The Big Not Very Wee Hag

This is so cool. I've been to a LOT of natural history museums and have never seen anything so creative and also what a terrific way to demonstrate a possible mode of and reason for flight evolution.

actually people should address this in fanfic more because “i know we could half-ass it, but i would never fake mistreat my fake husband, how dare you” is absolutely delightful

#i think this is honestly the backbone of the appeal of the fake dating trope (i am a fake dating enjoyer) #the reason why the characters put so much unnecessary effort into the fake relationship tells you so much about them #does the idea of being someone who doesn’t really care about their lover disturb them? do they secretly care a lot about their fake partner #are they a person who needs to do everything well and with care even when it’s stupid? do they just commit REALLY hard to the bit? etc etc #ADDITIONALLY another main appeal of fake dating is the characters going ‘wow this is really easy and working really well for us’ #‘our fake relationship looks (and functionally is??) better than uncle carl’s 15yr marriage’ #‘which probably means nothing. i will not think about this in depth for at least another three chapters’ #you get it. you understand. i am sorry for the in-the-tags fake dating manifesto (via @river-gale)

gameshow voice: is it gay subtext or are the writers just so catastrophically bad at writing female characters that the only relationships in the entire story that feel human are the ones between the men.

"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.

The warding sigils would have detected the problem, but they were so overtuned that they were constantly throwing false alarms, so eventually one of the assistant thaumaturges simply disconnected them and forgot to tell anyone they'd done so.

I support this 100%, if only because I want to listen to the Well There's Your Problem OrbCast, starring Roz the Wizard, Liam the Rogue, and November the Sorceress.

This has been sent to me four times today, so I'm condemning OP to be judged by the 42 and fall into Nuun.

New sleep style: hitting the snooze button so many times that you sleep two additional hours in ten minute intervals. I call this Horse Sleep

Worse sleep. That was meant to say worse sleep

I Am So Fucking Tired

Literally immediately after reblogging this to correct it I went "wow, it has a reblog already?" And got all the way to checking my notifs before I realized. That it was me.

Anyway horse sleep: sleep, but horse. Worse. Sleep but worse. Definitely one of the two.

Y’all “critical thinking” does not equal “criticism”.

I am very tired of saying positive things about characters and getting told I need to do some critical thinking (so that I’ll see the characters are actually bad). No. That’s not how that works. I already did some critical thinking and came to the conclusions that these characters are wonderful. Criticism or straight up character bashing is not more enlightened and is not how critical thinking works. “Critical thinking” is not “thinking about all the bad or problematic aspects of something.” It’s looking objectively at evidence, looking at context, recognizing and examining personal biases and assumptions, considering what assumptions and biases are being used in a given argument by other people, etc. Sometimes this process brings up criticisms, yes, but sometimes it also leads to the conclusion that something is actually good despite it being made out to be bad. 

Also criticism is not synonymous with lambasting, haranguing, and being a shitstain to others. I'm sorry your parents made you internalize that but criticism and critique is actually a function of mutual dialogue and not you shouting insults at people for not interpreting something the exact same way as you.

i actually can’t stop laughing thinking about someone seeing me on their dash and being like this deranged bitch and her algorithmic social media we would NEVER be friends in real life

No. :)

It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.