on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship
it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.
“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”
“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.
“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”
“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”
“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”
“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”
“but then what is its purpose?”
“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”
this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard but I thought about it for five seconds and realized that if I were, say, a random communications officer onboard this ship and someone taped a knife to a roomba it would take maybe three weeks before even I was inordinately fond of Stabby. I would be proud of Stabby when I met up with my other spacefleet friends for space coffee, I would tell them about the time Stabby got the second mate in the ankle five seconds before the fleet admiral beamed on board and she swore in seven different languages in front of high command.
also by the fourth day Stabby would be in the ship’s log, he’d have little painted-on insignia, people would salute him as he went by, and someone would hook up a twitter account to tweet maniacal laughter and/or a truly terrible knock-knock joke every time he managed to nick someone.
Omg so the ting I typed up might actually happen this is gold
I am suddenly astonished that Stabby isn’t Farscape canon. 1812 was weird enough.
Stabby’s little charging dock would start accruing cuddly toys and commemorative holo-vids of Stabby’s greatest stabs. Its insignia would start off at a fairly low rank, but soon, without anyone every discussing it, everyone would know that Stabby got to take the rank of the highest ranking crew member it stabbed. The ceremony for Flag Admiral Stabby was beautiful. The captain gave a speech.
why am i proud of stabby this is irrational
like if you’re proud of stabby
reblog to tape another knife on him
I love how Stabby is now included in most speculative space posts now. All Hail Stabby!
Stabby doesn’t even exist and I’m already proud of him
like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
they are scary smart at solving puzzles
some crows stay with their mates until one of them dies
they can remember faces
SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT. They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows. Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag. But the nice guys with masks they left alone. THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight. THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.
A colleague of my dad’s lives next to a lake, and looked out the window one morning to see a duck trapped in the ice. A crow swooped down. “Oh hell,” she thought, expecting carnage, because crows are opportunists. But the crow chipped at the ice with its beak until the duck was free.
Idk of this counts but a few crows saved me from a magpie swooping attack once ,they’re bros who can tell when magpies are being unreasonable and need to chill
I love crows so damn much. When I was fifteen, I hit a pretty serious bout of depression, to the point I was in my room for months. Well, a family of crows made a nest in a tree outside my window. There were two parents and two chicks. One chick was healthy and strong. One was weak, and had a caw like something being strained. It sounded more like a rooster crowing and so my parents jokingly named him ‘Buck’.Well… months passed and Buck’s sibling was taught to fly. His parents focused on the sibling because the sibling was strong. The father stayed behind to try and teach Buck, but I saw him try to fly, fail, and crash to the floor. His father helped him back up into the tree.
Every day, I would watch Buck from my window until one day I opened it and started talking to him. He was small and gangly and he couldn’t caw right. His feathers were all over the place and I felt a kinship. So I made a deal with him. I told him that if he could do it, if he could fly, then I could find the strength to get up. Well… near the end of the season, after talking with him every day, I finally saw him get out of the nest. He went to the edge of his branch, braced himself, and jumped… and just before he hit the ground, he soared back up into the sky. I cheered harder than I ever had before.
That winter, Buck left the area. I was crestfallen. I felt like I’d lost a friend. But I was so damn proud of him.
Cut to the next spring? I’m walking up the driveway one day when suddenly I hear a sound… a broken caw. I look up, and Buck is sitting in a tree above my head. He stared at me and puffed his feathers, then hopped down in front of me and cawed again. I was so damn thrilled, and I told him how proud I was of him. He ruffled his feathers and then soared off into his old tree.
That summer? I heard two broken caws. One from Buck… and one from his chick.
Cut to ten years later? We have a family of crows who all have a very distinct caw and they come here and spend every spring, summer, and fall on our property. Buck still greets me every spring.
that last reply made me wanna cry. that’s so beautiful.
this one morning i kept hearing really loud caws, i remember it was like 5am, LIKE REALLY LOUD AND ANNOYING AND AGGRESSIVE, so loud that i could hear it through a closed window, and i eventually went outside to check it out. there was a crow on my front lawn, it had an injury on its head and couldn’t fly and there were two other crows circling right above it, and they were cawing like mad.
i tried to get close and take a better look and one of them dived super low and tried to attack me. so i went back in the house and chopped some sliced raw meat and tossed it at him from a distance.
a few more times later, very soon after, they could tell i was trying to help, and did not attack me. i was “allowed” to walk up close and pick him up, he couldn’t drink water properly so i had to dip my finger in a bowl and stick it in his mouth.
i did this few times a day and it went on for about a week before he disappeared, i thought he recovered and left, but he came back the next day and lands on me, and i see him around the block quite often, and he would come sit on my shoulder for a few minutes and then fly away again. i feel like i’ve adopted a son.
Best birbs !!
your son is Beautiful and Strong
every time I see this post it has different crow stories and every time I reblog it again because all crow stories are good stories
French privateering in the Gulf of Mexico: ended circa 1830
Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible.
OK I WANT THIS REALLY BAD SO I MADE THIS REALLY QUICK
As much as I absolutely adore this, you’d probably have to come up with a fairly good reason for them to all meet up together in the first place. I mean, MLK and Anne Frank were born in the same year, but they lived on different continents and had no opportunity to meet. I’m not saying these cross cultural interactions are impossible, but choosing a certain region with an era isn’t necessarily exclusionary. It just doesn’t occur to people (or rather most writers in general) how well these eras matched up or how to connect these extremely varied backgrounds.
just make it a fighting game and ur good tho
I didn’t pick those roles at random, mind. All four of them are outlaws of some description, and thus have incentive to travel outside their native range – and in particular, all four of them would have any number of plausible excuses for ending up in San Francisco during the late 1860s or early 1870s. Once you’ve got them within shouting distance of each other, getting them in the same adventuring party is a simple matter of Plot.
I feel dumb for not picking up on that. :B I’d definitely be curious to know just what kind of hijinx they’d be getting themselves into (I can already imagine an Ocean’s Eleven-esque heist).
Out of curiosity, why San Fran? I’m a west coaster myself, but I usually picture New York when it comes to historical fiction.
1. San Fransisco in the early 1870s is both very prosperous and a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
2. It’s more plausible for a vaquero and a ronin samurai to meet there by chance – New York is on the wrong coast entirely for that.
In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)
Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.
I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.
You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics?
You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.
But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”
Can we propose a rule for “realistic” historical fiction/fantasy? Twelve graphic cases of dysentery for every one graphic rape?
^^ I like this idea.
You know, they could deny that they find rape sexy, and they might even believe their own denials. But the point is that they clearly don’t think of rape as something distasteful enough and disgusting enough to omit.
And you know what, I’m not even gonna insist on the dysentery. Just this: if you’re going to include rape on the basis of historical accuracy, none of your female characters are allowed to have shaved legs or armpits. And all of your characters have to have terrible teeth – yellowed and worn and crooked, because nobody’s getting braces or regular visits to the dentist – with at least a few teeth blackened or missing for every character over the age of thirty.
Of course, if your reaction to blackened teeth and hairy armpits is “ugh, no, sure it might be historically accurate but it’s gross, nobody’s going to want to watch that" and you don’t have the exact same reaction to rape, you might want to think about why that is.
Not to mention that some of the societies portrayed, or inspiring similar fantasy settings, actually had STRONGER protections against and consequences for rape than the ones we live in today.
Accounts from Vikings’ contemporaries recount a lot of raiding, but not a single case of rape. Viking law didn’t treat rape as a property crime, and the penalty for it was outlawry, which was essentially a death sentence. Medieval English law prescribed that rapists be castrated and blinded. And the sagas contain vanishingly few references to rape (and violence against women is usually followed with comeuppance–often death–for the perpetrator).
TL;DR: History wasn’t one giant rape-fest, and in fact, members of the cultures high fantasy is usually based on may have actually been more disapproving of rape than we are today (imagine trying to pass a bill making rape a capital offense today!).
These writers include rape because they like writing about rape, not because history dictates it.
Like… the intention is good, but I don’t know how I feel about the angle of “you shouldn’t bully someone because you may not know the whole story”. You shouldn’t bully because it’s fucked up.
That girl you called fat, maybe she’s NOT starving herself. Maybe she just likes to eat. You want to call her names because of that? Fuck you.
That girl you called a slut, maybe she’s not a virgin, maybe she’s had a lot of sex with different people, sex is fucking AWESOME! Your hang ups with women and sexuality is not her problem. You’re an asshole.
That boy you pushed down in the hall… maybe everything’s great at home for him, so the fuck what? Don’t put your hands on people you piece of shit.
That black girl you teased for her skin color… just, fuck you, period. Doesn’t matter what the fuck is going on in her life, you’re fucking garbage. Get the fuck out of here.
The old man with the scars… seriously? Like… if you’re making fun of an old man’s scars you’re too far gone, you’re some kind of amoral sociopath or something cause that’s just some fucked up shit.
That “gay boy” you made fun of? Go fuck yourself.
The man you made fun of for crying? He just watched the episode of the Office where Jim and Pam get married, so what? Who cares why he’s crying? People have emotions dipshit.
That poor boy? Oh you’re one of those assholes who makes fun of poor people? Go die in a fire.
How about just don’t bully people at all for any reason cause it’s a fucked up thing to do regardless of what you do or don’t know about them? Treat people the way you want to be treated, it’s that simple. We’re all human beings just trying to be happy, you make the world a worse place when you try to stand in the way of that.
Reblogging for the comment
I love when something on Tumblr is bothering me and I’m sighing and thinking about if it’s worth it to try and articulate my thoughts… and then I finish scrolling and someone has already taken care of it, better than I would have.
Elephants are the reincarnated souls of some really decent people.
Hold on friend, we are coming, it’s ok.
fun facts: elephants are some of the nicest, most caring animals on the planet. they go through physical depression and suffer grief when their loved one dies and in situations like this, the whole entire herd will work together in order to save one and won’t move on until the one in danger has been saved or is dead.
HAVE I TOLD YOU HOW MUCH I LOVE ELEPHANTS
I saw a documentary once where there was a herd of elephants migrating somewhere and a baby elephant was, for some reason, walking on his front knees. He just couldn’t get the hang of walking right.
And his mom was like, I don’t care if I get separated from the rest of my people and die alone, I am not abandoning my kiddo. So she kept trying to help him walk, and lifted him some with her trunk like doing physical therapy for elephants and the herd was just getting further and further away.
But the fascinating part was the sister. She was grown, and kept heading away to catch up to the rest of the herd and then stopping and looking back at her mom and little brother and running back to them but then looking at the herd getting further away and changing her mind and then (repeat, repeat, repeat)
The whole thing was amazing and heartbreaking. Good news, the baby did get the hang of it after a while and they didn’t get left alone or anything.
