most of the time everything sucks but when the sky is blanketed in dark blue-grey clouds after heavy raining and the sun starts to peek through the clouds so that the tops of trees glint pale green and every white structure is starkly, blindingly silhouetted against the sky i’m ok.
this made me think “Hephaestus would also love us” and then I saw Hephaestus going on a forbidden journey to sunder Prometheus’s chains because without the gift of fire humans would never have learned the art of the forge. and he was already cast out of Olympus for being born with a disability, without fire in human hands he would have been so lonely, god of nothing and no one.
now they watch humans do these things together just beaming like two proud dads and occasionally calling Asclepius when shit goes sideways (“we love you, children! always wear your PPE!”)
Fic idea I was struck with the other day and keep thinking about: a Vulcan adopts a cat.
Still thinking about this, even though I’m not writing the fic!
This Vulcan, I’m calling her T’Pen, goes to a shelter and gets a cat, and the shelter employees are like, a bit weirded out? But obviously they’re going to give her a cat, I mean, she’s a Vulcan, she’s Super Responsible, she takes all the pamphlets and listens attentively to all the advice the shelter employees give her, even though it is obvious she researched a lot on her own.
Then T’Pen asks the shelter folks what she should name the cat and runs into That Thing Humans Do Where They Confound a Vulcan With Their Weird Ways
Shelter Employee 1: oh, you can name a cat anything! That’s what’s great! People names, common nouns, whole phrases.
Shelter Employee 2: yeah, nothing sounds weird on a cat. Everything from Chad to Cupboard is fair game.
SE 1: yeah, I mean, you can’t call a dog Chad, that would be weird
SE 2: I wouldn’t fuckin’ trust anyone who named their dog Chad
SE 1: oh word
T’Pen:….
T’Pen: ….fascinating.
Later, in the interest of furthering her anthropological study of Earth, T’Pen has a houseparty and she invites her coworkers, many of whom are human, but others which are aliens, and are fascinated by T’Pen’s cat
Vulcan Co-worker: T’Pen, what have you named this small Earth feline?
T’Pen: I have named him Marmalade.
Vucan co-worker: Is that not the name of a type of Terran fruit preserve? I do not understand the logic behind this choice.
T’Pen: the logic is self-evident to a human.
Human Co-worker: T’Pen, omg, you have a cat! What’s his name?
T’Pen: thank you for your inquiry. His name is Marmalade
Human Co-worker: oooh! yeah, that makes sense, because he’s orange and sweet! lmao, great name
Vulcan Co-worker: …
Vulcan Co-worker: ….fascinating
Human: So, how’s Marmalade?
T’Pen: He has the peculiar habit of walking on my workstation.
Human: Aggravating, isn’t it?
T’Pen: We Vulcans do not feel human emotions. However, I would prefer it if Marmalade stayed off my workstation, particularly when I am working.
Human: Get a box.
T’Pen: Murdering Marmalade seems an overreaction.
Human: No, you need a box with interior dimensions approximately the same as Marmalade’s body, and set it on the floor next to your workstation. Marmalade will sit in the box.
T’Pen: Why do you believe that this will work for Marmalade?
Human: We don’t know. It’s just something cats do. If he fits, he sits.
T’Pen: … Fascinating.
Vulcan Commander: T’Pen, you are posting videos of your cat. Explain.
T’pen: My colleagues are amused and entertained by Marmalade’s interactions with his environment. I am amused and entertained by their reactions as reflected in the comments.
Vulcan Commander (reading): “U haz done me a startle”?
T’Pen: Some of them like to verbalize what they believe are Marmalade’s thought processes. He is a cat, so they imagine that he does not grasp human spelling and grammar.
Vulcan Commander: … Fascinating. As you were. (signs off)
T’Pen (returning to her meal): Now I can haz lunch.
I need more people to write more bits of this.
Marmalade: Meow. *nudges food bowl and looks expectantly*
T’Pen: You have just eaten. Logic dictates that you should not yet be hungry.
Marmalade: Meeooowww!
T’Pen: I must remember that cats do not adhere to the dictates of logic, and adjust accordingly. However, I will not give you more food right now as that would be unhealthful.
Marmalade: *sad cat eyes*
T’Pen: You attempt to appeal to my emotional side, however you will find that your attempts will be fruitless.
T’Pen:…I am speaking to an animal who cannot understand linguistic communication. The cat’s illogical nature seems to be having a deleterious affect on my own. Fascinating.
“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”- Anthony Bourdain
i feel like people got so weird about age gaps in this very abstract sense that now there’s this taboo about being friends with someone who’s a few years older or younger than u….like, i have friends in their 70s and i have friends in their early 20s and im always friendly with teenagers & kids too because they all deserve to have adult friends in their lives who they can trust! other people projecting their gross shit onto those friendships is not my problem
guess what! its good for us to have intergenerational friendships actually! its good for all of us to have healthy, friendly, respectful relationships with people of different ages! it works in all directions!
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
“We’ll fire you if you tell others how much you’re making” The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can’t reveal someone else’s wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
“If we can’t fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we’ll just fire you for something else the next day.” This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn’t retaliatory.
“Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination” Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren’t allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they’re obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
“If you unionize, we’ll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off” Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
“We can have any rule we want, it’s only illegal if we actually enforce it” Any workplace policy or rule that has a “chilling effect” on employees’ willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
“If you [protected action], we’ll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again.” Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone’s job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
“Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye.” Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you’ve been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
“We’ll deny that you ever worked here” not actually possible unless they haven’t been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they’re guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there’s nothing they can do about that.
doomsday preppers always keeping rusty tins of food in their basement but never building springhouses and smokehouses and paddocks for future livestock 🤨 those canned peaches are only going to bring you so far babe
are you going to study medicinal herbs and their cultivation or are you just going to keep stockpiling weapons like a little bitch 😩
going to shoot your way out of an infected cut, dumbass?
Historically, many American states considered the rights of private property owners to extend “up to Heaven and down to Hell”, a state of affairs which posed a navigational hazard to American vampires. Those who were wont to fly by night in the form of a bat found themselves obliged to weave through a dense thicket of privately owned airspaces, with dire consequences for miscalculation.
With the advent of commercial aviation, however, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was granted control over passage through American airspace which supersedes the properly rights statutes of the individual states. This created a loophole which vampires could exploit, albeit at a peculiar cost: in order to fall under the FAA’s jurisdiction, vampires are obliged to register themselves as ultralight aircraft and submit flight plans for their nightly excursions.
Today, FAA is heavily infiltrated by vampire thralls tasked with ensuring their masters’ registrations and associated flight plans are properly filed and approved without coming to the public’s attention, a position of both considerable influence and considerable risk.
(The plight of Canadian vampires, meanwhile, is more straightforward. Strictly speaking, all Canadian airspace is the private property of the Queen of England, so the freedom to fly by night hinges upon having received the Queen’s personal invitation. The ability to obtain this invitation remains one of the primary drivers of class stratification in Canadian vampire society.)
