martianloon

[martianloon]

[martianloon]

the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor

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15 year old Dick Grayson: I’m joining the swim team.

Bruce, trying to remove his eye paint with the new micellar water Selina got him: Okay.

Dick: I have to shave my legs. Gotta go fast.

Bruce: Do you need a new razor?

Dick: No I’m just not sure what to do? I found a YouTube tutorial but…Eh. Don’t trust it.

Bruce: Hn. Give me an hour.

Dick: Where are you going?

Bruce, mumbling: Trial run. Will report back with results.

—

Dick: So how did it go?

Bruce: Mn. Fine. Be careful around the knees. Against the grain. Use more shaving gel than you think you need.

Dick: Alright thanks for your sacrifice.

—

Later:

Bruce: *crawls into bed wearing briefs and an oversized t-shirt*

Selina: 👀

Bruce: Don’t.

Selina, running a foot up Bruce’s leg: Aww-

Bruce, eyes fixed on the ceiling: Don’t.

Selina: Babygirl did you shave all nice and smooth for me—

Bruce: *blushing furiously* SELINA—

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You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.

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I luckily haven't had to deal with much chronic pain or hand pain yet, especially with regards to baking (crochet is another story). That said, these look like some pretty solid tips! There's also some in the comments section.

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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

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A group of rough looking boys walked past me today and all I heard of their conversation was “he’s got that anxiety disorder bro so I went with him so he’d be more comfortable” and it made me realise the world isn’t all that bad

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Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.

Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.

---

Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--

Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and

and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.

Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.

Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.

“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”

---

She choose her own.

...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.

Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--

Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.

“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.

The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.

---

He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.

---

“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.

The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.

“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”

Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.

Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.

There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.

He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.

“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”

---

They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--

They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.

And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.

“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”

Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.

---

Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.

---

Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.

---

It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.

Oh. They were going hunting.

“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.

The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.

“I can hunt,” he scowled.

He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.

---

“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.

She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.

“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.

���Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”

“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.

“Is it,” said Kanna.

---

Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).

Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.

“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.

“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”

---

Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.

---

Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.

The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.

“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.

“...No.”

“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”

She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.

---

Elsewhere, the war continued.

The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.

The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.

The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.

---

Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.

[martianloon]

[martianloon]

get yourself a main character whos two primary emotions are "little cunt" and "catatonic with grief"

[martianloon]

What's the process if you're a superhero and you come out as trans

Do you tell your villains?

Do you keep it a secret so no one can connect Spider-Man with your secret identity for a while? Or do you pop a pronouns pin on your costume and the next time you web up Doctor Octopus and he goes "I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME SPIDER-MAN" you go "Spider-Girl actually! I've been figuring out some shit"

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Palpatine: My boy, Master Kenobi is lying to you!

Anakin: ?...yeah? He does that? Lying is Obi-Wan's favourite sport. Bant told me that he was dropped on his head by Master Qui-Gon when he was a child and Master Qui-Gon was really tall, so the fall shook loose some things in his brain and now Obi-Wan is allergic to giving straight answers. It took me 3 years to figure out his favourite colour. and his birthday. 5 to figure out that he's allergic to shellfish. I once told a restaurant that Obi-Wan can't have shrimp and he told me to "stop giving information to the enemy". I've made a game of it really.

Palpatine: *muttering under his breath* ok try using shrimp next time

Anakin: what?

Palpatine: Nothing!

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So often I am reminded that no one will understand Arthur Pendragon the way teenage girls on tumblr in 2013 understood Arthur Pendragon. I don't even think Arthur Pendragon understands himself the way those previously teenaged girls did. It's me. I'm one of those previously teenaged girls in 2013.

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Honey they’re inventing unions at DoorDash

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Yunmeng Jiang is probably the Florida of the Jianghu

Like, they canonically fought water ghouls with their bare hands, regularly get into brawls with each other, have no concept of appropriate volume, hell they have a town down close to the worldly people with no height separation or massive stone walls or a comical amount of gold plating, if you didn’t know that they was a cult of martial sorcerers in that town you might just think “wow, wealthy trading family. The docks are nice!” and then just leave.

The sect leader has no spine and a vaguely homoerotic relationship with his dead best friend slash manservant, he adopted one is fucking insane and also a radical genius, and you’d expect him to be the outlier but no, the sister is just as fucking weird, she’s probably gone around in soaking wet clothes carry a child like a football because “he fell in, I couldn’t just leave him there!”

The son likes to pretend he’s sane but he’s such a chronic gossip that he probably needed an intervention, his sword was named after the three poisons, and he also spent 13 years thinking that his dead adopted brother would find a way to resurrect himself.

Even Madam Yu isn’t safe because she lashed a teenager with a lightning whip like 36 times in the middle of the fucking Spanish Inquisition. She has such an irrational hatred of this one guy that she starts shitting on anyone even remotely kind to him. Girl. Go to therapy, or go to jail.