I absolutely love the casting for the AOS movies because yeah Chris Pine kinda looks like a yassified Jim Kirk, and Zachary Quinto does look like a younger Spock. But then they looked at big, tall, broad shouldered, muscular action man Karl Urban and went. Yeah, I think he can play scrawny bean pole shrimp postured, looks like a light gust of wind would blow him away, Leonard McCoy. And by god, were they correct because it was like the spirit of Deforest Kelley himself possessed him to play Bones.
not wanting to be outdone by the benders in the gang, sokka invents the flamethrower, the supersoaker, the leaf blower, and the concept of throwing rocks at people
Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"
And they were like "What?"
And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."
And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"
And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.
And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.
Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.
Maybe it's naive of me, but whenever I see portraits like this, with just a father and daughter, it restores my faith in humanity a little. Because people seem to love this idea that fathers never loved their daughters in the past and only saw them as bargaining chips for marriage or whatever, but look at the guy in the first portrait on the left, he loves that little girl! And the dad trying to do his work while his daughter bothers him with an Old Timey Barbie. The man teaching his daughter geography, his expression is so soft! The way the man in the last portrait holds the little girl's hand! And none of these are incidental, these aren't photographs, someone (probably the father) paid good money and sat down for hours so that they could have a painting of themselves and their daughter. Probably because they loved their daughter.
From left to right: 1795 Michał Jerzy Mniszech with his daughter Elżbieta - Marcello Bacciarelli; Christopher Anstey and his daughter Mary Ann by William Hoare 1776; A Musician and His Daughter by Thomas de Keyser 1629; The Geography Lesson (Portrait of Monsieur G. and His Daughter), 1812; Jean-baptiste Isabey And His Daughter; Portrait of a Young Girl and Older Man by William Harrison Scarborough
(this is probably somewhat related to my other favourite genre of painting, Husband With Multiple Kids Making Come Hither Eyes At His Wife)
oh I love those! People being people is one of my favourite kinds of paintings and an important reminder that people in past times were not all that different. There were dads who loved their daughters fiercely. There were fathers who happily looked after their babies too. The German reformer Philip Melanchton for example had a cradle in his office. His wife was busy organising a household for 20 people- she was out and about, he mostly worked in his office, it made sense for him to look after their babies too babies while she dropped by at snack time.
in fact often if it was kind of safe dads had the babies in their workshops for just that reason as we can see in these paintings:
The left is “the busy father” by Theodore Weber, the right one is “At the china repairer’s “ by Wenzel Tornoe. All dads who are actively involved in childcare and a painter who thought it was a cute topic rather than anything ridiculous.
Every vampire is all "oh drinking blood is better than any food, drugs, even sex" but I don't even believe them because all of them were literally made before the invention of really good drugs and before we got all the nice foods from the new world, so I don't trust any of their opinions. Lestat has never ate a potato and Armand hasn't ever even tasted tomaotes. The only guy I trust is Daniel Molloy who has probably tried every drug on earth, has definitely ate nice food and would be a valid judge on how good drinking blood really is.
Lestat was born circa 1760. Europe had potatoes by then. Armand was born circa 1480, though, so that part's correct. Armand has tasted neither tomato nor potato.
They did have potatoes yes but I doubt Lestat has ever had any since he was an aristocrat (even if he was a poor one)
By the 18th century, most French recipes were rooted in religion, so while orchard fruits and game birds were celebrated, anything dug from the “devil’s dirt”—like onions, carrots, and especially potatoes—was deemed fit only for peasants and swine. People believed the potato was akinto the deadly nightshade and linked to leprosy due to its spotted skin; it was deemed un-Christian, and its cultivation for human use was banned.
I knew that the potato is technically akin to the deadly nightshade, as is the tomato, in that they're all in the Solanaceae family, but I didn't know that the 18th-century French thought potatoes were unfit for [upper-class] human consumption.
Did they think the same about tomatoes, or were those seen as ok because they grow aboveground?
Actually, wait, I think maybe I have heard something about this before. Wasn't there a thing where a government started posting guards around potato fields in order to trick people into thinking they were valuable, so that they'd get over their aversion to eating them? Or something like that? Maybe somewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, if not in France? This is very faintly ringing a bell.
(Linked article is paywalled, so idk if there's something about that in there.)
I'm also still curious how they felt about tomatoes.
I think the upper classes used to believe that tomatoes were poisonous, because tomatoes are a bit acidic and rich people used something poisonous in their cutlery/dishware that the tomatoes could slightly dissolve, which would then poison the rich people. And since their dishware only noticeably poisoned them when they ate tomatoes, they figured the tomatoes were the culprits and stopped touching them.
Peasants, whose dishware was all wood and pottery, did not have this problem, so tomatoes were just fine by them.
I literally love all of you, but as a Tumblr veteran, Tumblr's main feature is the reblog feature. It is the beating heart of the dashboard and the foundation for a chronological timeline. The For You page here should not be your default setting.
You guys have got to start reblogging stuff you enjoy, especially, specifically gifs and fan art but also fics and fan theories or even hot takes if you're not afraid of a lil discourse. I'm tired of being the first or third reblog for a person's post and then seeing my blog's followers do nothing but hit like, while blogs sit there with no new posts in months or years!
Reblog more stuff please. Thank you, have a good day.
You're not even going to reblog this post are you
you don't need to write a dark deconstruction of Peter Pan where he's willing to kill people and his state of eternal childhood makes him morally ambiguous, JM Barrie already wrote one and it's called Peter Pan
To clarify, this post isn't about the misconception thrown around by clickbait online listicles that "Peter kills the Lost Boys when they get too old"*. Any real horror that comes from the story, IMO, is about Peter as a VICTIM. His very existence is a tragedy.
Peter, like a lot of mythological fairies and fae folk on which he's based, is stuck in a sort of eternal childhood not just of body, but of mind. While to another child this would obviously be a dream come true it becomes VERY clear over the course of the story that he's deeply suffering under the surface. Peter Pan was written partially as a critique on Victorian and Edwardian ideas about childhood innocence. JM Barrie, when describing some of the fundamental traits of children, calls them gay, innocent, and heartless. Peter being morally grey is text, not subtext.
I'm not saying a more adult-oriented retelling shouldn't exist, I'm a grown-ass man who still loves this very story. But shouldn't it touch on a topic less shallow?
You exist in a state of eternal play. No parents to tell you what to do - or take care of you. You have all the friends you want, until they start to grow up, and you stay the same, no matter what you do, and you don't know why. Finally one day you bring home a "mother" who isn't a grown up, and it's so much fun! It's amazing! But she starts getting scared because she's forgetting things, forgetting the way her own mother looked (her real, grown-up mother, the thing you never had, the thing you hate and want most of all), so she leaves you, and you let her go, because you have to. And maybe she comes back, but every year she's more and more different until suddenly, you don't know her anymore. But that doesn't matter, because she has another little girl, so you can have another mother, so why not start again?
And you do. And thus it will go on. As long as children are gay, and innocent, and heartless.
* That's basically a throwaway line that he tells Wendy as a sort of brag, and imo I think we're supposed to take it with a grain of salt, since Peter is established to be a habitual liar and mis-rememberer of events, especially when he thinks it might make him look cool. The Lost Boys we meet in the original 1911 novel go home with the Darling children and are adopted into the family, something which you might not know if you only saw the Disney movie, so we know they aren't "actually dead and Neverland is heaven" and Peter didn't kill them after the Darlings left. In the official sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet (yes there is a canon sequel, it was written in 2006 by Geraldine McCaughrean after she won a contest put forward by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the owners of the Peter Pan IP, it's amazing and everyone should read it right now) we actually meet some of the OTHER Lost Boys who were banished by peter for "growing up" and are still stuck in Neverland, and they still know Wendy (she comes back every year for the spring cleaning until Peter just... forgets about her). So there's no real evidence that Peter really did kill any of the Lost Boys, and in fact more evidence to the contrary - the closest we see him come to that is when he believes Tootles has accidentally shot and killed Wendy. When it's revealed that Wendy is fine, Tootles is forgiven entirely.
These two stories work so well as mirrors to each other that I sometimes like to say that AIW is an imaginary world running on a child's version of "adult logic" whereas in Peter Pan the "real" world runs on child logic. Why do mothers seem to know everything? Well...
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers.
Obviously your mom can literally rummage through your thoughts! This is the most out-there example but generally in the story children's ideas about the world are just objectively correct. Mr. Darling's work is very abstract except for the idea of sums and small talk, Mrs. Darling can watch her kids through night-lights, the stars talk to Peter; I often say that Peter Pan is so surreal that, were it to come out today, could only be marketed to very young children (who would accept the weirdness of a fairy tale) or adults/very advanced readers who are used to surrealism (who can understand when not everything is meant to be understood in a book). Alice In Wonderland definitely has a current day reputation of being surreal, but I think Peter Pan deserves that as well, it is BUCK-WILD in some parts.
@fagboysupreme could def explain this better than me because whatever brainworms i have for Peter Pan he has the wondrrland variety
so wonderland is in practice a reverse of neverland. neverland works on kid logic so everything makes sense to kids and only to kids, and this kind of nonsense leaches out into the real world and that's why mr. darling's job is just The Concept Of Business and why crawling into the doghouse is treated as a reasonable response to upsetting your children.
wonderland, by contrast, is as nonsensical as it is because it's about societal rules and the way children are treated by adults, none of which makes much sense to a kid. especially during the time it was written. certain sections of it parody old virtue poems that children had to read in school and that probably seemed super dumb and arbitrary but you had to do it anyway. despite having lots of personality, alice is rarely allowed to be an active participant in her own adventure because she keeps getting pushed and pulled and kicked out of places and asked to perform pointless tasks and play stupid games.
they both meet at a sort of central point of "children see things in a very specific way and adult things are basically just nonsense" to the point that mr. darling's Nebulous Business Job is more or less an equivalent to "painting the roses red", representing the vague childlike idea of Having A Job and Having A Boss You Hate
alice is also notably sort of weird? granted wonderland turns out to be a dream and in dreams you just sort of accept things as standard, but she doesn't really do that. her reactions to most things are "well hey now i don't care for your wacky talk" as opposed to "holy shit why are we playing croquet with birds??" like she recognizes the circumstances as weird but not the earth-shattering weirdness that it so clearly is.
an edgy alice in wonderland story can and should, in my opinion, be more like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" -- it should be about tangibly representing stuff like childhood trauma. or, to contrast, it could be about the fear of growing up, the fear of responsibility. but to me the best "edgy" takes on wonderland are just about taking the pre-existing twisted world of wonderland and twisting it further. Jan Svankmajer's "Alice" is a good example of this, it's a relatively faithful adaptation of the story but replaces wonderland's whimsy with a sort of beige, crusty vibe, using a lot of animal skulls and other creepy things. it relies on the uncanny valley, to an extent.
a peepan and alice crossover is something ive had in the back of my head for awhile now, because either way there's an interesting interaction. if alice goes to neverland, she'd probably have a really good time? like she certainly wouldn't question not having to attend school, at least up until what she wants out of neverland clashes with what peter wants. if peter goes to wonderland, it would further dive into the arbitrary nature of childhood, only from the perspective of a person who has never had to experience anything resembling a normal childhood. which i think is objectively cool as shit.
i also want to point out the third point of this triangle that came much much later, "Coraline", where the alternate world is instead what an adult would assume a child wants. idk that i need to brainstorm more on but theres something there about alternate worlds in service of a child's mindset.
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