1000 years ago, a great king had his soul infused with the crown so he may rule eternity, taking possession of anyone who wears it. But with each new ‘successor,’ the king took his extra lives increasingly for granted, until one day…..

The crown hit the floor of the blacksmith’s forge, the heavy ringing sound of gold on packed earth echoing long after it should have faded away.

“Melt it down.”

The blacksmith choked, glad that she’d put down the horseshoe she’d been working on. “What?”

“Melt it down,” the Heir repeated patiently.

The blacksmith glanced at the Heir, then to the discarded Crown of Helgrath lying on her floor, then back at the Heir. “Why?” she asked plaintively.

“That thing ate my mother,” the Heir said grimly. “My mother died thirty-nine years ago, when she first put it on, and something else stepped into her place. It’s soaked in blood magic.”

“Magic is forbidden in this kingdom,” the blacksmith said automatically.

“Probably because any halfway competent mage would take one look at that thing and know what it was.” The Heir grinned. “Probably the one thing old Helgrath never thought about; that a royal scion would learn about magic outside the Kingdom.”

“When you stayed at other courts, on your search for a spouse,” the Blacksmith said, horrified. “That’s - that’s heresy.”

“Not for much longer, if I have anything to say about it,” the Heir said, mouth forming a thin line. “Look, it’s five pounds of gold, it’s stupidly, neck-breakingly heavy, and it could be much better used to fund a clean water supply than it would on my head. Especially since I have no intention of being possessed by some greedy bastard who likes to murder his descendants so that he can hold on to power.”

“And fire will destroy the evil magic?” the blacksmith asked.

“Should do, fire destroys most magic. If not, we’ll figure something else out.”

The blacksmith nodded. “You had me at ‘clean water supply’.” Wrapping her hands in her leather apron so that she wouldn’t come in contact with the cursed crown, she lifted it into a metal bucket and swung it onto a hook over her forge fire.

The screaming coming from the bucket was a little disturbing, but it did prove the Heir’s claims.

Either the blacksmith was working on a blank, or this whole scene takes place in front of a horse’s behind. 

If “about 40 years” is the average lenght of rulership, the amount of heris-turned-corpsepuppets posessed by douchbag mc asshole is 25.

This has got to be the worst recipe in this manga yet

So milk and either like that tumblr post with the guy who puts powdered milk in his milk so he drinks more milk per milk...

Or just sweet warm anise milk. 

... For the love of chocolate, just stretch gently. Dance, do weird poses in the shower, act like a cat when you wake up and shamelessly work out the kinks in your body. Wiggle your legs if you stand on them too long. Do half-assed squats. Change how you sit behind the computer every so often. 

I’m overweight, my joints are shit, I don’t like working out, and you know what? I can bend backwards 90 degrees if my lower back rests against something. I can touch my toes while standing with my legs straight. My neck turns both ways. 

Just gently move and stretch whenever you feel like it. Pain means stop. Stiffness means please carefully move me. 

“Irish doesn’t have a word for please, you have to say if it be your will” buddy do I have news for you about “please”

“Irish doesn’t have a word for hello you have to use a shorthand religious blessing” buddy do I have news for you about “goodbye”!

“In Polish the word for car is that which walks by itself” BUDDY what do you think an AUTOMOBILE is?

you have got to understand that your mother tongue is not the model of language. all your words have secret histories and layers of meaning just the same as other people’s words. the word you think of as just a word has etymology, it wasn’t handed down from God as a finished word. English doesn’t have a word for movie you have to either refer to the recording medium or use a short version of “moving picture”, isn’t that cute?

Okay, so, the French word for “potato” is “pomme de terre”, which literally means “apple of the earth”, roughly.

One time, I was talking to my kid, and because I am Like This, I said “apples, or as the French call them, the potatoes of the trees”. Haha. See what I did there?

Anyway, sometimes I tell this story to people, because I think it’s funny and witty. Twice so far, native French speakers have responded to this story with “… FUCK” or words to that effect, because they did not know this. They simply had a sound that referred to potato, and had no semantic content past “potato”. And then they said “potatoes of the trees? what?” and then they thought about French and potatoes and they thought about apples, and about “pomme de terre of the trees” and they actually heard the term “pomme de terre” as adults who knew about apples and etmymologies, and they said “FUCK”.

And I think that’s absolutely beautiful.

Oh! I found a great one of these the other day!

So English has this word – gall – that originally meant bile, but because of the 4 humours theory of medicine, came to also mean, like… spite and irritability, and then migrated into meaning impudence, boldness, nerve. It’s now found mostly in phrases like “I can’t believe he had the gall to stand there and claim…”

Unrelatedly, I was trying to find the Chinese names of acupuncture channels, cuz I wanted to trace their etymology (yes I’m a language nerd don’t @ me). So I happened to look up the gallbladder channel, which is 胆囊, and that one’s actually pretty straightforward:

whereupon I – for the first time in my entire life – actually considered what the word gallbladder means.

Anyway, both Chinese and English are in agreement that you have a little pear-shaped container tucked in under your liver that’s where you keep your bravery. So if you’re ever feeling like you’re lacking in heroism and you don’t know where to find some…

… apparently it’s right here

This is like the time I was trying to work out the etymology of Fallopian tubes and in the process I learned they weren’t originally named tubes as in tubes they were named tubas as in tubas

the instrument

otoh tubas were named after tubes, so I guess it all tracks

Isn’t potatoes based off of the french word to begin with?

Pomme de terre, pom de ter, po te ter, potater, potato?

idk why but i feel like being a punk is for he/hims and doing ballet is for she/hers

Bibliography

Op added sources that make this joke from “is it a joke or is it yet another case of too stupid to live on the internet” to an absolutely delightful experience.

My autistic ass aproves.

i KNOW the sleep tips, google. trust me, i know about the darkness and the light and evil screens and exercise and meditation and not napping. i know “”“how”“” to sleep. what i need you to tell me is how to convince my fuckass adhd brain that i need to give up on doing things for the day and that the hours between midnight and five a.m. are NOT secret free extra time that no one will notice if i steal

Those are secret free time hours, though? It’s just that you’re stealing them from yourself, and you’re the one noticing and paying for it the next day.

Not my scene, but I have to say, after taking in so much anime and manga in my late teens and early twenties, it is such a relief and a delight to see pantyshots and thigh highs on a full grown man instead of a teenage girl.

Because AI image generators create new images by collecting data from old ones, their understanding of what an image is supposed to look like will logically be shaped by those who most frequently upload images online. On a global scale, this means biases towards the wealthy, "western," online, urban/suburban, etc.

"...seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, 'cheese' smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had...

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions. As we increasingly seek our own likenesses in AI reflections, what does it mean for the distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions to become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset? In the AI-generated visual future, will we know that Native Americans didn’t smile for photos like WW2 U.S. Navy Officers?"

Article goes into a lot of detail a lot of people might not know about how Americans are typically taught "uncertainty avoidance" - smiling purely to be reassuring to strangers - but how in much of the world it reads as goofy and stupid to outright menacing.

So if you use AI images, you get that creepy serial killer/customer service under stress smile? 

I literally have an art book where some idiot drew one of those smiles as “innocent and friendly”, whereas it really looks more like “deceptive and about to hurt you”. 

The one thing the american suburban smile is good at: letting you understand why monkeys and apes use it as a threat guesture before they bite your face off.

Quarters only, please [x]

(done in procreate)

Hey, that’s a shoebill, right? Those guys are friendly to humans!

What is it looking at instead?

If there was so much discourse over continents I CAN'T WAIT for you to find out about the south-up map

This is what the earth looks like btw

Ok stop answering to this post with "up and down don't matter in space" cause north and south are not up and down and their orientation doesn't matter on earth either. This is legit what the earth looks like.

Well somebody has a superiority complex. Go to a shrink or something idk

Just in case you're feeling important, our planet also looks like this:

"there's a very good reason we humans tend to draw north up maps" yeah, colonialism and eurocentrism. anyway south up rules

mapposting time post your favorite projections mine is the pierce quincuncial!!!

My favorite map of Earth

Oh I feel like I should be able to fold up the pierce quincuncial into a sort of ball

did someone say fold up into a ball

Waterman is clearly the best except it needs the origami gold lines

If you want to learn about map projections check out

It let's you make your own maps and is very fun to play around with. Here's my Antarctica-centric Mercator map, which reveals the hidden existance of Big Africa

[Image description: a square map of the Earth with Antarctica at the center. The distortion of the map causes Africa to look huge]

I love non-standard maps, thank you for this!

For a second there, I thought I'd read this fic before.

When you have so much to give, but he only wants you for your matrix 😞😢

I currently have 62 tabs open.

get onetab and never close a tab again in your entire fucking life

I have a habit of clicking things that are interesting into tabs, then reading of viewing or listening them. When I am done with them, I close them, but usually, they themselves lead to new pages to open in a new tab.

Of course, at some point, I can't see all tabs, so I can't close all tabs, and I'm not done with the ones I can see.

Some of my tabs have been open for years. Some of them I have not seen in years.

I am currently at a little over thirtythousand tabs.

The numbers in your poll are... a little on the low side.

Either way, if I cleaned things up, I'd probably be in the 80 - 300 range.

... computer starts to glitch a bit if I approach 4000 tabs, btw.

I wanna see if we really are all trans here

It's not a competition!!!

The average tumblr user is nonbinary, good to know

I mean, I'm a cis woman, but if it could be done without medical intervention and societial reprecussions, I'm sure we'd all change our genders now and again.

Just hanging out and chilling as male or nothing in particular and then switching back to female sounds pretty relaxing to me.

If you said yes to the first 3 please explain in the tags what animal it was and what was the damage

With very few exceptions (like a dog charging you and biting you out of nowhere, or a rabid animal attacking in the throws of disease) if you're bit by an animal, it's almost universally the human's fault.

Any time you hang out with animals for any meaningful amount of time the odds are one of them is going to eventually bite you.

I've been bitten (playfully) by both my cats and they don't break skin. I've been bitten by my leopard gecko when I was hand feeding him and he missed and got me. I've been bitten by my mice countless times because they're naturally jumpy as babies and they hate being restrained or picked up but sometimes you gotta. I've been bitten by my bunny because I wasn't giving him enough attention. I've been bitten by my snake when I messed up trying to feed him (that one sucked) and I've been bitten by a hedgehog for being a dumbass and putting my hand in front of its face.

Say what you want, I'm still blaming those musqitoes for biting me.

༓♡ ROUND ONE IS HERE!

Yanno, I can't help but notice that we've had two robot husband polls, but not a single one for any ladies ( At least, not to my knowledge )! I for one think that's a crime, so I aim to change that.

The matchups in this poll were set up via randomizer, but I did tweak a few to feel a bit more fair? I hate to have big names go up against lesser known characters, but it's sometimes just unavoidable... If I forgot any major characters, I apologize. I'm pretty knowledgeable, but TF is a big franchise, and i'm bound to miss something. As a note, i'm not including children or characters that feel too close to children for my own comfort. That's why Gauge, Twitch etc etc aren't present.

Rounds are set to run for 24 hours, and then i'll allow myself a small grace period to prep for the next one. I'll deal with ties and such if and when they arise.

Though i've used particular images for each match up, let it be known that any listing isn't continuity specific. You're voting for all versions of a specific character, not just one! No worries.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send them my way!

➜ Windblade VS. Termagax ✫ Elita One VS. Flamewar

➜ Glyph VS. Aileron ✫ Lodestar VS. Glowstrike

➜ Anode VS. Solus Prime ✫ Trickdiamond VS. Lightbright

➜ Stormclash VS. Rosanna ✫ Jumpstream VS. Blackarachnia

➜ Slipstream VS. Provoke ✫ Javelin VS. Mistress of Flame

➜ Nyx VS. Botanica ✫ Proxima VS. Airazor

➜ Airachnid VS. Quickshadow ✫ Velocity VS. Cryak

➜ Greenlight VS. Dust Up ✫ Skyburst VS. Arcee

➜ Lug VS. Slash ✫ Nautica VS. Nickel

➜ Strika VS. Moonracer ✫ Clobber VS. Firestar

➜ Codexa VS. Chromia ✫ Strongarm VS. Rust Dust

➜ Nightbird VS. Shadow Striker ✫ Pyra Magna VS. Road Rage

This is difficult because all of them are too good and all of them are good in different ways.

Easiest to hardest: Lodestar, a very tall city-sized spaceship woman with a cool design vs villain of the week who happens to have a cool design. Skyburst vs Arcee. I mean, it's Arcee. Poor Skyburst didn't stand a chance. Clobber vs Firestar. Clobber has the sheer force of her personality. Shadowstriker vs cool ninja that isn't always a person Velocity vs. Cryak. The best friend vs the toxic mother. Javelin vs M.o. Flame is cool design vs cool design that bitchslapped Windblade for misguided religious reasons

Edit: Forgot to put in Blackarachnia vs one of the Torchbearers. Strongarm vs Rust Dust. Rust Dust is cute, but Strongarm is wife. Slipstream vs Provoke. Provoke is cute, but Slipstream. I mean, it's Slipstream. Airachnid vs Quickshadow. Sorry Quickshadow. Airachnid is not the missus, but she's certainly the mistress. Nautica vs Nickel. Nautica. Nautica is fave. Lug vs Slash. Lug's had more of a story arc. Nyx vs Botanica. We're heading into uncertain territory here.

Pyra Magna vs Road Rage. This would be a draw, but I have a fave. Codexa vs Chromia. Even closer to a draw. Chromia is Chromia, even though Codexa is Optimus' mom. Glyph vs Aileron. Before IDW 2, it would have been Aileron without question, but now they are both so cute! Still Aileron, though. Augh, why did you make us choose! Proxima vs Airazor. Nerd vs tomboy, but Airazor. Stormclash vs Rosanna. Team Torchbearer twin vs cool spy idol. But Stormclash has the advantage of not reminding people of Hannah Montana. I voted, but did I vote correctly?  I don't know. Strika vs Moonracer. The general who must be worshipped and obeyed vs the cute girl next door. Moonracer is so good. But Strika is too magnificent. Trans lady adventurer who is a wife vs literal godess. This is nearly impossible to decide on, but Solus is my fave. Character wise, it should have been Anode. Trickdiamond vs Lightbright. Yeah, just do this by feel and impulse, otherwise I just can't decide. Greenlight vs Dust Up. I think that Greenlight will win this, in part because the Torchbearers have six of them. Windblade vs Termagax. Optimistic sweet idealist vs extremist beef idealist with MILF potential. I think Windblade, but ugh. By a hair. Termagax is so good though! Elita vs Flamewar. Are you kidding me. You want me to decide between these? Queen Elita vs horrible little gremlin Flamewar? They are both such delights! This is cruel and unusual punishment. Gah!

ps5 brain monday

Oh so THIS is the ps5 post. I can see why you all imprinted on it now that’s hilarious

This is probably me taking things too seriously, but you should choose the ps5 every time, even if you’re not that into gaming.

The girl: Makes ultimatums, threatens to destroy your property with a smile, shows signs of insane jealousy

The ps5: Literally just an overhyped gaming computer. There is the suggestion in the narrative that the problem is that the owner of the ps5 has a gaming addiction or problems with time management, but that isn’t resolved by destroying (one of) their gaming computers, nor is it helpful to keep around a real life version of a yandere. 

Change the locks, then break up. Make sure to have security cameras installed to deal with the follow-up stalking. 

Then work on a healthier game-life balance.