Whatever.

Source

-looks cool -got gendered correctly more -protects against disease -fucks up facial recognition

-chapstick actually works now

- people are better about respecting my personal space

Because kids shows have:

Clean humor that won't make me uncomfortable

Jokes that aren't related to sex, drugs, death or politics

Almost no mention of current events and things that I would like to avoid hearing about in my leisure time

Characters that like each other and treat each other kindly

Plots that hold morals, determination, teamwork and love in high regard, rather than being nihilistic about everything

Interesting and emotional plots that aren't slice of life or sitcom-based

Or drama that relies on real emotion and arcs rather than overdone melodrama and 'who's sleeping with who'

How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard. 

that’s it. rosa’s feet were tired. 

You see, the actual, spontaneous, unplanned incident was done nine months earlier by a black girl named Claudette Colvin.  She was in the section designated for black people, however, the front became crowded and she was told to move to make way for a white woman (who was actually fine with standing as it turns out, to show how adamantly racist the bus driver was).  She refused and was arrested.

Rosa Parks was a secretary at one of many chapters of NAACP and they had seen the incident but they had multiple reasons for not wanting to publicize it when it happened.  One was that Claudette was a minor.  Another possibility is that Claudette had some marks on her past that could have been considered questionable or immoral and they wanted someone that white people couldn’t pick apart as a villain or a thug for when it happened.

DID Y’ALL MISS DOMINO (2005) ????

LOOK AT THIS FRESH DISASTER. THIS ABSOLUTE DREAM OF A MESS

DID Y”ALL MISS THIS

AND THIS

AND LOOK AT THIS GAY ANNOYANCE???

oh and at the end lucy liu shows up and interrogates her and it is v intense and lesbionic

she cuts off her own hair and dresses like a boy to protect the crown prince

also she’s amazing at archery. legolas whomst?

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.

You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.

You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.

The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.

Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”

That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not. 

J.R.R. Tolkien

“[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”

Pride & Prejudice / Good Omens - Cinematic Parallels

The Republican Party has a war on Christian babies, toddlers, and children held in their custody. They are being treated worse than terrorists.

A. Many of them are asylum seekers. Seeking asylum is NOT illegal, in fact, it is a legally protected right we have agreed to uphold.

B. By that logic, if you are SUSPECTED OF mispaying your taxes the IRS should be able to kidnap you and keep you on a concrete floor with a tinfoil blanket and no soap. People don’t magically lose their rights or status as human beings just because they’re awaiting an asylum hearing or deportation trial.

C. If you say “well they aren’t American citizens like me, so they don’t get the same rights.” -It doesn’t work like that, and it shouldn’t. If your citizenship and right to be somewhere must exist and be proven in order for your basic human rights to exist, then the government can just steal or destroy your ID or passport and boom, no more rights for you. The State has declared you an Un-person. Who are you to argue against the State?

Regardless of your stance on immigration policy this is an outrageous and immoral way to treat human beings. The government has lawyers trying to argue that they aren’t obligated to provide soap or blankets to people that the government has locked up. Defending that shows a staggering level of blindness to the possibility that this treatment could someday happen to people like oneself.