My art blog is @agender-ryland-grace, and my Ao3 is AroaceRylandGrace.
If anyone wants it, here's my mini Project Hail Mary-related library with a bunch of resources for the story as well as the source material. I've also posted a bunch of references for various costumes and props for the movie that can all be found in my reference tag. The pattern, instructions, and some photos of the book Rocky plush I made are all here as well!
I have a Deaf Ryland Grace AU! All my posts about it are under #deaf grace au, this is the masterpost, and all the fics are here!
My personal tag is #riley's record and all my fandom-ish posts are under #ryland's rambles.
I post a lot of random thoughts, but I also reblog a bunch of stuff.
Ask me anything you want!
A little list of medias I like is under the cut
These are in a vague order in the sense that I like the second listed media more than the tenth, but I don't inherently like the third more than the fourth.
I really like:
- Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, AOS, and Lower Decks)
- Project Hail Mary (Book and 2026 movie)
- The X-Files (1993-2018)
- The Martian (Book and 2015 movie)
- The Outsiders (Book, 1983 movie, and stage musical)
- The Magnus Archives
- The Nice Guys (2016)
- Murderbot (All Systems Red and Artificial Condition so far!)
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Book and stage musical) & The Glass Scientists
- Barbie (2023)
- Les Misérables (Book, 1978 movie, and stage musical)
- Doctor Who (2005-)
- Newsies (Stage musical)
- Cabaret (Stage musical)
- BBC Ghosts (2019-2023)
- Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
- Legally Blonde (2001 movie, stage musical)
- Dirty Dancing (1987)
- Dead Poets Society (1989)
- The Sound of Music (1965)
- Ted Lasso (2020-)
- The Interview with the Vampire (movie and TV show)
It took me about 15 seconds in to realize what was happening in this vid, but the second I did, I legit came. This is… I got chills and got so much validation for my theories about tap and pretty much any genre of music here…
They’re tap dancing, a kind of dancing typically associated with being old-fashioned and kind of silly. Personally, even tap dancing to old music is awesome in my eyes, but this is on a totally new and exciting level
The thing about tap is that it’s so often seen as a fancy, old-fashioned dainty dance that only posh (and generally white) people do in tuxedos but it didn’t used to be the case.
Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.
It’s such an expressive and joyful kind of dance and matches so well with hip hop beats and rhythm, which is why the modern reworking of it is so awesome.
Im sure a lot of people also watch the op video and they assume that “clap” sound is part of the music just because a LOT of modern music samples that sound and in some music it is just the sound of hands clapping, but no that is a sound being made by all their shoes at once.
I am gritting my teeth at the mere suggestion that tap is primarily associated with dainty white people.
Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.
Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.
The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)
Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM
Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:
There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:
… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.
Today I’d like to talk a little about Savion Glover, who is one of (if not THE MOST) famous living tap artists. This is from 2002:
and this from 2014-ish:
And if you are saying, well, I never heard of this guy, I guess today you are going to learn about this guy. But I bet you know THIS guy:
Mumble’s dance is choreographed by, and mo-capped from, Savion Glover.
This guy. This guy is SKILLED, ok? He’s in his 50s now; he’s been a professional tapper for over FORTY YEARS – he made his Broadway debut at age 11. He’s in that movie, Tap, that I linked a clip from above. Sometimes his tap seems a little old-fashioned – other times it is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is intentional – he’s paying tribute to his teachers and tappers of the past by learning and performing their signature moves, but also he’s got his own style.
It is absolutely worth going through whatever you can find on YouTube. Look for “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” – he was Tony nominated for the choreo & his performances in this musical. (The MDA telethon performance above is an excerpt – he did these for several years on the telethon.)
I like this one, because you can watch modern African-American tap alongside modern-traditional Irish dance and you can see that these are related, but distinct, art forms. They share a common ancestor, but they’re also so different. Right around 4 minutes, Colin Dunne (the man in the cover image below) and Savion Glover start dancing together, trading off, and it’s AMAZING.
Sidenote, if anyone ever hears of a revival of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” please tell me, I want to see it liiiiiiive.
Let’s finish off with Glover’s special guest performance at the Stockholm International Tap Dance Festival last year:
I don't know what is it exactly that Brent Spiner did or maybe it's just my interpretation of his acting, but he really makes Data feel like an android. From the future.
Even if he didn't have any makeup on or contact lenses, I'd be like "yeah that's Brent Spiner and that's an android." Maybe it's because his facial expressions are preset and even Data says the wildest things it's passable.
I'm in awe everytime he appears on screen, literally a test to one's acting chops.
I’ve actually thought about this a lot because I’ve had non-Trek friends roll their eyes when they see a picture of Data like, really? They painted a dude gold? That’s it? That’s supposed to make us think he’s a robot? But then they see Brent act and the instant suspension of disbelief that man creates pistol-whips them into the 24th century whether they want to be there or not.
I do think it comes down to Brent’s impeccable consistency. The facial expressions, mannerisms, movement, intonations, etc. In conjunction with the writers, he “found” Data very fast and honed that essence into a precision cut character.
That’s why it’s always so delightfully shocking when we see a “Data gets possessed” or “oh no! It’s Lore!” episode. We witness the pristine Data persona shatter into something unrecognizable even though the actor and his silly gold paint doesn’t change. Absolutely remarkable.
^^ six different characters but we all instantly know who the real Data is.
I think he has, as the industry folk say, catastrophic chops.
"Clearly I wasn't talking about disabled people-" yeah part of the problem is that the existence of disabled people just isn't considered in your worldview like that's the problem we're criticizing not a get out of jail free card
hey guys unpopular opinion but you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about every bad thing happening in the world all the time, or if you do care but you’re not constantly reblogging posts spreading awareness and information
it’s okay if you’re just on tumblr to have fun and reblog things you like or that make you happy.
humans aren’t made to process trauma and suffering on a worldwide scale without any breaks whatsoever & the internet has created an unprecedented access to bad news so please never feel guilty for scrolling past it because you can’t process it! and you’re not doing anything wrong & there’s no need to feel guilty
