I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

#IM SORRY THEY DO HOME FUCKING WORK IN ANIMORPHS??????

Yeah they're students. If they don't keep their grades up or if they miss too many classes (or miss classes at suspicious times) then they risk drawing the attention of the faculty and/or their parents, some of whom are the enemy and some of whom can just make future espionage a whole lot harder. There are multiple missions where they're like "okay, this is incredibly time sensitive but it'll take a full day or longer so it has to wait for the weekend and we'll have to all lie to our parents about sleeping over at each others' houses. It's gonna have to be done at the last minute because we've gotta go to class. Also, remember to get that English paper finished, we can NOT afford to have you grounded right now."

They also get disembowelled and/or eaten a lot

#animorphs#its actually devastating i bever got into these#they wouldve been a million times more up my alley wtf was i reading harry potter for

It's not too late. You can still read them.

These have been out of print for an age, and the authors have given their blessings to share the PDFs. Here's everything, including companion/side books and the non-canon Alternamorphs books, in reading order:

the white house is now so right wing, the GOP turtle man is by default on "our side." Trump's only response to this so far is to insinuate he's lying about the polio. Classy!

> The college I attended was small and very LGBT friendly. One day someone came to visit and used the word “gay” as a pejorative, as was common in the early 2000s. A current student looked at the visitor and flatly said, “we don’t do that here.” The guest started getting defensive and explaining that they weren’t homophobic and didn’t mean anything by it. The student replied, “I’m sure that’s true, but all you need to know is we don’t do that here.” The interaction ended at that point, and everyone moved on to different topics. “We don’t do that here” was a polite but firm way to educate the newcomer about our culture. […]

> It turns out talking about diversity, inclusion, and even just basic civil behavior can be controversial in technical spaces. I don’t think it should be, but I don’t get to make the rules. When I’m able I’d much rather spend the time to educate someone about diversity and inclusion issues and see if I can change how they see the world a bit. But I don’t always have the time and energy to do that. And sometimes, even if I did have the time, the person involved doesn’t want to be educated.

> This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values. If I deliver this sentence well it carries no more emotional weight than saying, “in Japan, people drive on the left.” “We don’t do that here” should be a statement of fact and nothing more. It clearly and concisely sets a boundary, and also makes it easy to disengage with any possible rebuttals.

> Me: “You are standing in that person’s personal space. We don’t do that here.” > Them: “But I was trying to be nice.” > Me: “Awesome, but we don’t stand so close to people here.”

> Them: Tells an off-color joke. > Me: “We don’t do that here.” > Them: “But I was trying to be funny.” > Me (shrugging): “That isn’t relevant. We don’t do that here.”

I really really do want to endorse this. Making a person’s behavior about capital-M Morality is a great way to get people to dig in their feet and escalate situations. By going “Hey, that behavior doesn’t fit in this context.” it removes a ton of the resentment and toxicity on both sides of the interaction.

not wanting to be outdone by the benders in the gang, sokka invents the flamethrower, the supersoaker, the leaf blower, and the concept of throwing rocks at people

this is canon. to me.

wait did anyone draw this already

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

Smithsonian Archives Transcription Center

tbh though if i were mccoy i’d be pretty fucking fed up with spock too. imagine you’re a doctor, you dedicate your life to learning how care for hundreds of different life forms and species across the galaxy, and then your wife divorces you, which leads you to enlisting as a doctor for starfleet. this is WAY outside of your comfort zone, you hate adventure and you’d rather be sittin on a porch in the sun with some sweet tea in hand and your daughter on your knee, but you ain’t got nowhere else to go, and who are you if you aren’t a doctor? you’ve dedicated your whole life and so much more to healing. so you enlist, you get assigned to a starship. not your dream job, but if there’s one thing leonard mccoy knows how to do it’s treat patients. and then THIS MEDICAL MARVEL MOTHERFUCKER comes in with his fucked up gene spliced half human half vulcan biology and the rarest most obscure blood type even among vulcans with ZERO precedent for his existence or medical baseline and also happens to be THE WORST PATIENT IN HISTORY. REFUSES to sit still and follow instructions. always making smart ass comments about your silly human emotionalism. you’ll get insane fucking readings and be like “spock i think you’re dying” and the bastard will answer with a straight face “yes. that’s just pon farr.” “can you tell me how to treat it?” “no.” and then just walks out of the fucking sickbay. you’re constantly busting your ass trying to figure out how to keep this human-alien catboy mix’n’match medical nightmare from hell alive and healthy and all you get in return is backhanded compliments from an emotionally stunted fruit. and you can’t even complain about it to your best friend because he’s too busy doodling this obstinate motherfucker’s name all over his notebook while eye-fucking him on the middle of the bridge. hell i’d be an alcoholic too.

The word you are looking for is “selfish.” Not narcissist, not sociopath, selfish.

The US having an entire city in the middle of the desert dedicated entirely to gambling sounds like a thing other countries would make up about the US as a joke but its real and no one bats an eye at it

They also do divorce

You know I held myself back from going off on an infodump about the history of divorce in Las Vegas for the sake of this joke but the amount of people reblogging this version from me and not getting my history based joke about how divorce was important in shaping the economy is Las Vegas is driving me a little bit crazy

The people want an explanation so an explanation I shall give.

Basically Nevada used to be like. Nowhere. Even more nowhere than it is now. They broke several rules when they made it a state actually because the population wasn’t big enough to justify it but they wanted Lincoln to get more electoral college votes or something. I dunno.

Point is, there’s not much in Nevada. Sure, there’s silver mines. There’s local tribes who are pretty cool. There’s wildlife. There’s some neat mountains. Not much water though and water is needed for most industries and large scale civilization.

This vast emptiness ended up making Nevada what it is today though mostly because of crime. It’s hard for the feds to stop your crime when you’re surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. Is the state and federal government gonna trek through the Nevada desert to scold you? I don’t think so.

Local governments today in Nevada can often trace themselves directly back to criminal organizations and corrupt groups of politicians, including the city of Las Vegas and the very large unincorporated community of Paradise which is actually where the Las Vegas strip is. Why is Paradise, Nevada still an unincorporated community despite having over 180,000 residents? Because if there’s no city government that’s one less government entity your casino has to pay taxes to. Duh.

And these crime people and casino owners and easily bribable politicians despite their many problems did figure something out. Tourists like doing things that are illegal in other places. Californian tourists in particular. And one of the illegal things that all Americans really but especially Californians wanted to do was get divorced.

Around 1930 Nevada became one of the first states to make no-fault divorce legal. Not only that but the required waiting period became six weeks. Not only that but only one spouse had to live in Nevada for those six weeks. To this day, the waiting period for divorce in California is still six months. This was huge.

This becomes a whole industry. Not only is gambling legal in Nevada but now divorce is too. When a couple decide mutually that they want a divorce but there’s no legal reason for it where they live, one of them, usually the woman, goes to live in a resort in Las Vegas or Reno for six weeks (often called a divorce ranch) and then they can get divorced.

And while one or both spouses are there, they can gamble, get pampered, see entertainment, meet other people. Then they go home after their divorce and tell their friends all about it. Now all their friends know that there’s gambling and entertainment in Vegas. And now they know about the divorce ranches. More money in the Nevadan economy.

Las Vegas is a bright shining tax evasion island in the middle of the desert built on entertainment, gambling, crime, and divorce. God bless Nevada and god bless no-fault divorce.

flow winning animated feature is the kind of story that's going to be taught like the boogeyman to every big animation studio's intake class for decades

i keep thinking of this team and getting really emotional. maybe it's because of the being made in blender and kinda looking like a cutscene thing but they really remind me of when tiny indie game studios win massive and Just Can't Believe It. they came to the oscars with cufflinks of their little cat on it. they had the cat embroidered into the lining of their jackets. they posted photos of them all celebrating with their oscars at in-n-out afterwards. imagine being in an indie studio in a country that's literally never been recognized by nomination at the oscars, picking up TWO nominations for an ANIMATED film, getting flown out, decking yourselves out in easter eggs of your little guy, going "hey we may not win but holy shit latvia's at the goddamn oscars let's gooooo" and then running away with the biggest mainstream animation award there is. i'd lose my fucking mind. peace and love and joy and jubilation on planet earth

this rules actually

idk if anyone cares but i can confirm that the entire country is also collectively losing their minds over this

and everyone is offering to do this WILLINGLY (or cashing in on the success depending on how you look at it, but really we’re just excited as fuck)

this is NOT part of a major marketing scheme by the studio - none of this was around before/around the movies actual release

i think it's really funny when formally fat people go "body positivity is a scam because when i was fat i was miserable and i hated myself but now that i'm skinny i feel alot happier" and it's like well that's because society treats fat people like subhuman dogshit for daring to breathe in public and treats skinniness as the pinicle of human excellence, so i think that's the reason you aren't as depressed maybe.

"formally fat" and "detrans" people have alot in common in the sense they project their insecurities of their former identities onto other fat/trans people and blame them for their misery as if the only reason they detransed/decided to lose weight wasn't because they were relentlessly bullied and oppressed for years by a society that values strict gender roles and beauty standards, and because they decided to crack to those standards they think the issue is with everyone else.

and obviously this doesn't apply to EVERYONE they are like. detrans people who don't project their issues with their identity onto other trans people, or formally fat people who don't treat losing weight like beating cancer, but those aren't the people trending on twitter for "being one of the good ones who overcame' or whatever.

oh i am going to kill myself

FAT PEOPLE IN FORMAL WEAR I AM SO FUCKING SORRY I LOVE YALL

I know I was joking the other day about Korra but I do fear it should be common knowledge at this point that all avatars are just causing messes the next avatars after have to clean up and yes that very much includes Aang

My boy Aang really got a guided tour of the inequality happening in Ba Sing Se and said "I have a war to deal with I'll let the next avatar deal with this shit"

#i still need to read the female airbender novels#but ive read kyoshi and yeah its bad guys#they should honestly just include it as part of the avatar title at this point#master of all 4 elements bridge between the spirit and human world cleaner upper of the previous avatars oppsies

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it's so true, and also so critical to the avatars that they had to Pick Their Lane. When everything is falling apart, you have to pick your One Thing to fix and sure hope the next guy gets one of the other things

Something critical is that probably the real dick grayson would absolutely never ever casually call BW Dad to his face, and truthfully even post-adoption in GK#17 the father-son thing is only like 49% of the Bruce & Dick rs although dick absolutely does lasso bruce into conversations as in “oh my dad does the same thing!” when hes having conversations w total strangers faraway from anywhere on the eastern seaboard where word could never get back and associations could not be made BUT WITH ALL OF IT SAID THAT DICK WOULD NEVER CALL BRUCE DAD TO HIS FACE, in Bruce’s like deepest, most potent fantasies, like daydreams and nightdreams and also canonically that issue where bruce is in that feartoxin dreamscape world in Batman/superman #65 where his parents are alive and bruce is romantically stable and dick is his son, Dick absolutely, and invariably, calls him Dad. But that element absolutely isnt on the table in the real world at all. It isnt even that Bruce Wants That—he doesn’t want a change to the very precarious working current order, not even a very small one bc its very precious & risk aversion reasons—but it’s also like a satisfying recognition of some real under-the-surface order in the world that bruce perceives but which just isnt in play in the real world. But it is something explicit and certain in Bruce’s head and something that Bruce is aware of. And sometimes he like closes his eyes and thinks of it or something.

#YEAH YES PERFECT #one of the things that i loved about the post-crisis batfamily #is that it was constantly TEASING family without ever quite getting there #everyone was very hesitant about words like 'father' or 'son' or 'brother' #and they all tended to get defensively couched in 'the closest thing i have to a brother' 'he was like a father to me' #'maybe that's what it's like... between fathers and sons' #or all the times dick & tim call each other brother but put it in air quotes. or the workarounds: my friend. my closest ally. #or when dick & bruce are performing themselves for strangers so then dick can say anything because it's half pretense #it's this dynamic where you alllllmost say you think of the other person as your family but you don't QUITE say it #and i loved this because i love the dynamic of 'we both care more about this than we're willing to admit' #and there's so much productive tension in that restraint & that unwillingness to say the words #and i feel like it loses so much of what i loved when you just retcon it and dick's just casually calling bruce dad. no!! no!!! #dick would not say that!!! he might think about it. or imply it. he might hint at it. he might put it in air quotes #but he would not say it straight out sincerely to bruce for all kinds of complicated reasons#and bruce would never expect it. not even want it precisely. because the person he loves is dick-grayson-as-he-is #and not really dick-grayson-if-he'd-never-had-other-parents-and-uncomplicatedly-grew-up-calling-bruce-dad #and yet sometimes. in the secret daydream of his own mind. (tags via @silverwhittlingknife)

#YES \o/#the tension of it all is the best part#how big and bedrock the emotions are vs. the unstable shatterpoint fragility they feel re: talking about them#like speaking a thing aloud could be enough to break it#vulnerability!! rejection!! giving up emotional leverage to someone who may (probably definitely) use it against you!!#the universe will conspire to steal from you those you love the moment you give away how important they are to you!!#these traumatized people#the bittersweet double-edged sword for Bruce of both wanting and not wanting to hear it (h/t @umbrellacam)

I really wish the West had more recognition of 'martial family' - the East Asian concept of mentor-student (and student-student) bonds. We've watered down the concept of mentorship so much that superhero-sidekick (and fellow sidekick) relationships just ... don't have a box, anymore.

Like, Dick and Bruce's relationship is DEFINITELY more complicated than that! Bruce took him in as his ward, and later adopted him! (Though, those thing can also happen in martial/mentor relationships.) They are in this weird, delicate place that isn't quite what either of them wants, but also is the only thing they both could accept.

But, even if mentor-student bonds don't ENCOMPASS everything their relationship is, understanding them would help push back on the modern idea of nuclear family that seems to get applied to the Bats these days. Dick would TOTALLY have called Tim 'shixiong' if he was in a wuxia show, and it would perfectly encapsulate their relationship. It would also have helped EVERYONE to provide Dick with the same term for Jason. Tim could correct people when they called Bruce his dad by explaining he's Tim's 'shifu', and maybe fans would stop snickering 'doth thou protest too much?' Cass IS Tim and Steph's 'shijie', and that allows us to place her in the Batfamily without reaching or twisting her actual relationships.

The challenge that Dick and Bruce have is that they started out as mentor-student, and then both later realized that father-son MIGHT fit better, but neither is sure. If we don't understand how they started, and how safe and rich and deep that relationship can be, it's really hard to chart their journey!

I don't think they can. Somebody asked the same question as a response to this post 2 days ago (February 14th) and this was their response

[Image ID: a comment thread between Alt National Park Service and another Facebook user. Thread reads as follows:

NPS (directed at Elon Musk): Why all the pettiness? We are proud supporters, and many in our coalition are LGBTQ+.

Sam Perkins-Harbin: can you put it back online?

NPS: Access has been denied to those who previously had it. This is getting ridiculous.

End ID.]

They also cite having severe staffing shortages, especially with emergency personnel, and fearing essential operations are going to completely shut down in a different post one day later.

oh snap ok i was ignorant, thank you for the info!

Uncredited art makes me sad :( The artist's name is David Nott

+

In order to stop the culture of faking orgasms, we need to stop the culture of shaming others for their sexual experiences.

Orgasms are NOT the defining characteristic of your sexual prowess. They are great, they’re lovely when they happen, but for the love of science, stop bringing them up higher than they need to be. 

This one’s a pretty big deal.  “Did you come?”  

All of these are fucking awesome answers.  Including the last one.  They’re also 100% legitimate answers.  Including the last one.

Only the last one is even a little bit “negative,” and, really, how bad, arrogant, or egocentric a lover do you have to be that you’d rather not know when your partner says “here are some great ways to help me come next time, lover?”

If on the other hand you’re going to panic or be unhappy about that last answer then you’re not a bad lover (no shame either way) but your sex life will be less workable.  With the result that you’ll continue having, well, the same result.

To be honest, whether you or your partner comes isn’t the most important thing about sex.  It’s whether you’re both satisfied afterwards.  The only trick being that 

Asking “did you come” isn’t really the right question.  “Does this work for you” is way healthier.  That’s the culture we want to look for and encourage.

—

P.S. Your partner isn’t a video game.  His or her orgasms aren’t a boss fight.  The question you want to ask isn’t “did I beat the previous high score” but “would you like to play again.”