I Love This So Much! Less 20-something Heroes, More Veterans Badasses.

ATTENTION: Femcon 2015 is a scam. Some users on 4chan decided to create a fake convention in order to scam feminists out of their money. Please, don’t fall for this, and help spread the word if you can. Here is a link to some screenshots from their chat: http://imgur.com/a/2e0kU

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.    He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.    The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.      Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.     But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.     This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (via cat-sophia)

The contrast between the calmness of an Aikido thrower and the panic of an Aikido “throwee.”

Naziyah Mahmood is a woman of contradictions. She was a scientist for the European Space Agency, an artist and soon to be published writer/poet. Also, she is a deadly martial artist and weapons collector while being a peace loving woman of faith. Naziyah has overcome a tough upbringing and disability to become an academic of excellence……who can also kick your butt. (x)

WHAT A BADASS <3 <3

“I do get a lot of odd looks when walking around Glasgow, especially when I’m training. There is still that stereotype here that women dressed like me should just be in the kitchen. An old instructor of mine used to call me his ‘little ninja girl.’ I didn’t mind because it gave me an advantage. I was taken lightly and I routinely got underestimated, especially when sparring. I remember one male student who was well over 6ft reassured me by saying,

‘Don’t worry. I will go easy on you.’

He soon found himself on the floor.”

REBLOG IF YOU LOVE DOGS

9 million people fucking love dogs

I want more :o

blvck and gold

*frantically takes notes*

I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.