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when you get half eaten by a hostile creature cause you’ve gotta save your stupid clients 🙄

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doylistic/watsonian compromise re: murderbot: the show WE watch is the same show MURDERBOT watches that is based on its exploits some years after the events of the books. murderbot's crew and friends are leery about the whole concept but murderbot is nothing if not a massive tv enjoyer so it says yeah go for it make a show. id watch it. then they cast the show and murderbot is Perturbed that they've picked a big regular humanman to play it. why not secunit actor? (not that many secunit actors. as a general rule acting is not their strong suit. but why not cyborg actor???? at the very least???) . still and all MB does watch the show and if there's one thing MB finds consistently fun about tv it's the way the people on it are hotter than the ones in real life. so it balances out in the end

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I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought “why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff,” so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It’s alright if you can’t because apparently I fuckin couldn’t either

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Without the federal funding provided by IMLS, the valuable programs and services that libraries deliver to their communities are at risk. As for current IMLS staff, the future is uncertain. The Executive Order directs the agency to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

ALA President Cindy Hohl weighed in shortly after the EO was ordered with ALA’s call to action. “This is a time for unity. As a community of library and information professionals, we must face these threats by showing up together—library workers, friends, trustees and public supporters—to advocate for our patrons, our profession, and our core values. The existential threats we’re facing now call us to draw on our greatest power: library stories that touch hearts and change minds, especially for decisionmakers. We ask you to call members of Congress to tell those powerful stories that show the true importance of our libraries.”

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i'm glad there are episodes in the next generation where data gets reprogrammed/possessed/we meet his evil twin/etc, because as much as brent spiner is amazing as data, his real talent is playing weird little freaks

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According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state. “Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure. But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.

One X user critical of King Arthur Baking’s contest posted an email she received from the company in response to her complaining. “Helping build joyful, equitable communities that celebrate diversity is an important part of who we are as a company,” the email states, later adding: “We love baking with anyone and everyone. Our simple expectation is that everyone show respect for one another.”

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Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

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For no reason here is a library story

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x

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AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT series final scene 13x05 "Curtain"

"Words really can't express how much that obsessive, kindly, gentle man with his mincing walk, his 'little grey cells' and his extraordinary accent had come to mean to me. To lose him now, after so long, was like losing the dearest of friends, even though I was only an actor playing a part." - David Suchet, Poirot and Me

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masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

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I’ve said this before but the way that I crave boring (affectionate) domestic destiel in post canon, I crave the exact opposite for sam. like that guy needs to go absolutely unhinged bonkers crazy and like practice experimental witchcraft as a hobby and tap back into his psychic demon powers while making out with a centuries old hottie who genuinely adores how insane he is because she’s actually worse and they encourage each other to be strange and off putting

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not only did the three “die” holding hands, the two of them that were in a romantic relationship didn’t. eliot was in the middle. he held both their hands. you would think a show would put their long-time building romantic relationship together and have them hold hands as they died, right? nope. not leverage. most shows wouldn’t even consider having their two male characters hold hands. especially in such an intimate, emotional scene. most shows wouldn’t have one of their male characters hold hands with his friend’s girlfriend as they were dying. leverage showed us how important their relationship was by eliot’s placement. eliot meant so much to both hardison and parker and they meant so much to him. and this was nate’s story. nate came up with this, told people how the three thieves died together, holding hands. he had to make sure people knew that eliot spencer , alec hardison , and parker loved one another so so so so so much

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I'll leave you with this thought for the night, gallows-humor though it is: even the lowest-informed, misguided, confused, and sometimes let-us-say-it flatly moronic people in America like to vote and take it for granted that they can meaningfully do so on a regular and expected basis. So if the evil orange and company actually try to make good on this whole no more democracy and/or actual elections thing, I really don't see it working out well for them.

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“One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly. “Num…?”- a particular which notoriously “expects the answer No.” Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for “polite negatives,” replied, still more briefly, “Benigne.””

—

-Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers (via summersanginme)

#wimsey #please #are we to assume she was saying thank you then or #gaudy night #harriet #you win (via @zooeyscigar)

I Am Not A Latinist but my mental translation is “thanks but no thanks.”

(via talkingpiffle)

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I made Vorkosigan Saga memes

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A murder mystery film set in a medieval village. After an outbreak of plague, the villagers make the decision to shut their borders so as to protect the disease from spreading (see the real life case of the village of Eyam). As the disease decimates the population, however, some bodies start showing up that very obviously were not killed by plague.

Since nobody has been in or out since the outbreak began, the killer has to be somebody in the local community.

The village constable (who is essentially just Some Guy, because being a medieval constable was a bit like getting jury duty, if jury duty gave you the power to arrest people) struggles to investigate the crime without exposing himself to the disease, and to maintain order as the plague-stricken villagers begin to turn on each other.

The killer strikes repeatedly, seemingly taking advantage of the empty streets and forced isolation to strike without witnesses. As with any other murder mystery, the audience is given exactly the same information to solve the crime as the detective.

Except, that is, whenever another character is killed, at which point we cut to the present day where said character's remains are being carefully examined by a team of modern archaeologists and historians who are also trying to figure out why so many of the people in this plague-pit died from blunt force trauma.

The archaeologists and historians, btw, are real experts who haven't been allowed to read the script. The filmmakers just give them a model of the victim's remains, along with some artefacts, and they have to treat it like a real case and give their real opinion on how they think this person died.

We then cut back to the past, where the constable is trying to do the same thing. Unlike the archaeologists, he doesn't have the advantage of modern tech and medical knowledge to examine the body, but he does have a more complete crime scene (since certain clues obviously wouldn't survive to be dug up in the modern day) and personal knowledge from having probably known the victim.

The audience then gets a more complete picture than either group, and an insight into both the strengths and limits of modern archaeology, explaining what we can and can't learn from studying a person's remains.

At the end of the film, after the killer is revealed and the main plot is resolved, we then get to see the archaeologists get shown the actual scenes where their 'victims' were killed, so they can see how well their conclusions match up with what 'really' happened.