Thinky Thoughts

taraljc:

jinxquickfoot:

So I’ve finally finished Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and not only did I enjoy the last three seasons way more than I thought I would, but I was not prepared for how delightfully unhinged the show became. Some of my favourite plot points included:

• The female protagonist has a long-lost sister with superpowers who becomes the key to the entire crew returning to their original timeline through the Quantum Realm. Said long-lost sister is not introduced or even hinted at until the last five episodes of the entire show.
• Half of one season takes place in a dystopian 2091 where the young twenty-something scientist couple not only meet their grandson who is the same age as them but said grandson returns to the present, becomes a series regular, and calls them “Nana” and “Bobo” in some Once Upon A Time worthy family tree shenanigans. Oh he also gets stuck in the 80s and claims he wrote Don’t You (Forget About Me)
• Phil Coulson dies in Season 5 because in order to stop an evil AI -turned-human-turned evil because she got dumped by a small Scottish man he has to become Ghostrider. The entire season builds up to this in a way that makes it feel very much like the actor is stepping away from the show and retiring the character, only for them to cast Clarke Gregg as an evil deity from another dimension in Season 6 and as a Life Model Decoy that may as well just be Phil Coulson in Season 7
• Patton Oswalt plays multiple identical characters who all work for SHIELD. This is never fully explained.
• The final season is a decade-hopping gimmick with matching genre episodes that beat WandaVision to the punch
• One character is a robot anthropologist who just wants to be best friends with the same small Scottish man. He has canonically been trained to perform in alien brothels and eventually becomes a bartender in the Crazy Canoe in 1955. He is one of the absolute best parts of the show.
• One plot line follows said same Scottish Man and robot anthropologist as they get stranded in outer space with their only way home being to gamble in an alien casino while their friends attempt to rescue them but accidentally take LSD instead
• “I found that bluffing was much easier if you kill someone and take their skin.”
• Area 51 is canonically a SHIELD base

Truly once you get as far away from the sucktastic joss whedon pilot full of all of his creepy creepy fetishes as humanly possible it grows into an amazing show and I keep hoping that Ming Na Wen and the rest of the cast can get worked into the MCU somewhere again because they were amazing and deserved so much more than to be disavowed and discarded because Kevin Feige was pissed at Jeph Loeb for reasons that to my knowledge have never satisfactorily been explained.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that of all of the pre-D+ Marvel television series, the only one I love with the same ferocity and intensity as Daredevil is Cloak And Dagger and if you haven’t had a chance to watch Cloak and Dagger please for the love of God do so adap. Skip Runaways as it sadly does not deliver upon its premise, but do watch the Cloak and Dagger crossover episodes because it gives you a sense of closure.

Agents of shield was one of the only shows where they 100% embraced that this was an adaption of a *marvel* comic specifically and marvel used to be where all the flat out ridiculous crazy shit went to live.

dresshistorynerd:

knittinghistory:

knittinghistory:

this is a head’s up that i block transphobes, homophobes, and radfems who interact with this blog.

nearly every kind of traditional handicraft is going to attract right-wing weirdos who think it symbolizes a past world where women were women and men were men proverbs 31 white man’s burden blah blah blah etc etc. knitting is certainly no exception, and in my experience, historical knitting is even more likely to attract that kind of attention.

just so we’re very, very clear:

• knitting was not invented by white people
• knitting, while historically most commonly practiced by people in cold climates (namely europe), does not belong to the quote unquote “west”
• except for extremely brief windows of time in very specific locations, knitting was not considered “women’s work”
• knitting is not a symbol of rugged individualism. in fact, throughout most of history knitting was considered a social activity, inextricably entwined with community
• knitting has been used as a tool of oppression. for example, Black slaves in the americas were sometimes advertised for sale with the promise that they were excellent knitters

Oh yeah absolutely this. The reason why I often write about how colonialism and gender relate to dress history is because I want to push back on the right-wing association of historical fashion. Fascists love to idolize past and they are very good at co-opting attempts at learning from history, so I think it’s extra important to look at that history with holistic lens when learning from it and appreciating it and not leave room for fascistic interpretations. Also you really can’t understand dress history properly without understanding class, gender, economy and colonialism.

So also for clarity:

• men wore skirts till 400 years ago in most places of the world including Europe
• the three piece suit originates in the Muslim world
• it was fashionable for respectable women to show nipple in couple of points in Western history (for a while in 17th and 18th century and Regency era) - it was in fact more acceptable for a woman to show nipple than a man
• the textile industry was a significant driving force behind industrialism, British colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade
• before the 20th century size, weight and the body in general had little to do with beauty, rather it was about body proportions that were achieved with structured clothing and padding
• the ones who were in Victorian era reviving and preserving traditional craftsmanship, including in textile and clothing, were gender non-conforming anarchosocialist feminists and queers

(via vassraptor)

riftclaw:

crimeronan:

god i wish i wouldn’t have to explain the intricacies of the neopets economy to you guys to give the full context for this but. the new neopets team that took over from jumpstart pledged that they were going to curb the inflation of rare items, which is great because a lot of rare items are worth literally hundreds of millions of neopoints, they are unbuyable unless you’ve been playing actively for 20 years. they did this earlier with a site festival that included random loot boxes, some of which had Unbelievably Fucking Rare And Precious items worth 200 million neopoints apiece.

well.

today they have gone a step further. by releasing this year’s trick-or-treat bags. and having the trick-or-treat bags be stuffed to the brim with unbelievably fucking rare stamps, weapons, paint brushes, defense magic, and other unbuyables. (all prohibitively expensive and in-high-demand types of items.)

jellyneo, the premier neopets website, has recorded prices of some items plummeting from 2,000,000 neopoints to 4,000 neopoints IN THE LAST THREE HOURS. this is when most people haven’t even heard about the event or OPENED THEIR BAGS YET.

and of course. cherry on top. 20-year-old account holders are crytyping on the site events neoboard about how mean and cruel it is to make rare stamps part of the prize pool, because their entire identity hinges on being part of the neopian bourgeoisie, and they are having MELTDOWNS over their assets being devalued until they’re part of the lowly proletariat.

this is a children’s game for children btw.

none of the money is real.

i’m having such a good time.

oh fuck yeah this is the coolest

I’m just gobsmacked that neopets are still A Thing, tbh

(via akilah12902)

lindseymcdonaldseyelashes:

Leverage 2x1 - “The Beantown Bailot Job”

If you have a (long, bulky) 2x4 or some (too short) rebar and the other guy has a bat and he does THAT, you do not want to try a zerg rush. That is a bad bad plan. (Dude with the prybar could be dangerous IF he gets in close, but Elliott’s got better speed, balance, and reach.)

Seriously, baseball bats are some of the best modern melee weapons around– you can fairly easily send a dude to the hospital with a wooden bat. You can send him to the fucking morgue with an aluminum one.

filmnoirsbian:

What’s wild is that you’ll have an abusive parent. And you’ll maintain a relationship with them despite your better instincts because that’s your parent and you want them to be a parent. And one day you’ll bring up all the things that they did to you because they need to be addressed. The baggage needs to be unpacked. And they’ll say what do you want me to do with this box of rotting flesh? And you’ll say I want you to acknowledge the box of rotting flesh. I want you to apologize for cutting it off of me and stuffing it into that box and then forcing the box onto me. I want you to recognize that I have been carrying this box for years. And I want you to help me carry it. And they’ll say well where’s my apology for you putting your unsuspecting body into my hands and then expecting me not to stick a knife in you? And you just have to move on because the only alternative is rotting in the box yourself.

(via into-the-weeds)

jeanjauthor:

tatttletalesocial:

royalhandmaidens:

y’all want some cool, muslim-made, modest fashion ideas for your hijabi characters?

absolutely nobody asked but here, have them anyway (all via the Islamic Fashion Institute):

YES!! THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!!

i have seen so many arabic/middle-eastern inspired fantasy settings where women’s fashion is made to be so revealing and near sexualised, because apparently the western people who make them cannot think of “pretty enough” designs that honour muslim culture and so erase it.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE SEXUALISED TO BE BEAUTIFUL!

i absolutely love these. And one of the reasons (though there are many others!) that I love these outfits…is because they’re not hypersexualized.

Honestly, there are only so many ways to reveal T&A “tantalizingly” or whatever. It Gets Boring AF.

These are not boring by any means!

(via nanaluvbug)

hollyevolving:

scientia-rex:

asmrican:

boeing747:

i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this

I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”

No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.

No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.

Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.

All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.

Be kind.

We have GOT to start preparing young folks for what happens as bodies age.

wolfyraged:

i love james sterlings little Looks and Tiny Waves at Maggie Collins in the Second David Job (s1e13). Like, i know he is Sus As Fuck but it is kinda cute, esp considering later seasons

Remember that Maggie cannonically had a crush on Sterling when she was still married to Nate.

landunderthewave:

The nice thing about Leverage is that they are very consistent with keeping the formula that made you watch in the first place. Sure they also need to develop a story and the characters, they cannot stay completely stagnant. But where other shows diverge from the “monster of the week” or “case of the week” concept, Leverage very rarely (if ever) deviates from the con of the week.

Instead, they make use of subtle changes to the concept. Okay, Nate runs the con, there’s a sad person who was wronged, everybody in the team has their role to play etc. But they start to occassionally mix up who runs the con, or the team members need to get out of their comfort zones, maybe take over the role of a different team member. And there’s a logical progression. You would think if they work together this long, they would pick up a lot of skills from the rest of the team - and they do!

Or their con doesn’t relate to a poor citizen, but instead it’s personal to somebody in the team, usually reserved for season finales.

What Leverage doesn’t do is lose you because all of a sudden it’s not the show you came for.

Also I’d argue the subtle character work and development of the team dynamic provide a much more satisfying pay-off.

The only other show that did character development arcs for the whole cast as well as leverage was deep space nine. I’ll die on this hill.

*Babylon 5 did very (very) good arcs for *some* of the characters but not all.

*Sterling did too get a full arc and I’ll give you a presentation with five part harmony if you press me about it.

willowcrowned:

ellie-you-idiot:

willowcrowned:

no nine words more horrifying to hear from your mother than “i went on archive of our own last night”

my dad has a tumblr. i don’t know his username. every day i live in fear

ellie. your mother and i have something very important we need to tell you—

Not going to lie, this is a reason why I’m glad I didn’t have kids.

(Though when my niece gets old enough to google family members there may be some awkward phone calls from my sister…)

(via phoenixyfriend)

bionelly2:

alwaysatomicconniseur:

mag200:

you may walk out of the underworld but you have to trust that she is behind you. do not look back to check.

i trust that she is there

i trust that she is there (i think)

i trust that she is there (please?)

i trust that she is there (can you hear me?)

i trust that she is there (say something so i can hear you)

i trust that she is there (what if it’s a lie?)

i trust that she is there (i can’t even see her shadow on the wall)

i trust that she is there (SAY SOMETHING)

SAY SOMETHING.

look behind.

#jesus.#orpheus and eurydice#as a poem#using a poll#this is probably the greatest exploitation of mediums i have ever seen op#every reader has the chance to become part of the text by voting#not the subtext#the TEXT#and i love me some ephemeral works in concept#you had to be here for this one week#and then the text is locked#(barring any edits to the original post of course)#and i just think that’s so beautiful#beauty springs from the simplest things viewed askew#and all you need is a poll that accepts long enough strings (via couchcrusader)

and then THE FINAL RESULT. where “look behind” came so so so close to winning, but “i trust that she is there” came out ahead by 0.1%. so maybe, maybe, we did it right this time. maybe this time we were able to save her.

(via berry-muffin)

stealthetrees:

It’s not a plot hole, it’s a bookshelf for fan fiction

(via arielsojourner)

dduane:

0fficelady:

Collection

“By necessity every book must have at least one flaw; a misprint, a missing page, one imperfection…. The Rabbis … point out that even in the holiest of books, the scroll resting inside the Ark, the Name of Names is inscribed in code so that no one might say it out loud, and chance to pronounce properly the Word that once divided the waters from the waters and the day from the night…. As it is, some books, nearly perfect, are known to become transparent when opened under the influence of the proper constellation, when the full Moon rests in place.

“Then it is not uncommon for a man to become lost in a single letter, or to hear a voice rise up from the silent page; and then only one imperfect letter, one missing page, can bring him back to the land where a book, once opened, may still be closed, can permit him to pull up the covers around his head and smile once before he falls asleep.”
—Midrashim, Howard Schwartz

cazort:

pjharvey:

pjharvey:

people need to accept that some gay/lgbt people are terrible and some gay/lgbt people are boring and it doesnt make them Actually Straight or anything

big pet peeve of mine is gay internet users talking about ellen degeneres and pete buttigieg and acting like they’re “basically straight” as if both these people aren’t literally married to someone of the same sex sleeping in the same bed with them and having gay sex with their gay spouses and as if ellen degeneres coming out wasn’t such a huge moment in the lesbian community and pop culture as a whole that the biggest lesbian website for decades after that was called afterellen like unfortunately being gay doesn’t make you immune to being friends with war criminals.

this message belongs on my blog more than once for the simple fact that not enough people have seen it and let it sink in really deeply

(via berry-muffin)

umuad:

the-punforgiven:

the-punforgiven:

Show up at work like hi boss sorry I’m late my I was helping my mother track down one specific 90s dungeon crawler for the purposes of obtaining a muffin recipe the developer hid in the files

Anyway shoutout to Stonekeep (1995)

tim cain???

(via berry-muffin)