daveeddiggsit:

barduil:

me: I’m so excited to write this fic, it’s going to be good, I love it, I’m so pumped

*writes it in head before sleeping, gets emotional over songs that could fit the story, elaborates background and characterisations, writes lines on phone*

also me, in front of laptop: yeah, but no, I’ve got nothing

WHY IS THIS SO ACCURATE

rustfoxes:

More “wtf are humans, please leave the rest of us be” stuff:

Human reactions to fear!

No, I’m not talking about screaming or freezing in one spot and pissing yourself. I’m talking about the weirder, more specific-to-only-humans fear reactions.

Like singing.

Idk how many of you have watched people play horror video games, but a surprising amount of people start narrating what’s going on in a sing-song voice.

Imagine being an alien, walking in a horrific, dark tunnel with these weird gangly creatures, you’re all scared out of your wits and then one of them starts fucking singing.

In a dark cave. While everyone’s terrified.

“ ♫ ~We are all gonna fucking die, this is terrible and I wanna go hooooome~ ♬ ”

wordsandshadows:

beka-tiddalik:

quasi-normalcy:

quasi-normalcy:

What if Scotty is not actually Scottish, though? 

Like, what if his name just happens to be Montgomery Scott, so all of his friends started calling him “Scotty,” and then every time he was introduced to a new person, they would be like “Oh, are you Scottish? My uncle was Scottish!”

And finally, he just gets sick of explaining the situation, so he starts replying with “aye, laddie!” But then it turns out that the person he said that to was Captain Kirk, and he doesn’t want to admit that he lied to his new commanding officer, so he has to keep speaking in a ridiculously over-the-top brogue and commenting constantly on how much he loves drinking Scotch, and by the time that he realises that Kirk would have found humour in the situation, he’s in too deep and can’t stop pretending, and it gradually just becomes his normal speech pattern.

Then, years later, the Enterprise is being inspected by a Starfleet engineer who’s actually Scottish, and Scotty takes him on a walking tour of his warp engines and is all like “Auch! Here be me wee bairns!” and the other engineer is just like “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I take the fact that James Doohan is Canadian as evidence of this theory.

Scotty hacking into his Starfleet personnel file to alter his place of birth.

Scotty soundproofing his quarters on the Enterprise so that no one can hear him teach himself to play the bagpipes from instructional videos.

Scotty making a great show of taking a shuttle down to Aberdeen to “visit his family” every time the Enterprise is in Earth orbit and then, once on the ground, discreetly site-to-site transporting himself to Vancouver or whatever.

None of these things are out of character or beyond his technical ability.

Yeah, but also in character: Jim Kirk has known since Day 1 that Scotty is not, in fact, Scottish, but is just sitting there waiting to see how far Scotty is willing to go to keep the story going. It started out as an “enough rope” situation but now it’s one of Jim’s greatest ongoing sources of entertainment and he wouldn’t admit at gunpoint that he knows. 

Honestly, Kirk would actively claim to have met Scotty’s Extremely Scottish Family/visited them in Aberdeen just to keep it going.

roscoerackham:

shinykari:

lady-feral:

hollowedskin:

cannon-fannon:

boneyardchamp:

Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.

Like he will not be happy at all.

For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.

This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).

Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.

And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.

I will always reblog this.

I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by

R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.

This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.

There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.

  1. Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
  2. Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
  3. If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.

The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.

And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.

Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.

So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done. 

In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier. 

And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.

 You can read an article about it here.  But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize. 

ironinkpen:

my favorite thing about yuri on ice is that i walked in expecting “self-conscious underdog learns confidence while arrogant playboy coach learns to care about others” but what i got instead was “anxious hardworking figure skating powerhouse learns confidence while kind-hearted goofball coach learns the joys of love”