shardsofswords
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A bunch of little gay people live in my head and if i don't get them out by writing about them they'll eat my brain like termites. she/her
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shout out to goblin sharks and their weird ass jaws! Goblin sharks have a special trait called a “slingshot jaw” where they snap their jaws forward to capture prey. their mouths can extend to up to 110 degrees wide, and shoot out at about 3.1 meters per second!
here’s a diagram of how it works:
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"Doctor Martin, why are you an atheist?"
Director Maria Kleinheart wasn't the sort of person who asked indirect or idle questions. She was in every way a Kleinheart, the spitting image of her grandmother. Only she wasn't staring out from a yellowed ad in a back issue of Popular Science or Woman's Day, she was staring from across desk made of polished slate.
Emil Martin didn't respond immediately. That sort of question usually came with an invitation to services or a badgering about Pascal's wager. That didn't fit what he knew about the director, though that wasn't much. An intense religious conversion would explain the rumors around her distance from the rest of her family.
"Director, is this a personal or work related question?" Emil finally asked.
"Work." She replied.
"Is that appropriate?"
"Yes. This is about security clearances."
That made even less sense. Emil decided to risk a lecture on his eternal soul and answered truthfully. "Pretty standard, insufficient evidence."
"Would you rather it be true?" She asked. "Would it be comforting to know you existed for a purpose, that someone was in charge of your existence, caring for you?"
"Not really." Emil replied. "I'm rather Hitchenisan in that regard."
"Good enough. Follow me."
-
"BE NOT AFRAID."
The words seemed to come out of the air itself. The thing was at the center of the large, expansive lab that had once been a missile silo. It was a sphere, surrounded by two rings of brass-like metal. The rings were lined with hemispherical semi-translucent white glass or crystal protrusions. The inner ring spun slowly, as did the central core, though only the faintest irregularities in its glowing blue-white corona revealed that motion.
The outer ring was held in place with steel chains, each link six inches in diameter. Two chains locked the ring to the floor, while a third latched the top to the ceiling. The cuffs the chains connected to seemed to have been welded shut around it.
"BE NOT AFRAID." It 'spoke' again. Its voice was clear and musical, but wrong and artificial at the same time. It sounded like familiar voices; his mother and father, his cousins, his old school pals, his boyfriends, even Director Kleinheart, each synthesized poorly via an AI speech simulator, all speaking in perfect time.
Every time it spoke, Emil smelled his grandfather's sweet cornbread fresh from the oven.
"That looks like an angel." He finally gasped.
"Looks like." Director Kleinheart smiled. He wasn't sure she could do that. "I knew we picked the right man."
"This is why you were asking about my beliefs?"
"Yes Doctor Martin. You see, freedom of religion is an extension of the principle of innocence until proven guilty. Once one faith is shown to be correct, all others are revealed as wrong."
"And you wanted to make sure I, what, wasn't guilty of being wrong?"
"No, the mistaken are innocent of everything except the actions they directly take." Kleinheart continued. "It's the ones who would take this to mean they were right that are fifth columnists to an unaccountable alien power."
"Oh." Emil replied. He didn't know quite what else to say.
"I want you on our team that's studying it. We need to know how it works, what it's made of, what those things its made of can be used for, you know the drill."
"BE NOT AFRAID." Again came the smell of cornbread.
"Are the restraints necessary?" Emil asked. "It is telling us we don't need to be afraid of it."
"Oh, we thought that too at first." The director said. "But we've already learned quite a bit about our little intruder here, even a bit of its 'source code' for lack of a better analogue. That message isn't meant for us."
"What is it then?"
"Can't you guess, Doctor?"
Dr. Emil Martin shrugged. "I have no idea."
"It isn't giving us a warning."
Director Kleinheart smiled for the second time in Emil's memory and spoke again.
"It's repeating its orders."
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Happy Leland Melvin Day!!!
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Obsessed with the fact that this really happened😳
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If you’ve already answered this, I’m sorry. How much of a liability is long hair in a fight? I mean it probably depends on the skill of the fighters and the tendency to grab each other’s hair as well. Is long hair still dangerous if it’s tied back?
Not that much more of a liability than having long hair in any athletic or otherwise hazardous situation. The biggest risk is the hair getting in your face (which yeah, keeping your hair bound will reduce the risks.)
The irony is, the risk of an experienced fighter grabbing your hair is probably lower than the risk of them grabbing you some other way, simply because hair offers no joint control. If someone wants control over your head, they're better off grabbing your head directly, rather than trying to tug on your hair in the middle of a fight. Also, if someone is going after your head, they have to get past your defense. That's not something that's likely to happen unless the fight is going very poorly for you.
The liability with long hair isn't in the fight itself (at least not when anyone knows what they're doing), it's in the ambush. It's when the fight begins with them getting a hold of your hair. Especially from behind. As I mentioned, it's not as good as getting a solid grip on the target's skull, but, for someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it is an easy way to grab onto someone.
Similarly, if the victim doesn't know what they're doing, they may not understand how little control their attacker has over them, and that the only leverage their attacker has (from grabbing their hair) is the ability to inflict a bit of pain in the scalp.
There's a logistical problem with grabbing someone's hair. As mentioned, it doesn't really control them, so you're giving up one arm to mildly inconvenience them. You now only have one arm which you can use to attack or defend yourself. They have two arms that they can use to attack or defend themselves. Meaning, they have one hand to deal with your remaining arm, and another hand free for unrestricted strikes to your face. This is not a good position to be in.
Outside of hand to hand, the biggest danger is simply getting hair in your face. Which you would have had to deal with on a daily basis anyway. In that case, yes, binding it will take that out of the equation entirely.
So, how much of a liability? On its own not much. There are other potential situations where it could cause catastrophic problems, like if the hair gets caught in heavy machinery, or something similar. In that respect it's more of a liability in an industrial setting. It still means keeping your hair short, if you're expecting to fight, is a good idea, but it's not the end of the world. If you do have long hair, keeping it tied back (ideally in a bun), means it's very unlikely to be a problem at all. The end result is that while it's not a major problem, it is one that can be easily dealt with ahead of time, and probably should be, because while the risks are fairly limited, there's no reason to leave them unaddressed.
-Starke
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in classic /derogatory) tumblr fashion the boop-o-meter isn't accessible. For screen reader users it just says the numbers, not what they represent. I'll just say in case anyone here uses a screen reader that the thing on top of your feed is the boop-o-meter, the first number is boops given by you, the second is boops received by you and the third is total boops on the platform
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The only reason why transphobes always ask “what is a woman” instead of “what is a man” is because we all know that a man is a featherless biped.
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you also get this little notification
FACT: you get special dialogue for pooping yourself
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Help Hamza get his family out of gaza.
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I'm obsessed with how Ryoko Kui draws orcs
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a butch is seriously life-changing butches i hope you know that. especially as a little kid.. seeing a butch out in the wild will change you forever. its like in old movies where they'd switch from black and white to color to signify transformation
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if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.
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I'm laughing I'm being Slapped, I had to figure out how to do it with my Extravagant kitty cat Paws
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"Dragon," poem assembled using quotations from Wikipedia articles
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It’s that time of the year again
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