#*find more books

[july-19th-club]

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

[wusnus]

I love mabel and bill and i want to see them being bffs but i cannot see an interaction between them going any way other than this

[spiralling-spires]

Being jurgen leitner the day that gerry almost killed him was probably really surreal. Imagine you’re minding your business, collecting fucked up books, and out of nowhere this goth guy covered in eye tattoos shows up and beats you half to death, then stops, goes, “no you’re too pathetic to be jurgen leitner” and leaves without further elaboration. And you dont correct him, you like being alive after all, and after that you just… continue with your life. And then several years later you tell this to some random guy in the tunnels you’ve been hiding in, and he not only knows who the goth was, but seems somewhat fond of the goth. And then you get brutal pipe murdered by the random guy’s boss. Oops

[pineapple-frenzy]

Book 2 au: sparring sessions and short hair katara

They like to have sparring sessions in order to keep their bending skills sharp. They allow themselves to go all out and not hold back at all cause they know if anyone got hurt, Katara could just heal them

But anyways, wouldn't it be kinda funny if Zuko accidentally burned Katara's hair tho? Aofkqldkkajfjd

The "I think we can save the hairloops" line is from @linnoya-writes thank you for that!! :>>

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I hope you take this as the compliment it is intended to be, but you strike the same chord of irreverence-as-love, jokes-to-showcase-sencerity that I get from Chuck Tingle, and I adore both of you.

You have bestowed the greatest honour upon me.

[wizard-laundry]

the text originally read "EGADS! DO MY EYES DECEIVE ME?"

[obsob]

oooooooooough i love you i love you i love you!!!! hand in loving hand !!!!!!

[drawnbythestream]

Obi-wan and his friend Bant Eerin having a sad moment after certain events

[shisasan]

𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝟸𝟷, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶 -𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹

[ID: July 21. Miserable creature that I am. END ID]

[ofswordsandpens]

actually I do want to talk about Sally Jackson a tad more because one criticism I've been hearing about her book counterpart more recently is "book Sally is one-dimensional: the perfect mother with no flaws" and that just has me biting my cheek because one part of her book counterpart that I always thought was ripe with discussion and didn't make it to the show is that Sally states that it was selfish of her to keep Percy close. It's one of the last things she says to him before she's "killed" by the minotaur.

And there's so much that we don't know about Sally because we view her from Percy's eyes. From his perspective we know that she's exceedingly kind, she never raises her voice to him or even Gabe, and she endured a horrible and abusive relationship to protect her son from monsters (of a different kind).

But there are things we can piece together from the text: Sally has known about CHB for a long time, apparently since before Percy was even born because Poseidon told her he wanted to send Percy there; she was told that it was a mistake for her to keep Percy close - who told her that, we're not sure, she only uses the phrase they; she's been in contact with Grover through out the school year; she knows that she can't cross the camp boundary line, which means either Grover or someone else (Chiron? Poseidon?) told her that, and that she understood that there was place that Percy would be safe from monsters.

And all of these little details are so interesting because it does make you wonder just how much she did or didn't know. Was her self assessment right? Was it selfish of her to keep Percy close?

On one hand, she kept him close because she loved him, alongside the fear that if she sent him to camp, she would be saying goodbye for good -- so is it even fair to call the act of keeping him close selfish? Or perhaps, much like Chiron, she assumed keeping Percy in the dark would be safer?

But on the other hand, Percy had been attracting monsters all his childhood, she understood camp was a safe place from monsters, and she had apparently been told explicitly that it was a mistake for her to keep him close.

And then adding in the factors of: Percy is her only family in the entire world, she's been suffering with Gabe for years, sacrificing so much in order to keep Percy safe when he's at home... but even that has a touch of sad irony because when we meet Percy in tlt, its at point when he's not really home at all -- he's been regularly sent off to boarding schools, so much so that he's internalized it as his own short-coming.

And all of this isn't to say "Omg Sally is actually horrible" or to assert definitely that she is selfish... but more to speak to the fact that in the books, she's not an all-perfect 2-dimensional mother. And her self-assessment of selfishness is something that is really interesting to explore and debate given the implications of what she apparently did (or did not) know about the godly world. I feel there's even an argument to be made that Sally being "selfish" could be a reflection of Percy's fatal flaw.

[wiltkingart]

Asche and Vindt from Ocean's Blood by Thelma Mantey

[frownyalfred]

thinking about a Damian who was raised his entire life hearing how much he looks like his Father, how he's the blood son, how he's better than any other child Bruce Wayne has taken in, starting to buy into it like a kid does, only to hit puberty and turn out looking like 80% Talia.

[sugarcoatednightshade]

thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.

[vaguely-concerned]

sometimes I think of all the on-the-surface warm, well-meaning but deeply ineffectual advice and attention john gives harrow through harrow the ninth (make some soup and get some sleep! get a hobby! don't be so hard on yourself! self care harrow! as long as I need take no actual responsibility in this relationship whatsoever I would have loved to be your dad!) set up against the stark truth that with his other hand he has been staging her attempted horrific murder again and again and again like a living nightmare on the logic that it will 'put her down or fix her'. and then I find that I wish there is a hell. a special hell where twitch streamers turned necromantic death emperors go

[feelo-fick]

it can't be too hard right?

it's easy not to think about things, he tells me i don't think all the time! wait...

—

a scene from a fic that i have no clue if ill finish, let alone post, but look i made fanart of my own thing that doesnt even exist :D

[hedgehog-moss]

Forgive me for making yet another post about the French Revolution but one small detail that makes me laugh is when, as things started to go seriously wrong, one of Louis XVI's advisers tried to persuade him & Marie-Antoinette to get away from Paris and wait for things to calm down (the idea was "if you lay low and wait, the newly-created National Assembly will vote something stupid and lose popular support" which was a solid plan honestly.) But he was also like "whatever you do, DO NOT go East or South or people will think you'll get help from other monarchies to restore your power and that won't calm things down"

So the King was advised to flee to Normandy, which... is just a short ferry ride away from another monarchy. But that's completely different since it's England. To be fair to the English, the French monarchy had basically bankrupted itself a few years back to send millions in support of the American revolutionaries because it would be a shame not to take advantage of "perhaps the best opportunity for centuries to come to put England in its place" (actual quote by France's minister of Foreign Affairs in 1777)

—still I love the realistic approach of the King's adviser telling him, Sire you can't go near any of our borders rn, it'll escalate the situation, Parisians will know you're trying to get another country to help. Obviously you can go set up camp right across the sea from England though, that's fine since everyone knows the English wouldn't piss on us if we were on fire¹

¹ Perfidious Albion was like "aw no France is in turmoil and possibly weakened :) a shame :)" exactly like France re: them at the start of the US independence war ² they also thought well these backward french are finally following our glorious example and entering civilisation (parliamentary monarchy) ³ and only when the Girondins started being like "let's spread the French Revolution to the whole universe!!! or at least Belgium" did England finally decide "it's been a while since we last declared war on France actually" (but it was too late for Louis XVI) ⁴ That's not how footnotes work sorry. Trying to make my post look fancier