I can’t believe this needs to be said, but the rich are not doing you a service by employing you. They require you. Everything they have is contingent on the fact that you work for them and do what they say. Without you, the rich have literally nothing. Workers have power over the entire economy.
It is actually workers doing a major service to their employers by not unionizing and not starting a revolution, since literally the only thing workers need to do to grind the entire economy to a halt is put their hands behind their back and stop working. That is it. Workers could crash the entire machine in one moment if they wanted.
Stop calling them “job creators.” They aren’t. They literally require you. But you dont require them. You are wealth creators. And you have the power to take it back whenever you want. You just have to organize.
i *can* believe it needs to be said, but it should still be said with a lot of venom + indignance
…is it crazy I kinda want to see post-Vader Anakin being set up for a blind date?
The whole thing is Han’s idea.
When he first suggests it to Leia, he says he wants to do something nice for the old man, which as cover stories go is frankly terrible. Leia only raises an unimpressed eyebrow. It’s such a bad excuse it doesn’t even deserve a response.
Finally Han gives it up and admits that, okay, fine, he just can’t stand watching Rustbucket get flirted at every time they’re all dragged to some gala or top brass event. Anakin’s clueless act is just embarrassing, and worse, Chewie thinks it’s funny, that traitor.
Leia just goes on looking at him. Luke, though, says, “Uh, Han, I don’t think it’s an act.”
Han stares at him. “Oh come on, kid. No one is that clueless.” Then he stops to consider this, and who he’s talking to. Luke is a very friendly person, and very bad at recognizing the line between friendly and flirting. Half the Rebellion wants to date him and as near as Han can tell, he genuinely has no idea. But still… “Okay, fine, maybe some people are. But your old man was married. He managed to produce the two of you somehow. So he can’t be completely unaware of how these things go.”
Leia snickers at him. Han has the sinking feeling she knows something he doesn’t, but he knows better than to ask when she gets that look in her eye.
So he decides he’s gonna set Anakin up on a date, and Leia can laugh all she wants. He’ll be the one laughing when it works.
His first attempt is a guy named Rav who used to work maintenance in one of the hangars on Home One. These days he’s planetside on Coruscant. Nice guy, a few years older than Anakin, green eyes, a great ass. Han arranges the date at a bar so chill he frankly hates the place himself, but it seems like the kind of scene an older couple might enjoy. (Anakin’s only thirteen years older than you, a little voice in the back of his head says, but he ignores that. It’s too weird to let himself think about.) He tells Anakin that Rav wants to meet up and talk shuttle maintenance, which is such a damn obvious innuendo that he barely manages to restrain a cringe as he says it.
But hey, it works, and Anakin’s off to meet with Rav and Han congratulates himself on a job well done. Leia’s still smirking, but that’s just because she hasn’t yet learned what a great matchmaker he is.
Anakin swings back by Leia’s apartment about three hours later, early enough that Luke’s still there and Han is just a little worried. But it was only a first date, so…that doesn’t have to be bad, does it?
“How’d it go, Rustbucket?” he says.
Anakin shrugs easily and heads for the kitchen to start a pot of tzai. “Not bad. Rav’s got some great ideas for B- and Y-wing class fighters, but his views on TIEs are woefully misinformed.” He grumbles something under his breath. “I understand that there’s a need to bad mouth the enemy fighters in front of the troops, but you don’t need to buy into your own propaganda.”
Han blinks a little. Luke and Leia are snickering behind their hands, and for once, it’s real damn easy to see that they’re twins. He glares at them both.
“Well, all right, but…what about the, uh, social aspect?”
“Huh?” Anakin comes into the living room and sits in the chair across from Han and Leia’s couch. Han can never get over how the guy just…sprawls when he sits. It’s about the least Vader-like mannerism he can think of.
“Did you hit it off?” Han asks.
A brief frown crosses Anakin’s face. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind another chance to correct his opinions on TIEs.” Suddenly he brightens, “I did manage to get him the bartender’s number, though, and I’m pretty sure they’re going out this weekend, so I suppose that’s my good deed for the day.” He says this last very dryly. It’s something his therapist suggested, taking notice of his good deeds and letting himself be proud of them or something like that, and Anakin always snarks about it but Han is pretty sure he’s also following his therapist’s advice, so that’s something.
Anyway, that’s clearly not the important thing here. “Wait,” he sputters. “You…set Rav up on a date…with the bartender?”
Leia looks positively gleeful now and Han is pretty sure she didn’t plan this, but if it turned out she did he wouldn’t even be surprised.
Anakin, though, doesn’t seem to understand what’s got Han in such a fuss. “Sure,” he says with another shrug. “They made a cute couple.”
“I don’t believe this,” Han mutters. What kind of guy plays wingman for his own date? He scrapes a hand over his face and resolves to hold on to whatever dignity he can. “Okay, so Rav’s not your type, huh?”
Anakin only looks at him with an expression of such genuine confusion that Han can’t even convince himself the guy’s pretending. “My type of what?” he says.
A loud snort of laughter escapes Leia, and she tries to play it off as a sneeze. Han isn’t impressed.
“Never mind,” he mutters, and eventually the conversation moves on, but he knows Leia isn’t going to forget about this anytime soon.
*
So okay. Maybe he made a bad call with that first try. Maybe Anakin’s only interested in women? It’s a possibility. Fine. So this time Han will have to find the right woman.
He considers his options carefully. Luke and Leia’s mom was a politician and a founder of the Rebel alliance, smart as hell and also pretty damn stunning. (Leia definitely takes after her mother, he thinks, without the slightest hint of a goofy grin, no matter what Chewie says.) She must have had a terrible sense of humor though. Either that or she put up with Anakin’s awful jokes out of some never before heard of reservoir of patience and goodness. Actually, the way Anakin talks about her, that might be true.
So he’s looking for someone smart, driven, principled, but also somehow willing to endure endless terrible puns. That’s a tall order.
The first person he tries is Mon Mothma. It takes him a couple weeks to work up to asking her, because yeah, there’s nothing about this idea that isn’t awkward. But he’s got to admit, she does fit the profile.
So eventually he gets up the guts to suggest the idea of a date, and Mon Mothma laughs in his face.
Well, Han thinks, muttering to himself and wishing he could erase the last fifteen minutes of his life from existence. In hind sight, that was a pretty stupid idea. He’s never even heard of Mon Mothma going on a date.
“You’ve never heard of Dad going on a date either,” Luke says, smirking. Not for the first time, Han wonders what the hell he was thinking, making Luke his confidant in this. But he needed someone with more insight into Anakin, and he’d be damned if he’d ask Leia.
“That’s different, obviously,” Han says. “He spent twenty years inside a tin can.”
Luke rolls his eyes. “I just don’t understand why you won’t let this go,” he says.
“Because people are always flirting with him!” Han says. “And he’s always pretending not to notice. It’s infuriating.”
“It doesn’t happen that often,” Luke says, and okay, Han thinks, that’s actually true, but still. It happens often enough.
Luke sighs. “If you’re so stuck on that, why don’t you just ask one of the people who’s actually flirted with him?”
Huh. That’s not a bad idea, actually. Why didn’t he think of that.
*
It still takes him a while to plan his strategy, but eventually he manages to set Anakin up on a date with a woman named Meera Yasko. She’s Corellian, he’s pretty sure, but she’s also whip smart and pretty attractive. She’s some kind of attorney at a non-profit or something, and Han’s never been especially keen on people of the legal persuasion, but he figures Anakin might like that.
The old man takes a bit of convincing, but Han is a master of smooth talking (don’t laugh, Leia!) and eventually he gets them set up at a nice swank restaurant and even orders a bottle of wine for the table as a surprise.
*
Anakin comes back from this date a lot more excited, and Han experiences a fleeting moment of smug hope, only to have it crushed beneath Anakin’s heel when it turns out the man is excited for all the wrong reasons.
Apparently, Meera is the chief counsel at a non-profit involved in education for underprivileged youth, whatever the hell that means. They’re an interplanetary organization, too, but it’s not the organization itself that really interests Anakin. Meera has the legal background to cover all of the complicated bits about starting a foundation that Anakin doesn’t really understand (and Han understands even less, if he’s honest), and he thinks they might really be able to get this off the ground.
“Wait,” says Han. “This? What’s this?”
He expects a glare or an eyeroll from Leia and maybe Luke, but instead, they look as curious as he feels.
“Oh,” says Anakin, looking oddly shy. “Right. I haven’t told you yet. I’ve been thinking, well, they’re paying me all this money that I don’t need -” (here he raises a hand to forestall Leia’s usual protest) “- so I want to do something with it. And I thought… Tatooine’s free now, but there’s not exactly a uniform system of education, and many of the communities don’t have necessary supplies or access to training for teachers or -”
“Dad,” says Leia, “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
As it turns out, setting up an entire school system takes a lot of work. Who knew, right? It also takes a pretty shocking amount of money, much more than Anakin’s supposedly extravagant yearly salary. That’s not a problem, though, because Meera helps him set up a fundraising program that’s frankly terrifying in its efficiency.
They spend an awful lot of time together, but it’s mostly in her office or over working lunches. Still, Han holds onto hope for a while. After all, she at least was definitely interested. He knows that. But after several months, he finally has to admit defeat. Meera and Anakin have a pretty great working relationship, and Han would even venture to say they’ve become friends, but he still hasn’t seen any evidence that Anakin ever realized she was interested, and it’s pretty clear now that she’s not thinking about him that way any more.
Still. The Padme Naberrie Educational Foundation basically exists because of Han, so he’s counting this one a win.
*
He keeps trying.
There’s a woman named Jasta who likes to dance and, apparently, has terrible taste in art. Not his best choice, but hey, Anakin managed to set her up with a guy they ran into at the art museum, and he seems happy about that, at least.
There’s Varin, who’s an active duty lieutenant in the Republic navy and likes to spend her leave time volunteering with animals. Anakin introduces her to the recently defected Admiral Piett, and damn if the two of them aren’t getting married about five months later. So that worked out, Han thinks, rolling his eyes. But hey, Anakin got a cat out of the deal, which apparently his therapist thinks is great for him, so…there’s that.
There’s Piett himself, which Han still thinks made sense in theory, because Anakin is clearly fond of the guy. But, looking back, he can admit that it’s pretty likely even Piett didn’t know this one was meant to be a date, and Han suspects Anakin may have agreed to the whole thing as an excuse to set Piett up with Varin.
His last attempt is a Twi’lek woman named Dinsa Atray who’s frankly just a little bit terrifying, but then so is Anakin, so Han figures it’s a good match. They actually start meeting up pretty regularly, and Han is starting to feel pretty smug about it, even though Leia still isn’t convinced of his matchmaking skills. But his illusions are cruelly shattered a few weeks later, when dramatic and disturbingly well-documented accusations of sentient trafficking and money laundering bring about the abrupt end of Senator Orn Free Taa’s political career and, eventually, the beginning of his exciting new prison career.
(“Well this was fun,” Han overhears Dinsa tell Anakin. “Let me know if you ever want to destroy a man’s life and reputation again. I’m always game.” Yeah. Maybe more than a little terrifying.)
*
Three years into his self-appointed quest, and Han’s sitting at the dinner table staring at an invitation to the wedding of Mon Mothma and Meera Yasko. He has to admit, he didn’t see that coming. He wonders a bit sourly if Anakin introduced them, too. Honestly at this point he wouldn’t be surprised. The universe is trolling him, clearly.
“Hey, Rustbucket,” he says, because no one’s ever accused him of quitting while he’s ahead. “Who are you bringing as your plus one?”
Leia eyes him with fond derision, and Han gamely ignores her.
It’s three more months before he finally gives up. But he’s not going to admit that.
“You know,” he tells Leia, “I think I can declare this operation a resounding success.”
“Really,” says Leia with a smirk. “Because from where I’m standing it looks like you set my dad up on a dozen blind dates, and he still doesn’t even realize he’s been on one.”
Han waves a careless hand. “Well, from where I’m standing it looks like Operation Get Anakin Skywalker Some Friends was an unqualified success.”
Leia’s face softens and she leans up to give him a lingering kiss. “That’s sweet, Han,” she says, and when he grimaces she laughs. “But don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else.
Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different.
I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year.
So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them.
I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated.
It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching.
And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition.
Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier.
Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time.
Let’s just pretend that Evo
takes place in the 2010′s, shhhhhh. But also I haven’t paid attention to
comics canon in like thirty years and I’m not about to start now so we’re just
not gonna use that canon at all because…I don’t know things.
Steve’s been out of
the ice for four months. He’s–adjusting. Going for a wander on his
bike helped a little, but now he’s back in Brooklyn, waiting for SHIELD to
decide what to do with him and hating every second of it and more or less on
self-imposed house arrest. He goes for a run every morning, he goes for
groceries once a week out of his suddenly full bank account–back pay for seven
decades racks up quick–and he watches the news between compulsively reading
historical texts and Wikipedia. It’s…
It’s not a great way
to live, to be honest, but what else is he going to do?
Steve is making
himself eggs when the news story comes on CNN. BREAKING NEWS, the screen declares. Steve has the
most basic TV he could find at a Best Buy, courtesy of a helpful young man who
took pity on Steve’s obvious choice paralysis, and it still cost what would
have been a month’s wages for a family of four. It’s bright and
colorful and he gets an apparently infinite number of channels with absolutely
nothing worth watching, and the breaking news banner is an eye-catching red, and Steve tries not to think about it too much.
Steve is still
absently scrambling eggs when the image cuts to a pan of a mansion, red-roofed
and behind a high stone wall with an iron gate, helpfully labeled in white on
the bottom of the screen. Xavier’s Institute for the
Gifted. The name rings a dim bell.
“This footage is coming to us live from Westchester
County,” the anchor says seriously, “where the fourth protest in a week is
threatening to turn violent outside the Xavier Institute, an all-mutant
boarding school. Charles Xavier, a mutant himself, has been an outspoken
proponent of mutant rights since the issue came to light four years ago.
Senator Robert Kelly of New York has put forth a bill this week that would ban
mutants from public schools across the nation–Kelly, of course, ascended from Westchester high school principal and school board member to senator in under a year,
running on a platform of mutant registration. We go now to Sherry Jackson
on site for more detail.”
The split screen
changes again, to a full screen view of a dark-skinned woman standing in front
of a line of protesters pressed up against the iron gate. The dull roar
of a chant–Steve can make it out through the din with his enhanced senses, but
just barely, a ragged Freaks go home–sounds
like an onrushing train behind her.
“Thank you, Frank,”
she says. “As you can see, these protests have grown more aggressive
by the day. A professor here, Doctor Henry McCoy, and one of the
students, a young woman named Jean Grey, are scheduled to speak tomorrow at
Capitol Hill, in defense of allowing mutants to attend public school, and this
protest has been organized by the well-known Human Rights Activist group in an
attempt to prevent them from leaving. Two people have already been taken
to the hospital after scuffles broke out on the fringes.”
“Have we heard
anything from the Institute, Sherry?”
“Professor Xavier and
another resident, Ororo Munroe, have both approached the gate to request that
the protest disperse to let the students through to attend school, as the
younger students attend the local middle and high schools,” Shelly says
neutrally. “Their requests were denied, but–” She holds up a
finger, eyes flicking away from the camera. “One moment,
Frank–really? All right. Come this way,” she orders, and beckons
her cameraman around the crowd until they manage to get a narrow shot of the
gate.
“Sherry?”
“One minute, Frank, I
think we have someone coming outside the Institute–Johnny, get a better shot
of the road, will you?” She nods to someone out of the shot and resumes
her professional stance, off to the side to keep a clear shot of the other side
of the gate.
Steve watches, and his
hand slows to a stop–the figure in the road is stocky and broad, with dark
hair framing a scowl, and for a second, Steve thinks he might be
hallucinating.
Because, see, it’s
been seven decades and Logan never really lived his life like he planned to
live a long one.
Apparently concentrated Kool-Aid can be used as a pretty effective leather dye.
I was making a drink while cutting the snaps off some new straps for my pauldrons and I got curious, so I tried it, thinking, “ok even if this works, it will just wash out.”
Nope.
It took the “dye” (undiluted) in about 3 seconds. After drying for about an hour and a half, it would not wash off in the hottest tap-water. It would not wash out after soaking for 30 minutes. It did not wash out until I BOILED it, and even then, only by a tiny bit and it gave it a weathered look that was kind of cool. Add some waterproofing and I’d wager it would survive even that.
That rich red is only one application too. Plus it smells great, lol.
So there you go, cheap, fruity smelling leather dye in all the colors Kool-Aid has to offer.
WELL THEN!
this may be important to some of my followers *and certainly not just getting reblogged because of my costuming and my boyfriends desire for leather armor*
When I was in middle school we used to use it to dye our hair. Potent stuff.
If you’re dying anything with kool-aid it’s best to use SUGAR-FREE ones otherwise the thing you’re dying might get all sticky
the flavor only packets where you are supposed add sugar are the best. they will dye any natural fiber: leather, wool, cotton, hair, flax, jute, silk and so forth. heat the dye water so it is more potent. let dry then rinse excess out in cold water. there’s a whole system to this.
Oh my god
This will prove very useful for any future cosplays I wanna do.
What in the hell is in it??? Americans drink this stuff???
//There needs to be more diversity in Trills and it got me thinking that black Trill spots might show up almost like vitiligo. I need more of this, okay? This needs to be a thing.
Are you tired? Bored? On enough pain meds to incapitate a horse? May I recommend: The Bear Cams.
The Bear Cams are live steams from Katmai National Park in Alaska. There are 6 livecams, 3 highlight reels, and 1 meditation reel. There are live Q&As with park officials, a very dedicated comment section with people who can seemingly magically identify which bears are which, blogs, weather, etc.
But most importantly: Bears.
Bears!
Baby bear!
Bears!
…Fish? (Sometimes with bears.)
If you’re not interested in bears (who are, at the end of the day, bears and thus prone to eating salmon in gruesome ways and occasionally killing other bears), explore.org has a number of other livecams such as: turkeys, sheep, kittens, dogs, alligators, and jellyfish. But the bears are in peak season right now, and they have a fat bear competition later on in the year, so I highly recommend them.
I especially like the “zen cams” of sunsets or waterfalls and the like, very soothing.
A lot of them seem to be live 24/7, and some of the cams are a little occluded because of the natural life of being placed in a nest/being exposed to the elements (rain!). Sometimes, you might find one of the streams like I did (aurora borealis) and find it to be the opposite of the optimal time of day for that thing to be on stream.
It’s a lot of fun, and it’s got a lot of educational resources on the website as well. Have fun and… Explore!
There's a Mirror on the Wall 