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BUSTED!!

A little White Rose and a little Bumblebee to tide you over. Have a good night and don’t forget your hot cocoa and cookies. They probably won’t help however if you’re feeling…”conflicted.”

bluboxblogs

@vigilantsycamore

stoneillustrations

BUSTED!!

reallyndacarter

It's June 1. It's time.

Go be gay.

fullyerecteggplant

ittybittymattycommittee

#raise your shields #because you’re about to get wrecked

jewishgarygreen

#this is the star trek i wanna see#like when somebody asked gene roddenberry why piccard was bald#because wouldn’t they have found a cure for male pattern baldness by then?#and he was like ‘no by the 24th century no one will care’#i wanna see that attitude with disability and neurodiversity#it’s not that we’ll have a magic cure for everything#there’ll always be something new#but disabilities and neurodiversity will be celebrated and seen as part of the norm#it will be accomodated#so blind people can serve in star fleet#and so can people in wheelchairs and autistic people and people with prosthetics and people with chronic illnesses (via @hunterinabrowncoat)

kiapet2

This episode ends with Geordi saving the planet by using something derived from the technology found in his visor (an adaptive device that lets him sense things around him). So a disabled man literally saved the lives of an entire culture that wouldn’t have considered his life worth living, using technology they would have never deemed necessary without the presence of his unique needs.

scholarlypidgeot

I don’t watch Star Trek, but I can’t stress enough how important this message is

fictionadventurer

My favorite thing about this episode is that, while the rest of the characters are taking a more Star Trek philosophical approach to this situation, calmly debating the good and bad points of this colony built upon eugenics, Geordi is just seething. Troi is having a romance with their flippin’ president, but Geordi never hesitates on his morals. He’s always aware that this world’s supposed perfection is built upon the despicable philosophy of killing people like him. He barely even bothers to hide his anger as he has to work alongside their scientists. He’s snappish and short-tempered and bitter, clearly only working with these people because lives are at stake. When he discovers the solution is based on his VISOR, he is viciously triumphant, his joy at saving the people boosted by a bitter sense of righteousness that these people were only saved because someone like him was allowed to survive.

And even though this anger and bitterness are very un-Star-Trek-like approaches to diplomacy–it works. The scientist who works alongside him is the first person who decides to jump ship and leave the colony behind. She sees the stagnation of their bland “’‘‘‘‘utopia’‘‘‘‘‘ and realizes that diversity and adaptation create a much better society. And while the other Enterprise crew members have some wishy-washy lament over how this will destroy this planet’s ‘‘‘culture’‘‘, Geordi never waffles. He has far too personal a stake in this to lose sight of the fact that peoples’ lives are more important than any high-falutin’ philosophical justifications. The episode might waffle over the Prime Directive points of this society’s decline, but Geordi’s perspective is the one showing clearly why it needs to die.

animusbell

celestia is such a funny character like she's constantly manipulating twilight and friends to do shit instead of just asking and you could arguably frame that as being bc she's a "god" and pushing fate to her design or whatever, except that she engages with the group like a normal and relatable person, which makes it more like villainous machinations, except 90% of this manipulation goes towards things like "I don't want my party to be boring shit again. put my little country girl blorbos in there with zero prep so they fuck it up bad"

animusbell

you think you've fucked anything up around princess celestia and she's like heh. no worries. all according to keikaku

jukashi

Celestia instantly makes more sense as a character when you ignore the princess stuff and remember that she's a 1000+ years old wizard. Of course she does manipulative trickster stuff to teach moral lessons and/or cause chaos to amuse herself, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course sometimes she's actually socially awkward and bad at personal relationships and has bad ideas that she thought were good that result in her eating shit embarrassing style, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course she lets the aristocrats and nobles run around being assholes she's still running on wizard advisor programming, she's basically trying to merlin the entire upper class of equestria instead of just a king and some knights. "Yeah uuhhh we'll release the incarnation of chaos himself from his ancient prison because we think this shy girl can be friends with him", terrible plan if you're thinking like a ruler, amazing plan if you're thinking like a wizard. Just look at Canterlot 'Castle' for five seconds and ask yourself if that's in any way a castle. No. Wizard tower, yes. Wizard.

animusbell

You are so right actually

ceruleanheaven

month starting on a monday we have no excuse guys lets get to work and lock the fuck in

ceruleanheaven

yk its actually very chic and avant garde to start on tuesday the second

ceruleanheaven

many claim theres nothing more subversive and revolutionary than starting on wednesday the third

hacvek

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

olyia-stories

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

dragonpyre

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

serinos-kitt

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

dragonpyre

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

serinos-kitt

So what is a rain shadow?

lethalbutterfly

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

roach-works

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

beatrice-otter

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

whetstonefires

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

beatrice-otter

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

maryellencarter

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

sunflowergardens-world

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

mysteryteacup

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

tatooineknights

Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.

While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.

On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:

On some of her work in Star Wars:

On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:

On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:

On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:

On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ:

dreaming-paradise-dixie

Demi Lesbians. Commission drawn by @inkrrred

beholdingslut

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

dikdikpronouncedxylophone

bigfoots-biggest-fan

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

Visit Original Link

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).

punkrorschach

happy first day of pride everyone

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I’ve received complaints from anonymous employees that our support of the “homosexual lifestyle” is “degenerate” and “irresponsible”. It really got me thinking and I think I found a solution. So good news! We now have 23 vacated positions reserved for members of the LGBT community. Additional good news, we began a new testing initiative on evolutionary degenration with 23 test subjects all ready to go.“

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. If you’re experiencing a time loop in which you’re repeating the month of June over and over, that’s totally intentional. We at Aperture Science felt that pride month was not long enough and so we created this loop to let employees experience as much pride as they feel like. To get out of this loop, simply use the pod labeled “Time Machine” in Shaft 6 and then either kill or save the baby on the other end depending on when in the loop you’re on. Don’t worry about the baby’s identity, he grows up to be an asshole.“

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here, happy to announce that our Rainbow Gel project was a massive success. We have developed distinct gels in every color of the rainbow pride flag. In fact, it was too much of a success, so we’ll be updating our pride flag accordingly to include 75 new colors corresponding to all of our new gels. Word of advice, though, don’t stare at the flag for too long, most of these colors haven’t been tested on human eyes yet.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here, Cave Johnson queer. Get used to it.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. Caroline just informed me that I am her “beard”. I checked, and I fail to see how I could possibly have grown out of her face. If anybody knows anything about human-to-facial hair transmogrification, please report to my office.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. Friendly reminder that Aperture employees living prior to the legalization of gay marriage are invited to use our Aperture Science Temporal Matrimony Pod in order to travel to the future with your same-sex partner and get married there. Employees from the future who wish to return to a time before gay people being able to marry are also welcome to use the pod and we’ll make sure to send you to an era well before gay marriage. I’m thinking maybe Late Cretacesous.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I’m proud to announce that our plan to hire only female test subjects to prevent them from flirting with our female scientists has been a resounding failure.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I’m afraid we’ll have to temporarily pause all experimentation with the Gender Affirmation Beam. The testing itself is going great, the beam is working. But we’re starting to run out of thigh high socks and khaki shorts.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johson here. Shafts 10 through 14 are currently under lockdown due to a meltdown in the Neopronoun Syntheizer. The transphobes up in DC might call that ‘a disaster in the making’ but I call it a win for diversity! That being said most of these pronouns are radioactive so do watch out.”

charlesoberonn

Cave Johnson here. If you feel a sudden sense of elation and contentness when putting on your new Aperture Science unisex uniform, that is not Gender Euphoria! That’s a hallucinogenic fungus taking over your brain. Take the uniform off immediately and throw it in the nearest incinerator.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I won’t tolerate any misgendering of the interdimensional invaders swarming the facility! Their pronouns are they/them and we’re ought to respect that. We’re also ought to shoot them on sight since they’re extremely hostile and bent on enslaving our planet.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. To all of my suitors and secret admirers: Thank you, honestly I’m flattered. Unfortunately for you, I don’t swing that way. Or any way. I only swing where the wrecking ball of science takes me. Usually into a brick wall.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I’ve been thinking. We have gay pride, and we have gender envy. What other deadly sins can we incorporate? Maybe bisexual sloth? Lesbian wrath? I’ll talk to the lab boys about it.”

“Cave Johnson here. Update: The Lesbian Wrath project is postponed indefinitely. My condolences to the families of the deceased. Though let’s be honest, they probably had it coming.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. For the last time! “I’m reclaiming the slur” is not a valid excuse to shout out loud the killer androids’ activation codes! We picked that word for a reason.“

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. I’d like to apologize to Floor 194 Safety Supervisor Doug Blakely for firing him after allegations that he was forcing employees back in the closet. I was not aware that said closet was a literal storage closet for zombified Aperture employees. To make it up to Doug, he’ll be allowed to feed Floor 194 HR Manager Lisa Briant to the closet zombies if he so chooses.”

charlesoberonn

”Cave Johnson here. A reminder that next year Transgender Day of Visibility falls on Extradimensional Day of Visibility. The lab boys are cautioning me to caution you to be prepared. Do not confuse transgender and transdimensional! Big mistake.“

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. To all cishet Aperture employees who volunteered for the ‘Get More Woke’ program, please report to your department’s OR at the nearest convenience to get the alarm clocks surgically removed from your spinal cord. Aperture Science apologizes for the misunderstanding.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. Dr. Barnaby from Cyborg Engineering is an attack helicopter. That’s not a transphobic joke, by the way, they literally transformed themselves into an amalgam of human and helicopter. Impressive. Unauthorized, of course, but still impressive. Anyway, we lost track of them, so everyone watch the sky for a mad scientist with blue rotors and machine guns.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. To the joker who added ‘make the sun gay’ to our quarterly agenda, I hope you’re pleased with yourself. The Astrophysics Department is tearing itself apart with half of them shouting that you can’t make the sun gay and the other half screaming that the sun is already gay. Either way, we’re not doing it.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. The congressional delegation of Senator Patrick Johnson (no relation) to inspect our facilities had to be cut short due to a mishap with the Gender Affirmation Beam. I’d like to apologize on behalf of Aperture Science to Senator Johnson and her staff.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. Just the other day, our sign guy asked me ‘Cave, don’t you think LGBTQIA2S+ is a tad too long?’ and I told him ‘First of all, that’s Mr. Johnson to you! And secondly, I actually think it’s not long enough!’ and that’s why I’m adding an ’&’ to the acronym. Don’t know what it stands for yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

charlesoberonn

“Cave Johnson here. You already know that here in Aperture Science we’re all about gender affirming care. We’ve been at the forefront of hormone replacement therapy since before we knew what these hormones do. You also know that here in Aperture Science we’re all about not getting sued. So everyone be quiet about our role in the Estrogen Cola disaster.”

kaereth

Some Lumity and Huntlow song lyric inspired commissions for anon!

lesly-oh

Whiterose smooches

punished-venom-solitair-e

at the library and i know im supposed to be "volunteering" for "college credit" but theres a dude at the other end of the room playing yu-gi-oh on the computer and let me just say. he is not good at it

punished-venom-solitair-e

just absolutely dogshit actually. i would be embarrassed

punished-venom-solitair-e

hes closing the yu-gi-oh website

punished-venom-solitair-e

hes opening twitter

punished-venom-solitair-e

ohhhhhh. thats pokemon porn

punished-venom-solitair-e

since this post is getting more notes than i expected i just wanna clarify that it was gay pokemon porn. i dont know enough pokemon to tell you who was bottoming but incineroar was topping

unseelie

i wish this was in my cart and not someone else’s

iam0to3yearsold

you can just take it from their cart. its not their possession if they haven't bought it yet

unseelie

if i were thrift shopping and you put your hands into my cart to take a unique handpicked item i was intending to purchase i would break your legs

ravioliet

god's weakest soldier is scrolling tumblr instead of being productive or participating in any of their hobbies

spiribia

one of my favorite glados gags is she keeps pretending she went places. she's like i went outside today. girl you did not go anywhere.

transfem-juice

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