ca: civil war but instead of the media pinning the bombing on bucky they pin it on hot tub time machine star, sebastian stan, who just happens to ruin zemo’s entire plan just by looking like bucky barnes
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
It’s been years since Laura helped solve mysteries with her friends Fred, Daphne, Shaggy and his dog, Scooby Doo, but sometimes when Lila runs into the kitchen and collides with the open cabinet door, Clint will hear her exclaim ‘jinkies!’ before asking if Lila is okay.
It had all started with him going undercover in a little burger joint in Coolsville – he’d scoffed at the name, but Agent May had insisted there was something off about the construction project, near the old children’s playground. The locals said it was haunted, and, as much as Clint entertained the idea of ghosts, he knew it was all mumbo jumbo, and if it could move objects, it meant he could hit it with an arrow.
It’s the third night, and this lovely girl has come in every night since he started, to have the same ridiculously over-sugarred coffee he’s ever had to make, but she sits at the counter, and does what he thinks is homework. The first night, she’d been studying ancient Icelandic Runes, so he’d thought she was majoring in the Old Norse degree at University, but the second night she had brought along an electrical grid blueprint she had spent three hours studying.
Tonight, she’s mumbling about inconsistencies in tax deductions. He’s about to serve her the third coffee with whipped cream, milk and sugar of the evening, when she looks up at him through those square glasses.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asks, and he shrugs. He’s got a whole backstory to go with his undercover alias, so he doesn’t bother too much with the bravado. He does struggle with the slight blush he feels – she’s cute, and intriguing.
So, as he puts the oversized mug next to the ledger she’s going through, he smiles at her. “Nah, I’m just staying a couple of months. Looking for a way to get out west, to California, but my car broke down some miles out of here, so now I’m here, serving you coffee.”
She looks at him, measures him up and down once or twice, then looks down at her papers again, as she exclaims a “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” before promptly resuming analyzing the data on the sheets in front of her.
Clint frowns.
“You don’t believe me?”
She smiles, pushing the glasses up to the brim of her nose and looks over at him. “Please, I’ve helped figure out at least twice as many tax evasion and construction hazard cases as what you’ve bench pressed this morning, your little cover story won’t fly.”
Clint decides three things in the second that follows: that she’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen, that he wants to get to know her, and that she’s absolutely, and completely bonkers, because the second that follows, a blue and green van stops outside the diner. A weird guy with shaggy pants, followed by an oversized grand danois walks in, and the girl adjusts her orange sweater, trying to look as if she was working hard.
“Hey, Velma, you wanna like, go find that guy by the playground? Fred says we’re going tonight,” the guy says, and Clint swears the dog says something too, but he doesn’t understand it.
The girl – Velma – looks over at him, a glint in her eye. “Looking forward to hearing your real story next time, cowboy,” she says, getting off the stool and folding the ledger, placing it under her arm.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Clint is watching in dismay as the dog – Scooby Doo – and his friend – Shaggy – have eaten the wedding cake, spreading frosting all over the place.
Kate is standing to the side, holding Lucky’s leash, while Laura – Well, Velma, but she liked her middle name better – tried to reassure her parents that no, she wasn’t sad about the wedding cake.
“Dad, whose idea was it to leave these two alone in the presence of a cake anyway?!” she’d said, before Clint had suppressed a laugh. Barney had laughed then too, and as Fred and Daphne began laughing too, soon everybody was giggling at the sight of a Great Dane covered in purple frosting, trying to hide behind a table it was decidedly too big for.
(When Cooper was born, Clint picked Nick as Godfather, and Laura picked Daphne as Godmother. When Lila was born, Clint picked Melinda as Godmother, and almost had an aneurysm when Laura picked Shaggy as Godfather.)
(Turns out, the kids love it when that too-dangerous-to-be-safe van comes up the driveway.)
(Scoob still goes out to the tree where they buried Lucky, after he had to be put down because of old age. Strangely, Scoob never seemed to age, so when it was time to invite a Lucky #2 into the family, he came with Laura and Clint (and Lila and Cooper and Shaggy) to pick the perfect Golden Retriever puppy from the neighbors who’d just gotten a litter.)
The first time Clint had said ‘jinkies’ on a mission though, Natasha had smacked him so hard across the face, he’d had a black eye for three weeks afterwards.
it fucks me up that tolkien only died in 1973. dude has the vibe of a victorian scholar who wrote all his manuscripts by candlelight but then you look him up and realise that he knew what color tv was. what the fuck.
Can we go back to where he had a beef with the Beatles because that would be like watching my two least favorite cousins have a fight
At the time when the Beatles wanted to make an on-screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien hadn’t yet sold the rights to the trilogy to any production company. When the band approached him with their idea and asked him to sell the rights to them so that they could start working on the movie, he refused without any negotiation. Tolkien was quite a traditionalist and he openly disliked the new musical trend sparked by the Beatles.
At the time, he lived on Sandfield Road in Oxford: incidentally, a band practice garage was situated just three doors away from his house. An unknown local band whose members frequently used the garage may have amplified his hatred of the Beatles and their music, which he considered overly aggressive. In a 1964 letter to his friend Christopher Bretherton, Tolkien wrote: “In a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable.”
It’s time for other kinds of single-biome planets to take the lead in science fiction. More representation of taiga planets, please! How about chaparral planets?
A planet of nothing but beaches… There’s no water or anything, but there are always shorebirds and you sometimes find beached sea life and somehow you can always hear and smell the ocean, even though it doesn’t exist.
Maybe the entire planet is covered in water, but only very, very shallowly, so that it’s like walking on the sand flats/swash forever and ever. it looks like a desert, but when you step on the surface, your foot sinks into the sand a few inches and your footprints fill with water. There are mole crabs and beach hoppers and kelp flies and blood worms, and parasitic sand fleas that will infect the skin of unwary travelers foolish enough to allow the soothing warmth of the wet sand to lull them to sleep, and somehow your sand castles always wash away…
It’s a commercially useless planet, but of great interest to ecologists and planetary geologists alike. Its uniform bleakness does not attract many tourists despite its unique biome.
Flamingo Homeworld
yeah it’s the soggy planet that flamingos come from
A planet that’s the same as the landscape of Joshua Tree National Park, complete with Joshua trees!
Joshua Tree National Park itself actually IS from Joshua Tree Planet – it was shorn off its homeworld by a meteorite strike and collided with Earth.
And it wants to go home.
In the Terran year 2344, astronomers in the United Stellar Alliance discovered a planet made entirely out of the hotly contested strips of no-man’s-land marking the property line between suburban yards. It was a miracle that such a world existed at all, let alone supported a teeming population of what scientists were forced to concede qualified as ‘intelligent’ life by galactic standards. The inhabitants of this unlikely planet were warlike and short-tempered, though conflicts between them seldom escalated beyond passive-aggressive grass mowing and performative shows of trespassing to brazenly tend to gardens on the other side of the property line.
what she says: i’m fine
what she means: it’s 2 am and I can’t stop thinking about the Pied Piper. Initially i thought it was just an old faerie tale but i’ve been reading up on it and it turns out that at some point in the town of Hamelin, a bunch of children really did go missing all at once in fact a stained glass window in the local church in 1300 was made to tell the story AND Hamelin’s written history literally BEGINS in 1384 with the sentence “it is 100 years since our children left.” There are a ton of theories about what the piper could actually represent but historians are pretty much convinced that something did take away children en masse in the 1200s in Hamelin and to this day we still use the phrase “it’s time to pay the piper.” When will we pay him? Who was he???? Like okay I see the theories but what if some flute paying faerie really just led a bunch of kids away in 1284 I cannot get over this.
Okay, uh. So you understand where I’m coming from: I majored in software and I dabbled in some AI and technology ethics & philosophy courses in uni, and I love tech! I think AI is wildly fascinating, I think it has a ton of potential for supporting remote communities, I do not think that connected homes or AI assistants are inherently evil. But they are… vulnerable. There’s a ton of potential for good in this industry, but tech is, unfortunately, filled with people who either don’t think about the consequences of their actions, or don’t care.
Smart home devices trigger with a wake phrase, the whole “ok google/echo/whatever” thing you say to get their attention. This means that in some capacity, their microphones must always be active and ready to pick up on this wake phrase. Unfortunately, a lot of smart home manufacturers are not particularly cooperative when asked what they’re recording, how it’s attached to your identity, how they deal with potential privacy violations, etc. They might make a show of letting you log in and delete recordings your device has taken when triggered by the wake phrase, but they don’t give a flying fuck about letting you keep your secrets.
My parents grew up under a tyrannical regime and didn’t know which of their friends and classmates and family were part of the secret police and would turn them in for saying the wrong thing about the government. My mother also got one of these devices last year. I asked how she could stand it, given our people’s fairly justified paranoia, and she just smiled and joked that she isn’t overthrowing a government these days. And there’s a lot of people who agree with her, and won’t particularly care if a company is storing massive amounts of voice clips and mining them for data, because hey, they got nothing to hide, right? But these days, data mining can draw conclusions that a human mind would never dream of making, with absolutely none of the compassion. There are algorithms out there that can calculate when you are pregnant before you know it yourself, and trigger a helpful wave of baby-related advertisements, which you might find handy! until it accidentally emails it to your family members before you’re ready for that conversation (yes, an amazon echo thingy did this) or doesn’t adjust its behavior when you have a miscarriage and really do not want cheerful congratulatory ads at the 9 month mark. (This particular example was, iirc, given at a tech ethics talk about facebook, but still applicable.)
Read up on Internet of Things and other smart home products – this corner of the industry absolutely plans to make everything in your house smart one day and they have no intention of making any of their shit compatible with each other so they’re going HAM trying to sell and give away as many smart devices as they can right now in the hopes that it’ll build brand loyalty.
TL:DR this tech is not designed for you. It is not your friend. It’s a tool for whatever manufacturer made it to profit off of you, and, eventually, lock you into their company. I will never allow one of these things in my house and I strongly recommend you avoid them and yes, I’m absolutely aware that I sound paranoid right now! I’m even cringing real hard about it bc I don’t wanna be all hurr durr technology is evil and Thomas Edison was a witch, but like, if you do decide to get or keep one of these devices, just… be aware. 🙁
