CONFESSION: I was so disappointed once I found out Varric and Aveline were not romanceable
I sometimes think my confession would be:
“I find an odd characteristic of any fandom (whether it be games or TV shows or what have you) to be the belief that the only worthwhile relationship between any two characters is romance. Two characters can’t have a deep friendship without it secretly being romantic. Two characters can’t hate each other without harboring lust. A follower that you have a great relationship with is disappointing if it also can’t lead to love.
Is romance great? Yes. Are people who like romance awesome? Why not. I just don’t get why everything has to lead to romance. It’s almost as if we couldn’t reveal a mailbox these days without someone demanding to know if they can have a romance with it.
—signed, anonymous curmudgeon”
THIS. Yes, exactly. Bring everything to romance is reducing the complexity of human interaction. Which is a pity, imo.
Late night Zevrans. Oops.
Dear ITunes
//Rant mode on
Dear ITunes, I hate you. Not only for your clumsy UI (one gets used to it… barely), not only for your inability to open BOTH applications preview and music, or many albums at the same time (tabs? what tabs? never heard of them, no, no), but especially and foremost for your non respect of my language of choice. Yes, I live in Switzerland, but my UI is in English, I’ve chosen English during your installation, then WHY for the God’s sake all texts and comments (and error messages too) in Apple Store are in GERMAN?! Agrrrr.
…No, not everyone in Switzerland speaks German. We in Geneva speak French, for instance, and me, I prefer to see all my UI in English.
…And why filter applications’ comments by location???? If I connect from the German speaking world, the English comments for the new Productivity app are suddenly not relevant?!
Agrrrr!!!
//Rant mode off
Sir Christopher Lee.
Sir Christopher Lee. What a badass.
My favorite badass. He’s amazing.
He was born in 1922. Yes, he is 91. He is still acting. And recorded that heavy metal album in 2012. Yep, at 90. He is more than a badass. He proves, you don’t have to grow old inside. Long live Sir Christopher Lee!
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.
Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.
”Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be. (via oliviacirce)
Beautiful
Reblog if you’re not American
I get a lot of people assuming I’m from America when they meet me on tumblr. I wanna see how many people here aren’t American!
Singapore represent (◡‿◡✿)
Indonesia!
Canada~
Switzerland
Because it’s something I’ve been researching for a while now in preparation for something I’m (eventually) writing, I’ll briefly bring up one of the many things about Thatcher we should all remember. She reversed the previous Labour government’s policy of accepting refugees and exiles from Chile after the horrific U.S. backed coup which put Pinochet in power on Sept. 11th, 1973. This was a regime which dropped pregnant women out of aeroplanes, which tortured girls by putting live rats in their vaginas, which once held a man at gunpoint and gave him the choice: sodomise your son or we kill you both. It was announced today that Pablo Neruda will be exhumed to investigate claims that his death a few days after the coup was in fact an assassination by poison rather than cancer; if it was the former he would only be one of thousands of others killed or simply dissapeared because of their leftist leanings. This was all well known at the time, but Thatcher still denied there were any human rights abuses or any need to accomodate those still fleeing Chile. They weren’t just political allies (it should be noted the only reason the UK even won the Falklands war was the amount of help from Chile), they were also good friends, and when he was finally put under house arrest in the UK, Thatcher was lobbying for his release. Pinchoet’s Chile was also the first real testing ground for the virulent form of neoliberalism which Thatcher and Reagan would then happily adopt and impose throughout the 80s, a project that the current coalition is now intent on completing. If you want to see what current cuts and policy trends will do to the UK, look into what they did to Chile. One example: every year after the privatisation of the Chilean NHS cases of typhoid practically doubled (they had until then been dropping), jumping from around 3,000 to over 10,000 in the space of a few years. Poverty, malnutrition, unemployment, depression and alcoholism, all shot through the roof as the national industries and banks were privatised, and multinationals were allowed to return and establish monopolies which funnelled vast amounts of wealth and national resources out of Chile. The gap between rich and poor became an unbreachable chasm.
Against those making bland moral objections about people “celebrating her death” I say: if she didn’t want her death to be celebrated she shouldn’t have spent her life doing and defending such irredeemably terrible things.
This.
Oh Mercy Me |the blog|: The first lesson Zevran imparted, improbable as the elf himself, was a...
The first lesson Zevran imparted, improbable as the elf himself, was a very stern and surprisingly long lecture about wine. Specifically, how much better brandy was than it - and he’d ended with a demonstration and a sly kind of smile, the smell sharp, a little flowery, and golden.
The second…
Very good.
??????
A++ gif use. Do you think that means he wouldn’t mind if all libraries stopped purchasing his work and exposing kids to it?
Ughhhhh
Your gif use, sir. It is perfect.
But really, the only people who say shit like this are those who don’t have to worry about broadband connectivity at home, access to information (including books) in multiple formats, basic information literacy skills, etc. How come it’s ALWAYS some uber privileged white dude who Googles things on his iPhone and suddenly thinks the work of librarians is obsolete? Seriously.
PREACH.
“How come it’s ALWAYS some uber privileged white dude who Googles things on his iPhone and suddenly thinks the work of librarians is obsolete?”
Thank you for summing up my thoughts EXACTLY
terry deary?? i feel so betrayed!
“How come it’s ALWAYS some uber privileged white dude who Googles things on his iPhone and suddenly thinks the work of librarians is obsolete?”
Yup.
This. And also… it’s strange how the very educated people sometimes don’t understand the difference between being able to find something and to discover something. On the Internet we mainly find what we need. In the libraries (and good bookstores) we are able to find something we didn’t know we need. The world(s) of difference.
