Life is now

the new euro banknote designs with the birds are sooo pretty... I hope the birdies win

You can vote for one of the bird designs here: Go Vote!!!

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

love the end of the two towers where gandalf looks into the sunset talking bout "yea frodo had to go it alone it was his destiny and there is no changing it he will be ok 😌✨" and aragorn is like "sam went with him btw" and gandalf is like "oh fuck thank god"

My one boring tip to anyone in their 20s is to resist the temptation to rot in your room every time you get a free moment. Dismiss any neuroses you have about going outside and "being perceived". Be a dictator about it, plan your hangouts like they are binding commitments. No excuses! Go to the bar with your friends. Be kinda hungover at work. Socializing is like exercise; even if you don't feel like you want to, you should still do it because it's good for you.

It's endlessly funny to me, that so many people read Nona the Ninth - a book where a group of indigenous people from a small nation in the southern hemisphere spend years trying to build a communal plan, begging anyone to take collective action, reaching out again and again for as many people to get on board as possible, only to be stymied again and again by the individually and structurally powerful, who simply didn't care (and couldn't care due to the incentive structures imposed by power) and just wanted to preserve their own power/lives at the expense of everyone else, only for one of their number to be singled out and given immense universe-altering power by a magical entity, which of course led to disaster and the collapse of their original goals because, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely and will magnify even the most minor human foibles - and came away thinking ah yes, the point is that John as an individual is ontologically evil.

#i think people also forget john is arguably the most fucked up dude in human history and an unreliable narrator #he probably. can’t connect with who he used to be before necromancy #John The Guy and jod are different guys entirely #the regular scale of trauma does a lot to a normal human brain #john went through arguably the worst trauma a human person could possible experience #while being transformed into a godlike being #they’re not the same person #the same way mercymorn ‘we will not stand for reproductive abuse’ becomes ‘infants as fingers and gestures’ (via @monetarymollusk​)

i don't get how you can read the end of john's story and not see someone undergoing a complete mental shattering it's not an excuse it's an explanation of why he did what he did if you had ultimate god powers dropped upon you from a great height then saw everyone you cared about hunted down and murdered in front of your eyes whilst the very people who made living on earth miserable and squeezed every drop of profit from it before abandoning everyone to die escaped in front of your eyes are you saying you could've kept your head in that moment?  ( via @2impostors​ )

#john's backstory is SO important to me because it makes so much sense every step of the way#he lost the plot but like. every moment he went down that path.... i could see it.#that rage. that senseless thirst for meaningless revenge#and once he literally becomes god.. why hold himself to human standards of right and wrong? why care for single individuals at all?#and all of this tragedy is 100x better BECAUSE of the good intentions paving the way to hell#how do you look at john gaius 'no one knowingly left behind' 'begged for funds to reduce chance of damage'#'spents weeks trying to handle maternity issue bc people deserve a choice on whether to terminate their pregnancy'#beloved of alecto. she gave the world john because she loved the world!#how do you look at THAT guy and think he was irredemable from the start (via liesmyth)

fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,  Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.

on a similar note, a traditional Ojibwe greeting is “Nanaboozhoo” so when the French first landed in southern Canada they thought that they were saying “Bonjour!” Which is fucking wild to think about. Imagine crossing the ocean and the first people you meet in months somehow speak French. 

this disability pride month lets be kinder to folks with moral ocd . no more “if you really care about this minority , you’ll reblog this post” , “someone will die if you don’t reblog this” , etc etc , and all other kinds of guilt tripping reblog bait . at the VERY LEAST tag your reblog bait so we can filter it out and avoid unnecessary spirals . it’s 2026 , we need to move past using guilt to get engagement .

One choice the show made in revealing Robby’s character is showing us that he’s friendly with staff at all levels of the hierarchy in the hospital (except admin because this man hates the hierarchy). He and Ahmad are friendly. He knows Esme’s name, uses it, and asks how she is in both seasons. If you don’t work in a hospital you might not know that this really isn’t typical for doctors. Many will ignore the cleaning staff entirely. Few would know their names. Esme likes Robby enough that she saw him struggling during the MCI and asked if he needed anything, if he wanted her to grab him something to eat. That speaks to their relationship and to why the staff like him so much. He talks to them as equals. He doesn’t put himself on a pedestal, and that is really not common among doctors.