I feel like I'm a bit obsessed with it but I cannot stress enough how great it is to have Lady Violet Crawley, dowager countess Grantham, be a ski jumping champion at age 80-and-more.

fanfiction side of tumblr, here's 2023 challenge:

take your most bizarre AUs, your OCs, the storyline going the furthest from the original story.

now rewrite it entirely but without the characters from the original story, the identifying details, all that.

ex: if it's a Marauders café AU, James becomes Harry, Sirius becomes Reginald ''Rex'', Remus becomes Theodore ''Teddy'', and Peter... I guess he can keep his name. Severus and Lily become Leonard and Sylvia. The café becomes void of canon characters. If the magic is kept, make all the spells unspoken. Sprinkle a bit of solarpunk? maybe? If you want to keep the ''blood supermacists'' part, set it in 1930's Germany or some time akeen (change the names accordingly obviously, for more german names or jewish ones for the muggleborns).

congratulation, you just wrote a totally original work about a magic café owner in the 1930's who has to deal with the rest of the world changing for the worse and their spouse's friends wrecking havock on one side or the other of the conflict.

time to polish it and send it to a publishing house under the category ''magical world overlapsing the real one", "rise of fascism'', and "romance".

it worked for EL James (my mutuals are gonna start noticing how obsessed I am with the concept of taking a fanfic, changing the names, publishing it and becoming an acclaimed author), it can work for you!

More things I love about Downton Abbey:

people ardently shipping a couple that has already been married for more than 20 years at the beginning of the series (and for more than 35 at the end).

Molesley. I didn't get the concept of ''wet cat'' until it clicked that he was one.

Maggie Smith.

Stakes. Is the Dowager countess cheating at the flower festival? Is the cousin coming back from the dead? Will the scottish cousins stop dragging people into their drama at some point? Will a war happen between the ottoman empire and the british one because of Kamal? Who knows? Who cares?

hat waving excuse me can you stop the music? thank you. Ladies and Gentleman, it's with great regret I announce you we're at war with germany.

costumes! Period costumes! Period dresses!

Cousin Rose's love stories. Like, how does she always manage to fall for the worse possible men? Not necessarily in character but in ''as far as possible from what her parents would approve". A married man of 50. A black jazz singer. A gardener at some point? Oh Atticus seems very great! Plus his father's a lord and he's rich! Yeah by the way he's jewish (luckily this one she managed to marry, even if it alienated her mother. Rose x Atticus is such a cute couple!)

the Christmas Specials (text santa)

rpg idea: survival game of zombies, a la PUBG: 100 players are put on an island. There are 100 zombies going after them. The players loot to find weapons and defend themselves. Instead of killing other players too you just have to find your way to the safe space (a smaller and smaller circle as time passes).

When you die, you become a zombie and have to kill other players. Even your own team is not safe (unless they're in the safe space obviously). Not attacking a former teammate who you are close enough to attack is considered cheating and will result in a ban. But anyway as zombies you don't see their names or numbers anymore. All humans are the same. Preys.

My pedantic friend: "Did you watch anything interesting recently?"

Me: "Weeeell, I've got to admit I got hooked in a science series recently. It follows four scientists who explain lots of experiments. There's also a reflexion about the importance of science in popculture and vice-versa, and at some point they even share relationship advice..."

MPF: "hmm not my usual area but given your recent recommandations I'll see... What's it called?"

Me: "The big bang theory"

Las Vegas is already a wild concept because people build a city in the middle of the desert whose sole purpose is to get people to drink, have sex and lose money.

But it's even wilder when you think that weddings taking place in such a city are legally binding. Like, 90% of the people getting married there are probably black out drunk, there's no legal verifications that they are not already married to someone else or both adults or not related or anything. You put an Elvis impersonator with a law book and bam. Married.

crazy when you think of it how Firestar had his kittypet name for three chapters top and then was named Firesomething for twenty four and more books, but ask any warriors reader what his kittypet name was and they'll know.

I just love when I see a post two times on my timeline from two different people because it means two of the people I follow are mutuals or at least one follow the other and it just feels so... idk, intimate? in a ''innocently watching the neighbours' bbq from behind the fence and being offered a beer'' kinda way.

Milliestar

Imagine the actual dread if the next Sky Clan deputy is like, Rileypool, or Harveymoon (yeah I know some of those did not make it to the latest books, but you get the idea) and then the leader dies and Star Clan is like ''Harveystar? Rileystar? Sorry it's just so stupid your name doesn't mean anything."

Like, there's an actual reason why loners/rogues/kittypets joining a clan get a new name (Rusty -> Firepaw, Red -> Russetfur, Leaf -> Leafdapple, etc) and that reason is that your whole identity circles around your name and if that name is not part of the naming system in place then you feel (yourself and in the eyes of others, including the reader) out of place.

But also the naming system is one of the few things that identify the Clans as something noble and different, some ideal to attain... it's what makes them different, at first glance, from Blood Clan or Djinn's group. It's the symbol of the warrior codes, the taking care of the elders, queens and kits, the communion with Star Clan...

And for a clan, who is xenophobic in building, accepting an outsider, giving them an actual clan name, making them part of their family as if they had been born in it... it's the highest honor.

So it infuriates me when Millie or Boulder are like ''yeah actually I prefer my name which was given to me by twolegs or loners rather than the name my actual (adoptive/found) family wants to call me", it's like, you left your older life behind you for a reason, and that reason was that you prefered to join a clan. In most of those cases it's not even cats who are like ''yeah but my family or my old friends might be confused/might look for me and not find me'', because the clans are all that's left to them.

It's like you're an orphan who could only left your abusive/neglecting family after they died. You're taken in by a friend's family. You don't have much good memories of the times before you arrived in the family. You convert to the family's faith. You share all their political, religious beliefs. You moved to their country with them. You adjusted to a completely different way of life. You feel happier and more in your place in here than ever before. You want to leave your old life behind you. And you're in a society that allows you to change your name as long as the head of the family accepts it. And so the head of the family is like ''hey kid, from this day on you can take our family name" and you're like ''oh wait no, I'd rather retain the name my neglecting family gave me, even tho I despised every single one of them, because it would feel like you're trying to take over my identity by giving me a new name". And the head of family is like ''well not to be mean but you did change your identity by becoming one of us. You changed your beliefs, your opinions, you told my husband that he was like a father to you and my kids that they were like siblings to you. You told me that you wished your mother had been more like me because then you would not have needed to run away and risk starvation in the streets. You told us all you wanted to put this life behind." and you're like ''yeah but still, I'd rather keep the neglecting family name."

So Sky Clan found a way to mix it and said ''ok you can keep your family name, and you can hyphen it with ours if you want." and the kids were like ''yeah great idea" and that's how you get Harveymoon and Rileypool.

The other clans however, are like ''no, you can stay in our family but if you want to keep your old name you cannot have ours too, because we despised your old family for what they did to you and we don't want it to be hyphened with ours". That's how you get Boulder, Millie, Daisy, Purdy... in the middle of Graystripes, Blackfoots, Clawfaces, Whiteclaws, Lionhearts and Molewhiskers.

It also infuriates me on that point that Firestar was like ''hey Millie it's been two moons (or idr the actual time) since you joined us, it's time you get a clan name" while with Daisy in the background, who had been there for like ten moons and taken care of numerous kits and queens, protecting them during a freak badger attack etc, he was like ''yeah no you can keep your loner name i dont care".

Oh, ok, so Graystripe's girlfriend is accepted right away while the one who actually has an important, unique role in the clan must still prove herself? Or is it that Daisy nearly never leaves the camp while Millie was seen by everyone at the Gathering she arrived, and you want to make sure the one the other clans know about is made a full warrior to cut rumours short? Well in that case you should either have named Daisy Daisyflower or something and everyone kept calling her Daisy, so that all cats in the clan had warrior names, or you should just not have given a choice to Millie (and also discuss it with her in private before putting on a show and being publicly ridiculed when she refuses her new name).

being an author is having epiphanies about your own work and figuring out secrets your own characters are hiding from you.

benign example: "oh shit I just realized A looks a lot like the long-lost sibling of B, that must be why B is so desperate to spend time with A"

less benign example: "oh shit. the murderer was Y all along but he framed Z. How could I, the author, not even realize that?"

if someone had a few thousands posts in queue, scheduled all around the clock, and died, no one would know the difference before quite some time.

how is HALLOWEEN trending? It's september!

I do! Half the Shire was invited and the other half came anyway!

Sure, everybody remembers the 21st night of September

But does everybody remember the 22nd night of September!!!

He really thought he could use the clout of this interview as a leverage to instrumentalise her against the people and especially women in his own country. He wanted to pit her against the women in Iran protesting for their freedom - and conceal the international solidarity from them. He wanted to show off his power and she said no.

@medic981 @xjsteph

quick question because I always thought they were synonyms but here it's ''or'', what's the difference between foster and adoptive? (english is not my first language)

Learn how!

Thesis: the reason we joke about what J R R Tolkien’s initials stand for but not C S Lewis’ is because nothing could possibly be funnier than C S Lewis’ actual name.