likes cats a normal amount

Vietnamese Animorphs 2018 rerelease covers

Just because one of your chicken eggs hatched a fire breathing dragon people think you’re evil. But you’re still just a regular farmer trying to make a living while dealing with an overprotective dragon, heroes that want to kill you and fanatics who want to worship you as the new Demon Lord.

The thing you need to know about all of this, the thing that got me into all this trouble in the first place, is that chickens will sit on anything when they get broody enough. Anything. Duck eggs, goose eggs, turkey eggs, lizard eggs, egg shaped rocks, anything. Chickens aren’t smart. If it looks vaguely like an egg, they’ll plant their feathery arses on it and wait.

I noticed that there was a bigger egg under one of the broody chickens, when I checked. Of course I noticed, it was twice the size of the others. But I have geese. I figured it was a goose egg she’d found and stolen. It was about the right size, and I didn’t take it out to check the colour because that particular chicken gets very protective of her eggs. I’ve already got a scar on one hand from trying to get eggs away from her. I didn’t want a matched set.

That was a decision I regretted the moment I went out to feed the chickens and found a little blue-and-silver dragonet’s head poking out from under a very confused-looking chicken. The poor thing kept shifting around and looking under herself in a bewildered way, like she didn’t know what to do next. This particular chicken is a good mother, and she’s raised clutches of ducks and geese without any trouble – she’s even resigned to some of her children swimming – but this was too much. She didn’t object when I carefully reached in and fished out the little dragon.

It was so tiny, then. It fitted in my hand, with its little head peeking out one side and its tail looping around my wrist. Cute, too, with its big eyes and little snout turned up towards me.

That was when I made my second mistake. I decided to feed it before releasing it. Dragons are innately wild creatures, everyone knows that. They can’t be tamed. People have tried. The eggs are abandoned as soon as they are laid, and the dragonets hatch able to hunt, so they don’t even bond with their mothers. So just feeding it a little shouldn’t have been a big deal. It should have gobbled the meat and fled as soon as I loosened my grip on it and it saw the open sky.

It didn’t. As soon as I’d fed it, it fluttered up to a sunny window ledge and went to sleep. I went about my work, figuring that it’d leave in its own time.

By noon, it was sitting on my boot, squeaking pathetically. I wondered if maybe it was confused by the farmyard – they usually hatch in mountains, if the stories are right – so I took it back to the farmhouse with me and fed it again when I ate, then took some time away from the fences I should have been mending to walk it up to the hills. I found it some nice rocks, with plenty of lizards and beetles and suitable prey for something that size. It pounced on a beetle almost as soon as I put it down, and when I left it was crunching happily.

I hadn’t walked a quarter of the way back before something hit the back of my boot. The little dragon was holding on with all four claws, and when I looked down it squeaked pathetically. If possible, its eyes got even rounder.

Listen, you don’t make it as a farmer if you just let orphaned baby animals die. We hand-raise calves and lambs and ponies, set chickens to sit on abandoned eggs, or put them under the kitchen stove or by a fireplace. You don’t make a success of farming if you don’t value every animal. A good shepherd will spend all night looking for one lost sheep. So despite what was said later, it wasn’t just sentiment that made me sigh and pick up the little thing and carry it back to the farm.  I am a good farmer. I don’t let orphaned babies die just because they’re a little work.

Continua a leggere

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the peer reviewed figure that 97% (something like that, maybe even higher) of people who receive gender affirming surgery experience no regret is really gobsmacking. people fucking regret everything. 97% satisfaction is really unprecedented in any sphere - medicine, surgery, auto purchases, marriage, having children, taking a new job. to me, this number tells you everything you need to know about “the trans debate”

misha collins didn't "queerbait in real life" he did something significantly weirder

check out this spotify playlist of men covering women’s songs without changing pronouns

nice

the same user made a playlist of women covering men’s songs without changing pronouns!

double nice

*steps one degree of separation outside my normal tumblr orbit* oh wow you people are all out of your minds

#i’m quietly ice fishing with my mutuals but sometimes i perceive the shadows of lovecraftian discourse monsters passing below the surface

the most harrowing animorphs book is the one where the animorphs, who are already child soldiers, are unknowingly forced to fight and kill alien children

yes, this happens

The “good” godlike figure tricks them into it and, the series representation of true pacifism chooses not to tell them what’s going on so he can use them as the tool of vengeance that his pacifism prevents him from becoming himself

#every time I learn something new about animorphs I regret ignoring the bin full of them in primary school#seriously I should have read them but I thought they were lighthearted based on the wackass starfish cover#very embarrassing but yes it was a classic judging a book entirely by its cover sitch#welp better late than never 

From memory I think that starfish one is the one where a teenage girl beats someone up with her own severed arm and also pins a random teenager to the wall in the mall (by her clothes) using steak knives, but more importantly, they are all available online for free with the writers’ blessing.

every

#I’m sorry Animorphs had a WHAT#A WAR?#I never got to read it but I always thought it was a fun and lighthearted story or something#I need to read it 

It’s um

I hate to be the one to break this to you but Animorphs is in fact a war story. The story does not exist without the war. It is specifically a story abut child soldiers being enlisted to fight bodysnatching brain slugs, meaning that almost every time the kids kill a ‘nasty invading alien’ they are also killing an innocent slave. Concepts of the morality of child soldiers, offense vs. defense, what counts as acceptable losses/acceptable collateral damage and whether it’s acceptable to slaughter enemies while they’re helpless, things like chemical warfare and the rights and protections that should be offered to displaced war refugees, as well as war not having ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and most actors being victims of their circumstances and societies, are heavily explored. (As well as trauma – these kids have SO MUCH PTSD. The first suicide attempt takes place in book 3 and things don’t really improve, especially after the torture book.)

I once did a quick tally and found that of all the “main” species in the book (humans plus any alien species that appears in three or more books), only three species do not explicitly attempt on-page genocide in the series. They’re the three species who we are introduced to in the first book as the antagonists.

I’ve done this rant before but animorphs radicalized me farther than anything else. I remember setting the last book down at the age of maybe 12 or 13, the book ending with a member of the main cast dead, warcrimes committed in the name of freedom, every character covered in scars both physical and mental, and I thought to myself “I don’t want to join the army anymore” Those books hit their target audience in me and they changed me forever. If not for them, I probably would have joined the army at 18 and royally fucked up my life

for reference, if you haven’t seen the covers, this is what they look like:

Made a Danny Phantom costume for Halloween.

I was Danny Phantom for Halloween! I think its hilarious that 80% of the Danny Phantom cosplayers I've seen online are transmasc. I think that's very sexy of us.

The hair gooo was somewhat effective but I think if I do this again I'll just buy a wig.

The problem with putting s’mores as a technical challenge is that baking your own s’more from scratch defeats the purpose of s’mores which is of course to spend ten minutes trying to get a crappy store bought marshmallow the perfect golden brown color before going “fuck it” and letting it catch fire then frantically putting it on a graham cracker with hershey’s chocolate before it falls off of the stick you found on the ground

the main ingredient of s’mores is chaos. the secondary ingredient is open flame. only after that do you break out the cheapest possible ingredients and go to town.

wake up america

this is to educate my non-American followers. This really is how the US sees itself. (and yes, 95% of the time, Florida = WHAT?!)

In Florida the more North you go, the more “South” you get 

In Florida the central part pretends to be the south, the western part pretends to be the northeast and the south pretends to be the west I’m not even kidding you 

… Please tell me you guys are kidding.  

Florida is like it’s own country I swear

I’m from Florida and I can confirm this. Also, South Florida is basically Miami and alligators.

oh, i always assumed florida was part of The South?

north florida is yes. The rest is not.

I’m from Florida, and grew up in SC/NC. Can confirm all true. 👍

Um. This is so wrong.

You’re forgetting the part where California sees itself as its own entity.

We do not want to be grouped in with everyone else, thanks.

clearly none of you have ever met someone from texas

Galaxy Quest (1999) (✚)

This is one of those moments that all great comedies have where it stops being funny for just a while and you have to take it absolutely, deadly seriously.

It’s heartbreaking, but I don’t think it’s dead serious. On some level, there’s still something camp and ridiculous about it (that line is inherently silly, regardless of context), and it’s the combination of silly and serious that makes it so poignant. We’re not doing something different than before, we’re just looking at the same thing from a different angle: “what if that objectively silly and camp thing made someone happy, and gave them peace in their last moments?” And that’s what makes it moving and powerful. That’s the whole point of the movie, and that’s why Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie ever.

Whereas, in The Princess Bride for example, there’s NOTHING funny in the line “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s unambiguously raw. We shifted gears completely, we’re doing another thing altogether. We’re not repeating the funny line any more, and the funny line (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”) was not funny inherently, only in the delivery (calm, gentle, with a smile) and the repetition throughout the movie. When you stopped saying it gently to the void and started saying it angrily to the actual killer, it stopped being funny. Shit got real.

Two different ways to accomplish the same thing, both wonderful.

cut open a package of bacon while making food tonight, and then paused to take a pic because I realized the way I open bacon is probably not normal

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is it just me? does anyone else do this?

update:

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(ID in alt text)

I think we’ve all done something very important here. thank you for your input!

ghost hunting team that keep a nonbeliever named steve around as an emergency supernatural suppressant

he waits in the car with a walkie talkie while they investigate and if things break bad they call him in. as soon as he enters everything stops floating around/trying to kill the hunters and he rolls his eyes and goes back to the car.

he’s not bluffing. i can’t emphasize that enough. he 100% believes that the hunters calling him in is either a prank, to make him feel useful, or because they’re spookable cowards who panicked when a book fell.

he stays because the money is good and he can play his gameboy in the car.

i fucking love this so much. it’s like having a service animal but instead it’s a guy named steve who owns more cargo shorts than the Gap continuously baffled by why he keeps getting befriended by goths.

There was a horror tabletop RPG I used to play in high school that actually had a character class like this; the game was Palladium’s Beyond the Supernatural and one of the classes was a character who disbelieved so hard in the supernatural that it didn’t work on them. (Or at least took a massive penalty.) They also were immune to, for example, healing or telepathy, but it meant that any baddies with supernatural powers were at a heavy disadvantage trying to do anything to them.

I love this so much

The idea of a pregnant couple posting about a gender reveal party only go to "PSYCH IT'S THE OTHER KID" is hilarious and also these are some fantastic parents

Honestly if you’re capable of pronouncing a row of asterisks I say go ahead and do it