jotc

leaf in the wind

[corneliaavenue-ao3]

Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction

[gnar-slabdash]

Reblog to give prev the TIME to write their fanfiction

[cutebutalsostabby]

Reblog to give prev the hocus focus to write their fanfiction.

[septic-dr-schneep]

Reblog to give prev the energy to write their fanfiction

[imsopopfly]

Reblog to give prev the executive function to write their fanfiction

[gremlininho]

then & now ♡

[ka-di-gan]

[anghraine]

I've had plenty of criticisms of prominent figures in the production of TOS like John Meredyth Lucas and Gene Roddenberry. But for the opposite of the Mirror Universe version, I'm also kind of fascinated by the person who seems to have been among the most universally liked and artistically admired figures involved in the whole damn show: Jerry Finnerman, the brilliant director of photography for two and a half seasons (aka the vast majority of the show), and at the time one of the youngest in the business.

When director Ralph Senensky was first brought onboard to film "The Devil in the Dark" only (to his disappointment) to get reassigned to "This Side of Paradise," he also first met Finnerman, to his eternal delight—

Jerry Finnerman because of STAR TREK became one of my closest friends.

-

From the beginning our working relationship was a friendly cooperation that very quickly evolved into an exciting collaboration. Half of PARADISE had been filmed outdoors in daylight. Filming ["Metamorphosis"] on a soundstage where the director of photography has to provide ALL of the lighting is a different matter. I was about to see at work an incredible artist — Jerry Finnerman.

-

He was an incredible director of photography, a true artist who painted with light. I feel that Jerry has not been given his full due on his enormous contribution to the series and that also applies to producer Gene Coon, who left the show a third of the way through the second season.

-

In spite of Paramount studio’s cutting almost a half-day from the shooting schedule, Jerry Finnerman’s photography remained exemplary. His lighting as always continued not only to light the bodies, but it illuminated the inner drama.

-

One day during filming ["Is There In Truth No Beauty"], after Jerry had lit a scene, I said to him, “Has anybody been talking to you?” He reluctantly told me the production manager had requested that he speed it up. Jerry was leaving [his budget and wages were under the Paramount axe and he noped out]. He would not have been affected if filming ran an extra day.. I knew what he had done was to protect me. I told Jerry I thought he should continue lighting as he had always done.

-

The biggest change facing me [in directing "The Tholian Web"] was the loss of Jerry Finnerman. He had departed the series, and his camera operator, Al Francis, had been promoted to director of photography ... I don’t feel it is disparaging to point out that Jerry Finnerman was sorely missed. His were very large shoes to fill, both as to his artistic ability and his speed. Al Francis, very new to the post of director of photography and faced with a very difficult show with unexpected complications—well let me put it kindly and just say—his feet were smaller.

This is not exhaustive, just a few of the many times Senensky was still lavishing his friend with praise in the later years of his life (Senensky lived to be 102, Finnerman 79).

But others remembered Finnerman fondly as well, very much including the actors.

I'll have to track down the source again, but I read that Barbara Anderson, who played Lenore Karidian in "The Conscience of the King" (I already babbled about how, in addition to the fantastic qualities of the episode as written and performed, it's also got some of the most superb scenes visually) developed a blemish on her face shortly before the episode. She was deeply anxious about it being seen onscreen and Finnerman readily promised to light her scenes to conceal the blemish:

In 2011, the (then) five surviving main actors from the show were asked (by email or phone) by the official Star Trek site to say who they felt was the most "unsung hero" of Star Trek, the person who did the most as an individual but didn't get credited properly in the mythmaking around it. Nichelle Nichols responded,

Jerry Finnerman - Cinematographer who with his meticulous and sensitive lighting created the Uhura "Look.”

Today as well as then, photographers and cinematographers are often notorious for being careless and insensitive about lighting darker skin, especially when it comes to Black actors. Not that you all don't know, but this is the "Uhura look" in question:

In Grace Lee Whitney's memoir, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, she said of Finnerman:

His contribution to the show has been greatly underestimated. His skillful use of color, backlighting and focus effects greatly enhanced the visual impact of the series[...] Color drenched Jerry's images, and gave the show a visual feel that has never been duplicated by any other show, or even by the Star Trek shows and movies that came afterwards. Jerry Finnerman's vivid and skillful use of color in the show may well have been one of the deciding factors that kept NBC from cancelling the show after the first and second season.

Meanwhile, Finnerman's artistry and personal kindness were always important to the show, but probably never more so than on one of its greatest episodes, "The Devil in the Dark"—the reason that the actor who has probably most emphasized Finnerman's decency as a human being is William Shatner, for entirely personal reasons.

So, for context: Whitney also noted in her memoir that, despite his later reputation, she didn't find Shatner difficult to work with or particularly self-absorbed, beyond what might be expected of a 35-year-old without much of a social net who was evidently worried about his daughters and sick father before the show even began. But it was early in 1967 that Joseph Shatner suddenly died in Florida, and Ann Shatner unexpectedly called her son on the set of "The Devil in the Dark" to tell him. According to Eddie Paskey (the stage double for Kirk, who did double duty on dozens of episodes as the omnipresent Mr. Leslie), it wasn't clear to most of them that anything serious was going on. Everyone "in the know," including Finnerman, put on such a good front that Paskey didn't even know why he was asked to do more work for that specific episode until long afterwards.

Behind the scenes, the story was different. Apparently Shatner kept his shit together well enough to appear like normal before people like Paskey, and retreated to go have his crying meltdown out of sight. It was Jerry Finnerman—a young man the same age as Nimoy and Shatner, who like Shatner had been close to his own father—who took him aside and talked to him about how his father died a few years earlier on set and how he got through it.

There's an unusual degree of consensus about what happened afterwards. The crew offered Shatner the rest of the day off, despite the studio's tight deadlines; it would be hours before he could catch a flight home to Montreal. He didn't want to be alone, however, and insisted on working through his usual hours, though he acted entirely on autopilot in a barely comprehending haze, guided through his scenes by Nimoy and Finnerman to such a degree that he seemed entirely normal to people like Paskey.

Shatner later said that, as much as it was an absolute nightmare at the time, in retrospect it was his favorite TOS experience because while he didn't remember the details of much of anything that day, the kindness of Finnerman and Nimoy on that day left such a strong impression. Even in much-later interviews where he's straining to remember Finnerman's name, he'll chatter about how incredibly compassionate and thoughtful he was as a person.

So, back to January of 1967: Shatner left for Montreal, and the crew were left with a challenging episode (the reason it was taken from new director Ralph Senensky and reassigned in the first place) without the lead actor, and trying to operate within the incredibly tight schedule that all episodes were made on at the time (slightly more generous before Paramount acquired Desilu and Star Trek with it, but still, what we'd consider labor violations). They decided to handle the problem by filming as much material as possible for "The Devil in the Dark" that could technically be done without Shatner there—basically, moments where Kirk isn't present, or where you don't see his face or hear his voice. It's actually a pretty Kirk-centric episode, so this took some doing, but they had Eddie Paskey come in and, explaining nothing to him, stand in for as many of Kirk's scenes as possible.

So, Finnerman managed to:

help console and guide the devastated lead actor, and film the scenes he was even there for in such a way as to obscure the fact that Shatner was blankly going through the motions of his scenes and steered around by Nimoy

film Paskey as Kirk as much as possible, without giving away the fact that the Kirk in these scenes was a completely different person to the audience or the reasons for the extra hours to Paskey himself

go back to full-throttle normal work as soon as Shatner returned from the funeral (still not at his best), at which point he and Nimoy quickly had one of their many spats and weren't even talking to each other beyond scripted lines

light and film the Horta (who looks roughly like a papier-mâché pizza monster) as a creature evoking real fear and then real pathos

also, the episode lacks the usual TOS eye candy to buy time, except Nimoy and (when available) Shatner themselves, since the Horta is the only female character in it with any significant screen time.

It's one of the greatest, most visually haunting, and well-characterized Star Trek episodes of all time.

When it came to make a DS9/TOS crossover episode for the anniversary, Finnerman's work remained so brilliantly inimitable that the DS9 team literally couldn't imitate it on their own, and had to personally contact Finnerman himself to figure out how to create the "look" of TOS for their own episode.

He finally won an Emmy for his work in cinematography in 1978, and in 1996, he was (very deservingly) inducted into the Producers' Guild Hall of Fame for Star Trek. He retired in 2002 (aged 70), and died in 2011, buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles, the cemeteries and mortuary where especially prominent Jewish people in US arts and entertainments are often interred. It's not hard to see why it seemed an appropriate resting place.

[deepdwellingsteamboat]

STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES 1966 – 1969・2x07 Catspaw

[annabelle--cane]

grace, en route to erid, lying down under a quilt in the dark: *whispering* hey rocky

rocky: shhh grace asleep now

grace: no, 'm awake

rocky: grace asleep now, command.

grace: I just wanted to say--

rocky: grace need sleep now, you always stupid when you try to speak at this time.

grace: I just wanted to say that if you're, I don't know, still a little mad or resentful about me trying to operate on your radiators and almost killing you that one time--

rocky: no no no, we talk about this before, rocky not mad. not happy about it, either, but understand. I live, is okay.

grace: yeah yeah, I remember, you were weirdly calm about it in a way that was a liiiittle concerning. so, yknow, if you were upset and holding something back to try 'n be nice--

rocky: rocky is not nice.

grace: okay not true. BUT, right, if you DID have some feelings that you weren't letting yourself vent, I was just thinking that, like, if you wanted to make it even and express some of your frustration, I would let--I mean, if you wanted to, and if you asked, if you thought you could get something out of it, like, either scientifically or emotionally or something, I wouldn't actually say "no" if you said that you wanted to. yknow. operate on me. like as mini-revenge.

rocky:

rocky: rocky no want "revenge." statement.

grace: aw, are you sure? 🥺

rocky:

grace:

rocky:

grace: ...I have been awake for, uh, twenty-two hours. sooo maybe we just forget I said any of that? maybe ignore all of that? ha ha. ha.

rocky: no I will remember this clearly until my death.

[thejoeyest]

My favorite thing about the Project hail mary fandom is that they just dgaf about shipping discourse. Other fandoms will legit send death threats over ship wars, but in project hail mary its:

- Grace is aroace

- Or maybe he’s the red string soulmate of the music space spider

- Or maybe he’s the dead malefailure bf of the woman who sent him to space

- Or perhaps he’s in a cute domestic mlm relationship with markiplier

And nobody argues with any of this. Like you see someone else shipping something different and you ACTUALLY stay in your lane!! This should be normalized but it’s just such a foreign concept to me being in the TADC and (formerly) Dandy’s fandoms.

[razielim]

Or possibly he's drowning in doomed yaoi!!!!

[snaillesnaille]

streets and sodium lights

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Lerp Psyllids: these insects feed on plant sap and then use the excess sugar to build protective structures around themselves

Above: three different species of lerp psyllid

These tiny, aphid-like creatures are commonly known as lerp psyllids or jumping plant lice. Their nymphs have specialized mouthparts that can extract the sap from certain plants, and the sugar is then excreted as a liquid that quickly crystalizes when it hits the air, allowing the nymphs to build intricate structures known as lerps.

Above: psyllid nymphs hiding beneath their lerps, likely Creiis corniculatus and Creiis costatus

As this article explains:

Lerps are basically pure starch with some proteins and fats. They are created by psyllids, which are tiny, sap-sucking insects. When psyllid nymphs imbibe tree sap, their gut absorbs the amino acids and nutrients, but they quickly excrete the water as honeydew and the sugar as lerps.

Above: the lerps of two different psyllids from genus Cardiaspina

Each species produces its own distinctive type of lerp. Some of these structures resemble clamshells, while others have a fuzzy, glassy, or basket-like appearance; most lerps measure roughly 1-5mm in diameter, but some have a wavy or tube-like shape that can extend to a length of more than 10mm.

Above: a pair of exposed psyllid nymphs

These structures provide the nymphs with some measure of protection from parasites, predators, and dehydration, but they can also attract some unwanted attention:

Unfortunately for psyllids, their homes taste sweet (containing more starch than cane sugar) and are a prized food of birds, mammals and opportunistic humans. The level of sweetness fluctuates depending on the season, the weather, and the species of psyllid.

Above: animals feeding on some sweet, delicious lerps

The nymphs themselves are tiny, and their bodies often have a flat, oblong shape that allows them to slide beneath their lerps more effectively. They spend all five stages of nymphal development tucked beneath their lerps; if the structure is damaged, removed, or destroyed, the nymph immediately begins to construct a new one.

Above: genus Hyalinaspis and genus Cardiaspina

When they finally reach maturity, the psyllids shed their exuviae (molted exoskeletons) and emerge from their lerps as fully-developed adults. The adult psyllids are winged insects that look like miniature cicadas, with their bodies typically measuring less than 5mm long (that's about 1/5th of an inch).

Most lerp-forming psyllids are native to Australia, but they also occur as an invasive species in many other parts of the world.

Above: nymphs of genus Glycaspis and Cardiaspina

Lerps have traditionally been incorporated into the beliefs and practices of Aboriginal cultures in Australia, which is home to more than 300 different species of lerp-producing psyllid:

Lerps feature in Aboriginal calendars, ceremonies, mythology, and cosmology, all of which have embedded biocultural knowledge about the time and place for optimal collection. These insects are central to Indigenous cultures, yet Western science knows surprisingly little about their taxonomy, biology, and ecology.

Above: an unidentified lerp psyllid

The term "lerp" actually comes from the indigenous word lerep, which means "sweet" in the Wemba-Wemba language of southeastern Australia.

Above: Eucalyptolyma maideni, also known as a spotted gum lerp psyllid, hiding beneath its fern-like lerp

Sources & More Info:

Land for Wildlife: Lerps: One of Nature's Sweet Offerings

Business Queensland: Psyllids and Lerps

Journal of Ethnobiology: Indigenous Use of Lerps in Australia: So Much More than a Sweet Treat

Aboriginal Peoples and Terrestrial Invertebrates in Australia: Lerp and Honeydew

iNaturalist: Subfamily Spondyliaspidinae

Brisbane Insects: Lerp Insects

[boykavalier]

MURDERBOT 1.07 "Complementary Species"

[niangdd]

metanoia……

It’s not finished but I can’t wait 😛

[jotctumb]

Alas I have followed too many cool people and I can no longer keep up with my 'following' tab. I must accept my fate. I can not unfollow anyone, they are all too cool.

[pregnanthudsonwilliams]

not naming names but some of you are so creative and talented it's an honor to have you in my phone

[lovesongs4robots]

finished the vid about everyone's (well, mine at least) favorite homme and his ongoing crise ontologique 😌

Those Who Dream (a Gurathin Anti-Lullaby)

Gurathin is not asleep when SecUnit leaves. Of course he is not. In a place where everything is for sale, some cannot afford to.

***turn on the English subs/transcript on YouTube for the lyrics translation (by me)***

a slightly longer description of the vid on AO3 ❤️

[lovesongs4robots]

plugging in that this vid will be screening at the World Wide Slash Con vid show this Saturday (tysm, @worldwideslash, for reaching out about wanting to include it!).

the con is run online (discord/zoom) july 17-19 and the programming looks really awesome. there are panels and screenings and vid shows (including gen vids and slash and otherwise queer ships-centered vids). so cool!

[wheelchairoftheseus]

how manual wheelchair users move (explainer for non-users)

frequently when i’m out and about with someone walking, they can’t anticipate what path i will take and therefore they’re in my way pretty frequently. this is fine! i can politely ask them to step to the side. but it makes me think about how little non-wheelchair users understand the way wheelchair users move. as someone who used to walk everywhere, it was an adjustment period for me to figure out how to navigate the world in a chair. here are some things that didn’t occur to me so that you don’t cut off your friend right as they’re building momentum to go up a ramp 😆

for context, i use an active manual chair. the world is very different in a power chair. even among active manual chair users, there is a huge diversity in physicality and strategies for getting around. this is a general guide that i think will apply to most manual wheelchair users. i’m starting super basic and getting more complicated as i go.

———

1. manual wheelchairs are a momentum game. it is very easy to maintain speed and direction. but speeding up, slowing down, or turning, is hard. one thing this affects is if we’re on a wavy sidewalk or other twisty-turny walkway, that is a pain in the ass and i am taking as straight a path as i can.

2. wheelchair users also have to pay attention to the slope and condition of the pavement, so our path somewhere will be different than yours, even if we’re taking the same route to the same place. for example, i usually have to go down slopes straight, not diagonally, to avoid tipping over sideways. one area this affects is crosswalks. many intersections have one curb cut for both roads you could cross, which means i will go down curb cuts to a crosswalk as if i am aiming for the middle of the intersection.

your path in orange, mine in blue. to you it seems indirect, but to me it’s the path of least resistance.

i also will be building speed in the second half of the crosswalk. this is a much easier way to tackle a ramp. if i approach with momentum, i won’t have to drag myself up the slope once i get to it.

3. building momentum and maintaining it is only half of the job. the other half is stopping. manual wheelchairs cannot stop on a dime if they’re moving with any kind of speed. if i tried to stop immediately when going downhill, i would fly out of the chair. so don’t walk right into the path of a wheelchair in motion and then stop! i will have to turn to the side very quickly and hope i don’t tip. i can’t tell you how often parents pushing strollers will stop their stroller directly in my path and then get offended when i am alarmed and turn sharply to avoid hitting their child. from their perspective, i was being careless and going “too fast.” in reality, normal walking speed takes a few feet to slow down from and stop.

4. in terms of slope. see this street in san francisco?

i can’t go down this street, it’s way too steep. i would give myself friction burns on my palms trying to control my speed. if i was in a situation where there was no avoiding this street, like in an emergency, i would be breaking my straight-slope rule and zig-zagging in the middle of the road.

this would require several zig-zags back and forth, more than the four that i drew. i also could not go up this road other than with this method. up or down, i risk tipping over sideways if i’m not careful.

4. in a similar vein, consider terrain. slopes with grass or carpet take huge amounts of energy to get up. this grassy hill isn’t insurmountable, but it would take me like thirty minutes to get up there. honestly i would probably go backwards, because it’s easier to pull yourself up a slope than push yourself.

other types of terrain can be completely immobilizing, though. this decorative gravel pathway is beautiful, and inaccessible to me. my casters (front wheels) simply will not go through that.

5. in terms of walkways and obstacles. if there’s a deep gap in the pavement lined up the way i’m going, and it’s, say, an inch wide, that is an obstacle for me. my casters are one inch wide, and my back wheels are an inch and a half. i’ll get stuck in it like a train on a track.

i have to straddle this, even if it means being too close to the middle of the sidewalk and preventing us from walking side by side.

similarly, if a crack is greater than an inch high, i’m gonna wheelie over it. at two inches, i have to. a wheelie may require a change in speed, either faster or slower depending on the person.

i have 4 inch casters, so a lip as little as 2 inches will stop me in my tracks. a lip as little as one inch, hit with any speed, can knock my casters out of square. casters can get knocked out of alignment pretty easily depending on the chair. i’d rather not have to pull out an allen wrench and a level, so i’m gonna wheelie.

this happened when i hit about a 1.5” lip on a pavement crack when i was going downhill at maybe 3mph.

6. putting it all together. see how diagonal this crack is?

this is another situation where i have to go straight relative to the slope. because that crack is wide, it will probably also require a wheelie. if i tried to approach that straight relative to the sidewalk, my left caster would get up the slope, i’d wheelie, then my right caster would land in the crack. i have to go this way.

(also lol at the trash can blocking the curb cut)

these are just a few things to keep in mind when walking about with a wheelchair user! ofc the best strategy always is just to listen when someone asks you to move out of their way 😆 but i think being able to anticipate movement a little better will help it seem less random. feel free to ask any questions!

[trollkatt]

Big Jack

Pet Foolery, #93

[gravitren]

We all know what erectile dysfunction is but literally no one is ever taught what vaginismus is and it can cause people to feel extremely lost, broken, and cause people to take their own lives. Raise. Awareness.

[pokemonprofessor]

For the uninformed, vaginismus is when the vagina painfully tightens and spasms when faced with pressure, usually from anything trying to insert into the vagina. It’s the reason I can’t wear tampons, and why many people can’t have vaginal sex without severe pain.

There’s not a lot of treatments, and there isn’t a single one that is for vaginismus exclusively - they’re all medications or treatments to treat symptoms, but not the causes. In fact, for a long time doctors waved off vaginismus as a purely psychological disorder in cis women.

Seriously, this is so unaddressed and uncared for in medical circles. Please spread awareness, even if all it’s for is to let those who have it but don’t have a name for it finally be able to understand what’s happening to their bodies.

[certifiedsexed]

Certified Sex Ed Post!

[mystery-ink]

Hi hello! This post is almost 10 years old and there ARE treatments for this. Vaginismus is otherwise known as pelvic hypertonia and it is a MUSCULAR condition that can be caused by many different factors including endometriosis, trauma, chronic UTIs, and connective tissue disorders.

It’s incredibly common! And it can be treated by physiotherapy.

I know this because I’m currently undergoing physio and although it can take months to recover, I’m already seeing improvement. A lot of the pelvic floor exercises are available online, but if you have these symptoms please TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR and see if you can get a physio referral (or investigation for underlying causes like endometriosis).

Also, my additions to posts never get reblogged so a note to my followers: this is SUPER IMPORTANT ISSUE that affects many people and is rarely talked about. Please reblog, and please share this info with as many people as possible.

Pelvic hypertonia/vaginismus is incredibly debilitating and psychologically damaging but it CAN BE TREATED. Spread the word, and you never know who you’ll be throwing a lifeline to.