Cutest Thing Ever

Yeah, that's stucky. Definitely. I really liked that ship some time ago

ship: *exists*

me: okay, it's okay i guess---

shippers: *are full of nasty veil hateful people, who will bully anyone who doesn't ship said ship, forces the ship down other peoples throats, acts like they run the fandom, erases and shits on other characters bc of their ship and are all around toxic to a fandom*

me: ya know what? nvm i hate that ship, that ship is awful.

Wow. The most accurate CW Steve meta. Thank you thank you thank you

“We don’t trade lives”- Captain Steven Grant Rogers

I need to hug this post. Seriously.

1/4 Hello! I'm sorry to bother you with this, but you're a really chill person from what I've seen and you love Steve, you're willing to listen and answer politely, and I don't know who else to turn to with this. I'm just so fucking sick of how Steve is used in fandom even by people who supposedly like him. Spoiler, they don't. They just want him as a trophy for [insert X]. Like, I read this hugely popular fic where Steve is essentially written as a selfish, incompetent idiot

2/4 who harangues Bcky and Sam into joining The Good Fight TM (post-CW) to the point where Bcky (lol) has to ~give him a lecture~ about how to treat Sam properly. It ends as OT3 (where Steve is treated as a sex-cessory, of course, lmao), it has hundreds of kudos, & yet no one seems to give a damn that Steve was basically character assassinated in it. Cherry on the cake is that when Steve mentions he went to Sharon for help getting Sam’s wings back, Sam is offended. Calls her “Carter”. Ok then.

¾ I get that fandom enjoys having Steve be pathetically codependent to their faves, as if he has no other friends who love him. I get that the angry!chihuahua Steve interpretation is popular to the point where that’s ALL he seems to fucking do in fic, as if there’s nothing else important to him. But to disregard his trauma, depression, suicidal tendencies, debilitating survivor’s guilt and the fact that he’s a damn veteran who has given up his life for his country and the rest of the world –

4/4 into “Steve doesn’t know how to live without war or violence! Ofc he’d keep dragging his (Fandom Approved) friends into this! He’s so selfish & boringly depressed, here we go again, Bcky/Nat/Sam/Chewbacca need to clean up his messes ~obvs~ since he’s so incompetent LOL can’t wait for him to die so someone else can be cap” is beyond galling. I’m tired of this. I’m sick of it being lauded. I can barely read halfway through a fic these days without back-buttoning in disgust and disappointment.

__________

Oh my dearest Anon, you have vented to exactly the rightplace. I know! I share your pain. Trust me on this. I am very, very picky aboutwhat fanfic I read all the way through. Part of that is not just that I’m ahuge Steve Rogers fan, which I am. He’s my main guy. I love him. But I also work full-time,I’m a wife and a mother. My spare time is precious. I have so, so many tabsopen for stories from authors that I trust that I have yet to read just becausemy reading time is so sparse. If a writer wants to catch my attention, to beplaced in front of the queue above the writers I already know are balanced andfair in their characterization, they had better be good about characterization,because characterization is the one aspect of writing I am most picky about. Itis the writers responsibility to build a trust in their reader, and to buildthat trust they need to follow the basic rules for character construct infiction writing, if the writers cannot follow those basic tenants, something justone creative writing class would show them in a heartbeat, or hell, even just alittle research into the craft, then I’m out. And I’m not likely to return toread anything else they produce. Basically it’s a writers job to sell thecharacters, even the characters who aren’t their favorite, especially thecharacters who aren’t their favorite. If their biases manage to leak throughtheir writing they are not doing it right.

Part of this might be the age of fandom. While there arethose of us, like myself, who are over 30, who have schooling and/or experience,a large section of fandom is very young. Some still in high school. Some incollege but they haven’t really learned yet or fine-tuned their craft. It is myhope that the more they write the better they’ll be at it. That one day they’llrealize that a) when you make one character the all-knowing, ‘right’ one, let’suse Bucky since that’s the example you gave me, you are actually not doingBucky’s character any favors, it’s not just Steve’s characterization who suffersin this. Gone are the Ian Flemming days when readers gave a pass to a lack ofrealism when it comes to building a protagonist. Were Ian Flemming try to sellJames Bond today - ingenious, undefeatable, sexually flawless James Bond - hewould be turned down. As a society we’ve evolved past that. We look forrealism. Identifiable characteristics. The biggest mistake a writer could makeis to make their character, any character, a stereotype.

As for how the fandom treats Steve in particular?  Using him as a whipping boy to prop up theirfavorite? Also, again, that’s immaturity. And also an act driven entirely byemotion with total absence of logic. Let’s say you, as a writer, or just areally big fan of a character, want to sell your favorite character so thatothers may come to appreciate him. Or, in the very least feel empathy towardsthis character and their situation. Let’s again use Bucky in this (just as anexample, I’m not trying to pick on Bucky). But here is the thing, you don’tneed to convince fellow Bucky fans. They are already convinced. They are onboard. They get it. What you need to do is appeal to the people who don’t giveBucky a thought. And how do you convince them? It sure as hell isn’t byattacking another character, that’s for sure! If I, as a Steve fan, see a Buckyfan attack Steve to prop up Bucky, I am going to be closed off to anything thatBucky fan has to say. It’s a defensive mechanism. i.e. ‘You’re attacking myguy, you’ve just made yourself and your character the enemy, I’m not givingyour words any credence’. Thus this person has not achieved their goal of convincinganyone of anything. In fact they made the situation worse because now the onlything I’m convinced of is that this characters’ fans are rabid.

With age comes wisdom and hopefully fandom will get pastthis. But yeah, they do it, and it’s awful and it makes no sense and uses nologic but we learn and grow and hopefully one day the people doing this willrealize that they’re creating this either/or situation, creating sides, whenthere doesn’t have to be any. That Marvel fandom is actually big enough foreverybody. And none of the leads are going anywhere. Disney owns these guys,they are going to milk them for every marketing and merchandizing penny theyare worth, so if anyone honestly believes they are going to kill off a popularcharacter whose likeness is sold on everything from lunchboxes to Kleenix theway Steve Rogers’ is, and this while they can have a Captain America, a Falconand a Winter Soldier all at the same time thus three times the amount of potentialproduct, a reality check is long past due. The people believing that need toget a clue. Disney is not the comics and they are not going to do anything thatwill affect the bottom line. Fandom needs to get over the mantel passing thing becauseit’s not going to happen in the MCU unless the actor requests it because they’redone. The only reason they killed HanSolo is because Harrison Ford asked them to, if he hand’t? They would havemilked him, too. Also, another thing to remember, online fandom only makes uproughly 1% of a movie’s viewing audience, so even if a fic like this seemspopular? It’s only popular amongst percentage of a percentage of 1%.

Until then I read pretty much every Steve-centric pairingthere is and I have a list of really talented authors I trust with Steve, andtrust me, I’m very picky about that, so if you’d like Anon, I can make a reclist for you. Just let me know. Also, you are most welcome to come vent to meabout this at any time. I feel you. As a Steve fan who genuinely cares andidentifies with the character I get exactly what you are saying. We can bepained by this together.

“You’re keeping the outfit, right?”

My Captain America Stuff  | Redbubble | Commissions

Let’s see who wins. Repost if you’re Team Cap for Civil War

(via lokifxnfiction)

Two Steps Forward in the Search for Life on Mars

We haven’t found aliens but we are a little further along in our search for life on Mars thanks to two recent discoveries from our Curiosity Rover.

We detected organic molecules at the harsh surface of Mars! And what’s important about this is we now have a lot more certainty that there’s organic molecules preserved at the surface of Mars. We didn’t know that before.

One of the discoveries is we found organic molecules just beneath the surface of Mars in 3 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks.

Second, we’ve found seasonal variations in methane levels in the atmosphere over 3 Mars years (nearly 6 Earth years). These two discoveries increase the chances that the record of habitability and potential life has been preserved on the Red Planet despite extremely harsh conditions on the surface.

Both discoveries were made by our chem lab that rides aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Here’s an image from when we installed the SAM lab on the rover. SAM stands for “Sample Analysis at Mars” and SAM did two things on Mars for this discovery.

One - it tested Martian rocks. After the arm selects a sample of pulverized rock, it heats up that sample and sends that gas into the chamber, where the electron stream breaks up the chemicals so they can be analyzed.

What SAM found are fragments of large organic molecules preserved in ancient rocks which we think come from the bottom of an ancient Martian lake. These organic molecules are made up of carbon and hydrogen, and can include other elements like nitrogen and oxygen. That’s a possible indicator of ancient life…although non-biological processes can make organic molecules, too.

The other action SAM did was ‘sniff’ the air.

When it did that, it detected methane in the air. And for the first time, we saw a repeatable pattern of methane in the Martian atmosphere. The methane peaked in the warm, summer months, and then dropped in the cooler, winter months.

On Earth, 90 percent of methane is produced by biology, so we have to consider the possibility that Martian methane could be produced by life under the surface. But it also could be produced by non-biological sources. Right now, we don’t know, so we need to keep studying the Mars!

One of our upcoming Martian missions is the InSight lander. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a Mars lander designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. It is the first outer space robotic explorer to study in-depth the “inner space” of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core.

Finding methane in the atmosphere and ancient carbon preserved on the surface gives scientists confidence that our Mars 2020 rover and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) ExoMars rover will find even more organics, both on the surface and in the shallow subsurface.

Read the full release on today’s announcement HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

This lady is one of us. How cool is that???

GotG Vol. 2 cast reveal their Avengers besties.

If the Government Treated Men Like It Treats Women

I could use some good news

This is my cat, Brigitte.

24 hours after I brought her home, I got a mindblowing job offer.  Since I adopted her nine years ago, my life has become an amusement park.  She has brought me good luck ever since I took her into my home.

I’m telling you, there’s something about this animal.  Good fortune follows her everywhere.

I don’t want to be selfish.  I have everything I need and then some.  So, I’m sharing her with you.

Reblog Brigitte and you’ll receive fantastic news in the next 24 hours.

And when you do, please remember to help your local SPCA and support them in the difficult work they do for wonder animals like Brigitte.  Any donation helps your SPCA, even if it’s just five bucks.

Kitties like Brigitte are counting on you to give back when they bring you good luck.

Thanks, and congratulations on your good news!

TEAM CAPTAIN AMERICA LOOKS SO MUCH BETTER…