brilliantyears

[brilliantyears]

Transformers One isn't changing the established lore y'all because there is no established lore

[brilliantyears]

hey hey hey

Assigning you a song that makes white people go nuts (from experience)

#sweet home alabama #.................... fascinating

[brilliantyears]

it’s like every month there’s some shit from the us that’s like “congressman for iowa john hamburger has introduced the Put Everyone Into A Meat Grinder bill (s.911) & it’s about to get passed to the senate everyone call your reps now!!!” & it’s something that affects the entire world

[brilliantyears]

Retraction Issued: analysis by the Very Online Fact Checking Institute has determined that only around 85% of those present were actually Kung Fu Fighting, and several were in fact using other disciplines such as Karate or Brazilian Jujitsu.

[brilliantyears]

THIS PICTURE JUST MADE MY LIFE.

[brilliantyears]

ursula k le guin was right

[brilliantyears]

Hazy Abstract Seascapes by Paul Bennett

Fine artist Paul Bennett paints semi-abstract seascapes, which resemble the haze of a dream or a memory. The moody, intimate pieces reveal nature’s deep isolation, beauty and loneliness. The foggy seascapes offer a calm, brooding beauty which is instantly detectable.

Keep reading

[brilliantyears]

don’t get lazy at the textures stage, kids

#transformers #drift #rodimus #driftrod

[brilliantyears]

So obviously, the most obnoxious and useless sort of science fiction criticism is provided by angry dumb guys screaming into microphones about things being “woke”; but I also get annoyed by the people who insist on applying a sort of “roman-á-clé” reading, where everything in the story is merely a disguised stand-in for some real-world human political issue. Like, yes, obviously, sf is used for social and political commentary a lot of the time; but it’s *also* used to just kind of play around on the frontiers of possibility. And it frankly seems kind of demeaning to the genre to pretend that its alien, its bizarre, and its inhuman features are necessarily just stand-ins for some mundane, real-world concept. Like, yes, clearly The War of the Worlds is about colonialism; but it’s also about alien life; it’s also about evolution and ecology; and it’s also about “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if THIS happened!?” And all of these are irreducible from the genre. Is your robot autistic? Well, maybe you can read it that way. Maybe it’s a sincere attempt to imagine a nonhuman mechanical intelligence. Maybe it’s both. Sometimes, you write a story strictly for “Wouldn’t it be fucked-up if…” purposes and it ends up shedding a whole new light on the human condition; in fact, I think that, if you’re taking your concept seriously, it should do this by default. But you have to take the bizarre on its own terms or you might as well be reading realism.

[brilliantyears]

Popcorn and Toast playing some vs basketball! I'm really proud of Toast in particular for being able to hold her own - Popcorn can be very pushy with basketball so I wasn't sure how Toast would do given her initial struggle with it, but she rose to the challenge and got just as many hoops as Popcorn! Go Toast and Popcorn!

[brilliantyears]

"Much knowledge that was forgotten because it wasn't needed for many years has been recovered" sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, but it's actually from Voyager mission engineer Kareem Badaruddin wrt Voyager 1, and one of various awesome quotes in this article about the possible effective death of the Voyager 1 mission.

#crying happy tears #this is so cool!

[brilliantyears]

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

[brilliantyears]

why are french people rude?

Ah well, the safest explanation when an entire country’s people are stereotyped as rude is that they have their own culture with different criteria for politeness than the ones you are used to. It’s probably easier for Americans to forget this than for the rest of the world, because they consume less foreign media than the rest of us (from literature in translation to foreign films) and are less exposed to aspects of foreign cultures that could inform them about different norms of politeness (online interactions happen in their own language and follow their own (anglo) social codes.) With this insular worldview it’s easy to take it for granted that American good manners are universal. They are not!

A very common gripe against American tourists in Paris is that they talk so loudly in public spaces, which is definitely rude here but I assume that in the US, people just have a different threshold for what constitutes ‘loud’ (I wonder if it is due to being used to having more space than Europeans). I also remember a discussion I had with one of my translation professors about the American concept of ‘active listening’ and how negatively it is perceived in France. It may be that in the US it is polite to make ‘listening noises’ at regular intervals while someone is speaking to you, ‘uh huh’, ‘right’, ‘yeah’, ‘really?’, and that you would perceive someone who just stands there silently as disinterested or thinking about something else. In France it is more polite to shut up and listen (with the occasional nod or ‘mmh’) and it’s rather seen as annoying and rude to make a bunch of useless noise while someone is speaking.

There are of course countless examples like that. The infamous rude waiters in Parisian cafés probably seem a lot more rude and cold to people who have a different food culture… People from other cultures might consider a waiter terrible at his job if he doesn’t frequently check on them to make sure they don’t wait for anything, but the idea that a meal is a pleasant experience rather than just a way to feed yourself (esp when eating out) means we like having time to chat and just enjoy our table for a while, so we don’t mind as much waiting to order or for the next course. French people would typically hate if an overzealous waiter took the initiative to bring the note once we’re done with our meal so we don’t have to wait for it, as it would be interpreted as “you’re done, now get out of my restaurant.”

The level of formality required to be seen as polite is quite high in France, which might contribute to French people being seen as rude by people with a more casual culture. To continue with waiters, even in casual cafés they will address clients with the formal you and conversely, and won’t pretend to be your friend (the fact that we don’t have the American tip culture also means they don’t feel the need to ingratiate themselves to you.) I remember being alarmed when a waitress in New York introduced herself and asked how I was doing. “She’s giving me her first name? What… am I supposed to with it? Use it?” It gave me some insight on why Americans might consider French waiters rude or sullen! It might also be more accepted outside of France to customise your dish—my brother worked as a waiter and often had to say “That won’t be possible” about alterations to a dish that he knew wouldn’t fly with the chef, to foreign tourists who were stunned and angry to hear that, and probably brought home a negative opinion of French waiters. In France where the sentiment in most restaurants is more “respect the chef’s skill” than “the customer is king”, people are more likely to be apologetic if they ask for alterations (beyond basic stuff) as you can quickly be seen as rude, even by the people you are eating with. 

And I remember reading on a website for learning English that the polite answer to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, thank you!” because it’s rude to burden someone you aren’t close to with your problems. In my corner of the French countryside the polite thing to do is to complain about some minor trouble, because saying everything is going great is perceived negatively, as boasting, and also as a standoffish reply that kind of shuts down the conversation, while grumbling about some problem everyone can relate to will keep it going. (French people love grumbling as a positive bonding activity!)

Basically, before you settle on the conclusion that people from a different place are collectively rude, consider that if you travel there and scrupulously follow your own culture’s social code of good manners, you might be completely unaware that you are being perceived as obnoxious, rude or unfriendly yourself simply because your behaviour clashes with what is expected by locals.

#i can't even reblog this without getting violent flashbacks to all the bullshit i've had to witness on this hellsite #it's so fine to shit on some cultures calling them rude for things that are different from YOUR culture #even if the supposed 'rudeness' is actual politeness #yes i am talking about the fucking 'they don't feed their guests!' bullshit post everyone believed without an ounce of critical thinking

[brilliantyears]

#where’s the lie

[brilliantyears]

Hear me out, gideon and harrow as chell and glados from portal. Imagine it in your mind gay people

#the locked tomb #portal #glados

[brilliantyears]

Your fat body is not a placeholder for a "better" you. It IS you. And you deserve love and respect NOW.

[brilliantyears]

"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”

- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)

#the locked tomb