i love my mother dearly but ability-wise she frightens me bc not only can she find 20 four leaf clovers within the span of like 2 minutes, everywhere, she can also write her name w/ both hands on a dry erase board or w/e at the exact same time and have both be a mirror image of one another
to add to this: i was making breakfast this morning and i hear “hey milo! look who came to say hello!” and, expecting like, a moth or a frog or something of that nature, i turn and she’s holding a snake
I wish more people got this because some ‘low-empathy’ people are the most compassionate and sympathetic in the universe, and I hate it when that’s taken to mean ‘unfeeling and probably hostile’ when nothing could be further from the truth
Or, as my dad put it,
Sympathy: I know how you feel Empathy: I feel how you feel Compassion: is there anything I can do to help?
Sympathy: that sucks bro empathy: I feel that compassion: want me to send you some puppy and kitten pictures to make you feel better?
Okay I know we always go on about Marvel’s uncanny casting ability.
But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:
Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth
would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity
was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained
occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)
does all his own stunts
lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages
you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away.
They actually cast Aragorn to play Aragorn
Can I just add a few things?
Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits
According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.
Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise
Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.
According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught
Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.
The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.
Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.
Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” – literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death.
Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.
Peter Jackson literally sometimes called him Aragorn by accident
there’s a guy in one of my classes who i am secretly battling for dominance over by wearing awful hipster outfits. i dont know if he is thinking the same thing but regardless i intend to win
i thought i won today when i walked into class wearing my awful 1995 figure skating tour of the world (sponsored by campbells soup) t-shirt, mom jeans, and 1980 moscow olympics-theme denim jacket but then he had to walk in wearing a donald duck jacket with matching donald duck socks like what a fucking power move
Sometimes I think about the future of self driving cars and how everyone I talk to about that future is like “okay but in an emergency we’ll be able to take back manual control, right?” and I usually placate them by saying, yeah, that’s totally how it’ll happen, but actually we’re already seeing the opposite. Cars with “self driving” features like steering and breaking that kick in and take control from the driver if the driver is about to rear end someone or is in a dangerous situation because the truth is computers can think faster and have better reflexes than us and I think about this going into the future and how if the self-driving cars are able to share their data with each other and learn from the driving experiences of every car on the road soon we’ll have cars that are so massively experienced at driving and avoiding accidents and making microsecond decisions and partial degree turns of the wheels and being so damn precise that automobile accidents will be almost unheard of and that’s when we’ll develop the most wasteful hilarious extreme sport in history where a single human driver will go up against an arena of ultra smart self driving cars and just by driving around recklessly try to coral them into crashing into each other and I tell you I would watch that sport all day.
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Tonight I may have had an encounter with the smoothest human being on earth.
As many of you know I work as an actor in a haunted house. This is a fun job for many reasons, but witnessing people’s reactions to being scared is by far the best. I’m a scare window actor, which means I hide behind a section of the wall that is held up by a latch that I can lift and drop away suddenly, scaring people with both my scream, and the loud sound my window makes upon being dropped. I have a small hole drilled in the wall to look through to see people passing.
The smoothest human being on the planet wore a white hoodie. He came in a group with three other friends. I did not expect to scare him much. After a while you can kind of gauge just by what you can glimpse from your peephole whether someone will be a good scare or not. Men in their 20’s in a mixed group of friends typically do not get scared easily. But this guy was wearing white in my blacklight-equipped hallway, so he had made himself an easy target and I had to take advantage.
I dropped my window precisely when he was in front of it.
He leapt back toward the wall on the other side of my narrow hallway and his drew back his arm like he meant to punch me.
“This is it.” I thought. “I’m finally going to be socked in the face for scaring someone.”
But I was wrong.
His arm kept curling back behind his head. Smoothly, flawlessly, effortlessly he tucked his hand behind his head, leaned back on the wall opposite me, and propped a foot up on the plywood frame of my open window, reclining with ease.
“So, come here often?” He asked.
All of this occurred within the span of a second. Maybe two.
I was shook. I was stunned. I almost broke character.
I shrugged. “Only on the weekends.” I replied with my character voice. His group laughed. He double finger gunned me and walked on.
I will never forget him.
I cannot stress enough how perfect his transition from his fear reaction to his playboy act was. It flowed so naturally.
My boyfriend talks in his sleep and because he’s bilingual, he says some hilarious/weird/sometimes creepy shit. I ask him every morning if he remembers saying this stuff and he has no idea about any of it.
Here are some of my favorites:
-”Babe, can you please turn down the brightness of your skin” -After stealing all of the blankets: “This is my right as a human” -After I take the blankets back: “I don’t want your freedom, America. Just blanket” -Sometimes he just says “Hello?” as if he’s answering a phone call -One night he just said “Cabbage” which is weird because he doesn’t know the english word for that when he’s awake. -After spooning me: “You have a nice butt” -”Who is that in the corner?” (terrifying) -”Watch out for the red lady” (even more terrifying) -Sometimes he will say things in German and it sounds like he’s speaking Parseltongue -One time I actually think he said something in Parseltongue -One time he talked about buying a ticket to “everywhere” and then just said “hello?” after two minutes of silence -And my all time favorite: ”This is MY yogurt, Satan”
I’m convinced he a nature demigod or be using pheromones
He started a foundation to help end hunger. It’s called Everybody Eats. From the Mission page on the site:
“Everybody eats began on an ordinary summer day which consisted of me playing 2k with my cousin ken polo, until we stepped outdoors with some club crackers and made friends with deer in our neighborhood. I began to record videos of me feeding the deer for fun, I thought it was completely normal and I even decided to name them since I felt we had a special connection. The videos began to gain some buzz over the course of a week, but on the third day is when things got crazy, Money’s whole family came to my backyard, this is when I established the “Deer Squad,” which consists of Money, Baby Mama, Baby Bambi, Lola, Money jr., Canela, and Tequila. I fed them powdered donuts and marshmallows at first since I had nothing nutritional in my house at the moment, but I could tell that they loved the snacks by the way they all surrounded me without fear and ate swell. I developed a love for the Deer Squad, well I guess you can say the whole world did. In just three days I gained over 150,000 followers on Instagram, and over 40,000 followers on Twitter. I was feeling truly blessed, amazed, and honestly a bit confused on how these videos went viral. But, I realized that this opened a lot of opportunities so I started selling my own merchandise named “Everybody Eats,” a phrase I use when I talk to the deer as I feed them because I treat them equally, with nice snacks and genuine love.
Gaining all of these eyes on me made me realize I can make an even bigger impact on this world, and that nothing makes me happier than helping people. Only being 18 years old I decide to start my own nonprofit organization, not only to help the underprivileged, but to inspire and set an example to all of my viewers. Coming from a single-parent home, after school snacks were considered a luxury and holiday dinners were always something special to us as a family. Food brings people together and it also brings happiness to the table. The Everybody Eats Foundation focuses on helping single-parent families during the holidays and after-school kids year-round. The way I envision it, if I could do it then anyone can, and in today’s society it is vital for us help each other and let positivity be a major key in everyone’s life.”
He’s also giving supplies to people in Puerto Rico devastated by the hurricane!
sparksoffandommagic 