Shiny things, few of them mine.

[cl3rks]

Burn Notice. [S1.E1: Pilot.]

[platypusisnotonfire]

This is legitimately how I’ve broken into a thousand places like just act like you’re meant to be there and if someone actually ends up calling you out on it just be super confused

[platypusisnotonfire]

#I would be an excellent pentester and actually have considered it as a job many a time#when I was a kid (7-14ish) my grandmother was in the hospital a lot and I was a bored kid that no one was really watching#and we spent days and days at the hospital over the course of those years#so I’d wander around and it became a challenge to see where it could get into without gettting caught#and the answer is basically everywhere#like ther is no legit reason for an 11 year old to be in the morgue but I was tall for my age and I would carry a cup of coffee#and look irritated to be there like someone woke me up for this#and no one would question me#people would ask where are you headed and if you just exhaustedly point through a security door 97% of the time they will swipe their card#-and open it for you

I want to add that I don’t make a habit of this now that I am a law abiding adult, but recently I accidentally did this again. Having been used to having my run of hospitals and walking basically anywhere as a child, I was visiting a friend in the hospital just before covid and I was legitimately exhausted and carrying a coffee cup cuz it was like 5:30am or something dumb, and I went to leave and get to the bottom floor and i’m like “this is not the lobby” and I walked around for a bit and people kept holding doors for me so I traveled through many corridors, and nothing looked familiar, and then I realized every single door was a key card swipe and everyone had mag-stripe badges with varying security levels and I realized I had gotton onto a staff elevator with the staff, who had swiped their card to go down into a high-security area of the building, and people had just been letting me through all these security doors.

So then I had to out myself and be like “Um I accidentally broke into you high-security wing, please show me the door, I’m literally just trying to leave this hospital” and I had to get like searched and stuff. 

And what was funny was that while I was blissfully walking around assuming I belonged, No one questioned ANYTHING and in fact, were violating protocols left and right to let me through, but the VERY SECOND I realized I was not where I was supposed to be and let that show on my face, like three people in the hall confronted me. 

So the take away is, be confident that you belong, look exhausted and like you don’t want to be there, and carry a cup of coffee. It will open pretty much all doors.

@clutchkuza I feel like you need to hear this lol

[i-am-corbin-dallas]

No joke, Burn Notice is a great show. If you like Leverage, give Burn Notice a try (its available on Hulu and Prime iirc) and frfr, confidence and an excuse are all you need to get around places

[disasterlarper]

This works I accidentally broke into someone’s whole ass home a month or so ago and uhhh it went fine because I’m short white and VERY CONFUSED

[echodrops]

One time while I was in Rome, I was busy admiring the ruins and not paying attention to signage, got lost, and ended up in some kind of archaeological dig or restoration. Not knowing it was off-limits (having missed all signage, as previously stated), I started peeking around all the stone stuff, wandering off the path, and most importantly (to this story), poking around in a hole that had been dug into the ground. I was careful not to touch anything, but still, clearly (to anyone who wasn’t as oblivious as me) this was not a place a tourist was meant to be.

I finally attracted the notice of someone who was meant to be part of this restoration project when I came back up from the hole. He quickly came over to ask me, in Italian, what I’m sure were the very normal questions of “Who are you?”, “What are you doing here??”, etc.

Problem: I do not speak Italian.

My brain’s solution: Quick, what language do we speak that’s close?! 

And that is how I wandered up out of a hole in a Roman ruin without warning and began speaking ancient Latin to an archaeologist.

This man’s face went through 15 different absolutely floored expressions in ten seconds, like you could physically see him going through the thought process of “Have I encountered a ghost from ancient Rome? No, ghosts aren’t real. But if ghosts not real, how Latin??? Fellow researcher??? Supposed to be here???”

So this is the story of how I was allowed to walk away without issue at all after blatantly trespassing upon the ruins of ancient Rome, because if you speak Latin, where else would you belong?

[krakenartificer]

Oh! So I was thinking about “That Idiot Ivan”

In Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles says he was a teenager before he learned that “Ivan wasn’t your middle name”

But we hardly ever see Ivan actually called “That Idiot Ivan”.   Simon says “Ivan, you idiot, what are you doing here?” when his chip is turning to snot.  Miles says “Ivan, you idi-” when Ivan and Dono and 4 conservative counts arrive at the voting chamber in Civil Campaign.  I’m sure there’s a time or two when Aral does – but when he and Cordelia are dissecting Ivan and Mark in Mirror Dance, all Aral complains about his that Ivan is “middling” or “average”.  Post-Piotr’s funeral, you could easily count the number of times Ivan’s called an idiot, in a way you could not conveniently count the number of times Gregor says “Let’s see what happens” or Miles says “If I can do it, you can do it.”

Conclusion: the person who called him “That Idiot Ivan” was Piotr.

Now Piotr was an emotionally-repressed Barrayran male just like all the rest of his generation.  After everything he’d said and done, he couldn’t ever admit to being proud of Miles, no matter what happened.  About the most he could allow himself was to compare Miles favorably to other people.  

What could Miles compete with Ivan on? Not looks. Not athleticism. Only intelligence.

Every time Piotr said “That Idiot Ivan”, what he meant was, “Miles, I think you have good features and I’m proud of the way you make use of your capabilities.”

“That Idiot Ivan” was the closest Miles would ever come to hearing Piotr say “I love you”

[slatestarscratchpad]

[mylordshesacactus]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[mylordshesacactus]

I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.

I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation. 

I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.

It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post. 

And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.

If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.

I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.

A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic. 

They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.

If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried. 

Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.

You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.

It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.

[willowings]

stupid mdzs/cql alignment chart i made in the middle of the night

(my template, dm me for blank)

[zamboni-whisperer]

@aceofalmonds @laughingfate @glyphsinateacup @kettlehead-comics​

[beardbriarandrose]

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, School For Dragon Babies, 1884, pencil on paper

[ponqo]

i can’t believe you posted this without posting the sequel!

[a-book-of-creatures]

It gets better and better

[rionsanura]

Oh my god. This is the same Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter who in the extra-dramatic BBC series about them, was played by Peter Sandys-Clarke, whose oeuvre is more usually represented by this kind of stuff:

It’s that Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Who drew all the dragonbabies at school. I’m.

[whetstonefires]

One of my favorite things is modern adaptations that leave people with the same careers they had in the original material, because unless you’re a cop or a doctor that practically never happens.

Irene Adler’s an opera singer. We still have those! They don’t have the same subtext exactly, but nothing is going to because we aren’t the Victorians. She could continue to be an opera singer. I have never seen this happen.

Jonathan Harker can still be in real estate. That’s a job people have. A modern story that still involves Dracula contacting his firm to help him purchase property sounds amazing actually.

[nudityandnerdery]

A modern adaptation of Dracula where you keep seeing Jonathan Harker’s face on bus stop bench ads for his realtor office.

[aninfiniteweirdo]

(Okay, but also when modern adaptations keep the few jobs that signaled a certain social class in that context, but now Darcy is just a CEO forever and Bingley is another CEO and Anne DeBourgh is supposed to take over her mother’s firm and nowadays, people can leave these jobs? I can’t really imagine either Darcy or Bingley staying CEOs if they had all the options we have today.)

[whetstonefires]

See, that’s the kind of modernization that really does fall flat, yeah!

Because honestly you can’t recreate the class dynamics of Pride and Prejudice; they are way too closely wedded to the intricate realities of that historical moment, on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, but before it had really begun. The tensions between the upwardly mobile mercantile class reaping the profits of empire and the landed aristocracy, and all the gentry between.

(You can even less recreate the marital pressures; enough of the plot is driven by the rigid legal and social strictures surrounding women’s chastity and access to wealth that a modern Pride and Prejudice needs an entirely new story. Even preys-on-teenage-girls-Wickham’s bit has to change a lot, because making him marry Lydia is no longer helping.)

But even within the differing context, you can do a lot better in terms of equivalency than making every wealthy head of house a corporate CEO, as if that is the natural equivalent of land ownership in an agrarian economy. It’s not. Inherited wealth is still very much a thing–even our ‘self-made’ billionaire class mostly started off life as millionaires, and in some cases more or less failed their way up via the endless streams of credit that adhered to their family names.

And via the reorganization of tax law over the last 50 years to favor them.

Which leads into how ‘CEO as definition of wealth’ is very much a new-money thing within our present schema. The old money have definitely gotten in on it, because it’s a very profitable racket, but until the top marginal tax bracket in the US dropped away through the floor, bloated corporate salaries weren’t the route to the top of the heap. After a certain point, so much annual income would go into taxes that it was better business and more personally beneficial to put those profits into building up the company.

Whose stock you of course owned some of, and thus stood to benefit financially from on the much more gently taxed capital gain front; that was where the real profits were. In owning. Stocks are the new acreage.

(The high income tax is actually really good for the economy even from a strictly capitalist perspective, btw, because it disincentivizes driving the company you’re running into the ground and looting the corpse. Bluh.)

Between this and the rise of insanely fast computerized stock buys, our current system of capital is remarkably unlike the one we had in the 60s, despite being on the surface the same one.

It’s not exactly comparable to the relationship between old money like the Fitzwilliam-Darcies and new like Sir Lucas and Mr. Gardiner, because our current money culture is oriented toward speed and extraction in a way that doesn’t make room for that level of separation and contempt within the moneyed class, even if we weren’t further into the economic transition period than the turn of the 19th century was to theirs.

But still. My point. Is that modern Darcy as sole heir to a large fortune does not by any means necessarily have a corporate career. Even if he inherited his parents’ large-but-not-conglom, privately held corporation (est. 1863!), and feels an enormous weight of responsibility for maintaining that legacy and thus is heavily involved in its operations, he may very well be doing so as company President, or Chairman of the Board. (See: Batman ffs.)

I actually quite like modern Darcy inheriting a corporation, because it gives him scope to run it as he did the original Pemberley–with a keen sense of duty and attention to detail, careful attention to the wellbeing of his dependents, patience, and a long view toward sustainable practices. Proving himself One Of The Good Ones through his sense of noblesse oblige lol.

(But also he needs to learn that just because you’re treating someone less powerful than yourself well doesn’t mean you don’t also have an obligation to respect them as a person.)

Bingley absolutely does not run anything, and almost certainly has no real career and very possibly not even a job, though he may have one for the look of the thing, because it’s socially what grownups do. But he lives on inherited money, soundly invested by persons other than himself on his behalf, and enjoys it very much. Nothing about him needs to change beyond details, like hobbies. He does have a larger set of options likely to appeal to his sensibilities than cards and conversation.

I bet he’s a grown man who plays Mario Cart on a huge flatscreen TV with much excited shouting at the screen. I bet Jane thinks it’s adorable and also beats him at least 60% of the time, which he finds delightful.

Elizabeth’s father is a medium-scale landlord whose books aren’t terribly well-kept, who’s slow as fuck about fixing anything in the houses and apartment buildings whose rent he lives on because he doesn’t really care, and who’s mortgaged the properties carelessly enough that when estate tax is factored in his daughters are going to have to liquidate the whole shebang after he dies, so while they’re well off and have considerable privilege, they can’t look forward to the security of being set up for life like the kids of someone with his assets should be able to if they’d been well-managed, and all have to figure things out for themselves.

Like I said, P&P needs an entire new plot when moved to the modern day, so keeping people in the same jobs is less natural, but generally speaking these roles do still exist. The world is not so changed.

Mostly people writing modern adaptations of classic literature have a much less keen sense of, and interest in, socioeconomics than Jane Austen did tho. 😆

[cctinsleybaxter]

Wait those English bastards in Harry Potter were allowed to keep tawny owls as pets right??? AND BRING THEM INTO IRELAND??????????

[cctinsleybaxter]

JK Rowling is the anti-St Patrick she’s here to spead imperialist propaganda and disrupt owl ecology

[cctinsleybaxter]

We have something new for her callout file; get whoever’s in charge of that on the phone

[cctinsleybaxter]

Never thought I’d say this but folks we may need a new harry potter book

[kiwisoap]

As someone who has spent time with professional ornithologists and has seen people make 500-mile trips to see a Single Species Of Hummingbird i can say without a single doubt that wizards being discovered cus they keep bringing their nonnative birds places is a completely realistic scenario

[dreamlogic]

i’m imagining a bunch of very confused ornithologists trying to research the appearance of non-native owls in scotland, but they keep getting turned around by hogwarts’ anti-muggle defenses and it’s this endless cycle of

“well, we know that within this few mile radius of undisturbed highlands, there are massive concentrations of owls that Should Not Be Here. we know the owls are here, we know where they hunt and approximately where they return to roost but we just. we jsut. can’t find a SINGLE fucking nest??? anywhere?????? every owl we tag has their tracker malfunction RIGHT HERE but whenever i investigate i somehow end up back home in my slippers with a cup of tea.”

[raptured-night]

@somuchanxietysolittletime

[dastardly-lemondrops]

I love this so much I almost want to put it in my project

[ritavonbees]

Normal Beasts and Where You Absolutely Should Not Find Them

[cromulentenough]

I was surprised how good of an explanation this was. the progressively more complex models were perfect.

no idea why this turned up in my recommendations.

[firebatvillain]

This is a remarkably good explanation of the problem and how it is solved mechanically.

[copperbadge]

I thought today about a villanelle I had an inspiration there and then I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

It’s hard to keep the poems rigid shell On track inside my mind, so when I thought today about a villanelle

I thought about refrains re-rung like bells And how simple it might be to begin; I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

The line below these two, I brag to tell Is simply coded as =A1 I thought today about a villanelle

And this stanza’s refrain, I needn’t spell It out; it equals A3 and is done! I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

I planned to use this better, really sell The bit; but flew too closely to the sun. I thought today about a villanelle I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

[Description: The above text is pictured in individual cells in column A of an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet’s title in the workbook is “Sheet Two Villanelle” and to prove the truth of how it was constructed, Cell A23 is selected; at the top of the image you can see that it does not actually contain any text, but just the Excel formula “=A1″. This is probably Art, somehow.] 

[gallusrostromegalus]

So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they're called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.

They have concluded, I think, that it's some kind of prey animal because right after this video ended they decided to crouch down and stalk it, which means I'm 90% sure I'm going to have to stop Arwen from eating it at some point.

[theodorepython]

Of course it's a prey animal it fucking eats GRASS

[gallusrostromegalus]

While I can’t fault your reasoning on robot taxonomy, apparently we’re both wrong:  Arwen, as much as she is a high-prey-drive animal, is foremost, a herding dog, and has decided that the Lawn Roomba is a SHEEP.

What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was siezed by 200 years worth fo Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.  

Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually.  pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions.  or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessuflly to capture her.

After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that 

It  doesn’t respond to Yelling, Posturing or Aggressive Eye Contact

It does respond to having it’s wheels or bump hazards hit 

It would respond to its side being nosed or slapped by moving in a different direction

Conent that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise (TM) it.

“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”

Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck.  She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’.  So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.

“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger

“Me either.” said Mom.

So Arwen now has a Semi-Weekly Appointment to play with Sheepbot.

[trebornosnibor]

Well this is just beguiling

[elodieunderglass]

It also just goes to show that all the dudes who have fretted about the Robot Apocalypse for generations needed to hang out outside with dogs more

[whitepeopletwitter]

[gingersofficial]

[candiikismet]

Life path unlocked. He’s a scientist now.

[prolifeproliberty]

If your dad is telling you in great detail about something he’s passionate about, you’re going to be hooked even if you don’t understand a word.

[by-grace-of-god]

He tells us more…

So now I have to deliver a quiet lecture on the Standard Model every night. He loves lists of things, like all the streets home from daycare, or the train stations between here and Central, so he loves hearing the list of leptons and quarks and bosons.

Anyway, I made this poster for him, based on the CPEP ones we used to have at uni . 

Alas I ran out of room for antimatter, colour charge and confinement, but hey, maybe there can be a second poster later.

It’s funny though — on the surface of it, it seems like it must be far too advanced for a 3yo. But when you think about it, quarks and leptons are no more or less real to him than, say, dinosaurs or planets, and he loves those too. And he recognises the letters on the particles.

I am absolutely overwhelmed by the kind and sweet things people are saying about this, thanks everyone ❤️

Addendum: he has really grasped onto the “everything is made of atoms” part of this, so tonight he listed just about every object he could think of and asked if it was made of atoms.

“And my bed?” Yes, and your bed. “And that wall?” Yep. “And the armchair?” Yes, the armchair too. … … “And… the book case?” Y—

“And my home?” Yep, the whole apartment block. “And your home? Oh wait, your home is my home.” Haha, it is. … … “But is it made of atoms?” Yep. “And… [best friend]’s home?” Yes, it is. And [other friend]’s home, and [third friend]’s home.

“Is [yet another friend]’s home?”

Update from the other night:

“Is my… is… [extremely long pause] is my atoms poster made up of atoms?” —Yes! Yes it is.

I have never heard such a contemplative silence. I think the next poster will have to be on the philosophy of referential language.

Update from this morning: after listing everything in sight (mummy? daddy? fridge? milk? cereal? table? etc.) he asks “is [baby sister] made up of atoms?”

yep!

*runs over to her on the floor* *puts face up real close to hers* “HI! YOU’RE MADE UP OF LOTS OF ATOMS! DID YOU KNOW?”

[arcticfoxbear]

@radioactivepeasant @themagdalenwriting @iusedtohaveanaccount

“HI! YOU’RE MADE UP OF LOTS OF ATOMS! DID YOU KNOW?”

[alexanderrm]

@zamboni-whisperer I feel like this is roughly how I learned about atoms and protons and neutrons? Maybe a bit older

[zamboni-whisperer]

sounds about right- I know I was reading Powers of Ten around six?

[teaboot]

Too bad the prophet Cassandra never met Odysseus

[teaboot]

They say if she made a prophecy Nobody would believe her

[edgar-allan-possum]

I’ve gotta say, that is exactly the kind of stupid thing that probably would circumvent a curse.

[elidyce]

Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW. 

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

Cassandra: *in tears* I love you, new family. 

[jaidefinichongg]

[th3-bear-jew]

I APPROVE OF THIS LEVEL OF NERDY ANARCHISM

[myfavoriteninja]

@willylordofnothing

[itsbenedict]

The Invention of Batman

“So… okay, I think it suffices to define a bat as… a basically like a bird, but without feathers.”

“Like a bug?”

“Okay, a bird without feathers and no exoskeleton. …Oh, god, what are you-”

“BEHOLD! A BAT!”

“God damn it, Diogenes, you kept that thing?”

“Behold it!”

“No, you- last week you said- it can’t be both a bat and a-”

“Says who?”

[slatestarscratchpad]

@lethriloth trying to play D&D with the local 2 year old, the adventure:

Merlin the wizard was at his house when the prince came.

“I need your help!” said the prince.

“No, I need YOUR help!” said Merlin.

“With what?” asked the prince.

“With playing D&D!” said Merlin.

“Um,” said the prince. “I need your help. Someone has placed a curse on my whole family. And the only thing that can lift the curse is…hot chocolate. Can you get me hot chocolate?”

“No, I am playing D&D now,” said Merlin.

“This is how you play D&D,” said the prince. “By going on an adventure. To get me hot chocolate.”

So Merlin gathered his intrepid companions @apprenticebard the fighter, @slatestarscratchpad the monk, and @towardsagentlerworld the squirrel (Merlin had interrupted her character creation process saying she should be a squirrel). They agreed to set off for the coffee shop.

“I don’t think I can go to the coffee shop, because I am a squirrel,” said the squirrel.

“Now you are not a squirrel,” said Merlin, waving his wand. “Now you are a @towardsagentlerworld”. And even as he spoke, it was so.

And so they set out. But the coffee shop was across tall mountains and dark forests…

“No!” said Merlin. “No dark forests!”

Correction: the coffee shop was over tall mountains and well-lit forests. They came to the tall mountains. Just when all seemed lost, a purple car appeared, offering to drive them across.

“No!” said Merlin. “I don’t want tall mountains.”

He waved his wand and the mountains crumbled into dust. He didn’t like the dust either, so he waved his wand again and all the dust went into the trash can. The purple car drove off, unneeded.

And so the party came to the well-lit forests. For a while, the going was easy. Then they heard a sudden roar.

“No!” said Merlin. “No roar! I don’t want to play D&D any more!”

So the party agreed to stop playing D&D. Just as they begin to disperse homeward, Merlin reminded them of their obligation.

“No!” he said. “We need to go to the coffee shop to get hot chocolate for the prince!”

“But,” said his intrepid companions, “you said we weren’t playing D&D any more.”

“No,” agreed Merlin, and he left the gaming table and headed to the front door.

“We’re not taking you to the coffee shop! It’s probably closed at this time of night anyway!” objected his intrepid companions.

“BUT WE NEED TO GO TO THE COFFEE SHOP TO GET HOT CHOCOLATE FOR THE PRINCE!” said Merlin.

“How about we go to the park instead?” said his intrepid companions.

And so everybody went to the park. The end.

[offtherecordsarahc]

What people call “adulting” these days — chores, errands, personal finance, bureaucracy & taxes — is hard for a lot of people, and we’re all vaguely embarrassed about it. We feel like it should be trivial. We rely heavily on technology that makes it easier, and wonder how past generations managed.

For some things, I think it genuinely used to be easier. Back when corporate employment was more paternalistic, the company did a lot of the “adulting” for you. Planning a vacation? You didn’t have Travelocity, but the company did have a travel agent.

Notice how a lot of “adulting” has to be done during working hours? When you’re kind of stealing time from work to do it? How are you *supposed* to do it? I think the answer is “that’s your wife’s job.”

But isn’t this kind of hard for your wife too? Like, it’s hard to go to the bank if you’re dragging a couple of screaming kids, right?

First of all, this only works if the kids are in school most of the day. Second of all, it used to be a lot more normal to have *servants*. Third of all, you can squeeze more work out of people if they feel they *must*, and sexism is great at that.

The 20th century system was never set up to allow a person to work full time *and* do all the chores necessary for a decent life on his/her own. Weird “millennial” ways of filling in the gaps — roommates, software apps, cleaning/laundry services, company perks — are substitutes for old solutions like non-wage-employed family members, servants, government services, and company perks. Sometimes better solutions, sometimes worse, sometimes exactly the same thing under a different name. But the fact that “adulting” is time-consuming and sometimes difficult isn’t a result of some inherent moral turpitude in Millennials. Chores have *always* taken time.