AU/Headcanon - Demon Hunter weapons don’t hurt humans. They slip right past them without drawing any blood. So when the girls are messing around and Zoey accidentally scratches Rumi, she and Mira don’t understand why Rumi gets hurt.

when they find out she’s half demon, Zoey decides that this means that Rumi is just like a half blood from PJO and will not take no for an answer. That Halloween she is fem!Grover, Mira is Annabeth, and Rumi is fem!Percy

or whatever gender headcanons you have, idk

surely this cannot be too hard a concept for people to grasp

I hate when my mind just goes full no thoughts, head empty. Anyways, here's a superman au

Celine and Mi‑yeong were children of Krypton, never meant to cross paths, never meant to love each other, and yet they did. They tied their lives together against their families’ wishes and left their world behind to chase the stars. Somewhere out there, between constellations, they welcomed their daughter. They laughed, they cried, they lived. They built a home they could only dream of on Krypton.

Teentrix getting ready to hang out

Demon Rearing by @beansmakesthings

One more cause i cant get it out my system 🥹🪐

Science fiction is full of first contact stories, but is there a such thing as LAST contact?  Decide exactly what that means, and write about it.

It was too late, when the humans came. They were a young species, still exploring outwards, vital and thriving. 

We… were not. 

War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away. 

And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few. 

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.” 

It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.

But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us. 

Keep reading

Impressive is Relative

“Gravity generators sure are a great invention,” I said as I looked out at the tiny ocean. I didn’t even have to turn my head quickly to see the curve of the horizon. This place shouldn’t have been big enough to hold an atmosphere, much less the beginnings of a city. 

“No joke,” Mur said, idly picking up a rock with one blue-black tentacle and letting it fall. “This one’s quality, too. No hiccups that I’ve noticed yet. In the old days, this asteroid wouldn’t be good for more than mining or a dug-out storage space.” 

“How long ago was that?” I asked. “Is artificial gravity a new thing? All I know is it’s older than Earth’s introduction to all this.” 

Mur rippled his tentacles in a shrug. “Beats me swimming. It wasn’t invented on my planet, so no one bothered to teach it in school.” 

“Really? That seems like an oversight.” 

Mur tipped his squid head back to look at me. “Is everyone on Earth taught the origins of every technological advancement ever?”

“Okay, fair point,” I said. “But we do know about the big ones. I could tell you all about the brothers who made the first flying vehicle, or the race between countries to reach the moon first.”

“Right. So who developed the air circulation systems for reaching the moon? The food storage, the propulsion?”

“Uh, somebody along the way,” I said with exaggerated confidence. “Those aren’t nearly as important, though. Artificial gravity seems like a big deal.”

Another ripple. “You just say that because your species never figured it out on your own. A culture that can’t throw things would be astonished if you didn’t know who first invented your ball-throwing sports.”

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

I want to talk about a very specific trans boy experience today: female friends or family members trying to pull you into „all men suck“ conversations. 

These might not be outright biological essentialism conversations (some pseudoscientific nonsense like „Men are biologically hardwired to be abusive and violent“). Most often, it’s just private rants: their boyfriend did something shitty or a male customer at work acted creepy or their ex cheated and they are actually just mad at that guy specifically but express it in a „why are all men always shitty“ way.

It’s a special type of uncomfortable. They are indirectly, subtly misgendering you by excluding you from „all men“ as a group (even if they do not directly say „I see you as a girl and therefore expect you to agree with me that men, which to me you are not a part of, are assholes“ out loud and they may in fact not even consciously think that, they do put you in a separate category than men just by silently assuming that they can say „all men are shit“ to you without insulting you.) 

But it’s a type of misgendering that can’t just simply be fixed by changing the words used. It’s not a „You are my sister“ „Please call me your brother“ situation that can be corrected just like that. You likely would not feel much better if they went „all men, including you, are shit“ instead. 

It’s not a linguistic problem, it’s a worldview problem, and those are much harder to correct. The actual issue is, of course, the assumption that a group of individuals can be by default bad due to something that’s out of their control - and that applies to „men“ as a group as much as it would apply to „women“ or „people of color“ or „elderly people“ or „gay people“. Saying „all of them suck“ just… sucks. 

Individuals can be shitty for lots of things that are within their control: their behavior, the way they treat others, their opinions etc. And some groups hold a special power position in society that makes it easier for them to be shitty and not face serious consequences. That does apply to „men“ as a group, and maybe for that reason we can not fully equate saying „all men suck“ with saying „all women suck“ - the latter is born in a misogynistic society, the former may just be a simplistic way to express „the patriarchy allows or even rewards male individuals for shitty behavior“. Which may just be why this stereotype of „women bond by getting together and complaining about how all men suck“ exists in the first place! 

But that’d be a whole lot to say when all your sister wants to do is just to go „Ugh all men are the same, I just found out my boyfriend cheated on me again, I hate men!“ and get a sympathetic „Men are the worst!“ back. You may not want to go „well actually, gender does not make anyone a cheater, your boyfriend is just an asshole, but then again growing up in a patriarchal society may play a role in why you forgave him the first time, so I understand your frustration, it’s a nuanced topic“ right there - or at least I do not when I find myself in that position. 

So, I just want to give you a hug and tell you that I get it. You’re allowed to feel uncomfortable with it. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Dad 

Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me

You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend

Humans being the first. Not the strongest or the smartest or the weirdest or the most violent. Just the first.

We called out into the dark over and over. We sent out messages in hopes. We searched every planet we could reach, in hopes of any sign of life. Any at all.

We thought, hoped we were the last, because we couldn’t bear the idea of being the one ones this awake and alive in a world as vast as this.

And we died alone.

When the others are born, many many years later, they find us, everything we left for them.

They recover The Golden Record and look at it a million times over, they dig up our fossils and put us in museums, they study us for years and years, loving us as we love our ancestors’ painted hands on cave walls.

In a lot of their languages, the word they use for us has the same root for “mother”.

I think about this idea a lot. Also think it'd be fun to have some alien characters in a setting like this who are super into ancient earth, like how some people are way into Rome.

Getting tattoos of ancient human deities like Superman, Shakira, or The Doom Slayer.

Maybe making their gamer tag a bunch of mistranslated Human words to sound cool and edgy

Getting into some VERY problematic intergalactic politics based on ancient Human leaders.

Writing retellings and reimaginings of legendary human epics like Gilgamesh, Dark Souls, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Wars.

Drawing inspirational and life altering messages and advice from completely bastardized Human media and myths. Their original messages somehow still preserved through the lens of a culture that might not understand, but most definitely appreciates them.

This is an enormously petty moment from me. We all have them. If it bothers you please just scroll on. My apologies.

But I'm sorry, why the chicken-fried FUCK were people saving their work only to google docs in the first place. I can understand if it's the only cloud backup you have, but text files weigh nothing--why aren't they on your own machine first, backed up to g-docs second? Your PC, your phone, your goddamn mp3 player? Why were you putting the ONLY copy of ALL of your work squarely in the hands of a single evil megacorp, and why have you been doing it since high school?

I ranted about this when google docs first came into fashion, and I'm ranting about it now. It's been like watching a grown adult walk into traffic. WHyyyyyyy.

If you're affected by this, I'm begging you to treat it like a learning moment. You are not in control of anything that isn't saved to your own device, accessible offline, and through your own choice of software. You never will be.

For a free cloud backup that, at present, is not known to fuck with your stuff, use dropbox.

For a much more secure paid cloud backup, use Protondrive. It comes with the VPN, and Proton is based in Sweden. It is thus more secure than corporations based in countries which are under certain U.S. treaties. It's also end-to-end encrypted. Nobody can see your shit and nobody can tamper with it. If you really, REALLY missed that browser-based editing or need to seamlessly work on stuff with multiple people, they even offer a docs clone.

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

I’ve seen some people (and/or ads) imply lately that talking to AI is superior to talking to real human beings (for example because it „replies immediately“, „always cares about your interests“ and is „always nice to you“) - let’s talk about that. 

First things first: I’ll focus on „talking to AI recreationally“ here - as in talking to AI about your day, your hobbies and interests, your everyday worries, your love life, your sex life, your creative projects, role-playing with it etc. Basically all the things people discuss with their friends. We are not talking about „AI helping with early detection of cancer cells“ or anything like that. That’s a completely different discussion. 

So, „ChatGPT is like a best friend but better, it is never too busy to talk and it never judges me“… well, there are certain things we don’t even need to talk about here. You already know that the conclusion of this letter won’t be „that’s a great idea, let’s all stop talking to each other and completely rely on ChatGPT for all our social needs instead“.  That’d be a horrible idea and I don’t want to belittle you by acting like you are not aware of that. 

Even if you don’t know any specific scientific details, you know that humans need humans in order to thrive or survive. We are just wired that way. We are group animals. A baby would literally die if left alone. Adults deteriorate both physically and mentally in social isolation. We don’t all need the exact same amount or type of social interaction but we all do need it. 

What I do want to talk about here are the specific claims these people/ads make, who they target and why they may work. 

Yes, humans need humans, social interaction is a core human need - and we don’t all have easy access to that. That’s, sadly, a fact. Loneliness is common. We live increasingly isolated lives. For many people, it’s not really like the choice is between „I’ll talk to one of my trusted friends“ or „I’ll talk to ChatGPT“ - it’s between „I’ll talk to ChatGPT“ or „I’ll talk to nobody“. And that’s heavy. That kind of pain is not something we can gloss over or ridicule. 

The reasons for severe loneliness are diverse. Some people struggle with forming or maintaining friendships, for example due to social anxiety or autism or negative childhood experiences. Some people become adults and suddenly realize they were never actually taught how to make friends outside of a school setting. Some people are so burned out from working to make rent, from taking care of their elderly parents, from raising their kid, from trying to survive as a chronically ill person (all without a community to fall back on when times get hard) that they have to helplessly watch their friendships fade away because they don’t have the energy to maintain them. Some people grow up as „the weird kid“ and internalize that they will always be the one to stand alone in the corner. And that’s still only some of the many reasons. 

The mean thing about loneliness - no matter if its the „I have no friends“ or the „I have friends but there are things that prevent me from reaching out“ type - is that real human beings are naturally messy. What I mean by that is: everyone has their own life. People have bad days and give short replies. People are busy and leave you on read. People are mentally preoccupied and accidentally ignore your topic. People give vague answers. People misunderstand you. - and in a really mean ironic twist, loneliness can amplify all that messiness. 

Think about it this way: if you haven’t read a book in years, then the very idea of starting a book can be daunting. What if you don’t get it? What if you don’t like it? But if you are a regular reader, then encountering a difficult chapter or even a book you don’t like is probably not a big deal! That’s because you have the experience that helped you develop the inner tools to deal with that situation. In fact, you may find that it’s often the „difficulties“ of reading (having to think about a chapter, weighing different interpretations etc.) that actually make it enjoyable and enriching! 

The same thing applies to the natural difficulties of relationships with real human beings. 

Yes, AI will reply instantly and it will agree with you and it will be nice to you. But real human beings will challenge you. They will actually broaden your horizons and enrich your life - by bringing up a new perspective, by disagreeing with something you believed to be true, by telling you when you make no sense. And, honestly, sometimes also just by making you wait for a reply. 

Actually, the selling point „AI never disagrees“ can be a really dangerous one. There have been multiple suicides and murders linked to that now - not because AI is evil but because it’s not a human being. It doesn’t think. It just predicts what you want to hear.. and that can lead to really dangerous spirals because it’ll also enable, encourage and even flesh out suicidal thoughts. Or manic thoughts. Or psychotic thoughts. Or extremist thoughts. 

That’s because, and this is really important, it’s actually not „a robot friend“ in the sense that it’s like an artificial personality that has thoughts and feelings, just not human ones. It does not have thoughts and feelings at all. 

I am not saying „ChatGPT is evil and wants you dead“. I’m just saying: It’s basically just autocorrect that is really, really good at putting together sentences. But it doesn’t think about the content of these sentences. (Of course calling it autocorrect is oversimplifying a complex technology but its a good comparison to explain the main misinformation: It creates text. It doesn’t create thoughts.) 

Human beings don’t reply instantly - because they actually think before they reply. And sometimes that reply will be „WTF are you talking about“ and that’s healthy. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Dad 

hi everyone. do yourself a favour and go create a beautiful horse for me

they jump if you click them by the way. but watch out

🎮 HEY I WANNA MAKE A GAME! 🎮

Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?

To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:

SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!

Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it): THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles! ✨Cons: None really <3 Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup

Twine: Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want) ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) ✨Cons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain. Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity

Bitsy: Little topdown games! ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small! ✨Cons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing! Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty

RPGMaker: To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!! NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post. ✨Pros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here! ✨Cons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale! Some games to look at: Ib, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)

engine.lol: collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden! NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?

✨more advice under the cut. this is Long ok✨

Seriously cannot recommend GBStudio enough for beginners, it makes making a gb/gbc game pretty simple, it's also FOSS (free, open source software) and the devs in my experience are very responsive as is the community

Worth noting that ren'py and gb studio will happily let you add whatever ridiculous code you want on top of their frameworks. GB Studio will straight up dump the entire engine as a CMake project if you want to work in assembler or C, so if you don't like the way something works you can change it.

A while ago, I made a doc filled with pretty much evwry cheap and free resource I could find for game dev, and Im still working on it. Highly reccommend checking it out.

Something everyone should know either as an authority or as a person labouring under an authority, being anywhere from a babysitter to a parent to a government entity, is that establishing a rule of any kind is incredibly labour-intensive and difficult to enforce.

So if you're going to make something into a rule, it HAS to be something you can both Verify and Enforce- if you can Verify but not Enforce, it's essentially just a suggestion. If it's something you can Enforce but not Verify, you're going to waste a lot of energy and time becoming an authoritarian dictator that nobody likes.

And because the process of Verification and Enforcement BOTH take a LOT of work, it makes no sense to waste all that work on establishing a Rule which has no Function.

For this reason, every Rule you set must perform a Function which gives you a return that is, if not greater, then at least EQUAL to the energy it takes to maintain, in one way or another. Otherwise, the whole system collapses.

Touching on unenforceable rules cause this realization helped me understand authority better: the point of a rule like 'no snacking outside meal times' is often not for the rule to be followed, but for it to instill self-surveillance. The fact that authority figures aren't going to be there to enforce a rule means the consequences of breaking it will be unpredictable but never entirely out of mind -- the POINT is to teach respect [read: passivity and submission] for authority by forcing them into a double-bind where they have to enforce the rule on themselves to avoid unpredictable consequences.

It's true in socially conservative parenting but maps to other authoritarian systems as well: think about how anti-trans laws rolled out in Texas. It's wildly unenforceable AND unverifiable to police people on whether they allow their kids to be trans or not, but the impractical nature of the law enhances its coercive impact because the implication of a law fueled by moral panic but with no enforcement mechanism is *well, guess ya just gotta enforce it on your neighbors.* It's easy enough to figure out the cops aren't able to verify or enforce that, but like clockwork bigoted community members stepped up to turn in their neighbors so the law would 'work' - because those folks implicitly understood that when authority figures make unenforceable rules they mean you should live in terror.