me bitch

aka disney+ if you fuck this up i stg im killing mickey damn mouse.

- first of all, please, please, PLEASE give us an age appropriate cast!! one of the beautiful things about pjo is that we watched them grow from being little eighth graders all the way up to seventeen and eighteen and we watched them become mature. i don’t know how many of you guys watched the dc show ‘gotham’ but i loved seeing a naive 12 y/o bruce wayne go through the troubles of gotham city up until 17, we’re growing with them the same way little ten year old me did when i had the books.

- second, do not and i repeat do NOT erase minorities - don’t remove nico being gay, don’t pull an ‘uwu i have adhd and dyslexia’ on near enough the entire plethora of characters, don’t whitewash people of colour. percy jackson is for everyone. that’s how rick made it.

- it would be awesome to have relatively unknown cast members, let their talents shine and give them the boost in popularity that things like harry potter gave daniel radcliffe, emma watson and such. as much as i like them, i don’t want finn wolfhard or the it/stranger things cast - give us new people.

- aphrodite - give her multiple castings. give us a curvy aphrodite, a trans aphrodite, poc aphrodite - everything! beauty is in the eye of the beholder, aphrodite is the epitome of beauty - not the conventional white, blonde, skinny standards of the west.

- do not gloss over the effect kronos has. he sliced and diced his own father before taking his place, he ate his children, he is pure evil. he manipulates luke and targets his faults, the same with ethan and his desire for recognition, kronos is the nightmare under your bed. 

- on the same point, don’t gloss over the deaths and the heroism of minor characters, silena’s bravery to lead the ares cabin, charlie’s sacrifice, ethan, lee fletcher’s death and the beautiful death and tragedy of zoe nightshade.

- show us may castellan. the mother who has no idea about the damage her son has done in his blinded rage, the vulnerability of a dying luke who finally saw he was tricked by someone eons older than her. show us the mother who still sits and waits, baking cookies for a boy never to return.

- give us travis and connor stoll and all their shenanigans!

- please give me will solace, god i miss him.

- don’t make hades a bad man, he’s the best out of the big 3 and i’ll be damned if you do him dirty. he cares through actions, the god of the dead is not meant to be a man of words - hades is hospitable, he doesn’t kill or trick the way zeus and poseidon do. hades is kind in a world that hates him, his kindness is rare but it is there.

- alabaster c torrington! that’d be such an awesome cameo!

- don’t overdo the cgi and effects, the movies were guilty of using effects to hide up bad writing and a lack of knowledge of the book - don’t make kronos some hell demon during the battle of manhattan, he was in luke’s body. the only sign was his golden eyes, not demonic horns.

- just remember that a generation of people fought for this for years and we’ll stay fighting for it. the pjo fandom is powerful, long-lasting and frankly protective of the books that made us feel included and we want another to have that same chance.

So lets say you’re researching something for a paper (or just for fun) and the research paper you want to read is behind a paywall, or the site makes you create an account first, or makes you pay to download, or limits you to only 5 free articles, or otherwise makes it difficult for you to read what you want.

do not fear! copy the link to the article

go to sci-hub.se         (the url is always changing so its best to check out whereisscihub.now.sh to find what the current url is)

slap the article link in there

Aries: sin(θ)

Taurus: sin(360°)

Gemini: sin(270°)

Cancer: sin(π/2)

Leo: sin(π/4)

Virgo: sin(40°)

Libra: sin(3π/4)

Scorpio: sin(π/6)

Sagittarius: sin(80°)

Capricorn: sin(10π)

Aquarius: sin(420°)

2. That time some friends and I went camping and we found a pile of bones wrapped in a garbage bag buried under a log, but the adult supervisor told us it was nothing, so we just put it back and didn’t talk about it again.

3. The time I was getting chased through the woods at night and I realized “wait it’s dark as fuck” so I just held still until the guy gave up and left.

4. The time this dude said he was in love with me and so he was going to cut my head off and dump my body in a lake, so I told him to grow the hell up, but then he got caught stealing girl’s underwear a day later and I never saw him again

5. That one time in college where I was taking a shortcut on my home at night and a car followed me into a dark alley, so I stared directly into the driver’s side of the window and walked towards it to psych them out

6. The night I was out on a walk and this old guy told me he’d locked his keys in his truck and that he needed someone my size to crawl in through the back window for him, so I told him “you know that sounds super suspicious right” and told him where to find a pay phone for a tow truck instead

7. The one time this random guy on the street said he was in love with me and so he was going to follow me home on my bus, so I clapped him on the shoulder and told him that if he got that close to my bus then I was going to throw him under the wheels, but then this really nice homeless man from Nigeria told the guy to fuck off and then checked to make sure he didn’t follow me onboard

8. That big cat with yellow eyes who I found in a well and brought home who used to put rotting meat in my closet and wake me up by chewing on my face, until I put him back outside and never saw him again.

9. My one cousin who used to come over for the summer who kept calling me ‘piñata’ and hitting me with sticks, until he went back home and was sent to juvie cause he finally got caught torturing animals

10. The time I got lost on the way to a meeting and wound up at a circus tent instead, and got followed by a full-out clown for three vacant street blocks

11. The pet hamster I had when I was seven who would scream all night and eventually escaped by ripping a bar out of its cage and wiggling through the hole. My mom caught it and put it back but it lived another year and a half until one night the screaming just stopped

12. The time I was whistling in the woods and something started whistling back, so I went home

13. That one night at summer camp where a group of girls got together to play ‘bloody mary’ in the lavatory and invited me to come with them so I said “no thanks” and stayed with the camp councillors and drank soup instead.

14. The old abandoned house I just moved into with the door that leads into a big empty room full of dirt and empty cooking pots that I just sort of… locked up forever and never go near

15. Once when I was at an ihop I saw a coffee mug do a full 360º spin with nobody touching it, so I said ‘that was neat’ and never ate there again

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So it’s been just a little bit over a year since I’ve made this post, and holy shit I didn’t expect it to get so many notes… anyway thought I’d make an update. First, a few responses to common criticisms I noticed:

“That house costs more than you said it costs”

I provided sources for everything, I can’t click on the links for you broski.

“The map of Russia is incorrect”

Strange, my bad… didn’t notice until after I posted that the map I used includes Belarus and a few other countries as part of Russia, no idea why they did that, I should have picked a better map.

“Net worth somehow doesn’t count as worth because not all of it is literal stacks of cash”

First of all I distinctly specified that my figures were based on if said billionaires liquidated their assets, but more importantly that’s like sitting on top of a pile of solid gold bars and claiming you’re totally broke because you can’t use them at the supermarket. Seriously, this is just asinine.

*Insert impassioned defense of capitalism here*

Now if you follow my blog it’s pretty obvious that I’m a leftist, but something I did very deliberately for my billionaire essay was try to avoid ever mentioning left politics or making any moral judgements, i.e. more or less everything I wrote in that post was just objective, inarguable facts. I very intentionally ended the essay with “make of that what you will,” without ever actually commenting on whether the situation was good or bad. If you consider yourself a capitalist and want to remain consistent with reality, you really shouldn’t be offended by this post. If your first response upon looking at a neutral series of data points is to immediately rush to defend the system that produced it, it means you instinctually realize something is terribly wrong and you’re trying to justify it. Just saying, not a good position to be arguing from.

ANYWAY

As of the time of this update, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world; the title now belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with with a mind-blowing $147.7 billion. Now, what could he actually do with all of that? Let’s make a list!

End Homelessness in America

There are an estimated 553,742 homeless people in America. Jeff Bezos could hand every single one of them $50,000 cash for $27,687,100,000, which should be more than enough to get a roof over your head for a decent amount of time.

Give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard

Going to Harvard University will cost a student about 60,659 a year including tuition, room and board, and various other fees. Paying for a full 4 years for 100,000 students would cost $24,263,600,000.

Buy Iceland for a year

The gross domestic product of Iceland is currently about $23.9 billion dollars, which means for that amount Jeff Bezos could buy every single product and service produced in the country for an entire year.

Fund every US national park for 10 years

This year’s budget for the national park service will probably be about $2.7 billion, so 10 years of funding would be $27 billion.

Give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus

Jeff Bezos has 563,100 employees working for Amazon. He could give each and every one of them a $20,000 bonus for $ 11,262,000,000.

End world hunger

It would probably cost around $30 billion to ensure that no person in the entire world suffered starvation and malnourishment this year.

And how much does Jeff have left?

After doing all of that, Bezos would still have upwards of $3.5 billion left over, which is not only far, far more money than a single person could ever spend on themselves, it also would mean he still gets to remain substantially richer than most other billionaires.