Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
The initial image is a size comparison between the statue of liberty and a wind turbine. The wind turbine is over ninety feet (about 28 meters) taller.
A commenter pretended to misinterpret the image as one of a wind turbine attacking the statue of liberty. The next commenter answered with an image of Don Quixote, a literary character who once thought a windmill was a monster and announced his plans to fight it. They are joking that if a wind turbine attacked the statue of liberty, Don Quixote would be willing to fight the wind turbine.
Incidentally, that scene led to the English idiom “tilting at windmills,” meaning a person who has not only disproportionate reactions of anger, but disproportionate reactions of anger to nonexistent challenges.
So all those people who are fighting to preserve coal jobs and the fossil fuel economy are….
actually…
tilting at windmills.
I feel like this is one of the very few times where explaining the joke leads to another one that everyone can now understand and laugh at
But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”
I need this as a series
Vampires sharing the recipe for Greek fire.
Vampires speaking in dead languages.
Vampires being able to translate untranslatable scripts.
Vampires who react to straightwashing historical figures like “Are you kidding me everyone knew that man was queer!”
Vampires from cultures who were once antagonistic towards each other stubbornly maintaining a friendship that’s lasted longer than their civilizations.
Vampires who honour forgotten deities you won’t find in mythology books.
Also, vampires who secretly saved stuff from the Library of Alexandra.
A vampire show that does not revolve all around sex and eternal cursed love.
nerd vampire whose knowledge of current events is terrible but they can always remember everything that’s considered “history” so they have a super-detailed knowledge of everything up to about thirty years ago and then ?????
vampire who couldn’t tell you what caravaggio was known for but duelled with him at least three times and slept with him at least ten. “cara-who OH YOU MEAN MICHAEL yeah he was cool”
vampire who spent 100 years in a convent and is still so bitter that in all that time they never made her mother superior “GODDAMMIT I HAD SENIORITY! I HAD SENIORITY!” “okay so first off janet, that was six hundred years ago, but more importantly, maybe if you didn’t always start those complaints off with blasphemy…”
vampire professor who just sort of showed up at oxford when it was founded and is still there (and nobody’s noticed because he still never actually shows up to his lectures)
vampire politician who lifts all their campaign speeches wholesale from speeches given 200 years ago and just waits for someone to catch them out (nobody ever does they’re prime minister and their approval ratings are through the roof)
WAIT I HAVE MORE
queer vampire who constantly talks about the fashion for straightness and you need to be really careful because if you tell them straight is default they WILL scream at you for five days straight about what a modern concept heterosexuality is
vampire hoarder who has an entire town where they just kept having to buy new houses to keep their stuff in and some of it’s probably worth tens of millions by now but you’ll never find it in among the 1950s kitschy kitten sculptures and boxes of newspaper (the newspaper is a wonderful mix of yesterday’s guardian and daily courants from 1725)
vampire sailor from manderville’s time who just has so many stories and some of them might even be true
vampire bluestocking girl who took to the internet like a fish to water and spends her whole unlife engaging reddit antifeminists about women’s rights because that’s one fight she’s determined to see through. also with the advent of cheap dyes she literally wears blue socks every day and hopes one day someone gets the joke
vampire doctor who just gets SO CONFUSED about the literature because do you know how hard it is to keep up with medicine kevin? when i got my doctorate we thought leeches were good and then they were bad and now they’re good again? i was published in issue one of the lancet kevin that is 387 lancets kevin how the hell am i meant to remember which one’s current kevin why are they saying cannabis is good for pain like this is news??? (but also lives in a state of wonderment every day in hospital because wow look at all this stuff we can do now look at it kevin!)
entire coven of vampires constantly quibbling over manners because they’re all from different periods: “HATS OFF AT TABLE” “SCREW YOU LEONARD ONLY PEASANTS EAT BAREHEADED” “TABITHA THAT HASN’T BEEN GOOD MANNERS SINCE THE 1500S NOBODY HAS LICE ANY MORE” “IT ISN’T ABOUT LICE LEONARD IT’S ABOUT GOOD MANNERS YOU NEED TO HAVE GOOD MANNERS WHEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE OVER FOR DINNER” “I SWEAR TO GOD TABITHA IF YOU MAKE THAT PUN ONE MORE TIME I WILL SHOVE YOUR STUPID HAT DOWN YOUR THROAT”
vampire musicians who might not have been child prodigies but goddammit 500 years of practicing an instrument is bound to get you somewhere (also knowing the composer and being the first person to start playing a song doesn’t hurt either)
my favorite will always be vampires who know fuck-all about the standard major historical events because they were always somewhere else whenever big shit was going down:
“yeah i heard about the hundred years war but i was in northern african at the time so…”
“the roman empire fell??? how did the fucking roman empire fall??? i spend a fucking handful of decades in india and i come back to this???”
“russia needs to stop having revolutions, i can’t keep them all straight…”
“when did france become a democracy?? and america’s now it’s own country??? i’ve spent the last century in a forest in wallachia scaring small children so––wHat dO yOU meAn we’re calling it romania now??? when the fuck did it become romania???”
“WE HAD A WORLD WAR??? WE HAD TWO WORLD WARS???? well obviously ‘world’ is an exaggeration because i heard nothing about it while i was lost in the amazon rainforest for the last fifty years…”
“listen i spent most of the fourteenth century as a pirate in the south china sea so someone’s gonna had to clue me in on all this ‘black plague’ nonsense.”
“The way music comes out of … every molecule of the place [is] something we share,” playwright says of track featuring Jennifer Lopez and Luis Fonsi
It’s been two weeks since Hurricane Maria first raged across the island of Puerto Rico, and the crisis has only grown more complex. What first seemed like a natural disaster has also proven to be a long-standing infrastructural one; most of the island remains without electricity and water, putting its residents at a heightened risk of disease and famine. Yet with Puerto Ricans’ pleas meeting inadequate responses from the White House, Tony-winning Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda has taken matters into his own hands – and with the help of many friends. Recorded alongside an all-star cast of Latin artists, including Jennifer Lopez, Gina Rodriguez, Fat Joe, Gloria Esterfan, Camila Cabello and Marc Anthony, Miranda’s new song “Almost Like Praying” is a love song to Puerto Rico as much as it is a fight song. The song’s proceeds will benefit the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS Disaster Relief Fund.
“You know how we always tell artists ‘stay in your lane’ anytime they say something remotely political? I’m trying to use what I do in service of this challenge,” Miranda tells Rolling Stone. “We’re facing a humanitarian crisis right now. And the response from our federal government is not commensurate with the previous two hurricanes, much less up to the unprecedented danger of this disaster itself.”
Miranda began work on the song, an adaptation of “Maria” from 1961 musical West Side Story, two days after the hurricane first made landfall. “I knew the name Maria was forever going to have a destructive connotation to this island,” says Miranda. “It’s also the name of my favorite song from West Side Story. So my brain was already looking for a sample to flip … And that’s what we do in hip-hop, right? We take a sample, we flip it and change the meaning. And so the hook of the song is, ‘Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying.’”
But first, he sought clearance from Stephen Sondheim and the estate of Leonard Bernstein. “They gave their blessing within a day,” says Miranda. “When there’s a crisis, you call in all the favors – call the gods of musical theater! I have the great fortune to count Sondheim as a mentor and a friend. I worked with him and Bernstein on the 2009 revival of West Side Story and its Spanish translations. Sondheim wrote back immediately and said ‘Yes – and what else can I do?’”
Miranda infused the number with a warm blend of dancehall, reggaeton and steel drum sounds; the result is an incendiary and highly danceable clarion call. (“If you’re gonna write a song for Puerto Rico and you can’t dance to it,” says Miranda, “you fucked up.”) Most moving is how many of Miranda’s childhood heroes, including original West Side Story cast member Rita Moreno, take turns shouting out each of the island’s 78 towns – a move Miranda says was inspired by Puerto Ricans’ heartbreaking calls across social media to find their relatives in the wake of the storm.
“There was a terrible silence,” says Miranda. “For some people days, for some people weeks. My Twitter and my Facebook were filled with friends and family listing the names of their towns. ‘My grandmother is in Vega Alta, my father lives in San Juan, has anyone heard from Isabela?’ I began thinking about the towns as lyrics. What unites us in this tiny island that is 100 miles across and 35 miles north to south … Is that we’re from these towns. We ask, ‘Where are you from?’ It is our link to our roots and our families.”
While enlisting collaborators for the track, Miranda says he made new friends in the process. “I broke my Rolodex and called every Latino artist I know,” he says. “And when I didn’t know them, I got on Twitter. I caused a minor uproar with Camila Cabello’s fans when I tweeted her, ‘Hey I have an idea!’ I also sent a private message to Luis Fonsi, who I never met before. I cold-called and every single person said yes, without even hearing the song.”
Within a dizzying72 hours, Miranda flew from New York to Miami and Los Angeles to be present while the artistsrecordedtheir respective verses. Yet some were still recovering in the Caribbean, where resources were scarce and internet access was spotty. “The rapper PJ Sin Suela recorded at home,” says Miranda. “But he didn’t have the bandwidth to email his verse. So he gave a memory stick to Estefan, who was there on a relief mission – she then flew it back to us. When I say ‘all hands on deck,’ I’m really not fucking around!”
Riggs Morales, the executive producer behind the Hamilton Mixtape, mixed and mastered the song in the days that followed. Meanwhile, Miranda harvested stories of Puerto Rico from his collaborators, evoking tears and laughter inside the studios.This behind-the-scenes footage will air as part of a televised benefit, airing commercial-free on Telemundo Saturday, October 7th.
“I asked everyone, ‘What are your favorite memories from Puerto Rico?’” says Miranda. “I will never forget seeing Rubén Blades breaking down about meeting Hector LaVoe for the first time. I’ll never forget Marc Anthony talking about wearing suits before getting on a plane [to the United States] so they’d look white when they landed … And Gilberto Santa Rosa, who sang at my wedding. He was a salsero, but grew up in the same part of town as Daddy Yankee. They could not make two more different genres, but music saved their lives.
“The way music comes out of every frog, every tree, every molecule of the place,” reflects Miranda, “That’s something we share.”
I’m sure you’re sick of seeing my donation posts. I’m sick of making them. But despite all my best efforts, I’m just as bad off as I was a year ago.
My name is Olita. I’m an autistic woman trying to survive in this capitalist hellscape. My job only gives me four hours a week: my income per month, after taxes, comes out to less than $200. I’m trying to find more work but the job market where I’m currently living is abysmal. My monthly rent is $550, and I also require money for transportation to and from work.
After paying my bills, my goal is to lease a car from Lyft for $250 and move down to Sacramento with a friend. This will secure me a far more stable income in addition to reducing my rent costs drastically. I have been trying to accomplish this for about a year but haven’t had a penny extra to save.
My paypal is temprecover1339@hotmail.com. I also have a Ko-Fi account, if you’re more comfortable with that. Even a dollar helps. If you can’t donate, please signal boost this.
Brie Larson: I merely smiled at a TSA agent and he asked for me phone number. To live life as a woman is to live life on the defense.
Amelia Ghoulpin:
I once had a TSA agent tell, me he was memorising my address on my ID so he could send me flowers.
Nodogbite: Oh no, not flowers. How awful.
Amelia Ghoulpin:
Men like this think flowers are the problem and conveniently skip over the part where a stranger in a position of power is taking my address.
Nodogbite:
Now let’s watch how many women (and other genders) agree with me
Amelia Ghoulpin:
Then you’ll have no problem proving your point by sending your address over
If I stopped enjoying things just because someone “problematic” was involved, I wouldn’t watch TV or movies, wouldn’t listen to music, and I wouldn’t interact with ANYONE who ever lived.
Everyone is problematic. Everyone does something somebody doesn’t like or is wrong in some way. Everyone. No exception to that rule.
It’s something you don’t realize until you grow up some and deal with more people and life in general, but if you don’t let stuff go you’ll end up with nothing because every single thing has something wrong or bad about it, no matter how pure you think it is.
And I’m not going to stop enjoying things just because it’s somehow tainted.