I JUST WANNA HELP.

SURPRISE GIFT FOR @cancelstrangerthings

Tropea (Calabria, Italy)

Photos by @acriativelife on Instagram

whats a gender neutral word you could use for your spouse? wusband?? hife?? wifesband?!?!?

i may be stupid

not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)

AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:

this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.

babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!

I really enjoy just existing in hotels. The long identical hallways. The soulless abstract art. The weird noises the air-conditioner makes. Strange city lights in the window. Six stories off the ground. Strangers chatting in the hall. Nothing in the dresser. No past, but an infinite present. 

i made a uquiz to answer the age-old question:

are you the sun, the moon, or the stars?

reblog with in the tags what you got!!

Gradients of Thick Petals by Artist Joshua Davison Are Layered Precisely with a Palette Knife

reblog this and put the year you were born and the first social media you had an account on in the tags

I must admit that “shit-ass” is not a word I ever thought I’d see in a 19th century letter… but here we are.

“This is kind of a shit-ass of a letter, but I just wanted to let you know I was alive.”

- Gilbert Patterson to Jack, June 16, 1896.

YOU CAN DO HOBBIES JUST FOR FUN!!!

YOUR NOVEL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOR PUBLISHING!!! YOUR ART DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOR SELLING!!! YOUR MUSIC DOESN’T HAVE TO GO ON YOUTUBE!!! YOU CAN JUST FUCKING DO THE THING BECAUSE YOU ENJOY IT AND NEVER EVEN SHOW ANYONE!!! THAT’S VALID AS HELL!!!

OK, but I partially disagree with this headcanon, and here’s why:

1) Bruce is totally playing Gamora. You don’t think Bruce Banner has played Dungeons & Dragons before? Bruce Banner has absolutely played Dungeons & Dragons before. He played all through high school and college and when Bucky announces the campaign Bruce jumps at the opportunity because he just misses it so much (mostly rose-tinted nostalgia goggles but). So he sits Bucky down and asks him for every bit of info he can on the setting and spends a whole night with a pot of tea drafting up the five-page backstory for his space assassin and her family tree and her struggle with her relationship with the villain and comes to Bucky with a fully-ready character sheet and a list of things Bucky will need to OK before Gamora hops in.

Bucky quietly resolves to integrate as much as he can into the story, mainly because Bruce came up with some better ideas than he’d had.

2) Tony is definitely playing Quill, because Tony has never played D&D before. You don’t get to be where Tony Stark is in life and have much free time. He does what a lot of newbies do and bases a character on himself, or at least the parts he likes: clever, snarky, pre-’90s musical taste, beds space babes, heroic sometimes probably. He wants to be cool but has no idea how to be cool within this context (“My character’s name is Starlord.” “What? Tony, no.”). He hogs the spotlight all the time (all the time) but clearly has no idea what he’s doing and when someone who seems like they know what they’re talking about gives him advice he always takes (“I’m going to need that guy’s leg.” “Seriously? Alright” *Rolls to grapple*).

Quill’s backstory is primarily Bruce’s doing. Tony just handed it in with a “yeah whatever’s on there.”

3) Thor is playing Drax but didn’t join until a few sessions in when he tagged along and decided it looked like fun (“THIS PLEASES ME! ALLOW ME TO JOIN YOUR TALES OF ADVENTURE!”). He definitely needed help constructing his character sheet, but he had no problem coming up with a character. Bucky asked him what he wanted to play and got that glint in his eye and responded “I WILL FORGE A HERO WORTHY OF THE ANCIENT TALES OF ASGARD.” And he put a lot of thought into Drax, both in personal history and personality. He’s mostly modeled on Thor’s favorite Asgardian folk heroes, with some personal flaws and quirks thrown in that Thor thinks are interesting.

Of course Thor doesn’t really understand the game part of it, he’s in it for the story (“Thor what the hell man there’s no way we can take on Ronan at this level!” “AH BUT THINK OF THE THRILLING DRAMA OF THE MOMENT DRAX AND RONAN MEET AGAIN!” “We are all going to die.” “AND IT WILL BE A THRILLING TRAGEDY!”)

4) Steve is absolutely playing Rocket but what started as a complete joke ballooned into a fully fleshed-out character with a tragic backstory. Steve’s an artist, he’s a creative guy and little too creative for his own good sometimes and bouncing his ideas off of Natasha turned a simple joke into a more elaborate character dynamic than even Bruce’s. He trolls Bucky a lot and it’s even better for Steve when he really gets into Rocket’s character and plays up the drama, partly because Bucky can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

5) Somewhere in the brainstorming session, Steve and Natasha decided that Rocket has a partner who is a talking tree. Natasha pitches this idea completely straight-faced to Bucky and after the fiasco of Steve’s character idea Bucky’s just too tired to say no to the tree-man. Natasha gives him a bit of a backstory and how Rocket and Groot got together and it sounds pretty solid, so whatever, tree-man can stay.

Then when all the characters get introduced Natasha just hovers over Tony and puffs out her chest and says in her deepest voice: “I am Groot.”

And Steve snickers and nobody has any idea why.

A session later Natasha is responding to everything Tony says with that same deep “I am Groot.” and Steve goes blue in the face trying to hold in his laughter and Tony cracks and the game has to pause for 10 minutes while Nat and Steve recompose themselves.

Nat also has a better grasp of the rules than Bucky realized and completely tweaked her character into being able to do basically anything she can justify. And it’s all right there in the book, Bucky can’t even argue from a rules standpoint. They’re only level 5 Groot shouldn’t be essentially bulletproof but through some loophole in the rules, yep, there it is.

Natasha Romanoff is trained to exploit weaknesses. Of course she’s a total munchkin.

IT GOT SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER