I stood at the end of a dark alley, a flickering street lamp behind me, while the rats scuttled around my ankles.

From the dark ahead, the old Man asked, "you've considered my deal then?"

"my ship for my soul? I've come to haggle."

"that's not how this works."

"it's how it works today," I said.

"A soul is the asking price. Though if you're offering more than one?"

"A soul is a fabulously expensive item," I said "but for a ship? One as fast as my blessed Leviathan? What's one soul to the bounties I could reap instead?"

"a sponsorship?" The old Man wheezed. "You think I'm so hard up for profit that I'll commission a tub like yours for me?"

I grit my teeth, but the insult was useful. More useful than the dealer realized.

"you underestimate the worth of me and Leviathan, why together we've delivered-"

"I don't trust that tub to deliver my mail," he scoffed, "and this is the deal you offer? You and your lowsy old scow as a worthwhile trade for not taking your soul?"

"Leviathan and i are valuable, sir, this is the weight is the transaction-"

"I care not even slightly for your fucking tub. But your soul, only that interests me. And that is the deal before this court."

The rats that swirled around me chittered excitedly.

"My ship calls so high a price as my soul? And yet what do you price Leviathan?"

"To you it is worth all the weight in longing gold, to you it is the price of your immortal soul, to me it is splinters and floss not worth two of the King's pence. Your soul is the cost and I demand nothing else."

"And this is the price?"

"your soul and nothing less."

"Then I have but one clarification, if it please the court."

"A Captain goes down with her ship. It's not a quaint notion, it speaks to the bond. A Captain and ship at linked. When the rigging creaks,I feel it in my bones, when the ship groans with the speed of our flight across the waves, I feel the vibration in my veins. When cannon shot pierces Leviathan's sides, I bleed."

"poetic. Irrelevant."

"not to the asked price." I said, shaking, trying to hold my ground. "You quoted me a price, soul for a ship, as if the two are separate. You derided my vessel, you disparaged my very heart and you think you can take my soul for my ship? Sir you misunderstand; my soul IS Leviathan. And for Leviathan you quoted me, in your exact words; two of the King's pence."

Shaking, barely able to stand, from my pocket I pulled two, thin, coins, rubbed them together, and held them out.

"For two pence, I pay the demanded price for Leviathan."

"That's cute, it's romantic, thinking a ship is linked to the captain, but-"

The rats that swarmed me heaved away, recoiled against him and the shadows he said shrouded in lurched in terror.

Through growling teeth he bartered in a language I could not understand but the court held firm.

In my heart I know this.

I held out an open hand, the King's pence upon it.

A rat scurried up my leg, back, across my arm, and took the warm metal from me, turned to smoke, and drifted away.

The shadows burst, fractured, lifted, a bell dropped to the ground and chimed, clear and loud.

The alley was lighted again.

I picked up the bell. Bronze, once, pocked by shot, too. But the name inscribed upon it, read, Leviathan.

The wind picked up, behind me.

The end

i love sunny days and hate cops. reblog if you love bisexuals

this site hates trans women so fucking much its unreal

at least have the fucking decency to hate us openly dont play around with this bullshit “no i totally support trans women u just gotta watch out man u just gotta make sure they arent horny, or trying to trick people by not being horny when secretly theyre horny, or bullying out innocent funnymen by, uh, being bullied by funnymen”

like fuck just call us trannies and move on

"This is my weird son. He can't climb for shit, but he is handsome and strong."

#cats be like#is anybody adopt that#and don't wait for an answer

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,

I know this post is at least half a shitpost, but this is a bad take that keeps coming around and it's genuinely starting to piss me off.

tl;dr: unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake, the thing that matters is your theme. the worldbuilding elements you use exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

look. in SFF, Worldbuilding Elements (TM) are tools. you are Building A World for the sake of a story. the Worldbuilding exists to illuminate that story- to tell you things about the characters, the cultures they come from, the world they live in. worldbuilding tells you a lot about the things they value, the goals they're pursuing, and the reasons they're doing what they're doing.

you know... your themes? the reasons why people should give a damn about your story?

if you are worldbuilding for a story, food is shorthand. the stupid little wizards and knights eat potato stew because potatoes are hearty, simple, and comforting, and potato stew sets the correct mood in a way that cabbage stew does not. the stupid ship captain drinks shitty coffee because drinking shitty coffee is an easy way to convey that This Person Is Consuming Stimulants For Their Effects, Not The Taste.

it is often wise to use this shorthand when writing SFF. if you deny yourself this shorthand for the sake of REALISM!!!!1!!!, you are making it harder to convey to your audience what your characters want and how they are trying to get it. you are denying yourself a lot of useful tools for characterization and illumination.

now, it's good to know what the shorthand means, and use it with intent. because, yes, potatoes imply the existence of a relatively free and independent farming class, and coffee in space implies the existence of a tropical region where it grows and supply chains to get it to your captain. if you contradict that, you are going to jolt readers who know How Food Works out of your story.

but like. unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake? the thing that matters is your theme. the shorthand you use should exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

you do not have to have a full 30-page ethnobotanical paper for every piece of shorthand you use in your story, actually, any more than you need to leave every honorific and pronoun in an anime untranslated. if you insist on this, a lot of people who would write damn compelling fiction will never get started because they feel the need to justify every small worldbuilding choice they make.

this is a shitty, stupid thing to ask of writers, and insisting on it actually makes stories worse. the thing you need to ask for is writers using their shorthand with intent, in service to their theme- not in service to some ideal of realism that doesn't even work for most of the stories it's applied to.

Jimmy literally

#they’re not technicalities!#they’re the law!#cops say it’s a technicality because they didn’t do their due diligence#if a cop finds evidence in a place he shouldn’t have had access to without a warrant#and the case or that evidence gets tossed because of it#the cop and media will say it’s a technicality#but it’s not!#it’s a constitutional right they failed to adhere to!#and the penalty is that evidence which was found illegally can’t be used 

As usual, @socialjust-ish leaves the gold in the tags and it’s up to me to mine them.

my father has such a fun vocabulary when talking to the cats (a totally normal and not autistic-dad thing to do). when they do something odd, he asks them, “cats, what is your dysfunction?” and when they are in his face he asks, “cats, what is your business?”

he calls their zoomies the “absolute mania of man” and calls my cat- who is a little chubby- a “bumbling bunches of boy.” he often spoils them and loves them. one of our cats is currently running amuck and my father just uttered the words: “he’s gone full banana.”

one of my cats got outside yesterday and ended up getting into a fight and losing his collar. among learning this, my father held my cat and asked him, genuinely, gently, “david, were you robbed? do we need to teach you the self defenses?”

Oh BTW one of the people who took a pup tested and the daddy WAS a German Shepherd. Along with Great Pyr and a dash of golden retriever, which means Tyr is in fact mostly pyr and a little golden retriever, which is what the vet had guessed.

Tell them I love them

Reddit Refugees

You're gonna wanna get caught up on 🧛🏻‍♂️ Dracula Daily 🧛🏻‍♂️ or 🧛🏻‍♂️ Re: Dracula 🧛🏻‍♂️ or things around here are gonna get real confusing real fast

Luke was an invasive species in the tatooine ecosystem if you think about it, like he grew up in a space deathworld full of bounty hunters and slavers and this pansy boy was like ugh.... this place is so boring.. nothing to do... what do you MEAN you moisture boy sandstorms come in once a month there's the constant danger of tusken raiders jabba tries to raise the water tax every other week there's a fight in the marketplace every single day, what do you MEAN its boring

He shot womprats in his spare time and he was like oh.. so boring.. so bland :((( meanwhile the womprats are feral creatures the size of a wolf that can bite your head off, he threaded the needle with his skyhopper in breakneck speed and he was like :] fun and wacky activities to do with your friends,, seriously it's no wonder that he took all the wacky jedi stuff in stride because that's literally what's normal for him. Insane stuff happening all around him is just another Taungsday, he did shit like this every day after his chores were done on Tatooine. As a jedi he's like oh golly gee! Another beautiful day of smashing stuff and raising hell! His head is full of flowers. But those flowers are carnivorous and also insane

i hope everyone knows that the last wga strike was ~100 days and it’s a pretty common phenomenon for strike support to tank after a month or two when it feels like it’s dragging on and some writers and talk show hosts are crossing picket lines and trying to “return” to “normal” because of people’s livelihoods etc when they’re really just scabs. sure hope that we keep that in mind and are prepared for the long haul and aren’t just in it while it’s convenient for us <3

As someone who’s living with a middle school social studies teacher, all the posts along the lines of “why did we never learn about this historical event in school” just make me go “because your teacher was supposed to cover all of US history in one year, and they didn’t get to the Revolutionary War until Halloween because they were urged to slow down the progression of the lessons because a more senior teacher was running behind, and they didn’t get to the Civil War until Valentine’s Day because the school kept scheduling every special event during social studies because there’s no end-of-grade testing for that subject, and they didn’t get to WWI until May because they were sick for a few days and the substitute couldn’t do much more than babysit, and now they’re having to do the entire Cold War in two days, so that’s why you didn’t hear about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut. They would have loved to tell you about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut!”

Alternatively, you could end up with a teacher like the one I had in the early 2000s who was an excited warhawk, happilt sharing their hopes and dreams for how many brown people US forces might kill abroad. In that case, they didn’t want to get to the lesbian peanut farmer, and you should really double check anything they ever said to you.

And remember that most Middle School Social Studies teachers are English teachers told to teach to the test who don't actually know History or History teaching methods that well beyond what's in the out of date textbook, so the high school Social Studies Teachers who are actually trained in History and History teaching are trying to desperately make up for deficits caused by you being statistically unlikely to ever have had a trained Social Studies teacher with a History Degree who's taken Social Studies teaching methods classes because nearly every top down School "Reform" in my lifetimes has been a concerted effort to destroy quality History and Science teaching because they involve things like logic, evaluating evidence, and critical thinking which are bad for the Republican Agenda under the rubric of "Back to Basics" which not coincidentally also steals funding for science to prevent science teachers having enough money for hands on experiments, and your kids' art, theater, and music funding as well.

It's all of a piece. The last thing Republicans want is a skilled and motivated teacher who loves what they are doing getting your kids interested in things like facts and history and evidence based thinking and how the government actually works. Next thing you know they'll be growing up to vote in their own interest and be out advocating for the public good, and we can't have that. better to have someone boring making people memorize names and dates and teaching from heavily censored white washed propaganda books that passed the Florida and Texas school boards a decade or two ago.

funniest thing about the “reddit migration” is that I haven’t seen a single post shitting on anyone coming from Reddit. when twitter started bleeding users everyone was firing rent-lowering posts but with redditors skittering about we’ve left the doors open and put out food bowls

Tags were too good to ignore.

I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.

I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”

And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”

“Do you now.”

“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”

“Oh, and why’s that?”

“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”

“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”

Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.

I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis. 

Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”

Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”

Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”

The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list

And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.

Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!

ten years of fighting and when shit hits the fan tumblr instantly has reddit's back. the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

you understand

Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection 

Hey there guys. It’s me, in 2022, commenting on this post from 2016. There’s been a lot of people on this site lately being like “oooh no don’t make viral uwu I’m so pathetic, little, and defenseless and my poor notifications can’t handle 10k reblogs” well first of all ALL of us are pathetic, little, and defenseless and secondly none of our notifications can handle 10k reblogs and thirdly I’m not a coward and I think this should have a million notes. Not because of its own merit as a post, I just think it’d be funny if when I turn 30 this year and I reflect on the greatest accomplishments of my life thus far, I have to at least consider putting “famous tumblr popcorn post” on the list

Hey there guys. It’s me, in 2023, in May specifically, I’m 30 and for the record it rules, I had a lil aging crisis and now I’m past that and I’m just like goddamn it is great being in my thirties and I had a wonderful birthday NO THANKS TO YOU GUYS

actually, much thanks to you guys. Some of you were inspiringly crazy about this post. Frankly you worked harder for this than I did, and your efforts were touching and inspiring and funny and yet we STILL FAILED. GUYS WE GOTTA PUT OUR EYES BACK ON THE BALL. We have ehhh about six months before I turn the big three-one, which is actually the most important birthday because now you’re in your thirties For Real, and I personally can’t think of a better way to ring in my 31st year of life than by trying and failing to do something that I was hoping to knock out in my twenties.

Good luck, kiddo

Are you satisfied, op? When will it be enough?

I feel I couldn’t have been clearer about the number at which this will be enough

mysterious creature of uncertain origin

✨ 𝑽𝒊𝒓𝒈𝒐 ✨

something im noticing is the redditors are just commenting on everything via reblogs with reckless abandon. and its so funny bc thats how youre MEANT to use this fucking website but we've trained ourselves out of it somehow.

I feel like a fucking chimp raised in a lab let out into the wild and just doing shit without understanding wtf is going on because I was raised to click the button to get cookie