To make mistakes is to live

Panda. 32. They/she. Multifandom blog. Hugs available upon request. Puns and sarcasm served daily. Theme courtesy of @octomoosey, icon courtesy of @casual--disaster

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[mewnosodenwyma]

[inkskinned]

before you make fun of a person doing something brave and vulnerable like dancing or singing or reading poetry in front of a lot of people:

don’t.

[kabsey]

Reminder to self: A file folder of outlines and character notes and half-written scenes is the equivalent of an artist’s sketchbook and holds just as much value to the creative process.

If a framed canvas isn’t the only worthwhile expression of visual art, then a fully edited and polished piece of significant length is not the only worthwhile expression of writing.

[goth-queen]

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

In The Road to El Dorado there is only really one inexplicable thing within the plot. Miguel and Tulio plausibly bluff their way through or slip out of most situations. However, I’d never figured out why the volcano actually stops erupting when Tulio commands it. 

The conclusion I finally came up with is that the actual gods were watching their big entrance go down, and thought “oh, this’ll be hilarious”

[sweetvantass]

theres a lot of evidence throughout the movie to say that the armadillo (whose name is bibo) is a god.

they first find him in the jungle, where an armadillo has no business being

they find the entrance to the city, while being followed by him

he is present when the volcano starts to erupt (previous concept art also showed him in the background actually stopping the eruption)

miguel and tulio sucked ass at the ball game, so they used Bibo as a ball. He ricocheted himself all over the place and defied physics to get into the hoop every time

they come up with the flood plan to stop cortez when bibo pushed a glass over in front of them

[famouslysleepy]

YOUR TELLING ME THEY USED GOD AS A BASKETBALL?

[butchfagminotaur]

the sims will never not be one of the funniest games on the planet

[depsidase]

[10aliens]

it's an honor to teach you

[weaselknievel]

giggled at something and my coworker comes out of the break room and goes "I just heard like, a haunted child laugh... so weird." and I'm like okay so it was a normal regular alive adult laugh actually

[velvetcloak]

Letter coat by SCAD Student Designer Riley Flynn

[userautumn]

devastating when good characters are put into a stupid show. you were born to fly but that evil hag of a showrunner clipped your golden wings. be free on ao3, my little dove. be free

[aquotecollection]

“Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.”

— What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon

[gaymolegaming]

Do not let gamers near nonbinary characters

[shadowblade8192]

yeah

[seelcudoom]

yeah

[toskarin]

one of my favourite human songs-and-dances is when someone notices someone else is lying and, for no particular reason besides love of the game, helps them get away with the lie without ever explicitly acknowledging they noticed. nightmare social animals.

[despazito]

Another one for "objectively funny crimes should not be punished"

[natalieironside]

Shout out to trans women who aren’t computer scientists or musicians or avant-garde artists or whatever.

Shout-out to tgirls who work at Taco Bell. Thank u queen, society would collapse without you

[snkrfnd]

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.

[natalieironside]

Thank u for sharing this with us