Anonymous asked: I was reading the post you reblogged about adults in fandom with nervous interest. I am over 50. I was around for the birth of the X-Philes and was considered older even then. Considering if I should turn in my fandom badge? I don't want to squick people out :(
1) OP was full of crap and had some pretty gross ideas about what women are supposed to do with themselves so I wouldn’t take any damn thing they said to heart.
2) if you are uncomfortable with your fandom interactions, then yeah, I’d say take a step back, consider how you interact with fandom and what you want out of it, maybe take a break. Make some changes so you’re enjoying yourself more, whatever that entails.
3) if other people have come to you and said, “hey, this specific action or behavior is making us uncomfortable, you should really look at that” then yes. Look at that behavior. Consider if you need to change or step back.
“Being old” is not a behavior you need to apologize for.
The internet is not a clubhouse, it is a public space. People bank on the internet, people get the news on the internet, they watch TV and talk to their grandparents and order fucking Taco Bell carry-out on the internet. The internet and social media aren’t the Cool Kids Hangout, it’s a public space and everyone has the right to exist here just like you do in any other public space.
Do you and I and the OP all have obligations as adults in a public place? Damn straight we do. It’s our responsibility to make sure the people we’re interacting with are adults, or that the topic is age-appropriate if we engage with younger Tumblr/Twitter/whatever users. We have an obligation to let the kiddies be kiddies, to not engage them in flame wars or attack them for saying something we disagree with. I don’t follow anyone under 18 (that I know of at least, some of you assholes are probably smart enough to lie about it, but I try) and if someone sends me an adult fic prompt and I know they’re underage I won’t fill it.
And just like you wouldn’t fling pornography around a middle school cafeteria, you don’t put your porn where it doesn’t belong. That means you don’t go over to the official Disney Youtube channel and post NC-17 Launchpad/Louie fic in the comment section because of course you fucking don’t. But on your own blog, or on places like AO3 and FF.net or DA where that sort of content is meant to be found, go nuts. Tag, because we’re not assholes, but you do you.
I don’t even know what my point was anymore, to be honest with you. Look. You’re the only one who can decide how you want to interact with fandom.
But just because we’re older doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be here.
Candle salad is a vintage fruit salad that was popular in America during the 1950s and 1960s. The salad is typically composed of lettuce, pineapple, banana, cherry, and either mayonnaise or, according to some recipes, cottage cheese. Whipped cream may also be used. (x)
I was looking through a vintage cookbook the other day, and I was reminded of my life-long mission to share with the world the horrors of candle salad
im not sure which to be more afraid of, the fact that its apparently a fruit salad with lettuce and mayonnaise or that it looks like a willy coated in mayonnaise flavoured spaff
Do we think the Greatest Generation is just the Greatest at Trolling Us?
Some magazine intern who really hated her job got tasked with inventing a new easy dish for housewives and she slapped this down on the editor’s desk fully expecting to get fired. Instead people have been posing with their phallic fruit salads ever since.
but yeah it does seem that most het men aren’t even attracted to women lol they find women in their natural state repulsive, they find the female body as it naturally exists repulsive and make all kinds of crude jokes about ugly vaginas etc even TO the women they date sometimes, but they are turned on by the power they can wield over women and that’s why they’re so attracted to hyperfemininity and sex dolls and hurting women, they’re attracted to dehumanization and degradation of women…male heterosexuality in our society is mostly sadism
He’s engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC – back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.
Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known….but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!
At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC
So who was Kilroy?
In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy….now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War II….offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.
Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.
“Kilroy” was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s).
His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wages….so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldn’t be counted more than once.
A warship hull with rivets
When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!
One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being “earned” by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on.
The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ”KILROY WAS HERE!“ in king-sized letters next to the check….and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fence….and that became part of the Kilroy message.
Kilroy’s original shipyard inspection “trademark” during World War II
Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.
Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.
Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.
To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
As the World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. It’s first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car….which he
attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the family’s nine children….thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.
The new addition to the Kilroy family home.
* * * *
And the tradition continues into the 21st century…
>>Note: The Kilroy graffiti on the southwest wall of the Bin Laden compound pictured above was real (not digitally altered with Microsoft Paint, as postulated by some). The entire compound was leveled in 2012 for redevelopment by a Pakistani company as an amusement park….and to avoid it becoming a shrine to Bin Laden’s nefarious memory.
* * * *
A personal note….
My Dad’s trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of “Kilroy” at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of this….even as we evolved into adulthood.
To this day, the “Kilroy” image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my head….and my heart!
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
DAILY FIND: Sometimes the Internet is a crappy place full of crap. But today I’m reminded that it’s an amazing trove of free and good information from reliable sources: The University of Illinois Extension has created a searchable index of every stain known to manand stain removal solutions for each. The tool will even tell you what your window of stain-treatment time is to achieve optimal results.
This is nerd GOLD, people. Use it in good health. -ts
UFYH, have you seen this?
So I keep saying that I don’t have a degree from stain college, but apparently the University of Illinois Extension is, in fact, stain college, so you should check this database out.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
So, I have to say something.
This is my favorite post on this website.
I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.
Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.
I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.
