embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

bat-trix:

Bruce Wayne, mostly to annoy Alfred and partly because he genuinely doesn’t believe anyone will care about his antics, claims that his almost ten year disappearance from Gotham was because he was cryptid-hunting across Europe/Asia.

(He was learning to be Batman but whatever.)

“Yetis are real,” he tells Vicki Vale.  “And one day, I will make contact.”

Bruce establishes himself as a cryptid enthusiast pretty quickly and blames most of his suspicious childhood injuries on dumb things he did trying to photograph Bigfoot behind Wayne Manor.

So anyways, Batman shows up and Bruce is a smart guy so he knows that Batman being partially myth and urban legend is going to help his crusade against darkness.  But he’s also smart enough to know that people are going to start getting suspicious if Batman shows up at the same place Bruce Wayne is and Bruce Wayne constantly denies his existence.

He sets his plan into motion at a bank robbery he happens to be involved in.  After sending Alfred off with his costume, he slips back into the bank in time to be there when the police arrive so that he can give his statement.

Bruce makes sure to play it up: his eyes dart around nervously, his voice pitched with excitement, and asserting at the end of his statement that, “I cannot be sure, but I am pretty positive that we were saved by a large, bat-like creature.”

The officers are like ‘yeah ok whatever man’ because Bruce Wayne once fell off of a water-tower because he thought he saw Mothman flying in the night sky, but some of the other witnesses describe seeing a weird bat-thing too so really who knows at this point.

Whenever Bruce Wayne appears publicly somewhere the Batman saves the day, he always makes sure to give a statement about Gotham’s new cryptid and how he intends to be the first on actually catching it in the wild.

“This… Bat-man creature seems to have a moral code,” he tells Vicki Vale.  “If I could just,” he clenches his fist, gazing wistfully out onto the street.  “Meet him…..”

This also allows for him to ply James Gordon for information without arousing suspicion.  And because Gordon has a soft-spot for the little orphan he comforted during his worst night, he usually is willing to give Bruce a little bit of info on cases that the Batman has been working on.

Bruce: Batman is real, don’t lie to me.

Gordon: I can neither confirm nor deny those rumors. *gives Bruce a knowing smile*

Bruce: I heard that he tore through Falcone’s racketeering club the other night!

Gordon: Well…. *glances around* We did get a call from the docks the other night.  SOMEONE tied up most of the gang and left them for us to find…

Bruce: Most of the gang?

Gordon: We think five of them are still on the run.

Bruce: Hmmm……

And of course, Batman does eventually become less of an urban legend and more of a known entity. 

Bruce, busting down the doors of GCPD: BATMAN IS REAL!!!!!!!!!

Gordon: *puts head in hands, sighs*

And like maybe one time Oprah or someone confronts Bruce like “Hey people are saying that maybe YOU might be Batman” and Bruce just like… fucking loses it on live TV and is alternately crying and talking about how Batman is REAL and he pulled Bruce out of a VERY DIFFICULT TIME and how without Batman Bruce would be LOST and if people want to ruin the SANCTITY of that BOND well FINE.

And then like… Batman Incorporated becomes a thing and Bruce is all teary-eyed and smiley doing news conferences and showing off the blurry picture of him shaking (Dick)Bats’s hand and talking about how “I just always believed and I knew this story would have a happy ending and when I clutched his talon in my hand I knew that I was home.”

Bruce similarly becomes famous for insisting the Superman is a fraud put on by the government.

Tags:

#Batman #cryptids #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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densewentz:

Baby photos

evidently i don’t understand the phrase ‘quick sketch’ but i will never turn down a chance to good-naturedly shame 1 (one) immortal ginger (feat. ultimate dad carlisle, and bella ‘extremely psyched to have this future blackmail material lying around’ swan)

thank you for the ask!

assorted twilight trash (6/?)

Tags:

#art #fanart #comics #Twilight #embarrassment squick? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”like I don’t have more copies”)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

whenever I’m faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem I’m always looking for the clever hack that can resolve it by a neat use of lateral thinking such that the solution is ingenious and yet much simpler than you would expect, and I don’t know where I picked up this habit because it has literally never worked, the solution always ends up being do a shit-ton of work and then do a shit-ton more work and then spend years polishing the mess until it doesn’t matter any more.

 

etiragram:

I don’t know where I picked up this habit 

I know where I have: from preparing for math tests and programming interviews!

Huh, I have the *opposite* problem. I keep doing things in obvious-but-tedious ways and then later finding out that there was a clever way that would have solved it in thirty seconds. I’ve started deliberately trying to keep in mind “there might be an easier way of doing this, look around for one first before resorting to the long way”.

Hmm. Maybe this is actually a slightly different thing: you guys are over-applying *lateral thinking*, while I am under-applying *automation*.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #embarrassment squick? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #proud citizen of The Future #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is where this usually tends to come up

Anonymous asked: i remember seeing this video of this girl blasting her bf with toilet paper (by using a blowdryer) and stealing the controller that her bf was just using and donna would def do that to the doctor (and mayhe hijack the tardis) , especially even when he goes all ‘i am god’. hsuznsixke what other extremely dumb but extremely fun pranks/shit would they do to each other??

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

i-run-a-trash-blog:

oh god this ask is from forever ago but YEAH she would. I’m the worst at coming up with pranks but here’s a select few that I think Donna would do to Ten:

– replace his shampoo with dye depositing shampoo and it just. Doesn’t do anything. Maybe he didn’t use it? But he does. Repeatly. Ni change. After like a week of this she tries to lean casually on a wall and  says, “so, uhh, doctor? Ever consider dyeing your hair?” and he’s like “oh i WISH i would love to but my hair doesn’t dye.” and she’s like..”Oh?” and he’s like “yeah well technically it isn’t hair it’s a bunch of very small antennae” and she genuinely does not know if he’s fucking with her until the metacrisis happens

-did that thing where you swap out the creme in oreos with toothpaste and served them to him and he made absolutely no indication of noticing. he ate all of them. what is wrong with him.

-Ten DEFINITELY walked in to Donna having converted the entire console room into a ball pit. It hardly counts as a prank though because this is the best day of his goddamn life. He does not know where the plastic balls came from but he’s having a blast

-Ten doesn’t really pull pranks as much as he just. Completely fuckin bullshits time lord culture half the time. Sometimes he’s honest and sometimes he’s just like “ i still miss the red skies reflecting off of the most beautiful place, Weed City”

-”did you know the most sacred number in all of time lord history is four thousand, two hundred and six point nine?” “No it fucking isn’t” *admonishingly* “Donna” “ Your sacred number is not fuckin 42069″

-One time Ten is like “smack cam!” and she gets Ready to throw down but he just kisses her on the forehead and is like “haha punk’d!”

– Conversely Donna learns about the chameleon arch and is like “oh i can mine this “fucking with the doctor” potential for MONTHS” she goes all out. She learns at least a little bit of circulean gallifreyian so she can comment on it. she picks up an old fobwatch and will fiddle with it in front of him without ever opening or commenting on it. She gets real vague about her childhood. It’s hilarious. 

Tags:

#Doctor Who #Donna Noble #headcanons #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moonlit-tulip:

There’s this failure mode that my dreams occasionally fall into.

A dream starts out as an ordinary interesting dream wherein things are happening. At some point, something forces me half-awake; the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night, but it’s occasionally prompted by other things too. Instead of waking up the rest of the way, though, I keep on dreaming while half-awake, just with much less brainpower behind the dream’s creative processes.

At that point, a handful of major ideas and images from the dream up to that point get tossed together and looped: instead of things happening, I just get repeated scenes of those same few ideas and images, over and over with no interesting variation whatsoever. Eventually, subjectively after a pretty long time (but not necessarily really after so long, since that sort of half-awake state massively skews my perception of time), the experience becomes sufficiently unpleasantly boring that I muster the motivation to force myself more fully awake in order to avoid continuing to experience it, at which point it ends (as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep too soon afterwards, in which case it sometimes resumes).

Is this a thing that other people have any experience with? I don’t recall having ever heard someone else describe anything along these lines, but it’s an interesting (if somewhat unpleasant) brain-state that I’d be curious to learn about others’ experiences with if they do exist.

>>the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night<<

These two culprits have different results for me, neither of which are your result.

Half-awake and *not* feverish: pretty much like a normal dream except also aware of [the external-world senses that don’t require moving] (proprioception and sound definitely work, smell probably *would* work but I don’t think I’ve been in a position to try it). Lucid, because the above is an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming. *Not* sleep-paralysed, but if you move the dream ends. (This often leads to absent-mindedly adjusting position and then going “wait, no, dammit, I wanted to see what happens next”. On the bright side, if I *want* it to end I can easily arrange that.)

Half-awake and feverish: only sometimes lucid, since even an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming is not always enough when you’re delirious. Tossing and turning is not enough to end it, and even getting up to go to the bathroom will often just put it on hold. Has been known to cause voices instead of full worlds [link].

Tags:

#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #embarrassment squick? #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

2357911131719:

slatestarscratchpad:

cryptovexillologist:

Me: It took me years to realize that “Discipline and Punish” Foucault and “giant pendulum” Foucault were different people

Friend, with some ha-ha-but-kinda-serious horror and exasperation: Wait, there are TWO Foucaults?

This is me, except with “fast Fourier transform” Fourier and “utopian socialism” Fourier.

It would be even fourier if there were four of them, but I guess they are not quite that foury.

According to Wikipedia, there’s also “Catholic Saint” Fourier, but no fourth Fourier.  Which is fitting, as though they’re Fourier, they’re not the Fouriest.

Tags:

#puns #names #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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prokopetz:

Bad: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, but nobody picks up on it for various implausible reasons.

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

 

yudkowsky:

“Literally everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose,” said the woman sitting across from me in our candlelit dinner. “The superheroes know it. The villains know it. The guy on the street knows it. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon know it. The Enquirer doesn’t break the mask code when they print your picture because they don’t even bother mentioning who you are. If I need to have conversations with you pretending not to know that Bruce is the ‘Goose, we’re going to be the only two people on the planet pretending that.”

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything – never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

Keep reading

 

mirasorastone:

I would read an entire novel series about this concept. 

 

yudkowsky:

To her dying day, reporter Terri Green would remember the look on Bruce Kent’s face as the assassin stepped out of the crowd, holding the gun.

Keep reading

 

yudkowsky:

(5000 words.  This story takes place chronologically before the first two Bruce Kent fics, but should be read afterwards.)

There was no warning. One moment I was waiting in line at the Gothic Cityville branch of the First Financial Bank to get a cashier’s check made out, trying to ignore the whispers coming from before me and behind me. Bruce Kent is very rigorous about pretending to not be the Masculine Mongoose, as everyone knows by now. Bruce Kent acts uncomfortable around people who whisper when they recognize him, just like he would if he was a normal human being who’d gotten mistaken for the Mongoose somehow. Keeping up the act at all times, yeah, that’s me all right.

The next moment, the glassed front door of the bank shattered into pieces around a woman stomping through in giant flaming power armor.  She was followed shortly after by ten other goons in smaller suits of flaming power armor.  When I say ‘flaming’ I don’t mean that it was decorated in red and orange, I mean that the powered suits were emitting gouts of fire from built-in spouts.

Professor Pyrofessor had somehow, God help her and both of us, managed to pick that exact moment to rob this particular bank branch.

Keep reading

Tags:

#storytime #oh look an update #embarrassment squick? #superheroes #death tw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

april:

one time a cold caller tried to open with “we are calling about your recent car accident” and i asked him what a car was and he hung up

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

m4ge:

a quick step by step guide on what to do if you come back to your apartment and find yourself locked out because your front door is frozen shut

  1. kick the bottom of the door for 10 minutes
  2. text your landlord
  3. remember your landlord is on vacation and also in her mid 50′s so it takes about 36 hours to receive a response
  4. briefly wonder why the fuck you moved the canada
  5. remember that college tuition is significantly cheaper here than in the united states 
  6. look up and notice your cat is at the window, staring at you. he paws at the window lightly and meows. it’s devastating. his eyes are so big and imploring. decide that you have to get inside your apartment at all costs. not even god himself can stop you from feeding your cat his chicken wet food dinner. frida kahlo herself could descend from the heavens and ask “hey you wanna bang?” and you’d say “hell yeah but first let me open this door so i can feed my cat his dinner”
  7. remember there is a starbucks 3 blocks down the street from you
  8. enter. the barista gives you a weird look for entering a starbucks at 7pm on a tuesday
  9. order a venti cup of hot water. you order in french because the barista just said “bonjour” instead of “bonjour, hi.” you have a strong american accent. you hit the r in merci a little too hard to compensate. you embarrass yourself.
  10. exit the starbucks clutching the massive cup of hot water in your hands. it’s burning your fingers.
  11. return. methodically pour the starbucks cup of water all over the the door frame. it begins moving a little but still wont open
  12. back up
  13. ensure your doc martens are properly gripping the sheet of ice covering the ground. many people have told you to stop wearing doc martens in the winter, despite your protests that theyre actually the ideal winter boot. also, you’re a lesbian and punk’s not dead
  14. release a pterodactyl screech and sprint towards the door, slamming the full force of your pathetically tiny 5′2″ 110lb body into it
  15. you dont know any of your neighbors so you dont care about maintaining your pride anyways
  16. the door swings open
  17. run up the stairs
  18. open the actual door to your apartment and yell MOMMY’S HOME MY LITTLE BITCHASS BABY BOY DONT WORRY at your cat
  19. cat flings his body to the ground and starts purring like he does every time you come home
  20. write tumblr post

Tags:

#storytime #our home and cherished land #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick? #weight cw? #and this one isn’t *quite* right but close enough that I’m going to include it: #fun with loopholes

missroxyspamcake asked: Glumshoe, I’ve had an idea about Brad Wayne for while now, and that is that he is unlikely to suspect the Bat Fam of being superheroes. But he’s probably more likely to suspect that ALFRED is up to something, if only that Alfred is lazier than he looks (he often suddenly disappears when Bruce does, probably for a smoke break, Brad tells himself). The others are used to having a butler around by now, and Alfred is very careful of course. 1/2

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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nentuaby:

glumshoe:

2/2 But Brad probably asks a lot of questions initially to try to get to know Alfred, like: “How do you stay in shape? You’re pretty spry for an old dude.” Let’s assume Alfred is ex military in this version, so that’s his explanation, and Brad accepts it. Until Brad sees a misplaced batarang or tool from a fight he completely missed, and all the pieces fall into place. He can’t stay quiet. “Guys, don’t freak out, but… I think Alfred might be Batman.” Bruce nearly chokes on his coffee.

Oh I LOVE the idea that Brad is suspicious of Alfred.

Concept: one of the inspirations for Batman is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1920 play The Bat. It features a masked bat-themed criminal. Her work has remained popular in Gotham because it fits the noir aesthetic. Her novel The Door is also the origin of the “the butler did it” trope. 

Maybe Brad has never met an actual honest-to-god butler before and his only exposure to them has been through pop culture, so he just kind of assumes Alfred is quietly scheming and hiding a dark secret.

That’s way smarter than my Brad & Alfred headcanon:

Alfred calls Brad ‘Master Bradley’. Brad keeps trying to get him to stop, as much because he’s literally got “Brad” on his birth certificate as because of discomfort with the form of address; but Alfred cannot bring himself to address a living human being as Brad.

Tags:

#Batman #fanfic #headcanons #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update