forged in the heart of a dying star.

LAURA • 25 • 2SPOOPY SOMETIMES GOES BY LIZZIE IN RP STEVE ROGERS' ASS APPRECIATION BLOG the avengers. final fantasy x. butts. my cat. other people's cats. tom hiddleston. disney. mac and cheese. harry potter. slytherin.

[melanieexox]

Ghost Adventures | 16x03: Kitty Kitty.

[vvinifredsanderson]

So... I wasn't going write this post, but it was making me mad, so here we are. Skip this long thing if you want, share it, I don't really care, but here's a lesson. On my "on this day" memories thing on Facebook, I discovered it's 3 years ago today that I was given a phone number at a restaurant-- the first phone number I was ever given-- and it was a joke. I don't know how many people I've actually told it was a joke, but I know there were plenty of people who knew about my stunned excitement before it came to fruition.

This post is not about me, but some background: I've never had a boyfriend. I've never dated. I'd love to, but I've never been asked. I struggle with my weight, and I have always lived in a very small town, rural area, so trying to enter the dating world was never easy, and to be honest, for a good part of my adult life I haven’t even wanted to because I know this is not where I want to be, so I’m waiting until I’m there. Regardless of that, to be slid a napkin with a phone number on it and a smile and a nod, I was floored. To discover I was the butt of a joke-- I was livid, but I was so SAD about it all. I didn't talk about it, because I knew I was better than this person, I was better than the hurt they wanted to cause me, and I did deal with it and move on in most ways, but still I would catch myself second guessing how much I was eating out in public months later, what the meal was, how fast or messily I was eating, how "fat" I looked eating it. How "fat" I looked doing anything, in a restaurant or not. I use the word in quotation marks because it’s not an insult to me, not anymore, but it did, and to so many people out there, it’s hard not to think of it that way. It hurts and they think the same things I did. And that makes me even more angry now.

I am angry because again, this post is not about *me.* This is about every person, regardless of gender, who's been the butt of a joke. Every person whose self-esteem has been put on someone else's chopping block. Every person who wonders alone at night what they did wrong, what's wrong with them, how ugly they must be, when it's NOT. THEM. It is not their fault. It sure as hell wasn't mine. If you have been this person, crying by yourself at night when you should be sleeping, IT WAS NOT, IS NOT, WILL NEVER BE YOUR FAULT. 

If you have been the person putting someone into that situation, FUCK. YOU. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. No matter what kind of shaming it was, it is NOT okay. It WAS NOT okay. It’s not okay that you did this to someone else. You went out of your way to hurt somebody, possibly a total stranger like I was. Because you could. Because it was funny to you. Well it’s not funny. It’s sick. I hope you have realized by now or will realize in the future exactly why this is so wrong, and it’s not just someone telling you it is; that you realize that for yourself on your terms and believe it. I hope you can be better. Fuck you for that moment, but still, I hope. Because I for one was raised to try and lift people up, not deliberately hurt.

If you’ve been hurt, I hope you rise above it if you have not already. You can do it. I believe in you.

[marciabrady]

Princess Aurora is arguably the least popular Disney Princess in the official franchise, with many people criticizing her for being romantic, obedient, and too “traditional”. While many people see her as a weak character I, by stark contrast, think she’s one of the strongest characters I’ve ever seen. While it’s important to have characters as headstrong as Belle and Jasmine, it’s equally important to have a character who chooses duty over personal desire, which is precisely what Princess Aurora manifests once she finds out she isn’t, in fact, Briar Rose and her entire life has been a lie. She doesn’t blame anyone, throw a fit, or try to run away; she returns to the castle to meet the parents she just found out existed mere minutes ago, leaves the boy she loves behind (yet she’s somehow dependent on a man?), and accepted a duty she was neither prepared for or asked for. [insp]

[opticculture-deactivated2017120]

perrinjames1 Floating through this iridescent dream

[dailystrangerthings]

Do I get recognized? I guess it depends on if I’m wearing a hat or not. The hairdo is a dead giveaway. There’s nothing I can do. It’s just the way my hair grows. It’s my parents’ fault, really, because they have such big hair too.

Joe Keery photographed by Aaron Feaver for GQ

[wrasslerjedi]

thor : *flies into battle while shooting lightning from his body while Immigrant Song is playing*

me: 

[spicy-blanket]

>be me

>about 13 years old

>basically naivete incarnate still

>just discovered the world of fanfiction.net

>have an account and a few stories posted so far

>currently working on a fanfic of Spirited Away

>get a comment one day

>commenter asks if I can put lemons in my story

>I think it’s an odd request but will do anything to please a fan

>write the next chapter acknowledging the lemon request and say that the chapter WILL CONTAIN LEMONS

>about halfway through the chapter I wrote a giant duck running past the protagonist with an armful of lemons

>duck says “MY lemons” then runs off

>feel pleased with myself at having granted my fan’s request

>years later I find out there’s another meaning for lemon in the fanfic world

>lemons are sex scenes

>my commenter was asking me to put a sex scene in my story

>at 13 years old I unintentionally trolled the shit out of some random person

>whoops

[nativeamericannews]

Sacajawea: If Not For Her, We Could Be Saluting the British Flag

Few women in U.S. history have had more influence on the nation’s history than the young Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacajawea. It’s very likely that Lewis and Clark would never have reached the Pacific Ocean had it not been for her help. White settlement would have been different. Indian wars throughout the western half of the country would have been altered. We might even be saluting the British flag rather than the American flag. Sacajawea’s role was gigantic.

[haiweewicci-blog]

MY GIRL. She is of our tribe and we are so proud of her out in Inyo County. The Lewis and Clark thing was just a small part of her epic life.

She was actually born with the name Poi Naipi (Little Grass Maiden). She and two of her friends (Nai Nukkwi, Patsu Naipi) were kidnapped by a hostile band of Hidatsa, who had a strange practice of replacing their own dead children with the children of other tribes.

Poi Naipi’s “adopted” parents didn’t like her much so instead of sending her home they freaking sold her to a drunken French guy named Charbonneau. This man was bastard incarnate. To put this into perspective: He had once been stabbed in the face in Manitoba when he was caught raping a young girl there. At this time, being forced to marry him, Poi Naipi was about 9 years old. And, he already had one other child bride.

He was very abusive, he drank a lot, and at some point Poi Naipi started calling herself Tsaikka Tsa Wea. It means in our language, “One Who Carries a Burden.” You see how this got corrupted to Sacajawea over time.

At one point on the L&C expedition Clark caught Charbonneau beating Tsaikka Tsa Wea and her newborn son. Well, Clark and Lewis beat the crap out of Charbonneau and told him to knock it off. Later, after the expedition, Clark paid for Tsaikka Tsa Wea’s son to go to school and live in his home.

That’s not even the cool part though. As an older woman Tsaikka Tsa Wea said “To hell with this, I’m going home.” This was a pretty big thing to do, understand that she had practically been raised by her abusive scumbag husband and it is very hard for women who have been systematically abused since childhood to learn to stand up for themselves, especially against their aggressors. But, she did it. Traveling all by herself, she found the Northern Shoshone encampment on Wind River, where Chief Wusik-He was with some Eastern Shoshone (and some Western at the time) (this would later go on to be the permanent Eastern settlement, those guys are still out there today). She was reunited with her brother, who by that point had been named Daigwani of the Northern Shoshone. Everybody welcomed her home, her friends, her family, and she broke down crying to hear them call her their “Lost Woman” (Wadze Waipu). For her resilience and cunning she was appointed the personal advisor to Wusik-He. As a very old woman was buried with the name “Chief Woman,” later her son and her nephew were buried on either side of her. Those graves are still there on Wind River today.

Poi Naipi and the Wide Ridge Clan, never forget you, your story is always being told. Miikwa katukan, tunna wunupuhantu tung'atiwan naangwunupuhantu

[prober2020]

[gotham]

Thor deleted scene

[beavesaintmarie]

#weeping #if u don’t like thor i don’t like u

[lyrangalia]

WHY WAS THIS DELETED.

[amuseoffyre]

I love how Thor learns to interact by watching and listening. Look at that last gif. She is showing acceptance and appreciation to him by touching his arm, so he reciprocates! Because he appreciates her too.

[nothowtheforceworks]

Also, he knows he did something that was culturally inappropriate and asks for permission to return to the restaurant instead of just assuming that replacing the cup made it okay.

[thatadult]

sending “I hope you get that job” vibes to the people out here tryna get jobs

[theeeprotagonist]

reblogging for yall bc the shit worked for me lol

[blkmedusa]

Karma will pop me if I don’t

[marciabrady]

get to know me meme: [1/10] favorite animated female characters → sleeping beauty // briar rose // princess aurora “She is just a romantic teenager…yet to consider her so seems not quite to capture the mystery, the strange elegance of Aurora, who is the central figure holding the choreography together, the key in which the music is composed. The film is drawn in terms of Aurora, her angular/arabesque linearity, not the soft roundness of the fairies or the caricature of the kings. She gives the movie its enchanted, modernist atmosphere; for Aurora is not just beautiful, she is otherworldly…I think Prince Phillip was on the right track when speculating that Aurora was ‘some mysterious being’ like a wood sprite. Aurora is gifted from birth by four fairies; her beauty and singing voice are literally supernatural. She grows up ‘in grace and beauty, beloved by all who know her,’ raised by immortals, far from any humans, strolling barefoot as an elf through magnificent primeval forests with a coterie of animal companions. In her long vertical aristocratic glamour she is more like Maleficent than like any human. Aurora is a demi-fairy, touched by the spirits, half outside this world. Don’t think of Sleeping Beauty as a ballet, if you please; think of it as a ritual. Think of her name, think of her sleep; she dies and is reborn, the sun returned in glorious dawn, dancing among the clouds. Think of her enchanted dress in its endless cycle between the pink of morning and blue of evening…she is an aspect of nature, the circles of the sun, the flow of the seasons; she is the Persephone of the Disneyland.” x

[showerthoughtsofficial]

What if Jesse’s Girl IS Stacy’s Mom?

[serenamidori]

The deepest lore

[technicolorrelays]

Spookies

The ultimate spookies playlist

60 songs 3hrs and 52 minutes of content

8tracks-youtube

[yrbff]

Tbh I never understood why the term “thunder thighs” is supposed to be derogatory, it sounds like I am a terrifying weather goddess

[celticshenanigans]

Just tell people: “Why yes, my thighs *were* blessed by an Asgardian diety. Thank you for noticing.”

[booksomewench]

“He murmured the blessing while he was between them, in fact.”

[thefairfleming]

#i am here for the unexpected overlap of body positivity and norse mythology and cunnilingus  ( via @misshoneywheeler)

[taylortut]

A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

[mcubed35]

As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.

[katistrophe]

@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?

[biologyweeps]

Ohhh.

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host. 

[futureevilscientist]

Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).

[redrikki]

@scriptmedic might this interest you as well?

[animatedtvfilm]

[lukearnold]