[seal-of-unknown]

me, begging, tears in my eyes: please. please just tell me what the book is about. the plot. please

a book annotation on the cover, unfazed: A Subversive Masterpiece. A Deep And Touching Story. The New York Times Bestseller. Go Fuck Yourself

[fuckyesmichaelbjordan]

Erik Killmonger: I’ve been waiting my whole life to kill you! Your father left me in Oakland and killed his own brother!

T’Challa: I JUST FOUND OUT YESTERDAY!!!

[braime]

[thesporkidentity]

I feel so bad but i’m just sitting here cackling as my bestie is sending me increasingly exasperated texts about her students’ first research paper (1 page long lol). Like. Despite having deadlines for each stage of research and writing, one kid emailed her at 7:45 pm for the final 10 pm deadline with a question about “resurch.” Multiple kids have plagiarized their papers, one of whom didn’t even bother changing the font or the color of the sections he copied and pasted. One girl just cited a fucking fanfiction story as one of her sources.

Middle schoolers are so precious, but god they can be so stupid too. Darling children lol

[thesporkidentity]

update: fanfiction girl may have put it in the works cited but didn’t even bother to put quotation marks in as she just copied and pasted two full pages of a fanfiction into her paper. every little additional detail i learn about these papers just gets worse lol

[thesporkidentity]

she sent me the link of the story she copied and pasted. it is…not good. it’s not even a good story. why did she steal it? god this entire sordid tale is so baffling. is it possible that this child has genuinely mistaken bad self-insert fanfiction for legitimate greek mythology? the world may never know

[thesporkidentity]

“Also, fanfiction.net is a community of modern fiction writers, and is not a credible source for your research papers.” - an actual sentence my friend just had to write to her students. i’m dying this is incredible lol

[thesporkidentity]

“Although the Trojan horse is something we all think is real, it’s actually classified as a myth.” oh you sweet summer child

“I used this video thing to find out what the roman house you can find out.” what does this even mean lol

god they’re such precious babies fumbling around like newborn colts and i am living

[thesporkidentity]

“The Trojan War Horse was built around the time the Trojan War took place.” I mean. He’s not wrong…

[thesporkidentity]

“ Like Gaea, Ouranos had a human form too, in his human form he was a tall buff guy, with long black hair, wearing only a loincloth… (don’t judge me, Gaea was the one who made him…) So then they get married, bla bla bla bal bal.”

“ So they have triplets, and these kids define UGLY. Now don’t get me wrong they were as big and strong as the titans but they were so brutish and NEEDED any kind of waxing, and to top it all off each one had a huge eye in the middle of their forehead. They became the elder cyclops.Of course when Ouranos saw them he was like “Nope!” and made chains out the nights pure blackness and chained up the triplets and tossed them into the pit.”

“ So Gaea had come up with this new and brilliant idea called killing.”

“ But that is a story for another time. For now I will work on painting some of the moments for the LAVP so see ya later.My references are:“Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods” book by Rick Riordan, Goggle, Wikapedia”

[thesporkidentity]

Okay I honestly never anticipated this post to go beyond my immediate circle, and apparently some people have missed the point of this post. This is their first paper. They are learning and part of learning is doing things very badly before doing them well. Honestly I only wanted to share some nostalgic cute-response trigger with y’all witnessing the first adorable, fumbling baby steps into this kind of assignment, not for some of you to fucking judge them or their teacher just because their first attempts aren’t perfect. So like. God just enjoy it without being an asshole.

[thesporkidentity]

“In this paragraph I will be telling you the dimensions of the Colosseum in Rome.” “In this paragraph I will be talking about the features of the Colosseum.”

Not what was meant by making sure you have a strong thesis statement, but kudos to this kid who was obviously listening and trying to apply that to their paper <3

“I am going to talk about things like Odysseus’s stops, the characters involved with his stops, and how long and far he traveled to get home. I can’t wait to show you everything that I have learned so far!”

oh my god this precious sunflower

[thesporkidentity]

“Nearly every town in Ancient Greek has a patron god or goddess because most gods didn’t share well.” There’s almost nothing wrong with this sentence I’m just enjoying this masterful use of understatement.

[bettsfic]

i read this entire thing nodding, going, yes, yes, this is what my students are like also. this is #relatable content. 

then i read “middle schoolers”

i am a graduate assistant

i teach college students

[cikero]

no one:

business majors: I have to be as unethical as possible

[accio-jamespotter]

during the reformation of the order of the phoenix, a clumsy pink-haired girl who excelled at concealment and a ragged-looking man with a tortured past and a good heart met for the first time

they watched each other from afar, making eye contact in between breaths of laughter and finding each other’s eyes in moments of pain

they found each other up close, when the world around them was in chaos and they stood still before parting ways to save the wizarding world

the man felt hesitant affection out of the fear he harbored for his own monstrous tendencies, claiming that

tonks deserves somebody young and whole

but tonks clearly looked at him with stars in her eyes and no intention of backing away from his jagged edges

tonks deserves somebody young and whole

but tonks found remus’ smile the most comforting and remus’ love the most warm

tonks deserves somebody young and whole

oh, but remus

she wants you

[80slesbiab]

me at 9 pm: ok im going to sleep

me at 2 am:

[wern]

yeah hyperfixation can be inconvenient sometimes but when i’m between hyperfixations life is like meaningless so

[goldenrose95]

Not to mention that feeling when you find a new thing to hyperfixate on and it’s like getting high for the first time

[keeperofthelighthouse]

Let’s talk about X-Files for a minute. Scully and Mulder may not always agree but Scully is Ride or Die by their second case. When Mulder doesn’t come home in the morning she STEALS A GUN from a DOA agent and forces him to drive her AT GUN POINT to the military base and threatens to SHOOT HIM if they don’t return Mulder, on their second case, she’s known him for like two weeks

[vermillionreasons]

Reblog if you’re part of the ‘I read a lot of fan fiction and now I have a bizarrely accurate judgement of how long it takes me to read a particular number of words’ squad

[lierdumoa]

People: This book is 500 pages long.

Me: I have no idea what that means. What’s the wordcount?

[kaijuno]

The Computer Room is such a weird concept nowadays but growing up in the 90s/00s we really had a whole ass room dedicated to our computer. Anthropologists 1000 years from now are gonna think we worshiped computers so much we had shrine rooms for them

[aspartaime]

My human anatomy teacher was talking about bone healing and when you break a bone it typically will heal stronger

So I look him in the eyes and say “so what you’re saying is I should break every bone in my body until I become superhumanly powerful?”

And he looks back at me and says, with the softest voice he could muster, “please do not no”

[unbreakable-red-riot]

[bertiesbott]

valentine’s day + harry potter couples

please request in my ask box💓

[thepastelqueenofhell]

As Remus Lupin once said, “Eat. You’ll feel better.”

[woolawool-deactivated20220724]

Every other straight man ever singing about a woman: wow baby you’re so sexy I love you because your body is sexy

Hozier, an intellectual and lesbian ally: I am a bird of prey and you are a sharp spike upon which I impale small rodents

[woolawool-deactivated20220724]

Straight man #2505: we met at the club she was really hot

Forest lad himself: it was as my baby churned up the mud that she found me there, buried and alone

[woolawool-deactivated20220724]

Fucking eduardo sheerman or whomever: I just want to errr kiss you babe

Andrew Hozier Byrnes: I want nothing more than for us to lay in a field together until we decompose and are eaten by foxes

[highqualitynot-deactivated20210]

billionth straight man: i love you, alive girl. i will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon. 

hozier, actual legend: when my time comes around, lay me gently in the cold, dark earth. no grave can hold my body down, i’ll crawl home to her.

[thexfiles]

the x files’ nonexistent writers room: one of the biggest holes we’ve dug ourselves into with the william storyline is the existence of his adoptive parents, the van de kamps. mulder and scully can’t just whisk their son away from the only family he’s ever known, right? that wouldn’t be moral or ethical, how do we fix this

james wong:

[skuls-s]

1 and/or 58?

1. “Pull over.  Let me drive for awhile.”

58. “You don’t have to say anything.”

—

He calls her on a Tuesday morning when he is supposed to be resting, only three weeks after his discharge from the hospital, with a proposal. He is supposed to be taking two months of medical leave, and she tells him “But this isn’t exactly work-related, Scully,” he teases. She can practically see his eyebrows waggling, as if he was standing right across from her.

She bites her lower lip, putting her feet up on the desk. “This had better not be another proposal to run off to Scotland and look for the Loch Ness Monster,” she tells him seriously, pretending she wouldn’t jump on that in a minute if it weren’t for his head injury. She’d do almost anything to feel normal again. She pretends that the sentence I have a proposal for you, Scully didn’t make her instantly, childishly think of marriage, of his voice over the phone in Maine. (Her cheeks are red with embarrassment.)

“No, not again,” he says coyly. “Well. Not exactly.”

“Mulder,” she says at length, knowingly.

“Scully,” he says, mimicking her, and she rolls her eyes gently. “I’ve been watching some sighting blogs lately, and I’ve noticed a pattern up in New Hampshire. Four sightings within the last two months.”

“Sightings of what?” she asks, suspicious.

“Sasquatch,” he clarifies. She bites her lip again, although she isn’t sure if it’s to stifle a grimace or a smile. She’s missed arguing with him. “It’s perfectly harmless, no danger or anything, and even you admitted that the Files are on a bit of a dry run right now. Which I’m guessing means you’re as bored as I am.” She can hear his grin over the phone. “C'mon, Scully,” he cajoles gently. “I’ll pay for gas. I won’t exert myself past what you say I should exert myself.”

“Mulder, three weeks ago, you were in the hospital because some madman did botched brain surgery on you. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself at all.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m inviting my doctor along.”

She can hear the tiniest pleading in his voice. She casts her eyes down on the paperwork covering her desk and swallows back a sigh. She has been bored. She’s stir-crazy. If Mulder hadn’t been calling her every single day, she probably would be making excuses to call him: just to check up, just to ask if he remembers this one detail for her report.  

As his doctor, she should be more sensible. But as his partner, she can’t help it. Sasquatch is a pitiful excuse for an X-File, but it is still an X-File.

“I’ll be there within an hour,” she says.

—

Mulder makes food for the road as if he were an elementary school mother. Sloppy sandwiches—peanut butter for him and turkey for her—stored in brown paper bags, carrot sticks, almonds, and three bags of sunflower seeds. Plus a couple packets of peanut M&Ms. His bandages came off a few days ago, and the line of stitches at his temple are just finished under the thatch of regrowing hair, the bill of his baseball cap from two weeks ago. “You look all ready for a field trip, Mulder,” she teases, raising her eyebrows at him. He shakes his head ruefully and plops his baseball cap down on her head as he climbs into the car. Hands her a packet of M&Ms and takes the lid off of her water bottle for her while she drives. They bicker over the radio all the way to Baltimore.

—

Near the Pennsylvania border, Mulder reads aloud to her from print-outs from his sighting blogs. He starts with the Sasquatch sightings, but he’s moved onto other cryptids and the like within a few minutes. “Hey, look, Scully, more Big Blue sightings,” he says, flapping a piece of paper in her face. A blurry picture is accompanied by equally blurry text, the ink smudged by the pads of Mulder’s fingers. “Want to go to Georgia next?”

She makes a face at the road. “Mulder, I thought we agreed that the deaths in Georgia—the deaths in Georgia that occurred almost four years ago—were due to the alligator.”

“But look at that picture, Scully!” He waves the print-out again. “Does that look like an alligator to you?”

She squints at the photo in brief increments before looking back to the road. “It looks vaguely like a tree branch.”

Feigning insult, he pouts. She reaches over and pats his knee, partially in reassurance and partially teasing. “We may be partners, Mulder,” she says gently, “but I am not galumphing up and down the East Coast all these next few weeks with your head energy. Especially not back to the place where my dog died. Let’s take it one sighting at a time, okay?”

There’s a sudden, straggling silence following that, and she suddenly worries that she’s hurt his feelings. (She doesn’t blame him for Queequeg’s death. She doesn’t; and it was a long time ago, anyways.) She looks over at him, and her stomach twists at the guilt on his face. She’s ready to apologize when he speaks, and his voice is even and steady. Not the self-loathing reaction she expected; a little guilty, but only a little. “I’ll buy you a new dog, Scully,” he says. “Or a cat. Or some fish, even. Fish are amazing, Scully, I speak from experience.”

Something like fear curdles in her gut, something like a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. Discussions like this is the type of thing she desperately wants, but is too afraid to ask for. She remembers her lips on his forehead, his soft, slurred voice in the hospital as he described his brain surgery-induced dreams of a suburban life with Diana, the guilty lurch when he whispered, But I don’t want that with her. The unsaid implications there. She grips the wheel hard. “We’ll see, Mulder,” she says, trying to sound amused, but her voice trembles. “We’ll see.”

—

They stop for dinner somewhere in New York. She checks his condition, leaning over the table and the basket of chips he talked her into ordering to check his pupils. She brushes hair away from his eyes and he looks up at her almost shyly. She sits back in her seat too hard.

Halfway through dinner, Mulder reveals a folded up map from the car and traces their route with his ink-smudged finger. He’s marked the specific spots where there’s been sightings, boxed them off, and she moves to his booth to look, unintentionally pressing their arms together. She’s missed this. She’s missed him at the office, she thinks, and is saying it nearly before she realizes it—”I’ve missed you in the office.”

He looks at her in surprise, blinking with huge eyes. She leans closer to look at the map, and her hair brushes across his jaw; she can feel his eyes on her, astonished and affectionate.

—

She starts yawning somewhere in Connecticut. She’s not too tired yet—she wants to get as far as they can tonight—so she keeps going. But she keeps yawning, her mouth gaping wider and wider, until she feels Mulder’s hand brushing over her cheek. “Pull over,” he says in a soft, gentle voice. “Let me drive for awhile.”

She blinks at the road, the blur of headlights stubbornly. She’d thought he was asleep. “Oh, Mulder, I’m fine,” she says. “And besides that, you shouldn’t be driving.”

“You’re tired,” he says matter-of-factly. “You’ve been yawning for forty-five minutes now.”

“I thought you were asleep, Mulder,” she murmurs. Her chest is warm, swelling with affection; she feels foolish and tired and strangely, deliriously happy.

“I was. Your yawn is pretty loud.” She shoots him a look, eyebrow cocked, and he grins goofily. “Endearingly loud. Endearingly.”

“Uh-huh.” She stifles another yawn with her fist, shaking her head.

“C'mon, Scully.” His voice is low and warm. “C'mon. Pull over and let me drive to a hotel, at least.” He taps her kneecap with one finger. “We don’t have to get there tonight.”

She links thumbs with him on an impulse before he moves his hand away, wraps her fingers around his. “You’re not driving,” she says sternly. “Not with your injury. Doctor’s orders. You should get some sleep.”

He rubs a slow circle on her palm with his thumb. “You should get some sleep.”

They both should get some sleep. Scully nods, her jaw clenched. They pass an exit sign with a singular hotel listed. She flips her blinker on.

—

There is only one room available, she tells him at the car. He throws her a wry smile. “Of course there is.” (They’ve dealt with their share of the only-one-room-left in their time.)

“I went ahead and took it,” she says, shifting from foot to foot. “So we can get some sleep.”

He nods, a whisper of a grin on his face. “Good call,” he says. “We can head up to New Hampshire in the morning.”

The room is fairly nice, considering their standard accommodations. Queen-sized bed, mutely patterned comforter, striped wallpaper. Scully checks Mulder out again, examining his stitches on the edge of the bed. He’s as tired as she is, his eyelids lolling. She sifts her fingers softly through his hair and he turns his head towards her touch, their foreheads nearly bumping. He swallows, his  eyes dark, fathomless. “What’s the prognosis, doc?”

“You’re fine.” Her hand drops from his hair, brushing down his stubbly cheek. “But you need to sleep on the bed, okay? Not the floor. Absolutely not,” she tells him sternly. “Okay?”

He swallows. She can see his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Only if you do the same.”

She nods. She looks away, down at the carpet under their feet, clustered together at the edge of the bed. She can feel his warmth against her side, resists the urge to lean into it. She starts to stand, their knees bumping together, and his hand curls around hers. “Scully, I, uh…” he begins, his voice warm with sincerely. “I have some things I wanted to—” He breaks off in the middle with an enormous yawn that surely rivals her own yawning, and she smiles. She cannot help it. That warm feeling, that anticipation is back, and there is no fear accompanying it. “… to, uh, to say to you,” he finishes, blinking rapidly as if to try to stay awake. He squeezes her hand.

She’s still smiling as she shakes her head, still biting back her own yawns. “That’s very sweet, Mulder,” she says quietly, “but I think it can wait until the morning.”

He shakes his head, nearly pouting, stubborn as always. “I don’t want to wait,” he says, and he sounds half-drunk on fatigue, but somehow, it’s one of the most serious moments she’s seen from him. He lifts his free hand to thumb her cheek, the hair slipped out from behind her ear. “I… I-I’ve wanted to say these things to you for a long time, and I've… I’ve waited too long to say them. I need to say them now.”

Overwhelmed tears well up in Scully’s eyes. In the past, over the course of their partnership, she’s been so unsure—never knowing how to interpret the little things, never being confident in what an interaction means, in how much Mulder cares for her or in the manner in which she cares for him. But now she knows. She just knows; it feels like everything has snapped into place. They’re exhausted and half-asleep in a hotel room in Connecticut, and he’s trying to say something to her that she desperately wants to hear, but he doesn’t even have to say it. They don’t need it.

She wipes her eye with one hand, whispers, “Oh, Mulder.” He’s shooting her a concerned look; she leans up to press a sleepy kiss to his forehead. “It’s okay,” she says, and leans bonelessly into his shoulder. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.” I know, she thinks, the words on her lips. I know.

She worries, briefly, that he won’t understand, that he’ll be hurt or think her dismissive.

But he doesn’t say a word. He winds an arm around her back and pulls her close. He puts his lips to her hair and doesn’t say anything, and she thinks, Oh. He knows, too.

They sit there together, unmoving, her face hidden against his shirt and their fingers tangled together, some silent understanding between them: This is enough. It’s everything.