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Beatles “Blackbird” cover, sung in Mi’kmaq. 

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TOS Kirk: Space Golden Retriever, the alpha dog but in a super chill and loyal way, looks at everyone with heart eyes, would like to friend the entire galaxy

AOS Kirk: Space Australian Shepard, alpha dog with perhaps too much energy and a very strong pack mentality, Blue Eyes™, requires affection… aggressively

TOS Spock: Space Abyssian, has adapted to life with space golden retriever but it still a cat, friendly but plays favorites

AOS Spock: Space Shelter Cat, plays favorites harder, resting bitch face, screams™, random outbursts of violence

TOS McCoy: Space Bulldog, tired, resting angry face, employs nihilist humor to cover the fact that is actually a nihilist

AOS McCoy: Space Toy Snchnouzer, yappy™, also angry but in a more tightly wound way, will not be denied or ignored

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how to draw arms ? ? 

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favorite presidential kid? probably alice roosevelt.

-her mother died two days after she was born and on the same day her maternal grandmother also died. teddy was so sad that he left his newborn daughter with his sister anna for two years and could never bring himself to say his wife’s name so alice who was named after her mother had to be called “lee”, her middle name.

-when teddy remarried, alice’s stepmom edith made it clear that she thought alice’s mom had been beautiful but dumb. when alice’s parents couldn’t handle her anymore, they sent her to her aunt anna’s. according to alice, “If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president”. alice claimed to feel one-sixth as loved as her five half-siblings.

-then alice got polio which at the time could kill, not to mention cripple. her stepmom put her through an uncompromising regimen of nightly forced wearing of torturous leg braces and shoes, which left alice with no trace of the disability and able to run up stairs and touch her nose with her toe well into her 80s.

-alice’s dad and stepmom tried to send her to a conservative girls’ school but alice wrote home, “If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will”.

-when teddy became president in 1901, alice became an instant celebrity and fashion icon at age 17. she did scandalous things like smoking cigarettes in public, riding in cars with men, staying out late partying, keeping a pet snake (called emily spinach) in the white house, and placing bets with a bookie. 

-she even had a color - alice blue - and a song - alice blue gown - named after her. the press called her princess alice.

-during an imperial cruise to japan, alice jumped into a pool fully dressed and coaxed a congressman in to join her.

-one time a white house visitor commented on alice’s frequent interruptions in the oval office, usually with political advice. after the third interruption, teddy explained, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both”.

-in february 1906, alice married congressman nicholas longworth and was the social event of the season. it was attended by more than a thousand guests and thousands gathered outside hoping for a glance of princess alice. she wore a blue wedding dress and cut the wedding cake with a sword.

-alice publicly supported her dad’s 1912 presidential candidate while her husband supported president taft. alice appeared on stage in her husband’s own district with her dad’s vp candidate. longworth lost by 105 votes and alice joked that she was worth at least 100 votes (meaning she was the reason he lost).

-alice’s campaign against her husband caused a friction in their marriage and longworth was known to be carrying on many affairs. it was also generally accepted knowledge in dc that alice had a long, ongoing affair with senator william borah, who by alice’s own admission was the father of her daughter, paulina. alice had a wicked sense of humor and had initially wanted to name her daughter deborah (as in de Borah).

-after the death of her daughter paulina in 1957, alice fought for and won custody of her granddaughter joanna. 

-in the 1950s, alice’s health began to fail her and she broke a hip. she also discovered she was suffering from breast cancer and had to have two mastectomies. in 1960, alice was diagnosed with emphysema. 

-alice was also a champion of rights for african-americans. one day, in 1965, alice’s african-american chauffeur and good friend, turner, was driving her to an appointment. turner pulled out in front of a taxi and the driver yelled at him, “What do you think you’re doing, you black bastard?” turner stayed calm but alice told the taxi driver, “He’s taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!”

-after many years of ill health, alice died of emphysema and pneumonia at age 96, outliving all five of her younger half-siblings.

-her most famous quote was, “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me”. 

-when senator joseph mccarthy joked at a party, “Here’s my blind date. I am going to call you Alice”, she replied, “Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not”. 

-she told president lyndon b. johnson that she wore wide-brimmed hats so he couldn’t kiss her.

-when a kkk member dressed in full costume asked her to trust his word, she said, “I never trust a man under sheets”.

so in summary, alice roosevelt longworth was badass.

this is her:

here’s little alice

more of teen/young adult alice

alice with her daughter paulina

alice as a grand old lady

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its really such an indescribable headspace going on long roadtrips in america (but not taking the scenic highways just using the interstates) like the road looks the same for hours. maybe you start driving into the mountains or you’re going out west and you go from plains to mountains to desert, but for the most part it just looks like trees and two stretches of asphalt for as far as you can see. you pull off at an exit to get something to eat or to get gas and it looks the same as every interstate exit you’ve ever been to. the stores might be different, maybe theres a burger king here where there was a mcdonalds at the last one. maybe its a different gas station chain. there’s a few strip malls but no two have the exact same stores. but it’s all the same. it all feels the same. there is no true sensory indication of where you are. you are both nowhere and anywhere. 

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A thought that arises from the idea of tiefling babies often ending up being abandoned: A rich tiefling adventurer retiring and starting up a tiefling orphanage that takes care of rejected tiefling babies and children.

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me as a writer: obsessed with being original, constantly worried that ill copy another artist by accident, i can’t use that phrase i saw someone use it on may 12th, 2014 and

me as a reader: happily reads 2349460283 different versions of the exact same plot

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A goyische friend asked, in the light of the Chabad shooting, what he can do. My immediate response was that he could volunteer to act as a door greeter at his local synagogue, which in retrospect sounded like ‘put yourself in the line of fire with us’, but going to synagogue shouldn’t BE putting oneself in the line of fire. It should be an act of love and commitment and community.

Do you want to know what you can really do to help, though? We’ve got killers referencing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in all seriousness. Can we agree, as a group, that jokes coming from it aren’t cool? Can we stop perpetuating the antisemitic canards?

This means:

No secret lizard people jokes. These come via David Icke, who proposed that Zionists were reptilian aliens hiding among real people.

No Illuminati/‘secret cabal of bankers, media moguls and politicians running the world’ commentary. This is also often a dogwhistle for ‘them rich Jews run everything!’

Diligence to avoid promoting the blood libel–the ancient lie that Jewish people kill Christian babies for our matzah, or other lies that make us out as predators who seek the blood of our enemies.

Shut down Holocaust denial. Do I need to explain this one further?

A detailed list of antisemitic canards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard ) can be found on Wikipedia. If you hear these come up, whether it’s at work or at home, with older people who ‘just don’t know any better’ or your children, please shut this shit down. It is literally getting people killed.

Feel free to reblog this, even if you’re not Jewish.

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Excuse me Rinpoche I have SEVERAL QUESTIONS!!!

1. The Buddha kills people??? And it’s just…fine??? 2. Why didn’t they just give the robber the money and/or disarm him, thus solving the problem without death??? 3. WHY DO BEINGS OF PERFECT COMPASSION NEED DAY JOBS??? WHERE ARE THEY GOING??? IS THERE SOME SORT OF BODHISATTVA CONVENTION THEY ALL MAN BOOTHS AT???

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Oh hey I think I mentioned this before but the final volume came out this week so 

Hey everybody you should read The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells! Starts with All Systems Red, then Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and finally Exit Strategy. 

It’s about a SecUnit that hacked its core programming and went rogue, but kept the same day job because change is scary and instead uses its newfound freedom to watch tv during downtime and occasionally ignore especially stupid orders from the stupid humans it’s supposed to be keeping alive. But then one day the stupid humans that rented it for security on their stupid survey mission end up in serious danger so Murderbot has to actually take its job seriously for once before they realize it’s gone rogue and wipe its brain (rogue SecUnits tend to leave behind body counts in the high dozens so The Company is understandable wary of such things). Then things get worse when the whole rest of the security system gets hacked by attackers, and only the fact that Murderbot stopped bothering to install software updates years ago saves them, so now there’s no way to get out of this without getting discovered, and also somebody is trying to kill them all, and to make matters worse these stupid doomed humans keep forcing Murderbot to care about them.

The later books expand out from that premise but [spoilers]. Just know that it’s super high quality sci fi, with good action on the side, and that Murderbot is what the kids call… relatable. Also the most realistic depiction of an anxiety disorder I’ve ever read.

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The thing about emo (as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon) is, I think, that it was a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the Bush administration’s painful mishandling thereof.

No, I’m serious. My Chemical Romance was formed as a direct result of Gerard Way witnessing the towers fall. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ (an album that, at least as far as I can tell from having been a teenager in Canada at the time, was seminal in influencing the look and sound of emo) is all about the Bush administration - all the lyrics are about life under a democratic dystopia and many reference current events from the time - and it came out in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency. A bunch of Linkin Park’s stuff makes reference to it also, especially their album ‘Minutes to Midnight’, where they first started moving out of the nu-metal/rap sound they’d been working with before and into a more mainstream emo-rock sound. That album came out in 2007. All of the really big bands with that kind of sound - and most of the smaller ones with more of a punk/hardcore sound but similar themes - were active in the mainstream from around 2001-2010. Many of them didn’t survive past 2009, and those that did either totally reinvented themselves (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, MCR for the five minutes it took to produce Danger Days, Linkin Park) or became near-totally irrelevant (Paramore dropped an album sometime in the last two years; did any of you know that? And Green Day haven’t mattered since 21st Century Breakdown, which was released in 2009).

Why? Well, many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the 2001 terror attacks were what really made ‘Islamic terrorism’ a real threat in the minds of most Westerners. We’d never experienced an attack of that scale on American soil, and it was just as the internet was really becoming a mainstay in every house and my generation was getting online. As a result, it was not only a major political event, but it was hugely personal - the coverage was everywhere, in everybody’s home, all the time, and there were a lot of kids being exposed to the coverage in such a way that they often had no good way to process it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed the way we live. I’m Canadian and I felt this shit. Before, we could fly to America domestic, without a passport. Now? Half the draconian, ridiculous rules that hold you up at the TSA today were initiated in September and October of 2001. It was the only thing anyone could think of to do - lock down, protect your own. People were scared, on a continental scale.

And to make matters worse, George W. Bush’s government, which had to somehow respond to and take point in the response to this unprecedented event, didn’t seem to have the first foggiest clue what they were doing. This was a government that not only didn’t seem to listen to its people, not only lied blatantly to its people, but did it badly. They made hugely unpopular decisions, including starting a war in the Middle East that dragged in multiple countries and completely failed to achieve its stated goal of catching Osama bin Laden or proving that he had in his control weapons of mass destruction (the whole war was predicated on the fact that these so-called weapons of mass destruction existed, that the Bush administration had good reason to believe that they existed, were under the control of the Taliban, and were going to be used against Western targets, none of which was ever proven to be true).

So, from 2001-2009, the two (TWO) full terms of the Bush presidency, there were a whole lot of people who couldn’t vote (be they under the age of majority, like most of the emo kids I knew, or Canadians unhappily dragged along with the US’ boneheaded foreign policy decisions because we’re allies, also like most of the emo kids I knew) and therefore felt, not only scared of basically the impending end of their world in a way that they hadn’t previously had to feel, and not only angry about being clearly lied to and clumsily manipulated when the truth was obvious to anyone with eyes, but also powerless to do anything to change anything about that. And meanwhile, people kept dying in this pointless war and the president kept trying to hold together the illusion that everything was hunky-dory.

And what was popular with teenagers from about 2001-2009? Yep. Emo.

Emo as a genre was very personal, very focused on the individual (with the exception of the albums I noted above), but lyrically and musically, it fit right with the cultural atmosphere of the time. People were scared of the impending end of their world/their lives? Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. People were angry about things they felt powerless to change? From Under The Cork Tree and Decemberunderground. Emo captured what kids were feeling about trying to fit into a world that was so clearly fucked up and broken and pretending to be okay, putting on a strong face to Show The Terrorists They Didn’t Win. Emo was about stripping away the mask, exposing the messy, angry, frightened, sad, true underbelly of American society at the time, and exposing hypocrisy - in individuals as much as in politicians. The hatred of ‘preps’ and ‘posers’? Totally not just a My Immortal thing. Emo was about wearing your heart on your sleeve, about it being okay to mourn, to rage, to be afraid for your life beyond this - and to keep moving forward regardless, step by slow step.

So what changed in 2009 that made the phenomenon fade without so much as a whimper? Simple. Hope. The Audacity of Hope, to be exact.

Barack Obama won his presidency largely because young people supported him. Those were the young people who suffered through feeling helpless and powerless under Bush, who wanted things to change but felt they had no chance of making it so. Barack Obama was a chance. One of his first campaign promises was to end the Iraq war, a promise he followed through on. And even if his presidency hasn’t been perfect, it has never been the Bush administration, with the feeling that the will of the people was being entirely and quietly ignored by those in power to further their own agendas.

What I am saying, then, I guess, is that it’s time to buy stocks in Hot Topic, because whatever happens in the upcoming US presidential election, there are a lot of young people who may soon be needing black, white, and red graphic band tees and Manic Panic hair dye.

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Since I already brought up my university’s chaplain once today, I thought I’d share with you the best advice he ever gave me.

If someone is suffering and you want to help, instead of saying “let me know if there’s anything I can do,” offer a few options of things you know you can do.

“Can I do your dishes while you study for your exam?”

“Would it help if I came to the waiting room with you?”

“I can distract you if you like.”

When someone’s suffering, making them choose how to be helped can sometimes be an extra burden, especially if they don’t know how serious your offer is. By giving examples, they only need to say yes/no, and they know you wouldn’t offer anything too big for you to handle.

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Someday I’m going to actually write out this fractured essay in my head about how important “home bases” in fiction are to me (whether that’s a literal home or an office or a secret hideout or even a vehicle in the right circumstances).  

I am very serious when I say that these places are characters to me, just as much as any of the living, breathing human (or nonhuman) characters in the story and once I get attached their loss affects me on an equally visceral level. And, in fact, a creator’s decision to destroy or abandon that “home base” can affect my interest in continuing to emotionally invest in a story just as much as when they cavalierly kill off a character for shock value. 

And someday I will figure out how to put down all my Thoughts on that.

But it is not this day, apparently. 

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So who else misses 2012 and the “they all live in the tower and tony made them separate floors” fanfics after seeing that shit fire angsty trailer

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Ah the free market at work. (Similar to when I went to CVS to pickup a 90$ prescription and they had their own generic version for 7.99).