Joysweepers Incoherent Idea Bank
This is Joy's Idea Bank. It isn't a story. It isn't an article. It is a list, and a list without organization, at that. To get ridiculously metaphorical, this is a garden of story-seeds, fertilized with things that supercharge me with enthusiasm, and populated by aggressive plot gizka. Joysweeper is easy to inspire, but for various reasons can't act on everything. This is a backup - her computer is crashy, and she doesn't want to lose all of these. Why is she typing in third person?
You can look through it, but it isn't for you. By which I don't mean that you can't use bits and pieces of it - I mean that I picked things out for me, and I haven't reformatted it, explained the in-jokes, or anything like that. To go back to the garden metaphor, I haven't hewn a path, and although I know where everything is and what is or isn't pleasing to touch, smell, or eat, you're likely to be lost.
Pictures.
And of course, there is still joy and beauty, because joy and beauty are as tenacious as fear and sorrow.
Female does not equal feminine, damn it!
I love the intense colors in shades beyond blue and white and green.
I love wearing shorts, even though my legs frighten small children.
I suspect that many, many people in the world drank that special kool-aid and believe there really is a magical little thing that can heal the world.
I have known, worked, and lived with many Catholics over the course of my life, and only a few of them are clinically insane.
Fear not, for we come from outer space.
I'm not crazy! Everyone else is just blind to my genius! I'll show you I'm not crazy! I’ll show every last one of them I'm not a foaming-mad megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur! As soon as I perfect my atomic supermutant alloygators, you'll all see I wasn't crazy!!!
It's like manipulating someone into doing something they don't want to do by trying to turn them into the person you want them to be instead of letting them be the person they are.
Even when mine don't turn into nightmares, they're so exhausting, I go for weeks wishing I could just *rest* instead of dreaming.
He did make sure YHG had good handwriting though. If I wrote a taunting message like that on something, there would have been confusion and cries of 'gross! someone smashed, like, ten millipedes in this book!'
"How many times have you died? I'm actually getting impressed."
It's the little things that count. Like being able to go to the local market without being ambushed by giant mole-rats and eaten by cannibals.
If you are to both succeed and to live with yourself, you must, must, must learn to never grieve. You must, must, must convince yourself that if you succeeded, and anybody else didn't, that there was nothing you could possibly have done to save them.
And I woke with a mask on my face and a burning feeling across my chest.
had to admire a man who could keep his sense of humour when there was a sense of ... something coming towards them.
"It was lunchtime; it was on my plate. It was not moving or attacking me. It did not say 'help me' or 'don't eat me' in a tiny voice. It was not made of metal or plastic or anything else non-organic. Of course I ate it."
I know these are English words, my brain just registers them as carnival organs and slide whistles.
"So if A = B, and B = walnut, then C = Detroit. I am following his logic perfectly!"
Amazing: Every word you say is a lie, including and and the.
To keep vaguely functioning in society, I need brain pills, pain pills, pills to protect my organs from the pain pills, sleepytiems pills, pills to protect my organs from the sleepytiems pills, yet more pain pills and iron pills. On a relatively pain-free day, I take twelve pills.
when I'm really hungry, I get to wondering what the people around me might taste like, and whether anyone would miss them.
Oh, what I wouldn't give for a good female villain like Ysanne Isard from the Star Wars EU. Now she had none of the "She's just a good girl who got hurt, a little love will redeem her" that most other female villains written in comics today seem to have hanging over their heads.
I found my day went a lot smoother when I consulted my guide maps instead of consulting the Elite team. (That's supposed to be ironic, right?) I got turned around on day and just wanted to know the best way down to there from where I was. The guy thought it was a panel or something. I swear we'd be better off with the Storm Troopers as security. At the very least the Droid Hunt would take on a whole new level.
fandom bylaws require at least one Klingon at a convention.
• Sanguine (blood): Exhibits optimism, good cheer, a love of fun, extroversion, enthusiasm. On the flip side, they may be impulsive, arrogant, self-indulgent, wear their hearts on their sleeves or even be a space case. • Choleric (yellow bile): Exhibits leadership, dominance, ambition, charisma, passion; also quick to anger, narrow-minded, obsessive. • Melancholic (black bile): Kind, thoughtful, creative; but also high-strung perfectionists whose insanely high standards lead to depression. • Phlegmatic (phlegm): Are calm, stoic, rational, reliable, compassionate, observant; but also lazy, reactionary, docile.
This morning at about 5:30, I was woken up because somehow I had managed to get hiccups in my sleep and they were painful. This was one of the more ridiculous experiences of my life. I hope I do not replicate it any time soon.
And unless the cover says "Timothy Zahn", I am not paying $27 for ANY book under 300 pages.
except where his required immense power hers required near-perfect control.
And, as pretty well evidenced in this thread, not afraid of anything, including people coming rapidly towards them on clunky mountain bikes. They just stand there hissing. It's disturbing. They must know they're impossible to kill.
They took the plan apart, examined it, debated it, and – in places – changed it; and then they put it together again and pronounced it sound.
She seemed to move with the restricted motions of one deathly afraid of knocking something over.
“You should know by now that clear-cut victories are as rare as oxygen worlds.”
A Titan complex. The belief that one is so powerful that one is above normal laws and standards. Handing someone all that physical power at once, instead of having to acquire and use it in small increments, essentially sidesteps the usual adjustment mechanisms.
Picture this: Two around six foot humans, one a cop, one a hockey player, two Great Danes, a Rottweiler and an American Pit Bull Terrier, fleeing across a field at top speed. We were being chased by one solitary (but hissing) Canada goose. Yes, that was my Saturday evening. That damned thing chased us for ten minutes!
They wheeled a set of stairs up to the plane and we all stepped out into a hot, humid night. 90 F (32C) and FOGGY. It was unbelievable. It was like being underwater, and the heat and humidity sapped the energy out of your body like so much water.
Dying is expensive.
Who thinks, "Today is a great day to beat a fawn to death!" NO-ONE SANE, THAT'S WHO.
"YOU ARE ALLOWED TO MISS ME. I am glad that people will miss me! But I do not want them to be depressed! Hence the orange punch. I cannot remain depressed after drinking that stuff. It has eerie powers."
This is a solid material thing I can look at and go "There. That! That improved the universe!" It is important to be able to do this occasionally.
If you can walk down the street and not get noticed IT'S NOT A COSTUME!
There will come a point when you get sick of each other, no matter how hard you try. It may even happen multiple times. Chances are at least one person is feeling overwhelmed or crowded, and needs some time alone. Don't whine about this. Remember the rule about respecting each other's space and time? If you're really feeling neglected, talk about it, make a date for attention when the other person(s) isn't feeling so fragged, and be prepared to do at least some emotional self-regulation. And if you're the one feeling overwhelmed, again speak up. Not saying anything and giving the other person(s) whatever they want, when they want it, isn't going to help the matter. The other thing to be prepared for is for all the little annoying things about each other to come out in greater force than before. You're going to get very, very well acquainted with whoever you're with precisely because you don't have the distance of a day job to give you a break from each other. This may mean that you end up fighting over stupid little things (or big issues) that never really bothered you before, simply because you can no longer get away from them.
That was freaky, how would you like your namesake to be a much sought after utility that people climbed inside of and proceeded to make go at very fast speeds.
It's amazing what going to three all-female schools does to a girl; I have lost any ability to be patient and try to explain that my ovaries do not impair my thinking ability. I just go straight for oh fuck you rage.
I don’t know how long he was there, but it was a long time. Long enough to become kind of “Amazon-ed”. Changed. Altered by the experience. Not one of the regular folks anymore, if you know what I mean. He had a different outlook on life.
Relaxed, at-peace-with-self eyes. Looking into something inscrutable, unobtainable, deeper than we can possibly imagine, an old soul that reflected something bigger, ineffable, eternal.
Just another day trying to keep my mind off the fact that my body is wasting away, devouring its own living cells for sustenance.
There is a joy in working towards a common goal, in being able to put aside difference.
Whenever my pain level got out of control, I landed in the hospital and they had to give me 20 to 40 units of morphine. To put this in perspective, a badly wounded soldier on the battlefield is given 10 units to treat his pain. Twenty units will kill a grown man. Only a doctor would administer my injection, since no nurse would take the risk. Yet, after this massive dose my blood pressure fell only slightly. When you’re in that much pain, your body goes into a hyper state of “fight or flight”, so much adrenaline that it counters the morphine.
My doctors said I would never get better, that I would always be in this state of outrageous pain and lassitude, lost in this deep pit, unable to climb out.
"They call me insane? I'm sane. Oh God am I sane."
"Even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly."
It seems like one in every four people is Extremely Sensitive [I forget the correct term for it] to sensory stimuli—painfully so—and I’m one of them. Seriously, after annejumps posted about that on her journal, there were soooo many things that made sense to me—why I had a mild panic attack-verging-on-tantrum in a tiny LOUD New Orleans club last year, why the smells of certain foods make me violently ill, and… why I can’t wear commercial perfume.
I said it would take you places. I never said they’d be places you wanted to go.
I was once plucked up by a bunch of football players who thought I would make a cute souvenir of their night at the strip club. That was scary enough and I had two bouncers, a bartender and several MPs all determined to keep me from going anywhere.
At least the world didn’t end this time.
They use real words and all those words have real meanings but they string them together and it ends up making no sense.
You know this and I know this, but remember that we're talking about deluded bigots.
Total nonsense can be difficult to refute. How do you use logic against the utterly illogical?
Almost everytime I look in the mirror, I get this small heartskip that is caused by a mix of excitement or fear. Hard to tell why but I seem to be expecting/afraid of seeing something else instead of my own reflection. No idea what but every time I look in the mirror, it is a mix of fear (what if I finally see it?) and relief that I am still looking at my familiar self. It all happens in a second but it almost always happens.
[He] burst into a luminous, knowing smile, looked at me, and locked his bright blue eyes onto mine. Strangely, it suddenly felt as if he were inside of me, as if there were now a direct neural connection between his eyes and my heart.
Every single generation is sure that the one following them is destroying culture.
"You white?"
...no?
"Black?"
...No.
"Chinese?"
No.
"What are you?"
Human?
One time I laughed so hard I seemed to bruise my chest from the inside.
Their conversation was interrupted by fade-outs and static, but it was a minor miracle that they were able to talk at all, the astronauts and the aquanaut, each in their respective tin cans, crossing their respective voids. They talked about what it was like spending so much time inside their own heads and what they missed about their former lives. They laughed about craving the strangest things: the smell of an orange, a drink with ice cubes clinking in it. But mostly they talked about things only people who have ventured so far from home can know. People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but the astronauts and the aquanaut knew love isn't a function of how long two things have been apart -- what matters is how far.
"I am given to understand that this establishment provides coffee? Have I heard correctly, or am I mistaken in that belief?"
When I was in my 20s-30s, I hung around with a lot of That Guys. They were members of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and even though we could all party like it was 1099, the men were chivalrous and respectful of the women. Or else. (First offense of being drunk and disorderly was being tied to a tree. Second - if there was a second, and most guys were too embarrassed for a repeat - was usually unofficial shunning.) The guys also looked out after the younger women, especially if they thought they were getting over their head. It was the safest I ever felt in my life - and you have no idea how funny it can be when a guy is flirting with you and a big Viking comes stomping over, looms over him, and asks, "Milady, is he bothering you and should I make him go away?"
It was wrong. I stopped it. I’m not sorry.
I stopped in a reception area, looked at the night sky from the second story window, and though how strange it was that the world — my world had changed so dramatically — yet the sky looked just the same.
"S-see how easy that was? And now we can start all over again and fix what was wrong and we'll all be one big happy family again and everything will be alright you'll see--"
I've known a few very old cats, and the combination of fragility and vitality is so charismatic and powerful.
Maybe when our outrageous spirit for living has died down a little bit and we slip into that phase of one's life where you start giving up on your dreams and all the amazing things you thought you were going to do, and you just start to panic that you're going to die alone.
That is the essence of love. When you feel it so strongly, and so deeply, that it has the power to draw others into it, and they can live it too, then you know that despite logic, reason, science, religion, or anything else manmade, that love transcends what we are, and who we are, and delivers unto us, something far greater than we ever suspected.
Makes me very, very angry, and very, very tired, and reminds me of the nights I sat alone in my car in parking lots, frantically eating, then running home to throw up because I knew something bad had happened to me but I couldn't say why, or what, and I just needed it to not be happening any longer.
It's heavier than it looks in my hand, whispering dark promises of madness and filth like a digital Necronomicon.
“Who are you?” “I don’t know. I used to know what I was. But now… now I am something else.”
Lawlis
Congratulations, you have made me inhale my drink. My forced evolution to liquid respiration is one step further.
Tyrannical is definitely your color
That face is... ugh... if my remaining biological systems had the ability to vomit, I would be doing so right now.
I guess it's really not that long in the grand scheme of things--it blows my mind a little that it was ONLY two years, it seems like something that happened so long ago, in another country in another language under another sun--but it throws my whole day a little off-kilter when it happens, and I spend the morning grumping around trying to get back.
It is not so easy a thing to come to terms with your once strong body failing on you. If you are 40 possibly you recall a vigor of 18 that's now on vacation and which you miss with creaking fondness. Remember the vigor of 40 when you're pushing your 82nd birthday.
Because the retina is the darkest part of the eye and it moves around, one can sometimes look into the eye of a jumping spider and see it changing color. When it is darkest, you are looking into its retina and the spider is looking straight at you.
I've been working a long time on getting my mental image of my face to line up with my actual face.
It's totally like staring into the sun. And having the sun stare also into you.
I felt like murdering them. All of them.
I don't like WarHammer because the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness (sorry, I like my fantasy/sci fi to have hope in it, I'm weird that way), but really doesn't this all come back to the same crap?
I keep thinking that I ought to become immune to this by now, but every time it gives me a punch in the gut. Hope springs eternal I guess, which is how it can be quashed over and over again.
He was an Imperial officer, and Imperials never gave up. Ever.
True to form for my life, the one in the laundry room decided I was a friend and tried to get me to play, and I had the hardest time convincing her that yes, I wanted her to leave. Holy f**k, one just WALKED ACROSS THE DINING ROOM SKYLIGHT. Several are crashing around on the porch. We are under siege. If you don't hear from me, send help; we have been eaten by tiny, deceptively appealing bears.
I'm grateful that you like me enough to greet me with somersaults and tail flips and leaps out of the water, which, since you are the size of trout, makes for a pretty impressive display. But truly, it's not really necessary to slam a quart of water into my face whenever you see me. Honestly, you don't have to worry about my drying out.
[[1]]
Suddenly the diffident and marginally competent Major Tierce who’d served as his military aide for eight months was gone. In his place stood a warrior. Disra had once heard it said that a discerning person could always recognize an Imperial stormtrooper or Royal Guard, whether he stood before you in full armor or lay dying on a sickbed. He’d always discounted such things as childish myths. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges. Ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. His goal in life, and his desire in death.
The being that I was is gone… the change is complete… But I am incomplete because you have made it so…
What a sweet little girl, plotting how she will eventually wreak bloody revenge on those who wronged her.
This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought.
This is the guy who was still so heavily loaded with shrapnel that he had to carry a doctor's note with him to all public buildings and airports, because he'd set off the metal detectors.
He retreats to an inward space as his body slowly fails him a step before his mind.
I can just imagine some sort of army having one of those radars and going "Sir! We're detecting high amounts of sexual energy!"
Anyway, humans breathe oxygen, one of the most poisonous materials in the universe. It's the same fucking thing that makes FIRE. It fucking kills METALS, and we need it to BREATHE.
I'm actually crying, right now, I'm laughing so hard at that one.
Point- it would be impossible to be insulted if you are able to understand every facet of an action.
Also, we used to use a couple variants on the fortune cookie thing in college: "in bed with whips and chains", and "thus ending the age of wonders". Uh, yeah, we were a bunch of geeks.
So sorry that life usually has consequences for you, pookie, but get over it. You take the responsibility, you take all of it. You don't get to pick and choose the parts you like.
Watch closely as I deftly flip these eggs in a needlessly dramatic fashion... WATCH CLOSELY! AS IF YOUR LIVES DEPEND ON IT! For, indeed, if you are as inept as I suspect you are, you would surely starve were it not for these... Very... Eggs.
In the foundation of our hearts, none of us sees ourselves as old. Mentally we are all teenagers—teenagers who happen to be trapped in increasingly unreliable bodies.
Rheum is a medical term for the natural mucus discharge from the eyes. It is formed by a combination of mucus consisting of mucin discharged from the cornea or conjunctiva, tears, blood cells, skin cells from the eyelids, and dust.
Kletecka, Dostis
[I spent time going through Ursala Vernon's Livejournal. Many bits are from it.]
I had this nightmare last night. I dreamed I was a dolphin. It sucked.
That hard, acrid chemical taste is really quite revolting to me--beer is even worse because it's chemical mixed with rot--and despite my ability to acquire many other tastes, like blue cheese and black coffee, alcohol eludes me.
I'm reading "The Mummy Congress" which is about mummy research. It's riveting. I am riveted. Like...big...steel...neat...rivets...The weird thing about reading while drugged to the gills is that you don't realize how out of it you're getting--you just keep focusing in on the written word until you look up and the world goes whomwhomwhom around you, gray sweeps in at the edges of your vision, and you make some witty observation like "Oooglleeey..." before sliding gently to the floor.
The funny thing about pain, though, is that anticipating pain is bad, and mysterious pain is scary and bad, but just plain jaw-shattering agony from a known source somehow isn't as bad as it could be. There's no anticipation--it hurts as bad now as it will five minutes from now. And there's no fear--I know exactly why it hurts, I know approximately when it'll stop (two days). So in a weird kinda way, it's more bearable than it could be.
First we had laws against illegal things. And that was fine. And then we started having laws against people doing stupid things to themselves, and that was not fine, that was bad, because it meant that common sense no longer held sway, and people could blame their stupidity on something other than themselves. And now we have laws against saving people's lives. And this is pure, profound idiocy.
I wander around snorfling and growling to myself and revisiting the age old truth that you shouldn't cry when lying on your back because your ears fill up with water, which tickles, and stomping snivelling into the bathroom to clean your ears out really ruins the mood of an otherwise perfectly good mope.
"Will this hurt?" "A great deal, yes." “In ways you have never imagined.”
Evolutionary Ingrates http://ursulav.livejournal.com/19596.html#cutid1
That's the one thing about religion I am absolutely not willing to dispense with--much, much better curse words.
I wonder if some people just get a lot angrier than other people--the maddest I've ever gotten, I never hit walls because I'm smart enough to know that hitting the wall will hurt me and cause structural damage to the wall, while not doing anything to affect the cause of the frustration. If I must do something hysterical, I will cry, since it's easy to clean up. But I know plenty of other people who, in a rage, will smack furniture or whatever, who don't seem any dumber than the usual run of people. So I dunno--it's possible that I deal with it better, or I'm repressing it all in something that will eventually erupt in a homicidal explosion. Or it's possible that I simply don't get that mad--I mean, I will display fits of temper where people walk around me on eggshells in terror of what I might say, but I never get into a screaming, blistering rage where I can't control my actions, the way that some people appear to.
Got a date, got a date with 7378
Eight months of sandal wearing means that I now feel like I've got cinderblocks strapped to my ankles. I pick up a foot. Ungh. I set it down. Thunk. I feel absurdly taller, as if I've got those pimpin' platform shoes with goldfish in the heels.
I like packing, as I've said before, but I pretty much hate every other part of moving, and generally spend it in a nerve-frayed state, waiting for Something To Go Wrong. Actually, "I hate moving" isn't descriptive enough. I feel it lacks resonance. How about "Moving gives me the feeling that my chest cavity has been filled up with a number of small furry animals, all of them milling about and climbing on top of each other with their tiny little sharp claws, and--this is the key bit--all screaming in unison."
But I will prevail! Once I can feel my hands again, once more into the breach!
"The Emperor's Embrace" by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
But I still nearly squealed. (I didn't, however. My gravitas is unshakeable. Also, I'd forgotten to breathe, so I didn't have anything to squeal with.)
"You know, I'll never forget..."
- dead silence for at least a minute*
"You'll never forget what?" "What?"
Possibly I have some unresolved issues.
"Because I knew it would be more fun to listen to you grovel."
One should not lose entire families. It is not the natural state in which people should live.
My friend has had jaw surgery recently and is still on liquid and pureed foods. She has been extremely busy lately and has not had a lot of energy available to figure out how to eat with her jaws held together with rubber bands. I am going to evilly feed her before she sallies forth.
"core dump." Trying to compress into the course of a few hours an expression of who you are, for someone else's benefit, and to receive the same.
I am so exhausted I want to cry.
Snow smells like tin. I'm never sure if I'm a thin skin of transparent cheerfullness stretched over an abyss of grief, or a slightly melancholy tinge on a crazy hysterical joy. I don't know whether I want to laugh or cry or both. Large mammal seeing the end of winter. Deer and bears and for all I know, chickens and frogs probably do it too. It's that sort of feeling. I feel restless, full of some powerful emotion, but either there isn't a word for it, or there's a perfectly good word that I just never thought to apply. And just as this isn't quite the thaw smell, I don't feel quite like that--but the smell brings back those memories of that weird feeling, a sort of reminder, enough to make me a little jittery and generally useless in the studio, unable to concentrate for long enough periods of time.
Stomach acid has a pH of 1.2, which is only slightly higher than battery acid. One drop of stomach acid will burn through wood, drop to the floor, and burn through the carpet, and if chewing through all that didn't neutralize it, it would burn through the floor below as well. Drinking more than 4 oz of water within 20 minutes of a meal will disturb digestion by diluting the acid, which has a job to do.
It's like having a lover: you can be passionately intense but you don't really know where it's going...and for all the excitement, you know who you come home to.
Felt this terrible fragile happiness.
It's a good thing humans don't speak Bird, or else we probably wouldn't find these bloodthirsty paeans nearly so charming.
As people who have thrown their back out know, it's a weird sensation, it'll almost not hurt for a bit, and then you'll move a millimeter, or it'll just get bored, and everything suddenly seizes up and the world does a kind of breathless wobble-and-flop around you, and for a brief, bright moment there is nothing in the universe but you and the God of Back Pain. That's much worse. A low, perpetual ache is peanuts.
They have little pipes threaded along the edges of the patios, and every few minutes, they release a fine spray of mist. Because the droplets are so fine, and the air so dry, you don't get wet, you just get a wash of coolness across your skin as the droplets evaporate before they quite touch you
Birds are the scions of dinosaurs.
The entry told me that it was often confused for another, similiar owl, called a pulwit, so I was flipping back and forth between entries trying to figure out which one it was, and finally the fact that there was a heated battle going on in the rest of the house, between the last defenders of righteousness and an army of gobliny things, became too distracting and I had to stomp out, owl only tentatively identified, and kick some ass.
Nobody to the front of me Nobody to the back of me Nobody to the side of me There must be nobody here but me.. It's about the two of us Just the two of us It's always about just the two of us...
Also, the answer to "Will this hurt?" is not "Maybe a little," it is "Oh, hell, yeah."
Isn't that always the way, though? The agonizing ones don't bruise, even though you feel that much pain bloody well deserves it, and then you get something that looks like the Mark of Cain and you can't remember what the heck happened, maybe the desk gave you a sharp look or something?
I think I need a t-shirt made up that reads, "Because I'm the human. That's why."
It's a luxury to be able to take a stance of nonviolence. Someone has to buy it for you. Sometimes it’s you.
So, I've been having these heart flutters for a few years, and sometimes they're absent for a while, and sometimes they're very frequent and upsetting. And it's possible they're not even my heart...it's possible they're spasms in some other nearby organ; everything's so crowded in the box of your chest and abdomen that it's hard to tell what sensation is coming from what place.
Life isn't infinite and I'm tired of being sad and grieving for my lost self, the one that existed before I got sick. So I'm just not going to do it anymore. I'm done.
The distressing fact is that I often have no color except for purple shadows under my eyes and whatever color I've dyed my hair (currently red), but last night it occurred to me that I looked...normal. This might not mean anything to someone who hasn't walked around for several years looking like they were just a few steps above legally dead, but trust me, looking just normal is for me about as exciting as it would be for the average woman to wake up and find that all her cellulite has disappeared overnight.
A truly colorful fall, on the other hand, is like a thunderstorm, or thaw, an almost meteorological event, the sort where you don't know if you're happy or despairing, if you're on the verge of nirvana or a midlife crisis, a state where you actually comprehend "melancholy" as something other than the domain of comsumptive poets. It's not something you get used to quickly. A good fall will leave you wrung out and drained, the way you get when you're sick as a dog, wrapped in a welter of blankets on the couch, trying to find something on TV at 3 AM, and you find Bob Ross or TV evangelists and it's so damn funny and you're so weak that you start laughing and can't stop, and every time somebody said "Praise Jesus!" or "...happy little tree..." it sets you off again.
Because failure is only failure, but not doing it smacks of defeat.
The thought of 200K legal fees if he lost gave him pause, but Mavis, who's intestinal fortitude I have praised before, said "No. They Have Annoyed Me." This is the sort of ground where angels fear to tread.
I recall a show once where several scientists set out to see just how aggressive cottonmouths were. At one point, they were standing around poking the thing with sticks, trying desperately to provoke an attack, and the snake was just "Let me go, let me go, I have no quarrel with any of you, let me go, let me go." They eventually concluded that as long as you don't step on them, and don't try to play with them, you'll probably be fine. This is good advice with any animals, and most artists.
Not that he gets off scott-free on the wax front. The wax is a trifle messy, it sticks to things like, well, wax and I learned I had not cleaned up thoroughly when the plaintive cry came from the bathroom--"OH MY GOD! Why am I welded to the floor?!"
I go a step further. My shaving is so sporadic, and my skin in such bad condition right now, that I have PATCHES of hair of all different lengths. And I've got too many androgens, so the hair isn't just downy fluff, but dark mean tough wiry stuff that WILL NOT STAY DOWN. Shaving's kind of a pointless exercise for me. I wear long pants a lot.
You pulled the Catheter out with your toes? well my arms were tied down because I kept pulling out my IV's and chewing through my breathing tubes. Apparently I'm not a Nice Person when you dose me with steroids.
It hurts. As pain goes, it's a bizarre jabbing tingly thing, like a fine gauge wire drifting through my hand. It still hurts, too, and apparently it's not going away for at least a day. Ice helps, but once I remove it, it starts right back up. It is a weird and distracting pain.
Well, twentysome hours after the bite, it's subsided to only hurting when I move my hand, jar my hand, or think about touching my hand. No swelling, and other than a tiny crease, you can barely see where the bite was. So it could be a lot worse. Still, it's rather extraordinary how persistent it is--whang my hand, and it's a bolt of pain almost as intense as the first ten minutes of being bitten. There is a brief sense of the top of your head coming off.
A goldfish can live as long as a human, or longer.
Rocket trooper!
Naturally, the Dark Side/Light Side thing is mostly a non-issue. No survivor of Prof. West's 8 AM philosophy classes, taught by a snarky ex-Jesuit who could convince you that down was up and up was morally indefensible will ever be even mildly interested in the cheap social darwinism of the Sith, particularly not when delivered by an NPC whose metamucil I want to spike with arsenic. And I can be kind and charitable to low-poly models 'til the cows come home, because decades of gaming have hammered into me that no milkrun, however lowly, is below me. We live for milkruns. If I ever made a game, it would be a fantasy quest to deliver a bottle of dragon milk across a continent or something.
odd glasses and a girl on impulse he opened his wings and leaped
reason revan and furiously thinks you are not supposed to be
evidently i like things best when they're somewhere around the middle
what was in the way he hopped off half spreading his wings and shoved
Yeah, after the Big Moment, every time a dialog option showed up with some variation on "I don't have to put up with this crap, I'm the Dark Lord of the Sith!" I had to fight off temptation with a stick.
It is unbelievably fun. It is sick and twisted fun.
I’m still not quite sure what I was, but I’m damn sure I was not a derelict who raved to herself on street corners. Let’s have a little dignity here.
I think he may be the most purely ruthless hero I've ever tried to write. It's not that he's a bad guy, exactly, but he's very, very practical and in his world, there are no innocent bystanders and no such thing as collateral damage and absolutely everything is justified. He engages in no soul-searching whatsoever. It's a sort of moral feedback loop--"I have total confidence that I am right, therefore anything I do must be right and justified, because it's me doing it." It dovetails nicely with Rail, who is quite sure some of what she does is reprehensible, but believes firmly that her ends justify the means, because after all, it's her doing it.
Well, this is always what it comes down to in the end, being alone with yourself in the dark.
It's a weird thing to be grateful to one's own creations, and yet, not a bad sensation.
Having another living being around does something to the human brain. We're stronger in the company of other people, as much out of pride, I suspect, as anything more noble.
It's been the longest year of my life, and very nearly the worst. And I kept on going, and I kept being strong. And I kept throwing myself into things, because I thought that strength was inexhaustible. Guess not. Live and learn, huh?
I hate being so fragile.
Eventually you stop that queasy "I can't eat..." and start thinking "Man, I could totally go for something with salami about now." Before long panic fades, you think "God, I'm an idiot..." and sanity returns. Well, for a certain questionable value of sanity. It's me, after all.
One thing I did know is that there is a point where you shut off. The emotional breaker gets thrown, with an almost audible click, and suddenly you are cold, cold, cold. You are calm. You have never been so calm in your entire life. It is not a healthy calm. It is a bad, bad calm, the hurt calm that radiates out from the belly, the eye of the hurricane, the rattlesnake coiling, the old, cold little voice that comes into your brain saying I will take this from here. I encountered this before, during the bad bits of my divorce, and what I should have learned then is that when this hits, it has a purpose. The purpose is to give you time to stand up, get your purse, and walk away, time to say "Ah, yes. I see," and hang up the phone. This is the calm that lets you extricate yourself. Do not stay there and hope to remain calm. This is the airstrike your brain calls in to cover your retreat. It is a finite gift. Don't waste it.
I don't feel miraculously better, but I'm not seized with an urge to cry, and I'm not yelling at anybody inside my head, so there's a lot to be said for that.
Sort of like the way Vicodin works--you call still see all the pain, it's just on the other side of that vague grey wall there. It doesn't fix it, exactly, it just puts it at a distance so you can turn your head and say "No, no, we're not going to look at that..." and go on about the day. It cures no pain, it just slaps a restraining order on pain's ass.
More importantly, I feel like ME again. And crimony, you never really appreciate yourself until you're gone.
Have discovered I cannot chew. Send pudding.
And to think, it took only six years of them seeing me every day for them to decide that I'm not Satan.
Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. Gods, I love Al Gore’s global warming speech.
Note to the cat: No, the turtles are not going to leap out of their temporary tank and fly through the air like Gamera and clamp themselves onto your nose, as rocks seldom become airborne without a precipitating event. So you can remove your claws from my neck anytime now. And why you think behaving like the result of an unholy alliance between a muffler and a cactus will save you from flying attack turtles anyway, I don't know.
Only problem so far is that I can't kneel or crouch in them. The leather bends fine, but I take a row of spikes in the back of the thigh, and nobody wants that.
I...I feel this strange feeling in my angry, blackened heart. I think it is called....love....
I have to admit that having animals that are so very dependent on us for their environment and whose environment can go toxic in the minute that you're not monitoring it, is getting old.
I am once again stupified by how much damage a small animal on a mission can accomplish.
"I am sitting here at home alone with large portions of my body covered in painted-on latex. Damn this is sexy. Why have I not done this before?"
I suspect part of it is that the last few moves I've made have been INCREDIBLY depressing--of the duct-tape-and-sobbing variety--so it's a bit Pavlovian--perhaps my brain now equates moving with despair. But moving into this place was good for me. I threw myself into it like a psychotic, trying to make a place that reflected ME, as part of that whole identity-nesting thing that you always go through after a divorce. You're not entirely sure who you're going to be, so "I am the person who lives HERE," is a pretty good starting point.
Suddenly you become a human thermometer. The metal bits can get really cold, and you feel that.
Will it change the whole world? Oh, probably not. The world is big and it rolls along with fine disregard for most of us. But it'll sure as hell change my corner of it.
A buddy of mine says that I just give off some kind of vibe that says in essence "I'm a very nice, laid-back person, and if you push me too far I WILL DESTROY YOU." I can't speak to the truth of that, but occasionally, at certain times of the month, I hope it's true.
Kill it with fire. Bring the grenades.
Dreamed I was a stormtrooper at Base, part of Tampa Bay, hit by it and taking Pyms, and desperate to keep anyone from knowing about it. But when I ran out of time, and I didn’t want anyone to know it was me, it was okay. Went around without my armor and talked to people. Part of how I got around involved balloons with strings in strategic places. I talked to Wedge in a cafeteria and was ridiculously happy about this. Because WEDGE! He was polite, but a little unnerved. I don’t think he knew why I was so happy.
"you open your mouth to scream, but you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx!"
Ooh! ASL-swearing. A motion like clapping once, only with just the fore two fingers extended. Also similar to the rude Brit gesture.
A period of uncertainty led to a night and a day of what might charitably be called soul-searching. Verdict: Yup, I'm still me. (Not as obvious an outcome as you might think.)
That wasn’t scary. That was a cataclysmic primal force that crawled from the darkest depths of hell to wreak cosmic horror on all humanity.
I told him I believed in him... but did he believe me? And was I right to do so? The Jake I knew would never do something so awful... but he'd lost his memory. Could he have been a different person... before? All I know is, I doubted, and I think he doubted too...
I’m not in a good mood today, what with the whole destruction of everything I’ve ever known.
Clearly we’d not killed him hard enough.
"I have tried so hard to do right."
Remember: If the skirt is poofy and long enough, you can hide a person under there.
sense of community and camaraderie and nostalgia
Belief that life is meaningful, they are saying, seems to require a belief in something like justice. But, well, look around. For this idea of justice to matter in any meaningful sense then there must be more to it than what we see here in this world -- there must be some kind of transcendent justice in the long run, some kind of ultimate balancing of the scales for those wretched who suffered more than they deserved as well as for those wicked who may have inflicted or ignored that suffering.
Aerobatics! Long periods of aerobatics = nausea.
Made me think that being able to get around freely is one of these things you just can't possibly appreciate fully until it's curtailed, and then you realize how awesome it was to have been able to do that without even thinking about it.
Cardiopulmonary bypass
I mean, the freakiest thing my mom did was buy octopus tentacles, stick them down the kitchen sink drain so it looks like Cthulhu was trying to climb out, and stack a bunch of dirty dishes on top.
Sometimes I think my subconscious mind just likes toying with me.
The breaking story of the day was a Canadian politician who was being indicted because he attacked his political rivals with his massive zombie army.
fem(me fat)ale
If you want to control your teenager -- if you want to protect him from the big, bad world and to ensure that he never strays from or escapes the sheltering bubble of your religious subculture, that he never encounters any thought or feeling or emotion too big to put into words, too alive to define and categorize and pin down on cardboard -- then you really do need to prevent him from listening to music. Any music. And every single one of them meant it. Even if what it was they meant, specifically, was something they'd never be able to put into words. Music can do this. Even cheesy power ballads. It can take you out of yourself. It can catch you up. It can make you lose your cool. Music is not easily controlled or contained. Those who believe in controlling and containing every thought and every emotion -- whether hipsters or fundies -- would do best to avoid it altogether.
I've been feeling either a step behind or a step ahead, but generally at a fifteen degree angle to the rest of the world.
An order to put polish on my boots means the whole boot.
There's something kind of sad about people who succeed so completely that they stop existing on the same planet as the rest of us.
There are few things more pitiable and terrifying than a rabid ninja.
Something had locked itself in my old bedroom because it thought it was me. Some kind of variation on the thing-that-won't-die dreams, I think, except that it was less "really annoying" and more "absolutely horrific." Not even Ben could protect me, and my subconscious, resisting all knowledge of the psychology of cats, had him trying. I even dreamed that I woke up, and went to pet him, and found crusts of scar tissue all along his back, and of course that meant that it was real, and then I was right back in the dream again.
and then there was much panicking and running in circles and flapping of vestigial wings.
I have spent my entire life on a quest for the honey I had once in my youth, a wildflower honey, still in the comb, that tasted like the essence of wildflowers. It was lightweight and fragrant and melted on the tongue, and I would claw my way over the piled bodies of the dead to get more.
I'll match my hokey religion and ancient weapon against your blaster any day.
I actually had to go look up the difference between mania and hypomania -- apparently hypomania means the same emotional state but not as psychotic as true mania. (That is, true mania is a loss of contact with reality, while hypomania leaves intact the bit of your brain that can look at the rest of it and go, "Man, I am acting WEIRD!") No psychosis.
"Somnio ergo caeles" 'I dream, therefore I am divine'.
As Joseph Campbell once said, "Anyone that animals speak to, or offer aid to, wins."
- after "What's the worst that could happen"* "Ooh, did you just feel that? It's like Fate just stood up and said 'ooh ooh I know the answer! Pick me!"
And then there was the time that my husband and I were deep in discussing our Champions tournament on the bus. "It's not enough to murder him," one of us said: "It's got to be messy. When they find him it has to send a message.." As the noise level on the bus dropped, we looked up to find that we suddenly had empty seats around us...
Despite all stresses there is an itchy kind of joy that fills up the back of my skull and the hollow spot under my breastbone. Something to do with spring and love and the belief that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (as St. Julian is supposed to have said.)
"It's a good life if you don't weaken."
The Lovecraftian citrus would be Buddha's Hand. It's also formally known as Fingered Citron, colloquially "the Cthulhu Fruit" among most varieties of Fandom, and almost invariably "time to call the produce manager over" when trying to check out of the grocery store.
Oooh. Now there's a power! Someone who can hear the soundtrack.
Sometimes you just wanna go "Pay attention, world! Somebody good died!"
"Bonk" by Mary Roach
I still keep doing this randomly. It's not even traumatic so much as just so WEIRD, ya know? I mean...really?
Anyone who talks to me on the phone has known me to utter such phrases as "Get off the ceiling!" and "STOP using the ironing board as a springboard!"
There are random crashing noises wafting up the stairs, as the cats systematically dismantle the house. I fear to go and assess the damage.
"Mad Scientist University" Any game where I can yell "We'll get to the center of the earth using genetically engineered eighty-foot tall lava-sucking mosquitos!" is a good thing.
You wear it so well.
"I have to wear two layers so they can't see the nipple rings."
Close my eyes to look at you.
Very odd, meeting someone you know well in some ways and not at all in others.
She is very bubbly and vivacious and ruffled my hair frequently, which was an interesting experience as people don't generally treat me like I'm cute. Particularly people who have to reach up to ruffle my hair.
Rabbits are cute to look at, but man, I get creeped out looking into their eyes. They're just...they're soulless, or something.
"I had to go through puberty twice, but it was worth it."
Just happens like that.
You’ll never escape me.
we turned off all the lights the other night, and I hear I didn't glow any more than usual
I could have my nose and my upper respiratory passages back any time now. Also my voice. Also my mind. Thankyouverymuch. Life without an immune system is so much fun.
Wow. Look at how much I get done when I don't sleep or eat.
This is the most bizarre virus. We're both tired but can't sleep, and have stomach-aches but are also constantly hungry. I think this virus is doing something with calories. Maybe it's building a particle collider.
There's no need to hog the cookies, 'cuz it's an infinite bag of cookies.
Yes! Just checked the mail and got my company-name registration. I am now something other than merely myself. Just wait. Someday I will rule the universe.
I am rapidly developing the impression that dealing with Israeli bureaucracy is like slamming your head repeatedly into a very slightly padded wall.
Crow is either terminally insane or having a really bad day and wants everyone to share it. Either that, or he is a Norse god really peeved about being imprisoned in the body of a small bird.
Crows with small, roughly triangular gullets attempting to swallow whole saltines: FAIL.
We named her Mystery, Myst for short, because her appearance in our lives was a mystery. And a blessing. And so it remains. As is true, I think, of all love.
Oh, WOW. There goes the mature eagle. If I thought having the juvenile eagle fly toward the house was impressive...oh. my. god. It's like having a deity turn up in your dishwasher, or something. Why should the sight of a bird move me to tears? It is just a prettily feathered North American vulture, really. In the most blazing white and depthless black. But oh, such magnificence on wings. This world is too beautiful and we'd better work damned hard to preserve it, because we are not the only beings who matter. it just soared over this megaconsumer development looking supernaturally beautiful and utterly out of place.
No, really. I'm not being sarcastic. I take the little ferry over to the city as a commuting method, but most of the people on it during the summer are tourists, and they're so happy and excited and smiling and taking photos and oohing and aahing over Seattle's considerable natural beauty, over which I am still not jaded after 18 (!!!) years. Then some of them take the little shuttle 'round Alki Point and there's more oohing and aahing when the view opens up to the beach. I love people loving my city...and even if we move, it'll still always be my city. But I don't love the tourist who just walked past the house, leaned over the fence, and picked yet another damned rose.
X was very social this past week. Now I'm solidly in control again, and I feel like crap. And weirded out by her actions. I got to jump in here and there, but a lot of it was her.
When bored supervillains don't have heroes to play stupid games with they tend to commit real crimes.
Palmares. Equally important was the complex political organization that these colonies developed, often based at least in part on traditional African practices, with their own kings, military discipline, and internal social stratification. In essence, they constituted nations in exile.
It's about half kendo, half fencing. Strangely, the Jedi never seemed to take advantage of the fact that the lightsaber is effectively bladed 360 degrees around and has no appreciable mass, and only rarely take advantage of the ability to retract and extend the blade at will.
Charivari - a noisy mock serenade (made by banging pans and kettles) to a newly married couple
But humans are pack animals, and it gives us enough sense of community to keep us from going insane.
“Aw c’mon stop complaining, this is fun!”
Super Tongan Nassarius. It is a snail. It sounds like a mecha anime.
Photos of it will not develop if taken.
No! I am not allowed to lust after X!
Avengers v3 56: "Lo, There Shall Come... an Accounting"
Nothing like waking up to find that a part of you died.
My mother learned to gauge how badly I was hurt or how scared I was by how hysterical the laughing was at the time.
Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra
[4] "On the third day away from all people, I became silent. It began to happen almost immediately; now, I said nothing, calling my dogs only when needed, with a short whistle or a movement of my hand. Even the written word seemed obtrusive."
"I have a virtually complete copy of everything I missed. However, the DVR picks up all sounds and seems to favour things like paper rustling, overhead projector whirring, and air conditioning over the human voice, even though I can't imagine anyone wanting to record any of those noises. Despite using both the low cut filter (which is supposed to remove low frequency machine noise) and the playback noise filter, there's still an awful lot of distracting extra sound. And because the playback noise filter cuts out some human voice frequencies along with the noise, the speaker sounds somewhat robotic and some words are inaudible."
"Tell me about Rovac." "It's a place where the ground's the ground and the sky's the sky. The people there are born of women, some nine months after their parents couple. To live they eat and drink; at the end of living they find they die."
I am a woman, not a pod babies grow in. I'm not the life support system for a womb and ovaries.
Presume not that I am the thing I was, for I have turned away from what I once was. Oh, it is excellent to have a giant's strength! But it is tyrannous to use it. (PLOT GIZKA. Yay TSSM!)
Informatio-Scope
My name comes from Greek for "rational"! That or it's derived from "Alice", which is derived from French "Adelais" which is in turn derived from old Germanic "Adalheidis", "of nobility". "Alexander" and its derivatives mean "Defender/protector/savior of mankind." ARGH STOP WITH THE PLOT GIZKA.
I had an aunt who believed that the world would end in 1978; Apocalypse and riders and all.
Everyone who knew me before thinks I'm dead.
Leyolet! Why didn't I think of that before?! See, "Level Up", said really quickly and with my weird inflection, sounds like "Leh vyol yup", and at some point I just started using Leyolet. Okay then.
"I've put on enough muscle in my legs that even relaxed-fit pants are painfully tight and cut off my circulation. By texture, it's not fat."
You guys, you guys, I finally discovered what everyone's been saying: skilled dancing is incredibly sexy! Yeah, I know, but I'm slow at figuring these things out. Skilled dancing is awesome. And so is this!
Tech bubble, housing bubble, thaumic bubble.
Big face on a big neck.
Many soldiers, when they march into battle, do so with their heads down like they're going into a strong wind, hunkered down to present a smaller profile. Not us. Our heads are high, backs straight, daring the enemy.
Ladarks
Je ne sais quoi. "I don't know what."
Or Xenos. That means "stranger" in Latin.
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/TheSpelloftheYukon/chap19.html
DON'T LOOK DOWN.
"[And] the children were asking, where is the boy who is Jesus Christ? We have seen his controversy in the East and are come to go trick-or-treating with him. And lo, the boy who is Jesus Christ and his followers went trick-or-treating, and received gifts of Butterfingers, Kit-Kat bars, and M and Ms. Plus some weird old guy who gave them myrrh. And having been warned by the older kids not to go to Old Lady Murray's house, they got into their parents' cars and returned home by another way."
"He'd lost his home, his family, his past. All that was left to him was his future, one that had then seemed threatening instead of inviting." I love Wedge.
[Some whispering poem was calling us home, to a place we know never existed.]
Chris texted from DC that his plane crashed and he was dead, but thought he'd be okay. I wrote back and told him to stay out of the sun.
You have destroyed me utterly.
Do it again.
What's love? This sense of freezing-bitter loss, the pit of anguish whose eyes I can't quite bring myself to fully meet yet, and which I am becoming heartily sick of? Or the way the sunlight catches briefly on a strand of your hair and the world collapses itself into a breathless and giddy moment of beauty, as piercing and pure-tasting as ice water? The moment in which I catch a breath of your scent by accident and, before I check myself, am moved to bliss?
It's November, and I can feel myself dying again. I'm starting to forget how many times it's been, but then I've never been fantastic with numbers. I wonder what new thing will rise from my compost heap this time?
FDR: "A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest-at the command — of his head."
Siren (ginger, jasmine, vanilla and apricot)
He is a lovely, lovely singer. His acting skills are on par with a certain Captain James "The T Stands For Manwhore, What Do You Mean I Failed Spelling?" Kirk portrayer.
'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia !'
'Be yourself. Everyone else is taken!'
Fainting: "I was walking, and then I was asleep with silent blackness all around me, and then I heard music and people talking and dishes clinking like at a party, and then I woke up and I was sitting in a chair with worried people all around me and my vision was clouded with little silver-edged black sparkles. I felt like I had been asleep for hours, but everyone said it was only a few seconds. I kept asking "Where am I?" but I knew where I was, I just couldn't comprehend what was going on. I felt like I must have traveled some enormous distance, I must have passed out and been unconscious for hours, surely they would have taken me to a hospital, so why would I still be at the doctor's office? It was completely disorienting. Being passed out felt just like being asleep."
Let me insert a slightly more annoyed rant about what it's like to be a non-traditional bio-female in the army. Judging from what other people say, every female (I think we're still at less than 10% of the total military population) has this same rocky reef to navigate, so my own personal set of grievances is just the way that this institution manifested in my case. I have heard it summed up like this: - If you don't sleep with any of the army guys, you must be a lesbian. - If you sleep with one army guy, then you're probably okay, or at least normal. - If you sleep with more than one army guy, then you're a total slut and deserve no respect. - (And if you watch enough Powerpoint briefings, bullet points really start to grow on you.)
Dantooine - dorian passion fruit
"Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String"
Breathe easy?! I'm trapped inside a psychopathic corpse! I can't get out!
I am the boomstick.
I have needs now - dirty, horrible needs.
I, for one, think it's pretty awesome that a god-tier space lord with phenomenal cosmic powers can just kick back every so often and have a brew with his dad, talking about all the wicked cool shit he's been doing.
I'm happy, hope you're happy too.
The main difference, I guess, is that the hydraulic “muscles” work more by pushing, while human muscles work by pulling.
Tomorrow starts today.
"And that's why I don't like magic, Captain. 'cos it's magic. You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!"
I thought it was a guiding omen, but it screams in the night.
Greek term thauma (marvel)
Technically, Zaktan from Bionicle. When his old boss tried to vaporize him, he was somehow able to pull himself back together as microscopic "protodites". In this new, permanent state, Zaktan can easily avoid attacks by turning into an insect swarm; change the shape of body parts; heal damage by filling the gaps with Protodites; and engulf a foe in an attack that must feel like getting hit with thousands of needles. Zaktan himself calls it a curse however, as his voice now sounds like a crowd speaking; and whenever he wakes up he can feel his body shifting "where there once were tissue and solid metal".
The boss of a level who plans to kill a bunch of civilians to cover his tracks is revealed to be an ex-employee of Stark industries fired for stealing supplies: "My inventions helped make you rich Stark! You never should have fired me!" Tony (Iron Man) "You were stealing pens!"
[lj-cut text = "This is a massive piece of ASM"] Lots of pictures [/lj-cut] But with pointy brackets instead of square brackets.
"Tony is molested by technology" is almost as popular an Iron Man storyline as "Something's wrong with Tony's heart/nervous sytem/etc--again!" Then there's the combination plot of "Tony's armor is killing him, yet he keeps wearing it anyway because he's just that stubborn."
"See, a side-effect of being able to break bricks with my bare hands is that I have a hard time fitting into clothes that are designed for the average woman. My arms are just too big and muscular (and so are my thighs, and my calves…)"
Human brains are 21% of our bodyweight.
"humans are actually very weak for animals their size, due to a difference in muscle protein structures. A typical adult chimpanzee could rip the arms off an Olympic weight lifter." "Chimps have a lot of dense quick-burst muscle, but they can't swim and they have very poor endurance." "Humans have great long-term endurance, though." "Yeah. We're built for chasing gazelles. For miles. Until the damn thing falls over from exhaustion and we beat its head in with whatever's handy. (See Niven's "Folk Tale.") Lions can't do that. They're sprinters." "The average office worker (ie, unfit sod who walks at most a mile a day) can train themselves up within a month to run 4-5 miles in one go, and then you have this thing called a 'marathon'. I don't think anyone even contemplates asking a horse to do that. That's not even counting how long someone can row or cycle for."
Human endurance running ability has been inadequately appreciated because of a failure to recognize that "high speed is not always important," Bramble says. "What is important is combining reasonable speed with exceptional endurance." Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12). “Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,” Lieberman said. [6] While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop. [7]
I love being human.
