Do You Think The Rest Of The Marauders Made Sirius Put A Sickle Into A Jar Every Time One Of Them Said ‘werewolf’

Prince Rupert’s Drop

Did you guys ever hear about Prince Rupert’s Drop? The British Royal Society was really interested in these things back in the 1600s.

It’s basically a long, thin, practically snaky bit of glass that you get when you drop some molten glass into water. It solidifies into a shape like this:

The interesting and weird thing is, you can’t really break the bulb part. You can take a hammer to it but it won’t break. But the long tail is fragile and easily broken. And if you break any part of this thing, it explodes. Really, it just blows up into a million tiny little shards.

With modern high-speed cameras, they’ve managed to measure the speed of the fracture at slightly faster than one mile per second.

The reason why it breaks like this is because, when the molten glass rapidly cools, the surface hardens right up, but the inside still stays hot for a while. As the inside cools, it pulls in on itself really hard in all directions, leaving the entire drop in a constant state of high tension. When it’s entirely cooled, it only takes a tiny fracture to release that chain reaction of released tension that breaks all of it almost at once. 

i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream

There’s no such thing as “pepperoni” in Italy, even though it is a corruption of the Italian word “peperoni” (sweet peppers). The most similar Italian food is “salame piccante” (spicy salami).

where are those startups that are disrupting the glasses industry

i walk into lab

hands: bare 

hair: down 

toes: out

the historical vlad dracula is overrated, his brother radu was awesome

nicknamed ‘the handsome’

died before the age of 40 but compensated by living a full and interesting life that did not consist of fruitless guerrilla warfare interrupted by long boring spells in the slammer

literally the sultan’s favorite boyfriend

you think i’m kidding but i’m not fucking kidding

so his dad who was ruler of wallachia (aka southern romania more or less) sent radu and vlad to the ottoman court as political hostages when they were kids and they grew up there along with the future mehmet the fucking conqueror

you know. the dude who conquered constantinople in 1453, brought an end to the eastern roman empire etc etc

that dude

turns out mehmet had a ridiculous crush on radu

so one day mehmet tried to get handsy and radu thought to himself, what should i do in my precarious position as political prisoner from a small-fry principality on the fringes of the empire when the heir to the ottoman throne is putting the moves on me?

I KNOW I’LL STAB HIM IN THE LEG

so he did. he did that

and then he went and climbed a tree and refused to come down until mehmet got patched up and probably limped over all c’mon baby don’t be like that

like i bet stabbing the sultan got you a one-on-one appointment with the royal executioner. except not for radu because he was that much of a badass

meanwhile vlad was probably planning to LISTEN WHO FUCKING CARES

anyway

so radu eventually of his own volition became mehmet the conqueror’s boyfriend and they went on many exciting adventures together

like the siege of constantinople

where was vlad at the time? being kicked out of his own country because his standard approach to politics was ‘devise new and exciting ways to torture and kill people slowly’. despite what certain history books will have you think he was super unpopular with… everyone basically.

radu was highly educated and spoke multiple languages and was all about turkish and persian literature. also possibly converted to islam though sources tend to contradict eachother on that

by the time radu was 22 mehmet gave him a command and started sending him places

like wallachia to overthrow his brother who was being politically inconvenient

SO MUCH GAME OF THRONES-GRADE BACKSTABBY DRAMA HAPPENED YOU HAVE NO IDEA

also radu married a serbian (or possibly albanian) princess named maria despina and had one daughter

died suddenly in his late 30s, which is code for ‘probably poisoned’

and in conclusion: a genuinely interesting historical figure you don’t hear enough about because his brother was a vampire or something

also you know what

you know what really fucking pisses me off about the whole “GASP ADULTS WRITING ABOUT KIDS” discourse

you know what really fucking pisses me off?

hi. i grew up in the bible belt of the midwest. as a young queer slowly coming to terms with being Super Not Straight, I grew up a town where there was one grocery store and eleven churches. on nice sunny days, before real summer heat set in, the chances of well-dressed smiling proselytizing boys with free copies of their holy books showing up at your door approached 100 percent. in my high school, there were to my knowledge about four queer kids, myself included in that number, and one of them was terrified to come out or even be seen with other boys because he grew up in the kind of household where you would absofuckinglutely be thrown out for being gay.

i did not have a queer childhood. this was just as the proliferation of the internet was starting to become a thing, but your best bet to get on a computer would be to go to the local library. the librarian, btw, was a devout christian and was part of the baptist church across the street. so the idea of using free resources to reach out or research what the fuck it meant to be queer was literally not an option.

i did not get queer literature. i did not get queer media. i subsisted on fandom, because it was the only type of content i knew that talked about being queer, that was positive about it, and was often created by adults who would point you to resources to help. this was before scarleteen and teen vogue and other sites.

fandom was my queer community, because i had zero alternatives. society gave me no alternatives.

and now I am looking at all these fearmongering puritanical moralizing shitheels go on and on about how any adult who writes about younger people is a predatory pedo

I did not get a fucking queer childhood. And if I want to sit down and write or read a story about queer teens who get a better shot, who do find love and feel comfortable experimenting with their sexuality instead of treating it like a potential death sentence,

you do not get to sit there and tell me what a fucking terrible human I am. I was a fucking kid too, and these are my stories too. they, in fact, are the stories fucking owed to me by a world that taught me to be afraid. and that part of my history as a human did not get erased when i passed some arbitrary milestone of time.

Society already stole the upbringing I should have had and locked me in a fucking closet until i was in my mid 20s, and you puritanical myopic shits have the fucking audacity to say me reaching back to try and remember something better makes me a pedophile, you dogwhistling dumbfucks.

you are literally on the same side as the people who made my best friend afraid his dad would beat him to death for coming out. that is where you stand. you use the same tactics and the same scripts. “oh if you are interested in these things…… that means you’re Wrong and will probably go to Hell :( why do you want to be such a bad person when you can be Straight And Pure?”

fuck off

Another one in the Cocktail Dresses 2017 revision series!

2 more to go!!

My foster kitten

Reblog to give the person you reblogged it from motivation to work on their fics.