fallen-angel-nightshade:

nerdqueensblogbitches:

xazz:

rlslut:

the best video i’ve seen today omg i can’t stop watching it guys i’m so happy

She’s so casual about it I love it

Her name is Young You

She’s a 2-time Korean junior national champion at only 14 years old. She won her first national championship at 11, which surpassed Korean figure skating legend Yuna Kim by one year, as she won her first title at 12.

The song is “I am the best” by 2ne1 for those who are unfamiliar. This whole routine is amazing!

lokispriestess:

thebibliosphere:

archionblu:

elodieunderglass:

moonymango:

cactusspatz:

bairnsidhe:

ariaste:

ariaste:

ariaste:

The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.

#this is a good post #also I need an example of hopepunk #bc the name #resonates with me #and I need it #please #if you don’t mind (via @lavender-starling)

So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”

Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.”  YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion

Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts. 

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.

Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.) 

And THIS, this is hopepunk: 

Here I am with more addendums to this post: Seems like a lot of people are saying the word “noblebright” at me, and I just want to be really clear about this: Noblebright is not hopepunk. Noblebright does not espouse the same ideals that hopepunk does. They are two distinct, separate, coexisting things.

Noblebright is Arthurian legends. The world is a good place, people are essentially good. The codes of chivalry are in full effect. People in positions of authority are there because they are wise, prudent, caring leaders. They rule because they deserve to rule. They protect the weak, they uphold their ideals, there’s people practicing chaste courtly love in every bower and garden. Things are fine, and people have adventures in which they triumph because (see: all of the above).

Hopepunk is (as many wonderful people in the comments have pointed out) Discworld: The world is the world. It’s really good sometimes and it’s really bad sometimes, and it’s sort of humdrum a lot of the time. People are petty and mean and, y’know, PEOPLE. There are things that need to be fixed, and battles to be fought, and people to be protected, and we’ve gotta do all those things ourselves because we can’t sit around waiting for some knight in shining armor to ride past and deal with it for us. We’re just ordinary people trying to do our best because we give a shit about the world. Why? Because we’re some of the assholes that live there. 

Examples of hopepunk media include:

Guardians of the Galaxy: “Why do I want to save the galaxy? Because I’m one of the idiots who lives there?”

Thor Ragnarok: “Asgard is not a place… It is a people.”

Leverage: “Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight.  We provide… leverage.”

The Librarians: (“I have seen you all die so many times when it didn’t matter, I can’t let it happen now that it does.” “What do you need us to do?”)

Scorpion.: (”If you try to tell me about the greater good one more time, I will hit you.”)

Star Wars: (”There is good in him still.”)

Star Trek (the original universe): (honestly, there’s no one single quote, but like, the entire damn thing is solid hopepunk.)

Wonder Woman: (”It is not about deserve, it is about what you believe.” also “Who will sing for us, Charlie?”)

Also, Mad Max: Fury Road. Angharad is a hopepunk queen, and Furiosa and Max get pushed and pulled on to that path by the end of the movie through their connection to each other and the people they fight with.

More HopePunk quotes, cause I think we all need them:

It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes
rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I
haven’t abandoned my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.— The Diary of Anne Frank

If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.
If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake
levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.
This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without
exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re
massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had
billions of people on my side.
Pretty cool, eh?— Andy Weir, The Martian

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin,
or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if
they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother
would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who
are helping.”— Fred Rogers


I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime
yet for every criminal there are ten thousand honest, decent, kindly
men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could
not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the
obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the
patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I
believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that
goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.— Robert A. Heinlein


Sure, humans kill each other. We kill for passion, madness, rage, love,
war, and lord knows other things. And yet, we’ve got six billion people
running around the planet. Almost as if people who kill other people are
the exception rather than the rule.— Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall Marville #4 review

“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”  – Robert Ardrey

Hopepunk, aka @thebibliosphere

Thank you, I try. And on the days where I can’t I have friends and good people in my life like @ariaste to remind me.

It’s looking at a hopeless situation, acknowledging the hopelessness, and refusing to lose hope anyway.

When all that is left for you is despair, hope is an act of defiance.

imheretopostthingsilike:

haze256:

such-justice-wow:

rafawriter:

murdercore-powerfuneral:

goulashnikov-concern:

captain-price-official:

Demonstration of the X27 color NVGs

Color what?

That’s the point. These are artificial colors, most night vision systems are monochrome, which takes away a lot of detail, specially when you want to use them to read anything, like that road sign.

Holy fuck thats night time

Hold my pancakes THIS IS NIGHTTIME??!?

why’s there glitter in the sky- *reads reblogs* oOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH THOSE ARE STAAAAAARSSS!!!!!!

Stones Have Been Popping Out of People Who Ride Roller Coasters

the-pie-initiative:

kristoffbjorgman:

kawuli:

kawuli:

kawuli:

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

SCIENCE: IT WORKS

Update: 

“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass.“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.

MSU Today

I just love this because it’s HILARIOUS and yet also a perfect archetypal example of The Scientific Method:

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion 

5. Conclusions

6. GOTO 1 (the scientific method is iterative, don’t forget that part)

was this like… done in cooperation with disney management or did some  random scientist go through bag check with a 3d printed kidney and a bottle of piss and start looking for big thunder mountain fastpasses

He asked first!

Of course, the researchers had to get permission from Disney World before bringing the model kidney onto the rides. “It was a little bit of luck,” Wartinger recalls. “We went to guest services, and we didn’t want them to wonder what was going on—two adult men riding the same ride again and again, carrying a backpack. We told them what our intent was, and it turned out that the manager that day was a guy who recently had a kidney stone. He called the ride manager and said, do whatever you can to help these guys, they’re trying to help people with kidney stones.”

Stones Have Been Popping Out of People Who Ride Roller Coasters