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Good morning everyone I feel like doing a worldbuilding project based on those “fictional characters IN THE REAL WORLD” stories. Enchanted comes to mind for tone.

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since pride month is coming up, that also means we’re getting closer to the month when there’ll be 10000 posts reminding us that all the gay pride merch is just a corporate cash-in, that these corporations don’t care about us, that the world isn’t really any better, that none of the pride merch and ads actually mean anything, that it isn’t really progressive, blah blah blah

let me just say

i know. most people on here know. you are not the sole thinking person in a world of sheep. i promise you that the person you’re making all these points to has heard it 100 times 100 ways from 100 other people. we know, tumblr. we know. 

but dammit, one month a year i get rainbow everything, and that’s a breath of fresh air after eleven months of straight nonsense. i LOVE seeing pride everywhere, even if it is just a corporate cash-grab. and it’s not like i can just opt out of this capitalist society, so fuck it, imma buy all the rainbow, pride-themed, gay merch i can get my hands on.

the world is a capitalist hellhole and there is no escape, so we may as well have what fun we can with it while we try and make things better.

happy pride, folks.

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The other day I got a bug up my ass about lake Natron, because I’ve seen the photos of the calcified remains of animals that died on the lake (contrary to popular rumor, the lake doesn’t outright kill them as soon as they touch it but it probably doesn’t help), but I’ve only seen those photos in black and white. I’m sure you’ve seen them.

This particular photographer posed them for the photos, but I thought, you know, calcified remains should be really interesting to see in color, so I tried to find some that had been taken by others, in color. It was not nearly as visual stunning, they were just white rotting remains.

But what caught my eye wasn’t the dead. It was the fucking lake.

It’s BLOOD fucking RED.

It’s super alkaline (typically 10, but can get up 12, and just so we’re clear, pH13 melts skin, go look up Lye), blood fucking red (terrifying), and oh, it gets to be 106F/41C in the water (which is not scalding but still unreasonable for a LAKE). Red spirulina cyanobacteria (toxic!) thrives here and provides food for the main denizen of the lake…. fucking lesser flamingos.

Look at their fucking mud nests! They have to build nests out of mud because there’s nothing else and the water is caustic enough to kill their babies before those babies are tall enough to stand out of the water! The parents are feeding them crop milk that contains BLOOD.

Additionally!! The chicks often get soda anklets from soda and other minerals collecting and hardening around their feet and legs, which is the major killer of lesser flamingo chicks! They’re so hard that they would need to be hammered off! Like with a hammer or a smashy rock!! Humans had to do this for thousands of babies one year just to keep them from all dying off after we screwed with the balance of minerals in one of their lakes!

Look at this place! What is that black void!!

You need to leave!! You have found flamingo Silent Hill!! What are you still doing here!! I’ll tell you!! They’re still doing there because literally the death lake protects them from predators, nothing big enough to be a threat to them gets across the lake to get them. There are millions of them living there safely.

What the fuck. what the FUCK nature. This is some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever pulled and hardly anyone knows about it. I’m on to you. I see your blood lake with your pink goth bird decorations. I see you.

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In highschool I wrote a story about a middle-generation of stellar travelers. Their parents were born on earth and left as children, and the middle generation will not live long enough to see their destination. They live their entire lives on the ship and I wrote about them trying to find their place in everything. They will never know blue skies and warm beaches and open fields with warm breezes. They’ll never know birdsong or crickets or frogs. They’ll never hear the rain on the roof of a dreary day. I never could find the right way to end the story. I wanted it to be a happy ending, but I didn’t know how to do it.

I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.

In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.

In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.

And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.

When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.

But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.

You have to teach yourself that being happy is not a radical idea.

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One of the reasons men didn’t have an issue with Wonder Woman is because they can objectify her. She’s basically in a metal swimsuit. Now, I think they did a really good job with her costume considering what they had to work with. It looked like real armor and something that an Amazon woman would wear, way better than past iterations where she was literally in lingerie. Captain Marvel, on the other hand, is in a full suit that covers her entire body. It fits her well, but it’s not a skintight bodysuit like what Black Widow has worn before.  It’s practical and isn’t something that men can easily objectify. They didn’t have problems with some of the feminist stuff in Wonder Woman because they were too busy staring up her skirt. Men don’t have an issue with a woman on screen if it’s someone they can objectify.

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[ID: A digital drawing of an American Bobtail cat wearing a collar sporting the colours of the aromantic flag. Behind the cat is a blob of colour depicting the aro flag and the words “American Bobtail Aro” written in all caps. - end ID]

More cat

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now that ive got a text tool i wanted to re write my last orc post

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Mario Kart Wii has probably the best modding community of any game

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let’s pour one out for all the janitors who clean and never get enough appreciation

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Sometimes I wonder if native English speakers appreciate how much more comfortable the internet is for them than for the rest of the world

Like, you can go on tumblr and simply read stuff in your mother tongue? Amazing. Go on youtube and you don’t have to replay some sentences ten times to try to understand what they’re saying? Incredible. Look for practically anything on google and know that there will be a fuckton of results that you can read without having to spend half the time looking up words in a dictionary? Fascinating. Make a post or send an ask without panicking that you’ll make a silly mistake or that they won’t understand what you meant? Unbelievable.

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The crossover we deserve

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vanessa vancleef is the coolest because she goes undercover as a chick named hope for like 10+ years almost solely so that when her ruse is exposed she can rip off half of her clothes and yell “THERE IS NO HOPE, THERE IS ONLY VANESSA” at everyone present. which is prime teenage melodrama but also kinda metal fuck bryan stoutmantle 

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Broke: Horde characters defecting to the Alliance because they dislike Sylvanas

Woke: Horde characters staying to protect their fellow Hordies (who are their friends and families) from Alliance retaliation whilst also having objections to how the war is fought, and coming up with ways to complete their missions without doing anything they personally object to or needlessly endangering the people they’re fighting alongside.

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in honor of trans day of remembrance, id like to take the time to talk about my fav trans actress that not a lot of people know about: maddie blaustein!!

she was a voice actress for various anime and video games, but she was mostly known for her work as meowth from pokemon!!

she voiced him for eight seasons until the VAs were replaced, and she considered him her favorite role!! she wrote some episodes of the show and said that the episode that revealed meowths backstory (how he learned to talk and was rejected by his kind until eventually finding a home in team rocket) inspired her to come out as trans!!

she also wrote and edited several comics!! she worked for both marvel and dc for a while and created a trans woman protagonist named marissa rahm for a mini series called deathwish!!

she was also known for being a very active player of the game “second life” back when it was popular and became a respected member of the community. her character was named kendra bancroft

unfortunately she died in december 2008 of a stomach virus, but she will always be remembered as a passionate activist for lgbt rights!! after coming out as trans, it was very difficult for her to find more voice acting roles due to the transphobic industry, but she was supported by her friends on the pokemon staff and online. she was a very sociable person who wasnt afraid to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed in

rip maddie, and happy trans day of remembrance!!

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You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”

Well I see that, and I raise you this:

An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.

And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.

He’s crushed by the competition every single time.

Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker. 

There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.

And he wins.

Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something. 

The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.

So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.

He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”