes, and she finds smiles in schoolgirls, finds enough of herself to give away.

Lucy gives faith, Susan gives effort, time, work—there are many differences between them, these two sister queens, but this was one. But for a long time, after they return, Susan doesn’t give anything. She is a queen who has abandoned her kingdom and she feels that in the very bend of her spine. She will build no more kingdoms, she swears. Her shoulders ache under the weight of a responsibility she will never lose and now can never answer to.

It is Edmund, of all of them, who understands. He is the other who gets angry, for all he holds it in these days. He is Edmund the Just, after all, and weighs each word before he says it. She is Susan the Gentle, because she will give, will build; because where Peter is elevated by duty, she carries responsibility in soft hands, on worn shoulders, pours all she has into it.

It is Lucy who makes things more than they are. Girls are dryads and bullies are the cruel kind of wolf. Trees dance and every roar of a city bus is a hallo from a lion who is not tame. That is Lucy’s battle and she is as glorious as her sunrises. It would kill Susan to live her life strung between two worlds. They go on walks together, Lucy and her effortless blaze, Susan’s quiet sturdy stride. Lucy sings, but Susan watches; the trees do not dance. The trees are only trees.

A boy pulls at a girl’s pigtails across the schoolyard, yanks at the bow on the back of her dress. Susan sees a bully and she marches forward as a friend, a foe, a young woman furious and proud, a kingdomless queen. Susan draws herself up, the scant inches of height she will some day supplement with heels her siblings will scoff at. Dripping majesty, she moves across the ground (crowds part in her wake), and steps between the girl and the bully.

Let’s talk about how Susan was reading a book the day they went through the wardrobe; how she found it sitting, neatly bookmarked, beside her bed the day they came back. Her arms still felt clumsy then, her legs too short but also too gangly. She kept thinking about white stags, about if her mare got home safe, after, about the meetings she had lined up for the next week with the beavers, the heraldic university, the stonecutters’ union. She had paperwork on her desk she had meant to get to, petitions and letters from faun children who wanted to come on a field trip to Cair Paravel.

Susan had this waiting for her here, left out on her little bedside table: a penny and dime novel about a schoolgirl romance, half-read. Susan sat down on the twin mattress and took it in her hands. She remembered buying this, faintly (it had been years now; weeks before they boarded the train for the country, years from this weary shaking moment). She had wanted a detective mystery, but this had seemed more appropriate and she hadn’t wanted to look odd at the cash register.

At school, Susan sees a girl in mathematics who looks like a dryad, willowy limbs and distracted eyes. Where is your tree? Susan wants to ask. Is it safe? Is it blooming? She would fight to keep her safe, talk to her guards, go out on diplomatic missions, negotiate with the local woodcutters.

There’s a girl in the back row, shy, steady, who takes the best and swiftest notes in her very own shorthand. Susan finds herself wanting to recruit her for the Narnian scribe service. She shakes herself, but she approaches the girl after class anyway. Susan reads through wanted ads and helps the girl send out applications for internships.

Or another young woman; this one blazes bright, drawing people in her wake as she chases after efforts for raising money for a new library wing or cleaning up some local empty lot for the children. This girl laughs, shakes her mane of hair, and Susan wants to take her under her wing and teach her how to roar.

“Edmund is so solemn,” says her mother, worried, to Susan. “Is he alright? And Lucy seems even less…” Her mother hesitates, chewing a lip.

“Present,” Susan offers, because Lucy still has a foot in Narnia the way none of the rest of them do. Peter still holds the weight of his crown, certainly, and Edmund the load of his mistakes. Susan has the faded ink-stains of a hundred missives, orders, treaties, and promises she never got to send. (She wakes now, some nights, full of nerves for a formal audience the next morning, and remembers it is just a literature presentation. She feels relieved and useless).

But Lucy, Lucy walks in light. She dreams of dryads and when she closes her eyes she can hear them dancing in the wind on the upper boughs of the trees in the garden.

It is a stubborn faith, a steady one, harsh even. Lucy clings to things with two small hands that remember having calluses from reins, remember holding hands with dryads and dancing in the moonlight, remember running though a lion’s wild mane. Lucy grins (it is a defiance, not a grace, not a gift); she bares her teeth and goes dancing at midnight under trees that creak in a storm’s gale (she gets a cold and misses a week of school, for that). Lucy will believe until the end of the world, burning with that effortless faith. 

This is not effortless. “Such a happy child,” their mother says of Lucy, sighing relief, glancing uneasily at Edmund. Susan is not a happy child, but she is not meant to be. She is their stability, their quiet, the little, gentle mother, the nursemaid wise beyond her years. No one looks. They rely, and it makes Susan want to scream.

“Luce?” said Edmund. “Happy? I suppose. She’s more a fighter than any of us.”

Lucy gets up early in the mornings and goes outside to watch the sunrise while she eats her toast. Susan is jealous of her ease, for years; an early riser, a morning person, effortlessly romantic. There are days, when Susan is angry at schoolteachers, or missing her seneschal’s dry wit, days when Susan cannot find even the most glorious sunset to be anything more than just glaring light in her tired eyes. But Lucy, no, every day Lucy watches the sun rise and lets that fill her. Easy thinks Susan, jealous, and she is wrong. 

It is not for years that she realizes how much effort is tucked into Lucy’s bright smiles. The joy is not a lie, the faith is not contrived, but it is built. Lucy pulls herself out of bed each morning. She watches the fires of the day climb and conquer the sky, and dares her world to be anything less than magical.

Susan tired of bullies before she and her siblings had even finished with the White Witch’s defeat. She will stand it no more in this world than she had in Narnia. For the cruelest bullies: she digs up their weakness, their secrets, and holds them hostage. The misled, the hurting, she approaches sidelong, with all the grace of a wise ruler, a diplomat’s best subtle words against a foreign agitator with borders along an important trade route. The followers she sweeps past, gathers up, binds to her own loyalties. They may be allowed to become her fine guard if they deign to learn kindness, or at least respect.

Susan joins the newspaper because extracurriculars look good, and if she is going to live in this world she is going to do it well. She finds she likes it. She rubs ink into her palms and feels almost at home. She hunts down quaint little school stories overzealously, like the detectives in the novels stacked by her bed, like a queen hunting down secrets at her court.

(Lucy contributes poetry to the arts section of the paper. Susan only reads them on weeks she is feeling brave, because, like all of Lucy, her poetry picks you up and takes you away). 

When Susan wakes up, these nights, dreaming of ink on her fingers, she doesn’t expect to find her desk at Cair Paravel. Or, when she does, she squeezes her eyes open and looks around at the newspaper room on submission night. The copy editor fumes quietly, a writer hyperventilates in a corner, another clatters away. An editor coaxes into the telephone, talking with their printer, negotiating for time. It is not quite a council of war, but it is hers. It is not quite a kingdom, but Susan’s still a child, after all. She has time to grow into this skin.

When Caspian’s horn calls them home, the Pevensies stand in the ruin of their palace. Thick, old trees, not saplings, not young wildflowers, grow over the graves of the petitioners Susan had never gotten to meet with, of the children who had written her letters in careful, blocky handwriting. When I grow up I want to be as beautiful as you. 

Susan, standing in ankle deep grass on the cracked flagstones of the home she had spent most of her life in, has the gangly, growing limbs of an adolescent. A horn’s call (her horn) is ringing in her bones, centuries too late. That call has always been ringing in her, really, shaking her hands, reverberating her lungs, since the day a queen tumbled back through a wardrobe and into a life she hadn’t missed.

Susan stands under a mound, in the ruins of a castle, on a battlefield. Her Narnia has grown out of itself, grown into itself; her subjects are gone, but there is an army at her feet who trusts her. She left, but they did not lose faith. Susan does not feel absolved. She feels guiltier than ever, to know they kept faith she didn’t deserve. She wonders if this is how Aslan feels about Lucy.

The very shape of the land has changed. Mounds stand over old broken tables and rivers have become deep chasms. Her body is the body of a growing child, and her heart is that of a widow twice over.

When Susan leaves Narnia for the last time, she steps back into a world where she has ten articles to review by Monday, an essay due the next week, and a mathematics test on Friday. She has dishes to do and Lucy to keep an eye on. She wants to weep for days, but instead she goes home, plucks a detective novel off her bedside table, and tries to remember where she left off.

Susan doesn’t cry, but she hardly sleeps. That call is still humming in her bones (it always will, even when she learns to call it by other names). Susan snaps at her lioness, her dryad, her scribe; her bully boys flee at her short temper. One of her friends finally takes her aside. “What’s going on, Su? You can tell me.”

She forgot people could give you kindnesses back. “I lost something important,” Susan says, and the tears finally start to fall.

She weeps into her friend’s shoulder while she murmurs comforting things. “I’m right here.”

You are, Susan thinks. And so am I.

There is wind in the treetops. They are only trees.

Susan was the chosen, the blessed, the promised. She does not want to be promised. She wants to promise, instead, to take the hands of brave friends and try to build something new. 

The only thing that will compare to this grief will happen years later, a train crash, a phone call to her flat to tell the awful news to the next of kin. Now, losing Narnia, these four are the only ones here who will remember that world. There is a loss in that. There is a fragility in that which terrifies.

After the crash, Susan will be the only one left to remember them.

Maybe it was a shunning and maybe it was a mercy, to leave Susan to grow old. She had had too many kingdoms ripped from her aching fingers to be willing to lose this one, so instead everything else she had was taken away.

Maybe it was an apology. Maybe a lion could better understand mourning the loss of a kingdom than the loss of siblings. Maybe he thought he was being kind. 

As Susan grows, her schoolmates stay in touch, young girls who grew in her shadows or strode in blazing light before her (both are strengths), the ones who walked with her and learned majesty from her older bones. She gets letters from her bullies, too, the ones she subverted through threats or kindnesses. Some are fathers, railway operators, preachers, bookshop cashiers. Her girls are mothers, some, or running libraries, charities, businesses from behind the throne; one is a butcher’s apprentice of all things, another battling her way towards a Ph.D.

One married a farmer’s boy with a warm smile and moved out into the country. Susan goes out to visit and they go walking through her fields and little copses of trees. The trees are only trees, and some of Susan’s heart will always break for that, but she watches her friend’s glowing face as she marks out the edges of her land, speaks with her hands. The trees are only trees, but they are hers.

Susan goes home by train, the country whisking by outside. She pours over notes, sketching article outlines in her notebook, deadlines humming in the back of her mind. Her pen flicks over the paper, her fingers stained with ink. This is hers.

Years later, Susan digs up old copies of her school papers. She goes through them, one by one, and reads each of Lucy’s poems.

Cross-legged on the floor, she cries, ugly sobs torn out of her, offered out to ghosts of sisters and brothers, parents, Narnian children grown old and buried under ancient trees, without her. Lucy’s poems take her away (they always do) and leave her weeping on her living room floor in her stockings.

Susan stacks the papers neatly, makes herself a mug of tea and goes outside. The trees are only trees. This is a curse. This is a blessing. She breathes deep.

Peter was the only one who understood as well as she did what it was to be the rock of other people’s worlds. She remembers Edmund every time rage swells in her stomach, every time she swallows that rage down and listens anyway.

On early mornings Susan rolls out of bed, all groans and grumbles, and scribbles down a thought or two about her latest article if anything percolated during the night. She does her make-up on her apartment’s little balcony. Susan watches the rising sun light the sky and dares her life to be anything other than hers. 

Companion to this post. 

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.

This is my new favourite story.

When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring. 

Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.

Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.

Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.

THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING

vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core

humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast

vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast

humans: hahaha yeah

humans: it did tho

vsa: IT EXPLODED

humans: it exploded twice as fast

I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.

Yeah, I love this.

Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.

All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.

klingons: okay we don’t get it

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip. 

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how. 

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want. 

klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation

Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.

you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.

“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.

“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten it.”

Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.

Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”

“That was ONE TIME.” 

There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity. 

And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”

There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”

reblog for new meta.  RE that last line: McGuyver. 

“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words. 

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’. 

This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg

The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans

The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light

This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.

“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”

I just died

I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”

Oh please please someone write this

sharing the joy that is this thread

Oh god yes.

This is why Q loves them and the rest of the Continuum hates them. It’s like, 

Other Qs: Oh dear god, did you see that? They somehow managed to leap into the core of the multiverse where everything happens at once, and instead of going insane, they mutated into salamanders.

Q: I know! That was awesome!

Other Qs: Oh shut up.

Q: Let me show you this reality-recording I have of one of them managing to make time go backwards!

Other Qs: Oh god now you’ve gotten him started.

I feel it’s only fair to point out that in DS9, when the ship gets taken over by a weirs rot of space parasite that was lonely, O'Brien immediately considers it to be a puppy in need of love and BUILDS IT A KENNEL OUT OF PROGRAMMING SO THAT IT CAN LIVE ON THE PLATFORM WITH HIM.

#NoWomanEver

Calling this kind of behavior “street harassment” almost sounds overly polite. In many instances, it’s stalking and intimidation. And no, many women are not going to tell these men that they’re feeling threatened - because doing even that could get them physically assaulted or even killed.

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

VIDEO

Finally. People need to realize aliens aren’t the answer for everything (when they use it to erase poc civilizations and how smart they were)

(via TumbleOn)

What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

And the Iroquois told Europeans that squirels showed them how to tap maple syrup and no one believed them until they caught it on video

Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.

Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄

ALL OF THIS.

Would also like to add that attributing “alien help” to almost all of ancient humanity’s achievements is absolutely 100% racist, because it suggests that humans - especially not-white humans - were too dumb to figure out things like advanced astronomy and complex mathematics on their own, because they would’ve needed the help of White Men to Achieve Such Great Things. 

Dear Millennials,

Do you hate the way Baby Boomers talk about you?  Well, I want you to remember something:

The Baby Boomers were also the generation of the Hippies.  And the so-called Greatest Generation said the exact same things about the Baby Boomers as the Baby Boomers say about Millennials.

The exact same things.  The only thing missing was the word “selfie”.

Hippies/Baby Boomers were called lazy and entitled.  They were called selfish and self-important.  They were treated as if they didn’t know how to work or show proper respect for their elders and everybody thought that they wanted some sort of special treatment.  The Baby Boomers were perceived as this group who thought everything was all about them.  If you asked the Baby Boomer Hippies, at the time, they’d say they were just exploring sexuality and fighting racism and trying to do away with the old ways because the old ways weren’t working.  They fought and they protested and they were passionate.

Then, to borrow a phrase from The Dark Knight, “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.”  That’s what happened to the Baby Boomers.  But, there’s a third option.

Remember.

Remember what this feels like.  Remember what it’s like to be in your teens and twenties.  Remember that it’s not easy.  Remember everything the past generation says about you.

Because there will come a day when the Millennials are in their 30s and 40s and 50s.  Where the President and Congress will all be Millennials.  Where you will be the establishment.  You will be in charge.

And there will be people of your generation, your age group, who will look at the Post-Millennials and say “Look at how selfish and disrespectful they are!  What is wrong with their music?  What is wrong with their hair?  They can’t be separated from their technology for one second, can they?!  People in my generation knew how to work hard!  They weren’t lazy and entitled like these kids are!”

It will happen.  Don’t let it.

Fight it.  Fight for yourselves now but, when you’re older, fight for the next generation.

Break the cycle.

If you hate the way you’re treated by the older generation and the media, then remember that and don’t do it to the ones who come after you.

Extremely true.

I <3 William Shatner on Twitter

I love how they respond to him, as if he is actually a captain, even more.

Nasa confirmed for huge fucking nerds

This is awesome and priceless and people that work on space stuff are the best people of all time.

Honestly this just about brings me to tears.

Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols and all the rest of the original Star Trek cast and crew had no small role in making the moon landing as important as it was.  A few years before they set that lunar module down, this little TV show came along and fanned the dream into wildfire with an image of what humanity in space could actually look like—not only peaceful on our own world, endlessly curious, and prosperous enough to pursue it, but an active force for good in the greater universe.  Carrying not what’s most toxic about us, but what’s best about us out to the stars.

Everybody who has worked at NASA or any other space agency for the past 50 years is waiting for the day when that unmanned probe doing a flyby on a comet can be controlled from the bridge of a space-faring vessel.  When we’re not just looking at that comet through a color-coded sonar map, but we can look out a porthole and see it tumbling by with our own eyes.  When as a species we can finally outgrow hate and fear and violence, and turn our faces with joy toward all the beauties and wonders that lie waiting to be discovered.

And every time he does this, Shatner is reminding them of what that hope feels like.

This was too great to not repost.

shoutout to paris hilton for not abandoning her ‘micropig’ 

when it turned out that it was a normal piggy who grew up to be a big fat fatty piggu

Actually that’s pretty standard size for a micro pig. Pigs are ENORMOUS, dude. The average pig on a farm is 7 feet long and over 700 lbs. A normal pig would be much bigger than Hilton.

EDIT: This is a photo of the world’s smallest recognized breed of pig, the kune kune. I’m sorry cartoons lied to you all.

This is the pot bellied pig, another famous “small” breed.

This is your average adult pig.

Big ole’ pigs.

Wild boars can feed people for a very long time! I believe this one was 1800 lbs. (largest piggy ever was about 1,984 lbs)

I NOW KNOW WHY WILD BOARS WERE SO DANGEROUS IN THE DARK AGES HOLY SHIT; RICHARD III I TAKE BACK ALL THE TRASH I TALKED ABOUT YOUR HOUSE CREST GOOD GOD THAT’S TERRIFYING.

So my senior friends wanted to do one thing before they graduated…

omg

I have watched this 15 times and I need more

I am oddly aroused

Your queerness does not need forgiving. Full stop.