xkxdx:

stele3:

amuseoffyre:

spanishskulduggery:

mynamesdrstuff:

enjoloras:

Excellent history fact to remember;

Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci, most likely at the behest of the Borgias, once conspired to steal a river.

That’s right folks. They planned to change the course of the Arno River so that they could steal it from Pisa and make Florence accessible by sea. 

Please take a moment to imagine that.

Please. 

‘So we just divert the -’

‘Don’t worry they won’t notice a thing’

100% better than National Treasure.

This should be a wacky bromance heist film. We need more wacky historical heist films.

It gets better. I just had to go check on the veracity of this and discovered MORE.

Their plan failed, at which point Machiavelli decided to quietly fade out of politics…and went on to write The Prince, one of the most (in)famous pieces of Western literature.

Da Vinci, meanwhile, never forgot the river that got away. In fact, he made it the background of one of his most famous paintings–hell, one of the most famous paintings, period.

Yup, that’s the fucking river.

Some shit is just too good not to reblog.

jingle-scully:

“it’s too early to know who’s right and who’s wrong in civil war!! don’t pick sides!! we don’t have the context!!” 

it’s never too early to come to the conclusion that the US govt rounding up its minority citizens and entering them into a database so they can be surveyed/eliminated at any given time, and attempting to slaughter an american prisoner of war who spent over 70 years being tortured is fucking wrong. 

skitzofreak:

coyotzin:

dalekteaservice:

radioactivepeasant:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous. 

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy. 

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel. 

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes – but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet. 

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems – now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before – was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra. 

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.

Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships – armed, now – entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease – the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later – it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species. 

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

Reblog for the amazing twist ending.

Never not reblog this.

buckbuckbuck:

beachdeath:

beachdeath:

re: last gifset i mean yes and good and i would die for zendaya but the spiderman reboot only exists because andrew garfield was vocally campaigning for a bi peter parker and for michael b. jordan to play mj and sony responded by firing him and signing a licensing agreement with marvel which explicitly contractually obligates marvel to portray spiderman as heterosexual and white

ok this seems to be getting notes outside of my circle so i’m going to add some more context to this

so in a july 2013 interview with entertainment weekly, andrew garfield said that he’d been discussing the possibility of a bi peter parker with marc webb, the films’ director, and matt tolmach, one of the producers. this was just a little over a year before the amazing spiderman 2 was released. choice quote:

Recently, he says, he had a philosophical discussion with producer Matt Tolmach about Mary Jane or “MJ” to fans. “I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ,” he tells EW. “And I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’ Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality?  It’s hardly even groundbreaking!…So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”

Garfield even has an actor in mind: “I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since The Wire. He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better—we’d have interracial bisexuality!” The star has clearly suggested a sexually flexible Spidey to his director, Marc Webb, as well. When EW later mentions the idea to Webb, the director says, “Michael B. Jordan, I know.” Oh, so he’s heard this too? “Uh, are you kidding?”

so, in andrew’s own words, he was “not joking” about this, and michael b. jordan was not just a random suggestion andrew threw out during an interview – he’d actually discussed the possibility with the director. 

for what it’s worth, michael b. jordan was open to it. in a july 2013 interview with vh1, michael said: 

Spider-Man‘s Andrew Garfield recently said that the superhero’s sexuality is open to interpretation, and he named you as someone he’d want to play his gay lover in the film, should Marc Webb choose to go that route.
No thoughts on that, but I am a fan of Andrew. He’s a talented actor, I admire his work, and I’d definitely love to work with him in the future. He’s a funny guy–he’s got a sense of humor and I love people that won’t take themselves too seriously all the time, so it’s cool for him to come out and say how he felt or joke around or whatever. It was fun, I laughed at it.

it’s worth noting that one month prior, in june 2013, it was announced in the hollywood reporter that shailene woodley, originally cast as mary jane, would have all of her scenes cut from spiderman 2. note this excerpt from the article:

“I made a creative decision to streamline the story and focus on Peter and Gwen and their relationship,” said Webb. “Shailene is an incredibly talented actress, and while we only shot a few scenes with Mary Jane, we all love working with her.”

The plan now is for Watson, one of Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s iconic love interests, to be introduced in the third movie.

It is likely that Woodley will not return and that the part will be recast.

“Of course I’m bummed,” Woodley told Entertainment Weekly, which first reported the news. “But I’m a firm believer in everything happening for a specific reason. … Based on the proposed plot, I completely understand holding off on introducing [Mary Jane] until the next film.”

okay, so – couple things:

• “watson, one of peter parker/spider-man’s iconic love interests” – not “mary jane,” but the gender neutral “watson”
• the director complimented shailene’s talent and work ethic, indicating that nothing in her performance was a problem; nonetheless, “woodley will not return and the part will be recast”
• and woodley says, “based on the proposed plot, i completely understand holding off on introducing [mary jane] until the next film”
• and the brackets around [mary jane] indicated that she… didn’t say mary jane. she said something else. maybe “watson.” maybe “MJ.”

and, of course, one month later, andrew garfield and marc webb were publicly running around comic-con calling for a bisexual spiderman and michael b. jordan as MJ. 

hmm.

now, when later asked about the entertainment weekly interview, andrew claims that he was “joking” and that “it wouldn’t make sense for peter parker to suddenly discover he’s into boys” but then… he delivers a three-minute monologue about lgbt teen suicide and the importance of representation and almost starts crying. so make of that what you will.

then, shortly after comic-con, in august of 2013, stan lee was asked a couple of times about andrew garfield’s call for a bisexual spiderman. his thoughts:

This past weekend, Comicbook.com covered Fandomfest in Louisville, Kentucky, where we reported on Stan Lee’s reaction to a question about Andrew Garfield’s idea to make Spider-Man bisexual. Stan Lee said, “He’s becoming bisexual? Really? Who have you been talking to? I don’t know…seriously I don’t know anything about that. And if it’s true, I’m going to make a couple of phone calls. I figure one sex is enough for anybody.”

In an interview yesterday with WGN radio, Stan Lee was once again asked about Andrew Garfield’s comments. The radio host asked, “There’s one thing that happened recently, and I think this is one thing that makes you a little bit mad. Andrew Garfield suggested that maybe MJ could be a man. Was that out of left field?”

Stan Lee replied, “Boy, that was so out of left field! I don’t understand why he said that, and one of the quotes I gave, he wanted to talk about I think Spider-Man being bisexual, and my only comment was I thought one sex at a time ought to be enough for anybody.”

When asked where he thought Andrew Garfield’s comments came from or if he was just trying to include another audience, Stan Lee said, “Or maybe sometimes you say something just to be noticed or to create a controversy, who knows? But he’s a great guy and he’s a fine actor, and I hope this doesn’t hurt him in any way.”

so like… stan lee was not on fucking board. stan lee was talking about “making a couple of phone calls,” and suggesting andrew “said something just to be noticed or to create a controversy,” and intimated, “i hope this doesn’t hurt him in any way.”

and then, of course, andrew was let go from his contract, and sony struck a deal with marvel to reboot spiderman according to a legal licensing agreement – in place prior to the andrew garfield movies, actually – requiring peter parker to be heterosexual and white.

now, earlier this year, andrew garfield took part in a roundtable discussion with several other actors, including dev patel.

at one point, around the 36-minute mark, dev mentions that he regrets participating in avatar: the last airbender, saying:

I saw a stranger on the screen, like, i didn’t really relate to. And I was just like, this is a terrible extension of me. This is not what I want to represent in any way.

andrew then replies:

I love what you just said, that it felt like you were looking at a stranger, and feeling like you were perpetuating something that’s toxic. And something that’s shallow. And something that has no depth. No matter how much depth was attempted to be bought into it and sold. And then you go – millions and million, for me it was, you know, Spiderman stuff… There’s millions and millions of young people watching who are hungry for a hand here. Someone to say, “You’re okay. Everything’s okay. You’re seen. You’re seen very deeply.” And we have opportunities to do that with those kind of behemoth films. And more often than not, the opportunity is not taken. And it’s absolutely devastating and heartbreaking because there’s so much medicine that could be delivered through those films.”

then the interview asks, “but why is it not taken?” and andrew replies, “why do you think? why do you think?”

tl;dr andrew garfield and marc webb were lobbying for a bisexual spiderman and sony literally fired both of them, signed a licensing agreement with marvel, and rebooted the entire franchise to ensure that would not happen. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

i say again, I AM SO GLAD I NEVER PAID TO SEE HOMECOMING. I AM NEVER SUPPORTING THAT PART OF MCU FRANCHISE.