Tag: nice

thesmallestwaffle:

favorite moments in flyers history (1/?): 
now here’s couturier. couturier already with three, couturier hands off to giroux, giroux moving in, dekes, and scores! another hat trick! two hat tricks in one playoff game for the flyers! and a six point night for claude giroux!  eight-five, philadelphia. that’s enough for the pittsburgh fans. i doubt they’re leaving at xfinity live right now. eight-five, flyers. some playoff game. 

What is the curb cutter effect

tatterdemalionamberite:

Here’s a post talking about it WRT interaction badges at cons:

“The Curb-Cutter Effect is when something to fit a specific need is found to create convenience in a broader area than intended.  Curb cuts allowing for wheelchair accessibility to sidewalks proved to also be convenient to anyone who may have trouble with steps or even simply a mother with a baby stroller or maybe a child with a wagon.  This is a desirable outcome with disability rights advocacy as creating convenience for non-disabled people often makes the assistive technology easier to advocate for.”

Or, in a series of examples: 

When moms with strollers use curb cuts, they also start demanding them and supporting them, and the sidewalks become easier to traverse for people in wheelchairs.

When neurotypical people use badges to indicate their interactional boundaries, curb-cutter effect makes it easier for neurodivergent people to do the same.

When a bunch of folks who can tolerate wheat decide they like gluten-free bread, it becomes easier for people with celiac disease to find it at the grocery store.

When asking people to tag their content becomes normalized, it means that people with severe triggers are less likely to encounter confusion or disdain when they ask. 

When able-bodied people understand spoon theory, it becomes easier for those of us who need it to talk about it. 

When people with mild mental health problems see a therapist, it makes it easier for that therapist to stay in practice and see their more vulnerable clients.

When people who aren’t direly affected by dysphoria access trans health care, the increased demand familiarizes more primary care doctors with an area of medicine they should all be able to practice, so that when people with severe dysphoria seek care, it’s less likely to require moving to another city or state.

TL;DR convenience users of any service or assistive technology are the shock troops of accessibility and I love them. 

what if wizarding america isn’t silly

violent-darts:

jumpingjacktrash:

loptrcoptr:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

jumpingjacktrash:

citysaurus:

jumpingjacktrash:

citysaurus:

jumpingjacktrash:

citysaurus:

jumpingjacktrash:

nerdyzebradog:

jumpingjacktrash:

when i heard there’s only one wizarding school in america, i laughed incredulously, and i know i’m not the only one. one school for the whole huge country? obviously brits don’t have any idea how big america is! cue derisive anecdotes about visitors who thought they could visit hollywood as a day trip from new york.

but recently something’s occurred to me: what if ilvermorny IS the only ‘wizarding school’ in america, with ‘wizarding school’ being defined as a wizard-only establishment where they teach nothing but magic?

aside from how unprepared that leaves kids for the rest of life, there just isn’t the population density to support wizard-exclusive pocket-universe enclaves anywhere but the east coast and possibly los angeles. even chicago is more spread out than that, and when it comes to mid-size cities like minneapolis and st. louis, forgeddaboudit. not even wizards would choose to live crammed cheek by jowl on quaintly crooked pedestrian-only streets when they could have a three-bedroom prairie-style on a wooded half-acre in edina.

so i’m thinking, yeah, ok, most american magicals don’t send their kids to wizard school. kids go to regular school and have wizarding clubs and retreats and summer camps instead. gives new meaning to “one time at band camp.”

the pureblood prejudice never developed in america? well, of course not, no one but the hamptons set goes even a single day without interacting with muggles. most of your friends are going to be muggles. there aren’t enough magical jobs for everyone, so most people’s coworkers will be muggles. except we wouldn’t call them muggles, of course, and certainly not ‘no-maj’ – that sounds like something that was said for a while by one particular new york jet set clique in the 1920′s and got written down in an english etiquette book as ‘what americans say’. we’d probably call them ‘mundanes’ or ‘normals’ if we called them anything at all.

the stuff about wand permits and other odd regulations makes sense for a small bureaucracy that doesn’t really understand why it can’t control things the way european magical governments do. it’s kind of a cargo cult legislation. probably most americans don’t even use a wand most of the time. european wand-focused magic might be the Done Thing among the WASP contingent, but everyone else undoubtedly knows at least something about navajo healing ritual, haitian voodoo, lakota dance magic, chinese feng-shui warding techniques, etcetera. taking away a person’s wand doesn’t take away their magic. you can’t say ‘corn pollen permit’ with a straight face and they sell chalk at the corner store.

i expect american wizards look at the hogwarts set as kind of a weird sect with weird restrictions and weird costumes. like the amish, but instead of furniture and quilts, they export clueless young men.

if I lick your brain will I gain your creativity?

i don’t know but it’s worth a try

also no one else will be able to eat it because it’s got your germs on it, which will be handy if zombies

this has always pretty much been my whole exact understanding of the hp universe

i also figured a lot of american magic is in english instead of the pseudo greek/latin British spells since, unlike British schools, most Americans never study those, so our spells are like ‘Fire’, ‘Unlock", “Magic Missile’

also american wands have gun grips or are baseball bats

when i was a kid i made a wand out of a piece of copper pipe with brass end caps, and carried it around with me for most of a year; i know a lot of kids who had walking sticks from summer camp or hiking, and pretended they were magic. hell, i bet a lot of wizard kids learn to cast with a #2 pencil, just from idly messing around.

also, spells based on superhero powers: definitely a thing.

imagine some baddie trying to AK someone and getting hit by SHAZAM in return.

american wizards learn how to do spider-man webbing out of wands the way kids learn to do that one S symbol

source: remember those dumb/racist comics ron had in his room? that’s all they got. britwizards don’t know a single spider-man

spells based on d&d too, i bet. and not nearly as much distinction between ‘dark arts’ and the rest, largely because a lot of the nonwhite arts got classified as Ebil Scary Bad by anglos, and the rest of america wasn’t having it. in louisiana, knowing the voodoo lady can raise the dead just speaks to the high quality of her marching powder.

florida wizards can use pool noodles as wands

not a single british wizard has ever returned from florida

dude florida is just one big messy cryptid zone, the ‘florida man’ phenomenon is real and ‘hold my beer’ is a very powerful spell

edit: ok, wizarding america IS silly, just not the way rowling thought

THIS ENTIRE THREAD IS GOLD

In Chicago you must be careful not to diss deep dish pizza aloud as the entire city is imbued with enough inherent magical pride that you may incur a hex if you say “deep dish sucks” while walking too close to the lake. Lots of pizza-fond kappa dwell in there, and they can get nasty. The Chicago Cubs curse was very, very real and it took a united ward circle featuring two thousand souls holding hands, the length of the entire magic mile, and a fuckton of celery salt to finally rid our poor baseball team of its 108 year curse. As such Chicago magic-users are extremely wary of the power of Goat Magic© to this day.

It’s a city named “onion” in the vernacular of the Miami and Illini, built on a swamp: you know it is steeped in some serious ancient native magic. And no ordinary cow started a fire bringing the whole town down in one fell swoop, come on now.

Whereas, let’s be real, the majority of magic used in Los Angeles is either a) used to alter/improve appearance as it is the city of undying vanity or b) used to bypass traffic while invisible because screw taking the 101 and the 405, honestly.

Minnesota wizarding families use old Norse pagan and church sigils, as well as some Proto Norse runic magic (the uses and varieties of which they do not share with scholars who would really like to know how to use the runes properly thank you). Hot Dish is a traditional meal at magic conclaves. Last year a nineteen year old wizard claimed he cast a spell using a cheesy breadstick from Toppers, but the claim has yet to be substantiated.

In the early 2000s every young witch chose to practice her magic by using a feather gel pen as a wand. Summer magic camps devoted entire charms classes to making your tech deck levitate and do flips. Wizarding Pokémon cards feature Pokémon that jump off the card and perform tiny battles when played.

as a minnesota bear i can inform you that our magic is equal parts scandinavian and ojibwe. our weather magic is unsurpassed. oh, we don’t use it to control the weather – that would fuck everything up so bad you don’t even know. we just know things like when to plug in the engine heater overnight, and when the tornado sirens are for realsies.

snow golems: totally a thing. plow truck patronuses are not unheard-of.

whatever lives in lake superior, you do not mess with it. it’s nothing so friendly as homicidal merfolk. the lake itself is alive, and she has weird moods. all the other 9999 lakes, we can calm with the swirl of a canoe paddle, but gitchigumi you leave the hell alone. when she kicks up you apologize and gtfo. all magic can do is give you fair warning.

the edmund fitzgerald didn’t have a water witch on board. bad idea, guys.

Everything about this thread makes me happy.

vastderp:

what-hath-science-wrought:

pomp-adourable:

tlaxxcalteca:

amuseoffirebane:

Reblogging this again because I found info!

This is 2/3 of a band called Too Many Zooz (they’re lacking their trumpeter here), the song is called ‘Flightning,’ and the genre is “brass house” (which i think they made up but hey i dig it). They have a handful of songs on Spotify and just successfully Kickstarted their first full-length album.

this song as the opening to a new anime by Shinichiro Watanabe honestly

These guys are CHARACTERS for a Watanabe anime.

I seriously love these guys, because they’re so interesting from a music-theory perspective. Their use of intense beats, syncopation, deep bass, and blaring harmonics borrows a lot from modern club music

they’re basically playing dubstep on traditional instruments. Seriously, listen to some tracks with all three of them together, and tell me that’s not what they’re doing

Holy cats.

jumpingjacktrash:

aethersea:

teamstopfightingassholes:

feitanswife:

systlin:

ella-raene:

systlin:

beautifultoastdream:

systlin:

GUYS THEY FIGURED OUT THE ROMAN CONCRETE RECIPE THAT MAKES IT IMMUNE TO SEAWATER

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mystery-of-2000-year-old-roman-concrete-solved-by-scientists/ar-BBDO5VC

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I KNOW RIGHT?!???

I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.

In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right. 

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that. 

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again. 

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt. 

3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down. 

So moral of story is be specific

I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs

2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense

except we have lots of documentation of people keeping chickens, getting eggs from chickens, etc – historians would figure it out.

but roman workers didn’t write diaries, at least not that anyone’s found. we don’t have anyone’s stories about life on a construction crew. “spent today drawing water for the concrete, my job was picking animals out of the dredge. found a fat octopus which i am having for dinner right now.” that would’ve told us all we needed to know… but they didn’t write it down.