#the perfect present

[knifearo]

being aromantic is like. hey btw you're going to live a life that is the culmination of most of society's worst nightmares. sorry lol ✌️ but then you turn around and take a really good hard look at it and it turns out that living in that nightmare is fucking awesome and you get to wake up every day and take that fear that other people have and laugh and hold it close until it's a great joy for you instead. and being happy is a radical act that you define instead of someone else. and you're sexy as fuck that's just a fact of life i don't make the rules on that one

[aingeal98]

The way Orv will dangle the basic premise in front of you like a set of keys and have you going "Ha! So Joonghyuk is the novel's protagonist but Dokja is OUR main character." and you're so busy enjoying that layer of meta text that you don't notice their other hand winding up the Han Sooyoung hammer to whack you with.

[egophiliac]

Most unhinged moment in TWST Wonderland that made you go:

I love this game.

can I just say the entire front half of episode 7 chapter 8, because everything about it was BONKERS in the most absolutely delightful way. genuinely this might have been the funniest single update yet. we got Idia's directorial debut! big stronk Epel! and. just. gestures to the entirety of SavanaRook. (then Vil went into a spiral of murdering people that culminated in punching the manifestation of his own insecurity in the face, and that was good in an entirely different kind of way, but I digress)

if I have to pick one though, I'm gonna go with Idia's video, because 1) adorable, 2) seriously just look at it, and 3) I did legit have to replay that subchapter on account of laughing over most of it the first time. truly Idia is the artistic genius of our generation.

[spirk-trek]

really love that for the metron design they went with "androgynous angel dressed head to toe in glitter"

[biggest-bara-tiddies]

I feel like one of the themes the writers of Kevin Can F Himself are going for is that sitcom-style presentation softens clear abuse to the point that it becomes hard to notice. Like as long as there is a laugh track, most people would struggle to clock Kevin as being abusive. But honestly I could tell from the first episode just by how he treated the coffee table in the living room. Allison got that coffee table on major discount from pottery barn and she is proud of it. Getting a table that nice for cheap is an achievement and it's clearly the nicest thing she owns, but none of this matters to Kevin, in fact, the very reason of her valuing the table is openly mocked by Kevin. He goes on to put drinks without coasters on it, puts his feet up on it, and stands on it eventually breaking it only crudely fixing it with duct tape to restore it's basic function as a coffee table and to lower it to his level. Kevin treats it with such disdain and abandon it's honestly instantly clear that nothing Allison values matters to him and that it's essentially open season on everything that makes Allison herself and not just Mrs. McRoberts or Mrs. Worcester Wild Dude. I love that you can analyze something as mundane as a coffee table in this show and see it as a microcosm of Allison and Kevin's marriage and a representation of Kevin's abusive treatment of Allison

[whitedarkmoonflower]

It's okay. You can be on top. // Interview with the Vampire // S1E2

[cuntylestat]

everything is romantic with vampires!

(youtube)

[ominouspuff]

Continuing this fix-it AU where Commander Fox springboards off the deep end into a full-on rebellion, featuring unlikely allies belatedly finding out they are allies far too late to stop being allies but then again it’s never too late not to throw a terrifyingly destructive fit about it (Maul)

Close-up’s under the cut

[keyjamm]

When you're in charge of the onboarding PPT in the jinlintai but all your employees are demonic cultivators

[inchidentally]

sometimes a video from last year just shows up on my fyp?? also does Oscar do a little dance at the very end help

[arabic-langblr]

Arabic learning event

Hello, lovely people (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

As discussed in this post, I will launch the Arabic learning event starting from July 5th, 2024 insha'Allah starting from the very beginning. I'm so excited!

If you're interested in joining, and for more information I'll redirect you to this link.

[sparring-spirals]

Well, I, for one, am convinced.

"I've factored it in :)" "Okay, great." *thoughtful head nods throughout the room*

[padmesbox]

Hangman Page birthday week → Day two: Favorite promo

[ingravinoveritas]

And they were neighbors...

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.