Ya Know Like….you Always Hear About The Classics™ Authors Having Stupid Wild Shenanigans With Each

I don’t ‘zone out’. Being zoned out is my default state, and I occasionally zone back in to check how things are going.

This is getting ridiculous... I filtered any tags that have something to do with SoW spoilers, but whenever I see blocked posts on my dashboard I just click on them anyways, because I´m curious and keep telling myself that one teeny tiny spoiler won´t hurt

My self control is like non existent :(

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

“I’m not a villain. You shouldn’t have treated me like one.”

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

Skulduggery Pleasant AU: Valkyrie is persuaded by kenspeckle to leave skukduggery and work with the irish sanctuary in a different capacity/deal with the magic/mortal-life divide differently.

[This ask is a prompt for this headcanons post]

First of all, let’s take a moment to appreciate this tag courtesy of the AO3 Tag Generator:

[image reads: “sappy scientific femslash”]

Surprising absolutely no-one, I am 100% here for Valkyrie and Clarabelle as magiscience wives. Lab partners, even. 

Like, sure, Kenspeckle could get Val to do something that isn’t either Skeleton Detective Assisting or Sanctuary Scientisting, but also. Clarabelle is right there y’all. And Val likes coats.

Ghastly would be delighted! He would make the best labcoats!

Now for the plot nonsense. Handwavey I-haven’t-read-these-books-in-many-years ye-gods-there’s-some-kind-of-second-series-I-haven’t-touched-isn’t-there? time, but I’d imagine some kind of complicated Darquesse related fuckery goes down anyway, because look at China. Being a librarian has not stopped her from being very much involved in drama!! I see no reason for Val to be any different.

I just typed “does valkyrie cain like math” into google and one of the suggestions along the way was “does valkyrie cain have a girlfriend”. oh my god !!! oh my god !!!!!

But anyway! I cannot remember if she likes math! I think the reflection likes at least one of the STEM things in school though. A Valkyrie+Stephanie teamup sounds like a good time.

Also, Valkyrie gets a dog at the end of the series right? She should still get a dog. The dog should have its own set of lab gear. 

Like, the goggles and the boots and the coat. Ghastly should be the one making the dog’s clothes. Ghastly should be chasing this dog around the shop with a teacup. 

Yes.

new powers who dis

genuinely one of the worst things that’s happened to television in the last few years (exacerbated by streaming services) is death of Filler. going from 20 episodes to 8 because “we didn’t really need that episode where the main characters went to the beach right? it had no long lasting effect” but we DID!!! we needed to see how they act without the Big Bad Plot and to establish the dynamics between the characters and lay in the sun (do they forget sunscreen? how do they react to a thieving seagull? do they get buried in the sand or do they do the burying?). the plot isn’t everything. the action doesn’t hit as hard without the quiet moments. give us character development and our little scenes back

Gods, that would be awful. In the livestream today tho he said that Valitsa was his favorite ship ... and joked about Fletcher only having a minor appearance in SOW. So I guess it's not likely

Yet another thought

I really….really hope Landy doesn’t pair Valkyrie with Fletcher for the end of the series? Like I’ve just realised, it’s the exact kind of shit he’d pull.