@peasant-player asked where huan’s high pony was for picture day… baby tyelpe agrees. uncle maedhros said everyone needs high ponytails, so everyone is getting them.
It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.
He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.
Like, look at this stuff????
It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!
Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.
And then there's this one:
The Fantasy
For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.
The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.
But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.
Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.
This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.
"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.
"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.
"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.
tl;dr: all "algorithmically" pushed stuff on a newsfeed is mostly ads. nothing that's really surprising form this vulture article, but it is dismal and makes me grateful for one website where you only see things from people you follow WITHOUT horrible short-form video content
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
Imagining Fëanor and Tolkien meeting and Fëanor just straight up not liking him lmao. It starts out well enough, but it soon turns out Tolkien's ideas about language are not actually all that much like those of an elf (insisting on th was about the erasure his mother, after all, and very much political), and it only gets worse when Fëanor finds out Tolkien has no craft, does not cook well (traditional elf man task as per LaCE) and worst of all claims to have written him into being.
Scrambling back and saying all subcreation comes about through god in the end really doesn't help.
on top of that, Tolkien's pipe irritates his sensitive nose.
Story in which Fëanor is actually Tolkien's subcreator in turn.
"In a house in England there lived a Man. Not a nasty, dark, cluttered house, filled with odds and ends and an moldy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, modern home with white walls, grey accents, an industrial touch and nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a Oxford home, and that means comfort. ... This Man was a very well-to-do professor, and his name was Tolkien."
To which Tolkien of course strongly objects in turn.
"So young Man," Fëanor says with a frown, "you truly believed this Story was yours? No, I simply imagined a world without the Valar, without Quendi to lead the Aftercomers along, exactly as they would have it; us all sequestered away in Valinor, so unreachable we might as well not exist, forever, with only the darkness to soothe your fears of the night. You were but a theme about mortal longing for more, for hope, of finding escape only in an imagined version of Eldalië through a glass, darkly. You never could survive without us, even if I had not been the one to make you up, imagining me."
New fandom debate; Tolkien yet another invention falsely attributed to Fëanor???
RE: will come back to your Great Man Theory comment as it relates to the historical impact of famous English authors later, but wholly agree his impact on the Story is exagerrated!! There were many mortal writers and why should he have had that much influence! He's barely even in the Story-- he lived for, what? 81 years! That's nothing. It had barely even started.
Besides I just don't think it's realistic to say Tolkien wrote both LoTR and the Silmarillion,
new version of the time loop plot but it's just an endless loop of author and character imagining one another (and never agreeing about who's writing who)
row breaks out as Fëanor turns out to prefer the mass in English because however much word sound matters to him (and all Elves)-- it makes no sense to him to say important things in a language its believers don't understand. This is simply not something that happens in any Elvish culture.
On top of that he remains unimpressed by Catholicism, says he wrote the trinity into the story as a joke and metaphor about his Silmarils (three jewels one Light).
Hot take; christianity actually a story about the Silmarillion. It is just never referenced directly because Fëanor considered that in bad taste. As he wrote through his philologist character J.R.R. Tolkien;
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers."
the implication here that Fëanor in this scenario is both the author of every extremely unnuanced pro- and anti- Fëanor take out there in the fandom.... feels in character tbh.
Jesus and the apostles were such a beautiful fictional reference to Frodo and the fellowship, very well done. and I love how he gave the Jesus character some Earendil symbolism too-- but i think Fëanáro Therindion messed up a bit when he tried to squash too many references to real people into one character tbh...still really appreciate the Fingolfin reference wrt the turning the other cheek moment though, shows a lot of personal growth since the sword incident!
Even so.... I think making a group of characters believe Eru took mortal form wasn't funny-- that's just blasphemy. He hasn't changed that much after all, despite those Ages in Mandos.
Some people say the myth of Prometheus is just another self-insert featuring a caricatural portrayal of the Valar as selfish and immoral-- as if Fëanor's plans to leave for Middle Earth with the Silmarils and rule there independently while bringing Light to the dark world were widely known before his release from Mandos. Those plans were abandonned the moment Morgoth started influencing him and he got possessive and paranoid about anyone stealing them anyway. Stealing their Light was never really the issue with the Valar, and it smacks of Y.o.T. era extremism to write deities based on them that way.
A more benign reading of it is I think the one that interprets it as a sort of upside down allusion to his son Maedhros, like some incoherent way to process what happened to his eldest while he was in Mandos...
He's never clarified it though and he's been known for some very problematic/cringy self-inserts before. I heard J. R. R. initially started out as one as well but he got distracted by his little meta joke with the character as the supposed author of the Silm, so...
The Endurance was trapped in Antarctic ice for about a year and finally sank in November 1915:
Famously, Ernest Shackleton used a jury-rigged lifeboat to sail over 700 miles to a whaling station, seek help, return and rescue his entire crew, which imo is a greater feat than reaching the South Pole. The ocean currents circling Antartica are some of the stormiest and coldest in the world. How the heck do you cross that in a small open boat without sinking, starving, or freezing to death?
Anyway, I'm impressed that the Endurance looks to be in pretty good shape considering how much it got crushed by pack ice. And it was just discovered yesterday (March 9)!
Ayup. Not only that, but I hadn't realized until I read Wikipedia: they were adrift on ice floes for six months after Endurance sank. This after they'd already been trapped in or next to the ship since January 1915, surviving the Antarctic winter. They rode the ice north until it broke up in April 1916, then scrambled into the lifeboats and sailed for six days to the nearest island, following the navigational skills of the Endurance's captain Worsley. (Shackleton was the expedition leader and organizer, but not the skipper.)
Once on solid ground, while Worsley recovered from staying awake 80 hours straight steering them through frigid, ferocious waves, they finished upgrading one of the lifeboats with bits of another, which they'd started doing while on the ice:
(more photos and story below; Not quite as noble as the Carpathia, but epic)
Above: the ship's carpenter fit the rescue boat with raised sides, decking and canvas, waterproofing it with seal blood, oil paint and lamp wick (probably jammed in the cracks; braided cotton cord swells to make a tighter fit when wet— a trick I learned in primitive camping). Winter was upon them. They had 1900-era polar trekking gear, but those were designed for warmth, not waterproofing. At least they had oil-burning stoves — life-saving, if they didn't set the boat on fire.
Shackleton took the amazing Captain Worsley as navigator and 3 other men (including, shrewdly, the two most likely to cause friction in his absence) and sailed north, trusting the winds to carry them east.
"Think it'll work?" "It'll take a miracle." (April 24, 1915)
Wikipedia (source of map and above photos) puts the lifeboat journey at 17 days to sail 800 miles to South Georgia. They almost capsized multiple times, especially while fighting the freezing gales off Cape Horn, which not only tossed them but threatened to sink them by coating every surface with ice, which they had to chip off with an axe.
South Georgia wasn't the closest land, but it was the only bit they could make with the Antarctic westerlies behind them. They had only one chance: If they blew past and missed it, there was no turning back. And Worsley had to navigate by the sun from a pitching deck under an almost always cloudy sky. The whole time they had one person on watch in case the sun came out, one person managing the sailing, and one person bailing water madly while the fourth slept.
They did it. They hit the backside of South Georgia in a storm, spent three days crossing it because it was safer (?) to go on foot than try to navigate around and maybe blow past it, and gave the whaling station captain a fright, since he didn't expect to see Shackleton again, or anyone coming from the island's interior, which was covered in mountains and glaciers that no one had been insane enough to try crossing before. Shackleton convinced the whalers to take a steamship back to rescue his crew. Which then ran out of fuel. It took him three more tries, finally hitching a ride back to Chile, to requisition a powerful enough steamship to make the crossing. The winds blowing around the southern ocean with no land to brake them are fierce.
So while Shackleton, Worsley and the lucky (?) three reached the whaling station in 17 days, it was 4 and a half months before they could return to Elephant Island for their shipmates. And you know what that means? Another damn Antarctic winter in the cold and dark.
22 men had to wait and try not to lose hope in two huts they'd built with the remaining lifeboats turned upside down on rocks (above). They made lamps out of sardine cans and seal oil with bandages for wicks, hunted seals to make the food last, and huddled together through the long dark. Fred Wild, left in charge, received a medal from George V for his part in keeping them going.
But "the Boss" did come back for them. Everyone was rescued, including the stowaway, who had cheerfully agreed to be first to be eaten if they ran out of food.
When they finally got home, the public wasn't that interested in their epic saga, because World War I had just ended wasn't finished. "You were stranded in Antarctica? Go cry me a river. Congrats on finding a creative way to avoid conscription."
[Excuse me. I do Shackleton a disservice. First he tried to convince Argentina and Chile to join the Allies, then he reported home in time to lead a 1918 military operation to Murmansk, Russia, a seaport that's iced in part of the year.]
So anyway. I have FEELS, seeing poor old Endurance at long last, discovered 112 years after all those eerie yet beautiful photos taken of her trapped in the ice by a photogapher with nothing else to photograph. Here she be, with her name still legible across the stern:
She kept Shackleton's crew alive through a terrible Antarctic winter:
Shackleton's expedition had aimed to be the first to cross and document the entire continent of Antarctica, 4 years after Amundson first reached the South Pole. The Trans-Antarctic mission failed, but because Shackleton had prepared supplies so thoroughly and selected crewmates with both versatile skills and good people skills, they survived a disaster that few would have (and the Franklin Expedition didn't)
They're basically the Apollo 13 of the early 20th century.
One more glimpse of the Endurance before and after:
Most of the good Shackleton Expedition photos are from this cool gallery, which includes lots of details about how they survived:
Shackleton pictures - page 2 - camps on the ice, boat journey, Elephant Island and rescue
This History Channel page does the expedition more justice than I can, with some quotes and diary excerpts (warning to dog and/or cat lovers... sad but quick ending for several dogs and one cat, mentioned briefly in a sentence):
The discovery of Ernest Shackleton's ship at the bottom of Antarctica's Weddell Sea recalls a grueling expedition, when men endured entrapme
I swear I am not making this up. There's multiple diaries by expedition members. There's tons of photos. Their camp on Elephant Island now has a memorial. The rescue lifeboat is on display somewhere. And now we know: the good ship Endurance, true to her name, still lies preserved in cold, cold water, ten thousand feet down on the ocean floor at the bottom of the world.
And I suspect that somewhere tonight, someone or several someones is banging out a screenplay. About bloody time.
the aroace read of ryland grace is so personal and haunting. "you don't even have a dog." was it not enough to love the world for the sake of living in it. was it not enough to live for the thrill of discovery. was it not enough to smile at your students. was it not enough to be afraid.
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