Different Stories Resonate With Different People

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.    He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.    The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.      Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.     But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.     This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (via cat-sophia)

youtube Swordman standing up to gender roles

Puppy reacts to getting hicups!

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Retour en France, entre tristesse, soulagement et appréhension

Ça y est, alors que j’écris ces lignes, je vis mes dernières heures sur le sol anglais.

J’ai dit au revoir à mes amis, mes collègues (et non, pas mes amours), et j’emballe mes derniers effets, lentement, en savourant chaque secondes.

  J’ai appris à l’aimer ce pays. Oh, je ne suis pas un Globe-trotter, je n’ai même pas tant visité le pays, au final. Mais l’ambiance, les gens, les pubs, les rues, le brouhaha sonore (anglais), l’architecture, la nourriture (si, quelque part…), le thé, les paysages, la pluie, le brouillard, tout ça me manquera terriblement.

  Mais je pense à nouveau à la France. Enfin, je n’ai jamais vraiment cessé d’y penser. A travers le hublot Internet, je me suis tenu au courant de ce qu’il s’y passait. A travers les couloirs blanc immaculés de ses fibres optiques, j’ai reçu les échos scandaleux de slogans haineux et de harangues nationalistes, homophobes et rétrogrades.

  Néanmoins, je suis bien conscient que de par sa nature, on n’a qu’une vision très extrême de l’info à travers les réseaux sociaux. Colères, scandales, pétitions, articles fumeux, brulots mal écrits, juste indignation, etc… c’est cela que l’on retrouve en 140 caractères sur Twitter, ou en une poignée de lien sur Facebook.

  Je sais que j’ai une vision déformée. Et pourtant, je n’ai pas envie que cela cesse. J’ai peur, même, de voir disparaitre ces luttes et ces indignations se diluer dans la masse oppressante du quotidien. Mais si ma vision n’était pas si déformée ? Si Lundi j’assiste à un acte raciste ou sexiste, au travail ou dans la rue, oserai-je élever ma voix et m’interposer?

  C’est terrible, avoir des (semi-)opinions et n’en faire rien. Encore pire, avoir des opinions et ne faire qu’en parler.

Critical Role fanart by @Mikandii

Animalistic Robots, by the very creative Robert Chew.

blvck and gold

IT’S BACK! I LOVE THIS VIDEO SO MUCH