the pros of reading ao3 fics in public is that their layout is so clean and simple that people would think you’re reading some academic researches when you’re in fact reading a 50k fic. the cons is that you need to control your face all the fucking time

An additional feature: the layout is clean and simple BUT anyone familiar with AO3 will immediately recognize it. Pro or con? You decide.

If they know it enough to recognize it on sight, they probably aren’t going to be judging me about it.

Who’s Alex?

Billboard demonstrating gender stereotypes as most people automatically assume that Alex is the boy.

Actually, I’ve studied design and advertising, and I can tell you that the reason people would look at this and immediately assume Alex is the boy is because, quite simply, the boy is the focal point of the ad.

English-speaking readers’ line of sight goes from left to right and up to down. This ad leads the viewer from the words MEET ALEX etc straight to the boy and then over and down to the girl. I didn’t even notice there was a set of parenthesis with words in them in the ad until I looked the fourth time. 

This is a fallacious confirmation bias, as anyone looking at it will assume Alex is the focal point (i.e. The Boy) and then if they’re perceptive they’ll notice the words at the bottom. Aha! Those damn gender stereotypes gotcha again! Except no, because the ad literally forces you to read it as “Alex is the boy” by the visual language and lines of sight. 

A better ad would have been structured from top to bottom instead of left to right, and wouldn’t have pushed the girl, the real subject of the ad (who, by the way, has been VISUALLY PUSHED OUT OF HER RIGHTFUL SPACE ON THE AD BY HER BROTHER) off to the corner as far away from her identifiers as possible. 

Here, I’ll make you a better ad.

Bam. Shitty stock photo but you get the point. If anyone sees this and assumes Alex is the boy, they don’t have the the ad layout to use as an excuse for their internalized gender shittery. Likewise, the ad isn’t actively trying to make you read it a certain way and THEN making you feel guilty for interpreting it the way they designed it to be. 

Holy fuck someone who actually understands design, sexism, and how they intersect? Yesssss

Make a Vampire character who’s lived through several waves of the common language’s development and can’t let go if certain gramatical habbits from different time eras.

So like, thou ist a horrid creature, an absolute cur, but go off i guess

… can i use that phrase irl?

Absolutely you can and I encourage more uses of similar phrases that just completely fuck up the chronology of the english langauge. I wanna hear 15th century english mixed with surfer speak mixed with current age internet lingo like all the time.

Like this? Well my dude, seems like a weasel hath not such a deal of splean as you’re toss’d with. Chill already, you’re not valid.

You are an unrighteous, bastardly gullion. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell. When you die, I will face God and walk backwards into hell just so that I can beat your ass in the afterlife too.

I love the idea of a vampire who’s language travels back in time as they get pissed.

I grieve for thee in these trying times. Alexa play Despacito

Reading these is like literary whiplash

This whole post is gold, but the comment about the vampire’s dialect “devolving” into older and older periods when he’s angry stood out to me.

It’s a cinematic cliché for a person of any foreign nationality to revert to their native language when angry (I usually see it with Spanish-speaking characters), and my southern accent deepens as I get angrier.

It makes sense that an immortal character who saw the eras of his language change and evolve over time would speak more and more archaically as he got angrier.

Historical linguists decide to get especially ancient vampires pissed off in order to study ancient languages

are you telling me that if I get a 5000yo vampire angry enough I can directly test the glottalic theory?

*Pisses off a vampire so much that they teach me Minoan*

me irl

Watch: Carl Sagan schooled B.o.B. on his flat Earth theory more than 30 years ago

Follow @the-future-now

bipch erastosthenes schooled b.o.b. 2,230 years ago

Ok so this is cool but I always wondered how they knew the shadows were different at the same instant. I mean it is not like they had phones. How did they sync up that instant. I feel like that would be interesting to know but no one ever says.

^^^Does anybody know this one? How, that far apart, the time at which the shadows were observed was synced up? I am genuinely curious, not a goddamn moron asking a gotcha question. High/Low tide? (I live in the middle of the country I do not know for the precise habits of tidal activity.) The appearance of a star (or planet) in the sky? Something as utterly mundane as sunrise?

Well, first of all, it wasn’t actually pillars! Eratosthenes was told about a well in Syene that, in the summer solstice every year (June 21st) would be illuminated at the bottom entirely and without any cast shadows. This indicated that the sun was directly overhead. Going off that well known curiosity and an intelligent hunch, our dude Eratosthenes waited until high noon of the summer solstice to measure the angle of a shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria. (Sidenote: Eratosthenes was a librarian of the infamous Library of Alexandria.)

His next course of action was to hire bematists, surveyors of the time whose professional specialty was to measure distance by walking with equal length steps. They measured a distance between Alexandria and Syene of about 5000 stadia. (Guess where the word stadium comes from.) Once he had that measurement, Eratosthenes did his math-y thing, and there you have it.

ANSWER EVEN COOLER THAN I HOPED!!

Eratosthenes’ work was thorough enough that by the time he finished revising his calculations, he ended up only 66 km off of the actual polar circumference of the Earth, or an error margin of 0.16%. [wiki]

“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

Who they are:

Emma Gonzalez

Malala Yousafzai

Ruby Bridges

Greta Thunberg

Mari Copeny

Autumn Peltier

Afreen Khan

Sophie Cruz

Charlottesville Black Students Union

Naomi Wadler

DAPL protestors (names not found)

Ahed Tamimi

This isn’t a coincidence. Revolutions almost always happen when the population of a country is at its youngest and that’s a lot more true nowadays with social media.

Claudette Colvin was actually the first one to refuse her seat in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. The movement chose to promote Rosa Parks as the figure for that form of protest because Claudette was a pregnant 15-year-old girl.

Barbara Rose Johns was a 16-year-old who organized a student strike protesting segregated schools. This strike, after gaining support of the NAACP, became a lawsuit that turned into Brown vs. The Board of Education and resulted in the desegregation of U.S schools nationally.

7th-grader Mary Beth Tinker, disturbed by the Vietnam War, decided to wear an arm band with a peace sign on it in protest. Her school suspended her. Her family filed a suit, Tinker vs. Des Moines, which reached the Supreme Court and ruled in her favor, ensuring that students and teachers maintain their right to free speech while in school.

Freddie & Truus Oversteegen were sisters who joined a Dutch resistance movement in WWII in their teens. They lured, ambushed, and assassinated Nazis and Dutch collaborators. They also blew up a railway line, transported Jewish refugees to new hiding places, and worked in an emergency hospital. 

Our history books may like to showcase male figures, but behind every movement is a young girl ready to make a change. It was true then, it’s true now, and future generations of teenage girls will go on to inspire progress, whether they’re credited or not.

We were raised on these stories of fighting back against oppression, but then the people who wrote them or read them to us act shocked we turned out ready to fight facism even while being anti-social.

justin mcelroy has said many powerful things but honestly no set of words in the english language conveys the same energy as “that’s a funny trick to play on god”

“you’re rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, my friend” is a very close second

“we can do whatever sins we want! there’s no god here to observe this” is very good too

“the man who sleeps with a machete is a fool every night but one” was also good

“for the millionth time the first amendment protects you from the government not the justin”

So you might have seen this image going around the internet.

[ID: A high school hallway crammed with shoulder-to-shoulder teenagers, about three of whom are wearing masks. End ID.]

This is a high school in my area. This was the first day back. This picture, taken by a student, went viral (ha), and the superintendent was more or less forced to make a statement. It’s long and it’s a lot of bullshit but here’s the big stupid part.

“One area where we have received a good deal of feedback is mask use in our schools. Wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them. What we will do is continue to strongly encourage all students and staff to wear masks.”

If I have to explain to you the staggering level of bullshit in this statement, then you’ve never been an AFAB person in high school. Tank top? Sent home. Jeans too tight? Home. Collarbones showing? Home. Never mind the application of out-of-school suspension, which is its own kind of bullshit that we’re not here to discuss today. If you can send someone home for showing too much ankle you can send them home for not wearing a mask.

I’ve seen pushback against him on Twitter but they’ve already proven they don’t give a shit what we think, or care about the safety of the students OR staff. Only that things look like they’ve gone back to normal.

So it’d be a real shame if people from all over blew up their phones at 770-443-8000 or used faxzero.com to send 5 free faxes per day to 770-443-8089 making known their concerns about this anti-response to a massive public health risk. Make it a national issue and maybe shame our government into acting like they’ve got a single brain cell between them. It’d just be real upsetting. I’m just saying.

Here’s audio of the principal threatening students over the PA system with “consequences” if they post about it.

I will not let the dread of wasted potential saturate my life with anxiety. I’m capable of amazing things but I do not have to force myself to accomplish every single one.

‘Don’t compete with yourself’ is amazing advice. Elizabeth Gilbert did a TED talk a few years ago where she talked about coming to terms with the fact that her most successful work is almost certainly behind her, and how she had to learn to deal with that.

Because’Eat Pray Love’ hit a cultural zeitgeist and how do you follow that up? But you’ll only become toxic in your head if you don’t learn to separate a works worthiness from its quality.

I understand how you feel a bit. One of my favorite things I’ve written is by any measure among my least popular. And a lot of writers have the same issue. In my own Sterek fandom there are writers of hugely popular fics that have continued to write, sometimes in the same fandom and sometimes having moved on, and their new works struggle to have hits that are 10% of those towering successes. None of this has anything to do with the quality of their current work.

“When u get carried through a match but still try to help out”

(Source)

if you tag me in a chain post and i don't do it it's not because i hate you it's because i am very lazy. i love you thank you for tagging me.

— Jonathan Carroll

STOP 👏 MAKING 👏 SHOWS 👏 DARK 👏 FOR 👏 THE 👏 “”””AESTHETIC”””” 👏 I 👏 CAN’T 👏 SEE

“Corporations supporting things like BLM and Pride is largely performative and shouldn’t be overly praised or focused on. They’re just trying to do what they think will earn them money” and “Corporations openly showing support for things like BLM and Pride are incredibly important” and not mutually exclusive ideas.

Corporation support is not the source of social change, it’s the visible indication of it. A mall covered in rainbow flags with ‘pride month sales!’ is nothing that makes LGBT people more accepted, nor do tweets from companies about supporting the BLM protests do anything to stop police violence, but they DO show the shift in public mindset. Corporations don’t take risks. They don’t make bold statements that they feel are unpopular or will lose them money or support. They’re a litmus test for when a statement or symbol that has been taboo becomes a commonly held belief. 

When a corporation makes these kinds of statements, it means that the people out there fighting every day for these movements are having an effect. Their fight is causing a change in social perception to the point where businesses who carefully choose every single thing they say can post about solidarity with protesters and feel confidant that they are saying something that represents the feelings and beliefs of the majority. A mall being covered in Pride flags is a sign that the country will accept a mall filled with Pride flags. That those working to make social and cultural change are succeeding. 

This this this this FUCKING THIS.

“it’s not nothing to have moved the needle so far that companies have decided the big money is on the side of pandering to us instead of to the people who hate us”