i know its a stingray but it looks like cthulhu popped his head up to say hi
I thought it was a giant squid.
holy shit they get this big?
They do get this big! They also tame relatively easily and are surprisingly docile animals. Its popular to swim with them in many beachy areas. As long as you’re not stupid and mean to them, your odds of being hurt by them are very low.
I had the opportunity to swim with a school of them on a sandbar once and I must say they are very aggreeable animals, though they do have the tendency to mob you if you have food, and they can be quite heavy. Still very pleasant animals.
ha cthulhu
Humans will pet anything. If aliens come, that might be what distinguishes us from the rest of the galaxy.
“we were going to blow them up, but they engaged in an oddly pleasing patting ritual and, well, it was nice.”
Imagine this for a second: you’re a kid in a wheelchair.
It’s pretty isolating. You love reading, but every book you read has a hero who can walk. After a while, you start to get the message: only kids without disabilities are allowed to have adventures. Because of your condition, you’ll never be able to have a story worth reading.
Now imagine you discover a book about a kid in a wheelchair.
It’s fantastic. All of a sudden, there’s someone like you who gets to go on awesome adventures. Maybe your story actually is worth telling after all!
But then the hero gets their greatest wish granted: their legs are fixed and they rise from their wheelchair, healthy and strong.
And there you are, the reader, still stuck in your wheelchair.
Your legs will never be fixed.
You will never be granted that magical wish.
And the character who used to just be like you is now something you can never be. The writer has decided that their story is only worth telling if they end up magically abled.
But you will never end up magically abled. So what does this tell you?
Your story will never be worth telling.
Now do you understand?
Disabled people do not need to be “cured” for their stories to be worth telling, they do not need to hate themselves or their disabilities for their stories to be worth telling. DISABLED PEOPLE ARE REAL MULTI-FACETED, MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PEOPLE AND THEIR STORIES ARE WORTH TELLING!!!
Character with psychosomatic paralysis who gets over it just in time to walk down the aisle for her wedding/graduation/etc is a trope that needs to be set on fire.
(what I want: a romance novel with a character who uses a wheelchair sometimes, who gets her dress made specifically for to look amazing in her wheelchair, and who then feels good enough to walk down the aisle
and doesn’t
because she cannot count on the duration of feeling good enough to walk for extended periods of time
her dress was made to accommodate her chair and would look silly standing AND she’d lose the nifty custom train and
the point where it’s an hour before your wedding and you don’t actually NEED another dress but you COULD wear a different dress is not the time to choose a different dress
and maybe her mom is like “I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING WOULD BE OK YOU SHOULD’VE LISTENED” and she is like, “I’m wheeling down the aisle and I changed the cake to the cake I ACTUALLY WANTED without telling you OH LOOK TIME FOR MOTHER OF THE BRIDE TO TAKE HER PLACE”
and her spouse gets on one knee for her wedding kiss and it’s beautiful and perfect and the maid of honor runs interference with mom for the the entire reception because THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR)
One time, because they’re wired after a fight and nobody else has a better idea, the Avengers get bored and decide to play True American.
It’s a drinking game. Except it’s also sort of like Candyland. There are stakes. The floor is lava.
When Steve first hears about it, he asks if there are actual rules. Natasha smiles at him and says, “Everything you hear in True American is a lie.” Thanks, Natasha.
There are a lot of jokes at first about how Steve is definitely going to make it through the Secret Order of the Circle beer cans and reach the King (a very nice Macallan scotch, courtesy of Tony) first, because Steve is the truest American there ever which was. This is, of course, a fabulous joke, because Steve wasn’t around for half the political imbroglios that are required knowledge just to move from one piece of furniture to another (the floor is lava, did we not mention this, Steve), and he has the loosest possible definition of a high school education. This is not going to be Steve’s game.
Several factors are not taken into account.
First is that Thor has even less of the cultural knowledge required, and it should have be assumed from the start that he would come in last. (This would of course be wrong. Not knowing anything about American history does not stop him from, during the course of play, gaining entrance through Ellis Island, finding all six hidden locations of the Union Rat, and stopping the 1911 shirtwaist factory fire. He gets third place.)
Second is that Clint’s schooling is not so much “worse” as “absent.” And as Clint’s strategy for True American is to emphasize the drinking side of it, with a healthy dose of outrageous cheating on the behalf of Natasha, his fourth place does not particularly bother him.
Third is that Natasha is a Russian ex-pat who, while admittedly well-versed in a large swath of Americana for reasons best left unmentioned, nonetheless is slightly off the mark when it comes to the key “American asshole” mental space required to be a true master of the craft. This bothers her, but she’s working on it. Add in Clint’s assistance, and what will be her easy slide into second place is completely understandable.
Bruce does not play. He sets a chair carefully away from all other pieces of furniture, declares himself a foreign nation, and eats snacks. He is designated a water hazard by the others. (There is absolutely not a rule saying that whoever’s closest to him can beg for foreign aid and get a cookie in return. Clint should shut up about that. Particularly if he ever wants another cookie.)
Really, of any of them, True American should be right up Tony’s alley. Drinking excessively while also maintaining balance and cognitive function? Check. Genius-level knowledge in a variety of subjects? Check. A deep-seated inferiority complex with an all-encompassing need to win? So thorough a check that it might as well fill itself out in cursive and add a ten buck tip for the waitress.
Tony is all about True American. It was his idea to play. Because maybe he wants to rub Steve’s nose in it. And it’s not like Steve can beat Tony at a game he’s never played before, with close to as much knowledge of the required history as Thor, and in the presence of teammates who he’ll probably feel obliged to help along in the spirit of team-captain-ness or whatever.
This will be great, Tony’s pretty sure.
…If not immediately narratively obvious, Steve beats Tony.
He beats him by a lot.
He beats him so hard it’s almost physically painful to watch, except obviously not, this is a great day in Avengers history, Bruce is recording it on Natasha’s phone and they’re going to have a play-by-play rewatch with Pepper just as soon as Steve stops chugging down the Macallan while maintaining constant, unwavering eye contact with Tony. Who isn’t anywhere close to second place, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because Steve knows who planted the idea for this game and he knows exactly what Tony was going to do if Tony won and he’d been damned if he was going to let some uptown rich kid beat him at a goddamned drinking game.
Tony comes in last. Steve is the True American. Everyone else eats cookies.
High schools in the south of the United States, especially in Texas, often have a tradition of the girls wearing “mums” and boys wearing “garters” to the Homecoming football game. Mums usually consist of artificial Chrysanthemum flowers (originally real Chrysanthemums were used) surrounded by decorated floor-length ribbon and little trinkets. The tradition is that the boys create a personalized mum in their school colors, white and silver for seniors, for their date. Girls make garters for their date which are similar to mums but shorter and worn on the guy’s arm rather than around their neck like mums. The size of the mums and garters tend to grow along with the grade the person that is receiving the mum is in. Around the 1980s, mums were usually about a maximum of three Chrysanthemum flowers and a few ribbons and only worn by the Homecoming Court/Homecoming Prince and/or Princess but as the years have gone by, the size and expectations of mums have increased and have gotten more elaborate and are worn by almost all of the students. Depending on the school, mums can get quite competitive, expensive, and drastically bigger than they previously were intended to be. New items are also placed on mums than there previously were like LED lights, bubble containers, cow bells, feather boas, stuffed animals of all sizes, and even more. They now sometimes act like scrapbooks made of ribbon and even contain passages and photos of the mum/garter-receiver and their date. The detail, size, and price usually varies depending on the school, town, and couple. The tradition is to make the mum and garter after the couple is asked to Homecoming and exchange the night of the Homecoming game and wear it throughout tailgating and the game. Couples often take group pictures with their mums and garters the night of or before the night of the Homecoming Game to showcase them.
I’m sorry, what? This is seriously just mainly a Texan thing? You’re telling me these
don’t
look
familiar
to all
yall
????
Yeah, wintry. I’ve literally never seen these before. They are… intense? Lol
OMG, are you telling me the rest of the US isn’t doing this???
This is what I’m saaaaayiiiiiiing
Though tbh, as I think about it more, there is something pretty Texan about it. Gaudy, rah-rah, and inappropriately large. I mean, that’s us.
Absolutely positively nope in NYC and my schools didn’t/don’t even have Homecoming (yes, even the fairly normal public school).
We had Homecoming (despite no football team?), and I come from the trashiest hickville there ever which was in New Hampshire, and LORD no we did not have those.
every time this post come back to my dash is more and more horrendous
Let me tell you about
The 1973 Levi’s Gremlin.
Looks like just another AMC Gremlin, yeah? Well, notice the Levi’s logo on the front fender just behind the wheel well, and you know that when you get in this car, you’re in for something very…special.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. The seats and the trunk are upholstered in GENUINE LEVI’S DENIM, complete with bronze stitching. This is not some ironic custom job from recent times, either; this was a real option offered by AMC in 1973.
“ohhh would you look at that, my pawns found jesus and now they’re all bishops”
“so i realize it looks like i’m putting a thimble on the board but actually my rooks have been using their downtime to build another rook, one that’s better, stronger, faster—”
“hey welcome back. while you left to get a snack, those six pieces you’d captured slipped their guards, tunneled to safety and emerged right in the middle of your royal palace.”
“oof, looks like you’ve got my king cornered…maybe this is a good time to mention that shortly before we started playing, my pawns and knights revolted and instituted a representative democracy. feel free to kill the puppet ruler that was the one remaining vestige of our tyranny, you cringing servant of the crown. vive la revolution!”
Kimchi and Justice 