No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

THE ULTIMATE FASHION HISTORY: Ancient Greece

Source: youtube.com

ladyyatexel this is p interesting

ladyyatexel

unflatteringcatselfies:
“This is Montague. Fat. Good.
”

cat therapy

cosmictuesdays

tanoraqui

top Vor things, no particular order:

Piotr, who wouldn’t accept Miles as his grandson until he was like five, asking if maybe Miles failed the Imperial Academy physical test because the instructor was a jealous prole
the end of Warrior’s Apprentice when Miles finally tells Baz his house colors and Baz nearly faints, and Miles tosses, “Break him in gently, Elena!” over his shoulder as he walks away
Gregor being like 95% sure that neither Miles nor Elena would ever point a loaded cannon at him
I’m almost entirely certain Simon isn’t actually, legally technically, sworn to Aral in any way, but every single person treats them as such
“Vor really does mean thief.” -drunk, furious Duv Galeni
Aral Vorkosigan, Admiral, Regent, Prime Minister and Viceroy, wears bright, floral shirts in his downtime.
“Let’s see what happens” (every. time.)
“But of course. Every Vor lady go to the capital to shop.”
when Vordrozda draws the needler in the Council of Counts, in the presence of the emperor, and fully half of them, these old men with the status, stuffiness, and average age of the UK’s House of Lords, get up and run forward to tackle him
Miles, what have you done with your baby brother?
when Miles reluctantly admits to Ekaterin that they would have had to sacrifice her and Professora Vorthys for the good of the station and Komarr, if it came to it, and Ekaterin replies, “Of course. We’re Vor.” And you can hear Miles’ jaw hit the floor, because coincidentally it’s the same sound my jaw is making, because holy mothergrubbing shit, if you were not convinced by this point that they were perfect for each other…
when Richars says “Lady Alys doesn’t have a seat on the Council of Counts” and five days later, Alys has whipped up like seven votes against him, mostly by talking to various Countesses and their daughters
when Miles shows up at Ivan’s office in Memory to requesition him, and Ivan is like, “NOPE” until Miles explains that it’s for Illyan, and Ivan is like, “…about time. Mother’s been complaining” and falls in behind him.
Mark haphazardly enlisting Elena as an armswoman-simple
Ivan explaining the secret code of Gregor’s suit choice to the Arquas
this list could go on for so long; I’m going to stop it with a reminded that Aral Vorkosigan wears bright Hawaiian shirts, and also honorary mention to the time Bel Thorne pretended to buy Mark’s charade of being Miles so they could go rescue a bunch of clones from Jackson’s Whole. That was the most Milesian thing anyone non-Miles has ever done, with the possible exception of sinking ImpSec.

fightscrimewhilesleeping

observer.com

A Biology Teacher Just Destroyed Every Excuse for Transphobia With Cold, Hard Facts

A biology teacher posted a status pointing out the wide variety of genders in the human and animal kingdoms.

prettyaveragewhiteshark

This is AMAZING. The teacher’s rebuttal:

I just commented this on a transphobic post that was all like, “In a sexual species, females have two X chromosomes and males have an X and a Y, I’m not a bigot it’s just science.” I’m a science teacher so I responded with this.
First of all, in a sexual species, you can have females be XX and males be X (insects), you can have females be ZW and males be ZZ (birds), you can have females be females because they developed in a warm environment and males be males because they developed in a cool environment (reptiles), you can have females be females because they lost a penis sword fighting contest (some flatworms), you can have males be males because they were born female, but changed sexes because the only male in their group died (parrotfish and clownfish), you can have males look and act like females because they are trying to get close enough to actual females to mate with them (cuttlefish, bluegills, others), or you can be one of thousands of sexes (slime mold, some mushrooms.) Oh, did you mean humans? Oh ok then. You can be male because you were born female, but you have 5-alphareductase deficiency and so you grew a penis at age 12. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but you are insensitive to androgens, and so you have a female body. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but your Y is missing the SRY gene, and so you have a female body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but one of your X’s HAS an SRY gene, and so you have a male body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes- but also a Y. You can be female because you have only one X chromosome at all. And you can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but your heart and brain are male. And vice - effing - versa. Don’t use science to justify your bigotry. The world is way too weird for that shit.

ruspeach

fightscrimewhilesleeping

charminglyantiquated

so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again.
and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.

BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.

i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…

you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’re realizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist

roachpatrol

okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.

finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’

and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’

and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’

and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’

and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’

the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.

and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.

naamahdarling

@elodieunderglass

tagged for imaginary swans doing the lord’s work

drferox

A++, two thumbs up.

It may also interest someone to know that swans can projectile poop.

hellenhighwater

I know a real-world mama swan who got shot in the wing and walked four miles overland to get back to her babies and dad swan, with her broken wing bleeding and dragging the whole way. She just kept going. Don’t mess with lady swans.

Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)

And when a swan decides to beat you up, it is not with fancy martial arts. Swans are brawlers. They have bone clubs built into their wing joints specifically for beating people up. A human swan is gonna come at you screaming and spitting and just keep punching you in the face until you regret every decision you have made ever in your life and also some of the ones your parents made too.

isanah

I want a movie where the swan is either played by The Rock or Gwendoline Christie and the screaming brawls are the centerpiece.

mrs260-deactivated20181228

Anonymous asked:

"It's best not to dwell on such minutiae" is one of my favorite line readings of the entire series. GARAK.

wellntruly answered:

So Guess What, @memory-for-trifles has done some investigative journalism for us and turned up that minutiae is the plural and minutia the singular, though most people conflate them into one they call “mi-noo-shuh” because “mi-nyoo-shee” sounds INSANE.

And so now we all have to face surely a DAILY choice of whether we’re going to pronounce minutiae wrong, like an asshole, or pronounce it correctly, like an asshole. THANKS, GARAK, u fucker.