Maybe making jokes about "Invading" countries while we have multiple devastating wars that have massive invasions going on isn't the best look you guys.

Are you. Are you planning to kill modern hambsburgs?

and you AREN'T?

Realistically speaking though how did Boone pull Carla? He knew her pretty well, but it sounds like he’s always been pretty taciturn. What if she wasn’t in love with him but the idea of him? What if he falls in love with the Courier bc they actually want to dive into his past and motivations and hopes instead of floating over them like the beautiful dreamboat that Carla was?

It's an interesting idea but I hate it. I'm a huge fan of my second husband's first wife!

Seriously, Carla and Boone are presented as being absolutely head over heels for each other. Boone traces his issues solely back to Bitter Springs, but people who know him say he was a totally different man before he lost Carla. He's still in the early stages of his grief (it's no more than a year since he killed her, and probably a hell of a lot less considering some townsfolk haven't noticed she's gone!)

Boone implies that he felt understood by Carla. The only distance between them was that he didn't want to tell her about Bitter Springs because he didn't want her to hate him for it. Which says both that she admired him and that he thought she was fundamentally honest and good. Totally crazy about each other. Andy makes it sound almost sickening!

I've invented exes for Boone including at least 2 who just want a big strong handsome first recon sniper who can transition quickly and neatly from spending out on her on the Strip when he's on leave to dying and leaving her with a nice pension lmao. But I just don't see Carla like that at all. Frankly, she could have done better. Everyone describes her as just about the most beautiful woman they ever saw. She hated Novac, but she followed Boone there because she loved him. They were talking about baby names :(

The big contrast between Carla and the Courier that I'm interested in and that applies pretty much however you conceive of your Courier is that she's a force of nature. She got jumped in the middle of the Mojave, buried and left for dead, and it didn't stop her basically conquering it. Maybe she's someone Boone can leave alone for 5 minutes without visions of her being abducted by Legion. But even once he gets over thinking that anyone he loves will be punished for his sins, he's going to be permanently aware of just how fragile everything is, even if his lover is someone no-one would describe as fragile

.

University au fics are very sweet and fluffy and cute but also very yearn inducing

No actually, was anyone gonna say that Zionism is a primarily Jewish movement that started because of how deeply hated Jewish people have been throughout history or was I , a white British woman, meant to just not raise eyebrows at everyone comparing it to Nazism?

(I’m talking about non Jewish people making that comparison to Jewish people and the Zionist movement, not how Israel’s treatment of Palestine is so horrific that holocaust survivors are calling it out to be clear)

Another funny thing about weird Decepticon stans trying to pretend that the Autobots were just as bad as them is that, in IDW1, the Autobots literally did not exist until Orion Pax stormed the Senate and delivered a speech claiming "Autobot" as a new label to mean "autonomous." Whereas all of the colonization during the Golden Age happened during Nova Prime's time a couple million years prior.

And during the war, the Decepticons were literally cyberforming planets they killed and had established something called the Interstellar Constellate at some point. And Megatron said in Chaos Theory that his plan for his Decepticon empire if/when he defeated the Autobots was to rebuild and cyberform planets to create a Decepticon empire where mechanical beings reign supreme.

Like, the BEST ARGUMENT you can make is that since Optimus is a Prime, he technically inherits the problematic nature of the Primacy's history of colonization, but I think that even that argument is pretty thin considering that Optimus was always pro-organic to the point of valuing their lives equally to Cybertronians, which is something that even a lot of Autobots fail to do. Compared to other members of his species, Optimus is literally a radical in terms of his stance that organic life = Cybertronian life, but go off I guess lmao.

You can even see that during the time of Sentinel's Senate, there was an engraving on the wall that said "freedom is the right of all civilized beings", showing that Optimus at some point took that phrase and changed it to underline the fact that freedom is a universal right for ALL beings.

Also, again for IDW1 specifically, a lot of anti-Optimus people clearly don't even know the timeline of events in that story. OP spent a good chunk of the story working against the Senate with things like

Storming the Senate on Megatron's behalf to deliver an angry speech against government corruption

Working with Senator Shockwave undercover to investigate Proteus being suspicious, uncovering a conspiracy to frame the Decepticons for a terrorist attack, and risking his team to prevent it

Going on the run and doing secret operations like saving hotspots from being attacked by Sentinel's forces

(For bonus points, he even saved Drift from dying either by drug overdose or being beaten to death by some thugs and called an emergency transport for him to Ratchet's clinic)

The regime change happens because Sentinel Prime is killed BY MEGATRON who at that point had already become a gladiator criminal underworld. By the time Orion is back in Iacon acting as Zeta's head of security/general/etc, Megatron is already well on the path of corruption and senseless violence doing things like arranging illegal weapon trafficking (shown in Optimus Prime) and forcing Rumble and Frenzy to get frame reformats to fit Megatron's tactical needs (Megatron Origin). Apparently Optimus doesn't deserve to have facts about his backstory and difficult contexts around his decisions be observed by this fandom though lmao.

If you take IDW1 out of context and go "OP worked for the regime!" then yeah of course it looks bad, and yes he did do that. But a lot of people also neglect to mention 1. the anti-government actions he DID take 2. the fact that by the time OP started fighting against Megatron, he had already become super evil and 3. because Megatron was super evil, Orion couldn't just desert Zeta's government and be like, "oh yeah I'll totally be able to talk Megatron out of doing terrorism and violence just on my own" especially since in this continuity they barely fuckin' knew each other before OP became a Prime. There's so much shit around OP being a cop and the ways he did or didn't succeed in trying to change the planet for the better, but none of that is addressed when people just go "oh he's a cop and the Autobots are colonizers" like ????? Stop it.

Stop taking this shit out of context and stop cherrypicking evidence to make one side look good and the other side look bad lmao.

all the trans women in my notes talking abt their experiences being expected/pressured to top it's actually so frustrating that even other lgbt ppl act this way when it comes down to it im going to scream what are we doing to our beautiful queens-_-

last post ended up deleting my tags so im continuing them here

as a general rule, on average, if americans consistently complain about a food being conceptually weird, gross, and scary, then it probably tastes amazing. or at least inoffensive.

this is because in my experience americans for the most part (give or take a few exceptions by region) think eating literally anything other than beef, chicken, bread, eggs, peanut butter jelly sandwitches, ketchup, and disgusting cloyingly artificial brown sludge soda is insurmountably weird, gross, and scary.

like, I still think it’s sort of weird that Shonda Rhimes bought the rights to the Bridgerton novels, did a mediocre job at adapting the material and also kinda ruined one of the most popular pairings from the books in the process, and then proceeded to hyperfixate on her own OC to the point of creating a spin-off in which the central romance is about two members of a very white, slave-owning, racist and imperialist institution that could only maintain power through the exploitation of people of color all over the world, but now the protagonist is a black woman who’s about to end racism in 1700s Great Britain through the power of Love

people always point out british and australian slang but i wanna know if there's any american slang non-americans find odd bc i am curious and unable to perceive myself

The pigeon is such a majestic animal and honestly makes me feel a lot better about my social anxiety

Look at him. Baby boy. He wanders around in his own world, with his neck bobbing and his eyes wide as he eats any food he can find. Unbothered by all the distractions and the chaos around him.

And does he care about how he looks to all those featherless weirdos? Does he care what they’re saying about him? He doesn’t give a shit… no self-conscious thoughts behind those eyes. He’s doing his own thing and I think that’s beautiful

coming from aus (an island in the middle of no where that no one cares about) to europe is insane like the vibe of just existing is so different day to day. there's snow on the mountains, everyone is talking about green energy non-stop, but i could also get on a train and in three hours i'd be in a country that has just elected a fascist government. Like. The UK, Spain, Portugal and Denmark are all here and aware of colonialism in a sort of abstract way but when you talk to any of these people about the actual effects of colonialism on the native people of colonised lands they're shocked and horrified - because despite the fact that they benefitted of the wealth of their periods of colonialism even now, they've been given a distance from it that America/Canada/Australia/South Africa/New Zealand and all the others aren't granted (and this isn't to say that the white people on these colonised lands engage with the atrocities committed in the past and today, but the degree of choice about whether or not to engage is extremely different). There's a lot of opportunity here and many countries are advanced welfare states but there are some elements of living that are so callous and seem almost cruel - like the fact that anyone can enter law school or a medical school in Germany and Switzerland and other places but actually becoming a lawyer or a doctor is almost prohibitively difficult. Like. The expectation and acclimatisation to people wasting thousands of dollars and years of their life on something that might not happen.

ughh SORRY BUT I HAVE TO SAY IT the people you meet in engineering are just by and large so unpleasant I hate it here

dramatically swinging between thoughts like "it will all be fine" "how to leave this shithole country because it wont ever be fine" "even if i want to leave i cant anyway" "thanos was right" etc