bless Scottish twitter

ya fuckin space slice

Might have these out of order but just a good thread to share.

“The Alienist” + “A Guide to Trouble Birds” because somebody had to

Bonus:

2011, after watching misfits: i have an unfortunate crush on robert sheehan

2019, after watching the umbrella academy: i have an unfortunate crush on robert sheehan again

we’ve got tv shows about people who pretend to be psychic but are just really observant. I want a tv show about someone who’s actually psychic but has to pretend to just be really observant.

I want to apologise to

- Britney for making fun of her when she had her breakdown

- Monica Lewinski for judging her when she was a 22year old temp sexually assaulted by the most powerful man in the world

- Ke$ha for ever thinking she was trashy when all she wanted to do was make party music

- Kristen Stewart for ever thinking she was dumb when she’s actually one of the coolest people ever

- Megan Fox for ever thinking she was just a slut when actually she was an actress being harassed by her employer. 

- Hating all the women who made a career out of having a hot body. Being is shape is hard, beauty is a weapon and auto promotion is hard work. 

- All the Mary-Sues, who exist because young girls everywhere want to be part of a story they love so much

- All the female characters I ever snobbed because they got in the way of my ship.

- Hating the color pink during my teenage years, when it’s actually a lovely color and what I resented was society’s pressure to perform femininity. 

A Good Old-Fashioned Midwestern Apocalypse

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Oh Yoon Seo, A Believer: Look, look! It’s a UFO!

Kwon Jung Rok, An Intellectual who Absolutely Does Not Believe They Exist without Solid Evidence and Proof: *strains his neck muscles to look*

I like Marie Kondo because I’m so used to all the rhetoric around “decluttering” or “tidying up” being about how it’s somehow immoral to own things and that we need to burn our possessions and all live in sterile minimalist Hell in a plain white apartment with a deck chair and one potted plant.

So I like hearing the tidy lady tell me that yes I should live in a hovel with a bunch of linguistics books and dragon statues and here are some ways to keep the hovel clean and orderly while I lurk in it.

It’s so refreshing.

Please, I am begging you, visit the official Captain Marvel website

this thread absolutely killed me

So, my university does a lot of outreach Classics work, trying to make it less of an elitist subject and more accessible to children, and as part of that, I went to give a talk to a class of 6 and 7 year olds a few months back.

And here’s the thing. Classics is really often portrayed as the last bastion of academic privilege, a subject that is only taught to rich white kids so that they can brag about knowing Latin and get jobs as Tory MPs. But these kids were OBSESSED. They had already done some stuff on myths, and they were so excited to talk about it. They knew all the stories, all the heroes, the gods, the monsters. I have never seen such an excitable group of kids as these 6 year olds shouting about Odysseus.

For the lesson, I asked them to think of their favourite myth and to consider it from the point of view of the monster rather than the hero. The end goal was to show that often the monsters and heroes are quite similar. We decided to do Polyphemus (the Cyclops) in the Odyssey, and so I asked them why they thought Polyphemus might have been so angry at Odysseus that he killed some of his men.

Because he came home and found lots of strange men in his house, eating his food, said the kids.

So, I asked them, do you think that was a good reason to kill people?

No, they said, but he was very cross, and he didn’t do it because it was fun.

And then this KID, this SIX YEAR OLD CHILD, put her hand up and said “well, it was very bad of him, but if we’re cross with him then we have to be cross with Odysseus too, because when he came home from his adventure and found lots of men in his house, trying to marry his wife, he killed them, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

AND LET ME TELL YOU

I am a published Classicist! A PhD student! And I have never made that connection before! Not once! And this child was six years old! And she made the link! By herself!

And so I tried not to show how gobsmacked I was, and we talked more about other monsters, including Medusa, and at the end of the lesson a lot of them said that they thought the monsters were not as evil as we usually think, and then I went home.

But I honestly haven’t got over how excited and engaged those kids were, in a totally regular primary school. Classics, in that classroom, was not elitist or inaccessible. It was something they understood, could really get their teeth into and use to think of new ideas of good and bad, of why we demonise different people for doing the same things. And that’s how I like to think about Classics. Not a series of dry texts in ancient languages, but as living stories that you actually can’t help but love, just a bit.