Breadstickcat

The coffee shop!

Alluras

HAPPY MAY THE FOURTH, YOU GUYS!!

@abjuly63

Allura and pidge baking together

You wouldn't last an hour in the...

Asylum where they raised me✨

one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.

what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.

star trek heritage post (June 9th, 2017)

Idk what he's hearing but obviously it's JUICY

Kofi comms

id: A sculpture of the original enterprise made out of straw. It looks to be over one story tall. Next to it is a sign that says straw trek. end id.

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

It’s years before anyone explains it to him.

People keep gifting him robes with long white birds on them.

The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. That’s a word, it’s his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, they’re putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.

It’s fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.

Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.

Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).

And he decides he’s honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.

The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down. 

Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city. 

And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families. 

There’s no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride. 

YES IT’S BACK ON MY DASH AT LAST

For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.

Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying “You appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the ‘bean-bag-chair,’ we can discuss the source of your distress.”

A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldn’t get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.

Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldn’t get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that they’d have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.

Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids he’d helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.

And he’d probably remember them too. “Welcome back, Eliza.”

“…Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so logically happiness must slow it down…”

Will reblog every time it crosses my dash 🖖🏾

I always thought it was like an exaggeration when horse people would talk about how silly it was for anyone to think that riding a horse does not require any particular level of skill or balance or anything, or even that they "drive themselves" (???) but just the tags on the reblogs of that "can you ride a bike and/or horse" post from me alone are demonstrating how overconfident some people are in their (often entirely theoretical!) ability to stay on an alive and moving animal with a will of its own.

like don't get me wrong, I've put young kids on horses & seen younger ride them entirely on their own.

but I've also watched grown-ass adults do things like back a horse straight into a bush because they couldn't follow basic instructions like "stop pulling back on the reins".

and those are just the horses I trust with 8 year olds.

I just think the "horses are scary idiots who eat fingers and break all their legs whenever they see a plastic bag" website was very quick to believe themselves to be the wayward city girl who trauma-bonded with the wild & troubled horse on her family's ranch & won the race & saved the farm all before summer break ended.

is all.

yes Anna May I'm sure riding a horse is much easier than riding a bike. those idiot country folk just don't know what they're talking about. your bond with Serendipity will be strong & you will overcome his troubled heart with the power of fresh apples and transcendant horse empathy.

theoretically, of course.

unfortunately I am beginning to understand why horse girls are so defensive about riding being a "sport".

you're so right besties! I'm rooting for you!!!

So like - y'all know how you have to learn to drive a car? and like, in theory its easy right - go peddle is vroom, stop peddle is eeeek and spinny wheel turns, that's all there is to it, right? (lol)

As many who have had the opportunity to drive a vehicle probably know, there's more to it. There's turn signals, there's dash controllers, there's things you monitor, things you watch out for, there's an intuition you develop for how your drives, when it feels... 'off' even if that check engine light isn't yet on. You know how the brakes 'feel' and at what interval to apply pressure to break smoothly, or how to turn sharply while still maintaining control to avoid a collision.

These are all instinctive skills we develop as we learn and practice driving.

Horses are very much the same - and they can also decide to NOT do what you tell them to do, have anxiety reactions you cannot control but must adapt to, and have unique personalities. Most Ford Fiestas are gonna drive comparably. Two Arabian horses? Good luck.

So. Yes. The theory is there, and with practice and bond-building and knowing your horse, or even developing overall skill, you can just pop on a horse.

Folks who have been on horses that plodded along on the trail or pathed around an arena - those horses have been trained to do that before you ever got on them. You're not steering them. That's what it was taught to do when the 'driver' isn't really driving. And that's not a bad thing! That's wonderful to give new riders a safe experience, to let adventurers go on trail rides without having to develop years and years of skills in advance. It's a fabulous way to maybe get over fear, or bond with a gentle beast that knows it's the expert in the situation and is more than fine with it. They are the calm ones, even if their rider is anxious and clutching the saddle nervously. They're good at being steady for you.

And yes, I suppose, technically that counts as riding a horse, but in the same way that sitting on the handlebars of a bike while your romantic partner pedals and steers behind you counts as riding a bike. Yes - you're balancing on it, and yes, you're along for the ride, and no those aren't bad or silly or anything negative. But it's not the first thing people will think of when they ask "can you ride a bike" is all.

Context is important. There is a difference between sitting on a horse that is pre-programmed to follow a set trail as mentioned above vs. actually controlling where you are going and how fast on any horse in any situation.

There's also the matter of riding the horse properly and not just flopping around like a sack of potatoes. Horses move better when the weight on their backs is moving with them vs against them. The girls i used to work with who professionally trained and rode flighty show horses had hella core strength. Ive witnessed them holding planks for twenty minutes straight and not struggle a whole lot. These were the same girls who, at a moments notice, would be down to go from a walk to flat out booking it at a gallop. That shit is hard, and nobody talks about how fucking terrifying it is. Especially when you pair that withh a horse who loves to go fast and hates to listen to you when you try to press the brakes. Ive been scraped off on a branch before, straight out of a slapstick cartoon.

A lot of people dont understand what riding actually looks like bc the only context they have for it is preprogrammed trail horses and/or westerns where horses are just portrayed as acoustic cars. Look up videos of show jumpers and cross country riders. Or if you wanna get yeehaw with it look up barrel racing and cattle sorting, reining, any sort of rodeo event really. If you wanna see just how technical horse riding can get look up dressage riding tips. Dressage infighting is one of my favourite flavors of online drama bc where else am i supposed to find people arguing about heels.

Tldr; horseback riding in all its flavors is a sport, most people just dont have context for what riding actually is.

Ice cream day