A report just came out from a Palestinian hostage saying he was strapped with bombs and sent into a Hamas tunnel, with Israel prepared to blow the tunnel up with his body if fighters were found inside and yet people are still making the “Hamas uses human shields” arguments that have been confirmed to be a myth with no supporting evidence

Every day I’m haunted by the fact the boys happily swim in sewer water

Even if it’s filtered somehow there’s no way it’s not still nasty 😭 Bet they can defeat any of their villains just by accidentally giving them diseases I swear

One mistake I made a lot when I started learning English was writing both the auxiliary and the main verb in past tense—as in, "Did the rain stopped?" My English teacher had to really drill this grammar point into my head, she was like "the point of 'did' here is to indicate past tense, there's no need for another time marker." Me, genuinely baffled: "Why not?" Teacher: "Think of the 'ed' in 'stopped' as having migrated to the beginning of the sentence and become 'did'. So it's no longer in 'stopped'." Well I was sad to see it go. I pointed out that in French you'd say "The rain (itself) has it stopped?" and 'the rain' feels welcome to stay even though the whole point of the pronoun 'it' should be to replace it in a quicker way. But it would be sad if the noun & its pronoun never got to hang out together so we keep both <3

My teacher had a British look on her face that made my middle-school self wonder if maybe she thought my language wasn't optimally designed, and then she said that in English it would feel clunky to give the same piece of grammatical information twice, and "if you use 'did' then the -ed in 'stopped' doesn't add anything." That just sounded offensive, I mean since when do letters need to add something to a sentence? isn't it enough that they adorn the end of words & frolic with the others in friendship. If it bothers you so much just don't pronounce them. Idk, "did the rain stopped" felt so right to me. In the end my teacher said that "The rain has it stopped?" with the redundant pronoun is the more formal French phrasing anyway, and I was like yeah true we'd rather say "is it that it (itself) has stopped to rain?" and I felt like this really proved my point and I think she felt the same way

y'all for fucking real. don't fucking write slave fics or x reader fics of aventurine's slavery??? are you guys out of your goddamn minds???

Everyday i think about this screenboard scene that got semi-scrapped from Donnie vs Witch Town, like it just explains so much about Donnie as a character and i’m very sad we didnt get to see it entirely

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

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(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

Prompt 251

Danny is tired and annoyed. On one hand, his parents took the whole ‘so I might be slightly dead’ pretty well! Which is good! On the other, they decided to send him and his sisters to their uncle while they take care of the Guys in White and refurbish the house to be, well, him safe. Which meant a ridiculously long flight all the way to New Jersey. 

A flight he was pretty sure happened to be illegal what with the fact that neither of them were asked for their IDs or anything despite having them with them. Hm. Y’know he’s not going to question it, he’s getting a nap the moment they get to Uncle Harvey’s. 

Thinking about this again, he's for sure gonna get hurt 🤕

SIKE! HE'S ALIVE 😤

i was just thinking how interesting the word oboe is because usually when we take a word from french we preserve the spelling to some extent, and oboe looks nothing like hautbois. so i looked up the etymology and apparently we got it through italian??? mystery solved i guess but that is such an interesting pathway for us to get a french word!

this started as a reply to someone but got out of hand when I remembered what Trey’s unique magic does, and therefore what the cutest solution to white queen Riddle would be 🌹

and then it very quickly spiraled out of control

steve harrington realizing that he’s got no purpose if he’s not protecting the people he loves from outer-dimensional beings, and has a minor (read: major) spiral about it post-vecna & the party fixing everything. he’s just a regular ole 20 something with no purpose— his friends are all in school, except eddie, who managed to pick up an apprenticeship as an electrician; putting all of that wire knowledge to use (just not in cars, he hasn’t hotwired one since 1986 and he’d like to keep it that way si vous plais) and making the rich houses have even cooler guts than they deserve.

the kids end up graduating (their first tries) and heading as one little pack to the same school (don’t ask me which, i’m a college drop out) and steve, eddie, and rob end up staying just outside of indy. rob finished school early, because of course she did, and she found that she may have a knack for hanging around high schoolers, so why not teach them how to become polyglots like she is?

steve still doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing— he bartends at a little club in the gayborhood, because they went there so often that the bartenders just kind of pushed him into it, and don’t get him wrong— mixing drinks and flirting all night is super fun, but it also… is kind of depressing? even if he gets to be around people like him and see them happy— he knows that a lot of alcohol and drugs causes that happiness and he wants so badly for his people to be out and proud and not murdered for it. but he can’t do that,, so he does the next best thing.

he talks with one of the regulars, andy, who owns a little tattoo shop on the corner, and andy invites him to come check it out. so he does the next day he’s free, and holy fucking christ. tattoos aren’t his thing— at least not on himself, but on other people they’re gorgeous. and they’re painful, but you’re turning the pain into art and you get to live with it in your skin and look at it and think about the fact that you’re here and you made it and you fucking survived. and people purposefully put scars into their bodies? and not in the i-battled-literal-other-dimensional-beings-and-won kind of way, or the i-battled-my-personal-demons-and-won kind of way, which both are things he’s dealt with so fucking intimately— but in the i-will-decorate-this-flesh-prison-and-make-it-a-castle kind of way, and that’s fucking beautiful. queer people taking their bodies and making them into art with ink and hot metal and needles and the love that they have for each other and the passion and the fucking spite at the world that keeps them going and making their presences KNOWN.

and maybe he gets some piercings while he’s there— it’s fascinating and feels so weird and freeing when the needle punctures his flesh and the jewelry goes in— and now he’s got a shiny little ring hanging through his earlobe; his nostril; his lip.

he learns that piercings take time and effort and care and that he has to treat himself with love to be able to heal— and that he is deserving of that love and care and dedication, especially from himself.

he keeps going back, maybe not always to get stabbed, but to watch others have it done. to see how different people’s anatomy takes different piercings, how he can’t have a piercing through his cheeks because he bites them too much when he’s anxious, but the girl that just left got both of hers done and they looked good. they fit her face, like little shiny dimples.

eventually, the piercer, killie, asks steve when he’s going to help them with their needles and their piercings— and he doesn’t know how to react because he hadn’t even thought about it and yet… maybe he could help other people fall in love with themselves and their bodies and help turn them into art one day

maybe he could be a pretty boy with his scars and his metal and his missing chunks and his polos and his jeans and his sneakers.

I want to know all the scandalous gossips of your village. Is that weird?

It's understandable! I'm not into gossip except when it's animal-related but as a frequent library-goer (a place mainly frequented by elderly women) I end up overhearing a lot of stuff and some of it is somewhat fascinating.

One of my favourite pieces of local gossip is about the Cursed Inn—not the main street inn which is very loved as are its owners, but another inn just outside the village, whose owners keep changing and always seem to meet a tragic end. There have been drownings, kitchen-related accidents (? I don't know), incredibly dramatic divorces, the Fire of 1982, and so on, but the inn is very well-situated (on a hilltop so all the rooms have amazing views) so it always finds new owners.

The new buyers never believe locals about the curse, of course. The people who currently run the inn bought it just before covid started (which is obviously curse-related) (well, people aren't claiming the global pandemic was caused by this modest local curse in the French countryside but you have to admit the timing is suspect), and their son's bakery in another village has recently gone out of business, which is obviously due to the fact that his relatives run the cursed inn. Why else would a bakery go out of business.

Anyway—why is the inn cursed? Because it was built with Resistance money. During WWII, Allied forces would sometimes parachute coffers of money in specific locations for resistants in the mountain maquis, to buy weapons and supplies for sabotage operations, etc, and one day this random cow herder in the village suddenly had enough money to buy this nice plot of land and start building an inn. Everyone strongly suspected he'd stumbled upon some of that parachuted money while herding his cows, and most locals shunned him and his inn (though it still prospered thanks to tourists.) The guy ended up hanging himself for unrelated reasons (family drama) (but still), then the next owners went bankrupt after trying and failing to start an additional fruit tree business on the property. Locals didn't dislike the new owners, who weren't related to the original one, but the reaction was along the lines of "of course they went bankrupt, no one's going to prosper in that place" because of cosmic justice or something. It's been 70+ years and people are still vaguely ill-disposed towards the inn that was built with resistance money and whenever something bad happens to the latest owners the general sentiment is "they live in the cursed inn, what did they expect."

this is like the first conversation scene of Dragon Age: Origins, and if we'd paid attention to it, we would have seen it was clear foreshadowing that the elven gods were "wrong" in a way that the Dalish don't expect. I've seen people claim the elven gods plot is some annoying new direction in the story that is made up to throw the series off track from what it's really about. so let me repeat myself

this conversation happens in the first ten minutes of Dragon Age: Origins

also I figured out how to use the Origins Toolset to look at the dialogue trees so you're all in a world of hurt

insane to me that if harvey had been even an iota less insane, he probably could have gotten mike to be a lawyer the more normal way. i mean, man is a big shot attorney who graduated fifth in his class at harvard law school and probably has a gazillion connections and he absolutely could have just gotten mike into harvard law school (and talked harvard people into looking the other way about how he got kicked out of college . . . worse people have gone to law school tbh), and then harvey could have just negotiated with jessica about not having a personal associate for another three years or just have had mike become a summer associate or something and then hire mike onto pearson hardman, but noOOoOoOoOOoOOO, harvey was so impatient to get his hands on mike that he had to go through this whole fraud thing. gay behavior

it's not ALWAYS like this, of course; some of them were okay. but. A Worrying Amount Of Bad Stuff Gets Glossed Over

growing up in the southeastern US as a girl in the early 00s was like

"hey kids, this white woman did something unusual and independent in the early-mid 19th century, despite the misogyny of her time! girl power!"

[5-10 years later when you do your own research]

"so, here's how many human beings she, specifically, held in bondage, and-"

(I'm not saying this would be as easy to explain to kids as "if your classmate is really good at drawing, that's good, right? but it's bad if she also pushes people down on the playground. sometimes people do good things in one way, and bad things in another." but. it definitely would)