#it was such an interesting lecture!

[purple-is-great]

Had a very gender day today, first I announced to a whole classroom that I was a trans man (it was relevant, we were talking about how identities are expressed and created with language). Most of the class was people who know me already, it was mostly the lecturer who wasn't aware

Aaand then after it as I was selling stuff at a little student fair some English speaking student called me "she" while speaking to the person next to him and somehow the English slowed down my processing enough that I didn't say anything

[everwalldigan]

Bruce: *waking up in a hospital that he drove himself to after having a heart attack and telling absolutely nobody* hey…

The entirety of the batclan looking over him with Dick in the centre, an absolute terrifying grin on his face:

Dick: hello Bruce, nice evening isn’t it? Got something to share with us?

Edit: the fic is now out on ao3! https://archiveofourown.org/works/57780508

[thegurlwhoisntthere]

Y’know, I feel like we don’t give the writers enough credit when it comes to Soren

So often when a character is the “comic relief”, they start off with dynamic personalities and then lose them as the season go on (looking at you Cat Valentine and Steve Palchuk), but not Soren

No, Soren somehow manages to jump between being comic relief and genuinely serious and caring seamlessly. And it’s all the same character, too! He doesn’t feel like he’s switching personalities they’re just other facets of who he is and it’s amazing!!!

[littlecrittereli]

Hey there! I read both Reprogrammed and Decoded and was blown away. Unfortunately (sorta), my odd little brain had one little question that was burning from the end of Reprogrammed till the end of the story: what about the Wild Kratts Kids? How did they react to Chris's disappearance/return? I know if I were 8 and my teacher (i guess thats an okay metaphor? maybe?) randomly disappeared for 3 months and came back 10 pounds lighter with dozens of new scars and white hair in their early twenties, I'd be a little torn up/curious. How would Chris feel about showing up on screen in front of a bunch of kids in his state? Would he...wear a...hat...or something...? I don't know, just thoughts lol

They never told the public that Chris was missing (Didn't wanna scare the kids or give the Villains the knowledge that they were vulnerable)

And being out in the most rural parts of the world, it's not uncommon for them to go months without any sort of public appearance. For now, Martin is handling any sort of press alone until Chris is ready to be back in the public eye.

But of course they still run into a wild kratts kid every once and a while.

He's still working on his alibi.....

[kazz-brekker]

even though he only appears in 1 dunk and egg novella, daeron the drunken IS a genuinely interesting character to me. a lot of asoiaf is about exploring the more realistic outcomes of very traditional fantasy ideas (what if the vows the loyal knight swore required him to stand by while his king horribly abused people? what if the beloved prince eloping with a young lady caused a massive civil war? what if the warrior who overthrew the evil tyrant had absolutely no interest in the actual job of ruling?) and daeron is an exploration of what it would actually be like to have prophetic visions. would you find them fascinating and try to understand what they meant and what would happen in the future? or would they be frightening and overwhelming and not actually provide any guidance, only a horrible sense of dread that something is going to happen that you don't understand and can't prevent? would you embrace being able to know what was going to happen, or is it something you would try to forget at all costs if there's nothing you can do to change it?

[sunderwight]

Thinking about Lan Qiren being online and I'm pretty sure that he would fall for the Smooth Sharks Fallacy like every single time.

People would try and explain it to him and it wouldn't matter. He would still keep trying to bring academic articles into pie fights.

[team7-headquarter]

Whenever someone tries to make a point about something the Konoha kunoichis, I need to make a pause and remind them how out of character they were in some of those moments.

Kishimoto pretty much abandoned Sakura and Ino's friendship and then tried to bring it back during the War arc. Ino lost her sensei and then her dad, and when was Sakura? You mean to tell me she wouldn't care? About any of it? Or when Sasuke was declared to be killed, do you mean to tell me that Ino wouldn't have run to find Sakura?

The way Hinata was written on Shippuden???? Naruto aside, people forget that Hinata refused to give up during the Chunning Exams and forced Neji to almost kill her if he wanted the victory. She was stubborn, she was prideful too, she had more going on than simply a crush on Naruto. She was told by her father she was a failure and yet she didn't give up on becoming a kunoichi, did she?

Then why is that Shippuden wrote her like her sole ambition was Naruto, hm?

And Tenten? She was MEAN when she wanted to be because she was highly competitive. We know that she wanted to train under Tsunade, so where did the death of that dream take her? She's such a powerful kunoichi and yet we know so little about her personality, her life...

We got "Ino and Hinata know some medic min techniques" in the most random way possible... We know Sakura would walk around with Hinata even, so what about their girl bonding moments during the genin to Shippuden years?

It made me so angry whenever the girls treated each other like strangers in Shippuden. So many stupid situations made to highly their teammates even if I meant to write the girls out of character...

[detectivebambam]

oh wow..

we also learned that MZ (identical) twins tend to be more similar when raised apart than MZ twins that are raised together... oh wow..

[fauvester]

nicktoonsunite's tigerghost haunting my brain

[cherubchoirs]

rotting in bed (not so bad edition)

[pix-writes]

Congrats on 1000 likes!! Wondering if I could request ford with an environmental scientist!reader? Like where ford enjoys theoretical physics and maths, the reader is more focused on geology and biology? No worries if not!!

Dearest anon, you don't have to worry because this is right up my alley!!! I studied earth sciences so let's gooooooo! 😁🥳

Stanford Pines x environmental scientist!reader

Rating: SFW

A/N: Was terrible at physics but I love earth sciences so this is practically a self insert? lmao! Ford finds someone who likes to infodump as much as him about their academic interests! ^^' so sorry that the reader rambles so much. The wilderness must be explored! Hope you enjoy!

"You mean to tell me that you think you've discovered species hitherto unstudied and you didn't call me until now? Are we even friends?!"

That had been your reply on the phone. Ford chuckled, relieved that you had been available and eager to accept. He was perhaps inundated with work and whilst he didn't want to admit where he was limited in his expertise, he knew he could afford to extend his studies and offer someone else an opportunity. He was glad it was you.

You had Fiddleford to thank for your introduction, you had been in a group campaigning for environmental rights on campus, the hubub was something Ford would've generally ignored, but Fiddleford had seen some familiar faces amongst the crowd and he couldn't deny that he was curious about the cause.

He'd found out why you had seemed familiar, as you recognised them from the shared lectures you had.

"Ugh! They made us take a course in statistics, but honeslty, I'm hopeless at it! It's right at the end of the day, too, so I'm trying hard not to fall asleep, you know?"

"Um, well, I actually don't find it that bad."

"But we both agree the professor drones on something awful, right Ford?" Fiddleford gave him an encouraging nudge with his elbow.

"My god, he does!"

"S-so, um, maybe if you sat next to us, I- we could help you? We both take mathematics."

He had been nervous at first, afraid that you would reject him for his six fingered hands. Rumours had been spread across the BMU about him and so far only his roommate had been the most accepting.

But like him you hadn't noticed at first, once you did you had only picked up his hand and said -

"Woah, far out!"

When he had slipped his hand away you had actually apologised.

"Don't give a damn what the rest of them think, Ford. Anyway, I think they're cool!"

And thus your friendship had been forged. Your shared courses were brief together, but you both had a love of DD&MD and kept a campaign running through college.

His excitement for someone coming to relieve the isolation of his life in gravity falls was curtailed, slightly, once you had started pouring over his work. He had temporarily forgotten that you were nearly as scrupulous as himself.

"I can't believe that you were recording these like this! What if your work was to get lost or destroyed, hm? There is so much to do here!"

Eagerness had devolved into critique it seemed, and Ford felt like he was losing the war.

"There's nothing even here about habitats or behavioural patterns for this entry... overall, this is inconsistent, Dr Pines."

He huffed, putting his hands in his pockets. "So are you going to accept the task or just pull it apart for the rest of the week?"

You tried to suppress a grin and failed. "When can I start?!"

Ford shook his head. "Just the same as when we were in college. You take too much delight in messing with me!"

Your laugh rang out over the lab. "Gotta keep you on your toes, Stanford! Like you, I have high standards."

"You can start whenever you're ready, of course."

"Good, because I want you to show me your latest find you talked about."

"Well, I'm glad you called me, seems like there's a lot of work to do here and it's not good to lone work so remotely, Ford, you know I wish you contacted me sooner had I known you were-" You gasped as you looked down into the river and Ford spotted one of the plaidypuses he had discovered last week.

"Oh this is fascinating, Ford! I wonder how they've developed such a pattern, perhaps in the falls they are not predated on? Yeah, maybe that's it."

This sparked a conversational debate, Ford elaborating on what he had said over the phone, how he had discovered them, what else lies in the forest surrounding.

"And just look at this waterfall, a perfect example of differential erosion! Did you know that this kind of basaltic rock in Orgeon was actually formed around..."

Ford looked over to you, you had gotten up close to the edge of the waterfall, as close as you could on dry land, pointing out formations. He tried his best to add in hums of response at the right places, however, his mind had drifted as he saw how your face was highlighted by the light filtering down through the trees. The way the light breeze blew at your clothes, the sparkle in your eyes that lit up your expression as you talked about your subject.

His heart swelled with affection, he had been so lonely before, and he was kicking himself on how he hadn't thought of this sooner; it was so... energising to have someone around with a similar level of passion for their studies as he has.

"Ford, the camera! Quick!" Snapped out of his reverie he realised you had been trying to get his attention, directing him to the shore where a group of plaidypuses had arrived.

"Right!" He took a few photos, managing to get the measuring rod that you placed carefully in the foreground without startling the creatures.

A few tranquil minutes passed as you watched the group glide effortlessly in the water away from you, leaning back on the grass with your hands, legs dangling off of the ledge.

"What were you thinking about? You've got that far away look in your eye."

"Oh, er, nothing! Just an equation." Ford could feel a blush forming.

"Didn't think that'd be something you'd have trouble with."

"Really (name), just because I have a PhD in the subject doesn't mean I don't have to work at solving anything."

"Yeah, yeah, tell that to the girl still trying to get approval for her original proposal." Voice laced with sarcasm. "What're you on now, you're 8th PhD or whatever?"

"10th, actually."

"Jeez, man! Do you ever rest?" You laugh and Ford can't help but join in. "Don't worry, you can get back to your equations and scanners or... whatever else you do with physics! The river isn't far, I'll be studying their ecology for now, then we can decide on the rest."

"Sounds like a plan!"

[yeoldenews]

I'm really loving your #tbt posts lately (which I assume might come from your queue). Thanks for keeping the historical interest flowing. One question: I'd love to know who the family is in the Minnesota photos. I assume you wrote about them in the past, if you have a personal source for the pictures. (My grandfather and his family were from Minnesota, and I recently viewed some photos of them.)

I wish I knew! Unfortunately this is one of several "white whale" albums I've purchased over the years with absolutely no written identification in them, and one of only two I haven't had any luck tracking down any individual people in the photos.

My current best guess is that the album is of a young adults group from the English Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in St. Paul, and was taken in the summer/fall of 1897 or 1898. There is one photo of a group in front of a church with a partial sign visible behind them which I was able to match to that church. I did some additional research and found that the church group did regular summer outings to many tourist spots and lakes in the St. Paul area.

I was able to additionally pinpoint the location to the St. Paul area due to the waterslide in the background of this image and a visible sign for the Nevers Dam (on the MN/WI border) in another.

I compiled a list of a dozen or so people who attended the church at the time (from newspaper mentions of various events at the church) but so far haven't had any luck matching any of those people to the individuals in the album.

It's a great album, about 40 or so pictures in total and I believe it was likely developed at home by an amateur photographer. None of the photos are mounted, being printed on very thin paper, and several have hand applied mats added to the exposures to change the shape - as seen above.

Snapshots from the 1890s are my absolute favorite photographs as personal photography was still in its infancy, and people were still figuring out what exactly to do with the cameras the now had access to. Many of the images are still posed like studio portraits, but you can see the very beginnings of people starting to get creative with what they chose to capture.

[poetrysmackdown]

what makes a poem a poem? does it have to be written in a certain way? is this question a poem if i want it to be?

Fun question! This is just my personal sense as an avid reader and less-avid writer of poetry, but for me it’s useful to distinguish (roughly) between poetry as a genre and poetry as an attitude or philosophy through which language and the world can be understood. And of course these two go hand in hand. I see poetry the genre as essentially a type of literature where we as readers are signaled, somehow, to pay closer attention to language, to rhythm, to sound, to syntax, to images, and to meaning. That attentive posture is the “attitude” of broader poetic thinking, and while it’s most commonly applied to appreciate work that’s been written for that purpose, there’s nothing stopping us from applying that attentiveness elsewhere. Everywhere, even! That’s how you eventually end up writing poetry for yourself, after all. There’s a quote from Mary Ruefle floating around on here that a lot of folks have probably already seen, but it immediately comes to mind with this ask:

“And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps.”

Similarly, after adopting the attentive posture of poetics, there’s plenty of things that can feel or sound like a poem, even when they perhaps were not written with that purpose in mind. I’ve seen a couple of these “found poems” on here that are quite fun—this one, for example. The meaning and enjoyment you may derive from the language of a found poem isn’t any less real than that derived from a poem written for explicitly poetic purposes, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be called poetry.

That said, I do think that if you’re going to go out and start looking for poetry everywhere, it’s still important to have a foundation in the actual language work of it all. Now, this doesn’t mean it has to be “written in a certain way” at all! But it does mean that in order to cultivate the attentiveness that’s vital to poetry, one needs to understand what makes language tick, down at its most basic levels. It will make you better at reading poetry, better at writing it, and better at spotting it out in the wild.

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is an extraordinary resource to new writers and readers, and a great read for more experienced folks as well. Mary Oliver’s most popular poems are all to my knowledge in free verse, and yet you might be surprised to find her deep appreciation for metrical verse (patterns of stressed/unstressed syllables), as well as for the most minute devices of sound. In discussing the so-called poetry of the past, she writes,

“Acquaintance with the main body of English poetry is absolutely essential—it is the whole cake, while what has been written in the last hundred years or so, without meter, is no more than an icing. And, indeed, I do not really mean an acquaintanceship—I mean an engrossed and able affinity with metrical verse. To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be.”

In another section, after devoting lots of attention to the sounds at work in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, she writes,

“Everything transcends from the confines of its initial meaning; it is not only the transcendence in meaning but the sound of the transcendence that enables it to work. With the wrong sounds, it could not have happened.”

I hope all this helps to get across my opinion that what makes a poem a poem is not just about the author's intention, and not just about meaning (intended or attributed), but also about sound and rhythm and language and history, all coalescing into something that rises above the din of a language we would otherwise grow tired of while out in our day-to-day lives.

I'll always have more to say but I'm cutting myself off here! Thanks for the ask

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my favorite parts of phase 2 (and indeed one of the few moments I resonated with IDW Prowl) was when the neutrals were coming back to Cybertron and Prowl said that he refused to let Autobots be pushed aside and overruled after they were the ones who fought for freedom for 4 million years (the exact wording escapes me atm).

And I mean, that resentment still holds true even once the colonists come on bc like. As much as it's true that Cybertron's culture is fucked up, and as funny as it can be to paint Cybertronians as a bunch of weirdos who consider trying to kill someone as a common greeting not important enough to hold a grudge over.... The colonists POV kind of pissed me off a lot of times, as did the narrative tone/implications that Cybertronians are forever warlike and doomed to die by their own hands bc it just strikes me as an extremely judgemental and unsympathetic way to deal with a huge group of people with massive war PTSD and political/social tensions that were rampant even before the war?

Like, imagine living in a society rife with bigotry and discrimination where you get locked into certain occupations and social strata based on how you were born. The political tension is so bad there's a string of assassinations of politicians and leaders. The whole planet erupts into an outright war that leads (even unintentionally) to famine and chemical/biological warfare that destroys your planet. Both sides of the war are so entrenched in their pre-war sides and resentment for each other that this war lasts 4 million years and you don't even have a home planet any more. Then your home planet gets restored and a bunch of sheltered fucks come home and go "ewww why are you so violent?? You're a bunch of freaks just go live in the wilderness so that our home can belong to The Pure People Who Weren't Stupid And Evil Enough To Be Trapped In War" and then a bunch of colonists from places that know nothing about your history go "lol you people are so weird?? 🤣🤣 I don't get why y'all are fighting can't you just like, stop??? Oh okay you people are just fucked up and evil and stupid then" ((their planets are based on colonialism where their Primes wiped out the native populations btw whereas the Autobots and OP in particular fought to save organics. But that never gets brought up as a point in their favor)) as if the damage of a lifetime of war and a society that was broken even before the war can just magically go away now that the war is over.

Prowl fucking sucks but he was basically the only person that pointed out the injustice of that.

And then from then on out most of the characters from other colonies like Caminus and wherever else are going "i fucking hate you and your conflicts" w/ people like literal-nobody Slide and various Camiens getting to just sit there lecturing Optimus about how Cybertronians are too violent for their own good and how their conflicts are stupid, with only brief sympathetic moments where the Cybertronians get to be recognized as their own ppl who deserve sympathy before going right back to being lambasted.

Like I literally struggled to enjoy the story at multiple points because there was only so much I could take of the characters I knew and loved being raked over coals constantly while barely getting to defend themselves or be defended by the narrative so like. It was just fucking depressing and a little infuriating to read exRID/OP

[notetaeker]

Knowing 5 languages with mediocre skill is not enough I need to be rlly bad at a 6th one

[okartichoke]

au where godot gets therapy and becomes a math professor after getting out of prison

no cuz i had so much fun with this

he either teaches 13ish year olds Algebra 1 or OR he teaches adults who are learning mathematics later in life! He’s trying to lay off the coffee at his therapist’s insistence. He’s gotten down to only 3 cups on a good day.

Pearl/Maya channels Mia the day before his very first lesson, and he practices the whole lesson plan on her because he’s actually nervous. </3 That’s the last time he’s seen her.

ngl i really love math teacher godot HAHA im genuinely so endeared to this idea???? putting many more hcs in the tags >:3

erm uh yeah but then i doodled squirrel godot and had fun with that too so here’s him HAHA

and yknow what sure here’s some cat lawyers from like 3 weeks ago that i’m never gonna post otherwise. epic post, artichoke, you’ve done it again. 😎😎😎👍👍