succumbing to my inner fangirl

I tried, I just couldn't resist the pull of a place to post all the awesome things I love about my tv shows...and music...and entertainment in general. But beware random life and political thoughts may also find there way here.

[batshit-auspol]

So Australia has a yearly tradition going back over 20 years, that every Australia Day we all gather round our screens to watch an ad for a certain product. It's so ingrained in our consciousness that the ads don't even really relate to what they're supposed to sell anymore, we all just know.

This year the ad broke containment, and non-Australians are having their brains melted by this bizarre tradition, so international followers, lets see if you can work out what this is trying to sell before the last few seconds.

[thelastdouchestanding]

OK, so I was going to rb this later, but this is too fantastic not to share. Key take aways:

-Phone Torch>Flashlight

-I feel called the FUCK out.

-I want Lamb now

[sadanandaom]

[1oldbear]

As should we all.

[o-wild-west-wind]

ofmd is like not comedy as in sitcom but comedy as in shakespearean where it’s psychological trauma and conflicts of violence but with dick jokes and the promise of marriage in the end

[mysharona1987]

Gop flat out admitting they don’t want young people to vote, tho.

They are even acknowledging she isn’t telling anyone how to vote.

Just telling them to vote makes her bad.

[theconcealedweapon]

Encouraging people to vote, without even telling them who to vote for, is considered "far left".

Well, there's some good news here. They're openly admitting to what they're afraid of. They're afraid of a high voter turnout, because they know that they lose whenever that happens.

[quasi-normalcy]

Republicans consistently lose elections with high turnout.

[wilwheaton]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Yeah, irrelevant political party, please pick a fight with Taylor Swift and her fanbase of empowered women. Go. Do it. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

[ineffably-good]

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[disast3rtransp0rt]

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

[themythicalcodfish]

I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”

It was glorious.

[1863-project]

This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren't exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, "Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?" and it shuts them down immediately.

This sort of thing always does the trick.

[aquitainequeen]

Pay heed to Klaudia Amenábar's words! Don't let the executives weaponize fandoms. WGA Strong.

[monimccoythings]

My guys it is starting to work, I've seen some people I know complaining about the writer's strike and turning against them because their favorite shows and/or movie got put on hold. Please do not be fooled like this, this is exactly what the corporations want. It can wait, I promise you will find other things to focus, but writers need this.

[cleolinda]

Reword every headline they put out. “Due to not wanting to give writers money, Marvel has shut down pre-production on…” You can end this strike any time you want to, pal.

[shadowmaat]

"Marvel too cheap to pay writers, production shuts down"

"Disney too greedy to pay residuals, deletes shows/movies"

"Studios cut corners on safety, production values, writing, acting, etc. in order to make more money; won't share with anyone below CEO level"

[dduane]

This.

[neil-gaiman]

100% this.

[crazeebiblio]

A little bit louder for the people in the back!

[only-tiktoks]

[crazeebiblio]

Woah I never fully considered the WHOLE ecosystem, just figured old growth forests were best and important to preserve.

[republicansaretheproblem]

[mistergandalf-deactivated201601]

one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math

[mistergandalf-deactivated201601]

some of my favorite tags on this post

[theelvenkingshalls]

Don’t forget that Frodo also speaks Sindarin, which makes this even worse.

Faramir: Hey, don’t go up the Spider Stairs.

Frodo: Why? What’s up the Spider Stairs?

Faramir: We don’t know, Frodo. We just don’t know.

[jumpingjacktrash]

to be fair, you’d assume the name means “there’s a lot of spiders here,” not, “there is one spider the size of a draft horse here.” so you go up expecting to have to shoo a lot of skeeter eaters out of your tent, and instead you have to figure out how to rope and shoe godzillarantula.

[ceescedasticity]

Hmmm…

They do live in a world where godzillarantulas feature prominently in mythology and history (Ungoliant plunged the world into darkness, scared the crap out of Sauron’s old boss, etc) and existed within the last century in Mirkwood. Assuming they ever talk to anyone who’s been to Mirkwood. They… probably know they were giant spiders in Mirkwood pretty recently? It’s hard to figure out how much anyone in Middle-earth has been talking to anyone else when we didn’t actually see it.

On the other hand – what if it’s the giant evil spiders’ prominence in history/mythology that’s causing trouble? What if lots of evil/nasty things/places get called “spider” just to indicate how nasty and evil they are, rather than any association with literal spiders, and it’s just… overloaded? Maybe the bad part of town in Minas Tirith is the Spider District. Maybe every tavern trying to be edgy calls itself the Spiderweb.

Actually spider/Ungoliant references could be really appealing to Gondorians trying to be edgy. They’re dark and evil! Plunged the world into darkness! But they AREN’T involved in the war they’re actually fighting, they aren’t directly associated with Sauron at all, so getting too interested in them would be creepy without being potentially treasonous. Because no one’s ACTUALLY going to worship those dangerous but not epic spiders up in Mirkwood, and no one’s heard anything from any proper spawn of Ungoliant in ages and ages.

In fact, spider/Ungoliant references might be appealing to ORCS trying to express that something is nasty and creepy! Nobody likes Ungoliant.

Maybe Faramir’s been to fourteen different Spider Caves across Ithilien, and half of them he didn’t even see regular spiders in, they’re just dark and damp and may have had orcs at some point, or something, and at some point in history someone got spooked. So you know, it’s POSSIBLE Spider Pass has something to do with spiders? But really it just means people don’t like it.

(The problem with this theory is we never actually SAW anyone overusing spider references. But it’s plausible they would!)

[wordswithkittywitch]

“The average spider on Middle Earth is the size of a dinner plate” is a statistical error. The average spider on Middle Earth is smaller than a coin. Cirith Ungol (lit: Spiders Gorge), which contains a spider larger than a horse, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[iwilltrytobereasonable]

OH MY GOD

[superstressedspidergirl]

@dendritic-trees

[theleakypen]

Come for the Tolkien linguistics, stay for the Spiders Georg reference

[roach-works]

this map, by jonathan hull, shows all the places in the USA named after the devil or hell. assuming big giant awful spiders were a common thing in middle earth, it’s likely that there were a shit ton of Spider Stairways. 

you don’t wander into Devil’s Lick assuming that satan himself is gonna give you a rimjob. you presumably also don’t head up Spider Stairs assuming an arachnid the size of a cottage is gonna try and eat your friend. 

[gallusrostromegalus]

FUN FACT: A huge portion of the “Devil’s [OBJECT]” names in Wyoming are from a poor bastard called John Coulter, who was probably the first white man to see Yellowstone! He saw it because he got seperated from the Lewis and Clark expidition on their way back east, decided that with winter coming on, he should head south to stay ahead of the weather, rather than east to try to catch up with the party, and instead got lost inside the Yellowstone caldera, the COLDEST fucking part of Wyoming, with its scalding, posionous geysers, earthquakes, massive packs of wolves that weren’t afraid of people yet, and temperatures hitting as low as Negative 40, and naturally assumed that he had somehow taken a wrong turn into the Nnth Circle of Hell.

He lived, managed to get out of the caldera, took extensive notes on the landscape, eventunally met up with some Blackfoot tribesmen who gave him a horse and directions to the nearest european settlement, and he left, naming every single notable feature after hell or the Devil, because Wyoming is clearly His Infernal Country.

So as far as Frodo knows, “Spiders Pass” was just named by a particularly disgruntled and arachnophobic field cartographer.

[graceking]

I love these comics by Nathan W. Pyle.

[patrickdiomedes]

Here are some more good ones

[man-peach-reborn]

Reblog for “imagine pleasant nonsense”

[fablesrose]

Reblogging for “perhaps I prefer fewer revolutions and more minerals”

[ailec-12]

Reblogging for

Let me absorb

Let me absorb

[crazeebiblio]

Reblogging for

EVERYTHING

[thesundanceghost]

Nothing I’ve read has changed me more than “you do people a favor by accepting their help” like I repeat this constantly to so many people because it’s true!!! People like to feel useful, they like to feel kind, they like to feel like they have an ability to impact people’s lives so just let them!! Not everything is a thing to be owed back — accept people’s kindness without making a competition out of it

[bogleech]

I figured out too late in life that refusing random help will more often make the person feel unwanted or not trusted : (

[queeranarchism]

This is true on the interpersonal level and on the community level. Your friendsgroup/family/house/affinity-group/street will thrive so much better when people accept each others help. When there is a regular back and forth of people helping each other and people accepting that help, you get a generous community where needing help is not stigmatized. Accepting help is an essential component of that. You literally can’t have a functioning community without it.

[emrosedeleon]

I always make a point to tell my partners “thank you for letting me help you,” because I know it’s difficult, and even more difficult to not feel guilty afterwards.

[flagellant]

“What then”

What then is that you have invented a hypothetical scenario which you want to excuse not offering help to those around you based in the fear that you might not be perfect at it, and justifies not asking people for help out of pride and the idea that they might just make it worse.

What then is that you isolate yourself, try and pretend you are capable of being an island, too proud to admit that you require aid via infrastructure and interpersonal relationships and so you push away those who care or could care about you. You second-guess every relationship you have, convinced that if you ask for help or even show a shred of vulnerability, the person will hurt you, or even just not give a shit about you, and you will be unaware you’re doing that to them with the lack of trust you’re willing to offer them.

What then is that you begrudge and resent everything and everyone when your life isn’t perfect and exactly under your capacity to control, which is always. You decide you don’t want help for whatever reason and then you blame people for not offering you help when you haven’t asked, or you even blame them when you’ve explicitly told them you don’t want help. You curl up inside of your own ego like it’s a snail shell, a fragile husk of a life and you’re filling yourself with salt on top of it.

What happens next is you either get over yourself and you start learning how to be a human being in relationship to others, definitionally one of community and aid, or you die.

[winchester-with-a-wormstache]

In love with this video

[katiecotugno]

I actually cried from happiness watching this. HUMANS! MOVIES! THE INTERNET! DANCING!

[fishyandclintbarton]

Bless you whoever made this, its wonderful!

[neil-gaiman]

This is probably the nerdiest possible thing, but I’m rewatching Good Omens right now and I noticed Aziraphale is wearing gloves while reading The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. I also just so happen to know that more damage has been done to old and rare books with gloves than without, due to the gloves making it more difficult to keep hold of things and harming your dexterity. Has Aziraphale ever damaged a book in this way? Moreover, do Angels even have oils on their skin that could damage the paper in the first place?

[schweizercomics]

Companions of Christmas 7: Mari Lwyd!

Mari Lwyd was a gray mare belonging to Taliesin, a poet hailed as “chief of the bards” in sixth century Wales. Taliesin frequently called on Awen, the Welsh muse, for inspiration, and Awen became so captivated by his verses that she determined that he would never again leave her cottage and stay with her forever in the forest glades on the edge of the Glamorgan pastureland.

Mari Lwyd, left tethered outside, was no fan of this plan. She was hungry, and thirsty, and if her rider wasn’t to be released to feed and water her, then the least Awen could do was let her into the cottage so that Taliesin could care for her there.

Mari Lwyd, so long the companion of a great poet, had learned to think as a poet thinks, and so, when she called on Awen to let her in, she did so in rhyme. Awen, not wanting her time with Taliesin interrupted, used rhyme in return to refuse her request, and Mari offered a different argument in favor of an invitation, which was likewise refused. Back and forth they went, neither failing to find the proper words, and their exchange went for so long that eventually Mari Lwyd was nothing but bones.

So engaged by the mare’s clever rhymes was she that Awen hadn’t spared a thought to her captive, but, a longing for him suddenly him popping into her head, she turned to him, and saw that he, too, had long become nothing but bones. Awen found herself at a loss for words, and, unable to offer further excuses to bar Mari Lwyd’s entrance, allowed her into the cottage, where the skeletal mare helped herself to the holiday food and drinks that Awen had prepared for her late paramour.

Now, each Christmas Eve, Mari Lwyd roams the roads and byways of Glamorgan, led by the silent ghost of Taliesin, asking, in rhyme, entry into homes which she suspects contain holiday fare for her to eat. As it was with Awen, she can only be kept out by rebuttal to her invitation in rhyme, but should those who would bar her entrance fail to provide a suitable excuse in verse, she and her entourage face no obstacle in entering and turning the home into their own boisterous feasting hall.

[leahstuff]

Ursula Vernon & Seanan McGuire in a Mari Lwyd style rap battle on Twitter (pt 1).

[leahstuff]

Ursula Vernon & Seanan McGuire in a Mari Lwyd style rap battle on Twitter (pt 2)

[ruffboi-mags]

Always reblog Seanan and Ursula playing Online Mari Lwyd.

[ray-marisha]

Happy December 10th