Languor

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes. [G. Carpentier] All the love to @steveshain for the avatar! He/They, Slovenia. Headline photo was taken in Berlin aquarium.

[weepingwidar]

Anthony Hurd (American, 1975) - You Have This Hold Over Me (2025)

[copdog1234]

[dailycatsblog]

[mimsymars]

I did bird names FIRST just to set the record straight….I am MUCH more passionate about birds than fish!!!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Okay where does your passion for bones fit in.

[blumineck]

Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)

Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!

The Bluminarmour Project

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

[davy-jones-lock3r]

happy pride month my friends <3

[siderealcity]

After System Collapse and Rapport, I can't help thinking about how completely and utterly insane ART and Murderbot's first meeting was from ART's perspective.

UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART's home station. In Mihira and New Tideland's system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren't any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they've been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn't either. They're not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it's a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.

And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.

So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That's point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.

And ART's paranoia is easily on par with Tarik's, generally speaking. Even though it's never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit's got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it's wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it's supposed to be mistaken for a human -- okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.

But there's no point in it trying to pretend it's a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It's not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can't get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can't get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it's doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.

And it just pings ART directly.

Not even... trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.

That is... possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART's crew (who aren't even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They're really bad at this.

And then it asks for a ride--which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily--wait. What the fuck? It's offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.

There is no human handler.

ART doesn't even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.

Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.

And apparently it's hitchhiking?

This raises so many more questions than it answers.

Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.

ART's explanation of, "I was curious about you," for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.

This is the equivalent of a frigging walrus ringing your doorbell.

[shutyourmoustache]

This is the sorta segment I wish still existed in kids’ shows. Soothing voiceover, mellow music, no flashy graphics. Just a calm behind-the-scenes look at something you might call mundane but that most of us would never have a clue about if no one pulled the curtain back to reveal its inner workings.

[fangirl-overload13]

Okay but imagine being in kindergarten and seeing something like this, you would absolutely change your mind about wanting to be a fire fighter or teacher or whatever Job you've been told is cool and possible to grow up to do because wait a minute it's just like play-doh, there's so much it's kept in trash cans, you can use your hands to smear icing everywhere? It smells like cinnamon buns all the time?! Yes please!

[shutyourmoustache]

I vaguely remember having a field trip to a bakery in kindergarten and thinking croissants were magical and that I wanted to make them in the future cuz kneading dough looked fun.

[aquilacalvitium]

This is way more engaging and easier to watch than those sped-up videos with no voiceover and trashy pop music playing over the top.

It actually does make me remember similar segments in shows I watched growing up, like that one program. I don't remember what exactly the segment was about but it followed a young boy, and he briefly mentioned stopping at a friend's house and trying goat milk for the first time.

Very little else stuck with me but it sure made me curious about goat milk.

[wanderinginkpot]

"I asked chatgpt-"

Well I asked the host of the community radio station of a small desert town and he said "Don't let numbers tell you what to do. You are blood and earth, not theory and chalk", so maybe think about that.

[pooblet]

SOURCE

I SAW THIS & IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF @shrimp-bird

[gallusrostromegalus]

@montereybayaquarium

[whenfatecollides]

Xena Warrior Princess 3.05 Gabrielle's hope

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

She dodged a bullet

[mercifulmother]

– Animorphs: The Reunion, K.A. Applegate

[dreamingeternally]

"The fun thing for us for that end sequence was his costume -- what he would have left over from the ship. I don't really think you see it in the film but the trousers that he's wearing, they're cut from one of the flight suits. And we've done a belt buckle that's made of xenonite that Rocky would've made for him. And all of the sewing on it is a little bit - it's nowhere near as good as Jenny would normally do, so we had to purposely ask Jenny to do bad sewing at the top of his trousers, so it'd look like he would've done it.

And then our brilliant breakdown department, run by Tim Shanahan, they break everything down to look like it's 10, 20 years old. So his cardigan and the t-shirt's all faded. And even on the laces -- the laces in his chuck taylors -- because your laces always break after a certain period of time, so we found stuff that was on the ship, like elastics and stuff. There's a nice big close-up actually in the film, so you can see that they're not normal laces, they're like stuff that he would've got from the ship that he's made as make-shift laces."

Glyn Dillon, one of the costume designers on Project Hail Mary

[theartofanimation]

Yare Yue  -  https://www.facebook.com/yareyue  -  https://www.instagram.com/yueyare  -  https://www.behance.net/392242300bf5d

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that Xena, for all of its ridiculousness and cheesiness, did a better job of conveying the allure of evil than just about any other series I've ever seen. Like it understands that violence, no matter how justifiably it starts out, is addictive, and that hatred poisons you until you can't feel real joy anymore, and it's strange to me that I've never seen it laid out so simply elsewhere.

[rachandroll]

...so THAT'S what sleeper cell activation feels like. Because yes, YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, because Xena is such an interesting lightning-in-a-bottle-case study! While I would never discount the work done by the writers, Xena as a show is almost perfectly positioned both historically and structurally to consistently explore that theme.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

It's fucking rad and interesting.

[calamitys-child]

I always say that the thing which sets Sargent apart as a portrait artist is that he draws/paints literally every subject - no matter their gender, social position, life vs representational drawing etc - like he is right that minute realising he's desperately in love with them. And it rules every single time.

[calamitys-child]

Examples pulled just from his Wikipedia page most popular works. Absolutely devastating scenes for bisexuals for over a century

[shorthistorian]

Don't forget the ALLIGATORS. He loves them too.

[stromcuzewon]

this is probably my favorite tiktok of all time and I finally got around to showing it to my dad the other day and now he comes home every day and tells me about all the places he saw crumbling concrete and says "guess they didn't add enough chinchilla flakes"

[thatdisasterauthor]

My dad has worked in construction is whole life, primarily with a company that does concrete foundations, and I immediately sent him this back when I first found it on TikTok, and he IMMEDIATELY shared it with everyone he worked with. They apparently still quote it on his job sites to this day.