your yearly reminder that Baby It’s Cold Outside is a song about a woman having CONSENSUAL sex, at a time when premarital sex was frowned upon. The female singer is offering up the token demurrals society expects her to, because it’s expected, not bc she doesn’t fully intend to stay and have awesome sex with a dude she’s into. The male singer knows this, and is in turn offering her an excuse to give to the neighbors in the morning (“it was too cold for me to go home, the only responsible thing to do was spend the night at his place. because of the weather, get your minds out of the gutter”). A 1950s audience would have understood all this, but the nuance gets lost in a modern age where women are actually allowed to say yes when they mean it.  

Also the “hey what’s in this drink” thing was a common joke at the time, where the punchline was that there was in fact nothing in the drink. the woman’s making a joke that she wouldn’t do this if she was sober, oh goodness no! it’s only a joke bc both she and the man are in on the punchline: she is sober, and is only staying bc she wants to

my tags: The female singer IS saying yes but using an outdated social script that doesn’t translate well to the 21st century. this song was funny and sweet to 1950s audiences bc it was about two people having fun and hooking up, and using the winter weather as an excuse

#it’s a fun song about having fun sex while being snowed in together. which as i say it i realize is ABSOLUTELY a fanfic trope  #they were SNOWED IN TOGETHER. and there was only ONE BED  #OH MY GOD THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED 

It was written by a guy and his wife! They performed it at parties! It’s the song they sang to kick people out of their house at the end of parties! The wife loved it so much and was totally pissed when her husband sold the rights to it.

And that line, as explained, is literally fine! It’s the same way people jokingly say they’re “sweating through through their eyes” instead of saying “crying” because crying over a romantic movie like The Notebook is considered lame or whatever (not true!).

It’s a wink-wink-nod-nod situation in which everyone knows the truth and the punchline is: Society’s Expectations Are Nonsense.

That line, even interpreted with today’s standards is fine BECAUSE it’s basically satire. There’s a lot of older songs that don’t age well, but this ain’t one of em

"Witches riding non-broom cleaning implements" gag always funny, congratulations to everyone who has ever made some variant of this joke, please keep making it

thinking abt a witch perched on a roomba, spinning through the air...

having adhd means i get special vip access to new emotions, such as Evil Boredom. its boredom but it turns me evil

lmao I do love that Loki’s evil plan for ruling earth was to…end war. 

IKR

Why isn’t this talked about more?

Exactly

omg yes all he wanted was for us to stop killing each other all the time XD

Me on a friday night

“The power’s out because what.”

don’t awoo

“don’t appropriate wolf culture” this zoo is run by fucking sjws trying to create some kind of safe space bullshit

But how agitated do the wolves get? Do they just stare at you like some humans do when you attempt to speak their language?

According to the local sanctuary, howling is how wolves establish territorial barriers and  unknown howling can trigger “OH SHIT WE’RE BEING INVADED” panic attacks.  Some of the animals have to be given canine vallium during coyote season out here because they get that wound up. 

It’s less of an issue if they can see the offending human, but it’s still very upsetting for some animals.  and even if it’s not panic-inducing, you’re still being LOUD during what is probably wolf nap time- Wolves are crepuscular and want to sleep during much of the day.

So yes, howling can be triggering for wolves, in the clinical sense, and you need to be quiet around them

every time someone is like ok make your christmas list im like well suddenly it turns out ive never desired anythign in my fucking life

this is literally how i feel

Family: what do you want for Christmas?

Me: idk, dragon stuff?

"But won't children be confused by all the LGBT-"

Yesterday I saw a mother with a baby carriage, being followed by a girl of about 4-6 years old on a bicycle. The kid started ringing her bike bell like RING RING RING RING RING RING RING, and the mother turned to look behind them to see whether they were being followed by a cyclist who desperately needs to pass them for the sake of everyone's safety.

And the little girl - who just rang the goddamn bell herself 5 seconds ago - also turned to look.

Kids are confused by everything at all times. They don't know jack shit. About anything.

i remember being like 8 or 9 and being told that my dad’s ex-wife was no longer diane and we were to address her as daniel now. my reaction: “ok.”

me and my brother later had a small discussion about whether that could happen randomly (conclusion: no, he probably had to file papers or something) and whether daniel should now be referred to as dad’s ex-husband (conclusion: yes but only to see the face he’ll make) but at no point did we find it like... alarming? the world is big and weird. we were used to it.

finding out a sorta-relative could just change genders off camera, as it were, was a whole lot less head-splodey than finding out there were no squirrels in australia!

There’s no what

Sometimes kids are so oblivious or just don’t care, but oftentimes it’s they’re just more accepting. They don’t need hard answers because they’ll accept the easy one. I remember learning a lot of words for the LGBTQA+ and otherwise and my only reaction was “oh, so there is a word for it. Neat.”

i always forget my grandma used to be a clown so it caught me the fuck off guard when she saw this

and no hesitation saying “oh it’s that creepy clown- oh he’s drinking that’s against clown code”

1. ARE YOU NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN YOUR GRANDMA’S PAST CLOWN CAREER? 2. WHAT’S CLOWN CODE??????????????

Clown code.

I call a lot of y'all clowns but it turns out that’s too good for you since even they live by a code.

Love seeing people debate how to make a cup of tea because even though I don't drink tea, I also have strong opinions on the 'right' way 😂

Okay so what DO you think is the right way??

reblog to give your mutuals tiny Chilean good luck pigs

I am Chilena!! 🇨🇱 and this is true, I have some myself!!

They don’t just come as a tiny pig, though. My mom has a really big one we use as a rice holder pot, and they can also be bigger, like this:

Chanchito < CHANCHO 🐷❤️

morticians

something sad but also kind of sweet ive noticed about human trait mirroring (i.e. seeing someone regularly preform a physical or verbal action and adapting it as your own) is that even years after a person has stopped being in my life theyve still left pieces of themself within me. i still smile and wave like my childhood best friend did. i still pull my shirts up to cover my face when im embarrassed because my favorite college roommate did that. ive learned how to be a human being through all those around me, and those after me will likely learn the same way too.

One of my favorite human things

So my husband is back on his medieval warfare and tactics special interest lately, and he was telling me about how so many battles were lost because the knights would just disobey orders and break ranks because they got too excited and just went full Leroy Jenkins. Prey drive switches on and they see somebody running and they just blank out and go.

Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.

It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)

We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.

And I took off after them.

I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.

I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.

Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.

And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.

So yes, I believe it now. People are so unbelievably dumb and the prey drive instinct is absolutely real.

@shizonrhu

@we-are-knight

Thoughts? I have had a few experiences like this before, and you seem the type to enjoy this story.

Yeah, this happened. Actually contributed toward the loss for the French at Agincourt.

It also contributed to Queen Zenobia’s loss to Aurelian’s legions at the battle of Emesa. Her infantry broke part of Aurelian’s lines and continued to pursue, drawing them out of formation and into flanking position by Aurelian’s reserves.

Ancient field-warfare relied very heavily on infantry maintaining formation, as a solid wall of heavy infantry like hoplites, phlangites, or legionaries lined up with weapons and shields ready was a formidable obstacle on any battlefield. One tactic was to try to goad them into breaking formation using archers, skirmishers, and other ranged units. Even though legionaries and hoplites and similar units wore heavy armor and bore heavy shields that were largely resistant to projectiles, lighter ranged troops might be able to piss them off enough to pull them out of formation and into a trap or flanking maneuver. 

The first time I ever came face to face with a bear I was having a conversation with a roommate outside our rented house in Asheville north carolina. Its head popped up over the hood of my roommates van and we looked at each other and I think I said “… that’s a bear!”

Next thing I know I’m at a full sprint in my neighbor’s yard with an axe in my hand chasing the bear into the woods and I stopped and slid like a fucking cartoon character and said out loud to myself “what the FUCK are you doing?”

I honestly don’t think I had a conscious thought until some part of my brain realized that the bear was way faster than me and I wasn’t going to be able to catch up.

Exit pursuing a bear. Legend status.

Really. So much of army stuff is just teaching people to follow commands at all times, under all conditions. Because human beings are bad at that! (So are most other creatures, so it’s not a human thing per se.) This is the reason for drill, repetitive training, development of muscle memory, strict hierarchy, and insistence that you can’t question the chain of command no matter what.

This drive is so intrinsic that “this army is inexperienced, they’ll chase us if we run” or similar ruses were FREQUENTLY used to massive tactical advantage.

This is both useful reference for my writing and an absolutely hysterical set of anecdotes, so thank you all

This is exactly how it went down at the Battle of Hastings (which is mostly famous because it’s the subject of the epic Bayeux Tapestry). Harold (the loser) had the high ground and superior numbers but his forces were undisciplined and fell for the “pretend to be scared and run away” trick multiple times.

@inky-duchess

WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN CHAOTIC

It’s like that mafia crew that made a pizza joint as a front but their pizza was so good they just went legit

UM?

dislike when ppl say to children things like "wait until you live in the real world" or "welcome to the real world" when something makes them unhappy or bad things happen to them. children are people. they live in the same world you do, and their experiences and reactions to their experiences are just as real as your own. comfort them instead of dismissing them

anyway children are real people and should be treated as such

As a child a lot of my interests were put down. I was told it was childish to like things like anime or fantasy or that my desire to one day cosplay should be reserved for Halloween lest I become a freak. Lots of other things.

Then I make it to college. I’m now 21 and just about finished with a huge cross country road trip that I not only paid for but drove almost 5,000 miles over the trip time by myself.

Lately I’ve been reinvesting in all the interests I was told were childish. Last week I bought a dress at Ross because I tried it on and felt like a princess. I wear all sorts of fun jewelry even when I’m in casual clothes. Dragons and butterflies and a bunch of rings. Most of the non fancy shirts I own are fandom tshirts. I’m planning on getting into cosplay once my college savings are a little more padded.

I’ve been dying my hair ginger for a year now, much to the displeasure of certain people in my life because it’s “flashy” and “unnatural looking” but guess what. I’ve gotten so many compliments from total strangers, and from friends and other family. I can look in the mirror and smile because my hair is such a pretty color, which is really nice after growing up and not liking what my natural color was. I pay for the dye and do it myself.

And I’m determined to be the parent who encourages her children to have interests. Like what you want! The only childish behavior is trying to tell unnecessarily tell people that things are childish. Dye your hair! My only rule with hair is you have to generally take care of it or it gets cut short (and yes I will make sure you have access to the necessary supplies it’s just up to you to use them). Wear fun clothes. Experiment. Watch those shows, read those books, oh you want to go to a con? Let’s see what your birthday present brings. Who cares if you sleep with a stuffed animal, I’ve been doing it since I was 18.

Life is too short to let people dictate your interests. Unfortunately a lot of kids live in homes where parents do and I can only hope my generation breaks that trend.