“The average US president has been charged with 1.54 felonies” factoid isn’t true. The average US President has been charged with 0 felonies. Donald trump, who has been charged with 71, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted
sometimes im like “tone down the Self to fit in” and other times, the voice of God comes to me in a dream and says “I didn’t make you crazy for no reason”
I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.
I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”
I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.
And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.
My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?
i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.
When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it
i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.
i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’
he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’
i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’
he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’
the conversation did not get any better from there.
hey uhhh but fr the concept of fallen angels existing but risen demons being an impossibility is kind of a great summary of sin in christianity
holy shit
no, no, come back here and tell me how stupid it is to talk about how the power dynamics inherent to christianity are built upon the rhetoric that failure is unavoidable and there is never enough you can do to make up for it
It can be somewhat disheartening when you the artisans and craftsman of yesteryear who created miracles out of limited technology go forgotten. Always nice to see someone somewhere making tributes to them.
There is something so magical about practical effects and I wish more modern movies would use them. The best movies are the ones where CGI is used to *enhance* the special effects, not replace them.
The thing is, I don’t disagree with you! However, the Doyle estate does, and they get litigious over it. Seriously, they’ve tried to sue SH adaptations on the grounds that he respects women in them, which he didn’t do in until the stories that are still under copyright. (Convenient, isn’t it?) So only when all the stories are in the public domain will Sherlock Holmes be Free
Something needs to be done about teachers who hate kids tbh
My sister is currently getting her doctorate in child psychology & education, but years ago she worked as a substitute english teacher at a high school in nyc. She spent half a year subbing for a woman who was out for surgery, and had been teaching english there for years and years. Most of the kids in this class were remedial; they had failed english before and had to retake it. Most of them hated the class, and they hated literature, because they had been made to feel unintelligent. My sister decided to introduce them to poetry, which was a little easier to digest than long form prose, and had them read Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” And the kids loved it! They connected with it, they were spirited and engaged in class for the first time all year. They wrote their own poetry! They started seeking out and reading poetry on their own! They were all on track to get a C, B or A in that class. And then the original teacher returned and failed every single student, to “teach them all a lesson”. That was the moment my sister decided to go into administration so she could hopefully prevent that sort of thing from happening. But it’s difficult. Despite numerous complaints from parents and other teachers, that teacher had a job there for decades. She continued to have a job there. There are a lot of teachers like her, wielding power and taking their frustrations out on kids, especially disabled and remedial kids. And students have so few advocates in the classroom.
This post has turned into teachers complaining that this behavior is understandable because of burnout, low wages, etc and like. Ok then quit lmao. If you treat my kid like this because of “burnout” I’m gonna burn out your fucking teeth
patternofdefiance, n.: exists as a collection of molecules and organized electrical impulses in Texas (for now); exists online as a specific collection of pixels on tumblr and on Ao3; allergic to free time.
Pronouns: she/her/hers
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My askbox is always open! I write johnlock fanfic of varying ratings, and eagerly accept requests. (I love AUs, I write AUs, I will greedily read AUs - feel free to rec me stuff as well <3)
You can read my fic here: http://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance/pseuds/patternofdefiance
If you are curious about how I write, you can search the 'pattern writes about writing' tag on my blog.
