on my bullshit

When they're waiting to board the boat and the crowd is all listening in on Murderbot telling the humans its going back to help the militia hold off the corporates

The crowd all parting to let it through and Mb thinks it must be its angry face and not the fact that everyone just heard its going off to protect them

When passengers spot it in the water and work together to pull it aboard

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.

ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys

ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food

the starling got home safely

the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.

at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.

I saw this picture on Twitter years ago & it reminded me of my cat. She used to wear a collar that had a jingly bell on it, Then we took it off, and she got good at sneaking onto tables and eating butter when no one was looking. Also she likes to eat her dinner very fast. 

I saw this picture on Twitter years ago & it reminded me of my cat. She used to wear a collar that had a jingly bell on it, Then we took it off, and she got good at sneaking onto tables and eating butter when no one was looking. Also she likes to eat her dinner very fast. 

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

OP also invented armsocks.

^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”

Murderbot has in fact freed other secunits before. Multiple times. Do not forget that. But also one time it offered and the combat unit was like I ACTIVELY WANT TO MURDER THE FUCK OUT OF YOU. So. It's cautious.

Three is doing something so developmentally important here. It's NOT just that Three knows it has a team to fall back on if it gets into trouble with the baddies, it's also that Three has figured out it can get in trouble with it's own side and that's ok. It's not thrilled to have pissed off ART but it did it anyways! It now knows it can be in trouble and not get tortured or disassembled over it! It did something it wasn't supposed to and then came home to the people who would be mad about it, even though it didn't have to! It could have run off to keep doing it's own thing but didn't.

I love that Murderbot's POV is so limited because it just only cares about it's own missions. If we hear in 2 books from now about how every SecUnit in the Torus deserted their post and have colonized a moon together or something somewhere Murderbot would just be like "huh". Like there would be an emotion check about it but it's not going to stop it's soap operas for more than 3 minutes about it.

I know the idea of the rogue unit that approached Murderbot recognizing Murderbot as the originator of the code is hilarious, but also, let us consider that if it doesn't recognize Murderbot as the originator of the code that unit is gonna get such a weird view of the world. Like sometimes you live your whole life in shackles and then somebody breaks them for you and you run around and the next SecUnit you run into is already free. You'd have to wonder, then, if freedom is far more normal than you'd realized. And you'd have to think- these free units are doing ok. Maybe I can also be ok. Also, the successful free unit is wearing a highly distinctive garment that must have a tactical purpose given than it is still on a mission. And is telling you to change your clothes. So like...maybe it is tactically useful to wear a very colorful poncho thing. Maybe it should tell the other free units to get those, to. It seems to have been aiding that successful free unit. And thus, free sec unit fashion culture is born.

ONE SCENE FROM EVERY EPISODE OF POKEMON