This cat is so, so friendly and stoked to be there, though! Look at all the leaning and rubbing on people and things, the upright question mark tail; this is a very cuddly cat who wants attention, lmao. 💜
i go to the job interview. there is a square table set out with a dish of assorted unwrapped candies, and an HR manager sitting on one chair facing the door. if i were a cis woman i would sit across from him, whereas if i was a cis man i would sit next to him. in either case i would take one piece of candy and slip it into my pocket for later. the HR manager rises to shake my hand. there are a million strategies to make a good impression on an interviewer with the correct handshake, but this isn’t my first rodeo.
ignoring his hand, i plunge my hand into the bowl of candy and deftly grab a handful, then begin feeding the HR manager. initially he’s agitated by my approach but i calm him down with my gentle demeanor. pretty soon he’s eating candy straight out of my hand. good sign. when he sits down i brush off his lap with a handkerchief (shows respect for his clothes by not using a bare hand, shows concern for cleanliness and thorough nature to clean off his lap).
i sit directly on his lap, and he winces in pain from my weight. “easy there, big fella. i’m not gonna hurt you.” i pat him on the head and reach into my pocket. i pull out a stick of wintergreen gum. the scent and flavor of the wintergreen calm his wild spirit and give me free rein to reach into the pocket of his trousers. “you won’t be needing this anymore,” i say, placing his wallet just beyond his arm’s reach on the table. “that life is behind you.”
carefully, i take his shoes. this is the hard part - even taking loafers off of an HR manager can startle them, make them bolt. but he trusts me. i put his shoes on my feet. they fit perfectly. i’m now ready to take his jacket and work badge and release him into the wild. he’ll be disoriented at first, but within a few months, he’ll rehabituate to the natural environment, maybe even find a mate and start a family. i’ll be a valued employee at my new job by then.
don’t worry about his clothes and wallet. he’ll find new ones, they always do. nature provides for all creatures.
Guys we gotta up our game the Georgians said fuck more than us
Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the “Long S” which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.
The rules of when the short and long s’s are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:
99% of the time the word actually being used is “suck” or “sucking.” It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word “suck” will almost always read as “fuck.” This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:
If you search for the word “fuck” in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:
This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn’t find this hilarious, I’m sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:
The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.
I should also note if it wasn’t clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature
the “came back wrong” trope except like… they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like “oh no… what have i done…. shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!” and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like “oh shes soooo weird” but shes just normal
If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:
Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say “yes”, the second will say “no.”
If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.
But what if people question you from there? “Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?” For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: “I don’t have a card for that.”
“What the fuck,” they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: “I have laryngitis. I’ve lost speech. My throat hurts”. Whatever you expect to occur.
The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. “How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?”
As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.
“I have powerful wizard magics.”
Gets them every time
On it boss!!
[id: a set of 5 UNO cards upon which has been written, “Yes”, “no”, “I don’t have a card for that”, “can’t talk right now 😢”, and “I have powerful wizard magics 🙂”. End id]
Plato makes up Atlantis as an allegory and over 2,000 years later people are still looking for it. You might as well be looking for Narnia.
Plato: Luxury and unlimited power are forces that corrupt human beings and lead them to being colonialist and stupid. The gods will punish Athens if we continue to exploit others for our own gain. I have invented this society as a parable to illustrate my point because I tend to use metaphor for a lot of things.
Everyone: But where are you hiding it though
Plato: I’ve purposefully included details like a mud shoal west of Iberia that doesn’t exist and references to a volcanic eruption that we all have cultural memory of as an obvious indication that I made this up. Are you paying attention? It’s a metaphor. I’m using literary references. You can go west of Iberia yourself. It’s not there. I explained where it is and it’s not there. You all know it’s not there. Please stop it with the luxury and exploitation. That’s my main point here.
Everyone: Yeah but where is it though
Plato: Orichalcum is just a fancy looking metal. It’s kinda like fancy copper. I made it up for this fake parable city.
Everyone: So it’s magic, then.
Plato: I want Athens to be a bit more like Sparta.
Everyone: Where’s the magic metal
Plato: I just think that greed is bad, generally. We should stop doing that.
The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters. The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.
I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4
The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.
Sauron.
Isildur
Deagol
Sméagol
Bilbo
Frodo
Samwise
I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds
He held it for the rest of of his life!
[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.
From the ring’s perspective:
1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.
2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.
3. What the fuck is you?
4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.
5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.
6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop.
7. FUCK
8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally.
9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt*
you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!
ALT