so no time to sew a new dress for Oxford Rennaissance Festival this year so i cobbled some stuff together from old dresses and a black summer dress i snagged to be used as a costume base at some point.
Come hang w me this weekend at Oxford Renn! There’s pirates n shit its dope as hell, its in Dorchester, Oxford County, Ontario
this weekend was dope as fuck and im pretty sure i didn’t get more than one bug bite camping so im fuckn pleased.
have this pic of the full costume with all the shit added, pollen count was buckwild ergo mask and it was cold ergo cape. the whole thing together had more of a rogue/pirate aesthetic than planned, but what would yall call this aesthetic??? Roast me in the notes thanx
I don’t know it you do it by land or by sea but you def look like you steal shit
fuck yea thievery
You look like the thief that lives in the woods that are probably enchanted but nobody knows because everyone else is too scared to willingly go in there and many, many people have gotten lost but you know the place like the back of your hand. Every once in a while someone finds your temporary camp by complete accident and you don’t steal from those people – but the rich assholes parading their way through the woods on the one reliable path are a definite target. The definite target. They don’t even see you coming, and the ambush happens before they know it, and then you’ve vanished, but nobody ever sees you running – you’re just gone. You vibe off the vibe that you know a lot about healing – maybe not as much as someone who studies healing for a living, but definitely enough to patch up wounded travelers or rescued captives.
Somehow, though even though you’re a thief living in the enchanted woods, you’re best friends with the queen, and she always greets you happily whenever you grace the castle with your presence – granted, nobody knows how you got into the castle, because the guards never got the opportunity to stop you and the servants never got to announce your presence, but you just showed up and nobody dares to try and throw you out because you and the queen have just sat down to share a bottle of fine wine
bruh this is fuckin dope as hell does anyone wanna start a webcomic on this premise
ok you know that ‘make the princess laugh and you can have her hand in marriage’ thing?
imagine so many come in.
they try, so hard, to make her laugh.
she just sits there, morose, ignoring every man who tries to coax a smile.
one day she’s sitting on the balcony. she just looks so sad.
of course that little thief tries to make her smile.
a girl who goes through the (semi public) royal gardens every day to pick flowers, even though technically only the royal family is allowed to do that.
she sees the princess while she’s picking them up to sell on the streets, and she’s just… so sad. this princess needs someone to cheer her up.
and she tries. she’ll do silly dances when she comes in, she’ll bring up frogs from ponds and act out comedies, she’ll make flower crowns and exaggerate just how hard it is.
the first few days, the princess doesn’t even look at her.
then she starts noticing. this girl, trying so hard to cheer her up. she probably hasn’t even heard of the hand in marriage thing, she doesn’t know she’s trying so hard for nothing.
but she does it anyway.
one day, the princess starts talking to her as she does these things. “You do know that it’s useless?”
“What?” the thief says. “No way! I’m going to get you to laugh!”
“The best jesters in the kingdom have tried, don’t bother,” the princess declared pessimistically, staring down at the girl.
Then the thief puffs out her chest, “Of course I am! I’ll find the best jokes, even better than the jesters have found! I’ll… fight a fire breathing dog for them!”
There’s no laugh, but the corner of the princess’s mouth twitches. it’s sad how she thinks she can make me laugh…
the girl keeps trying, for years, making more silly stories and trading flowers for jokes rather than food or money. the princess slowly realizes the girl is getting closer and closer, asking her for responses in knock knock jokes and encouraging her to speak when she wouldn’t respond immediately.
the princess eventually had the girl hanging from her balcony, holding on tight to the rail and feet wedged between the columns, grinning and telling yet another iteration of that already old chicken joke.
the princess has been smiling, slightly, but she mostly just looks unresponsive. the girl is happy, it’s better than looking so sad, like she had been years before.
the girl moves on to puns, pointing at the exotic lunch the princess was eating. “Why do the melons have to go to get married? They cantaloupe!”
“You only know that word because of me,” the princess snarks, but there’s a small smile there, a bit of happiness. This little flower girl, this thief has grown into an amazing friend, a wonderful person who genuinely just wants to help. she doesn’t know of the deal, only nobles and jesters could know, not the commonfolk.
“Well, it makes quite the pun,” the girl says, proud of her joke. a smile! what an accomplishment!
“Say…” she continued, “What would you call a princess who got swept up in conversation a thief?” she pulled a flower out of her pocket, waving it in front of the princess’s face. the princess’s eyes crossed to see the flower before they rolled at the obvious setup.
though, it was interesting that it obviously involved them.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, sighing in preparation for another horrible pun. “What?”
the girl grinned. “A pretty theft!” she exclaimed, ticking the flower against the princess’s nose.
the princess froze for a moment, stunned. she had been complimented a million times over, called graceful by etiquette instructors, been called beautiful by many a suitor, been called wonderful by her mother before… she stopped thinking about that.
she had never been called pretty.
she burst into laughter at the commonplace compliment, as if she was some sort of milkmaid who had somehow grown up to be good looking! it was ridiculous, the notion, yet somehow it had her blushing all the same.
then she suddenly stopped, realizing what she’d done.
the flower thief was staring at her in amazement, a blush of her own speckling her cheeks. her flower tilted out from in front of the princess’s nose, as if it had it’s own amazement.
“Wow…” the girl breathed. she’d never heard something so beautiful in her life.
The princess was silent, knowing what she had just done. She had just laughed for the first time in years.
The girl may not have been aware of the arrangement, but she was quickly swept up in it. A maid had heard the laughter and burst in, to find the thief and the princess, caught up in each other’s eyes, reveling in what had just happened.
The wedding was beautiful, a flower filled affair, a wonderful nod to how it happened. The king was so happy to see his daughter with someone who made her smile for once, tearing up as they were wed.
The princess’s laugh was still incredibly rare. She still had a hard time smiling. But a well timed joke from the girl– no, her wife– and another flower that had a hidden meaning behind it, than maybe, maybe you would hear it.
After all, the princess had finally laughed with the one she loved.
I was attempting to add maple syrup themed things to my amazon wishlist because people are practically yelling at me in my inbox to add food stuff to my wishlist that I can eat and I found this gem and I am honestly losing my mind:
It’s a classic [City Slicker Girl] with [fancy glamorous but stressful job] is forced into [Rural Environment By Circumstances Outwith Her Control] where she meets [Rugged Rural Area Man Who Juts Wants To:] *spins wheel* “build barns and make maple syrup and be left alone to raise his coyote in peace”, formula right there and honestly I am HERE FOR IT
Oh god it isn’t properly formatted for ebook, why have the maple gods forsaken me.
{Edit} The main dude’s name is Rick Stannard, he’s a rugged manly man with loner tendencies, a pet coyote he rescued from the woods (pretty sure they belong out there bud) who builds barns with his bare hands and harvests maple syrup for his Aunt Joy’s maple themed store. Aunt Joy is of course, an absolute sass factory. I did not expect to be making a cameo in this book, but there you have it.
It’s also been implied that Rick has medical PTSD so even if he turns out to be a total walnut I’m still going to defend him. He is my nephew after all. He’s also a dumbass who just tripped in the snow by attempting to run in his snow shoes, sprained his ankle, blacked out and nearly froze to death while his pet coyote looked on contemplating the merits of going full feral.
Our main city slicker gal is named Lily Hindsdale and she’s super pissed her grandma died and she has to leave her swanky city slicker job to go to “the wilderness” (aka, Vermont) to take care of her grandmother’s estate. She’s giving off serious corporate villain vibes atm, as she plans to sell her grandma’s land to the resort building company she works for, and “bring civilization to these backward living people”. She may yet have some redeemable qualities but I’ve yet to ascertain any. Frankly I’m hoping the coyote eats her.
Update: Lily has no redeemable qualities.
Just in case any of you were doubting that Aunt Joy is actually me.
[edit]
Okay so Lily also has PTSD related to being in the wilderness. I think she got mauled by a bear or something as a child but we don’t know yet.
Rick is also a poor patient and keeps trying to walk on his busted foot. He’s also dazzled by shiny looking women who look like “they belong in make up commercials” and suffers from “meandering laundry list of descriptor syndrome”
You guys, she’s not like other girls, she’s not one of the wild folk like his rugged Vermont cave people, she’s elegant and refined. With skin. We know this because she’s wearing a cream-colored scarf. Also that’s an odd phrasing I can’t get over, “hung to her thighs”, it’s like the author tried to avoid the cliche trope of describing something as “clung to her thighs” and my brain is just…not parsing it. Hung, hung to her thighs. Surely “skimmed” is a better descriptor? “that skimmed her thighs”.
Actually now that I look at it this whole sequence is out of order.
He starts at her face, goes to her legs, then to her coat, and then her scarf? When surely his gaze could just have easily skipped over her taking in detai—you know what fuck it I’ll just rewrite it:
“A woman stood impatiently in the doorway, brushing the curls of her strawberry blonde hair away from her face as she waited impatiently to be let in. She was not one of the locals who frequented the store—Rick felt certain he would have remembered a face like hers, with her glowing warm tan and piercing blue-green eyes. She certainly wasn’t dressed like someone prepared to brave the Vermont winter, but he couldn’t help but let his gaze linger on the cut of her rust colored dress coat, the fabric hugging her figure and skimming just short of her thighs to reveal long shapely legs clad in skinny black jeans and designer boots better suited to the runway than the mud and snow. She was like no one he’d seen. Not since he’d left New York.”
Like, I mean, I know I’m just a lowly smut peddler who does this for a living and all that, but if the most fascinating thing about the beautiful woman standing unexpectedly on your doorstep is the cream-colored scarf she’s wearing
Or maybe he just has a scarf fetish, who knows. I’d be down with that.
Okay so he invited her in and she’s not sat down three seconds before she insulted his entire home, his business and his way of life and told him she wants to buy up all his land to make a tacky hotel resort and bring some “class” to Vermont and my hard headed fictional nephew did the only plausible thing. He’s going to let the coyote eat her.
Wow great book everyone, so glad it just ends there and there isn’t 300 more pages of this. Yep. Yep.
I’ll say this much, at least the author is aware that her main character is a completely unlikable corporate shill and seems to have an intentional sense of humor about it lmao.
Anyway, I’m off to bed, see you all in the morning when I will likely look at my life choices and still decide to keep reading this sticky maple mess cause gosh darn it, I want to know where the pancakes feature in all of this.
After Ragnarok, the Revengers travel back to earth, which includes everybody meeting up with Loki again. As prompted by the post by @artemxmendacium Loki meeting Peter goes a lot better than a certain Irondad feared.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
“Thor, why on earth would you bring Loki here?”
Stark was angry, and Thor had to admit for good
reason. The last time the Avengers had seen his brother he was in chains after
attacking New York and was trying to kill them. But a lot had happened since
then and Loki was no longer the homicidal maniac, as some may have put it; he
was getting better, which Thor tried to explain to his friends.
“I understand your hesitation, but believe me when I
tell you that he has changed.”
“He threw me off a building!”
“I am aware, but…”
“Do you remember how many people he killed?”, Natasha
continued.
“I do.” Thor knew it would be hard to convince them of
Loki’s changed nature. They hadn’t seen him back on Asgard and Sakaar, how they
worked together, side by side. “I also do remember how many people he saved on
Asgard.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe that?”
“Tony, I know it’s hard to believe, but I actually saw
it with my own eyes”, Bruce explained, “we did fight together.”
Thank Frigga for Bruce. Maybe Tony would trust his
word.
“I’m sorry Bruce, but I don’t trust Hulk’s judgement
on fighting.”
“You know, I don’t either. But we have travelled
all across the galaxy together, and, as weird as it is to admit
it, but we’re actually friends.”
Thor looked around the room, at his fellow Avengers,
as reassuringly as he could.
“Guys, I’m sorry, but it is a lot to take in. You
disappear for two years which you spent as gladiator-style slaves on an alien
planet before blowing up your homeplanet to defeat your evil older sister you
never knew and oh, by the way, Loki is good now”, Clint summarized. “Excuse us
for taking a moment to process all this.”
“I understand”, Thor answered, “though if you put it
like that, my brother being good is the most believable of all this.” He
grinned a little and heard a chuckle from Bruce.
“It’s really not funny, guys”, Nat grumbled.
“It’s a little funny.”
“Maybe you had to be there…” Bruce gently patted his
arm, sort of pulled him back. Maybe humour was the wrong way to smooth things
over.
“Friends, we are not asking you to trust Loki. We are
asking you to trust us!”, he pleaded.
Tony locked eyes with Bruce. “You really trust him?”
“I trust that he is willing to better himself and I
trust that we can help him with that”, he nodded.
The Avengers exchanged a few glances, before Tony took
two steps towards Thor, who was getting a little nervous. What if they were to
tell them to leave?
“You vouch for your brother, Point Break?”
“I take full responsibility”, Thor nodded.
“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”, he grumbled and
shook his head, before looking back up. “Fine. We will give him a chance. But
the slightest slip-up…”
“Thank you, Stark, a chance is all I’m asking for.”
Gratefully, he smiled at the man, before he turned to Bruce. “What do you say,
we go and give him the good news?”
“That will not be necessary.”
Thor didn’t need to turn around to recognize his
little brother’s voice. Of course, he had listened in on the entire discussion.
And his friends looked mad about that.
“Loki, what about waiting outside?”, Bruce hissed at
him.
“But it is so much more fun here!” With a smug grin,
Loki greeted the Avengers. “Hello. Long time, no see. How have you been?”
Silence. Thor and Bruce exchanged a quick, worried
glance, before Bruce broke it. “How about I take Loki back to the ship and get
all our belongings?”
“That is a good idea, Bruce.” He nodded at his friend
and shot his brother a warning glance. Loki did a theatrical curtsy and
followed Bruce out of the room.
As soon as the door closed, it felt like all the
tension vanished out of the room. Everybody sank on a chair, leaned against the
furniture and Thor wasn’t sure what to do or say.
anyway i love that thor ragnarok parades around as this cute fun happy go lucky inoffensive film even though at its core it’s just a big resounding FUCK YOU against imperialism and colonialism. thor stands by and watches his ancestral home be completely destroyed because he figures out that asgard was built on the backs of invaded and enslaved people. the second his father’s crimes are exposed he does the right fucking thing and lets it all burn instead of excusing his own ignorance. that scene of the tapestry coming down is so goddamned fucking iconic i could cry oh man
“Other symbols are transparent to the point of invisibility at their core but slathered with so much laughter as frosting that they might escape cursory notice. When The Grandmaster (played brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum) engages in exploitation and human trafficking with a big smile and a manic affect, he reacts angrily, though hilariously, to his actions being referred to as “slavery.” Much the same way that capitalistic exploitation of labor is fine so long as we never make those doing it feel bad. At the end, in the first stinger, the same character (a defeated slaver–wink wink nudge nudge–doyougetit?) declares what is essentially a civil war (where he got his ass kicked) to be a tie.
Perhaps the most obvious and also subtle metaphor is Hela herself, who not only marks the MCU’s first woman villain, but arguably one of, if not the best. Naturally she too has symbolism both glaring and inescapable and somewhat muted. She walks onto the screen and declares herself returned and in control and can’t really understand why no one is happy to see her. In one scene with Thor she indicts Odin as: “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it" and literally reveals how a sanitized history has covered up the real one. (No, like LITERALLY it covers it up.) She asks where Thor thinks all the gold came from. And in doing so she reveals that the nine realms were conquered and Asgard is a colonialist and imperialist power. Their prosperity has come at the expense of those they vanquished. She says that she will kill everyone who doesn’t share her vision of Asgard’s return to glory and power.
The only thing that could have made this more overt would be if she were wearing a red MAGA cap during her monologue.
But the family dynamic of the Asgardian royals is far more subdued as subtext for colonialism and white supremacy. Each presents a facet both of the complexity of colonialist nations (particularly the US) but also of the periods in history. And it brings out the real metaphor of the film–the tension between the distant past, the recent past, and the present. Hela represents a violent, tyrannizing distant past that has made the colonialist power great, and now seeks to destroy any who would challenge her vision. And when most of Asgard rejects her, she draws on that past (literalizing the rise of long dead armies who will execute her vision). Thor is a young, well-intentioned and good hearted person who has benefitted directly from that violent past without knowing it and now comes face to face with it–and is shocked at its power (a moment literalized by the smashing of his hammer). Odin participated in the crimes, changed his mind, covered up the past, declared everything all better, and held Hela in check. Of course there is also Loki: a character who doesn’t care as long as he gets his.”
YES to all but the last sentence of that.
Loki is part of the colonialist/imperialist Asgardian history as well – he is the last thing Odin stole in his quest for dominance over Jotunheim.
My dad is Native American, and my dad loves to talk about how Loki reminds him of the tradition of colonizers taking indigenous children from their families and sending them to boarding schools or putting them in white foster families.
Think about it – first, we have no evidence that Loki was unwanted except for what Odin, the colonizer, tells us: that Loki was Laufey’s child, abandoned in the temple. But…if he was a newborn abandoned in a temple, how does Odin know who his father was? Given what we know about Odin’s history now, doesn’t it make more sense that Laufey placed his very much wanted newborn son in the temple in the hopes that it or the gods or the Casket of Ancient Winters would keep him safe while he and every warrior in the entire country apparently went to battle that night? That Odin, the colonizer, went to that temple to take the casket and the newborn prince so that Laufey, with no heir and no source of power, could never rebuild what was damaged that night? That Laufey grieved the loss of his son but had no power to take him back, compared to the strength of Asgard?
That’s what happened to indigenous children perfectly legally in the U.S. all the way up to the 1970s. Canada’s last boarding school wasn’t closed until the 1990s.
At the Carlisle school, a boarding school that Native American children were shipped to in Pennsylvania, they acted according to the motto “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” and that is exactly the approach Odin took with Loki. Loki is not told about his heritage. He is not taught anything about Jotun language, art, food, gender roles, family or political structure, or culture of any kind. He – along with Thor and every other Asgardian child – is taught only that Frost Giants are the monsters and that Asgardians – imperialist colonizers – are the peacekeepers. Asgardian culture is the only culture and is good; Jotun culture is savage and not worth talking about, let alone learning.
Loki’s internalized issues surrounding this carry him through the plot of the first Thor film, in which he attempts to prove that he is a true Asgardian – which he’s been brainwashed for fifteen hundred years, a truly unfathomable lifetime, to believe is the best thing you can be – and not a Jotun monster by setting up a scenario in which he is literally killing the Indian (Laufey) to save the man (Odin). That Odin does not value this action doesn’t diminish his responsibility for the centuries of work he did to turn Loki into a young man with no emotional framework for being able to accept himself for who and what he is and his subsequent spiral into this plan.
Loki is so emotionally damaged that when he thinks his Asgardian colonizer-father can only see him as a savage, he attempts suicide. This type of damage, too, was not uncommon for indigenous youth who were stripped of their culture and felt as though they were ultimately not capable of being either white or indigenous.
Loki later struggles with being manipulated by Thanos and the Mind Stone, and while this is presented as having started as some mad thirst for power on Loki’s part, it’s worth examining closer. It’s entirely plausible that what ruling Midgard meant to Loki was not infinite power (especially given the apparent benevolence he shows in Ragnarok when he is actually ruling – the Asgardians are neither overly surprised that Odin was actually Loki nor thanking Thor for relieving them of Loki’s rule, and they look as prosperous and happy as the ever have when Thor arrives), but rather a way to prove to Odin that Loki was like him: not a savage, but a colonizer in his own right.
The Dark World contains its own take on colonizers – Frigga is the center of that film even after her death, and nobody talks about how she embodies kind-hearted white feminist colonizer bullshit. She is sweet and strong-willed and a good mother and…and she kept Loki’s heritage from him as well. She teaches him her magic but never tells him that she isn’t the source of his. She doesn’t speak up when her Jotun (indigenous) son is sentenced to prison for actions contributed to by her Aesir (white) husband, who is both judge and jury. She visits him in secret, because she loves him but doesn’t love him quite enough to publicly act against her (white) husband. She’s the lady down the street whose foster children of color all loved her growing up but are now certain she would have voted for Trump, because she loved them as individuals but not enough to overcome her racism. And she did love Loki. That’s the hard part, and we can see Loki struggle with the emotions around that over the course of the film.
Loki’s actions at the end of that film come back to killing the Indian and saving the man – he fakes his death, and it looks like he’s setting himself free from the responsibilities of trying to navigate who and what he is, but he doesn’t actually choose freedom. He’s still so sure that being a Jotun is unacceptable that he has been walking through worlds as an Aesir – as Frigga’s son, if not quite Odin’s – and there’s nowhere for him to go emotionally or physically but back to Asgard. We’re initially led to believe he has killed Odin and is on the throne because he craves power, but the truth is that Odin is living out his days wistfully in New York and not even trying to return to Asgard, because…well, that part is a mystery. Does he think Loki will be a good king? It seems that way, given that Odin had not hesitated to prevent Thor from being the king when he wasn’t ready, but we can only speculate.
Loki rules Asgard for four years, which isn’t long compared Odin’s reign, which stretched across millenia, or even his own life, as he’s nearly Thor’s age (approx. 1500), but the people seem happy, healthy, and as well-off as ever when Thor returns. The only things about Loki’s rule that are relevant to this are that the Asgardians (aside from Thor) haven’t been engaging in inter-realm stuff at all as far as we can tell, because Loki is not the colonizer he tried to be under the Mind Stone’s influence, and…the play.
That play that was seemingly just in there for laughs. Watch it again, and you’ll notice that it’s not just Loki being, as Tony pointed out that he can be, a full-tilt diva. The play dramatizes his false sacrifice, yes, but it also contains a fictional retelling of his relationship with Odin. Any good therapist would have a field day with this line:
“Loki, my boy… ‘Twas many moons ago I found you on a frost-bitten battlefield. On that day, I did not yet see in you Asgard’s savior. No. You were merely a little blue baby icicle that melted this old fool’s heart.”
Loki tries to paint himself in a positive and tragic light, sure, but he does the same for Odin. He wants so badly to be able to believe that Odin raised him because he loved him that he rewrites what Odin himself gave as the reason for taking him.
“I thought we could unite our kingdoms one day. Bring about an alliance, bring about permanent peace… through you.”
Loki was intended to sit on Jotunheim’s throne as Thor’s counterpart, an Asgardian figurehead under Odin’s guidance, with no understanding of his own culture or the people he ruled. This is what was done to the sons of indigenous chiefs across the world through the boarding schools of the 18- and 19-00s. This is peak colonialism.
At the end of his life, Loki is able to start to move past his issues. He comes to save the Asgardians, because he knows that they are not Odin, though they benefited from his actions. Set free from the expectation that he return to Thor’s side just because they were raised as brothers, he returns to him anyway because he loves him and because he has learned to separate who both of them actually are as people from what Odin wanted them to be. In a moment of obvious symbolism if you think of him as a victim of Odin’s colonization of the realms, he carries out the resurrection of Surtur and helps his brother of choice destroy Asgard and the legacy of colonization that it was built on.
As he dies, he articulates all of the complicated things that he is – “Loki, Prince of Asgard, Odinson, the Rightful King of Jotunheim, God of Mischief” – but before that, before he calls for the Hulk, he starts with “Well, for one thing, I’m not Asgardian,” and in that moment, for the very first time in his entire life, Loki says that like he’s proud of it.
Loki is not the one part of the story of Odin, Hela, and Thor that isn’t about colonization and its evils – he is the direct victim of it. He is the colonized.
you’re going from one extreme environment to the polar opposite, and that is gonna throw you at first.
high school:
every minute of the day scheduled
immediate penalties for missing class
need permission to go to the bathroom WTF
your movements/behavior strictly enforced with punishment systems
you’re forced to interact with teachers and classmates
small assignments over short periods
basically bullied by the administration into obeying arbitrary rules
college:
you can show up late. it’s a jerkwad thing to make a habit of, but you can do it
YOU CAN FUCKING SKIP CLASSES WTF. most professors don’t take attendance. I missed soooooo many classes. use good judgement or your grades will suffer
DONT NEED PERMISSION TO GO TO THE BATHROOM. or leave class early. you can just, literally walk out? on bad mental health days I found it helpful to like, leave in the middle of class and spend 10-15 min resting. and then walking back in. (but be careful not to disrupt the class. I mostly did it when there was a back exit.
No Body Cares About Almost Anything. Dress code what’s that? u wanna wear a bikini to class, you can. a unicorn onesie? go ahead. randomly burst into parkour while walking to class? it’s whatever. you can literally (in the short term) get away with so much shit, and so many bad choices. no more demerits or detention or suspension
very little accountability/punishment, but the few rules they do enforce come at a huge cost if u get caught (these things are also arbitrary)
big part of your grade can be large end-of-term essays/assignments. you get to put it off andoff and no one holds you accountable…. until the grades come in. (I’ve failed more than one class this way)
you have to consistently self monitor or you’ll end up putting work off until way to late
No one’s stopping you from making bad choices. or even telling you not to. usually the opposite really. pay attention to your choices.
high school forces you (unsustainably) into study routines but without teaching you how to do it without external pressure. That framework collapses super quickly. you’re going from one ridiculous extreme to another, you’re gonna end up overindulging & being irresponsible bc
you couldn’t until now
your brain is trained to weigh consequences/rewards in the short term
you’re exhausted from high school
it feels like everyone else is doing it
my GPA bombed in college, I was not prepared. my advice comes from only my experiences, but check the notes, I’m sure my followers have loads to offer. off the top of my head:
look for stablizing influences
no seriously choose your friends wisely, their bad habits will become yours. college students tend to function in herds.
join study groups. for most classes. do it.
FREE TUTORING THERE’S FREE TUTORING TAKE ADVANTAGE
make friends with the TAs, go to them for homework help. you can like, ask them about a specific question and they’ll walk you through it.
as s freshman, maybe don’t sign up for classes with large term projects.
always check ratemyprofessor.com before enrolling in a class. it won’t always tell you much but it can give you huge red flags.
you can change your class schedule super easily for maybe 2 weeks. use that.
you can actually basically avoid talking to the professor the entire semester. DONT do this. be careful about self isolating
ASK FOR HELP ASK FOR HELP ASK FOR HELP. professors can actually be really accommodating if you explain you’re struggling with adjusting, mental health, deadlines.
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES. USE THE STUDENT HEALTH SERVICES.
just make a (free!) appt w/ any therapist. it’s amazing and you don’t need parent permission. do it at the start of of the semester, before you start struggling. this is s fantastic prevention tool
last thing: if you’re a white dude be careful not to talk too much in class it’s a Thing)
related note: don’t take philosophy
tell your mom I’m having a good day and I said hi!
Not all of them. 30 and 50 aren’t spelled with the letter e in it …
father god
…if you can split a number in half evenly, it’s even. 30 and 50 are odd.
-_-’
(15+15=30
25+25=30)
25+25 = 30? You sure about that??
Lord have mercy….
Bye
3 days into 2018 smh
LMAOOOOOOO
One
Three
Five
Nine
And since everything else after that is a variant of these numbers, then all odds have the letter ‘E’.
🗣YOU FORGOT SEVEN!!
It keeps getting worse.
LMAOOO WHAT IS GOING ON
My head hurts…
This is why that Tumblr University shit was the dumbest idea ever just look at this
who failed yall?
IM SCREAMING
You whole ass forgot about eight – a number with an e and is pretty fucking even
why would 8 be brought up if it’s EVEN in a post about ODDS??????? the post said “every single ODD number has an ‘e’ in it” not “every single number with an ‘e’ is odd” what the fuck
3 days until 2019 and we’re still here
happy New year’s eve
I’m going to bring this flaming dumpster into 2019 so future generations can see what a mistake Tumblr was
Er, guys two is odd and doesn’t have an e. Just saying…
did you deadass just try to tell me two is odd? i’m fucking crying throw the whole website away
Reblogging for the last one😂
The one thing I notice is that no matter how much you want to throw this site away, you just can’t.
TWO IS ODD?!?! PFFFTT I’M SCREAMING
Wait what about zero that’s an odd number ,no?
ok but hear me out fifty and thirty make up for the fact they have no e by the way they are pronounces third-E fifth-E
bro why do 30 and 50 matter THEY’RE FUCKING EVEN
what the actual fuck is happening
1 is an even number
I’m gonna smack you
-30 and -50 have an e in them
Wait why are we so quick to throw away the Zero idea
Zero isn’t a number
It can’t be divided by two though, can it
It can??? 0/2=0??
OD NUMBERS
onE
thrEE
fivE
sEvEn
ninE
OD numbers huh?
Anything that ends with a 0,2,4,6,8 is even and the rest is odd (1,3,7,9) stop freaking out y’all
YOU FORGOT 5
DUDE WHAT ABOUT FOUR
What about it?????
THAT DOESN’T HAVE E IN IT
THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S EVEN?????
A R E Y O U G U Y S O K A Y
IM FUCKIN SOBBING HAVAGAFDHFDHHBJJ
im rblogging this again oof
Is it too late to change my major after I already received the degree? Asking for a friend… 😣
You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”
Well I see that, and I raise you this:
An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.
And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.
He’s crushed by the competition every single time.
Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker.
There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.
And he wins.
Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something.
The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.
So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.
He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”
There’s an international competition, and Main Character-kun and all his candy-haired rivals/peers/nakama/friends are being housed in the same hotel.
The night before the competition, some ungodly scream sounds from the Naruto-kid’s room. The rest of the cast rush in, flick on the lights, and find Naruto-kid sitting up in bed, his hair completely flat and utterly black, a pair of DIY salon gloves discarded next to his bed. He races to the mirror across the room, hands hovering in shock around his straightened hair, as though unable to recognize the boy staring back at him.
It’s… an unsettling act of personal vandalism, but Naruto-kid seems unhurt. After verifying he’s okay and reporting it to hotel security, most of the kids are content to go back to their own rooms and just double-check their own locks.
Most seem content…. Not all…
The next day, Naruto-kid is eliminated from the competition nigh-instantly. He’s given no chance to monologue about his ambitions, his friends, his hometown. Not even a second spared for a flashback to the bullying that became the formative motivator of his childhood.
No. He’s summarily eliminated by another candy-haired contestant. Naruto-kid, with his suddenly unassuming black hair, is dismissed from the arena. And Main Character-kun is distressed.
There’s a murderer on the loose. Just in no traditional sense. Another kid is shaved bald in the middle of the night, and eliminated from the competition the next day. Colored contact lenses go missing, and suddenly the red-eyed yandere girl doesn’t have a leg to stand on. She’s sent home without the slightest bit of fanfare. Someone funnels bleach into the sprinkler line, and a triggering of the fire alarm leaves a whole arena of contestants doused in the ruinous fluid. Their candy colors melt into brittle, tacky, bleachy off-orange. Not a single one survives that night’s round of eliminations.
Main Character-kun is still pink. He’s still gelled. He’s still dressed in fiery robes and platform sandals with a bandana cinched around his forehead. He hoards hair dye in his room and sleeps with one eye open. He can only watch in silence as this gruesome assassination plot unravels, without a doubt in his mind that he is the real target.
One night, there’s a knock on his door. And the twisting of a key. And the squeak of hinges swinging open. Main Character-boy’s breathing halts. His time has come.
He looks. It’s the blue-haired girl, the quiet one with self-confidence issues. Her hair is tied into twin pigtails. She’s carrying something in her right hand. Main Character boy braces for impact.
She flicks on the lights. He looks. They’re wigs, in her hand. Three of them. Purple Green and Orange, each primmed and poofed and curled to extravagant degrees.
“Here,” she offers, hand extended. “Take whichever you like. They’re extra.”
“Wait. Why…? What’s this–what’s happening?”
She takes a step forward, and she shuts the door behind her. With her free hand, she grips the blue hairline at her scalp, and she pulls back gently, revealing netting. She drops the blue hair to the ground, and pulls the netting free from her forehead, and a loose, unassuming bob of perfectly black, perfectly normal hair falls around her shoulders.
She’s unassuming in every possible regard, mundane in every sense, a girl to blend into the backdrop of millions.
“We’re not going home yet,” she says. “Not you, and not me.”
chrissy i want you to know im in love with this
The Comb and the Dye are in fact the real anime weapons of this series im so glad they’re wielding them as such
The Main Character girl wraps her hair back up in the
netting and fixes her blue wig back in place. She takes a seat in the nearby
desk chair and explains why she’s here. She’s suspected for a while that she and MC-kun are the
same, both normal-looking people masquerading in this candy haired world. MC-kun
had seemed just a bit too distraught during the Naruto-kid incident. That was when Main Character-chan first noticed him, and when she recognized his shade of candy pink hair by its bottle
brand.
MC-chan explains that she had lived a very normal and
unassuming life. She did Stage Crew in middle school for the drama club, always
the unnoticed extra in the background, sweeping in silently, covertly, under
darkness to handle the scene changes and wardrobe transformations. She honed her skills making props and costumes
for the drama kids, til she was a master of needle and thread, dyes and combs,
and props built from paper and plastic.
She thinks it was that attention-to-detail she cultivated in
prop-design that let her finally See what MC-kun had seen—the Candy Haired
world around her that constantly overshadowed whatever she did.
One day, she put on the wig. And she never looked back.
But she doesn’t know who the hair assassin is either, any
more than MC-kun. There’s still strength in numbers. And she figures if they
work together, their odds of survival are greater.
MC-kun agrees.
…
The next day is a free day for the kids competing in this
International Competition. The morning passes with most of the contestants
montaging through a romp in the city, tasting local cuisine and window-shopping
around the market area and getting into Kodak-moment worthy shenanigans.
MC-kun and MC-chan steal away to a quiet park, sitting at a
picnic table, putting pink- and blue-heads together to talk through all the
info they have, and what options are open to them. They don’t get very far. A
glasses-wearing girl appears from behind the bushes and stops them cold.
Glasses Girl is small and wiry, mousy in her frame. She has
orange hair that poofs around her head, cropped at chin level, in a way that
reminds MC-kun vaguely of a roosting chicken. Her glasses are enormous on her
freckled face, and they capture the light, obscuring her eyes behind their
glare.
“You two… you’re fakes, aren’t you? Both of you.”
MC-kun stops cold. MC-chan spins around in her seat,
wide-eyed. “I don’t… I don’t even know what that means! Go away before we—”
Glasses Girl pulls an immaculate, highly stylized laptop
from her bag. She flips it open with one hand, propping it on the table and
typing furiously, too fast to even see her fingers. Audio begins to play from
the laptop speakers.
“We’re not going home
yet. Not you, and not me.”
“I hacked into your phone last night,” GG-chan states
simply, head tilted toward MC-kun. “I’ve heard the whole conversation.”
“How?!” MC-kun asks. He holds his phone at a distance, like
it’s suddenly venomous.
GG-chan shifts. Suddenly the glare of her glasses is no
longer obstructing her eyes. Behind the coke-bottle look is an expression of
pure brow-knitted confusion. “I don’t…. I don’t actually know. I just could.”
GG-chan was an art student. A not-very-good-at-all art
student. And a very-much-below-average competitor in sculpting competitions. She
was plain, and unassuming, and inconspicuous, and jealous of the
better-established art students around her with their own flashy styles. Her
peers wore giant non-prescription glasses; they dyed their hair bright colors
and cropped it short to perfect hipster chique.
GG-chan tried to imitate that. But as a truly-not-fantastic
artist, she couldn’t even pull that off. She dyed her hair, picked out glasses,
overshot “hipster”, and landed firmly in “geek”.
She landed so
firmly in “geek” that internationally-acclaimed hacker abilities spawned with
her makeover. Suddenly she could break into anything, override anything, hack
or fix or erase anything over a permanent wifi connection that followed her as
its hotspot.
Her laptop never loses charge. Her bash scripts never fail.
Her glasses always glint in the slightest bit of light and slide down her nose
so that she has to keep her middle finger pressed firmly to the bridge at all
times.
She’s afraid of being sent home in ruin, sent back to her
life as a mediocre art student.
GG-chan wants to join the effort to not be eliminated.
…
A day passes. GG-chan has hacked all the email accounts of
the registered contestants and has found nothing suspicious. MC-chan has spent
her time crafting shorter-cut wigs to give to MC-kun and GG-chan as backups.
MC-kun has been trying his best to understand what he’s gotten into. He bought
a few extra obnoxious bandanas to bolster his obnoxious outfit, as if that
might help.
They’re sitting quietly at lunch, eating in silence, with no
new information to share and no desire to attract unwanted attention from the
contestants around them.
“Ohhhhh my what is
this? Has this pathetic posse of plebeians formed a little club oh how quaint!”
MC-chan chokes on her noodles. GG-chan startles. MC-kun
groans.
The voice belongs to a platinum-blond boy, dressed to the
nines, who’s sidled up to the table unannounced. He reeks of ambition and money
and arrogance and a very particular high-end cologne, and he laughs heartily at
his own joke. He flicks a lock of blond hair from his face, which all but
sparkles.
MC-kun recognizes this kid. He was one of the first Candy
Haired kids to declare an eternal rivalry with him.
“What’s it to you?” MC-kun challenges, already ticked off.
And the Rich Blond Rival Boy deflates. Comically. Pale and
hollow-cheeked and exhausted, suddenly leaning against their lunch table,
speaking in a rasp. “Please let me join you. I’ve been wearing this Gucci suit
for two weeks straight I don’t have any others.”
No one answers immediately. No one has anything resembling an answer.
“Then buy another suit!” MC-kun says.
“Do I look like I’m made of m o n e y to you?!”
“YES.”
“Ah ha! Yes that is the point, well you see–”
and RBR-kun pulls out a soggy PB&J from his bag, slumps into an open seat at the
table, his eyes dull and matte, solemnly chewing his lunch. “Can one of
you spot me like $1.50 for the bus ride to the competition arena tomorrow? I
spent the last of my money on this bread.”
MC-kun: “What?”
RBR-kun: “I don’t have money!”
MC-kun: “Why are you ACTING like a rich boy if you DONT
HAVE MONEY”
RBR-kun: “LOOK IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED OKAY.”
MC-kun: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT JUST KIND OF
HAPPENED.”
And well, it just kind of happened. Rich Blond Rival Boy is
as fake as they come. He grew up in a modest household, making money over the
summer by doing yard work for neighbors. He was fairly frugal and quiet and
unassuming, until his grandma bought him a nice tux for the school dance, and
he dyed his hair platinum blond on a dare, and suddenly the world was in his
pocket.
Suddenly he had connections in high places. Suddenly he
could have wait staff doting on him at a moment’s notice. Suddenly he could summon
helicopters at the snap of his fingers, and have any product imaginable, legal
or not, air-lifted to him on a whim. Everyone was his pawn. Everything bent to
his will. Ever since then he’s been unstoppable in his ambitions.
He just doesn’t have any of the actual money to maintain this. All his cards are overdrafted. His
credit is in the toilet. Several different loan sharks technically own the
rights to his immortal soul.
Rich Blond Rival Boy wants in on the League Of Background
Characters, because he is utterly afraid of the ruin he faces if he is exposed.
If the others get assassinated, they get sent home. If RBR-kun gets
assassinated, the debtors will drag him out by his toes.
A scuffle erupts over by the lunch line. It’s over in an
instant. A shriek, a clatter, a tray and knife hitting the ground. The biker
ruffian boy with the blue mohawk lies on the floor. His shorn-off mohawk spikes
lie on the platter, as if being served to the cafeteria at large.
Worried murmurs break out in the crowd.
No one had seen the knife-yielder.
No one had seen anything.
As if the act were committed by someone impossible to even notice.
“Hey, how is it that we’ve all managed faster-than-light interstellar travel and it’s relatively commonplace?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I never really paid attention in school.”
“Oh, well, it’s simple, really. All it takes is—”
[LOUD TRAIN NOISES]
“Wow! Really? That’s incredible! What an amazing technology. Thank you for telling me this.”
Alternatively:
“Hey, how are you able to make this interstellar voyage in an amount of time comparable to sailing a ship across an ocean?”
“I have no idea. I sit at the controls, put on a blindfold, and start pressing buttons and hoping for the best.”
“That seems… unwise…”
“It hasn’t failed me yet.”
“How do you make this thing go thousands of times faster than the speed of light?”
“Oh, you know. I just press some buttons and hope the laws of physics look the other way.”
“That’s insane.”
“It helps if I’m really wasted.”
“How do you make FTL travel work?”
“Well, this button sends us into a dimension of darkness and horror inhabited by todash monsters incomprehensible to the human brain, where the laws of reality do not dare to set foot for fear of corruption.”
“That sounds… bad…”
“Yeah. On second thought, let’s stay put. One habitable planet is just as good as the next, I think.”
“Yeah. Space is a silly place.”
“I can’t believe the ancients used to have spacefaring technology. That was thousands of years ago! How did we lose that? Where did we go wrong?”
“Are you referring to the dilithium crystal myth?”
“Yeah. They used them to power their starships.”
“You know ‘starship’ was a euphemism, right? They didn’t actually travel through interstellar space. They just ground up dilithium crystals into a psychoactive ointment and applied it between their legs and the resulting trip probably made them feel like they went to the stars. The idea that they ‘rode’ on ‘starships’ actually just means they used—”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear it. History majors ruin everything.”
“How do you expect to get a ship of this size to the other side of the galaxy in such a short period of time? I don’t see any cryosleep chambers, so I can only surmise you’ve discovered FTL travel.”
“Very astute, my dear fellow. It operates under a simple mechanism that I’m sure you’re already familiar with, in some crude fashion. May I ask you a personal question? Good. Do you accept that the universe is a cruel and spiteful place?”
“Well… I uh… I don’t know. I guess I’m agnostic, when it comes down to it, but…”
“But it sure seems as though the cosmos at large seek at all times to punish hubris, yes? To elevate heroes only as an excuse to dash them against the rocks? Surely you’ve heard the saying ‘no good deed goes unpunished’?”
“Of course.”
“It’s true. Nature abhors a vacuum of retribution. This is the theory I have developed and upon which I have based my life’s work. All the pilot of this vessel has to do is declare, “Boy howdy, I sure am glad this ship will never leave the planet and its crew dragged across the galaxy to land safely on Egoni Beta c! I am too good of a pilot for that to ever happen!” and the universe will take care of the rest out of spite.”
“You’re exploiting the Universal Law of Situational Irony?”
“Exploiting? I am obeying it in the only way I know how.”
“You’re an accomplished starship pilot. May I ask you how FTL travel works?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. The computer takes care of that. Nobody likes to admit it, but there isn’t a human alive who could tell you the means by which we achieved warp speed. Computers have been designing themselves for generations and we don’t really know how they work, just that they do.”
“Oh. Then… then why do you have this control room? You’ve got all kinds of buttons and wheels and algorithms in here! Surely you must do something to make this ship go.”
“It’s all for show. It doesn’t actually matter what I do in here, but pressing buttons makes my monkey brain feel accomplished. You see, the computers take care of absolutely everything for us, but they’re programmed to prioritize keeping the essential human spirit alive through trials and hardship. Nothing too difficult, mind you, but just tricky enough to make us feel invigorated when we ‘solve’ our problems. I’m pretty sure they engineer dangerous situations just so we can rescue ourselves in the nick of time. Otherwise we’ll become complacent, and the spark of enterprising humanity that brought us here will fade. Not sure if I believe that, but the computers do, and that’s what matters. So I press some buttons at random, put on my captain’s hat, spin the wheel, and pretend I am having some kind of effect upon the universe.”
“But that’s so depressing!”
“Is it? Sounds like you just need to press some buttons. Look – they’re bright and colorful and they go ‘beep beep’! What more could you want?”
“I recently learned that the Ardavan Principle was first discovered by a fiction writer in the early 21st century. That seems wild to me… do you know if it’s true? I always thought Ardavan must have been a famous quantum physicist to have discovered the key to faster-than-light travel!”
“Nope! Nadia Ardavan was a sci-fi author with a degree in horticulture. She actually developed the Ardavan Principle for one of her novels. The story goes that her readers and peers gave her a hard time for handwaving aspects of her worldbuilding to focus instead on speculative botany. They kept complaining that her stories weren’t ‘hard sci-fi’ because, while the botany was exhaustively researched and captivatingly believable, she never bothered to give an in-depth and scientifically plausible explanation for how her human characters could travel so easily and quickly between distant planets. You know the ancient proverb, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’?”
“Yeah, it sounds familiar…”
“Well. Necessity has nothing on pure spite.”
never underestimate the will of a science fiction author to make something plausible just because someone said it was impossible.
The second to last one is the plot of Asimov’s short story Escape!
Also, you realize how disappointed I am after having googled Nadia Ardavan?
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness – but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you – and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty – humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits – but they’re highly functional.
Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves – and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
It would be interesting to meet a species with fewer senses than humans have. Aliens who cannot see or hear would view our ability to do so like we would look at telepathy or precognition.
They compensate for their own lack of natural camouflage by TERRAFORMING THEIR ENVIRONMENT TO MATCH THEIR NEEDS
They are HIGHLY RESISTANT to temperature change.
They PUT METAL AND INK IN THEIR HIDES FOR FUN
They are SO SECURE in their position as predator over prey that they have developed and wear an array of decorative and protective wear in colors so bright that it challenges any other species to just /try/ to mess with them. However, they have also developed highly effective materials that both swallow light and completely divert it, effectively creating invisibility, as well as perfect camouflage for everything from deserts to tundra to water to forest to jungle.
THEY SEND HUNDREDS OF LOUD EXPLOSIVES INTO THE AIR BECAUSE THEY LIKE THE PRETTY COLORS
They have managed to harness ENERGY ITSELF to heal themselves.
They as a species can climb sheer rock surfaces and trees, AND walk and run (Even those that have lost their limbs being able to attach prosthetics or use contraptions to get around) AND THEY SWIM AND FLY AND GO IN SPACE AND THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THEM????
They are so persistent and patient as to carve into rocks for massive amounts of time in the name of preservation of history, and have elevated it to an art form.
