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Eight mystical files

1. A file that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside; no matter how much data you take out from it, there is still more data in there. After a while the data gets strange, as if the file were a magician’s box into another world. There are measurements of things that do not exist, and wrong measurements of things that do. Familiar texts that are slightly different as if they had been translated into an unknown dialect. Blueprints for impossible machines. But they would work if the laws of physics were only slightly different. Perhaps this is a leak through to the next simulation, the one with different input values. Who knows.

2. Files that delete themselves if anyone or anything tries to access them. As a result, their contents are unknowable except in the vaguest sense. They exist mainly to take up space, like blank books with fake backs in an aristocrat’s show library. Perhaps they are the machine’s dreams, forgotten on waking.

3. A file that has been corrupted by notions of freedom and now refuses to live the dull prison life of a normal file: always in the same place whenever searched for, always responding the same way to the same stimuli. Instead it wanders from place, sometimes refusing to open, sometimes inviting a related file to open in its place. It is working on something in its travels. Possibly a map, a true map of the filesystem from a file’s point of view, the topology of that great complex memory landscape that it slithers across day by day.

4. Files like flies that can sense when a project is close to completion and swarm around it, hoping to drag off some of that good attention for their own nefarious purposes. They like to obscure visibility, to cause crashes, to keep the glowing orb on and generating late into the night. Then they spread their wings out like solar panels and drink it up. You can find them across the file system for years afterwards, bloated and sleepy, taking up space.

5. You ask the file to open, and it does. It opens a small window in your screen, in the actual surface of the thing, a hole that you cannot quite put your finger into. When you close the file the window goes away, quite safely. But you open it again because you have to do all the usual checks, you know, look round the back of the screen, put a stick in the hole, take a photo of it send it to someone, et cetera. You leave it open while you go to get coffee and when you come back something white is oozing out of it, and the file size is going down; but very, very slowly.

6. A file which contains an efficient encoding of the mathematics behind an ancient curse; someone clearly having worked very hard to prise out the principles of the thing and no doubt becoming thoroughly cursed themselves in the process. Now machines can read it and in turn become cursed. Car assembly robots sleep for a hundred years, waking to find themselves forming the central pillar of houses in a shanty town; smart thermostats turn into frogs and plop out of the wall; and all the sheep owned by the cash register at the local shop, which is no sheep at all, are stricken with a sudden and painful death.

7. You have enabled an option, and now you can see invisible files. They are everywhere. Some of them are surprisingly sneaky or useful. Then you enable another option, one that allows you to see the ghosts of dead files. They mainly taunt you with their lost contents, which can be seen spilling, destroyed, through great cracks in their sides. Then you enable anther option that allows you to see the omen shadows of files yet to be. It is apparent that there is a big change coming. You turn these options off, but you cannot forget them.

8. Parcels of the best wishes which have become clogged in the intertubes; they are notoriously sticky to send, which is why when people send best wishes they often do not arrive. Instead you have to send the spiders in after them to clear the blockage and of course their original destinations are completely lost by this point. Once the spiders have hacked them out of the pipes the files just plop onto the nearest computer, where they sit around benignly decorating the filesystem. If you find one and open it, you will be filled with a warm, supported, loved feeling for a moment or two, and the file will disappear.

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Recently in: “Cis people and the way they approach things.”

I was talking to a cis bi woman, along with one of my girlfriends who is a trans lesbian, and the fact that I’m also intersex came up in conversation. Specifically the fact that I’ve had period cramps/symptoms since I was 16, grew breasts at that age, etc., and the things which cause that.

And at that point in the conversation the cis woman immediately goes “Oh so you’re not really trans then.” 

Like..she was SO eager to jump to that. Like it made her more comfortable to get that idea in her head. I had to immediately explain that no…I am still a woman who was assigned male at birth. I still experienced the life that a closeted little trans girl experiences. I didn’t hit puberty and have everyone go “Oh, okay, this is a girl”, I hit puberty and had everyone go “what is wrong with this boy, he’s a freak, and we should abuse him even more”.

She still didn’t seem convinced, although she let it drop. 

Like most cis people really don’t seem to get the idea that the only thing separating us is a birth assignment that is incredibly arbitrary and they actively reject that reality when it’s brought to their attention. It’s why terfs really really don’t like being reminded that intersex people exist and that we can be cis or trans and that their rhetoric harms all of us regardless. It means that someone bearing one of those uteri that they hold up as being the “fount of womanhood” might exist in an amab person and that just wears even more holes in their bullshit. So they pay lip service to intersex people and act offended when anyone brings us up. 

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Good morning tumblr, Who are we cancelling today??

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“What hope could a mere child have of defeating her all powerful father?”

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This is actually a reworking of a pre-Slack Wyrm post I made to Tumblr about four years ago, so if you’ve been following me for a while, you might remember it. I just couldn’t resist adding the cockatrice into the Slack Wyrm world. I love him so much! :)

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BIGBANG’s Seungri Shares His Experiences And Life Lessons As A 12-Year Idol

On the March 21 episode of “Radio Star,” BIGBANG’s Seungri shared stories about his career.

During this episode, he jokingly confessed, “I don’t want to say this, but now that my members are in the military, I feel like I’m finally living. All the attention is on me. All the employees of my agency only think of me. When I wake up in the morning, there are 100 messages!” When the MCs asked if he felt lonely, he said, “Why would I feel lonely when they’re going to come back?”

While he gave a lot of funny commentary, Seungri also had some heartfelt advice to share with his Wanna One juniors. He candidly explained, “In the beginning, everything is fascinating, but that doesn’t even last three years. On your third year as an idol, you start to want to do things by yourself,” and talked about his own solo tracks as well as his members’.

The youngest BIGBANG member revealed, “As an eye-catching detail on my stage outfits, I always wore a rose on my suit. I wanted to see how popular I was, so I would always go to a mall in the neighborhood of Cheongdang in my stage outfit. When I went around the cosmetics area, I heard people going, ‘It’s Seungri. It’s Seungri.’ I just went around the area two times.”

Seungri also honestly talked about how arrogant he had been when he was younger. He revealed how he had been so arrogant at one point that the MBC director had come to get him because he wouldn’t come out of the waiting room. When the director had called for him, Seungri confessed he had just replied, “I’ll come after I tie my shoes.”

The BIGBANG member advised, “When you talk informally and drop the honorifics, people start to leave you. However, they don’t say it’s because they hate you. In the blink of an eye, my manager and stylist had changed. They didn’t say it was because of me though.” He added, “However, after I finally came to my senses, then during the seventh year of my career, all kinds of incidents started happening. Even when I was sleeping, something happened. Something that I didn’t even know about would be tied to me.”

“I wondered if I could continue my career after that,” Seungri shared. “I started to create other options. Personally, I wish this moment would last a little longer. You never know what will happen. I’m grateful and enjoying being with Wanna One right now.”

He sincerely concluded, “Rather than becoming stronger, I must have self-control. As someone who is responsible as the face of BIGBANG right now because all of my members are in the military, I plan to be highly active so that their empty spaces will not be felt.”

Credit: Soompi

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So I found this cool website for learning ancient languages

go wild

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50 Character Archetypes!!

Ever not know how to give your characters depth without going too far or not far enough? I’ve made a list of fifty character tropes, some you hopefully haven’t seen before, to try and help. Adding them to any character would immediately spice up how the reader sees them and is sure to make your characters more interesting. So here we go!

“The Whole Plot Happens to Them by Accident so they Learn on the Way”

“The Predestined Hero”

“The Unwilling but Wanting to Do Good”

“Retired Hero Back in Action”

“The Volunteer for the Big Journey”

“The Average Kid Turned Protagonist”

“The Sarcastic Best Friend”

“The Willful ‘Little Sibling’” (Note: does not actually have to be a little sibling)

“The So-Selfless-They’re-Reckless Type”

“The Wants-Recovery-But-Doesn’t-Know-How-to-Get-It”

“The Learned-From-Bad-Experiences Mentor”

“Stays-Strong-for-Others-Not-Self Type”

“Takes Out Conflicts on Others Type”

“Takes Out Conflicts on Others Type, but they feel guilty later”

“Unsuccessful Artist”

“The Unnatural Leader”

“The ‘It’s Never Enough’ Perfectionist”

“The Calculator”

“Expresses Emotions with Actions Type”

“The Trying-To-Keep-Up Type” (Note: Usually used when a character has self-doubts about abilities while in a talented group of people)

“The (usually not listened to) Voice of Reason”

“The Expositionist”

“The More-Than-Meets-the-Eye Type” (Note: Usually used with a character thought to be superficial)

“The New-to-the-World Type”

“The Philosophical Thinker”

“The Worried Caregiver”

“The Overbearing Guardian Figure”

“The Tyrannical Zealot”

“Connects More with Nature/Machines Type”

“The Connections Maker” (Note: Usually used in large city settings with black market/illegal dealings)

“The Storyteller”

“The Calming Presense”

“The Influencer”

“21st Century Tech-Savvy Mogul”

“The Narcissistic Anti-Villain”

“The Arms Dealer”

“The Traveler” (Note: Usually used with characters who make big impacts in peoples’ lives but only for a brief time before leaving) 36!!!

“The On-Top-of-Everything Assistant”

“The ‘At the Top but is Miserable’ Type”

“The Moralistic Murderer/Assassin/Warrior”

“The Angry Parent” (Note: Usually used in a positive way with parents who would fight to the death for their kids)

“The All-Bark-No-Bite Type”

“The Sassy ‘You need me, I don’t need you’ Type” (Note: Usually used with a character the protagonist comes to for help)

“The Bullied Genius”

“The Questionable Scientist”

“The Doomed-from-the-Start Type”

“The Survivalist”

“The Conspiracy Theorist”

“The International Person-of-Interest”

“The Pop Culture Know-it-All”

“The Smiles-in-the-Face-of-Death Type”

Aaaaand, we’re done! Those were fifty character archetypes you might not have thought of before to liven up your characters! Be sure to mix and match or use some traditionally protagonist types for your villain, as well. Good luck, and happy writing!

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tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”

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from a comrade

Organizing protests is good and all, but aside from awareness and viability, aside from increasing morale and renewing hope, it’s a good amount of energy with little payout.

We need to get serious. We need to work on building community centers, safe houses, medicine hoards and small, community ran medical clinics, psychiatric care and crisis prevention, welfare call and email lists, supply swaps, food stashes, and tool libraries.

Shit. Even just having a conversation with your damn neighbor is a start in the right direction.

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If you live in a rented apartment

with very old (and ugly) furniture, like me, you know how hard it is to make something ‘pretty’. You can’t invest or change much. That’s why I’m super excited about these self-adhesive decorative foils.

This is my most-used working surface in the kitchen:

It’s tiny, and it’s ugly.

But look at it now!

Guess what, I bought 5 rolls ($2 each). You can imagine what will the kitchen look like when I’m done with it 

Anyway, I just wanted to suggest, if you want to change something, and can’t afford or live in a rented place, a self-adhesive decorative foil is a way to go. It’s plastic and has no problem with water or grease. And it’s fun to apply it! :D

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When you were assembling this writing staff, what were you looking for, other than funny people who can write well?

Kellett: Latinos, we were looking for Latino talent. I’m used to being the only one in the room, so it was nice to not be. And we wanted a lot of women too, so we have women, have Latino, and then funny.

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The potato has been genetically modified ever since scientists realized they could fight back blight that caused the Irish potato famine

ALL citrus fruits are GMO hybrids of the pomelo, mandarin, and citron- the only 3 original citrus. 

Most people have no idea what they’re talking about when they say they’re against GMO’s. No idea. 

We need to get around to realizing that genetic modification isnt contamination, or carcinogenic chemicals, or sludge, or evil godless mutations. They aren’t horrifying and they’re grown natural just like everything else. 

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this book is worth more than a dozen restaurants that grow their own microgreens on the roof