Zuko, finally finding his five year old adopted daughter after hours of searching: Sokka, why is Korra on top of the fridge
Sokka: she’s in time out
Zuko: why
Sokka: I just remembered the time Aang woke me up before sunrise and then wouldn’t let me go back to sleep and he may be our daughter now but that doesn’t mean he can get off the hook for his crimes
that theory that the Arkenstone is a Silmaril…it’s doubly implausible, but imagine if nobody knew. If the dwarves were guarded enough of their greatest treasure that…you wouldn’t even need to hide it from that many people, honestly. Mostly a few elves, and all wizards.
and then Bilbo sidles up to Gandalf like, “Thorin and all are holed up in the Mountain, but I think they’re being nuts, so I…kind of stole the Arkenstone, I think.” And (it’s been thousands of years since the light of the trees was doused save for the precious brilliance locked away in Feanor’s gems, since oaths and blood and war that raged until the skies cracked and the earth shattered, and the little people of the Shire have no memory of it at all) he pulls out a fucking Silmaril.
Gandalf: *hurriedly glances at Thranduil. the king of Mirkwood’s eyes shine with curiosity and greed, but not recognition, nor the terrible lust that overtook Feanor and his sons. right, right, he was never in Thingol’s court while the jewel that Luthien and Beren took was there. we’re good. we’re good for now*
Gandalf: That’s, uh, nice, Bilbo. Put it away, would you?
Gandalf, telepathically(?): EMERGENCY RINGBEARERS ONLY CONFAB NOW
Gandalf: [mental image of a goddam Silmaril in hobbit hands, labelled “thisfuckingrockagain.jpg”]
Galadriel, who watched 95% of her family slaughter everyone within 100 miles for several thousand years over these things, including each other and themselves: no.
Elrond, who was very nearly one of those people slaughtered, and did watch most of his town be killed before he and his twin were kidnapped for a while: Absolutely Fucking Not.
Gandalf: Apparently fucking yes. The legendary Arkenstone-
Galadriel: You’ve got to be kidding me.
Elrond: Thorin Oakenshield has a Silmaril right now?
On a small farm outside of a small town in Canada, a horde of four-hundred thirteenth-century Mongol soldiers on horseback rode out through a hole in time and space.
One of them had a thick leather glove, on which a golden eagle perched. Its handler reached up, slipped the little hood off the eagle’s head, and flicked his wrist. It took off, caught a thermal, soared in a lazy arc, dove, spread its talons forward, and then hit a window with a thunk.
Daniel DiSebastian, who was fifteen and on the other side of the window, stared. The eagle had managed to sink its talons into the mesh of the window screen before it stunned itself. It was hanging upside down. Over it, Dan saw a horde of four-hundred thirteenth-century Mongol soldiers standing in formation in his neighbour’s field.
He stared for a moment longer. Curiosity won over self-preservation, and he walked out onto the porch of the house for a better view.
There was a ripping noise, the sound of panicked flapping, and something huge and tawny swooped low over Dan’s head. He ducked and only just managed to see the golden eagle fly in a wide circle back towards the horde of waiting soldiers. He heard a distant shout. Then two-hundred-and-forty of the soldiers drew their bows and fired into the air, creating a screaming cloud of arrows that blotted out the sun before raining down in a lethal shower.
Eighty-seven of these arrows hit Dan.
Dan died instantly.
He got better. When he did, the horde was already gone.
*
Eleven months later, Dan was mostly sure that whatever had happened that day eleven months ago had not, in fact, happened.
He was very happy to accept that it hadn’t happened until he walked into a Tim Hortons for a coffee and a donut and walked out to find a golden eagle perched on the sign for the drive-through.
Dan blinked. The eagle blinked. It took off with a heavy thump of wings, and Dan noticed the four-hundred thirteenth-century Mongol soldiers on horseback in the parking lot.
There was a whistling noise. Dan was hit by one-hundred-and-seventy-nine-arrows.
Dan died instantly.
He got better. The horde was gone again. One of them had stolen his donut.
*
It was already dark when Dan and Cameron Burnaby walked out of the theatre.
“God, what a bad movie,” she laughed. Her breath came out in puffs of vapour in the November air.
“Like not even so bad it’s good,” Dan said. “It’s so bad it goes all around the world and crosses back into bad.”
“It’s supposed to be the last one, right?”
“That’s what I heard?”
Another puff of laughter. “Hope,” Cameron Burnaby said, grinning. “That’s what you hope.”
A huge bird took off from the sign over the theatre. Cameron Burnaby oohed at the sight and watched as it flew away.
Dan looked at her. This was nice. It was slow, but it was nice. It was nevertheless slightly spoiled by the little anxious voice that banged around in his hindbrain. It had been a year since his last attack. It was bound to happen eventually, and he had no idea how to bring it up in conversation. ‘So, I see you like the Mongolian beef and broccoli. Speaking of Mongolia, have I ever told you that I’ve been killed by Mongols four times?’
He had to tell her. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe they were done. It had been a whole year. Maybe killing him four times was enough for them. Surely killing somebody once was enough for most people, right?
Cameron Burnaby turned back at him and grinned. “So!” she said. “Was it the worst horror movie you’ve ever seen?”
He shook himself out of a vision of archers on horseback. “Nope, not even,” he said, walking forward again. “There was this one movie that came out last year. It’s about a guy who kidnaps tourists and turns them into walruses, it’s amazingly—”
Dan slipped on the ice. His leg flew up from underneath him. He felt sudden weightlessness and there was a crack as he landed on the sidewalk.
Everything hurt. Stars flashed across his vision. They faded to reveal the face of Cameron Burnaby, mittens clasped over her mouth. “Are you okay?” she asked.
No, Dan thought. “Yep,” Dan groaned. He pulled himself up onto his elbows. “Trust me, I’ve had worse.”
Cameron Burnaby offered him a hand. He took it, she pulled him up to his feet, and the two were suddenly standing much closer than he had expected.
Dan swallowed. He was suddenly aware of a thousand tiny details. The snowflakes that hung in her hair. The freckles on her nose. The shape of her lips. The terror in her eyes which were looking at something just over and past his shoulder.
He was briefly aware of seventeen arrows hitting the back of his skull.
Dan died instantly.
He got better. Cameron Burnaby was retching in the snow.
“What the fuck was that?!” she finally said, wiping the corner of her mouth with a mitten.
Dan considered a variety of responses. He decided that they all sounded stupid. He settled for the only one he knew was accurate. “A horde of four-hundred thirteenth-century Mongol soldiers,” he sighed.
“They – you—” She gestured wildly. “Your face.”
Dan winced and eased himself onto the sidewalk. “I didn’t want you to see that,” he said.
There was a pause. “Has this happened before?” Cameron Burnaby asked.
Dan thought. “Yeah,” he said. “Five times, counting this one.”
“So this is just a thing that happens.”
“It – yeah,” he said. “I think so. It is.”
Cameron Burnaby nodded. “Oh. Okay.”
Another pause. A car drove past. Cameron Burnaby stood up. “I’m going to go.”
Dan nodded. “Right,” he said. “Some other time?”
There was no answer. Dan closed his eyes. He laid down on the sidewalk and listened to the crunch of snow under boots until they died away. Snowflakes landed on his face, tiny pinpricks of cold which stung and faded almost instantly as they melted.
There was a thump. Dan opened his eyes and looked over. There was a golden eagle standing there, twisting its head to glare at Dan.
Dan glared back. “I hate you,” he said. “I really, deeply hate you.”
The eagle, apparently satisfied with the answer, took off.
Another two-hundred-and-forty arrows sprouted from the sky.
On China’s transition from disdaining the English language to considering it very important for individual success:
“English fever” settled on waiters, CEOs, and professors, and elevated the language into a defining measure of life’s potential—a force strong enough to transform your résumé, help attract a spouse, or vault you out of a village. Men and women on Gong’s dating site often included their English proficiency in descriptions of themselves, alongside mention of cars and houses. Every college freshman had to meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it was the only foreign language tested. In a novel called English, the author, Wang Gang, a teacher in a rural school, says, “If I rearranged the words in the [English] dictionary, the entire world would open up before me.”
This was a sharp reversal from the past. In nineteenth-century China, English was held in contempt as the language of the middlemen who dealt with foreign traders. “These men are generally frivolous rascals and loafers in the cities and are despised in their villages and communities,” the reformist scholar Feng Guifen wrote in 1861. But Feng knew that China needed English for diplomatic purposes, and he called for the creation of special language schools. “There are many brilliant people in China; there must be some who can learn from the barbarians and surpass them,” he wrote. Mao favored Russian for the country, and he expelled so many English teachers that, by the sixties, China had fewer than a thousand high school English teachers nationwide. After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold. Eighty-two percent of those polled in 2008 thought it was vital to learn English. (In America, 11 percent thought it was vital to learn Chinese.) By 2008 an estimated 200 million to 350 million Chinese were studying English.
On Li Yang, a celebrity English teacher
Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, selected by Beijing hospitals to work at the following summer’s Olympic Games. But like millions of English learners in China, they had almost no confidence speaking the language that they had spent years studying by textbook. Li had made his name with an ESL technique that a Hong Kong newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argued, was the way to unleash what he called the “international muscles.” Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.
One by one, the doctors tried it out. A woman in stylish black glasses said, “I would like to take your temperature.” Li gave a theatrical shake of his head and made her do it again. Her cheeks flushed, and in a sudden burst, she bellowed, “I would like to take your temperature!” Then came a thickset man in a military uniform who needed no encouragement—“I would like to take your temperature!”—followed by a tiny woman, who let out a paint-peeling scream. Around the room we went, each voice a bit more confident than the one before. I wondered how a patient might react, but before I could ask, Li was out the door, and on to another group in the adjoining classroom.
…
He favored flamboyantly patriotic slogans such as “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!” On his website, he declared, “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful! What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerated, the happier they are!”
Tags:
#language #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”I wondered how a patient might react”) #China #interesting #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
justin: boobobubobuboo its a haunted doll watch this is nikola she’s a haunted doll
nikola: i sure am : )
*incomprehensible scream*
J: “Okay, so we’ve got another Yahoo from- BOOP BOO-BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP BOO-BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP BOO-BOOP BOOP”
G: “Oh, Christ.”
T: “Yeah!”
J: That’s right, it’s a Haunted Doll Watch; I know I’ve been talking about retiring this bit forever but ladies and gentlemen-”
G: “Wait-”
J: “-even though it’s in its sunset years, Haunted Doll Watch is-”
T: “No, Justin, that’s another-”
G: “That’s another bi-”
J: “-Haunted Doll Watch is- it’s always time for- see, haunted dolls never go out of style-”
G: “Were they in style?”
J: “-extremely fashionable, haunted dolls, there’s clearly a market- this one comes to us from an overseas seller, the listing is in- jolly old Brrrrritish Pounds-”
T: “Justin, I love you, but that was the worst-”
G: “-the best British accent anyone has ever done including all actual British people, can we please move on to the doll-”
J: “-seller ‘TMI Artifact Storage’ appears to be some sort of haunted artifact wholesaler, y’know, one of those places that acts like they just happen to come across so many haunted artifacts that they just need to-”
T: “They just need to get rid of ‘em all!”
G: “For many, many dollars, get rid of these real haunted items. Please. I need these gone but also I have a wife and kids who are starving-”
T: “It’s a starvation curse from all these haunted artifacts-”
J: “So- no, see, they’re selling these things on behalf of other people, is the idea, they- it’s more of a resale shop, I guess, they come with these statements from-”
G: “So- wait. There’s a store, where you can go, if you have a haunted doll-”
J: “A haunted anything, the next item in the lot is a haunted calliope-”
T: “I thought it was pronounced ‘cal-ee-OH-pee’.”
J: “This isn’t Haunted Calliope Watch, Trav, I’m trying to get to the-”
G: “-you can go to this store if you have a haunted ass, and you can sell your haunted ass to the store and now it’s not your problem-”
J: “Yes, I believe that to be the case.”
T: “Oh, ‘Doctor, my ass is haunted!’ ‘Well, I know just the place to sell your ass’-”
G: “Okay, say a haunted toilet brush-”
J: “Haunted Doll Watch, please let me get on with the listing. Statement comes from Leanne Denikin, regarding an antique calliope organ she possessed briefly in August 2004.”
G: “Juice, you just said it’s not-”
J: “Okay okay okay. Strange music, yada yada yada, creepy clown, okay, something something, here’s the doll… sending you a picture of the doll…”
G: “Oh, God.”
T: “Where’s its mouth?”
J: “This haunted doll is named Josh, and-”
G: “Josh?!?”
T: [hysterical wheezing]
G: “Your fucking haunted-ass doll that you’re selling on eBay to spook people out is named-”
J: “Yes, his name is Josh! Josh is a tormented spirit of the seller’s ex-boyfriend, who was brutally murdered in an unsolved-”
T: [still wheezing] “Please, he’s-”
G: “You’re SELLING your BOYFRIEND’S GHOST on eBAY?!”
J: “No, TMI is selling-”
G: “Your boyfriend was brutally murdered and you sold the doll containing his immortal soul to a resale shop and then they SOLD IT ON eBAY?!”
T: “No, it’s a scam, see? That’s the beauty of it! You disrespect his ghost like that, what’s he gonna do? He’s gonna come back and haunt you!”
J: “Come back and-”
T: “You sell the doll, it comes back to exact vengeance, you sell the doll again- it’s infinite free money!”
G: “Infinite free money that will eventually get angry enough to succeed at killing you.”
J: “Says ‘Josh is a nervous spirit who will-”
T: “The Prestige, Griffin! But- hey- I’ve got an idea right here.”
G: “Trav, tell me you’re not gonna-”
T: “If it’s trapped on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean-”
G: “Please don’t-”
J: “If it’s trapped on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean then what?!”
T: “Buy It Now, two hundred and three BrrrrrrRRRRrrrRRRRRrrrrRRrrrritish pounds-”
J: “Oh my god.”
G: “You bought this lady’s boyfriend off eBay?!”
J: “That’s not the problem-”
G: “Trav, we can’t just do this for every haunted doll-”
J: “-the problem is two hundred pounds is like, four hundred dollars US-”
T: “Not since Brexit it ain’t! That was 265.41 plus shipping!”
G: “Okay, so imagine the extra shipping costs when the package escapes to hunt down his human trafficking ex-girlfriend-”
T: “Doll trafficking. Ghost trafficking. We’ve been over this, it’s not-”
G: “Yeah, you’re going to die-”
J: “Okay, we’ll get back to this Haunted Doll Watch when Travis ends up with his jaw mysteriously torn off or something- Griffin, can we please get a Yahoo?”
G: “Thank you. This one was sent in by Level 9000 Ya-drew Druid Drew Davenport, it’s from Ya-drew Answers user MBlackwood, asking… ‘coworker keeps recording all our conversations, how do i make him stop’…”
Tags:
#Magnus Archives #My Brother My Brother and Me #fanfic #ghost #crossovers #I’m not actually in either of these fandoms but #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw?
Brinens and Things 