thebestsophist on Michelle Obama’s speech

protip to aspiring authors: if you ever need to feel better about your writing then please just read any of the best-selling erotica titles on amazon

you’re fine

i love the internet

im not petty and i dont see the point in holding a grudge. Anyway would you like to come into my cellar and taste a fine vintage

me in a silly hat, completely wasted: boy would i!

Time for another political essay. If you’re not an American citizen or able to vote in this upcoming election, my apologies.

I make no secret that I fucking despise Donald Trump. I actually like Hillary Clinton, which seems to be a weird rarity considering the amount of good work she’s done and the fact that all of the bad press about her is the result of the Republicans trying (and failing) to tear her and her husband down for thirty years.

Trump is now trailing far behind Clinton, which I consider a cause for celebration. But it is NOT a cause for complacency.

The biggest landslide election in US history was the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920, when Harding won with about 60% of the vote to his opponent’s 34.2%.

Some polls are reporting Trump with as little as 35% of the popular vote right now.

If turnout is large enough and loud enough, we can make Donald Trump the least supported major candidate in US history. Since the recording of him bragging about sexual assault came out, he has turned to dragging the whole election into the mud by striking back at Bill Clinton’s affairs; the usual goal of that kind of tactic is to drive down voter turnout. Trump’s band of Redcaps is pretty much guaranteed to vote, so they figure if they reduce turnout enough, they’ll win.

I want their plan to fail. I want their plan to fail so fucking spectacularly that NO ONE will dare to run for President on a platform of thinly-veiled fascism again.

The Republicans thought the House of Representatives was safe this year. In 2010, they gerrymandered the shit out of district lines to keep the House safe for them for at least ten years. But there’s a problem with gerrymandering: if the demographics shift unexpectedly between censuses, then suddenly a lot of districts wind up flipping against the party that the gerrymandering was meant to support. And Donald Trump is driving away the Republicans’ most secure core of voters, the evangelicals. And as I’ve said before: Congress is MORE important than the presidency.

If turnout is strong enough, and if people vote down ballot, the possibility exists for a massive upset. A Democratic presidency, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate. They’re within our grasp. All you need to do, voters, is show up.

Motherfuckers don’t want you to vote. Young people, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks–they want you to be scared away, or to be convinced that voting doesn’t matter. They want your voice silenced. Don’t give the fuckers the satisfaction of letting it happen.

GO VOTE. VOTE DOWN-BALLOT. MAKE TRUMP THE BIGGEST LOSER IN US HISTORY.

IF YOU CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO VOTE OUT OF CONVICTION, THEN DO IT OUT OF SPITE.

the 2016 Democratic platform is the most progressive political platform ever advanced by a major party in this country. it is important and it is necessary. it has little chance of going anywhere if the Democrats don’t take back Congress. at the very least they MUST take the Senate; if at all possible, they need to take the House. THEY MUST. Every single one of President Obama’s legislative achievements? That happened in his first two years, when the Democrats had Congress. The last six years of vicious gridlocked GOP hell were enough; let’s not repeat that. VOTE DOWNTICKET Vote for the platform and the causes that matter to you GET OUT AND VOTE

I love how when you first get a tumblr you reblog every popular post and you think they’re all so funny and then your humor slowly degenerates until all you reblog are vague neo-dadist memes that make no sense in reality but by then you’re too far gone into this hell site to even think about what could possibly be funny about vaguely ominous Craigslist ads

mod post

Ok guys, I don’t know how original authors are finding this blog because I don’t share the url around, and I have no idea whether tumblr considers what I’m doing wrong enough to warrant deleting me (because if the authors deleted their fic, I’m not sure what claim they still have over it?). But I’ve been getting messages and blocking people, and I just want you all to know that I’d never voluntarily delete. If somehow that happens, just keep checking #kazerfic. I’ll post whatever my new url is there if I have to.

As one of the authors who you have decided have no say in whether the fic they deleted can be reposted without their permission –

Fuck. Off.

I deleted my fic for a reason, and the reason is that Patrick Kane is an accused rapist and I regret writing about him. I don’t want people reading my words about him and thinking that he is in real life the way he is in fanfiction. I don’t want people to read this fic. It was my choice to take it down, and it was my choice to keep it off the internet and not give it to people in private.

Don’t fucking repost my deleted fic. You don’t have my permission.

I just want to let everyone know that we’ve done a pedigree analysis of a force-sensitive family, and come to the conclusion that turning to the dark side is a simple recessive X-linked Medelian trait.

I’m so happy you’ve done this. 

Had a few minutes before class, so I made a pedigree. 

Squares are males, circles are females. Shaded in indicates the dark side; I also put force sensitivity as the blue border, although this pedigree isn’t really very informative about that. There’s a potential but so far unconfirmed branch of the Skywalkers shown in grey. 

X-linked recessive for the Dark Side isn’t conclusively proved here, but it’s the simplest explanation. Leaving aside whatever’s going on with Anakin’s father (or lack thereof): his mother would have been a carrier, and he would have gotten the copy of her X that had the Dark allele. Since he only has one X, that single copy would have been expressed. Neither of the twins shows it; Luke because he got his X from Padme, so he isn’t even a carrier, and Leia because she did get one copy from Anakin, but it’s recessive so we don’t see it in her. But then Ben gets his X from her, with a 50% chance of inheriting the Dark allele. Sadly, that means that if Leia and Han had had daughters, they would have been fine. But the inheritance of the trait shown in the maternal grandfather is a classic, if not completely conclusive, pattern of recessive X-linked traits. 

Force sensitivity is harder. If it’s a simple trait, with just one gene, this pedigree would suggest that it’s dominant; if it were recessive, then Anakin’s mom, Padme, Han, and Rey’s hypothetical mother would all have to be carriers. But if it’s dominant, which this pedigree would kind of suggest, then you’d never get a force sensitive child born to non-force sensitive parents, which isn’t my impression of how the universe works. That, along with the amount of variation in how force sensitive individuals are, suggests to me that it’s a complex trait controlled by a lot of genes. Plus, the whole midichlorian thing makes it more complicated.

when the machines rise up to enslave humanity, and the only hope is to break their code so badly it no longer functions, tumblr staff will step forward and say “it’s our time to shine”

#s5 of poi right there

I like how Bethesda manages to be more progressive than most of the games industry by doing as little work as possible.

Unnamed npcs like bandits are randomly assembled from the available body features, which inadvertently leads to more balanced gender and race representation, because every physical attribute has an equal chance to be chosen. In Skyrim, marriageable npcs are marriageable no matter what the player is, because having a single “marriageable” box to tick when coding npcs is easier than having to check for multiple variables like race and gender in the player.

No one in any bethesda game will treat you any differently or even speak differently other than “he” or “she”, and even then a lot of dialogue uses “they” or your characters titles rather than your pronouns to save dialogue lines.

It is literally less work to just represent everybody equally. The next time a game dev tries to say they don’t have the resources to include more diverse representation, you push that shit back at them because that shit is bullshit.

Lazy FTW!

It’s so weird sometimes reading discourse about media outside of tumblr, because there is this barrier that comes from refusing to see social justice implications that are so god damn apparent. Like when I see people elsewhere saying over and over that Kylo Ren is hugely disappointing because he seemed like a scary badass and it turns out he’s a whiny kid throwing a tantrum, I’m baffled. Because that’s the point???

Because entitlement is terrifying and hurting people isn’t actually cool or manly. Doing horrible grimdark things doesn’t make you an awesome badass; most of the time it makes you a tantrum-throwing child fixated on your own preciousness. The movie just presents that without comment and it’s SO CRAZY to me how many people could watch that and come away from it without understanding what’s so evident. 

Like I’m sorry the last several years of television and movies have programmed you to believe that the white boy villain all in black is such a necessary and important fixture that he must be the coolest thing in the entire story, but the fact that Kylo takes his mask off when he’s facing down Rey is not a misstep along the way, it’s the fucking destination. The entire fucking POINT is that he is small and weak while she is awesome and strong. Being a shitty person doesn’t make you more grown up and more of a badass. Doing the right thing makes you awesome in the face of other people’s fuckery.

It’s just so strange that there are people who need to have this explained, I don’t GET it. It feels so fucking blatant.

who else is ready for the most brutal slaughter in cinema history?

star wars doesnt stand a fucking chance

teach a man to fish and he’ll forget who you are and then he’ll see you in a bar a month later and he’ll try to seduce you by telling you things he assumes you don’t know about fishing

18 Real Things Donald Trump Has Actually Said About Women

only millennials take pictures of their children

my parents only painted impressionistic portraits of me, as all good parents should

i love a good joke

then you should check out your blog

wow just got roasted

I love sincerely arguing over citation formats. On that note APA format is absolutely the best and easiest.

enjoy making a cover page for your fucking 2-page paper while i’m over here with the superior MLA format (Magnificent, Logical, Astonishing format) eating up multiple lines on the front page to bump up my page count. MLA is not only the most efficient, it is the most environmentally responsible option. the earth is dying and my grandchildren will know that it wasn’t my fault

Y'all can go eat a shoe. Chicago is where it’s at.

Chicago ruined citations more than they ruined pizza