Anyways I’ve started shipping tater and snowy who wants 2 hear me yell about it
ANYWAYS they’ve been dating since tater came to the falconers and they live together and have an incredibly ugly dog and they don’t know what breed he is but he’s tiny and always gets under snowys feet when he’s walking around but somehow he never does it to tater and for every PR event tater gets them matching ties but snowy would rather die than do cheesy couple things also once snowy tried to do tater’s eyeliner but he kept moving so it ended up looking like he had a black eye
1) that much eyeliner but you couldnt be bothered to fill in your brows.
2) your mask is off you dont HAVE to drink water like that
3) why do u look like they forced you to be there. No matter where you are
4) why is your hair so pointy. You wear a helmet.
1) No one taught him how to do his makeup properly. He probably watched a ton of youtube makeup tutorials and just never thought about filling in his eyebrows. Buddy, you got a whole new world that’s gonna open up for ya
2) He’s channeling Braden Holtby shhhh. He probably idolizes Holtbae and wants to be just like him
3) He’s pretending to be Chill™ as goalies do but inside he’s completely unchill. To distract himself, he drinks some water
no wonder brits think we’re all junk-food-snarfing morons
not a big enough pop-tarts choice
the only things there i actually buy, btw, are peanut butter cups and arizona iced tea. and even those are very occasional, cuz they’re so sweet.
just in case anyone was wondering what americans actually eat.
answer: not this.
non-snarky answer: i gather brits use something called ‘salad cream’ in tuna salad and egg salad and the like? we use mayonnaise or miracle whip, never seen salad cream for sale. miracle whip is spiced mayo, btw, it’s not a different substance, it’s just got a bit of onion, mustard, and paprika flavoring.
we don’t eat hamburgers at home much, except for cookouts. they’re mostly convenience food or backyard picnic party food. same with hot dogs. cold sandwiches are a lunch staple – deli meat and cheese, or pbj – but hot sandwiches are too much work for a quick lunch and not nutritious enough for a sit-down supper.
one thing i think is particularly american is the amount of ethnic foods we eat. even the whitest of families has some chinese, mexican, and japanese dishes in their menu rotation. italian’s hardly considered ethnic anymore, everyone eats lots of italian. more recent immigrant waves like vietnamese and somali haven’t quite sunk in to the common cuisine yet, but it’s still not at all unusual for random suburbanites to be fond enough of pho or sambusas to learn how to make them.
those huge airplane-hangar grocery stores you see on tv? yes, we really shop at those, and it’s not because we need fifty flavors of pop tarts. it’s because we cook fifty regional cuisines.
although… gotta fess up… everyone likes pop tarts. my favorite are raspberry. un-frosted so i can put butter on them when they’re hot.
one thing i notice is how most of these things are kid treats. i’d never eat them now, but when i was nine? hell yeah.
maybe this is one of those childhood nostalgia things–grown up food you can make on your own, for the most part, or get at a restauraunt. only a foul little twinkie tastes like a twinkie, god save us all.
Concept: one of those fantasy settings where elves and dragons and whatnot have ridiculously long and complicated names, except instead of “hello, my name is [thirty-seven syllables with way too many apostrophes]”, it’s “hello, my name is [four-minute guitar solo]”.
(Of course, that’s just when the dragon in question is speaking a human tongue. In native draconic, the whole sentence would be like that: a series of polyphonic growls that just happen to resemble overdriven guitar riffs. In this milieu, the genre of music we’d recognise as “heavy metal” is actually draconic poetry performed by human musicians, with the human vocalist providing a loose translation. According to dragons, human instrumentalists’ “pronunciation” is typically quite poor, with a few notable exceptions.
The native languages of elves, meanwhile, are similarly musical, perhaps in emulation of dragons themselves; though their tones lack the bone-rattling harmonics of draconic speech, they rely on changes of pitch too rapid for the human vocal apparatus to emulate. For a human, your best bet at producing elvish speech is usually an acoustic guitar, though when portability isn’t an issue, a piano may be more flexible. Efforts to replicate the elvish tongue via accordion have typically not been warmly received.)
Wait, what about harps tho?
Certain ill-informed stereotypes notwithstanding, harps are actually a traditionally dwarvish instrument, not an elvish one; attempting to communicate in elvish using a dwarvish instrument would be something of a faux pas.
(Dwarves are not, themselves, tonal communicators. Rather, the primary difficulty humans face in speaking dwarvish tongues lies in that much of their speech is below the range of human hearing. This is believed to be an environmental adaptation; speech in the range that humans are accustomed to quickly becomes muffled and confused by echoes in cramped stone tunnels, but subsonics carry clearly for great distances. Indeed, the popular image of dwarves being prone to muttering or grumbling to themselves stems from their habit of taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of their speech is inaudible to humans to converse in front of them without being “overheard”.)
what about flutes?
Also, I disagree. In order to have your sound travel well underground, it needs to be deep. Dwarves use bass.
Dwarves are big on harps because dwarves are into chamber music.
*ducks*
(As for the remarks in the notes about what instruments other fantasy species would “speak” with, well, as I’m picturing it, they wouldn’t. The whole notion of being able to speak via musical instruments depends on a very particular set of assumptions: i.e., that the language family in question is structured so that pitch and emphasis are the primary semantic units, while articulated phonemes are either inessential for conveying meaning, or else wholly absent. Having one or two species that this is true for is a neat idea; uncritically applying it to every species is taking a neat idea and beating it to death with a stick.
I think it’s more interesting if each species has a completely different language barrier; so, for example, while elves are pure tonal communicators, dwarves use articulated phonemes just like we do, but their voices are too deep for us to hear properly, as outlined above, and halflings… oh, maybe let’s run with the fact that extremely good manual dexterity is one of their traditional shticks and propose that their languages depend much more heavily on hand gestures than ours do – to the extent that if you can only hear a halfling, you’re getting less than half of what they’re saying!)
Further to the last bit: halfling spoken languages have lots of filler words that basically mean “refer to what my hands are doing” – much like when a modern English speaker says “like so” while gesturing to indicate the shape or size of a described object, but with a great deal more descriptive nuance. The upshot is that, to someone who doesn’t pay attention to the gestures or can’t follow them, halflings speech is indecipherably vague.
(And yes, this does mean that it’s nearly impossible to eavesdrop on two halflings having a private conversation, because the overhead component will typically boil down to “you know, the thing with the stuff”.)
So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body.
If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.
But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:
DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.
Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.
Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.
(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)
headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.
Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.
fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!
here is a fact:
during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.
So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.
Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it.
Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever,
So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.
On a related note: we need to talk about the inaccessibility of homeless shelters.
This is relevant to a lot of groups. Shelters are often run by Christian groups and unwelcoming of LGBT people, for starters, or in a less obvious route they will often accept LGBT people into their shelters but do little to nothing to combat homophobic and transphobic harassment or violence that takes place within them. Sometimes that violence doesn’t happen inside- but in queues or simply within groups of people who frequent them. But the shelters know, and they know that they build up a reputation for not being safe for LGBT people, and they do nothing about it deliberately.
The buildings themselves are often inaccessible, especially with DV shelters. They’re built to be inconspicuous and often have stair cases just to enter the building- never mind that disabled people experience higher rates of abuse.
Most shelters will boot you out for drinking or consuming drugs, whether it be on premises or simply be that you are effected by it while on premises.
Plus, shelters often ignore violence and harassment towards those who are noticeably mentally ill. Many have strict rules such as enforced curfews, anti-swearing policies, etc. that often make mentally ill people feel unsafe and unwelcome. Imagine experiencing paranoia at the same moment that someone tells you you’re not allowed to get out of bed- in spite of being an adult who has paid for the privilege of being there.
And then, of course, is the big one. Shelters in my city vary costs between $12 and $30 a night. The money is used in part to fund the shelter, and in part as a form of triage to decide /who to turn away/, because there aren’t enough beds. Imagine not being able to afford to spend even a dollar on getting yourself something to eat but somehow having to scrounge up $30 to be able to sleep indoors that night. Seriously.
The shelter system is not ‘charitable’. Religious groups receive huge tax cuts for running them and still charge a fucking entry fee. This is a privatized business. They might claim they aren’t making a profit, but that’s /before you take the tax breaks into account/. Nothing about this system is designed to protect or serve vulnerable people, but to create the image of ‘helping’ while saving some cash.
@dreagentry oh fuck I forgot the underage bit! Yes! Okay, in my state you legally can not be forced to return to your family (or foster care) once you are over the age of 13. But in spite of that, you also can’t legally sign a lease, consent to just about any kind of guardianship situation without the signature of your legal guardians, and access the vast majority of shelters. Because legally you’re considered too high risk. And yeah, the few that will take in someone underage are usually the hyper religious ones.
Please reblog this complete version with this addition:
I failed to mention racism in discussing ways in which shelters are inaccessible, which really isn’t good enough. I don’t have the personal experience to comment on the ways in which this manifests, but shelters are 100% built for white people and that inaccessibility is a major issue which needs to be acknowledged.
just moving along like everyone else 