if you didnt ship the queen and joe as a child you need to rethink your life choices
it’s so true it hurts my heart
- Spock: don't do the thing
- Kirk: I'M GOING TO DO THE THING
- #mccoy: WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THE THING
- #Uhura: I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THE THING
- #Sulu: I VOLUNTEER TO HELP DO THE THING
- #Chekov: THE THING WAS INWENTED IN RUSSIA
- #Bemused writer: That's pretty much the plot of MY ENEMY, MY ALLY right there. (adding)
- #Seductively intelligent alien: Go on, you know you want to do the thing. Let's do it.
- #Everybody else: NOOOO NOT THE THING! ...Oh fuck.
- #Writer: :)
Yahoo!
what? this isn’t a nude beach this is a nerd beach who’s ready to catch some .wavs
(via kayirowling)
Dowling Duncan and redesigning the American Dollar:
Why the size?
We have kept the width the same as the existing dollars. However we have changed the size of the note so that the one dollar is shorter and the 100 dollar is the longest. When stacked on top of each other it is easy to see how much money you have. It also makes it easier for the visually impaired to distinguish between notes.Why a vertical format?
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.Why different colors?
It’s one of the strongest ways graphically to distinguish one note from another.Why these designs?
We wanted a concept behind the imagery so that the image directly relates to the value of each note. We also wanted the notes to be educational, not only for those living in America but visitors as well. Each note uses a black and white image depicting a particular aspect of American history and culture. They are then overprinted with informational graphics or a pattern relating to that particular image.$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.this looks like fucking monopoly money
Ya know I like it
Australia already has dollar bills in different colours and sizes (they don’t look like that though)
(via kenporusty)
bananasaregood-bowtiesarecool:
I don’t even want to imagine the night before Series 3 airs.
lock your doors
did you just put bilbo baggins’s face on bilbo baggins’s face
I DON’T EVEN LIKE THIS SHOW AND I CAN LEGITIMATELY NOT STOP LAUGHING AT THIS GIF OH MY GOD I’M GONNA PEE
(via kenporusty)
“Hey Dad, since we’re this far south already, can we go home by way of Batavia?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m wearing the shirt.”
:)
Not the sexy lingerie like I had promised, but I kept thinking how Tony wearing only the gloves and feet of the Mark 42 looked super cute and kinda reminded me of anime girls wearing big boots and gloves, which just made me want to draw this 8UUU So yeah, Magical Boy Tony Stark ~*~*~*~
Okay, that triggered a coughing fit… (Coming down with a spring cold. Most things are triggering coughing fits today.)
There are two small, neat holes in my bedroom ceiling. And we all know what that means.
Obviously my poor ceiling, at some point in the past, fell victim to the wily ceiling vampire, most dangerous of the architectural undead, which shuffles in, deep in the night, to drink the plaster of the living, before escaping into the twilight with a whuffling of great pink insulation wings.
No more shall my once happy-go-lucky ceiling romp carelessly atop its walls! No, it’s doomed to crouch sullenly in the corner of the apartment, listening fearfully for that familiar lathe-and-drywall creak on the stairs, wondering if tonight the ceiling vampire comes back to…finish the job.
Or possibly there was a light fixture there at some point in the past, and those are the holes where the screws were removed, but c’mon! Where’s the fun of that?
Perfect.
Someone enlighten me please. It crossed the dashboard a couple of months ago and now I can’t find it and I want to show it to Peter.
ETA: Ok: got it. (There have been a number of variations on the theme, but the one I was thinking of: it’s here (among various other places).
Under the cut: “Persephone Lied”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow (via polymnia)
…And this is something that so often gets dropped out by those who don’t know canon. The moments when Sherlock says (paraphrasing here, but the cites are easily produced) “Screw this, Watson, let’s go out to Romano’s and have a big splurgey dinner!”, or “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here, Tchaikovsky’s conducting at Covent Garden tonight!” Canonical!Holmes is ascetic by choice only: he kicks his transport to the kerb when he’s working (or having trouble working). The rest of the time he doesn’t mind indulging the body’s and mind’s love of food and music and other arts. Just think about “A Dinner With Sherlock”, and the concert after.. :)
(via dduane)
Roughly every six weeks, my parents try to convince me that my writing is a waste of time. Not making money therefore irrelevant. This week, we went along the lines of “change the names and publish it”
Roughly every six weeks, my parents try to convince me that my writing is a waste of time. Not making money therefore irrelevant. This week, we went along the lines of “change the names and publish it”
I wanted to be articulate. I wanted to explain that characterisation was the foundation of a reader’s understanding and empathy with a story and its plot. I wanted to explain that Sherlock would be Sherlock if he were called Steve and John would be John if he were called Jason. I wanted to explain you couldn’t change the threads in a tapestry already woven without unravelling the whole thing.
Instead I said “NO!” in a really loud voice and consumed wine in copious quantities.
Thus began an evening of conversations that began with “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but…”
Pass me the rum, lovelies.
No writing is ever wasted. NO WRITING IS EVER WASTED.
Jeez, if I had a nickel (much less a 1982 nickel) for everyone who told me I wasted the plot of a potentially Hugo-winning novel on The Wounded Sky, I could possibly retire now. But I wrote it in the Trek universe because that was the story’s proper place. (And I LOVED TREK. Well, love it. No past tense there.) And doing that in its proper place has done good for me ever since.
…They don’t get it. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t, ever. This is a writer’s burden, and her glory. So just kiss them and drink the damn wine. :)
And this is what happens when a masterfully crafted katana collides with a masterfully crafted longsword.
Suck it, katana
HAH!
suck my fuckin’ diiiick
Aren’t katanas and longswords made for different overall purposes tho
Katanas are slasher weapons made for cutting masterfully through human flesh so obviously it’s not gonna get through a fucking longsword which is really fucking thick and heavy and made for beating the shit out of people as well as hacking at armour
A katana would slice the shit out of you guys so idk what the fuck you’re so smug about^That.
this is basically like driving a ferarri into a tank.
Now /that’s/ a metaphor
And fun, too, but the above comparison between the purposes and structures of the two types of swords is simplistic and (at core) incorrect. …I’ve got things to do this morning, though, so I’ll just reblog this for the moment and ask Peter to spell it all out when he gets up.
Very briefly, though: longswords are not “really fucking thick and heavy”; this is that old Victorian-era music-hall myth about heavy swords and armor surfacing again. …I have a long posting about this from a year or so back on my own tumblr, but I’m going to excerpt out the germane part here. (With just the general note added: I am trained in iaido and the use of the katana: but these days — knowing now what I’ve learned about European weapons over the past quarter-century — if you’re going to ask me whether I’d prefer to take on a katana user with another katana or a longsword, it’ll be the longsword every time. It is a far more versatile weapon to use against a broad spectrum of opposition weaponry. The katana’s versatility is surprisingly limited.)
About longsword / broadsword weights:
I am 5 foot 7, and while I’m not at my optimum weight right now, I am by no means hefty and would be classed as petite if I were a bit shorter. In any case, here’s my broadsword.
It is an Oakeshott Type Xa made by Fulvio Del Tin of Del Tin Armi Antiche in northern Italy. Fulvio specializes in both museum-quality replicas and “hero weapons” for major motion pictures. (For example, he forged Mel Gibson’s famous hero weapon in Braveheart.) From point to pommel the sword is 39 inches long. …And there’s my hand for size comparison.
Now watch what happens when I put this sword on the kitchen scale.
It weighs twelve hundred and twenty four grams, or just under two and three-quarters pounds. This is a normal weight for a broadsword of the period. They did not weigh tons. That myth, and its fellow urban legend that armor of the period was so heavy that a knight wearing it had to be winched onto his horse and couldn’t get up again if knocked down, are the direct result of popular British music hall comedies of the Victorian period. They have no basis whatsoever in fact, as any museum’s armor curator will immediately tell you (while either groaning and tearing their hair, or snickering a lot). I mean, seriously, what possible use would there be in a weapon that either a man or woman would get too tired to use in a very short time? The people who used it would select themselves out of the gene pool in very short order. (And their relatives would select the weaponsmaker out of the gene pool immediately thereafter.)
Now, on the off chance that my relatively small hand makes this seem not very much like a broadsword to you (though I guarantee you, it is one): okay, let’s pull out our other one.
Here it is, once more with my hand for scale. This is an Oakeshott Type XIII, a so-called hand-and-a-half or “bastard” broadsword of the same general type as the first one, 48 inches long from point to pommel. (Peter got it because it was a close match to the description of Khávrinen in the Middle Kingdoms books: in fact, we used it on the new ebook cover for The Door into Fire). It was meant to be used easily either one-handed or two-handed. So now let’s weigh it.
Fifteen hundred seventy-six grams, or about three and a half pounds. Again, I have to emphasize that this is the proper weight for a sword of the period, and indeed, many of similar size were lighter because they were made of better steel. (Fulvio forges his swords of steel that will be able to cope with the mishandling inherent in use on film sets, or the much more intensive banging around that’s expected when such a sword is being used by re-enactors.) Both this sword and its smaller sibling are balanced with extra weight in the hilt and pommel so that the blade is astonishingly easy to handle… as both Peter and I know from personal experience.
…The source, I think, of these most recent katana/European sword pissing wars is that the katana has been so mythologized over the last hundred years. Peter will doubtless get into this in more detail. But the tide has been turning of late. As the many medieval- and Renaissance-period European swordfighting manuals start to seep out of the museum collections into the public consciousness, the fascinating and complex details of the old European fighting styles are starting to be better known as well. This shift of balance has been taking some of the Eastern weapons fans by surprise, and has started leaving some of the too-thoroughly-legend-invested katana fans feeling a bit exposed — as what they previously decried as a landscape bereft of any real sword technique or weapons sophistication suddenly turns out to be just thick with it — and a bit butthurt.
(sigh) Oh well. The pendulum swings.
ETA: re the downstream comment “…so Diane Duane could totally take Jo Rowling in a fight”: Likely enough. But the only place I want to take Jo Rowling is shoe shopping. :)
