“The journey tempts me.” - Tenzing Tharkay @captainlaurence - Tumblr Blog

I made a thing

#three whole days #I don’t understand how people make multiple edits like this weekly #anyway #ta da!#temeraire #his majesty’s dragon #will laurence #yes that’s Sam Reid #love that guy #and Tony Thornburg as #tenzing tharkay #he’s jus perfect

papershorts

SPOILERS FOR THE NEW EPISODE

The fact that we see Tartah's POV multiple times throughout the episode, and his silver wash is displayed to the viewer. And then briefly when Qifrey comes to check on them and we see his perspective?? And it's blurred and filled with glare from the rising sun?????

This anime adaptation is so good it kills me

#it was so subtle I didn’t catch it the first time #but then I Realized

veritech-fighter-bastard

My favorite part about my friends reading Temeraire is them eventually texting me and going "Goddamn it sure is nice to have a fully realized adult as a protagonist who does have angst but it's not like teenager or young adult angst he's just suffering adult problems while also knowing in general who he is and that's so refreshing" and it happens every single time.

#william laurence the man that you are #thank you naomi novik

liberalsarecool

"That’s what makes Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York so unsettling to the old order. New York City is not just another municipality; it’s a sovereign-scale entity. Its population surpasses 38 states. Its metropolitan GDP trails only Texas and California.

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

- Jackie Summers

#zohran mamdani

cipher-fresh

the 20th century is crazy what do you mean that airplanes didnt exist in 1900 and by 1999 Futurama was airing

tibli

literally what was the reason for her putting him in this slutty ass shirt. like tell me these aren't basically the same thing.

luulapants

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

nestofstraightlines

There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”

throckmortons-thrussy

7andaswitch-blade

A coyote cools off in the drink fridge at a Quiznos in the Chicago Loop, 2007

“It did not growl. It did not make any sounds. It just tried to get in. Apparently it was scared and tried to shelter itself,” said Ray Zavalas, Quiznos employee.

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

hypokeimena

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)