asylum-art-2:

10 Photos Of Norway’s Fairy Tale Architecture

Norway started out as a kingdom in 872 and has existed ever since. It
has also saved quite a bit of its traditional architecture. Traditional
Norwegian architecture makes it look like a land out of a fairytale.
Stave churches – so named because of the Norse words for their
load-bearing poles – were extremely popular back in the 12th century,
and their unique shape matched with all-wooden construction make is
simply spectacular.

Norvegian vernacular (as in, built to local requirements and using
local materials) architecture is wonderful. Moss and even trees grow on
the roofs of wooden or stone buildings, making Norway a sort of Norse
Shire. Have a look, and plan your next holiday accordingly!

via: boredpanda

giggle-fit:

roachpatrol:

mercurialmalcontent:

I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.

Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!

I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.

i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.  

rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character. 

then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story? 

and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues. 

so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr. 

Thank you! ! I get so pissed when people harass shippers for this. seriously…

hey what’s up with the “!” in fandoms? i.e. “fat!” just curious thaxxx <3

nentuaby:

hosekisama:

michaelblume:

molly-ren:

stevita:

molly-ren:

molly-ren:

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

oniongrass:

kakujaeto:

I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how Kaneki’s aunt messed him up but not so much about his mom, but I think what she did to him was pretty bad.

She neglected him for his entire childhood. He doesn’t remember his father because he died when Kaneki was 4. His only memories of a parent are of his mother. Specifically, of his mother ignoring him.

She ignores him, and that hurts him so much. Look at him:

image
image

He’s begging her to look at him and she won’t. No matter what he says, how much he begs, she’ll keep ignoring him.

And Kaneki hates her for that.

Look at him when he’s talking to Rize. He’s honest with himself for once when he’s talking about his mother:

image

And when he asks his younger self if he loves his mom, and his younger self lies:

image

She ignores him and then leaves him for good by working herself to death. And she does all of this with the excuse of love. 

He hates her for that, but he can’t admit that to himself because she’s still his mother and he loves her too. So instead, he internalizes everything she taught him and tries to show he cares the same way she did, because the alternative means admitting that his mother neglected him and left him alone – that she hurt him that badly – for no good reason. 

No wonder Kaneki shows he cares by leaving the people he cares about “to protect them”, and doesn’t stop to think about how that affects them. His mother showed she cared about him by hurting herself without stopping to think that she was hurting Kaneki too.

He eventually does admit all of this to himself. “In the end, mom and I are no different,” he says. Just in time to lose all his memories.

(And on a related note, it’s also no wonder Kaneki has such a strong need to act as a parent figure for Hinami, or for Saiko. He doesn’t want others to be without a parent the way he was.)

I think the part where Kaneki is forced to choose between saving the mother or the child gets overlooked because people somehow ignore the shit his mom did, so they don’t realize how significant it is. It’s pretty obviously a metaphor for him clinging onto his mother’s ideas, because she was unable to make the obvious and most moral option of choosing the child over the adult when it meant hurting the other, and so was he.

Wait, why did my school teach me that Poe was like a creepy pedophile who was obsessed with his cousin if they were actually just friends and he married her to provide for her family?

annabellioncourt:

cameoappearance:

raptorific:

For the same reason the safe money says your school, like mine, taught you he was probably a drug addict who hated everybody and had no friends and drank himself to death. 

Because by some wacky mix-up, somehow the right to legally execute Poe’s literary estate and therefore the public image he carried following his death was transferred to a dude who openly and without shame hated Edgar Allan Poe. 

Due to some legal mumbo-jumbo and trickery, this dude Rufus Wilmot Griswold somehow managed to get the rights of literary executor to Poe’s estate from his aunt (which she didn’t technically have the power to give, that power remained with Poe’s sister), and he and Edgar Allan Poe hated each other SO MUCH in life, that after he died, this asshole published a memoir of Poe’s life in which he was totally demonized. 

Rufus Wilmot Griswold is one of the most successful character assassins of all time. Because of him, schoolchildren are taught that Poe was a depraved misanthropic lecher who lusted after his underage cousin, was never sober, and died of drinking too much even though all of those “facts” have been discredited. Poe was a shy and reserved, though generally personable, man who married his cousin so to establish legal guardianship and provide for her financially. 

He was also apparently a total lightweight who got tipsy after a few sips of wine, but occasionally drank socially or when feeling particularly down. His doctor insisted there were never traces of opium in his system. Poe’s friends insisted that he was not an alcoholic. At the time of his death, he had quit drinking, and the idea that he was one was heavily promoted by other members of the Temperance movement who claimed his death was a relapse as a cautionary tale. The most commonly accepted theory as to Poe’s death is that he was abducted, drugged, and beaten by political agents who forced him to vote for their candidate, changed his clothes, and then forced him to vote again and again to stuff the ballots. 

Anyhow. This is why you should evaluate the validity and agendas of your sources. 

That last bit seemed exceedingly peculiar to me and I had difficulty believing it, so I looked it up, and apparently it’s not the most commonly accepted theory at the moment, but it is a legit possibility and a thing that actually happened in the 19th century often enough to be given a name. It was plausible enough for quite a few of his biographers across several decades to agree on that theory, at least. So that’s a thing.

His exact cause of death is mysterious, especially since most of the records have been lost, but the drinking binge theory is unlikely. It’s more plausible that he died of an illness or foul play.

BLESS THIS ENTIRE POST.

The Customer Is Not Always Right: Getting Owned By the Owner Part 2

Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 2
COFFEE SHOP | LEICESTER, ENGLAND, UK
(I’m standing in a fairly short queue when a businessman walks in, pushes straight to the front and starts dictating his order to the 20-something year old cashier.)

Cashier: “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go to the back of the queue, sir.”

Business man: “I have an important meeting shortly. You must serve me now!”

Cashier: “Yeah, the longer you stand there, the later you’re going to be. Back of the queue.”

Business man: “Do you have any idea who I am?”

Cashier: “Nope. Now shut up and go to the back of the queue.”

Business man: “How dare you talk to me like that?! Get me your manager now!”

(The cashier sighs heavily, walks into the back, comes out with an older woman in tow and nods her towards the businessman, then disappears back into the back.)

Manager: “What seems to be the problem, sir?”

Business man: “That boy was incredibly rude to me! I demand you fire him immediately!”

Manager: “I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to do that, but if you want I can get the owner for you.”

Business man: “Bah! Fine, but I expect to be compensated for having to go through all of this trouble!”

Manager: “I’m sure you can discuss that with him, sir.”

(She then walks into the back, then comes out again with the now grinning cashier.)

Cashier: “Yo.”

Business man: “What’s the meaning of this? I said I wanted to talk to the owner!”

Cashier: “Like I said, yo.”

(The businessman silently gapes for a few seconds, then walks out stammering threats about having his head and closing the shop down.)

Manager: “Why do you always have to involve me?”

Cashier: “I just love the look on their stupid little faces when they find out I own this joint.”

(The manager rolls her eyes and walks into back.)

Cashier: “I love this job. What can I get you?”

ninemoons42:

thewinterotter:

casspeach:

star-anise:

last-snowfall:

star-anise:

last-snowfall:

inscarletsilence:

on the one hand

what is the fucking point of flipping it you pulled it out of the sheath by the handle there’s no goddamn need for that

why even bother having a special spot easiy to reach in your black leather suit for knives if you’re just going to play with them when you take them out

but on the other hand

hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng 

(He’s switching grips, largely because someone like Steve ain’t gonna give you an easy target for a straight thrust, especially if he’s got his shield, which makes for a lot of over and underhand stuff. But god yess hnnnnnnnnng.)

Also he LOOKS like he’s pulling it out normally, then flips it around—if you don’t have the advantage of a specific close-up you’d easily miss the little flip and think his blade was pointing toward his thumb.  Then when he pulls his arm back across his body you think he’s pointing the knife over to his left, when in reality it is pointing straight at you and he’s about to slam it in your face.  The arm movement to pull it out of the sheath that other way is super awkward and telegraphs the fact that your blade’s going to be reversed from the very beginning.  But the Winter Soldier is a tricksy bastard.  And IIRC, it works—Steve isn’t aware until his arm comes down to strike that he’s about to get hit.  Otherwise he’d find a better way to block it.

</fencer>

Now with additional commentary from a fencer. My “hnnnnnnnng” is only exponentially increased.

Tl;dr knife flips are a useful, brutal, excellent tool.  When the Winter Soldier is coming after you with a knife you’d better have superhuman reflexes, because he is going to attack you from every possible avenue.  If I only hold my blade like a screwdriver, there are a limited number of physical movements I can make, and they are relatively predictable.  If I hold it like an icepick, the repetoire changes but is likewise limited.  If I can flip it around with absolutely no notice, I’ve effectively doubled how difficult I am to defend against.

Reblogging for commentary, and also because I could watch that gif all day.

All of this, and also, even if he WAS just playing with it, fucking around with a weapon is one of the ways that you get really good with it. With knives specifically, for a guy like Bucky — in both his lives — you’d pretty much have one on you at all times, and a lot of the military life (and probably the assassin life too) involves sitting around being bored as shit waiting for the death and terror to start. You end up playing with your weapons, because they’re there, and that’s one of the primary ways you really learn that weapon inside and out. You might play around, switching your grip, flipping it over and over, learning to catch it by the handle, by the point, learning to throw it, learning the exact weight and the center of its balance and all the other things that make handling it so effortless… it’s all just repetition and asking yourself “I wonder if I can….” and doing it until yes, indeed, you can stab some guy in the face before he can even see you coming.

oh wow.