There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
“Ma’am, I really must insist that you
pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”
“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”
“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.
“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.
Worth it.
—
“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”
I yawn. “Didn’t
ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all
transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little
ol’ me.
—
“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”
Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”
The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”
“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”
“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.
So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.
“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”
“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”
“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
—
After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.
They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.
“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”
—
So of course they try assassins next.
Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.
So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.
Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.
The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.
—
Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.
Good.
“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”
I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”
He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”
“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”
He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.
“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”
I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”
I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.
—
And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.
Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.
But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.
Op is denying us the fucking golden replies to this tweet omg
When i had breast reduction surgery, i got into the OR and got put on this table that looked like a flat crucifix (arms out so they could get to the girls), and i said ‘god, don’t nail me down’
they put the mask on my face and the nurse said ‘no jesus treatment today’
and the last thing i said to her was ‘jesus with some big ass titties’ and then passed out.
Good for this person. This is exactly what you do. Screw the job.
I had a job that made me work an all nighter, 30 hours straight, over Thanksgiving. I resigned that Monday and it was one of the most satisfying decisions I’ve ever made.
Please pay attention to all the manipulation tactics this boss uses, because they’re pulling out every trick in the book.
“I’m not your boss, I’m your friend”
“Other people will be hurt by this and it’s your fault and I’m going to tell them all that”
Mocking language
Jobs are important too
“Be a team player”
“We’re your family too”
Talking as if this is a thing you must do
“We all make sacrifices”
Undermining your authority
“You caused all of this, really”
Accusing you of being “unprofessional”
“Look at the money you cost us”
“Just laugh it off and come back to work”
This is like a 101 course in how employers use guilt trips to coerce you into putting up with their bullshit. This is precisely why you should never trust those employers who insist that they’re “like a family.” They are not. It’s just a ruse so that your boss can neg you into putting your job ahead of your actual life.
people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat
german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans
Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn’t even gone extinct yet: Oh hey I can use these two obelisks to calculate the earth’s entire circumference based on
the length of their shadows
and the Earth’s curvature. Neat.
Erastothenes was born in 276 BCE.
The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.
And as I’ve pointed out previously, the Coriolis effect was known even earlier than that, although it may not have become important to gunnery.
I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna.
“
In fact, the Wrangel mammoth’s genome carried so many detrimental
mutations that the population had suffered a “genomic meltdown,”
according to Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of
California, Berkeley.
Analyzing the Swedish team’s mammoth data at the
gene level, they found that many genes had accumulated mutations that
would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete,
making the proteins useless, they report Thursday in PLOS Genetics.
“
That
“genomic meltdown”
is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.
Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer,
sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every
complex species uses it.
Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the
Wrangel
beasties.
Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…
What …the fuck?
That went off the rails so suddenly like I thought I was just gonna learn something cool about mammoths and then WHOA.
I scrolled past this thinking “the earth is round, yes, something, something, mammoths…’
But the second time it came past I saw
That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal
And I think I got whiplash from that pivot. I also laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe.
I’m????
Point and laugh at the MRA, kids.
How … does he think … mammoths reproduced …
Never mind, not sure I want to know.
reblog to support Mammoth Feminism,
ignore for G E N O M I C M E L T D O W N
I here af for my Feminist Mammoth ladies, bring the species back!
DOWN WITH GENOMIC MELTDOWN
I… what exactly is combining ovaries supposed to achieve? 400 lazy feminist babies at the same time?
Shhhh…you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.
FEMINISM KILLED THE MAMMOTHS
I feel like we’re getting away from the main point here, which is that the world is flat
the world is only flat because it was trampled by feminist mammoths
reblog if you support your army of genetically-melted feminist mammoths that trampled the earth flat
Don’t anybody tell this guy about that species of lizard where there are only females it might break him
That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.
I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god.
Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male.
There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.
Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!
Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.
Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed
all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either
as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator
or even the pop science article you cited yourself
which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself
the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw
you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger
how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones?
you obviate your own thesis with your own intellectual failure, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge
I reblogged this before but I have to do so again because of the above takedown with its glorious insults. Also, it’s always fun to point and laugh at MRAs.
I am in awe.
“Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!” and “you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge” are honestly awe-inspiring and I’m fucking blessed I read them today
This is beautiful
It’s been long enough since I last saw this post that I’d nearly forgotten and it still fucking hit me like a goddamn freight train.
You self-satisfied jellyfish fellator, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge
Fucking poetry there, Shakespeare would be hard pressed to improve upon these lines.
@shitpostsampler The snailsucking jellyfish fellator quote is golden.
Are we just going to ignore “a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish”?
‘oh hey that’s funny :D man, flat-earth sure is one of the stranger conspiracy theories isn’t it. ooh who was Eratosthenes? i should look him up! and now we’re talking about mammoths, cool , i love mam
“genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries
my favorite thing about this post is all the people who chose to use the default icon defending themselves in the notes like no stop it just put a picture up
Loving this energy
*wipes tear* they learn tumblr culture so fast … the spite … the malicious compliance of it all … I’m so proud
The first sentence says 32 and 13 implying that the speaker is 32 years old and their girlfriend is 13 years old, which is both highly inappropriate and illegal. The next sentence reveals the speaker was talking about their game levels, not their ages, which is perfectly okay.
In their reply to the audience they then say they are picking her up from middle school, again implying that their girlfriend is underage, but quickly state she’s grading papers letting us know she’s a teacher, definitely an adult, and there no reason to be upset.
The rollercoaster gif portrays how switching from upset and worried to relieved in such a short period of time feels emotionally.
The next meme shows the guy panicking from misunderstanding, then feeling relieved and calm realizing the truth, only to panic over the next misunderstanding and then calm again when hearing the end.
the above explanation is followed by a picture of data from star trek with a speech bubble’s tail coming out of him, implying he’s the one saying all of that, which is humerous because the above text is written in a style similar to his speech patterns, and with a subject matter he would enjoy
This is the worst website ever and I love it.
I’d rather see Tumblr die than see it stop being like this.
