Concoction of obsessions

Y'all rushing to that reblog button:

I said yes! 

“doing adult things” = almost always a euphemism for sexy stuff (when other people say it)

Basically the word “adult” or “grown up” was used to condescend to us and exclude us. And what made a person an adult was treated as inherent.

Then we got older and tripped into what actually doing adulthood meant and came to find that

1. The people who were supposed to explain to us how this worked had completely failed to do so

2. They had done so in such a way that was meant to protect their authority while also (possibly inadvertently) barring us from the experiences and skills that would’ve helped us transition into adulthood better.

3. There is no inherent authority that comes with adulthood. The adults around us were talking out of their ass. Adult is a verb, not a noun. It’s not an inherent source of authority, it’s a thing you work at daily and you have to maintain it.

And what’s more the same people who lorded their age over us, telling us repeatedly we’d suddenly come to agree with them with age, completely failed to cede any of that authority or power even as some millennials are now staring down 40. So clearly “adulthood” is a game you’re trying to play to control us, even now. Fuck that. We’re not playing.

Honestly that some in Gen Z find it irritating is fine by me. If they think it sounds juvenile, that’s because it is. It is specifically useful in that it breaks the illusion of adults being better than kids. When kids are like, “you sound absurd. You’re in your thirties” I’m like, yeah kid. That’s the thing. Being an “adult” never stops being absurd. If it makes me sound like the mundanities of my life are all a performance that has nothing to do with my actual age or ability, good. That’s why I say it. I’m glad you’re growing up knowing that age isn’t an inherent door to authority. I’m glad you’re growing up thinking “fuck, these adults ten years older than me don’t act grown up at all.” That’s what we want. That’s we call it “adulting”, instead of claiming adulthood as part of us.

Maybe if your gen is lucky you will feel more appropriate claiming your adulthood without caveats. Maybe your definitions of adulthood are more versatile, so you won’t feel barred from the signifiers you’d need to feel like an adult. Maybe you’ll have a better launching pad. Maybe you’ll always hate we call it “adulting”. That’s okay. I hope you get better than we did. But I’m still gonna call it adulting.

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she’s been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

have I used that word recently *ctrl + f* shit

“are you still working on that fic?” last edited: 24th January 2005 “haha of course”

that feeling when someone comments

planning a fic down to the words you’ll use without anywhere to write it down and getting home and remembering none of it

it’s just a fic no one will care about inaccuracies *spends four hours researching a 2000-word one-shot*

grammar

*sees word in advert* yes that’s a good word I’ll remember that word *never uses word*

my last four fanfics are centred around this character and while it means their characterisation is perfect, people are yelling at me

“oh you write? can you name a character after me” “ummm”

Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….

The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.

When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true. 

Drop The Mummy into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing about a lot darker…

Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.

It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.

Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.

Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”

Winston: “Is it dangerous?”

Rick: “Well, you probably won’t live through it.”

Winston: “By Jove, do you think so?”

I just saw the movie and honestly it was alright. I only have two things to say: 1, The movie was confusing at times, especially with the flashbacks, but definitely not on the level of Saaho, so that's good. 2: I LOVED the chemistry between Hrithik and Tiger. I got HUGE homo-erotic vibes from their interactions and I can't help but wonder if it was intended or not. Seriously though, the scene where tiger just waits for Hrithik to come out of the helicopter was soooooo gay !! I'm gonna need somebody to make a gif of the look on tiger's face and write "gay panic" on the post because it's that intense. It's too bad that Vaani Kapoor was a love interest for Hrithik when Tiger was RIGHT THERE ! Anyway, I'd recommend the movie just for Hrithik and Tiger's relationship (and abs too 😉)

Also, Khalid’s very first scene when everyone is trying to catch Kabir, his superior Colonel says ‘You love him’ (his exact words, not mine). 

AND the whole chasing Kabir scene plays out like a jilted ex lover. Khalid always uses the ‘aap’ honorific with him except for that ONE time on the train. 

This movie. I kinda want to write an AU where Tiger survives cause they cryo freeze him. Hrithik is fighting this new super agent threat called the Asset. Meanwhile, Khalid is amnesiac (because almost dying does that to you) and the bad guys told him that Kabir killed his twin brother (the face swapped guy) so he’s hell bent on revenge. Confrontations happens, a la Winter soldier and Kabir finds out he’s really Khalid and does everything he cans to make him remember. Basically it’s a winter soldier AU with romance.

I hated that they killed Khalid. I want him to live. I want them both to be happy with each other.

i don’t even like you      you do         

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