Roman Roads as modern transport network (3638x2738)

Today’s aesthetic: people in their 30s who are clearly still using the email address they signed up for when they were 14.

1. Allison Janney’s performance as C.J. Cregg on The West Wing.

2. Using the Boer War as a metaphor for things that are really, really old.

3. Informing someone that “flaccid” used to be pronounced “flak-sid,” but “flass-id” DOES sound more appropriate given the image it creates.

4. When you are six minutes away from bailing on someone so you can stay home and watch TV, and they cancel on you first.

5. Stevie Wonder’s performance of “Superstition” on Sesame Street.

6. Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess.

7. Shows featuring Timothy Olyphant as an angry person with hats and really low-riding jeans.

8. Nice tributes to the guy who wrote one of the books that became one of the shows featuring Timothy Olyphant as an angry person with hats and really low-riding jeans.

9. Eating in any position other than upright and at a table.

10. Celebrity blind items where someone has clearly gotten it right in the comments and everyone agrees but you wouldn’t have figured it out on your own.

11. Very slow remixes of “Jolene.”

12. Pointing out that you’ve always liked “Jolene.”

13. Getting to explain what steampunk is to someone who has not yet heard of the idea of steampunk.

14. Books about death in the Grand Canyon.

15. Books about death in Yellowstone.

16. Books about death in Yosemite.

17. When elderly black people are friends with elderly white people in real life, not just on benches in ads for statins.

18. Pappardelle.

19. The opportunity to correct someone for having a cell phone conversation on Amtrak’s Quiet Car.

20. Saying “a raisin is a horrible thing to do to a grape” to someone who hasn’t heard you say it every time someone mentions raisins.

21. Middle-aged Canadian lesbian stoners.

22. kd lang

23. Listening to kd lang with middle-aged Canadian lesbian stoners while eating pappardelle.

24. A new video about cats on YouTube that has enough of an original hook to it that you can share it on Facebook.

25. Anne Helen Petersen’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” series.

26. Dessert menus that have something which is basically just a huge, upscale Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

27. Pretending you’re singing Kirsty MacColl’s half of the “Fairytale of New York” duet by the Pogues in a a karaoke bar, while Sean Bean sings the other half, because you’re dating and he doesn’t care if people know.

28. When movies are made now, but set in the 1970s.

29. Anticipating how amazing smartphones will be in twenty years.

30. Thinking about how embarrassing it will be for Adam Levine’s kids to watch his music videos.

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Flatiron Books to give away FIVE copies of M. L. Rio’s newly released (and critically praised) literary thriller If We Were Villains! To enter, you must: 1) reblog this post, and 2) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check ;P). Easy, right? We’ll randomly choose one winner on each of the following dates: 11 April, 19 April, 25 April, 2 May, and 9 May. This is an international giveaway. Good luck! Listen to the Prologue Order here

We’re choosing our second (of five) random winner(s) tomorrow, so reblog now! :D

Gabourey Sidibe attends the 48th NAACP Image Awards.

Free Online Language Courses

*UPDATED* Here is a masterpost of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are available, archived, or starting soon. Some are short, some are very interactive, some are very in-depth. I think they will help those that like to learn with a teacher or with videos. I checked each link to make sure they are functioning.

Spanish

Beginner 

Intermediate 

Advanced

French

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Portuguese

Italian

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced 

Catalan

Latin

Russian

Beginner

Advanced

Ukrainian

Kazakh

Chinese

Beginner

Intermediate

Japanese

Korean

Beginner

Intermediate

Dutch

German

Beginner

Advanced

Norwegian

Swedish

Finnish

Frisian

Icelandic

Arabic

Hebrew

Hindi

Indonesian

Nepali

Welsh

Irish

Multiple Languages

I’ll keep an eye out for new courses and if you know of any, let me know so I can update this list.

Last updated: February 19, 2016

god bless whoever made this 

some unlucky kiddos :’)

Stripper Tutorial Masterpost

The links are in order from beginner to advanced. Most of this is aimed towards dancers-to-be or baby strippers, so there aren’t many complicated moves on here. Also, please note that this list is incomplete. I will be adding to the Bootywork and Lapdance sections in given time and as I find better videos/tutorials. FLOORWORK: Sexy Worm (with Spin Sity)  The Dive (with Spin Sity)  The Clock (with Spin Sity)   Crawl (with Pole 2go) Goddess Rising (with Pole2go) Outside Tick-tock Clock Variation (with Pole2go) Leg Peels (with Pole2go) Floor Fan Kick (with Pole2go) Backwards Shoulder Roll (with Melonie) Four Ways to Get Up From the Floor (with Dirdy Birdy)  Twisted Grip Floor Roll Down (with Dirdy Birdy)  Intermediate Drop & Roll (with Cleo the Hurricane) Advanced Pole Press Handstand (with Cleo the Hurricane) POLEWORK: Basic Walk (with Pole2go) Eternal Pole Walk (with Pole2go) Figure 8 Walk (with Pole2go) Hip Circles (with Pole2go) Booty Dips (with Pole2go) Pole Plie (with Pole2go) Beginner Fireman Variations (with Dirdy Birdy) Beginner Sunwheel/Ankle Hook (with Dirdy Birdy Beginner Pole Climb (with Dirdy Birdy) Beginner Pole Sit (with Dirdy Birdy)  Beginner Pole Plank/Layback (with Dirdy Birdy)  Beginner Angel Spin (with Dirdy Birdy)  Beginner Fan Kick (with Dirdy Birdy)  Beginner Cradle/Cradle V Spin (with Dirdy Birdy) Beginner Pirouette Variations Inner and Outer Grip (with Dirdy Birdy)  Beginner Bodyrolls (with Dirdy Birdy) Beginner Invert and Exercises Before (with Dirdy Birdy)  Intermediate Gemini Aka Outside Leg Hang (with Dirdy Birdy) Intermediate Scorpio Aka Inside Leg Hang (with Dirdy Birdy) Tips for Using a Spinning Pole (with Veena)  Static Pole Spins (with Veena)  Back Arch Slide (with Pole2go) The Wrist Seat (with Pole2go)  Corkscrew Spin (with Pole2go) How to Shoulder Mount (with Blush Dance) Jade (with Muse Fitness) Jade Split (with Cleo the Hurricane) BOOTYWORK: How to Twerk For Non-Twerkers (with Firestarter)  How to Twerk Tutorial and Leg/Booty Workout (with Keaira Lashae) Ass Clap 101 (with Imani Rose)  Booty Pop on Floor (with Amy Shi)  Booty Flexing Exercise (with Empre$$)

STRENGTH/FLEXIBILITY/STRETCHING Beginner Pole Strengthening Exercises (with Dakota Foxx) Back Stretches/Flexibility Training (with Dirdy Birdy)  Four Exercises Every Pole Dancer Should Know (with Veena)  Tips For Splits and Hips (with Veena)  Stretching for the Splits (with Veena)

I think this may be the only post I will be known for on this site lol Thank you for helping it get over 1K in notes guize

Always in need 

this is fucking great

Right! I haven’t had time to look at all; but so far it is really good info

For anon

Harrison Ford goes out into his backyard. He looks up at the stars and finds the brightest one. He shakes his head as he speaks. “You just had to tell them we slept together, didn’t you?” Carrie Fisher emerges in the sky like Mufasa and looks down on Harrison Ford before flipping him off. 

*Palpatine voice* drew it

Reblogging again because somebody drew it.

There’s something definitely… ironic… when a bunch of fanfic authors sit around and laugh about how “trashy” and “shitty” historical romance novels are.

Like honestly, this is part of why I haven’t written more of any of my historical AUs: if you’re gonna laugh about it and talk about how ridiculous and lulzy the genre is, I do nooot want to crank out more for you to be snidely ironic about.

If I’m writing something, it’s because I believe in it. Even if I know it’s cracktastic and not up to high artistic standards–I’m doing it because I believe that spontaneity and play are important in creative communities.  But it knocks me down every time someone acts like the stuff I make is worthy of contempt or mockery.

I have some thoughts about this! Because before I got into fanfic back in, like, March of this year, I had spent the previous six months getting heavily into historical romance and following a number of the current big names in historical romance on Twitter. And let me tell you, those authors? They know their shit. There is no discrete genre that takes its craft *and* its publicity as seriously as romance. I was a witness to the shit show that was the controversy about the SFWA newsletter, and let me tell you, when the dust cleared and people started actually trying to be constructive in their thoughts about how to create a real professional publication? They pointed to the Romance Writers of America, because their newsletter treats all its subscribers like the professionals they are.

And the historical romance writers? They are even more amazing to me, because they do so much incredibly detailed research. Even if their book ends up being a fun, rompy, very-nearly-AU, you better believe they know their historical facts. Do you know another genre where the authors regularly teach themselves to sew and wear accurate period clothing so they can describe ball scenes correctly?

Anyway… I feel like I’ve picked up a huge amount about the craft of writing from both the fanfic and romance writing communities, both of which are generally dismissed for containing sex and feels, so instead of writing each other off, let’s band together! In that spirit, if people would like to read some kickass historical fiction, allow me to recommend some authors:

Tessa Dare: Her Spindle Cove series features a small English coastal village functioning as a haven for women in need of refuge, whether it be due to scandal or spinsterhood or poor health or any other oddity, such as excessive independence of spirit. However, I think my favorite book of Dare’s so far may actually be the latest one in her Castles Ever After series, When a Scot Ties the Knot, (which can be read as a stand-alone,) because it features a young woman who establishes a career as a scientific illustrator after avoiding marriage by faking engagement to a soldier she made up… except all those letters she sent off into the void to sell the story to her parents actually went somewhere. So adorable! So hilarious! There’s even a romantic sub-plot featuring lobsters.

Eloisa James: This particular author is, for her day job, a Shakespeare professor, so you best believe she understands research. Her books are… amazing. Her Desperate Duchesses series is set in the Georgian period (ie, when Hamilton is going on across the sea), and if you long for some men with equally ridiculous fashion sense as the women, look no further. But that’s just a side note; the thing that really makes her books stand out (to me, anyway) is how well she can write unhappy married couples realistically overcoming miscommunications, sometimes years in the making, to fall in love with each other, either for the first time or all over again. Furthermore, in her Fairy Tale retellings series, she doesn’t romanticize what it’s like for virgins with no sex ed to try to navigate their way through things. (Seriously, read Once Up a Tower, it will change your whole conception of romance novels.)

Courtney Milan: Read her Regency-era Brothers Sinister series. The whole thing. The female characters in these books! They are the best! And the male characters, too, yes, they’re good. But the women all have such amazingly interesting lives and stories! There’s a chess champion, an intentionally socially off-putting heiress, a female biologist (and the man who presents her work to the public), and a suffragette newspaper editor. Plus the ebook “box-set” comes with all the side-character novellas already interleaved. And each book has historical notes at the end, which I found fascinating. I love the balance Milan creates between witty character banter and their attempts to address serious societal issues of the times. (She’s also started a modern series about a not!Apple tech company that I am eagerly anticipating the next installment of. Interracial couples! Trans characters! Trading places plot devices!)

Sarah MacLean: I was instructed to start with Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, which I did, and oh, the wonderful hijinks that ensued! As if the title wasn’t a clue. These are again Regency romances with intelligent, dissatisfied women who decide to take their lives into their own hands. The Love by the Numbers series then leads into the Rules of Scoundrels series, and while each book tells its own romance, you’ll pick up so much more background gossip between the characters and amazingly delicate and interwoven worldbuilding if you read everything in order.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Not actually usually shelved in the romance section, since what Kowal writes are historically-based fantasy novels, but her attention to detail is impeccable. She’s the one who taught herself to make Regency gowns and does all her readings in period costume, down to the shoes and undergarments. She built a custom spellchecker to flag any word not actually used by Jane Austen for her first series, which started as pastiche but quickly gained its own momentum. The worldbuilding is meticulous; everything is period-correct Austen/Regency, until it’s not, because she created a magic system that works with the time and culture, but also changed the time and culture just by existing. She thought about everything. Her new series is set in WWI, and looks at how the war might have been different if spiritualism had been true, ie, what if there had been a corps of women receiving battlefield reports from recently deceased soldiers? I just finished this one, and the level of detail is true #authorgoals.

Meljean Brook: These are actually steampunk romances (rather than true historicals) with an amazing amount of alt history worldbuilding, but the impression that stuck with me after reading them was that Brook was putting on an absolute master class in how to do character-driven plot. Nothing in these books is gratuitous. No detail of the world is ever revealed unless a character has a reason to be thinking about it, no interaction the two people involved in the romance has is done simply for the sake of drama. The people are the story–and they just happen to also be police detectives and sky pirates and treasure hunters. Brook has also clearly put a lot of thought into the various power structures of her world, and while the books can be viewed through the lens of romping adventures on airships, she is also addressing serious themes such as the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, racism, ableism, and attitudes towards homosexuality.

I could go on, but I’m going to stop here. I have a lot to say about books, clearly.

I also love Alexis Harrington, who writes detailed, wonderful, thoughtful books set in places like Oregon, Washington, and Alaska in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Joanna Bourne, whose series on British spies in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France is absolutely amazing.

Draco and Harry with their scars and tattoos (and looking all pumped and shit ‘cause it’s typical upthehillart)

Heavily inspired by @sadfishkid, also @coldcigarettes and some other random posts on tattoos that are drifting somewhere within the ocean of internet x)

This is glorious.

I love whenever Damen gets such a stupid confidence boost 👏

Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.

Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.

Isaac Asimov.

yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point

If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?

PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame

And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.

Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:

Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.

You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.

Got that?

Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it

I have literally been telling people this for over a year.

the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman

The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).

The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.

Women invented language while men were hunting. I mean…