cheattoe:

a-bore-of-a-whore:

lady-of-greenwood:

sindri42:

solwardenclyffe:

sindri42:

sidereanuncia:

ontologicalidiot:

an-actual-stone:

glumshoe:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

Evidence:

Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.

And they told you science was no fun.

Science!

I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.

Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.

But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.

you mean like

@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares 

I shall never find peace.

Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.

There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.

Yeah there is.  The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor.  But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.

So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.

So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.

Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post

Elves are flat-earthers

This post went from amusing to horrifying, to be brought back down to amusing, sprinkled in with some cannon explanation, and then you leave me here in fucking outrage

apparentlyaspergers:

neonperri:

forgetfully:

violent-darts:

j-gaff:

violent-darts:

uristmcdorf:

violent-darts:

ilikeyoshi:

ilikeyoshi:

ilikeyoshi:

me: hey how long is this thing going to last

someone: haha you just want to know when you’re off the hook

me: hah

me: (actually i just need to allocate the right expectations and backlog of energy and make sure the rest of my day falls in good accordance with it so that i don’t feel time-crunched and propel myself into a hysteria because if i don’t know how long this thing lasts or when it ends i can’t possibly know when literally anything else starts and my entire life becomes an unraveled realm of anarchy with no rhyme or reason and how is that not terrifying to you)

me: hey how long will this take

someone: oh like twenty minutes

me: ok

*an hour later*

me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*

someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby

me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*

someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]

me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?

someone: oh we’re doing it right now

me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?

Any NT/mentally healthy people who would like a model of the SOME (because there are always others depending on the circumstances!) correct responses: 

1. “How long is this gonna last?” “The dinner’s from now till seven, and then there’s, like, deserts and Wandering Around Talking to people around nine. The venue is DEFINITELY kicking us out by 930.”

VARIATION: “How long is this gonna last?” “I honestly have no idea – you have a time limit I need to keep in mind?

2. “How long will this take?” “Oh like twenty minutes.” *AN HOUR LATER* “Okay I swear we’re almost done – we need to drop you at home after, or should we go get a coffee or just sit in the car?” [insert appropriate wind-down or rest activity for your friend here]

VARIATION: *after twenty minutes* “Shit, this is taking longer than I meant it to – you want to go sit somewhere and wait for me? Sorry.” 

3. “Hey, I know this is super last-minute, but we’re going to go do [involving time-consuming thing] – you up for it?” [and then accept “no” if the person says it and maybe try arranging a PRE-PLANNED thing for some future date so that it doesn’t feel like, if they’re not up for dropping and running, they don’t count]

VARIATION: “Heeey we just decided we want to go [involving time-consuming thing] – would you be up for it if we came to pick you up in like 30 minutes?” (Otherwise known as “if it’s not THAT time-sensitive, maybe give a buffer). 

Because here’s the thing: for some people (like, oh, me) that wrench of re-planning around a sudden emergency is <i>actually painful</i>; when it isn’t painful, it’s sort of like making jumping from a huge height not-painful – you might be able to do it, but it’s super physically demanding and you’ll pay a cost for it later. Sometimes it’s worth it, but you can’t do it EVERY DAY, and it adds a definite element of Not Fun to supposedly fun things. 

Think like if every single time someone did that to you, the cost to going was standing very still while someone blasted a full-volume vuvuzela RIGHT into your ear for two minutes. That’s EVERY TIME in a day that plans suddenly change, that massive uncertainty enters the question, whatever: every single time, two minutes of FULL-VOLUME VUVUZELA MUSIC RIGHT IN YOUR EAR. 

Like yeah: you’re not going to die. You CAN deal with it, if you’ve gotta. But now imagine that’s already happened three times that day due to 1. your bus was ten minutes late (throwing the whole day into disorder: VUVUZELA MUSIC TWO MINUTES RIGHT IN YOUR EAR), 2. meeting that was supposed to be twenty-minutes turned into two hours (VUVUZELA BLAST TWO MINUTES RIGHT IN YOUR EAR) and then 3. it turned out something you had to have for your work project was out of stock so instead of doing what you needed to do you had to spend an hour wrangling a totally unfamiliar ordering and inventory system and reworking the next two weeks schedule and then probably doing something TOTALLY DIFFERENT that you were going to do next week that now you can’t do next week because you have to do this thing next week (VUVUZELA BLAST TWENTY MINUTES BECAUSE FUCK YOU RIGHT IN YOUR EAR). 

And now your friend wants you to go out to the bar! Right now! And you like your friend. You do. You even like going to the bar with your friend. 

But you cannot. handle. another. fucking. vuvuzela. screaming. in your. ear. 

So you say no. 

And your friend gets mad. 

Which is like another screaming vuvuzela in your ear AS WELL AS your friend being mad at you. 

So there is no winning. 

And this is why people with these difficulties tend to self-isolate! Because while we’re still utterly fucking lonely and want people, there is only so much fucking metaphorical vuvuzela music we can TAKE. 

(One can take this metaphor even a bit further because you know what some days you end up so surface-inured to the vuvuzela blasts that you don’t THINK they’re getting to you anymore until a) you turn around and MURDER THE VUVUZELA PLAYER and then everyone gets Upset at you, or b) you suddenly find a space where there are no vuvuzelas and burst into tears because it’s so fucking nice omg how. 

Sometimes you even then have to leave that place, because you’re so USED to being hit with RANDOM BLASTS FROM VUVUZELAS that places where there don’t seem to BE any just make you fucked up and paranoid because you can’t stop expecting it but because you can’t see where it would come from your paranoid hindbrain keeps thinking “but that just means they’re hiding REALLY WELL and we have to be MORE CAREFUL” until it gets to a point where you’d rather have your eardrums broken by the noise PREDICTABLY once a week than wait in anticipation. 

Which is fucked up because you would actually MOST like to just … not be screamed at by vuvuzelas but when they just go away you don’t get to enjoy the freedom you just get wound up waiting for the next blast. And this is why we do something called seeking negative stimulation, or neg-stimming.) 

Also, this is why it’s super important to be honest about your plans and expectations.

I have had more than one person intentionally downplay the time-frames and other aspects of events, even to the very nature of the event, because they don’t trust that my avoidance of uncertain scheduling and certain kinds of social situations is based in a genuine prioritisation of my own, known, needs.  They just think if they can trick me into those situations I’ll magically discover I like them. 

It’s called “taking you out of yourself” or “bringing you out of your shell”.

Some notable examples have included being invited to dinner only to find it’s actually a party.  Being told a diversion from plans would take “about an hour” when the person saying that knows full well that just driving to the diversion would take most of that time.  Being told that dinner would be around 5 when the cooking doesn’t even start until an hour after that.  Inviting me around for a quiet visit and then springing a pretend “spontaneous” day trip on me in the hopes I will suddenly learn to love spontaneous plan changes.  And my all-time favourite Worst Incident Ever:

Being invited to visit a relative.  Arriving at their house at the arranged time and letting ourselves in to find no one home, and then getting a call from them to their own home phone to say they were “just at that community centre around the corner enjoying a boot sale (yard sale in the US?) and would I like to join them?  Internally doing the maths that a boot sale is a pleasant, low-stakes situation that is easy to dip into spontaneously because there’s no reason we couldn’t leave when we were ready and.  Arriving at the building to discover they actually meant “hi, I’m running a political fundraising boot sale this weekend and wanted volunteers to set up AND RUN the stalls and now you’re here I can give you a list of jobs and force you into social situations with total strangers that also involve money and you have no idea how long this is supposed to last”.

I am not going to get annoyed if you say “this diversion I want to take in the middle of our plans will probably take about 3 hours out of the day”.  I will be re-working my plans for the day around the timing you give me, and will be glad to be able to ensure I can, for example, pick up the groceries in the morning instead of waiting until the afternoon since the diversion will likely mean the shops will be shut.  I may decline to take part in the diversion if it is important that I be able to complete my original plans for the day, but I should fucking well have the right to make that choice.

Yes, this. 

People don’t do this to me, I think because anyone who talks to me for five minutes becomes pretty sure that if you DO do this to me, there is a significant chance I will outright walk away and go home, and if for some reason I choose not to do that we WILL be having a DIRECT conversation about this that will involve me telling you that if you ever DO do this again, that’s it, we’re done. 

But I have come to be able to do this out of years of just going you know what? Yes. I am the Difficult, Asocial Bitch. That’s me. You are correct. IF this is beyond your ability to handle, please just … save us both time and energy. 

This is not something that everyone is capable of doing! But just because they can’t tell you off – and in fact MORESO IN THAT CASE – doesn’t make it a NOT shitty thing to do. 

I feel like these scenarios describe unhealthy relationships, tbh, and author(s) SHOULD be saying no/be displeased being treated this way. Not downplaying extra efforts required in this examples, but I don’t think people scheduling inappropriately is ever considered ok?

Oh I don’t disagree, but bluntly: it’s incredibly normalized in a LOT of cases. It’s sort of like how tickling someone who doesn’t want to be tickled SHOULD be unthinkable on basic Common Fucking Sense, and yet remains a common human-interaction dynamic that you often get happening with people you’d THINK would know better, and have them sulking and Upset. See also: most gender-based dynamics period.

It is disgustingly normalized and if you do anything but happily go along with such crap then you’re the bad guy. Imo that would be fine if only it would discourage from future repeats. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

As a day-to-day thing, I don’t do spontaneous, unless I am spontaneously keeping my butt at home on the couch with my cats rather than going out and doing whatever. I need advance notice, and planning time, and I do NOT like surprise! events. I have to deal with being “flexible” at work, and it saps all of the capacity I have for that out of me. Anyone doing any of the above to me would hear about it, at length, and with massive amounts of cursing.

( I have much more capacity for this when I’m visiting someplace safe, like my parents’ house, when I am already out of my schedule and work isn’t draining my coping energy. Sure, let’s go out and do something unplanned! But day to day? Nope.)

Yeah, this sounds fucking familiar

@gyhldeptis

@makethwoman

showerthoughtsofficial:

How is it possible that everyone as a kid on earth knew “the floor is lava” game

itsbuckybitch:

avoidcats:

manic-intent:

rabidchild67:

olderthannetfic:

esteefee:

itsbuckybitch:

buckyballbearing:

I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending

Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:

Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)

And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography

I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet

I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it

Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society

It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free

And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)

Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places

I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women

And I’m going to need it to stop

Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.

Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world – in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.

It’s about sex. It’s always about sex. 

From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence – unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time – there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.

And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ – they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ – they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.

The core assumption underlying all of it – an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting – is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.

To anyone who’s reading this – and there’s always a few – thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?

“…women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge.”

I was just telling a friend of mine I attribute my (fortunate) comfort with my own sexuality to a chance encounter, at a very young age, with a paperback titled “My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” by Nancy Friday. Found it in a stack of mystery novels, and man, I remember blushing so hard… It was reading all these fantasies other women had that normalized what, at that young age, I considered to be pretty extreme desires, all in the context of this authority saying, “Anything you fantasize in the privacy of your own head is perfectly natural and okay.”   She asked hundreds of women to share these fantasies so that others could read them and see we aren’t alone; most everyone has these thoughts and fantasies and desires, and that’s perfectly fine.  Since then, I’ve discovered fan fiction as a whole universe of people’s fantasies writ large, and goddamn it, that is perfectly fine. Anyone who wants to argue the point and try to stuff us all back into the cramped cupboard of shame should have a talk with Ms. Friday. I believe she’s still around.

Agreed. Women are shamed for exploring dark themes everywhere else. Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.

Ship and let ship, don’t like don’t read, and your kink is not my kink and that’s okay: these are the maxims that make fandom a welcoming, creative space.

“Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.”

There are a lot of corners of fandom that need this (metaphorically) branded on their foreheads.

When I first started in fandom over a decade back the predominant attitude (at least in the fandoms I was in) was ymmv… your mileage may vary…. can we go back to that please.  

it is incredible to me that writing pornography about minors somehow fits in to this otherwise interesting and informative post about “problematic” fandom behaviour

telling pedophiles to quit it is not a bad thing btw

#like i agree about criticisms and about the need to crack down on problematic things that aren’t just shipping #(tho i see a lot of talking about racism and trans/homophobia in fandom) #but writing about children fucking is literally pedophilia 

It “literally” is not.

Molesting and abusing children is literally pedophilia. Grooming children for molestation and abuse is literally pedophilia. Viewing and disseminating actual child porn is literally pedophilia.

Teenage shippy fanfiction is not literally pedophilia. It’s not even figuratively pedophilia, and I don’t buy for one split second that any of the people trying to derail this post with ~but think of the children~ actually believe that the entire Harry Potter fandom is a malicious network of predators. It is so, so incredibly belittling of CSA survivors to equate their actual real-world suffering with the benign hobbies of fucking Katniss/Peeta shippers. It is so, so cynical and disrespectful to use real live vulnerable children as a weapon in your goddamn ship wars.

Pedophilia is not a joke. It’s not an accusation to sling at anyone who pisses you off on the internet. It’s an incredibly real, incredibly serious issue and I am so, so tired of seeing it trivialised.