In the midst of all these “Humans will packbond with anything” posts, I’m going to pause and give you some actual, real-world career advice

tehnakki:

deliriumcrow:

pom-seedss:

mockiato:

rainaramsay:

Ready? 

Humans are packbondy creatures.  I mean, there’s just no arguing it.  They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly.  Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.  

There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned.  It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded.  It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings. 

If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.

“Yeah? So?”
So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career.  No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired.  

Not to mention the big things.  They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects.  It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place?  

Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with.  They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss).  They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.  

“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –” 
Listen to me. 
Listen.

You may be right.  You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization. 

It
does
not
matter

Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it.  No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do.

All you can do is work with it. 

If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.

“Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –”
Hey, my pal, I feel you.  I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger.  

For you, I have good news:
Humans will packbond with anything.  

Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest.  

If you can talk with them, that speeds things up.  But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go

You: boy, sure is hot out!
Human: Man oh man, can you believe it?
You: Wow, yeah
Human: Totally
You: ….
Human: ….

This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

• You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
• Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
• That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers

Tips

• Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected.  In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
• Keep some packbonding-time questions handy.  My go-to list is:
• (If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
• (If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
  
• (If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
• How’s your day been?
• You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions.  Therefore questions are your friend.  If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
• Learn to disengage from packbonding.  You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural.  I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”

I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need.  Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.  

So we’re just not gonna talk about how OP is an alien anthropologist investigating the human species before infiltrating huh

“That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers”

In many of my shittiest jobs I wasn’t allowed to talk to the other employees because the bosses say we couldn’t do our jobs if we were socializing. Now that it has been phrased this way it makes me realize how not only just how life-sucking that is but also how dehumanizing.

They won’t even let us packbond.

Pretty sure that’s by design. They know you won’t talk to the bosses, much less packbond with them, but if you bond with your coworkers? Well. That’s perilously close to unionizing, but arguably more dangerous. Now you actually care about them, like with your real *heart*.

I love that this concept has gone full circle from “let’s talk about how humans interact to aliens” to “let’s look at humans through an alien lens” to “let’s use our observations about humans to now interact with other humans.” It’s exactly what scifi is supposed to make you do: challenge your assumptions about how you view the world so that maybe you can approach your world from a new POV. Just perfect.

Quick, Someone Call Batgirl! - Hinn_Raven - Batman (Comics) [Archive of Our Own]

secretlystephaniebrown:

Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Batman (Comics), Batgirl (Comics)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Stephanie Brown & Duke Thomas, Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain
Characters: Stephanie Brown, Duke Thomas, Cassandra Cain, Lois Lane, Vicki Vale
Additional Tags: Humor, Secret Identity Fail, Social Media, Stephanie Brown is Batgirl, Past Fake Character Death, College
Summary:

When Stephanie Brown was Robin, her secret identity became public knowledge. Now, she’s Batgirl, but nobody knows about that… right?

I really meant to be working on other projects, but as it turns out, I left my organizing notes at my place when I returned home for the holidays, so instead, I decided to write Steph Brown humor.

This possibly takes place in the same universe as Really Close Friends, but it’s not explicitly so, and you don’t have to have read it to understand this.

onthespectrumwriting:

the amount of sass in these frames is overwhelming

irlbartallen:

khaji da + some bluepulse!!
i think when khaji da has control of jaimes body xe wears very different things and has way different body language and expressions than jaime
(no kin tags)

(Source: modecrash-archive)

anatoref:

Facial Expressions
Top Image
Row 2 & 3
Row 4
Row 5: Left, Middle, Right
Bottom Image (Source Unknown)

markruffalo:

The remedy to despair… remember that our power is in our hope and action.

Art by Grace D. Chin

scifimagpie:

vital-information:

To those who have swept or have blown the leaves from the walk, have rinsed the dishes or dusted their screens, Hestia looks on you from beneath her veil. She smiles, then wraps a shawl made of sunlit October air around you.

To those who remain in bed, who are on the edge of crying, who have turned on the tv to drown out the world, Hestia sits on the edge of your bed, patting circles on your back. I know, my love, she says, I know, I know. It can be so hard. My sweet, it’s time to get up. I need you, she says. Let’s make this home a sanctuary. Light a candle. Make your hands to care about this place. Let out the work of love.

I was just here to check out pagan prayers and now I’m tearing up 

saphire-dance:

davetheshady:

brawltogethernow:

shapechangersinwinter:

locusimperium:

A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic. 

Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day. 

Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.

Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy.  Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour. 

Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick.  Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.

So I tried this recipe.

And it is GREAT.

It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.

Life hack: add white chocolate chips and sea salt

I made these last year. I used colored sugar to dust the tops they were really delicious and festive looking

comicroute:

11thsense:

Here’s some Starfires

That is definitely Red Hood’s symbol on her sports bra. Also, I want these outfits (and that haaaair). ❤

protego-et-servio:

The point of voting blue in 2018 isn’t to make the US perfect. We cannot accomplish that in one fell swoop. There’s gerrymandering, voter apathy, voter suppression, and generations of older party-line fucks we have to deal with.

Voting blue in 2018 is to make it less immediately threatening for PoC, LGBT+ people, the disabled, and any other marginalized demographic. It’s a stopgap against Republicans who are aligned with Nazis, white supremacists, and sexual abusers.

Correcting politics in the United States is going to take decades of new voters staying on top of politics and not falling prey to apathy, like our predecessors. 

People telling you not to waste a vote on 3rd Party this midterm aren’t saying “never vote 3rd party.” Republicans have united behind one utterly heinous front. We need to unite behind Democrats, for the time being.