[sharkflan]

can i request a skitty? im kinda bummed out and its my favorite poke <3 you dont have to of course!

[naomistares]

ianthe always said we were born cursed

[spaceboytoy]

Hello bisexual community

[spaceboytoy]

Begin killing

[tartrazeen]

[ottoillustrates]

today i just (remembers to maintain privacy online) did something really cool. you have to trust me

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[cringecorp]

so. i do this thing where i wake up still half-asleep, write a note in my phone, and then fall back asleep and forget about it completely until i find the note later.

and i need to show you all some of these because ?????

[aroacedavestrider]

ok prev called me tf out so now im obliged to put these here

^ fun fact this one ive actually posted before and it got like 60k notes

^ and this is supposed to say “#1 christmas movie of all time”. btw.

[ostolero]

I can use excel and the toilet

[ostolero]

spreadcheeks

[rongzhi]

Translation request by @unbridled. English added by me :)

[bolinbender]

[jawbone-xylophone]

@moonlightink7

[yarrow-heather-and-hollyhock]

I love this little bit by Cathon

[dirkedup]

snowboarding dirk ft alt snowboard design for the 3rd one bc i wanted to make something more fitting

[icteridcorvid]

My hack for morning getting out of bed anxiety is to turn on my space heater until my room gets to be like 82 degrees and it’s just too physically uncomfortable to be laying down so I no longer care

[your-fav-bratt]

I feel like a lot of people mistake vanilla sex for unsatisfying sex. They’re not the same thing. You can have the most vanilla sex of your life and be completely wrecked by it — fully present, fully seen, fully satisfied. And you can have the most intense, experimental experience and walk away feeling absolutely nothing. The kink was never the point. The connection was. The hunger was. Two people who actually want each other will make missionary feel like a religious experience. Two people who are disconnected will make every fantasy feel hollow. It was never about what you did. It was always about who showed up for it.

[bowsersthotsv3]

This! Kink is a way to scratch a certain itch deep inside! But it does not define sex! Connection is the most important thing for sex to be good! It doesn’t have to be rough, sloppy and demeaning.

[jerreeeeeee]

not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally

[jerreeeeeee]

what mutual is prev

my liege lord

my loyal knight

my wise wizard

my evil advisor

my brother in arms

my lady muse

my wild mermaid friend

my fellow alchemist

my dashing rapscallion

my monstrous foe

Remaining time: 2 days 16 hours

[inthevasoline]

guys what should my 10,000th post be

[inthevasoline]

im so fucking stupid

[molly-ren]

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx <3

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

[molly-ren]

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

[stevita]

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

[molly-ren]

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

[michaelblume]

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

[hosekisama]

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

[nentuaby]

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

[raincityruckus]

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

[sassafrassarah]

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

[taraljc]

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

[realmarysue]

I am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Hm. Interesting. Apparently cortisol production depletes magnesium stores. And I have a lot of symptomatic overlap with magnesium deficiency. And it can apparently help migraine. And ADHD. I think I'm going to try supplementing magnesium glycinate. L-threonate sounds really interesting too as that's magnesium that can cross the blood-brain barrier and apparently is super useful for memory and shit.

[goflowolfog]

[balaclava-trismegistus]

this can't keep happening

[sugarcoatednightshade]

[au-roulette]

AU Roulette 2026 Sign-ups are officially open!

And with that, we are getting things started! As a brief reminder for those new to the event -- AU Roulette is a casual fic-writing challenge encouraging fanfic authors to play around with different types of alternate universe stories, which will be randomly assigned to each participant regardless of the fandom they sign up with.

Writers will be able to sign up from May 10th-31st with a fandom of their choice. At the start of June, each participant will be assigned three AUs from a masterlist using a random number generator. Each author will then have the choice of completing the challenge one, two, or all three of the AUs. Any fic exceeding a 500-word minimum will be considered a completion, so long as it employs the AU premise. Fics can then be posted at any point during the month of June.

As a reminder: The fandom you signed up with is used to filter AU assignments, in order to minimize re-rolls! (For example, someone signing up with "The Lord of the Rings" will not be assigned a High Fantasy AU). Please only sign-up with one fandom.

The sign-up link can be found here. Please feel free to spread it around and get the word out about this year's event!

[au-roulette]

Today is the LAST DAY to sign up for AU Roulette (sign-ups will automatically close at 11:59pm US Central Time). Join us!