Not To Be Emotional On Main But Fanfiction Is A Gift And Its So Fundamentally Human To Tell Each Other

not to be emotional on main but fanfiction is a gift and it’s so fundamentally human to tell each other stories and i am deeply grateful to have that in my life. thank you all for adding so much emotion and meaning to the world with your words

The eight planets of our solar system (and the dwarf planet Pluto) image credits: [x] / NASA

Q&A: Betty Reid Soskin reflects on her life and multifaceted career as a singer, activist and park ranger

“What a gem.”

“A national treasure.”

“The most amazing ranger you’ll ever meet!”

What more can we say about ranger Betty Reid Soskin that hasn’t already been said? How about, Happy 100th birthday? We thank you for your dedication and years of service in helping preserve and protect our nation’s history.

Ranger Betty was born in 1921, just a few years after the creation of the National Park Service. She grew up in a Cajun-Creole, African American family that settled in Oakland, California after the “Great Flood” that devastated New Orleans in 1927. She didn’t begin her career with the National Park Service until the age of 84, when she took a job at Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park. There she was able to share with visitors her first hand and lived experiences from World War II, especially the untold experiences of African-Americans during that war.

Help us send ranger Betty all the birthday wishes today!  

Photo description: Ranger Betty sits on a concrete block while dressed in her park ranger dress uniform.

Ten more favourite tropes:

Character multitasking an extremely critical task with an extremely trivial one  

Character displaying jarring shifts in demeanour as they switch between different activities  

Character dressed in a manner that’s conspicuously inappropriate for their current situation, without explanation  

Character reacting to an unexpected or frightening turn of events with an implausibly seamless change of mental focus  

Character describing a situation in a way that’s both complete and correct, but emphasises entirely the wrong thing  

Character offering a very unlikely explanation for something with no indication that they’re aware how unbelievable it is  

Character remarking on an unfortunate happening in a way that vastly understates its import  

Character willingly participating in a fun activity while maintaining an impenetrable poker face  

Character demonstrating notable proficiency at something with which they firmly insist they have no prior experience  

Character treating a ridiculous undertaking with enormous gravitas

katherine blower ghosts

“Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient of everything that informs the present. When we read Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch, we’re not tempted to believe that because the characters wear funny hats, get about by horse and don’t talk explicitly about sex that they’re innocents. This is because we are allowed full access, or carefully arranged partial access, to their feelings and thoughts, their dilemmas. Assuming we’ve been carried along by the narrative, they appear before us, these characters, intact, as contemporaries, unscarred by unintended ironies.”

— Ian McEwan, interviewed in The Art of Fiction No. 173 (via theclassicsreader)