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Hitherto Unexplored.

@hithertokt / hithertokt.tumblr.com

Teacher. English/Language Arts. Boss of Binders, Organization, and Wit. [as yet]
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I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

- Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses" 

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“There’s no apolitical way to justify the storytelling: A character who has proven to be a more than competent military strategist, not to mention a very effective self-propagandist, abruptly decides to commit a war crime after she’s won the war in question, thus needlessly turning the populace against her, because… the plot says so. Because she’s upset and petulant and suddenly a bad person in a way that overrides all her previously established skill sets. There’s no arc, no track, no work done to show us why she thinks this is a good idea. Even stupid decisions have a thought process behind them — we understand Tyrion freeing Daenerys’ prisoner, right after Dany tells Tyrion she’ll kill him the next time he disobeys, because the prisoner is Jaime and Tyrion loves him — but this one doesn’t. It just happens. But the decision might work if Daenerys’ desire to lead had already made you dislike her. If you believed, not just that women in power can be abusive, but that all women in power are abusive, not just that some women internalize tyrannical ideas of power, but that the very desire to wield power makes women tyrannical — not just that the world contains Cerseis, but that any woman becomes a Cersei by virtue of leading — then it would completely make sense that, the very second a female character obtained her world’s highest position of authority, she would PMS and have a meltdown and get hysterical and lash out and otherwise prove herself not only unfit to lead, but dangerously so. In other words, this would make sense to you if you did not see Daenerys making a decision, but a woman making a decision, and if this were the kind of decision you expected women to make.”

Ohhh the tea. Spill it

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oadara

Here’s another excerpt that really hit the nail on the head:

Character introductions define characters. An arc — a character begins as one person, meets an obstacle, overcomes it, and becomes a different person over the course of the quest — depends on the clear and illustrative contrast between who the characters originally are and who they become. Luke Skywalker is introduced as an insignificant farm boy, and ends as the Jedi prince who destroyed an empire; Walter White is introduced as a panicky suburban wimp telling us he loves his family, and ends as a strong, confident drug lord whose family despises him. The arc works if we can understand how Walter White’s decisions turned his personality inside-out, and the image of the scared suburban Dad saying “I love you” has to stay in our heads for the entire series, so that we’ll have a clear understanding of what has changed.
Daenerys’ defining scene, her perpetually relevant starting point, is “rape victim.” We understand, from her first moments, that this is a story about a woman who is powerless, and that her powerlessness stems largely from being female. The obstacle, then, is misogyny, and her arc, her radical change, will presumably be a journey from powerlessness to power. Women who expected Daenerys to become a benevolent feminist ruler, to break the wheel and end the cycle of oppression, were not stupid; they were following basic story logic. Their expectations didn’t spring from delusion or narcissism, they sprang from Star Wars.

We were trying to use logic, but that was just a waste of our time and the end was just a basket-full of illogical nonesense.

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srbrienne

both bastille and hozier have really nailed the “the world is ending let’s jam” vibe huh

Because the world IS ending, if we don’t jam then what is there left but crying to do?

We’ve reached the “band playing on the titanic” stage of nihilism now

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reblogged
Baby: *intense eye contact*
Me: 😍😍😍😍😍
Baby: *big smile*
Me: omg I die 😍😍😍😍
Baby: *stares into my soul*
Baby: *farts*
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hithertokt

GPOY

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When the bones are good, the rest don't matter Yeah, the paint could peel, the glass could shatter Let it rain 'cause you and I remain the same When there ain't a crack in the foundation

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missymalice

“young adult dystopian novels are so unrealistic lmao like they always have some random teenage girl rising up to inspire the world to make change.”

a hero emerges 

And just like in the novels, grown men and women are going out of their way to destroy her. Support our hero.

And it’s not even like it doesn’t happen regularly.  

Teenage girls are amazing.

Sometimes they’re not even teenagers

Reblog every time a girl is discredited/ignored

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thecaboodale

Can someone name all these girls?? I only know malala

Here you go 💪 

List of names and why they kick ass  

Emma González (born 1999) - American activist and advocate for gun control. Surviour from the Stoneman Douglas High Shcool shooting in Parkland, Florida. 

Malala Yousafzai (born 1997) - Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. 

Ruby Nell Bridges Hall (born 1954) - American civil rights activist. She was the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.

Greta Thunberg (born 2003) - Swedish schoolgirl who, at age 15, began protesting about the need for immediate action to combat climate change outside the Swedish parliament and has since become an outspoken climate activist.

Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny (born 2007) - In 2016 Flint resident Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, aged 8, wrote President Obama to bring to his attention the public health crisis caused the Flint Water crisis. The month after receiving her letter, the president responded with one of his own, thanking Mari for her activism and telling her he’d visit Flint. Their meeting went viral, and seven months later, President Obama authorized $100 million to repair Flint’s water system. 

To date, she and the education nonprofit Pack Your Back have handed out more than 700,000 water bottles to local families.

Autumn Peltier (born 2004) - Anishinaabe-kwe and a member of the Wikwemikong First Nation and an internationally recognized advocate for clean water. She is a water protector and has been called a “water warrior”. Peltier addressed world leaders at the UN General Assembly on the issue of water protection at the age of thirteen in 2018.

Afreen Khan (born 2000) - a young girl who is part of a generation of Indian women fighting rape and sexual harassment. Along with other young rape survivors, Afreen has formed a vigilante group called The Red Brigade. Together, they march along the streets in their red and black uniform, drag young men out of their homes and publically humiliate them for harassing women.

They also teach self-defense to the girls of their community and organize protests.

Sophie Cruz (born 2010) - American activist. Her parents are undocumented immigrants from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Cruz’s activism is geared toward ensuring the continuance of the DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans) program, which would allow her parents to remain in the United States legally.

The Black Student Union of Charlottesville High School - Led a #RacialJusticeWalkout on March the 25th 2019 demanding a number of policies to promote equity in city schools.

Naomi Wadler (born 2007) - American student and activist attending George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia. She has held speeches advocating for victims of gun violence in the United States, especially black female victims, most notably at the anti-gun protest March for Our Lives.

Riley Keough (born 1989) pictured with two young unidentifiable protestors at Dakota Access Pipeline Protest 2016 

🤘🏻🤘🏼🤘🏽🤘🏾🤘🏿

here you guys go 

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nutmegthings

Beautiful

Kloe cares is a nonprofit run by a young girl named kloe in the us for homeless people and people in extreme poverty.

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I can never seem to successfully capture your beyond wild movements on camera; I've come to accept that it's just a thing that you and I alone will share. But given the voracity of those motions this week, like Animal on the drums, and that you are now merely six days shy of full term, might I just suggest..... joining us?

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nonasuch

Yesterday I overheard someone talking about how he was taking classes at the University of Maryland because they offer free tuition if you’re over 60. 

My brain IMMEDIATELY began scripting a screwball comedy in which a broke millennial who desperately want to finish his long-abandoned degree but is drowning in student debt pretends to be a senior citizen in order to attend college for free.

I’m picturing someone Channing Tatumesque, applying age makeup every morning before he heads off to class. It’s sort of a cross between 21 Jump Street and Mrs. Doubtfire. He keeps forgetting which hip is supposed to be his bad one. His classmates laugh every time he uses slang. There’s definitely a scene where he attends a college party and busts it up on the dance floor.

He catches the eye of a fellow returning student, a woman in her 50s, but she thinks he’s like 70 and she’s already buried one husband, you know? She’s not interested in doing that again. When his charade unravels (hilariously) at the end of the movie, though, she finds out he’s actually like 30 and has abs you could bounce a quarter off. And he’s still super into her. And really, maybe it’s time she gave May-December romance a chance.

Okay so to refine this concept a little:

Our Hero is stuck in a job where he keep seeing people get promoted past him because they have a 4-year degree and he doesn’t. He can’t afford to go back to school until he finishes paying off his student loans for the degree he’s one semester from completing. If he got the promotion he wants he could pay them off a lot quicker. But he can’t get the promotion without the degree.

Along comes a clerical error in his almost-alma mater’s records which lists his birth year as 1948 instead of 1984. He gets a call from them about their “free tuition for seniors” program. “Wow, that sounds amazing!” he says. “I’ll be sure to tell my, uh, grandpa, as soon as he gets home.”

It’s one semester. If he can keep up the charade, he’ll have the degree, get the promotion, pay off the student loans. Hell, if they figure it out after the fact and come after him for the tuition, he’ll be able to afford it by then. He just needs to pass as a 70-year-old until graduation. How hard could it be?

(also, someone in the notes suggested “Senior Year” for a title, which is PERFECT.)

Holy shitballs.

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