Low content zone

Mostly here to follow people, occasionally reblog

[stra-tek]

I remember when the first pics of this show came out and a few people were mad at gendered clothing still being a thing in Trek's distant future, with the girls wearing skirts and the guys in pants.

Here's a Klingon dude in a skirt.

[liz-squids]

Also I spotted another male-appearing person wearing the skirt in the background of the bar scene, so it's not just Jay-Den.

(I was also low-key concerned about the gendered costumes - I had hoped the posters were a fake-out, but after the relentless heteronormativity of Strange New Worlds, I did not dare to hope. I love that instead SFA is building on the foundation Discovery laid, and we have cranky middle-aged lesbians and drag queens and boys in skirts and an all-male love triangle developing.)

[jesuswasbatman]

I am absolutely not suggesting that Darem is lying about being bi/pan, but everyone is forgetting that his boasts about his wild sex life at home were all part of a lie about how he got a scar in a knife fight, when it was actually unromantic surgery. Can we 100% believe it when a massively "lad"-coded dude tells us about his incredible sexual experiences and ability to seduce a whole family?

[rudjedet]

I very genuinely need tumblr to understand that museums are as diverse as historians, egyptologists, archaeologists, and what have you in general. Like from the way people are talking you'd think that only straight white Western men are ever involved in these concepts, because the internet at large just loves to be able to get on their little high horsie about how they are sooo much more morally correcter than the Evil Other

Which is absolutely not a concerning attitude to have, not at all no sir

[rudjedet]

forgot I'm on the piss on the poor website so I'll spell it out: Western straight white men aren't per definition the Evil Other either

You know where the real danger is? Anti-intellectualism, the concept of moral purity, and opening your damn trap when you don't know shit about fuck

[veliseraptor]

#also our job market is a hellscape and a lot of us aren't wealthy either and neither are our workplaces #many museums especially have SUCH a hard time affording anything rn #the days of museums as institutions and the humanities being a realm of wealth and prestige are well and truly over #this is a field that is being devalued constantly in a world that would love to believe everything important is digital #or about making money #and that's a fucking problem bc the whole thing of museums is that they offer easily accessible education #HOW is the “go to your local library” website so indifferent or even hostile towards museums#academia (via @veilchenjaeger)

[cricketcat9]

☝️☝️☝️

[abigailnussbaum]

"Museums are nothing but a pile of loot and the only thing worth doing in them is a heist to restore stolen artifacts (a thing that has never happened in reality, and will never happen no matter how much people keep insisting that it is a thing)" has got to be one of the most annoying memes to emerge out of social justice culture. It's one thing to say that we should remember and discuss the flaws in the museum system, or advocate for the repatriation of specific artifacts. It's quite another to throw the entire concept of museums out with the bathwater.

A museum is a place where you can go and, for a relatively small fee and sometimes even for no money at all, see art and craft and culture and history at a level of quality and variety that, until not so long ago, you would have no hope of ever experiencing unless you were a fantastically rich person. They're a way of making beauty and science and knowledge accessible to the public. And yes, most of us don't live within easy access of the great museums of the world. But the overwhelming majority of us live near some museum, and even if it's a very small one, it is a window onto things we might never have experienced without it.

So sure, museums have flaws. But the alternative is a world where only rich people get to experience art and culture. And guess what? That is exactly the sort of world that the people dismantling the humanities are trying to achieve. A world where beautiful paintings and ancient artifacts sit in some oligarch's vault, and the rest of us make do with photographs and AI slop. So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be acting as if contempt for museums is the progressive position.

[jesuswasbatman]

You know, I think quite a lot of this comes from a very simplistic reading of Eric's introductory scene in the first "Black Panther" film. Because while Eric has a point, he promptly undercuts his self-righteousness by grabbing a random mask that he doesn't have any cultural connection with just because he thinks it's cool.

(Broadening from this, I think a big part of Eric's role in the film that flies over the head of a lot of American viewers is that he's partly influenced by the resentment some black Africans feel about some African-Americans who exoticise African cultures and, when visiting Africa in search of roots, end up, through failing to consider their own relative wealth and geopolitical privilege, being just as well-intentionedly offensive as your stereotypical entitled and ignorant white tourist.)

[open-sketchbook]

once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!

[open-sketchbook]

this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person

[jesuswasbatman]

My problem here is that I am unable to do a trilled r sound properly, which was an issue when I was learning Spanish at school.

[doctor-who-tournaments]

Classic Companion Outfits - Qualifying Round (top four will advance)

Favorite Romana II outfit?

Destiny of the Daleks (pink coat)

City of Death (school uniform)

The Creature from the Pit (white and pink dress)

Nightmare of Eden (gray dress)

The Horns of Nimon (red hunting coat)

Shada (Edwardian skirt and lace blouse)

The Leisure Hive (sailor suit)

Meglos (red breeches and shirt with lace sleeves)

Full Circle (red jacket over lace blouse and long red skirt)

State of Decay (beige suit)

State of Decay (ivory vampire sacrifice gown)

Warrior's Gate (red silk blouse and black trousers)

Voting ended onJul 22, 2025

[jesuswasbatman]

Why the FUCK are people voting for the fox-hunting outfit?

[jesuswasbatman]

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE FOR NON-BRITISH PEOPLE ABOUT THIS POLL.

Romana's "Horns of Nimon" costume is a direct reference to the traditional outfit in Britain for hunting foxes on horseback with dogs and making a big upper-class social event/celebration out of it. This was still just about acceptable when the story was made, but was banned in 2005 after a massive national political controversy, and is regarded by most British people to the left of neo-fascist as a spectacularly cruel and depraved activity, that was not as effective for its purported purpose than it should have been, and gave the opportunity for hunters to act in really arseholish ways apart from the morality of hunting. Seeing a character dressed as a fox-hunter in a modern British work basically means "this person loves animal cruelty, and is also probably an evil aristocrat who randomly kicks peasants into their own manure piles and urinates on them just to remind them of their social status".

So it's probably the most politically embarrassing thing in old-school Who after "Weng-Chiang", and most British fans will not be happy to see it leading the poll.

[doctor-who-tournaments]

Classic Companion Outfits - Qualifying Round (top four will advance)

Favorite Romana II outfit?

Destiny of the Daleks (pink coat)

City of Death (school uniform)

The Creature from the Pit (white and pink dress)

Nightmare of Eden (gray dress)

The Horns of Nimon (red hunting coat)

Shada (Edwardian skirt and lace blouse)

The Leisure Hive (sailor suit)

Meglos (red breeches and shirt with lace sleeves)

Full Circle (red jacket over lace blouse and long red skirt)

State of Decay (beige suit)

State of Decay (ivory vampire sacrifice gown)

Warrior's Gate (red silk blouse and black trousers)

Voting ended onJul 22, 2025

[jesuswasbatman]

Why the FUCK are people voting for the fox-hunting outfit?

[prettypinkdork]

Threshold is unfairly maligned as ‘the Worst Trek episode’ when not only are their objectively worse episodes of Star Trek (Code of Honor, about a fourth of Enterprise, Profit and Lace, etc); it’s not even the worst episode of Voyager.

Which Voyager episode do you think is the worst?

Jetrel - being mad that your people got genocided is a moral failing

Tattoo - their native expert was a fraud and it really shows

Tuvix-it's like a bad abortion debate + a dishonest attempt at a moral dilemma

Retrospect - the fake rape analogy episode.

The Fair Haven episodes - just like in general

Fury - This episode qualifies as bullying Jennifer Lien

The Void - in which Voyager plagiarizes it's own exceptional 'Night'

Flesh and Blood - 2-parter where the Doctor sabotages Voyager

Retrospect - Tuvok causes a Maquis uprising. 150,000 things wrong with this one

Some other non-Threshold episode not listed

Voting ended onApr 18, 2025

Side note: I find that the worst episodes are just really forgettable. Had to redo this because I forgot about Retrospect

Edit: the second Retrospect is suppose to be Repression

[captaincrusher]

I voted Retrospect because despite having watched through Voyager countless times that is an episode I have only seen once and now skip every time. Just a big no thanks.

[rikerssexblouse]

This! Saw it once. Never watched again. Rewatching VOY now for the first time with my daughter. Going to skip it again.

[liz-squids]

I voted "Retrospect" over "Tattoo", because way back on Usenet there was a guy known as Macedon, who was Native American. He's best remembered now for his J/C fic, but when "Tattoo" aired, he was like, "This could be better, but it's actually more respectful than a lot of Native representation and I really value that."

Whereas I don't know a single woman who looks at "Retrospect" and goes, "This could be better, but it's not that bad."

(Also, "Tattoo" and "Tuvix" and "Threshold" aren't even the worst episodes of season 2. That goes to "Alliances", the one where Janeway briefly considers an alliance with the Kazon but then she meets the nice white people who used to enslave them and decides to be friends with them instead.)

[jesuswasbatman]

My choice is "The 37s", which was the episode that made me give up on the series at first UK broadcast and never want to try it again. It's the one where they find a planet of transplanted humans who were abducted by aliens centuries before, and when Janeway gives them a free choice not one of the human crewmembers decide to stay and build a life on the planet. Ultimate example of being committed to a reset button ending and never even trying to take your show's premise seriously.

[jesuswasbatman]

So many Buffy fans do art of Spike as a 70s punk and I wish someone would depict him as a Teddy Boy. Because he definitely was in the 50s.

[omnifuneral]

been doing a LOT of analog note-taking / journaling / planning lately (new years' resolution fulfilled! yes!), and I've slowly but surely started writing mostly in cursive again.

that said, I'm old (almost 35, ew) so I have questions.

when you're writing on paper, you use...

cursive pretty much ALWAYS

MOSTLY cursive

roughly equal cursive / printing

MOSTLY printing

printing pretty much ALWAYS

what's cursive?

what's paper?

Voting ended onMar 25, 2025

if you want to RB this and put you age / locale / whatever else you think is relevant in the tags, that'd be very cool

[jesuswasbatman]

47, UK

[b5ffy]

i do think it's crazy that faith gets excited by buffy punching her in the face, goads her into a murder attempt, tells spike how awesome she thinks buffy topping you and hurting you would be, and tells robin buffy's given her her favorite bruise and fandom still turns around and says "yeah she's definitely a dom" like no she's not

[jesuswasbatman]

See also how into the idea of Gwendolyn being a harsh and semi-abusive tutor she is.

[thephilosophersapprentice]

when you realize your rarepair is so rare it doesn't have an ao3 tag

[animate-mush]

Until now

[jesuswasbatman]

One of my few fics was the first ever to need an "Andrew Wells & Rupert Giles" tag and that makes me feel sorry for Andrew again.

[lizardsfromspace]

I do love the idea of some fretting that the flop of Joker 2 means Hollywood will stop making "big budget artsy movies" and just make...sequels based on comic books forever, and not projects, like Joker 2. We will no longer have a cinema of Grand Ideas like "what if The Hangover guy ripped off The King of Comedy to be about the Joker" & "what if the Joker guy did a sequel to Joker that's a jukebox musical"

But also. I don't think anyone was surprised Megalopolis bombed or that it will mean much, bc it was made entirely outside of Hollywood. Coppola financed it personally. He also paid for marketing costs. According to Deadline Lionsgate arranged the distribution deal so they get at least $3-5 million even if it bombs totally. Which it did, and which everyone knew it would

But also. Hollywood will stop making big budget artsy movies like Joker 2, and instead pivot to comic book sequels, unlike, The Joker 2

[abigailnussbaum]

The thing is, you're right, but this tweet is also right.

Because look, set Megalopolis aside for all the reasons you note, but Joker 2 absolutely should have been a hit. It's the sequel to a movie that made a billion dollars, starring an actress who previously made the fourth version of a very tired concept into a global phenomenon. Bad reviews shouldn't have touched it. For exactly the reasons that, as you point out, make it ridiculous to distinguish it from comic book sequels, and by all the logic on which Hollywood has operated for decades, it should have been a gargantuan box office success.

Instead, it seems to have been greeted with a shrug. And it's not alone in that - this year has been chock-full of box office disappointments, including some that on paper should have been hits. The Fall Guy, an action comedy starring America's favorite Ken doll, and which is actually quite good, met with a yawn. Furiosa, the follow-up to a generation-defining classic which somehow manages to outdo it, didn't even come close to $100M. There's a heist movie starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt that was released directly to streaming, for crying out loud.

Hollywood is broken, and probably irreparably. And as much as film bros loved to blame Marvel for this, the fault is with the studios for getting everyone used to watching new movies at home, and failing to realize how hard they'd have to work to get audiences back. Now the question about every new movie isn't "does this look good", but "does it look good enough that I don't want to wait six weeks until I can watch it in the comfort of my own home?" I can't even pretend not to be part of the problem - I've watched four movies in theaters this year, and looking forward there's maybe two more I'm willing to venture back to the theater for. The theatrical model has collapsed, and I have no idea what, if anything, could bring it back.

[jesuswasbatman]

Sorry to go off on one of my personal hobby-horses, but "film bros" and other cineastes simply will not accept that, since the cathode ray tube was replaced by better technologies, it is now a better experience to watch almost any film at home instead of at a cinema. (I'm not talking just about mobile devices, but about high-end home cinema audiovisual systems.) Occasionally you got the romanticised experience of seeing a film as part of an enthralled audience, but more often you got some combination of little kids melting down because their parents took them to something that was too scary or not interesting enough for them, bigger kids causing trouble just to be assholes, people chattering to each other or on their phones, and people thinking that everybody else wanted to hear their "humorous" commentary on the film. Add ridiculously high prices for any decent cinema, minimum-wage staff incapable of recognising or fixing a technical problem or of asserting themselves to suppress badly behaved audience members, sound systems optimised for the effects instead of muddily-mixed, mumbled "naturalistic" dialogue, and increasingly lengthy pre-show adverts and trailer reels. And then add the number of people who are still wary of crowded, poorly-ventilated spaces for fear of catching something.

[evviejo]

poll time: this is mostly directed at trekkies, but if you've dipped a toe in the franchise, feel free to contibute

how much of star trek have you actually seen?

all shows and movies

all shows

all live-action shows

all "old" shows (tos-ent)

all new shows (disco-snw)

some shows

some movies

some shows and/or movies

most/incomplete shows and/or movies

1-2 shows/movies

uncertain - bits here and there

i'm bald/nothing/results

Voting ended onJul 17, 2024

rb for sample size and add revelant comments in the tags 🚀

and please, be nice in the comments, this post is not for you to spew your dislikes and frustrations, thx

[liz-squids]

At this stage, there are three and a half episodes across the franchise that I haven't watched, and that was by choice.

[jesuswasbatman]

No TAS, first two seasons of VOY then gave up, first episode of ENT before I noped out. Everything else

[bloodied-metal-pipe]

so ruby's mum was a normal person, who was just wearing a cloak? and omniously pointed at a sign? yes of course, makes perfect sense and is in no way anti-climactic

[eschergirls]

TFW you paid a lot of money to get uncomfortably vacuum-sealed into your costume, possibly dislocating your leg in the process, but you also really want to show off your freshly shaved pits.

(Cover of Catwoman 80th Anniversary: Super Spectacular #1, DC Comics, submitted by @hieroglyphic-lion)

[jesuswasbatman]

That costume is just weird. It's as if an editor said "Catwoman's been too covered up for years, I want a more revealing costume", and the artist thought "Yuk, I'm going to troll them by designing a costume for an incredibly niche fetish", and the editor turned out to be an armpit fetishist who didn't realise how niche it was.

[please-dont-pet-the-okapi]

Okay, my sister and I have been discussing this between ourselves, but I want y'all's opinions.

Behold this, the worst poll I have ever made.

If the CW Babylon 5 reboot series were made and gained traction in this Great Blue Purgatory, which guy from Babylon 5 is most likely to be come a Tumblr Sexyman?

Alfred Bester

G'Kar

Kosh

Lennier

Londo Mollari

Marcus Cole

Michael Garibaldi

Morden

Stephen Franklin

Vir Cotto

Zathras

Someone else (Cartagia, Zack Allan, Warren Keffer, etc.) ; I ran out of room.

Voting ended onFeb 14, 2024

I made the executive decision to not include Sheridan and Sinclair on the main list, since I personally think they are unlikely to become Tumblr Sexymen, and there are more likely candidates I wanted to include. (If you feel I was wrong, feel free to make your case in the tags)

[minim-calibre]

[liz-squids]

I've already seen Alfred Bester being (what was not at the time called) babygirlified, sooooooooooooooooooo

[katemonkey]

Okay SO. SO. I was there. I was deep in the Babylon 5 filthy fan fiction mines. I have seen things, people. AMAZING THINGS.

I have voted for Bester, because everyone loves a villain, but, man, you got PTSD, you got tentacles (two species!), you got bones...

If they actually ever get the reboot off the ground, it is going to be filthy and everyone is going to become Tumblr Sexymans.

[liz-squids]

There is going to be Gaim Discourse, because someone WILL decide it's unethical to write porn about a species named after Real Person Neil Gaiman. With a schism because Also Real Person Neil Gaiman is Problematic Because ... I Assume Something Something Good Omens

I cannot wait.

[jesuswasbatman]

Glad that the correct choices are still winning, except that G'Kar always was a Tumblr Sexyman if I'm understanding it correctly.

[teh-nos]

have to say one thing fandomwise i'm not enjoying about RTD2 is him getting/taking credit for positive moves when he'd previously been very much part of the problem and we're just pretending that bit never happened. davros shouldn't be a disabled villain, yeah, but you were fine with it before, even adding the wheelchair-using villain in that s2 cyberman story, and i want to know what changed and when. like that's actually a thing worth discussing, what kind of awareness-raising actually works and what didn't?

the tardis is accessible now. good! but the old tardis was just a flat studio floor, it was nu who (back at RTD1) that started adding pointless stairs to the set just because it... looked nice? apparently? so i am glad it has at last lost the useless stairs (for now at least) but why did it have them in the first place? cos i already know that the real answer is "because nobody involved in the production even realised it was an issue." which is normal! i accept that people mostly don't think of these things because they don't have to! even in fandom the fans who first noticed the ramps in the new tardis were the ones with some interest in disability rights (often because they or someone close to them is disabled - as i said most people don't have to be aware of these things (though it'd help tremendously if they were)).

idk there's a level on which i feel like i'm being gaslit? i mean good on him for having learned over time on a number of issues, but pretending he didn't learn makes it all seem a bit disingenuous and also takes away from the fact that he clearly has done some thinking on things and has come to new conclusions, which is good and the sort of thing we can praise without pretending there was no problem to begin with.

[jesuswasbatman]

I read in multiple places that Lumic wasn't planned to be in a wheelchair, it was that Roger Lloyd Pack broke his leg shortly before the recording dates and couldn't walk.

[bellaschinchilla]

okay, yes, the hand picking up tooth!master at the end of the giggle was probably jinkx's, sure, but i have completely convinced myself that it is missy and i will not go back on my opinion, i will die on this hill