something unbroken, something defiantly whole

parker, in episode 6 when she’s fighting the orphanage guy, doesn’t do anything elliot does. she has nowhere near the body mass or the pure power that elliot does, because it doesn’t benefit her, and because they’re simply just different people. when she fights, she uses things to her advantage, and she fights according to what she’s capable of. she uses pressure points against him, because she can’t physically overwhelm him, she uses her hands to knee him in the skull, because she can’t just break a bone or punch him unconscious the way elliot can. she’s not as “clean” of a fighter, but that works, because she’s fighting an opponent she’s not on equal ground with, height/weight wise, and also because she wouldn’t be. elliot is a professional fighter, parker isn’t. when she grabs the bar to swing into his chest, she’s using momentum and physics on her side, not her strength, because in a 1v1 matchup, that’s not a fair fight. and COULD elliot fight like parker? yes. absolutely. but he has no need to, just like she would have no use for his bulk/stability.

i really just love that they included these details and took the time to make this believable, because so often the whole “guy faces a bunch of other guys with guns and comes out fine” trope annoys me, because it’s beyond unrealistic. but with elliot, the way he uses his body and fighting style, it genuinely works. and similarly with parker, her fighting isn’t “woman punches a man in the face and knocks him unconscious,” it’s a somewhat messy, adrenaline fueled fight where she not only outsmarts him, but uses the physical capabilities that she does have more control over/strength in, to render him a non-threat. that’s a genuine fight that i believe could happen. also, a key difference i love is that when parker is about to get punched, she ducks. elliot would simply block it, or grab his opponent’s arm and do something with that. but parker doesn’t have the knowledge or the power to do that, so she avoids the blow and fights using what she can do and what she does know. both options work for them. parker has the dexterity to duck quickly and retaliate, and elliot has the power to simply block it and use it against them. that’s perfect. 

also, in the episode where they save the church, hardison makes a joke about fighting the injured. but quite honestly, what he did worked, and it’s what i would do as well. the fighting style i was trained in was so much less about power than it was manipulation and taking advantage of what’s presented to you. if someone tries to punch you, they’re most likely throwing themselves off balance and also, extending an arm into your area. if you know how to use that, you absolutely can to your advantage. and what hardison did was smart, he had previous information about a weakness and he utilized it to prove a point/get info. 

1994 was the first season of Friends, and all six members were paid $22,500 per episode. However, as that initial season centered on the characters of Ross and Rachel — played by David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston — the duo became the main stars by the end of season one. When contract negotiation time came for season two, the two received a pay rise to $40,000 per episode. This was more than the remaining four main actors were paid.

By the end of season two, Schwimmer was being offered lucrative movie deals, and his agents once again renegotiated his ‘Friends’ contract. This time Schwimmer came up with the selfless idea of getting his costars to form a mini-union of sorts and demand the six to be paid equally. It was a decision that would cost both Schwimmer and Aniston in the short term but had the potential to pay off long term.

However, by doing so, it would give the group of six control of the negotiations. Previously the show’s producers could easily drop one of the actors and write their character out of the show if contract negotiations for that individual stalled. Under this new tactic, the studio couldn't write all six at once as it would kill the show. It was all or none.

So, I do love this little essay about Pizza and Loneliness on Friends, I think it's missing that this whole "your friends from your 20s will be your friends forever and there will always be pizza and you will never be lonely" fantasy is downstream from the cast's labor negotiations.

sounds like someone needs to go in the water

We all know the “jokes” about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they’re not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don’t understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a “legitimate” position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We’ve had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn’t going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN’T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a “fake” sexuality and “pretending to be oppressed” and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of “pedophilia” in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes “child porn”, and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don’t Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to “sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn’t even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed”,

We’ve seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance “it’s us vs. them so anything they don’t like is Good”,

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I’ve seen in recent years hasn’t come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren’t exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they’re the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn’t resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We’ve seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don’t know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

Best friends

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

After the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, Spanish names were mandatory, since the Catalan language and culture were completely banned by the fascist regime, but he referred to himself as Joan. So let’s refer to him as Joan as he would have wanted, and not use the name that the Spanish fascists imposed.

ok. We tried placating them. We tried hiding. We tried being nice and  inoffensive.

Noticed talk of a mutiny and brought it to Stede's attention before anything happened

Quietly coached Stede on how to be more effective as captain

Caught sight of the Spanish ships on the horizon before anyone else, including Blackbeard and Izzy

Didn't assume the fog alone would conceal the Revenge from the Spanish

Knew the movements of the Dutch merchants so precisely as to be able to zero in on them a full day and a half before their paths crossed

Very much attempted not to let Calico Jack on board

Only one besides Stede who didn't engage in Jack's shenanigans