The Musings of Dee

Dee/Meowbooks. Student of Life.Hobbit. Whovian. Super hero fan. Geeky storyteller. Lvl 30+ Can also be found at Indie Bruce BannerRP BlogSorrythatwasmean

[ao3-anonymous]

What in the fanfic hell is this?? 😂😂

[moonblossom]

And there was only one (heart-shaped) bed

[possibleplatypus]

@stucky-fic-idea-bank

[marvel-and-moor]

Absolutely obsessed with him

[trulycertain]

Oh, 2008 Iron Man movie, how I love thee. Let me count the ways:

Tony Stark’s ridiculously floppy hair he has to slick back for work, because like any good comics hero, he always has That One Rakish Lock Of Hair ™. Whoever styled Downey obviously knew what they were doing.

Relatedly, Paltrow actually ginger as Pepper. I love the strawberry-blonde look from later movies, too, but it’s so bright and pretty here.

JARVIS. Just… JARVIS.

The soundtrack. It’s one of the most distinctive and enjoyably electric-guitar-heavy soundtracks I’ve heard. I love how it mostly goes for modern-ish synths and ambient stuff, and also nods to classic rock, classic metal in particular. (The drums are incredibly John Bonham, and one of the main refrains is so close to “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin that I’m pleasantly surprised someone didn’t try to sue Ramin Djawadi.) Makes perfect sense for a futurist who works in tech at the cutting edge, but does it listening to stuff like 90s metal and AC/DC and wearing Black Sabbath shirts. Also, it means that when the full orchestral pomp kicks in, it’s even more affecting for how unusual it is.   

“The bad guys won’t even want to come out of their caves.” Sure, it’s an offhand joke, but there’s a kernel of truth to it. It shows how damnably naive he is about some things, even as he pretends not to be. (”There’s a line, we don’t cross it.”)

The fact that he tells Yinsen, “Thank you for saving me.” A little thing, but important, especially contrasted to “What have you done to me?” at the start of their acquaintanceship.

The American Cheeseburger

The way it shows that good is something you have to do, not just something you are. We get to see pretty much every step of him becoming Iron Man, and it’s shown to be damn hard work. We get to see him exhausted and scruffy and injured, and his test flight nearly kills him, but he keeps going.

And we see the intricacies of what he’s doing. God, I love how much attention has been paid to the tech. The sequences when you get to see all the hydraulics and the soldering, so on… That’s just lovely prop and animation work. (Yes, I’m just here for the tech porn. How did you know?)

“I shouldn’t be alive, unless it was for a reason.”

A lovely Pepper/Tony dynamic that’s so different from the comics in all the best ways. “You’re the most qualified, capable person I know” is said with earnest admiration.

Though “Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart” could be straight from the comics - again, in all the best ways.

How quiet Tony is. It’s more pronounced after Afghanistan, but even before, when he’s not playing up the snark, he’s soft-spoken, introspective and receptive, constantly trying to put people at ease. Sure, he can be arrogant and do dumb things (keeping Rhodey waiting three damn hours? Really, Stark?) and he’s obviously very used to his privilege, but it’s an interesting contrast and a nice piece of characterisation that’s very in line with 616. We get to see that less in other movies, but it’s always there.

The arc reactor. A beautiful piece of in-universe engineering and prop design, and a really lovely poetic device that makes perfect sense with the arcs and motifs from the comics even though it was an MCU invention. 

The fact that someone clearly went, “The workshop is important to him and probably where he spends most of his time” and worked to add little touches: the coffee machine, the models, the spare parts, the bits and pieces of a life dotted around. It feels very lived-in and like they actually thought about his character, rather than like they went for generic “harsh and futuristic = cool”.

Oh and: Tony Stark rides bikes, apparently. I needed to know that.

That Audi. 

And that damn water feature. Apparently the epitome of cool is having your own little waterfall. I miss that waterfall; I’m so sad we lost it when the mansion got trashed.

How easy an entry point it is, and how it stands perfectly well on its own as just… a really good movie, regardless of the rest of the MCU or the comics. I’d never picked up an Iron Man comic before I saw this, and I fell utterly in love with the universe, the characters and the themes anyway.

The little, realistic touches like the goatee starting to grow out and the motor oil marks.

“The truth is… I am Iron Man.”

[cardelostudios]

Marvel has already done a much better Secret Invasion TV series, and it's called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

[writing-prompt-s]

You are working the gate in the afterlife and for the first time ever, something the humans built has shown up to be processed. You’re not sure what to do, this… entity shouldn’t have a soul, but here it is in front of you, freshly dead and awaiting the next life.

[wishingtoflylikeabirdinthesky]

It’s not as exciting as it sounds, working at the pearly gates.

Sure, it’s satisfying to send the hypocrites and the assholes to hell. And it’s nice to see the ones who thought they were beyond redemption walk through into paradise.

So yeah, it has its perks. But not exciting. I mean, after the first million souls or so they all blur together, you know? You never get anything new. Animals all get sent right on through automatically and there’s nothing other then humans in our jurisdiction. Oh sure, there’s life other then humans. But that’s no my department.

I keep tads on humans on my lunch breaks. You’re a damn fascinating species, better then anything your “television” puts out. Although The Good Place was a little too relatable, I’ll give you guys that.

Anyway, one of my favorite things you guys came up with was the Space Race. I mean, what a nail biter! And it was so tense up until the end. Pity about those Apollo one guys, though. But I heard they got a kick out of watching the moon landing when it did happen.

Course, that sorta died down after a decade or so. Don’t know why you guys quit going to the moon.

And then you decided Mars was the place to be and started sending out all those rovers of yours. Not nearly as exiting as going yourselves, but as you all like to say, baby steps.

The rovers were surprisingly fun to watch. For mindless robots, they’ve got a lot of spunk. So I’d check in every once in while, but mostly I watched Earth. You guys had figured out how to work memes and it was a very amusing thing.

I was half way through a shift when it go here. I have no idea why none of the others I processed mentioned the thing, but death is confusing enough I guess.

It shouldn’t have been there. I want to make that clear, by no law of the universe should that thing have had a soul. You humans are where closer to making actual AI then you are sprouting wings. And you never even tried with this! Its job was to collect rocks!

And yet there is was, beeping up at me.

It didn’t look like a human soul. Or any other form of life that I had ever seen. It wasn’t damaged at all, or even afraid. That was the weirdest thing. You humans are always scared shitless by the time I see you. But this thing wasn’t. Even a little. It was just… curious. Like that’s all I could feel from it. Pure wonder.

I blinked a bit before flipping through my files, seeing if it was a new species or something. I found nothing, of course. Those idiots over in records never give us anything useful.

So I did the only thing I could do. I asked its name.

Now, you humans have come up with so many ways to say the same thing that I’ve had to learn a lot of languages to keep up. The newest was binary, which I never expected to actually need.

It came in handy, since that’s what the thing answered back in.

01001111 01110000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01110101 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001

Opportunity.

I remembered that name. It had popped up in new reports regarding a Mars rover that went out of commission, sending the final message “my battery is low and its getting dark.” before dying.

Humanity had cried over it for a solid couple of days. You guys really like personifying objects.

But I had dismissed it as just that. But here it was. Waiting patiently for me to send it On.

I could just opened the gates and sent it through and put from my mind. Make the thing some else’s problem.

I didn’t.

I stood, crossed in front of my desk, and put out my hand to touch the strange soul.

Opportunity didn’t feel human. Nor animal. It felt…. simple. Calm.

I could feel an awearness of the love its chief engineer had felt for it. The pang of missing the workshop back on Earth where it had been built, during long nights on Mars.

It had dreamed. Dreamed of humans making it to Mars and finding it. Of it’s engineer taking it home and repairing it. Dreamed of exploring Earth as it had Mars.

I could purpose, and curiosity in its mission. Lonely as it was, it never doubted its purpose or resented its lot in life. It got to learn, and to see what had never been seen. What more could it ask for?

I could feel one tiny spec of fear. Near the end of its life, it realized it would never go home. Never see Earth or its engineer again. That it would die alone on Mars.

And like all things with a soul it did not want to die. It cried and mourned and begged to live. It was alive! It had a home and it wanted to go home! So badly did it want to go home.

But there was nothing to do, of course. Even its engineer, whom it loved so dearly, couldn’t reach Mars and bring Opportunity home.

It had watched one last sunset, and sent one last message.

A goodbye. And a plea to be mourned, if it could not be saved.

I withdrew my hand and looked over the soul. It looked up at me.

For the ones that I send upstairs, I take the form of whoever loved them most in life. I guess in that moment, I was in the form of an engineer at NASA. Opportunity seemed delighted to see me.

“Welcome home,” I gestured to the gates that swung slowly open behind me. “I missed you.”

It beeped out a single phase, 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111

I missed you too.

Before going forth, to explore the next life.

[dayoldpepsi]

@marcholasmoth

[ironwoman359]

I am crying at work over an opportunity robot fanfiction. Humans are incredible.

[jose2bjose]

@thebibliosphere

[official-megumin]

@a-sentient-cup

[thepromiscuousfinger]

@donjuanquixote @silent-calling @beardedmrbean @fingerdownthebooksspine

[beardedmrbean]

[grandenchanterfiona]

Can we talk about how Steve Rogers would probably fight to keep abortion legal and safe, because he saw how many people used to die back in the day because all abortions were illegal and unsafe and he knows if a person is pregnant and don’t want to be pregnant they will find a way to not be pregnant?

Can we talk about Steve Rogers telling off right wing politicians who say minimum wage isn’t supposed to be a living wage? Can we have him saying ‘No, I remember when it was instituted. It was supposed to be a living wage, senator.’

Can we talk about Steve Rogers supporting a raise in SNAP benefits, because he knows how it feels to go hungry?

Can we talk about Steve Rogers having problems with this country’s military industrial complex?

[fandomsandfeminism]

#ProgressiveFarLeftSteveRogers

[dukeofnachos]

What if Right Wing Politicians were using him as like a mascot before he was defrosted. Like Fox News has “What Would Captain America Do?” shirts and shit like that.

And then Steve wakes up “He’s just like, lol no don’t even say my name anymore.”

And then the daily show has an entire segment dedicated to the speech he gives and fox news’ reaction.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Steve Rogers is not the hyper-masculine ultra-patriotic gun-toting conservative puppet that Fox News wants him to be. 

[androgynealienfemme]

The news media has a field day on both sides about how he reacted to fox news. 

Liberals and dems are cheering him on and talking about how great he is and having him speak on shows and conservatives and republicans are enraged and offended and yell about how he has betrayed them and try to get him to mess up in interviews and go “well no but you really mean this right?” and he blasts them down every time. 

I need this written 4000 years ago 

[ladygrey92]

I feel uncomfortable turning Captain America into the subject of a highly partisan argument. He’s supposed to represent universal American values like democracy, liberty and freedom. He is a better representation of classical liberalism and founding principles than he is of either the Republican or Democratic parties. The idea of Captain America is to unite people, not divide them.

[grandenchanterfiona]

Theoretically yes. 

Non-theoretically, he was made to represent the 1940s liberal ideals. 

Non-theoretically, he was the son of a single mother who grew up in New York in poverty.

Non-theoretically, he was made by Jews to fight against the oppression they experienced at that time. 

Non-theoretically, Steve is leftist as fuck.

[fandomsandfeminism]

The entire plot of Cap2 is “Look at how fucked up the American Military Industrial Complex is! Look at it! We need to literally blow it up and tear it down. It can not be saved. It is corrupt to the core.” 

Like, that’s the entire plot of the movie. Three soldiers finding out how truly fucked up the American military industrial complex is and deciding to end that shit. It’s a two hour criticism of domestic surveillance and American military force framed as a peacekeeping measure littered with explosions. 

Steve is left of center as the day is long. 

[redwoods301]

Allow me to quote Steve Attewell about one of my favorites:

“Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother who insisted he stayed in school despite the trend of the time (his father died when he was a child; in some versions, his father is a brave WWI veteran, in others an alcoholic, either or both of which would be appropriate given what happened to WWI veterans in the Great Depression) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother died of TB.[2] And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.

Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.

And this Steve Rogers, who’s been exposed to all of what New York City has to offer, becomes an explicit anti-fascist. In the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, he first volunteers to join the army to fight the Nazis specifically. This isn’t an apolitical patriotism forged out of a sense that the U.S has been attacked; rather, Steve Rogers had come to believe that Nazism posed an existential threat to the America he believed in. New Deal America.”

The whole article (he knocks on Mark Millar!):http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/10/steven-attewell-steve-rogers-isnt-just-any-hero

[transpataphysics]

i wrote this character off for so long as like patriotic american bullshit (as my canadian socialization - lol). After seeing Winter Soldier, bisexualCap fanart and #ProgressiveFarLeftSteveRogers , he’s like one of my favorite characters.

[grandenchanterfiona]

This is my preferred version of that post though. 

[sigridstumb]

May I interest you all in a fanfic?

[aqueerkettleofish]

It’s also worth noting that the storyline of Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a rewrite of a story from the comics in the 1980s, in which the U.S. Government decided to say “Oh, hey, we gave you that shield and costume, so it’s time you started working missions for the American Government and not, you know, the American People.”

And Steve went…. naaaaah, here’s your shit back.

[luxflora]

and are the "new tumblr users" in the room with us today?

joined tumblr in 2021 or later

joined tumblr in 2018-2020

joined tumblr in 2014-2018

joined tumblr before 2014

Voting ended onJun 23, 2024

[klarmis]

I have nothing to say. They are ponies now.

I'm tired but happy 💫

part 2 coming soon

[georgedontdothat]

To-cat-ata in B by sympawnies

[kimije]

I wanted someone to play it as soon as I saw it and they delivered

[elodieunderglass]

Hat tip @eldriwolf !

[georgedontdothat]

To-cat-ata in B by sympawnies

[kimije]

I wanted someone to play it as soon as I saw it and they delivered

[elodieunderglass]

Hat tip @eldriwolf !

[tubbytarchia]

Told myself I wouldn't get angry but ugh people saying stuff like "likes are literally useless. Do you even know how the site works. Reblogging is kindness. If you don't, you're a bad person. If you like without reblogging I will block you" makes me so irrationally upset. I don't give a shit how the site works frankly, I've seen the justifications and I get what people are saying but how the fuck is this guilt tripping supposed to help artists. Discouraging people from engaging at all with your art is only harmful, no? I would never want people to reblog my art out of a feeling of obligation, that's awful. I hope to god everyone on this blog feels encouraged to like posts because you're AWESOME and I APPRECIATE YOU!!! Tagged reblogs make my day too, I get it, but holy fuck. I love you tumblr but this part of tumblr culture sucks

[wigglemore-deactivated20150217]

[mimicofmodes]

In Defense of Embroidery

Embroidery is routinely used in historical fiction to represent women’s oppression. And I ask, why? And what if it weren’t like that?

I watched the new episodes of Bridgerton, and while I enjoyed them a lot more than I expected to (PENELOPE!!!), I was really, really annoyed with the scene where Eloise suffers through other ladies at a ball listing embroidery stitches.

(@marzipanandminutiae - you did a post on that stupid Edith-Ann fake sampler, didn't you? I went looking for it but couldn't find it. If you can get me the link, I'll add to the blog post!)

[kyberinfinitygems]

Had the idea to draw Charlie stitching dolls of different creatures and cryptids, which shows up a little in Somewhere in the Woods, Waiting.

[causalityparadoxes]

Cannot emphasise how OBSESSED i am with the Doctor being able to hear the show's backing music. Does he have favourites? Does he ever miss the funky classic who tunes?

Its giving Day of the Doctor novelisation, where the Doctor's vision changed when the show's colour grading did.

I love whenever they make allusions to the 4th wall or skirt near it. 1st Doctor talking to the people at home. 4th Doctor's laugh at the camera. 12th Doctor's monologues and playing of the Theme tune. Its all so wonderful.

But to put it in the forefront. To literally have him say " I Thought that was non-diegetic " (music not actually present in the world and only for the audience) to have him WINK at us.

Obsessed is too weak a word for what I'm feeling right now. I love them

[image description first image: The Fifteenth Doctor with an expression of surprise saying, "I thought that was non-diegetic." second image: The Fifteenth Doctor looking directly into the camera, about to wink. end description]

(Thank you @thevalleyisjolly for the image description text!)

[rbbanner]

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[siyurikspakvariisis]

an article on the subject for the curious:

Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again

"We're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for, and that's always good news.”