★
Today's Document
bliss lane
Misplaced Lens Cap
The Stonewall Inn
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Monterey Bay Aquarium
d e v o n
Cosimo Galluzzi
Cosmic Funnies
almost home
Andulka
Claire Keane
YOU ARE THE REASON
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
The Bowery Presents
No title available
@theartofmadeline
we're not kids anymore.
No title available
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Belgium
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Israel
seen from Germany
@mountpyro
This one was made by working backwards from the idea of a hostage note.
It's even worse when Adrian tries. Just does that parent thing of no context message really quick that turns out really ominous. The note to Grace just says something like:
I have him
Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.
you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands
op how does it feel to be the most correct person on earth
My trying to write a dialogue and my professor marking me down for "run-on" sentences.
Sir, I have ADHD, that's how I speak AND think.
So is no one going to mention that Dr. Ryland Grace just becomes eridian Sandy Cheeks?
Rocky and Grace's friendship is everything to me.
But,
What if was different? What if Rocky was the eridian equivalent of the "staggering waste of carbon" and he and Grace just argued all the time?
But still had to save two planets together, still wanted each other safe, still risked death to keep each other safe?
But no hard-won friendship. No ship gets sailed.
Imagine being codependent on someone you can't stand.
That'd be so fucking funny.
Genuinely evil and dark-sided to put the periods between the letters in "milf" and "dilf." Like what is M.I.L.F. that is a supervillain organization composed entirely of cougars. Whoa that's a great idea actually post canceled hold on
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
Terraforming Mars should be the victory lap of our species, not a last resort.
The problem with using "guns aren't cool" and "guns aren't toys" as part of your gun control messaging is that guns are very obviously cool toys and everybody knows this. People go to shooting ranges or shoot cans in the woods for the same reason they play golf or Magic the gathering. It's playing toys!! Dangerous toys, but still toys.
And when you include blatant falsehoods in your messaging, now nobody believes you when you talk statistics on gun use in domestic violence or other serious issues.
Maybe I'm an outlier in the pro gun control group, because I'm a MechE and I love machines that perform a precise function with clever bits of steel, and i went to a summer camp when i was 11 or 12 where they had a shooting range with dinky little .22 rifles, but like
I can't be the only one who understands this, right?
yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."
the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.
my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.
oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.
with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.
he just needs some time to adjust LAKSDJKLADJ
my other PHM art here
VERY big fan of the "Eridians experiment on Grace to make him live longer/less laboriously" trope.
Dumb Soulmate AU idea:
Dr. Grave and Eva Stratt are (platonic) soulmates with the "name/first phrase on your skin that turns black by death" thing.
Eva still has to send him up to space, to the horror of everyone but especially Grace, but then--around the date of arrival at Tau Ceti--everyone starts fucking giving her the 👀 periodically to see if "who's there? Not good at jokes who?" has turned black yet and it just... never does.
Not in a few months past the arrival at Tau Ceti's system, and even after that.
There's just this period of everyone around Eva Stratt getting less pitying and more impatient while waiting for her sacrificial soulmate to croak.
A few years pass and they calculate he is completely out of usable food even if he was the only one to eat it the whole time.
I like to think that to the eridian scientific community Grace and Rocky do their best to look professional. Individuals who saved the stars and were able to make the first contact happen.
Then there is Adrian, who knows the true, and has see the two of them been completly dorks, and replicate the scene of Lilo and Stitch uncontable times.
Rocky, poiting Grace to Adrian: He is touching me! He is touching me!
Grace, who has a finger just a milimeter over Rocky's suit: I'm not touching you.
Rocky, poiting more agressively: AAAAH! YOU ARE TOUCHING ME!
Grace, pretending to kiss Rocky: Not touching!
And that is the life of Adrian, having to know that the saviors of Erid and Earth are just two children when there are together.
I'm absolutely positive that Mary had to stop them from murdering each other out of boredom at least twice on the way to Erid
one person's "ugghh this trope is so overdone" is another person's "oooooohohohohohohohoho"
watching twilight and I keep making myself laugh imagining if it was just alucard or any other vampire instead of Edward. POV nausferatu goes to ur school
This is all one take?? And they have MULTIPLE people as Robin Hood so that they can "cut" between them by spinning the camera??? Wow. That's so complicated but super clever
OK, so, what's happening here isn't actually a single take. But that's OK, because faking a good one oner is often just as hard as doing one for real.
There's definitely only one Robin. Sorry, but even with identical twins, those guys are flat out identical, down to the chest hair.
So how are they doing this?
It's called a whip cut. Every time the camera swings, the view smears for a moment. By carefully blending the start of one smear with the end of another they can stitch together two shots in a way that appears completely contiguous.
I want to be 100% clear; this is not easy. It takes care and knowledge of your tools to make the cuts this smooth, and your original footage can't have any noticeable differences in stuff like lighting. This took work, all for a bit. I'm actually more impressed at how they faked this being in one take than I would have been if I thought it was real.
Wulf: Doll, we have to clean this place up a little. Danny is coming over for a visit.
Lady Gotham: THE KING?! THE KING IS COMING?! WE HAVE TO FIND A BETTER LODGINGS FOR HIM.
Wulf: Why?
Lady Gotham: I will not make the same mistake again. I made the mistake of disrespecting the King and got turn into this.
Wulf: The human definition of gorgeous?
Lady Gotham: Humans dont know real beauty. They only know brief flashes of infatuation that melt into resentment
Wulf: Damn, who hurt you?
Lady Gotham: Humans did. They're always trying to kill eachother, take advantage of eachother or harm eachother because of sheer boredom.
Wulf: Humans can't help their nature. It's a pity that they aren't meant to hold happiness for too long. I pity them.
Lady Gotham: Monsters the lot of them
Wulf: ...Yeah, monsters. Did you know my life ended because they found out my race existed? They wiped out all werewolves, erased us from history and then told lies of us only having fur on full moons. All because we were different then them.
Lady Gotham: I'm sorry. That must have been horrific.....You know what might make you feel better?
Wulf: What?
Lady Gotham: Breaking and Entering
Hours later:
Danny: This place is lovely. You two seem to be doing well for yourselves!
Lady Gotham: Thank you for your kind words, your Highness. It's a honor to know you find our home adequate
Danny: How did you get such a nice place?
Lady Gotham: The Drakes died-
Wulf: *kicks her*
Wulf: She means they moved. The Drakes moved and sold us this place at a decent price. Trying to get out quickly. Too many memories, you know?
Danny knowing they're lying: Memories of what?
Lady Gotham: The worst thing to happen to anyone: Adultery. Worse then your own core exploding from Obsession Deprivation
Wulf: No seriously, who hurt you?
Lady Gotham ignoring him: As you can tell they were most devastated and took everything with them.
Danny: Is that why we're having dinning on the floor? Can you two not afford new furniture?
Lady Gotham: Oh no! See there is a good reason for that. Right Wulf?
Wulf catching on: Its a human way of life to enlightenment.
Danny: Oh?
Wulf: Yes. Its a teaching from monks.
Danny: Monks?
Wulf: Yes, Tibetan Monks. Having no possessions beside shelter brings enlightenment.
Danny: That....actually makes sense.
Lady Gotham whispering: Nice cover. Who are the Tibetan Monks?
Wulf whispering back: I have no idea. I heard the neighbor mention it when we were looking for a way pass this place security.
Bruce easedropping with a listening device that glitching a bit due to Danny and only hearing bits of the conversations: Did I go to class with them????
Wulf: haha i'll just overshadow this--wait what?!
Gotham: Wait, don't!
Wulf: *gets ejected* woah... where did you learn to do that?
Batman: I WENT TO SCHOOL WITH YOOUUU!
Wulf:
Batman: I AM ALSO A BLACK BELT
Wulf: ?
Batman: WE WERE IN THE SAME. FUCKING. KARATE CLASS.
Gotham: "karate"?
Batman: *throwing batarangs* HORRIBLE DICKHEADS
Batman: YOU HORRIBLE DICKHEADS
