consider arson

no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life

you can’t even “tell a trusted adult” because you cannot begin to articulate the thousands of small transgressions you’ve experienced building to the horror of knowing your peers would like you dead. they don’t have to say it or hurt you physically. they have other ways of letting you know they’d prefer if you were worm food

close your eyes and imagine freshly roasted root vegetables perfectly seasoned and crispy as far as the eye can see

Sam trying to get Frodo to take one more step

Sam psychologically tormenting Gollum

Free service with no ads: Okay so these guys are stealing my data

My dad used to design kitchens at Lowe’s and one day he got a dude from one of the national labs looking to buy a countertop. Dad sent him home with a sample of a quartz-composite countertop to make sure the color will look good with his existing cabinets. The dude asks my dad what the composition of the countertop is and whether it’ll melt if he puts a pot on it (since it’s a composite and not pure stone) and Dad gives him some rough numbers and reassures him that it won’t melt if he puts a hot pan on the counter. The dude comes back with week later without the sample. The dude gives dad a detailed list of the countertops composition, to the nearest hundredth of a percentile, and the exact temperature it melts at, because he took it to his lab and melted it down. tldr, it’s not just firefighters.

Imagine giving someone a sample of the granite you use to make countertops and they come back a few days later just to tell you they fucking dematerialized it

Ok, but this is just, like, what people do if they have access to equipment. We just… put shit in it. Just to see. At this point, I’ll try and hit just about anything with an arc, just to see. I’ll sand and polish anything you’ll let me, if I’m bored enough. If I had a machine that could melt something down and tell me exactly what was in it? I’d be just waiting for parts of my world to become “trash” so I could de-materialize it and turn it into knowledge of what it was.

#zoologist adrian would be absolutely captivated by the concept of Plants. erid doesn't have those#you mean your atmosphere is so clear your entire planet has ground level sunlight and there's an entire subsection of life#defined by their ability to turn it into energy... because the rest of it DOESN'T? sure you synthetize vitamin d out of it#but that's nothing#saviour grace why don't you photosynthesize question? skill issue question?

bbc merlin has a lot of faults but i do think the way they blithely ignored the existence of christianity was very funny of them

"#'old religion' they said. and then simply said nothing of a new religion" yeah Uther Pendragon, noted athiest. Entirely agnostic court. It's crazy that there's no belief system backing anything up. Like, we're going to get by on vague prophecies but also prophecies are magic which is evil. Divine right of kings but no divinity. Mirrors and mirrors but no windows.

nothing unsettles me more than like a good fic on ao3 with no opening notes and no end notes. nothing but story. who are you? where are you writing from. are you ok. who hurt you

#i click onto the author’s dashboard and open all their other fics looking for notes on them#they are all similarly blank#i go to the author profile. it tells me the author joined in 2014 and nothing else#they have no bookmarks. they have one gift and it’s a bts fic from orphan_account. none of their own fics are bts fics.#this fic has altered me. i leave an unhinged comment then bookmark it and go stare out the window // via @elegantlyloquacious