#or as us Northerners say

[koboldkind]

Christmas right behind the dike in Hamburg this year. Ground floor. Hamburg storm surges will forever fascinate me.

[fromtheseventhhell]

"Sansa = Ned 2.0 and Arya = Catelyn 2.0" is one of those takes where you can just tell people are more attached to the aesthetic than anything. "The Stark girls are most like the parent they look least like" sounds good on paper and people run with the idea, regardless of how it actually fits into the story. A majority of the justification relies on misinterpreting all of their characters + a healthy dose of fanon. What gets me is that this is the same fandom that insists that Lyanna, only compared to Arya in the text, is equal parts Arya and Sansa but Ned and Catelyn, two fully fleshed-out and complex characters, have to be more like one girl or the other? There's just nothing in the story to justify being so adamant about these comparisons. Arya and Sansa have parallels with both of their parents but at the end of the day, they are unique characters with their own stories. I'll never understand why people want to flatten these complex characters down to their most basic tropes and fit them into restrictive boxes just for a "poetical~" comparison.

[sk-yay-sk]

I don't like any of the maps I've seen for HTTYD so i'm playing a puzzle game w all the locations. This is the 3rd version so far

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Could I ask you to explain, in simple terms, what is the electoral college? I tried reading the wikipedia article but I just couldn't understand anything.

Basically every state gets a determined number of electors, and the electors vote on who gets to be president. The electors do not neatly scale with how many people are in that state, so some states have disproportionate voting power. Meaning that even if the popular vote favors one president (as has happened before), if the other one gets enough votes in the right states, the electors have to elect them instead. That's how Trump became president despite having 2 million less votes than Hilary Clinton: he won in the states that are disproportionately favored by the electoral college.

And yes, we have been trying to reform or abolish the thing since 1800, with the closest we came to it being in 1969 when Nixon got elected, and which got all the way to the Senate floor before it was filibustered to death by states that enjoy disproportionate voting power. And Nixon won the popular vote.

[northirish]

You may not like America but its not our fault that we are God's new chosen people and you live in some backward communist country where there aren't any guns or Bibles. Freedom!

>Country where there aren't any Bibles You are aware I'm from Ireland, right?

[mira-likes]

I've previously joked about Fan Xian's daddy issues wrt the emperor, but on a rewatch, they surprisingly seem to surface for the first time in s2 episode 6. Or at least, that's the best way I can explain Fan Xian's approach to accusing the Second Prince of treason at family brunch.

I mean, it goes without saying that he wanted to reveal the Second Prince's crimes and bring him to justice. That's a given. But frankly, there were better ways to do that if that was the only thing on his mind. No, imo his other goal here was to test the emperor—the emperor's feelings about justice, and also about Fan Xian himself. He wanted to get a read on his importance to the emperor after finding out that he was secretly one of the emperor's kids.

The emperor has blown hot and cold to Fan Xian over time! He's given him a lot of leeway and indulgence, but on the other hand also sent him to Northern Qi and put him in danger, and also got properly furious at the whole fake death act. It's hard to figure him out. Fan Xian has reason to believe the emperor might value him; even right before the confrontation, the emperor summons him to family brunch with the princes (point 1 in the 'favour' column) and fakes his punishment for deceiving the ruler (point 2 in the 'favour' column). But ultimately Fan Xian doesn't know whom to trust at the moment, and he wants to see where the emperor stands on everything. And how Fan Xian measures up against the real princes in his estimation.

So he takes a gamble. And loses.

"Who do you think you are?" the emperor thunders at him, after he accuses the Second Prince.

And Fan Xian's mouth twists, like: also your kid, actually. But apparently my words don't weigh anything with you when an actual prince is here.

And he says as much to Chen Pingping later, while angrily cleaning the monument with his mother's words: "The emperor protected his own son. It's only natural." With the heavy implication of—he's chosen the son he wants to protect, and that's not me. And he's mad about everything that's happening—that the emperor chooses to shield the Second Prince even when he's committing crimes—but also a little about the fact that the emperor sided with the Second Prince over him.

(And then Chen Pingping says that the emperor didn't actually take Fan Xian's bureau position away, and does want him to investigate the Second Prince after all. And in so doing, he gets Fan Xian to calm down. Much of Fan Xian's new equilibrium is, of course, down to how he now sees a way to fight against the Second Prince! But he does stand up a little straighter once he realises the emperor wasn't actually against him that whole time. And imo that means something.)

[justarandombrit]

God the absolute urge I have to make Owen use Cockney rhyming slang... ESPECIALLY as the DMA. Imagine, the DMA is talking about how many people he's killed and he just throws in "brown bread" and Von Nazi is just like ???????? with waffle fries?????

[pitske]

ROTZBACKE! HAKENZAHN! OI! OI! OI!

[borgeslabyrinth]

Nothing is more embarrassing to me than liberals who want to write off the entire south because it votes red. Sorry, but if you think the entire south is irredeemable and that none of the vast swathes of minorities in red states matter. That's embarrassing. Moving back to Florida has really radicalized me for empathy towards the marginalized people in southern states. We're here, and our lives matter, even if they don't matter to you.

[los-plantalones]

northern bayberry.

if you’ve ever come across a natural bayberry candle, this is where they come from! the berries are coated in a thick layer of sweet-scented, grayish wax.

you need a very large amount of berries to render a useable amount of wax, and because the wax is so brittle on its own it’s often mixed with soy or beeswax. With its emollient and astringent properties (not to mention the amazing balsam smell!) it’s also great in soaps and other skincare products.

[nostalgia-tblr]

finally caught up a wee bit with dr who, i skipped the babies one cos it sounded terrible, went with the music episode.

good things: i like the doctor and the baddy was fun and clarose (i forgot her name twice now) is fine. also a very good episode for reaction images:

less good: i think i made a few of those faces myself while watching. what i assume was foreshadowing was pretty bad (had someone decided "one word repeated every episode" wasn't enough?). i am not sure why the doctor knew exactly what was happening, i don't mind that as an occasional plot device (they do know pretty much everything, after all) but it felt over done in this. why was there a music battle? why was there a song? WHY IS MURRAY GOLD BACK, HAD WE NOT AT LAST BANISHED HIM?

[serpientesuenos]

~ April so far ~

[lala-blahblah]

Reading the Raven Cycle as someone who grew up in Northern Virginia is soooo crazy bc whenever they mention Ganesy living near DC I'm like omg that's my home? They mentioned picking up Professor Mallory at the airport and I was over here twirling my hair like "oooh I wonder if he's at Dulles or Reagan national"

[mariemariemaria]

Found out about this recently and it's driving me insane lmao

[the-magpie-archives]

Yknow one of the first signs that Martin's a badass is that he actually felt safe on the northern line after meeting prentiss... For those of you who haven't been subjected to its horrors, here's a few things you should know:

-it is fucking LOUD. Tube trains are loud, but northern line is the loudest. Like, permanent ear damage loud if you travel on it regularly.

-it shakes you about a LOT! Okay all the underground trains do, but on the northern line its more random and jarring.

-it is CONFUSING. There's several different branches/routes that take you to entirely different places, and if you find yourself on the wrong one you have to change trains at Camden Town! A notoriously busy station!

-in reputation, it's in competition for the worst line on the underground! Its main rivals are the central line and bakerloo line, but a large percentage of Londoners (myself included) consider it the worst one.

So in essence, Martin, pursued by worms, found comfort in a place that activates my fight or flight response on the best of days! That half an hour of being deafened and shaken about in a tiny tube underground calmed him down, and that's absolutely tougher than surviving an apocalypse.

[st5lker]

this is so entirely random but one thing i thing i wonder abt every once in a while is if there are any indigenous american emigrants like ones that have left the americas entirely. like indigenous americans in the uk or whatever. i dont even know of any hispanic mestizo british people…. i mean statistically im sure there has to be at least some of them right. however small the number. but ive like never seen or heard from them if they do exist… so i always wonder what that must be like. like how comparible is that to cultural diaspora in america. how much of your cultural identity do you keep with a community that small? and like the way that the majority of countries have at least some amount of black & east+south+west asian immigrants for the people to have exposure to even if not everywhere is as culturally diverse as america. but if youre british have you met all of those but just never met an indigenous american. or like any latin american. thats crazy to me