MisterMetalMaker

Eh, what do you want from me? I'm Weird

[thulium]

[song-of-the-spheres]

I'm re-reading the Vorkosigan Saga for the first time in a long time (I think it's been maybe 15 years since I read the earlier books) and I remembered how much I liked them, but I forgot how feral they made me. sorry to anyone in my general orbit for the next 12-14 months.

Lois McMaster Bujold really did go: here have space opera shenanigans paired with an exploration of societal upheaval and intergenerational trauma, told from the perspective of a family composed entirely of people who are deeply unhinged. A+, no notes.

[animentality]

[hedwig-dordt]

Honestly, I don't remember when I started agreeing with the Vatican on important issues and yet here we are

[l-r4inb0w]

Fic writers & fellow Ao3 users I have a question-

Do you like it/is it correct Ao3 etiquette to comment on a fic you liked even if it’s like, from 2005 and from a fandom long dead? I’ve been tossing and turning about this because I don’t wanna accidentally like, bring back middle school trauma for sonicfan420 on a random Tuesday.

[waknatious]

ALWAYS COMMENT

[philologicalbat]

for context, AO3 was launched in 2009. if you’re reading a fic from 2005, it’s specifically because the author wants you to have access to it. I myself have something like 15 fics that I re-uploaded to AO3 from other sites. I know other writers have more. AO3 is an archive; it’s not social media. your Instagram rules of engagement don’t apply.

old fics are on AO3 for you to read. enjoy them!

[pusheenthenerdcat]

please comment! the archive emails us to let us know if someone leaves a comment no matter how old the fic is it will get seen and appreciated!

Especially lately when i have gotten so many bot comments, when a real human being shows up it is SO EXCITING

[azriona]

Getting comments on older fics is almost better than comments on new fic--it's a thrill to know something is still appreciated after so many years.

And we can turn off email notifications if we decide we DON'T want to hear from you, but still want it available for you to read and enjoy. So please don't be afraid to leave a comment if you want--if we want to hear your thoughts, we will, and if we don't, you won't be bothering us in the slightest. And when we're ready to hear them, they'll be waiting for us!

If you can see the fic, you can comment on the fic. Older fics deserve love, too!!!

[porcupine-girl]

Also remember that, not just email notifications, but authors can completely turn off commenting on a fic if they really don't want you to comment! If an author is so embarrassed by a fic they don't want to hear about it (but can't bring themselves to delete it), they have that control.

If you are able to comment on a fic, the author decided to allow that when they didn't have to. THEY WANT COMMENTS.

[geddy-spageddy]

and then i crashed into you and i went up in flames

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

my actual vampire hot take is that if you're going to be a 'vegetarian' vampire (a vampire that only drinks the blood of animals) you MUST have hunter education. i'm so sick of people being like oh well predator animals are mean and scary because they kill cute 'harmless' animals like NO they're crucial for the environment and if you're going to hunt animals for blood you still need to stick to regular people hunting guidelines and only hunt things that are in season and abide by your areas bag limits

[moral-autism]

vampire that did a detailed study about whether vampires can get prion diseases and concluded they can't and preferentially hunts animals with chronic wasting disease. and then incinerates the corpses.

[aksemmi]

vampire who is a woke predation abolitionist and so exclusively hunts predators, leaving primarily herbivorous and scavenging animals alone

[yaldabaothadeez]

"For miles around the foul creature's lair is nothing but barren wastes"

"because of The Curse?"

"Because of the deer and rabbits, fucking thing ate all the wolves"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

as a younger person I'd sometimes get overwhelmed with the violence of the world, not just human violence but the violence done to animals and by animals, the innate violence of being an animal. because an animal is, by definition, an organism that must consume other organisms to live. and this would lodge in my spiraling young adult mind, the tragedy that to live, to be a creature, is to cause harm. that life is sustained by consuming life.

eventually I got older (and medicated), but in the meantime spending time in woodland really helped. it comforted me to be around plantlife, which feeds not on life but on sunlight, and therefore causes no harm.

anyway now I'm reading The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (incredible book) and it turns out that was a big fat LIE. forests are violent as FUCK

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

life as a tree is fucking BRUTAL. ok no they don't actually eat each other (well, not until they've been broken down and digested by microorganisms first) but competition is FIERCE. sunlight and water are finite resources. survival rates are dismal. a tree can release a million seeds in a lifetime and have only one offspring live to maturity. some species evolved ways of stealing sunlight from trees who got there first, bidding their time as a sapling then shooting out from under older canopies to hog as as much light as possible. next-door neighbors? fuck em, let em starve.

then you get shit like epiphytes that decided to just grow on top of other plants. strangler fig vines, for instance, which decided well fuck, im just gonna cling to this tree trunk and let it do the support work. maybe entangle our roots and envelope my host completely over time. oopsie my host died? that's ok I'll just cling to its corpse for eternity

equally horrifying is the honeysuckle, which preys on young trees boa-constrictor style, squeezing the life out of saplings, which grow with permanent deformities before dying prematurely (makes for a neat walking stick though)

then you get out and proud parasites like mistletoe who are happy to attach themselves to tree canopies and suck their blood extract water and nutrients. so yeah some plants do eat each other actually. gives ya some perspective on the old christmas tradition of hunting mistletoe with guns (yes that's a thing, shooting them down out of trees like squirrels. yes, unlike squirrels they deserve it). as for the romance angle, who doesn't want to kiss a lover beneath the dying corpse of a parasitic trophy kill? sexy as heck.

in conclusion, PLANTS ARE VIOLENT AS FUCK, and that's not even getting into the eternal chemical warfare they are forced to wage against insects, fungi, microbes and other enemies.

one day soon the forests will turn on us, and when that day comes I'm cheerfully betraying humanity and skipping away to cross enemy lines 🫡

kofi

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

to those who thought this post was heading in a heartwarming direction, i do NOT apologize and i DO hope the forest and its creeping mycelium tendrils crawl their way into your nightmares

[teoft]

Are you The Listening Friend?

You always listen, always try your hardest to understand, always try to make conversation, even if you don't understand fully, just so ppl can gush about their interests to you.

But in turn you aren't listened to that much, your opinions and suggestions often get quietly overruled, and you can never really talk about your interests bc others don't get it, and seem to be unwilling to. And now you don't even know how to talk about things that are important to you.

[teoft]

You understand the value of being understood, being seen, being heard. You want others to feel like their interests matter. You may dislike some things, but realize they might be very important to some other people, enough to literally save their lives. There's never enough joy or excitement in this world.

Yet you wish someone else did that for you too.

[bugthingsdaily]

Today's bug thing is this pair of horseshoe crab earrings from Bamboo Jewelry!

[kellylor]

Continuing my Vorkosigan saga shenanigans, it is time for a Mark Pierre Vorkosigan appreciation post.

Ways to tell Lord Mark is a true Vorkosigan:

Wants to save everyone even when it's obviously impossible

Wife (partner?) guy

Deeply fucked up

Good at personnel and recruitment

Faithful worshipper of Cordelia

Some of my favorite quotes:

"I'm not sure you're ready for this, but here goes. You had exactly three role models to learn how to be a human being from. The Jacksonian body-slavers, the Komarran terrorists—and Miles. You were steeped in Miles. And I'm sorry, but Miles thinks he's a knight-errant. A rational government wouldn't allow him possession of a pocket-knife, let alone a space fleet. And so, Mark, when you were finally forced to choose between two palpable evils and a lunatic—you upped and ran after the lunatic."

[...]

Having named them all, he finally found Mark by process of elimination. Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other had sent Lord Mark deep inside, to sleep through it all. Poor, fragile Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old.

[...] "Don't you dare pity me. I won. Save your sympathy for Baron Ryoval, if you must. I took him. Suckered him. I beat him at his own game, on his own ground. I will not allow you to turn my victory into defeat for the sake of your damned . . . feelings." [...] I don't want to have to fight Ry Ryoval in my head, or in their heads, for the rest of my life. He's dead, I'm not, it's enough."

- Mirror Dance

Mark said valiantly, "If Kareen wants me to marry her, I will. If she doesn't, I won't. If she wants me to go away, I'll go—" This last was accompanied by a covertly terrified glance her way.

"If she wants me to walk downtown backwards on my hands, I'll try. Whatever she wants," Mark finished up.

[...]

"Mark is as much a veteran of our wars as any Barrayaran I know, Kou. He was conscripted earlier, is all. In his own strange and lonely way, he fought as hard, and risked as much. And lost as much."

- A Civil Campaign

And of course, "Miles, what have you done with your baby brother?"

It's not a coincidence that half of these are Cordelia talking to or about Mark. I wish we'd been able to see a little more of the two of them together in Gentleman Jole. All three of them really, with Cordelia gently roasting Miles to Mark's benefit. Maybe Mark could give everyone updates on his luxury sex-hotel.

[kaijutegu]

Dr. Lizard tries on her tam.

[kaijutegu]

Dr. Lizard is a scholar of note.

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[rootbeergoddess]

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

[thesaltofcarthage]

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

[kawareo]

Got reminded again of my old coworker who was a massive misogynist but also trans inclusive. Told me he believed trans women are indeed women because "only women would be stupid enough to want to be women"

I wonder what he's doing now

[kawareo]

He also aggressively corrected himself whenever he accidentally misgendered a trans guy we knew because "there's already more women than men in the world, the more numbers we steal from them, the better." Did that even when the trans guy wasn't around.

[kawareo]

I need to point out that he was completely serious btw. This man had no sense of humor if he tried.

He was a cook at the restaurant/bar I was a bartender at, and almost punched a costumer once because he overheard him talking about how women belong in the kitchen. Told me he thought women should stay out of kitchens, that cooking is a man's job and when I asked him what he thinks women should be doing, he went quiet for a moment, then proceeded to explain to me the following

"I trust a bitch to run a kitchen as much as she can run a country, they should do shit like plumbing. Or electricity. Something you can just learn to do and don't need to lead, you know?"

Apparently women are good at "fixing shit". He claimed that he doesn't trust male plumbers or electricians except if they're gay because "something most be wrong with you if you want to go fix other people's houses, that's that maternal instinct"

[kawareo]

Love that you guys seem to like the stories about my Guy, here's another. (also for context i need to say that english is not the language he spoke, and when i say 'fag', i'm using it for our version of the slur. Our Guy insisted that that's just how you call gay people in our language (it isn't))

We had an openly gay coworker who looked like it (crop tops, dyed hair, make-up) and he was often harassed by the waiters from the football bar next door. The gay dude had the same name as the Guy, who insisted that we would specify the he isn't gay, so they just became "Name" and "Not Gay Name". He was fine with that.

Oh he also once went on a rant about how he respects our gay coworker more than "those other fags" because "at least he has the balls to look like a fag, yknow? None of that sneaky shit where you can't tell if they're trying to fuck you or your girlfriend." When I then told him I was bi, he looked me over and called me some slurs before telling me that I don't need to rub it in that I can get both. Then he asked me if I think he's hot and when I told him no, he informed me I should stick with women because I clearly have shit taste.

[kawareo]

He once accidentally bullied one of our younger waitresses out of an early eating disorder she was developing before working there (she told me about it after)

Boss gave us one meal from the menu a day as a job bonus, and we had this very shy seventeen year old working with us who was already nervous around men, but Our Guy was a 6'3 dude who only stopped yelling and cursing when he was not speaking at all. If he was the one cooking that day, he'd peek out of the kitchen an hour before he'd start closing it up, and would shout at you if you haven't ordered your meal yet because he hated cooking once he already cleaned. The waitress was scared shitless of him, and so whenever he would yell at her to "fucking order already", she'd panic and just pick something.

She didn't eat much but the first time she tried to throw out almost the whole plate, he got so personally insulted that he berated her for not picking something she'd like, and demanded to know what he did wrong. He got really upset about apparently not being able to cook something that this kid would like and I'm pretty sure he started putting in extra effort to make sure she would eat it this time? It lead to him quite literally standing over her like a hawk when she ate to "see her reaction" and demand an immediate review to see what he can improve.

She later told me that it she was so scared and awkward around him back then that it kind of overrode her fear of food, and that she still sometimes pretends she's back there, when she feels a bad episode coming on, so. He did do something good for the world i guess

[kawareo]

Our Guy met a nonbinary person once when my friend came to visit me at work. He was just on a smoke break so I had to introduce them and when I said "They're visiting" he got confused and asked us how many people are there (and then threatened murder if they dare order something while he's on a break). I had to explain this man what a nonbinary person is, he thought about it for a second, called the whole thing "fucking stupid, there ain't that shit in nature" and then proceeded to very mockingly refer to them as (our language equivalent of) "your majesty" and use the pronouns you use for people you're supposed to respect (which is genderless and very formal)

My friend thought he was really funny before I explained to them that I'm pretty sure he thought he was being mean (but hey he it wasn't misgendering so yay)

Then (after his break) they ordered a vegan sandwich and we heard him cussing them out about how "they should pick a fucking struggle". Later I asked him about it and got told that "how much shit can you deny yourself? Cheese, gender, the fuck's next?"

[veal7creative]

"Cheese, gender, what the fuck's next?"

I like how his issue isn't with the "that shit ain't in nature" thing he mentioned, but the idea that being nonbinary is some form of self-deprivation and that they deserve a gender like everyone else.

More notes for The Study

[hussyknee]

This post made it to TikTok.

[elodieunderglass]

What a FASCINATING person

[hussyknee]

Adding OP's final addition so we can get it all in one reblog chain.

[trickstertime]

Absolutely fascinating human, I never ever want to meet him or know what he looks like but want to hear more

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

Boris "professional idiot" Johnson wanted to build an island airport in the immediate area.

it's fucking visible

This post requires authentication to view.

It is fun to learn.

[thevideowall]

Yeah, there's major shipping lanes either side of the wreck, and if it blows the town of Sheerness will be destroyed - if not from th eblast directly then from the tsunami

[itsrainingshadybitches]

[tygermama]

“We heard youse are behind on your payments to Fat Tony.”

[defydamage]

I ALMOST SPIT MY ROOTBEER

[gallusrostromegalus]

“Think you’re all aesthetic, huh? A real instagram Wiseguy!  You want something to blog about? We’ll give ya something to blog about!”

[quendergeer]

the nature of tumblr is such that every few years it will independently invent goodfeathers

[txttletale]

yknow i really like tom bombadil and a big part of that is how much he fits into LotR's framing narrative... like, it seems so obvious to me that tom bombadil is an important folkloric figure in a culture that the in-kayfabe "original narrative" passed through to become the version "translated" by tolkein, and in that light everything about him and his dissonance and his status as this strange disconnected interlude make such perfect sense, right? that at some point someone in a culture that expected tom bombadil to be in every epic story wrote or told this tale and felt obliged to include him, and by the arbitrary ravages of history that's the version that's survived to this day... to me it does so much for LotR really feeling like an ancient epic embedded in a specific cultural context and history...

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

…yeah, that tracks.

[billymayslesbian]

imagining a universe where porn is a marketable genre so you have to deal with raycon ads while trying to jerk your shit

[torchichate]

You’re an easy slut, aren’t you kitten? Almost as easy as dinner with Hellofresh

[tbposting]

You're such a pretty little toy for me... and I can show the whole world how pretty you are with the stylish design templates on Squarespace. Whether you're starting a new business, or humiliating a pathetic praiseslut to multiple orgasms, Squarespace has everything you need to build a compelling online presence.