AmunConcoction

Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.

Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.

my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.

in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.

so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-

PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.

And what many people don’t realize is that this subculture was born as a way for young girls to express themselves in their own way. And it was also used as something against the adult life and the traditional culture, often seen as dull and boring and oppressive. By embracing cuteness, these young girls (and adult women, after a while) were showing non-conformation with the current standards.

NO OK THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!

This is also how the kawaii fashions started! Girls began dressing in cute and off beat styles for themsleves, they were criticized by adult figures telling them “you’ll never find a husband if you dress that way!” to which they began to reply “Good!”

All the japanese subcultures and fashions that evolved out of this became a rebellion to tradition and the starch gender roles and expectations the adults were forcing on the younger generations. As early as the 70s and still to this day you’ll see an emphasis on child-like fashion and themes in more kawaii styles and the dismissal of the male gaze with styles like lolita (a lot of western people assume lolita is somehow sexual due to the name of the fashion, but ask any japanese lolita and they will tell you that men hate the style and find it unattractive which is sometimes a large reason they gravitate towards the style - they can express their femininity and individuality while remaining independent and without the pressure to appeal to men)

So this one day my dad was in a rush and this scruffy looking guy comes up to him and mumbles somthing about money. And my dad just walked by and said “Oh, sorry. Not today.” And he went inside the bookstore he was going to.

Once my dad gets inside the bookstore he turns around to see the guy who came up to him outside looking very angry. And then he realized that the guy had said, “Give me all your money.”

He must have known Sirius well due to his time in the Order, he must have known what James meant to Sirius. Dumbledore was a member of the freaking Wizengamot yet he didn’t fight the Ministry’s horrifying trial-optional policy. 

This is a man who took back Death Eater!Snape at his word, shielded him from prison, and employed him at a school for children. 

But he didn’t have a use for Sirius, so he didn’t care about him.

Naturally, this took me back a bit since he’s one of the heroes of the series, misguided as he was at times. Still, I was curious and asked my friend why he hated him. His answer still strikes a chord with me.

also the OS has this big honking flaw where it freezes up a lot and all the memory access to anything but negative shit gets locked out, plus all the code regarding physical interface with external modules appears to be either corrupt or missing

The thing is… I think Steve actually would get on people’s cases about their language, but not about cursing in general. Instead, I think Steve would be insistent on what kind of insults were okay, and the second you used one that wasn’t, he’d be so unimpressed with you and just sort of pop out of nowhere like…

“-used to be such a man-whore-” “Whoa! We do not shame sex-workers or sexual lifestyles in this tower, thank you!” “Oh, uh, sorry, Steve.”

“God, I know right? I’ve never met a bigger bitch-” “That’s a misogynistic and dehumanizing insult to use and we need to be better as a society than to make negative associations to being female or feminine.” “…Right. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“That bastard!” “While they are a horrible person, making comments that imply someone born to unmarried biological parents is a bad thing is unacceptable.” “…weren’t you working out with Thor three floors down?”

“Son of a bitch!” “I’ve already talked at length about the misogynistic nature of comparing people to female dogs, but surely there’s a better way to insult someone than to bring up and insult their mother. Bringing familiar relations into it is just cruel; insult the person, not their parent.” “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN COME FROM?”

“Motherfucker!” “…” “Rogers, your Captain America glare doesn’t work on me.” “…” “Goddamnit, Rogers.”

So it somehow comes to be that, while “fuck” is a regularly used word, Steve unintentionally manages to train the entire Avengers team and quite a bit of SHIELD into using completely non-problematic insults. Superhero-supervillain trash-talk has become endlessly entertaining; there are twitter accounts dedicated to immortalizing every word of this.

Clint Barton is regularly heard calling people “goobers”. Tony Stark loses his temper at a press conference and refers to Justin Hammer as a “fucking douchenerd”. A guard at an enemy base swears he heard the Black Widow say “crapwaffles” while trying to hack into their systems. The confused and furious rant that happens when Loki is first called a “dweeb” to his face goes viral on Youtube.

Garnet knows what’s up.

Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.

But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart. 

She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see. 

Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.

Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.

(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a tinker’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less). 

I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs. 

Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.

Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.

She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine. 

Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands. 

When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a tinker on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her. 

They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.

Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.

Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen. 

She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords. 

She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same. 

They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the tinker’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The tinker’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.

Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.

shout out to the ones who find themselves in constant frustration because they just dont understand, and in turn, others dont understand them.

the ones who find reading multiple paragraphs exhausting, overstimulating. shout out to the ones that have to read things several times to understand something.

shout out to the people who fear others will think them ignorant.

- weight

- gender

- sexuality

7 Disney Scenes That TOTALLY Shoulda Happened

It’s been getting a lot of coverage lately. You’ve probably seen it. Thom Feeney who is currently living in London is trying to pledge €1,600,000,000 EUR to get the economy back on track. He’s currently raised just short of  €1,000,000 with six days remaining. If the crowdfunding fails, all donations are refunded to the donators. Let’s just get Greece sorted All this dithering over Greece is getting boring. European ministers flexing their muscles and posturing over whether they can help the Greek people of not. Why don’t we the people just sort it instead? The European Union is home to 503 million people, if we all just chip in a few Euro then we can get Greece sorted and hopefully get them back on track soon. Easy. What We Need & What You Get €1.6bn is what the Greeks need. It might seem like a lot but it’s only just over €3 from each European. That’s about the same as half a pint in London. Or everyone in the EU just having a Feta and Olive salad for lunch.

So come on, order a Feta and Olive salad, maybe wash it down with an Ouzo or glass of Assyrtiko greek wine and let’s sort this shit out.

Pledge €3 and get a postcard sent from Greece of Alex Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister. We’ll get them made and posted in Greece and give a boost to some local printers and post offices.

Pledge €6 and get a greek Feta and Olive salad 

Pledge €10 and get a small bottle of Ouzo sent to you

Pledge €25 and get a bottle of Greek wine

Is that really all it would take? OK, it might be a short while for the cash to get fully into the Greek economy, but hell - what is there to lose? Another Tesco Meal deal? Ah well.You get some tasty Greek things.

We promise that all profits will go to the Greek people and all products will be 100% Greek. 

Okay, so I might get a lot of hate for this, I might not. I don’t particularly care either way, as long as word gets out about this, because it’s extremely important to me.

As I’m sure most people know by now, bees are disappearing at alarming rates. Simply put, our entire species could not survive without them. This is due to a syndrome called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Many vegans opt to use agave nectar instead of honey, because agave nectar is plant based. But harvesting of agave nectar is threatening the existence of two other endangered species: Mexican long-nosed bats (who live strictly off of nectars - primarily agave nectar) and the Jaguarundi (a solitary feline who basically looks like a love child between a jungle cat and a ferret.) Approximately 113,126 acres of these animals’ habitat were destroyed from 1991 to 2000, and more has been destroyed since.

On the other hand, beekeepers are essential to increasing bee populations. They monitor the bees’ health and help protect them from dangerous parasites and pesticides that are suspected to cause CCD. In addition, well-kept bees never need to use the amount of honey they produce; Honey is made by the bees to consume only when there is not enough food for them outside the hive. In the care of a good beekeeper, this will only happen during the winter months, and the keeper will leave enough honey for the bees to thrive until it’s spring again.