Sean's Tumblr. Now with less woozles.

[sparklejamesysparkle]

“𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐲: ‘𝐎𝐡, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐠 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐡. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐩 𝐢𝐭. 𝐈𝐭’𝐥𝐥 𝐠𝐨 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲.’ 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐲: ‘𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜!’ 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐝𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐡𝐢𝐦, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝.” Elizabeth Taylor chats with Whoopi Goldberg on the debut episode of The Whoopi Goldberg Show, originally broadcast in syndication on September 14th, 1992. An early trailblazer in the fight against HIV/AIDS and a staunch and outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, Elizabeth committed her time and energy to the cause when her friend and co-star Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS prior to his passing in 1985. Elizabeth went on to become a co-founder (alongside Dr. Mathilde Krim) of the first AIDS research center amfAR, and later founded her separate Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 with the specific focus of providing nutritious meals (as well as medical and financial assistance) to people living with HIV and AIDS. She also lobbied the U.S. congress to contribute more money for AIDS research and education, devoting the last twenty-six years of her life to the cause. After Elizabeth passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, a large portion of the $156,800,000 raised at the Christie’s auction of her legendary jewelry collection was bequeathed to her charity in order to continue providing the services and assistance she believed were important in perpetuity. Still actively raising funds today, Elizabeth’s grandson Quinn Tivey is now an officer and co-trustee of her foundation. Reflecting on his grandmother’s humanitarianism and advocacy, he recently stated: “The fight against HIV/AIDS was such a vital part of her legacy, and although the fight is far from over, I’m honored to see the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continue her work, educating legislators, raising awareness for the public, disproving myths and decreasing fear and stigma. Grandma stood up for what she believed in, living boldly and courageously. She would never buckle under pressure, and she certainly would not support the status quo if the status quo didn’t feel right.”

[madlori]

nobody better say a goddamned word against Elizabeth Taylor in front of me, is all I can say. She fought this fight before it was popular, before it was acceptable, even before people knew it WAS a fight. She didn’t care if it made people think less of her. She fought it.

[newtypezaku]

Allegedly

[bloodraven55]

love when a yapping x listening adoringly dynamic goes both ways

[dduane]

The Onion says it won’t wait for the courts, will launch Infowars to pay Sandy Hook families

The Onion’s staff is tired of waiting for the courts to settle its pending takeover of Alex Jones’ brand, so the new Infowars will launch ne

Now The Onion says it isn’t waiting on the courts anymore.  “Alex is holding Infowars.com hostage,” Collins said in a phone interview. “He’s trying to intentionally degrade the assets so these families can never sell them, and the courts have largely obliged. We’re tired of waiting around.” “We are allowed, and even more, these families are entitled to this stuff,” Collins added. “Somebody’s got to do this, or else he’ll get away with it.”

[stars-inthe-sky]

A 50-year Trekkie bestows Star Trek history upon the next generation: How fandom and fanfiction sparked the galaxy’s most controversial romance

Beam me up, Grandma

A wonderful piece about fandom history, friendships, and legacies.

[legobiwan]

Dee called AO3 a “candy store,” and said the fan art she has seen, in particular, has been overwhelming. “I cannot get over the art,” she said. “We would have jumped at this. I would’ve given my right tit for all this art when I was in my twenties. Because you couldn’t reproduce it, you couldn’t send it out, but [now] there’s this fabulous art coming out every single day.”

[skyywalkerfen]

Yes. Yes. Yes.  This is how it happened.  Excellent article.

[spockslash]

Thanks to the author for permission to share this here, and for being just a really nice human being, and big thanks to the artist who did my mom’s portrait, above. -Zachary

[jackironsides]

The link is broken, so here it is on the Internet Archive:

A 50-year Trekkie bestows Star Trek history upon the next generation: How fandom and fanfiction sparked the galaxy’s most controversial roma

Beam me up, Grandma

It’s well worth reading.

[sean-gaffney]

Manga the Week of 6/24/26

SEAN: School’s out for most kids by this point, so let’s give them some manga reading! ASH: The time has come! SEAN: Airship has print relea

[icarianarts]

My fan art of the three stooges

[newtypezaku]

[beardedmrbean]

[youchosewrong]

(from Be an Interplanetary Spy #1: Find the Kirillian, 1983)

Revisiting the bad end which begat all this tumblr tomfoolery.

[beardedmrbean]

[unamccormack]

I thought it was for the village fete/wedding marquee vibes. As in, it's a summer, it's a party, but obviously it's likely to rain at some point. But what do I know? Little about the world I live in now makes sense to me.

[apricops]

The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and you’re feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - there’s this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely won’t make it to India, but maybe he’ll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. He’ll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then he’s no longer your problem.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

The moral of this story is that I’m going insane.

[matrose]

quora please stop emailing me

[cronenburger]

[newtypezaku]

[lizardsfromspace]

Hollywood execs responding to the success of Backrooms by trying to adapt more stories from Reddit, a website that the Backrooms did not come from, is p. good but my fav example of Hollywood leaping on a trend in the dumbest way possible is still when they responded to the success of Tim Burton's Batman by making a wave of movies based on 1930s pulp heroes. Dudes sitting around a boardroom telling one another that the children crave The Phantom

[lizardsfromspace]

The 1960s obsession of making movies long roadshow releases entirely bc they thought people liked long roadshow releases for being long roadshow releases was perhaps the most overtly stupid act of Hollywood trend-chasing, given it came closest to killing the industry, while the 30s-pulp trend of the 90s did prevent the rise of the superhero movie for another decade, so

(wait and it came along with the entirely forgotten "quasi-ironic 60s TV show remake" trend! Which was largely inspired by TV Land and its ilk, but also by the Adam West show becoming syndicated again after the movie. They took two stabs at what made Batman (1989) popular and never landed on "superheroes" once)

[opinions-about-tiaras]

Functionally speaking, isn't just about every example of Hollywood missing the point "we prefer to think about this structurally, rather than creatively?"

Like. If there's an institution that exists with the purpose of "make movies to make money," like all institutions it is going to want to systematize things to the greatest extent possible. Your institution will understand on a basic level "for our movies to make money people will have to like them enough to fork over said movie; those people must think our movies are good."

But the problem there is "good" is an aesthetic judgment. It's subjective. It involves trying to read the fickle minds of the broad mass of the moviegoing public and predict what's going to catch fire with them.

In addition, you know for a fact that because you make movies, you are going to be approached by a lot of people whose priority is not "make money" but "I am artist driven by needs and demons most normal people will never understand; I don't care about money, I care about getting my movie made, and I will use YOUR money and YOUR resources as a vehicle for this. I will do this by making wild claims about how everyone will love how good and awesome my movie is."

The last thing you want is to try and figure out what "good" is aesthetically. Who understands good? You? You know what you like but you're a studio exec, you're not willing to wager your job and your reputation on your own sense of subjective aesthetics. What the artists who surround you tell you is good? You have the sense that the aesthetic sense of even your most bankable writers and directors is... somewhat orthogonal to the general public on a GOOD day, and these are the clowns always going overbudget by ten million like the money grows on trees.

All of these pressures lead to one logical outcome; you will try to reverse-engineer what is "good" so you can define it with objective criteria.

"This movie is good because it has a distinctive style, sharp dialogue, a killer plot that will have people glued to every twist and turn, and is directed by one of the best cinematographers we have. Everyone we've shown the script to loves it" is a terrible thing to have say. That's nothing but a litany of subjective criteria!

But you can say "this movie is a neo-noir revival of a 1930s pulp hero" and those are largely objective criteria (largely) and follow it up with "and we know people think neo-noir revivals of 1930s pulp heroes are good because this OTHER movie that is a neo-noir revival of a 1930s pulp hero made a ton of money."

Structure. System. Objectivity. You try as hard as you possibly can to make your movie-making enterprise into a widget factory. You know people will buy widgets. They're clamoring for widgets! But you live in an imperfect universe, and sometimes your customer base will decide "that's not a widget. That's a sprocket. I hate sprockets. I want to buy widgets, not sprockets" even when you've worked as hard as you can to produce an amazing widget.

You do understand, both as an institution and as a person, that sometimes you will have to take creative risks. But you can make that case in business terms; trying to discover new markets or serving an unmet need. Those are objective business needs; "sometimes we need to let the weirdos jump off a cliff because every so often one of them learns how to fly."

But by and large, you will always look for something objective to hang your hat on.

[newtypezaku]

I'm trying to be patient but I'd have buried him three times by now