e4knee:

kaytwodeetwo:

milli-tricks:

kaytwodeetwo:

right so this post went round a bit ago about how Pokemon Go is basically a huuuuuge capture-tag-release wildlife research program for Willow’s lab

consider the following: Candela, Blanche, and Spark are his grad student advisees/assistants.

(incidentally we are the undergrads who will do a bunch of random shit for candy in this scenario.)

anyway

  • Blanche wrote the better part of the code that records and calculates all their statistics and occasionally winds up in a corner, morphed into a malevolent pile of scarves glaring out at the world through a choking haze of MATLAB, trying to fix some shit in the model while the other two occasionally scoot a cup of tea over to them
  • Candela and Spark take turns wrangling the undergrads and other randos who contribute to the program (large parts of Team Valor and Team Instinct are just the undergrads who particularly liked either of them and will get into arguments over which is better)
  • Spark does the most field research of the three and at one point wound up flat on his back in the middle of a field with a mob of Pidgey attacking his pockets because he forgot he had sandwich crusts in there
  • Spark occasionally has an really out-of-left-field hypothesis and the other two are simultaneously amazed and infuriated at how frequently his weird ideas are right (instinct yo)
  • Candela occasionally just slams a couple of energy drinks and pulls an HONOR AND GLORY enthusiastic all-nighter and the other two come round in the morning to throw a blanket over her because they know she’s just gonna wind up passed out on the desk eventually
  • the three of them haggle over who gets to play music and have worked out a rota, or at least they did until Willow confiscated their speakers because they were tagging batches of Jigglypuff at the time and the jigglypuff were picking up their musical tastes so there was one day of Dragonforce Jigglypuff (Candela duh), one day of J-Pop Jigglypuff (that was Blanche surprisingly enough), and one day of super-soporific Jigglypuff because Spark had the bright idea to play them some Pachelbel
  • Candela orders hot peppers on the pizza, Blanche has a knife and fork in their bookbag and eats pizza with utensils (plastic utensils really aren’t enough), Spark will stack one piece of pizza on top of another and eat both simultaneously
  • Spark once took a photo of Candela tackling a Snorlax that didn’t want to be tagged while Blanche and Willow looked on in horror
  • Candela in general handles the big Pokemon where a bold approach works best
  • Blanche handles the tiny ones that need a lot of precision
  • Spark handles the shy ones that need an understanding approach
  • or at least that’s what they would each specialize in if they weren’t all fuck deep in Pidgey and Rattata all the time
  • Spark has a handful of Rattata that might not have made it back in the wild and he’s named them all and taught them all ridiculous tricks. His Pikachu acts as their leader
  • Blanche has a Lapras they hatched from an egg and they ride it, among other things, across the aquarium tank that houses the big water pokemon that need examination and tagging
  • Spark wants to help with the aquatic pokemon and will attempt valiantly if allowed but he can’t swim for shit so he’s banned, Blanche and their pokemon had to keep rescuing him (Candela was taking pictures)
  • Candela has a Growlithe that follows her everywhere with no Poke ball or leash, including to lectures and office hours
  • OH SHIT TEACHING PROFESSORS the team leaders are Willow’s teaching assistants too, Blanche is the most meticulous grader but also is the most sought after at office hours because they’re very knowledgeable and good at explaining, Candela is beloved for her personality and occasional Adventure Tangents and Spark straight up puts stickers on papers he grades
  • Spark will eat obscene amounts of instant noodles because lol grad student budget, Blanche makes instant noodles too but you don’t realize it because they put in egg and vegetables and somehow make it very edible

this isn’t as #overlyhonestmethods as I wanted it to be so go ahead add more ideas on if you want

Very yes, except the MATLAB bit. The biologists I know use R and Python.

Didn’t know that about the programming languages of choice! What do you want to bet there’s a scripting language called Ekans or something in the pokemon setting?

So, my naming scheme for the Pokemon I get in Pokemon Go is classical composers (with a few jazz musicians and singers in there as well). I’m tickled, because I decided long ago that my best Jigglypuff/Wigglytuff is gonna be named Pachelbel. 😛

prokopetz:

I think the most plausible The Force Awakens headcanon I’ve ever run into is that the galactic media started holding Ben up as the face of the nascent New Jedi Order from a very young age, and everything that’s happened since then is basically the equivalent of a former child star meltdown.

Just, you know, instead of getting drunk and trashing his hotel room, he shivs his dad and blows up the sun, because Skywalkers never do anything small.

friendlytroll:

snailchimera:

god-dammit-mason:

Everyone is saying that the professor is grinding the Pokémon into candy, but consider the following:

• The professor frantically running around with assistants, inspecting hundreds of thousands of pidgeys a day, getting bitten and screeched at while they try to figure out if this pidgey has been tagged yet so they release them back to track their migration

• Panicked interns trying to scoop the ekanses back into their tank because theyre freaking out the rattatas

• Three caterpies climbed into a vent and evolved into metapods that are too far in to reach so six underpaid college students are trying to dismantle ductwork

• Theres a big door marked “KEEP OUT” because a dozen oddish evolved into a squad of Vileplumes and until they stop releasing stun spores the entire room is just off limits

• Hundreds of researchers running on red bull and determination trying to tag and examine all the Pokemon but having to turn off the machine every once in a while to the discontent of trainers who are all getting a “Sorry, the servers are currently down” message at LEAST twice a day

• “GPS not found” flashes while returning a big group and suddenly Florida has been gifted 6,000 mankeys right in the middle of Epcot

• Someone in the back room up to their waist in stale dog treats with a bunch of little stamps. They sigh deeply at how gullible Pokemon trainers are that they think these things actually do anything other than excite the Pokemon so much they evolve

• Actual science professor surrounded by chaos and interns and a budget just too small

Pokedexes have always been biological survey equipment, and this? Right here? Is largely how actual biology surveys work- you catch and release LARGE numbers of the species you’re studying, as large as you can afford, sometimes keeping them in the lab for observation first.

Also if they were running on the average funding of a US university/public bio lab, this would explain… basically everything about the app.

It Also explains why the professor is like HERES SOME POKEBALLS CATCH EM HERES SOME TEAMS FOR FRIENDLY COMPETITION GOGOGO and then vanishes. If he’s running a whole survey on his own he’s probably running on sheer determination and sleeping on his office couch. 

If his office couch is even visible anymore. 

god-dammit-mason:

Everyone is saying that the professor is grinding the Pokémon into candy, but consider the following:

• The professor frantically running around with assistants, inspecting hundreds of thousands of pidgeys a day, getting bitten and screeched at while they try to figure out if this pidgey has been tagged yet so they release them back to track their migration

• Panicked interns trying to scoop the ekanses back into their tank because theyre freaking out the rattatas

• Three caterpies climbed into a vent and evolved into metapods that are too far in to reach so six underpaid college students are trying to dismantle ductwork

• Theres a big door marked “KEEP OUT” because a dozen oddish evolved into a squad of Vileplumes and until they stop releasing stun spores the entire room is just off limits

• Hundreds of researchers running on red bull and determination trying to tag and examine all the Pokemon but having to turn off the machine every once in a while to the discontent of trainers who are all getting a “Sorry, the servers are currently down” message at LEAST twice a day

• “GPS not found” flashes while returning a big group and suddenly Florida has been gifted 6,000 mankeys right in the middle of Epcot

• Someone in the back room up to their waist in stale dog treats with a bunch of little stamps. They sigh deeply at how gullible Pokemon trainers are that they think these things actually do anything other than excite the Pokemon so much they evolve

• Actual science professor surrounded by chaos and interns and a budget just too small

unpretty:

unpretty:

tim drake’s snapchat is 90% him making bruce wayne do normal middle-class american things and filming the results. popular youtube compilations include the one where they’re at denny’s at two in the morning and tim keeps trying to get bruce to order a moon over my hammy just so he’ll have to say it, the one where they’re at disneyworld and bruce gets increasingly frazzled culminating in him actually physically picking up gaston for reasons no one can entirely recall, and everyone’s favorite series “bruce wayne doesn’t understand walmart”

having thought about it the best part is probably when a pranking fails because bruce has such a bizarre patchwork of knowledge/skills and it does not occur to him to hide most of it. tim puts a ghost pepper in bruce’s food but bruce just eats it like nothing is wrong. the same thing happens with the chocolate-covered crickets. it turns out bruce can lick his own elbow. bruce can lasso a runaway robot lawnmower like it’s a calf at a rodeo. whenever tim expresses shock that bruce knows how to do something he says “i did go to college, tim” as if that explains anything and it becomes a meme. whenever anyone does something fucking absurd it just gets tagged “i did go to college, tim”.

lullabyknell:

ginevravweasley:

ginevravweasley:

listen secret magical creature heritage au’s may be cliche and overused but they are my JAM

you can’t tell me Luna didn’t have some sort of fae background. or parseltongue didn’t come from the nagas. or the Malfoy’s didn’t have veela blood. or the Weasley’s didn’t come from fire sprites. or the Pervell brothers weren’t necromancers. because I assure you this is 100% canon. fight me.

(What are you even suggesting, this is totally canon. Anyone who wants to get to you will have to fight me first. Bring it.)

It’s fairly obvious if you know what to look for. Unfortunately, so few people do, not realizing that person does not necessarily mean human. But perhaps this is inevitable, given that most nonhumans are dead, elsewhere, or intensely and viciously private nowadays.

A younger humankind would have laughed at the idea of “pure blood”. If anyone human-shaped was pure, then it was the purely nonmagical humans. Mud Men, many nonhumans affectionately called the tenacious people.

Goodness gracious, where did people think magical blood came from in the first place? The term mudblood? And if you wanted to call a pure elf or fae a creature or a beast, then it was a good idea to dig your own grave first. Save everyone else the trouble.

But that was then… and this is now. Now, you often must watch closely.

Lucius
Malfoy, for example, is not a terrifying difficult puzzle. One only has
to look up the family tree to find their French origins and relation to
many prominent Veela clans there. Although, that is perhaps more
difficult than it sounds, as the Malfoys have “fixed” all their copies
and buried the rest deep in unmarked graves.

But, watching
closely… the hair and general preening suggested quite clearly,
accompanied by a certain slant to the jaw and elegance to the limbs.
Along with how the man could lure many a Ministry official into
agreements with seamless charm and smooth smiles. And also in the way
his handsome face will twist into something terrible in anger, his hands clenching like claws, flexing with half-remembered fire and talons.

When
Lucius Malfoy cares for the peacocks at Malfoy Manor, when nobody is
watching, he will cluck and coo at them. And they will answer him.
Veelas have their own origins, after all, in the avian set of magical
creatures.

On the other hand, while Narcissa is loyal to her husband, the Black family has their own hidden nonhuman origins.

She
is much more of a lurker than dear bloodthirsty Bella, waiting for the
right moment to strike from the shadows, much like viciously protective
Andromeda – they are more scavengers than predator, the younger two.
Though none the less cruel or dark. None the less protective of their nest.

Narcissa
is quiet, unlike the howls of hateful Walburga, much like the silent
judgement of cold Orion or the creeping calculation of young Regulus.
Entirely unlike the brash swipes and territorial snarls of Sirius, who
is more familiar with lurking in shadows and striking for blood than he
will ever be comfortable with.

They are so similar, yet so
different. What they are has many names, bogeymen is one; they are the
brothers and sisters of all the necromantic (and some of the demonic,
too), and they come in so many kinds.

Luna Lovegood is
another simple puzzle – that she is practically made of thousands of
clues is answer enough. That she can see things and creatures and the
invisible sorts that most can’t is almost the only clue you need. Fae
are a rather insular bunch, after all, and few have the Sight to looking
for the Fair Folk or the way their Worlds weave together.

But
as for the little clues, well… the girl’s heritage is in the
vegetables in her ears, the odd-sounding sentences and introductions,
and the used bottlecaps around her throat. It’s from the inverted
reading of everything… to the visiting of Thestrals in bare feet and
with both an apple and a strip of flesh as offering.

Little things, odd things, but important things.

There
are certain Safe Ways of dealing with the world, you see – a certain
way to go about doing things. Like tossing salt over your shoulder if
you spill it, never breaking a mirror, and not intruding on Fairy Forts
for anything. Luck has to be worked for, and a smart fae follows
traditions and pays attention when their ears burn. Listening to omens
like owls and robins and black cats can save a life. (Luna didn’t know to be listening then, she regrets it now.)

And
it’s too faint to see, but when she skips, she hovers for a
split-second before she falls. Somewhere deep in Luna Lovegood,
something is singing a half-remembered warble… of wings made of
gossamer and glass turned flesh.

Weasleys, on the other hand,
are an interesting matter, especially with the introduction of the
Prewetts. Weasleys come from a curious line of creature, literally quite
curious, and… well… quite
weasel-like in appearance, as opposed to the avian origins of Veela. But
Prewetts… Prewetts were born of fire – fire sprites, elementals,
somewhere between nature spirit and demon, spiteful and fierce and warm
and hot.

One would need the right machinery to see it,
but it can be felt perfectly fine when a child of Molly Weasley gets
angry. The air around them gets quite warm. And they turn quite red,
which clashes horribly with their hair, which is sign in itself, really.
Quite a temper, fire has, if you poke it.

For those who can
see it and are paying attention, Ginny Weasley’s hair rises slightly
when she’s furious, and her tomato-red ears give off the faintest of
sparks. Luna doesn’t mention it though, because it’s not very polite to
point out that sort of thing. She does, however, note with some interest
that Ron’s do the same, after she meets him.

Harry Potter,
the infamous Boy Who Lived, is… a bit strange. He’s hard to pin down,
honestly, almost impossible. When he flies, one might suspect something
born of wind or something born with wings. When he fights, one might
suspect something animalistic, something extremely loyal and fierce, and
maybe a bit mean when provoked out of gentle contentment. Or maybe
something powerful, something truly sorcerous or maybe demonic.

He
hisses like a naga, he’s got eyes between nymph and necromantic, and he
acts sometimes… elvish in demeanor… house-elvish. It’s hard to
tell, honestly. Who knows? He certainly doesn’t.

Hermione
Granger, while on the subject of the three friends, is actually
incredibly obvious. That truly fearsome intelligence? That offensive
temper, that righteous determination, that jealous pride, that cruel
vindictiveness when crossed? That affinity for fire? That near hoarding of
as much knowledge as she can reach? A tad insecure, but the young ones
are always easily upset, and the kindness and crusading isn’t at all a
dealbreaker.

Oh, wouldn’t the so-called “purebloods” be
surprised? But, then again, many forget that fire hides under the earth.
And the riddling, terribly clever kind of dragons aren’t really around
anymore. The rare few that remain, however, always tend to be such book-wyrms.

Like the mudblood girl’s,
Tom Marvolo Riddle’s naga heritage was well-hidden. First behind his
handsome nonmagical father’s face, then behind the mutations and
corrupting magic of the Horcruxes.

He shouldn’t have tried to
get rid of most of his “Muggleness” when he resurrected himself, if he
had wanted to keep a human appearance. The faint scales of scales on his
skin and slits of his eyes are entirely his own fault – the ancient
naga blood wasn’t enough to create something less unnatural and
ill-suited to exist. Voldemort was always cold, wherever he went.

“Purity”
of magic and of witches and wizards, my friends, is such a laughable
thing. “Pure blood”? Goodness gracious, what a joke.

maroonknight14:

oh-mother-of-darkness:

Concept: a small child whose imaginary friend is Superman. He talks to “Superman” all the time, completely unaware that Clark can in fact hear everything he’s saying. The child and associated adults are infinitely surprised when reply letters from Superman start appearing in their mailbox

#clark is just#goin about his business#fightin bad guys and smashing through walls#listening to this little kid tell him about school today and soccer practice and#how his mom is making spaghetti for dinner and does superman want to come??#one of these days he’s probably going to do it#hello it is I superman#I heard there was spaghetti?? 

azkvban:

You know how Draco visited Harry’s train compartment at the start of books 1, 3, 4, and 5? I’m just thinking about him walking along the corridors, looking into every single window searching for Harry whilst racking his brains for something obnoxious to say to him what a loser ALSO, DO YOU THINK he searched the entire train for Harry in Chamber of Secrets but he never found him so he trudged back to his own carriage all distressed

lackadaisicallexicon:

roachpatrol:

paradoxcase:

roachpatrol:

liesunseen:

roachpatrol:

i always thought it would be interesting to have a story where the aliens are using a universal translator so all the humans had their names translated from old english or greek or whatever. if you did this with homestuck fic, it could be especially interesting if the trolls got their names through an automatic six-letter name generator, so they didn’t mean anything but ‘this guy in particular’, while the humans were: God Is Gracious (john), Usually Greenish Metamorphic Silicate Rock (jade), Romantic Flower (rose), Beloved, Cherished (dave), Bright Dawn (roxy), Long Stabbing Knife (dirk), God Is Gracious, the Girl Version (jane), and then it turns out that jake could be a hebrew name or an english diminutive of john or a regional pronunciation of jack and therefore his name translates out to everything from Supplanter, to Joke, to Male Person, to God Is Gracious Number Three.

like can you imagine karkat being like, ‘OKAY, I HAVE TO ASK. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GUYS HAVE SUCH PHENOMENALLY STUPID NAMES’ and Usually Greenish Metamorphic Silicate Rock is like, ‘hey, fuck you too, buddy!’ and the pornographically titled Beloved, Cherished is like ‘okay like you’re really one to talk, Feline Composed From Or Associated With a Small Self-Propelled Vehicle,’ and karkat realizes once more he has created the worst of all possible species of alien and has to go and lie down and hate himself

Translator has always been my headcanon for why highblood trolls seem to use “normal” words for objects (refrigerator) while lowbloods use long descriptions of objects (thermal hull). I like to think that the lowbloods are using some sort of slang that doesn’t translate. Maybe like Cockney rhyming slang.

haha, my headcanon for that bit of troll culture was pretty much the opposite. i think lowbloods are obligated to speak simply and clearly to be most widely and easily understood, so the common usage of alternian is to make compound words out of regular words plus various prefixes, suffixes, and maybe infixes. like german, though english does a bunch of this too, though english usually drags in latin and greek to do so. 

meanwhile, alternian nobility has no such obligation to speak intelligibly, because it’s their underlings’ job to figure them out. they can use as many archaic nouns as they want, plus puns and weird grammar, and then feel superior when they watch everyone else scramble to keep up. 

access to education is basically a privilege among humans, so regional dialect, slang, and nonstandard grammar are markers of low class.  hence, the condesce sounds silly to us— uneducated; frivolous— but would sound much more serious to trolls —assertive; imperious— because of our different standards of formality.  

People don’t speak standard or non-standard dialects because they’re supposed to, it’s just that dialects spoken by upper-class people wind up as the standard because of privilege. The only reason non-standard dialects are harder to understand is because while most people are exposed to the standard dialect, the upper classes don’t bother to learn the non-standard ones, because why would they? It’d probably be impossible for a dialect spoken only by disprivileged people to become the standard.

On the other hand, if sea dwellers and land dwellers were originally separate groups with separate languages, the sea dweller language might have come to be a prestige language, like French and Latin did in Europe. In that case, those highblood terms might actually be from sea dweller roots, as opposed to the lowblood terms that are from land dweller roots, with the land dweller language being more agglutinative.

great addition/correction, thanks! and i definitely like the idea of a seadweller prestige language. 

important notes:

the most high-ranking troll we ever see blatantly uses aave (i would write this off as something she picked up on Earth but Meenah did, too). aave is a dialect, with a lot more specialized shit than a few simple words like “fridge”. aave being a prestige language would make sense because we only see tyrians who are very into being empresses use it

unpretty:

unpretty:

unpretty:

come to think of it, why wouldn’t someone with superman’s powers use them for physical comedy? like. buster keaton style. or dick van dyke. he is invulnerable and can fly, those are the perfect circumstances for a pratfall. half the time only he is aware that he is joking and he just looks like a clumsy asshole but he knows in his heart that the timing on that gag was perf. add this to my list of stupid fucking headcanons.

clark sits down too aggressively in a desk chair, rolls backward across basically the whole office before the chair tips backward and he rolls out of it and into a vending machine in the break room that drops candy on his head because he whacked it. lois is laughing so hard she can’t breathe but the joke is on her, he did that on purpose. he planned that gag for days. she is laughing with him, not at him. who is the real winner here. score one for kent.

at least once he has nearly given lois an aneurysm because his glasses broke and he decided the best way to deal with this was to go full mr magoo. constantly barely avoiding catastrophe. lois keeps having to try to rescue him so he has to plan things so she won’t get hurt. nonetheless he enjoys the change of pace. the next day at work he listens to her regale the office with tales of how clark nearly fucking died like fifty goddamn times when she was walking him home. he feels like he did a good deed giving her a fun story to tell at parties. after lois finds out he is superman there is hell to pay.