I would like it on record that the ONLY good successor to Daniel Craig’s James Bond would be Q, still played by Ben Whishaw. Just the most reluctant 007, who simply wants to be at home with some digestives and a blanket. A skinny little Victorian gay Bond.

Q ends up with some female villain trying to pull the Skyfall shit on him and he just gives her the most unimpressed look ever.

“I’m not AFRAID of you. I just don’t LIKE you.”

When he loses his gun on his first ever assignment, he just 3D prints himself a new one, which also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

The villains discover that sending a Bond Girl after him is useless.

One of them sends a Bond Boy.

This doesn’t work either, but for entirely different reasons. Namely, he’s like “so you’re very cute and all but you clearly know who I am and I have to tell you MI6 offers a much better pension than your boss does” and the Bond Boy ends up absconding from the villain to tag along with Q.

… who, by the third movie, has like six Bond Boys and has built his own team out of them.

One of them is his boyfriend, probably.

Nobody knows which one.

Finally, after a solid 8 months of hearing on the grapevine about how handsome and talented his successor is, James Bond corners Q in some random London alleyway and he’s like “I’ve had enough of this. Your kill rate is next to nothing, your gun is 3D printed and you mostly use it to browse for vintage cardigans on eBay, and you haven’t absconded with even one saucy minx! Tell me the truth, are you really a 00 agent, or is this just some ploy by M to make me jealous enough to come back?”

And Q is like “well, for a start, it’s really not that hard to avoid absconding with saucy minxes, because it’s not 1973 any more and most of them are on Tinder. Also, all the 00s are unionised now. We play paintball every Tuesday, and we’ve already got the teams sorted, so.”

Gradually, Bond just starts turning up at the exact location where Q has been posted on his missions. At first, Q thinks it’s just a coincidence, that Bond has probably kept in touch with some of his old 00 pals and just wants to feel like he’s still part of the action, so Q mostly just tolerates it and doesn’t pay much attention to him, but when Bond also turns up at an incredibly fancy charity soirée that Q has been tasked with infiltrating, and very pointedly doesn’t flirt with a single one of the eligible bombshells, instead spending most of his time making very loud conversation about the possibilities of fibre-optics, Q realises that he is, in fact, trying to become one of the Bond Boys.

So according to your tags, Bond probably succeeds in pulling this off.

I wholeheartedly agree. However.

I also need the spinoff film where we see exactly how many ridiculous hoops of radioactive fire Q makes him jump through to make this happen.

So, so many. Q Branch has a collaborative spreadsheet where they keep track of each of the attempts and the reason for its failure. If you do a data sort on it, you can see that the most common such reason is ‘murder is a crime, not a wooing tactic,’ swiftly followed by ‘it had boomer energy.’ It’s colour coded and has a separate worksheet dedicated to fact-checking Bond’s attempts at discussing computers.

(It’s also synced to Q’s phone, but they don’t know that.)

I made it exist. It’s dumb. Enjoy.

AI under capitalism

If there are trees you aren’t alone

I can’t tell if this is supposed to be encouragement or an ominous warning

#that’s entirely up to the trees

@zannolin this feels like a very Narnia post to me

I’m just going to leave this here

He really did.

having a freeze response to stress is so funny in the context of normal adult stressors. millions of years of evolution are trying to tell me that the email will not find me if i stay very still and do nothing

One of my early internet friends was a refugee child of Rohan, a fact that we took very seriously because we were like 12

One of my friends worked in a Wellington library. Her boss was the Witch King of Angmar.

This is the second "Witch King of Angmar is a librarian" contribution so I'm fully accepting it as fact at this point.

He’s googlable. Brent McIntyre.

I refuse to fact check anything. I just read comments on my posts and integrate them into my belief system based on vibes alone.

*cough*

Y'know when Ody was like "I need to be a monster to get home, rarwrr"

Yeah, he didn't actually give up Polites' "Open arms" thing until "Six Hundred Strike"

In "Get In The Water" Ody doesn't jump straight to planning, scheeming, attacknng, or anything really. He actually tries to reason with him, to use compassion and sympathy. He tries to relate to Poseidon and apologizes, encouragung him to forgive.

Then when he's in the ocean, sinking, Poli, Eury, and Anticlea sing to him. But their words are different from the usual.

Eurylochus, is encouraging him, rather than criticizing him.

Anticlea is telling him that she loves him, instead of making it seem like he let her down.

But Polites' what he said. That is what gave Odysseus the ability to go Ruthless on Poseidon. Instead of what he's always been saying, which is "This life is amazing, when you greet it with open arms." He now says, "You can relax my friends, I can tell you're getting nervous"

This is him telling Odysseus, "I know what you've been through... Do what you must to see them."

This 'acceptance' is what allows Odysseus to abandon any form of compassion and mercy and why he's able to be as ruthless as he is.

That's also why he was quick to kill Eurymachus, he mentioned open arms, Odysseys didn't need that philosophy anymore, dead.

Also, y'know when he says "My mercy has long since drowned" ?

yeah thats bs. It only drowned like, 4 hours ago, when he was sinking in the ocean. Because yes, the spirits whre pushing him up. But Polites took his philosophy down with him.

so uh yeah.

dick grayson is absolutely the kind of person to have a fairly bad allergy to some food, and completely ignore it because that is his favorite food what do you mean he can't eat it?

i like the idea of him being allergic to mangos. not necessarily bad enough to warrant a hospital visit every time, but enough he suffers for his choices.

i also like the idea that the batfam have to keep eyes on this man at all times when a mango is in his vicinity.

Dick, wandering the Manor with faux casualty, mango in hand as he tries to find somewhere to eat it out of sight:

Jason, sitting in the library: "Hey, Dickie, what've you got there?"

Dick, immediately looking like a guilty dog who got caught in the trash: "...nooothing-"

Jason, snapping his book shut and sitting up: "Is that a fucking mango."

Dick, bolting: "NO?"

Jason, chasing immediately: "YOU CAN'T FUCKING EAT THOSE, GIVE IT HERE! DICK!"

Tim, sitting at the Batcomputer, working on a case:

Barbara, popping on screen: "Mango alert."

Tim, dropping everything to bolt upstairs: "RICHARD JOHN GRAYSON!"

A muffled screech is heard in the distance, followed by curses and demands of "spit that shit out NOW-"

The entire Batfam at dinner:

Dick, sneaking the mango flavored icecream over:

Damian, smacking his hand: "Richard for the love of-"

Dick, snatching the icecream and bolting: "You can't keep me from my mangos! I will never relent! MANGOS FOREVER!"

The entire family chases him down. Alfred is preparing treatment, and Bruce is sitting alone at the dining table, a few more grey hairs, and looking like he regrets everything. Muffled screams, curses, and then a loud lecture from at least three different people can be heard a few rooms over.

listen, the day he discovered his allergy was the same day he discovered his new favorite fruit, and he absolutely considers it a crime of the highest caliber to keep such a snack away from him.

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral

(x)

I love how the tornado doesn't look malicious. She's just dancing along, doing her thing, and it's a pity you're so very ant-sized below.

tumblr will turn anything into a girl

of course, this is the turning into a girl website

I do believe the girl is turning already

Antinous: When the crown wonders where the prince is, only the ocean and I will know!

Poseidon:

the worst part about cardio is the laundry

“ancient Greeks exercised naked for spiritual or sexual reasons” no they exercised naked because they didn’t own automatic washing machines

This is galaxy brain thinking

Would anyone like to join me in my New Year's tradition of reading about good things that happened this year?

A couple highlights:

This year was deeply shitty in a lot of ways - but not all of them.

Fix The News is a weekly newsletter covering hundreds of great news each year! The link above only lists a small selection of all the great things that happened. I signed up two years ago and it's been great for my mental health. So if you don't want to limit yourself to getting good news only once a year, there's also an option to get thel weekly (also without a (free or pro) subscription if you simply check their website each week).

The notes are broken. This is what tumblr is all about apparently.

THE NOTES ARE BROKEN!  This has been reblogged so many times, Tumblr just shrugged and said “infinity”

It shows up as 0 for me.

This is your monthly reminder to start reading sansukh because by the time you're done, you will have read sansukh and isn't that great?