I'm a Lab Coordinator, at a grain testing company in Australia. A bit of a fandom geek, mainly Sanctuary, Stargate SG1, The 100, Star Trek VOY; TNG. I play baritone saxophone (when I can get my hands on one)
Sorry to add another dimension to the "I've got scars" "No you don't" exchange.
Whilst I understand why everybody is focusing on the 'they've explored each other's bodies' perspective, and I don't deny that definitely happened. I think the reason Agatha can respond so definitively that Rio has no scars and hasn't gained any during their time apart is because you can't physically harm death, like her body physically cannot hold scars.
Which to me makes it even more poignant that Rio describes the emotional scar that the rift between the two of them had left her with.
In Australia the main brand is called Zooper Dooper so that's what most of us called them. Don't know if that brand even exists anymore, and guaranteed there are regional differences 😅
A jewel box of a book ✨ This 19th century French sales sample book contains very thin metal ornaments, made of foil over card. These would have been used like fancy sequins, and adorned everything from cards to clothes! They’re sometimes called Dresdens after the town in Germany where many were made. I know I say this a lot, but this book really floored me 🤩 Part of col. 838 in the Winterthur Library 📚
I've seen this screen shot doing the rounds recently and every time I see it I think the legs of the table belong to the guy in the centre and it always makes me pause as then his proportions are way off.
I have drawn what my brain sees at a quick glance.
Love living in the era of social media where every site is run like a personal fiefdom by a terminally fragile failguy systemically deleting and moderating posts and features by fiat when their razor thin egos are lightly scratched
This is wonderful research and scientific testing. Which, I guess you should expect from an actual scientist, but still.
I always grew up thinking the Pyrex glass was indestructible and you could heat it to the temperature of the sun and it would barely flinch. It's a shame they changed the formula without telling folks.
I was going to say Ann is a national treasure, but she's from Australia so I guess she is a global treasure.
And if you are a flat earther I guess a... discal treasure?
This cat is so, so friendly and stoked to be there, though! Look at all the leaning and rubbing on people and things, the upright question mark tail; this is a very cuddly cat who wants attention, lmao. 💜
i was thinking about that post comparing Jessica Rabbit as an asexual to Barbie and an asexual and then i thought of the Neil Gaiman post (was it a post?) about Crowley and Aziraphale being asexual and then this happened.
Okay so I did some research, very basic research, on the user base of tumblr and how many of us there are.
There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.
Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.
If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.
If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.
If we want this to work, we have to make it work. We can even make it into a game. Just how long can we outlast the other social media sites?
It needs to be a holiday. Pick a date a few weeks from now, and just make it Crab Day. Maybe a Saturday as a lot of people are paid on Fridays. Just in case this post becomes more popular than any I've had before, lets set the date as the last Saturday in July (which for us in 2023 will be July 29th.)
On July 29th, gift as many crabs as you can without breaking the bank. Post crab memes if you cannot afford a crab.
Tumblr can pull this off. Tumblr likes doing things like this.
I accidentally started this thing and I can’t believe it either. This Entire Day, I’ve been sitting here, watching people glom onto this in bafflement and amusement and slight fear.
So this is only my second quilting project, and the first that I've designed myself. I am really happy with how the colours have turned out, and I plan on adding detail with stitches.
If this works out it will be the perfect wall addition around my computer.
I’m not super fandom savvy, having only ever been active in one of them in any meaningful way, but I am familiar with the online culture surrounding shipping fictional characters together. Something I’ve personally witnessed is that the thinking around platonic v.s. romantic is extremely binary; a relationship can be one or the other, and a platonic relationship is the failing outcome if you, as an audience member, preferred the latter. This reflects much broader societal thinking, so it makes sense that most people approach shipping this way.
However, when you’re aspec (anywhere on the aromantic and/or asexual spectrums), this idea doesn’t necessarily apply. Suddenly, platonic and romantic are not opposing ideas, they’re just two potential options on a very, very wide sliding scale / multi-dimensional graph wherein the significance of a relationship is completely disconnected from its label.
A huge part of shipping culture (again, just from what I’ve witnessed) is that Explicit Confessions and/or an onscreen mouth kiss are necessary to make a ship canon, and that not happening means Your Ship Isn’t Canon And Therefore Isn’t Important or Valuable (and gets used as a way of invalidating other people’s ships). However, for a lot of aspec folks (and others, of course), romance is not automatically more valuable than friendship, and an end goal for a particular character dynamic becomes a lot less about fulfilling A, B, and C to verify the couple as “real” in the eyes of the mainstream or even the fandom as a whole, and instead is more about wanting to see characters happily in one another’s presence. Specifics vary wildly case to case, so I’m gonna leave that fairly broad.
Ultimately, I have found myself shipping characters in the usual way less and less as I’ve learned more about my own aspec identity and experience. I care less if characters kiss; I care less if characters declare three little words…though I also am very familiar with the history of queer erasure and definitely root for explicitly romantic queer rep. And all this doesn’t mean I don’t have couples I root for - I very much do. But whether their relationship is specifically romantic matters very little to me, with rare exceptions. (In fact, I often find myself “shipping” characters platonically - seeing a couple that would make great best friends being forced along standard, probably heterosexual romantic beats.) Mostly, I want the characters I ship to be around each other, to support each other, and to love each other in whatever capacity is fulfilling to their arcs and to the narrative.
Or, to put this all in a more digestible meme format:
Allos: If the couple doesn’t kiss then the ship isn’t canon
Me: but have you considered that the real kiss was the friends we made along the way?
I've been in fandom almost 20 years now, and OP has wonderfully articulated how I as an ace person fundamentally relate to 'shipping' as such.
I guess I would say that when I am interested in the relationship between 2 characters what I am hoping for from canon is a demonstration through the text that this relationship is important and how each character demonstrates that importance/how far they'll go to maintain that relationship. But I also just want to see those small interactions too, how they enjoy each other's company, the in-jokes, the small acts of kindness or comfort, how well they know and understand each other.
And unfortunately for me half the time it's a main character and a supporting character that I find interesting. Which means there are limited interactions to enjoy.
Falling down the rabbit hole (of fangirl fanaticism)
Just gonna say this, I'm luke warm about the romantic relationship between Jean-Luc and Laris, I just want Laris (or even just an Orla Brady character) to be alive and, preferably, in the next season at all.
I'm hoping that more will be made with Laris' character, else I'm gonna be real mad. Don't use a female character to set up the protagonist's whole character development plot and then only have her in 3 scenes to set it up and a few scenes after all the heavy lifting is done to then write her off.
As such, I have tried to find any morsel of proof that says Laris will be staying, or getting her own happy ending. Expanded below.
So I have been going back through some of the photos that have been released, especially for season 2 promotional articles.
So to begin with, I do agree that one of these sets of photos are probably from a deleted scene. As I can see quite easily that there may have been an additional scene in the first episode to help demonstrate the new status quo between Jean-Luc and Laris, a 'look how cute/domestic and comfortable they are around each other, they seem to really bring something to each others lives' before Laris reveals that she wants to make this into something more.
Now the first episode of season 2 was already pretty long, so I can understand why this might have been cut. My issue is there seems to be even more photos of the 2 of them at the chateau with different (very similar, but different) clothing on, and yet, what Picard is wearing is in fact the clothes we saw him in for his very first scene of the season.
So episode 1 of season 2, Picard's first scene with him in the vineyard eating grapes.
Here he is wearing a cap, thin grey jumper and light jacket with a pin.
The next scene he is in, looking at wine bottles and Laris.
Broad brimmed hat (though an easy change) but the jumper is a heavy cable knit, and the jacket looks heavier too, but also has a dark colour patch over the shoulders.
Laris in this scene is wearing an olive cardigan with a yellow blouse, that is shown to be especially long in the promo shot.
These are the outfits they are wearing (with the jackets/cardigan off) for the drinking wine by the fire scene.
These all line up with the images of Laris stomping grapes and Picard helping her with them (my suspected deleted scene from episode 1)
Just a link add for the rest of the photos if people are interested.
But continuing on in that twitter thread are these photos.
Where Picard is back to wearing his thin jumper and jacket. while Laris is also wearing the same jumper as episode one, the shirt she has on underneath is almost certainly not the yellow one, as even with the long scarf I'm sure we'd see a bit of that ridiculously long yellow blouse poking out at the bottom. Also from the side shot, Laris is wearing a brown top of some kind, but these are definitely season 2, as Laris' hair was nowhere near that long in season 1.
What I find even weirder is that whilst looking for these photos on google image search I found some others from articles about the first season, with Picard in almost exactly the same look.
See Picard and his "Number One" canine pal walk among the vines.
I've added this link to prove that the image is from season 1, that article is from Jan 2020.
So the theory going round that Picard will get the chance to do over the day in the first episode again is looking more likely to me, as I can't figure out why they would have shot 2 scenes that were both removed from episode 1, especially as they are both in unique locations, so footage can't easily be slotted into other scenes. Though I do suspect some of the shots of Picard looking at tgraphic designer Laris, are actually from the grape stomping scene.
On a side note, we've seen that record player before.
When Q snaps Picard and himself out of the chateau courtyard.
Basically my hope is that the scene between Picard and Laris under the vines is a scene coming up in episode 10, as we had better get some closure on the Laris front, for herself at least.
Personally I'd kinda find it funny if this scene was Picard giving Laris the vineyard and chateau as a, you're the closest person currently to family that I have who would actually be able to run/live/possibly enjoy being in the vineyard (ie. all his work collegues have lives, whereas 10 year refugee Laris doesn't have another home) or they are going on a new adventure together (deciding to give it a go romantically).
Also I'm bereft that they took away this Laris look from us.
Thank you for reading my rant, I'm fully prepared to be disappointed, if only I could write good fanfic.
So we know that something is up with Tallinn right, they wouldn't have put in the Romulan tablet or the swearing in Romulan unless they were going to give us some kind of answer right, especially with the fact that Picard also seems to have trouble differentiating between the two.
Now I don't know the episode assignment earth especially well, but I'm trying to logic out a theory with the little knowledge that I have.
So I think that Tallinn is actually future Laris.
So after the events of episode one, where Laris has laid her feelings bare to Picard and he clearly wants to keep a status quo "Nothing has to change" to her "It's already too late for that" and then he leaves without any consideration for her at all.
With all of that Laris decides it is time to cut ties with Picard and try life somewhere else, because of that decision she is approached by who ever organises the watchers/supervisors and she accepts as currently she has no close ties to anything and at least this would give her a purpose. I don't think the she knows that she will actually be looking over a Picard, but she may be aware that they will tamper with her memories, as a way of preventing her from being able to accidentally affect the past with too much future knowledge.
Now that she ends up looking after a Picard, in some ways she becomes too attached, maybe an echo of her love for Jean Luc, though she is meant to be detached and a 'ghost', she doesn't interact with Renee but I think it's clear that emotionally she is almost in love or at least in awe of Renee.
Now with Q going back to alter the past Tallinn actually wants to preserve Renee's life at all costs and so actually goes along with Q's changes, whereas if it had been any other watcher they would have done everything in they're power to stop Q.
Now some may be wondering how Laris has ended up in the past, but in my mind, a species that knows what parts of history to protect in order to have the desired outcome, must have some kind of time travel capabilities.
I hope there is some kind of connection, as the way that Guinan described the watcher kinda fits in with an outsiders view of Laris as she can be quite aggressive and brash. Which is another unneeded similarity if they don't make Tallinn and Laris connected.
I would find it interesting if the mistake that Picard made was to do with his feelings for Laris, and his lack of action on them, rather than any one decision he made on the stargazer.
However I'm fully aware that this is probably too convoluted to be the actually answer in the show, but I can dream right. Just give me more Orla Brady please.
my brain went straight to the ‘put him in the airlock ‘till he’s sober’ part of ‘what can you do with a drunken spacer’ and i never want to look back from this.
THIS IS 100% A THING. It’s usually considered a subset of filk, so naturally a lot of prolific filk artists like Leslie Fish have a selection. Sci-fi filk is possibly my favorite genre of music.
Most of these are actually ballads, not true shanties, but still:
The Senate - Space Shanty
Kristoph Klover - Fire in the Sky
Duane Elms - Dawson’s Christian
Catherine Faber - Providence Skies
Julia Ecklar - Ballad of a Spaceman
Leslie Fish & Ann Prather - Hanrahan’s Bar
Julia Ecklar & Ann Prather - Pushin’ the Speed of Light
Leslie Fish - Ship of Stone
Leslie Fish - Guardians
Leslie Fish - Sam Jones
Vic Tyler - Space Hero
Vic Tyler & Duane Elms - Spacer’s Home
You can probably just google “sci-fi filk” and get a zillion more. It’s a surprisingly rich genre for one so unknown to most people.
I don’t normally reblog this kind of post, but this seems so perfect as background music for a dark matter game, I had to share it with you all. SPACE SHANTIES HO!
For those unaware reblogging this post, “What Shall We Do With A Drunk Space Pirate” was the close out song for the Mechanisms concerts. Their entire discography was taking folk songs and making them sci-fi epic concept albums.
Some of my favorite songs include:
Matty Groves, now with electric violin, about a lute that controls the dead.
Pump Me Boys, now a shanty about keeping the life support systems running on a dying ship.
Gently Johnny, now about sirens in a neo-noir sci-fi city lulling people into complacency.
Rising of the Moon, now about a doomed manager of a space station that descends into chaos and mutiny, left abandoned.
So I’m married to a person who grew up in Canada’s folk scene, and we often talk about folk music as a genre. I was cranky about the way that people tend to slap an “alt-folk” label on folk because they assume true folk is a dead genre, and I got thinking and went: what is a dead genre, anyway?
T chirped “sea shanties!” and then added “not that you can’t compose a new one, but it’s not in conversation with other songs that are being published at the same time, it’s only in conversation with other songs that have been written long before.” It’s important to know, in this conversation, that Tay grew up around Stan Rogers’ family and therefore knows damn well that you can write a song in the modern era that everyone assumes is a hoary old traditional: Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” in 1976 because he wanted to sing lead in a sea shanty and there weren’t any in existence that had a baritone singing lead.
No, seriously. And now there are lots and lots of people, less than fifty years later, who think that Barrett’s Privateers is a couple hundred years old and has Always Been Here.
So I started thinking about dead genres, and it occurs to me to ask: why is the sea shanty largely dead? Or rather, actually, why is the work song, which is the larger category of music that sea shanties are a subset of, largely dead? Why don’t we sing work songs anymore when we’re working? Stan Rogers wrote the “White Collar Holler,” of course, and the premise of that song is indeed the notion of making a work song for office work, but I can’t imagine anyone actually signing it at the office as they go about their work. For one thing, I code quite a bit at my day job, and the speed at which I code doesn’t depend at all on what the people around me are doing; indeed, trying to match my speed to theirs would probably make us all less efficient.
Tay’s theory is that industrialization killed the work song in the West (they pointed out to me very explicitly that the idea isn’t actually dead world-wide), especially as work became more cognitive for many people and less reliant on keeping time with the people you’re working alongside. After all, work songs are most popular when the most efficient way to work is to keep pace with everyone at the same time, so you’re neither too fast nor too slow, and you’re all working at parts of the same tasks that rely on other people’s tasks to keep going without building up too much of a deadlock at any one part of the process. So much of work for so many people today is more like piecework than making things on an assembly line, and like piecework, it’s so much easier for our employers to encourage us to take the work home and keep making as many pieces as we can before we fall over and collapse… or else it’s service work, and you can’t be singing at service work, you won’t be free to quickly respond to clients and adjust your tasks to their needs.
I suspect that’s not entirely it, though, because assembly line manufacturing work isn’t actually dead in the West, not even close, and the work song is still gone from our halls. Tay pointed out that OSHA and hearing protection make it more difficult in many of those jobs to be connected to other workers and keep time on the song, and I think there’s definitely an element of truth to that, too.
But I think the death of the work songs go even deeper than that. See, work songs didn’t completely vanish as work became less dependent on keeping time together. They just turned into songs about the condition of working, and from there they turned into songs about unionization, workers’ rights songs, like the ones the Wobblies used to great effect in the 20s. And that happened in response to managers and bosses who see singing and talking and responded by trying to control workers and make that shit stop. Some of that is about controlling unionization but some of it is about control, full stop: pretending to oneself that workers only really exist while you pay them as cogs that produce labor, and anything else they do is a distraction from the labor you pay for.
Why is it that we don’t have modern work songs for Amazon workers? There are enough of them, after all, their very boring and physically demanding jobs depend on keeping time together, and everyone’s working together in a relatively quiet environment. I’ll tell you: it’s because Amazon views interactions among its workers as a threat and bans workers from talking to one another or listening to music while they execute their shifts.
We lost the work song, I think, because we gained bosses that see the work song as a threat instead of an intrinsic part of keeping the work force from getting bored and stale and tired and making mistakes. In a real way, killing the work song is a decision you make if you don’t understand the value of the work song to the workers themselves: it makes the work less boring, so you stall out less, and it reminds you you’re all doing this together, and it keeps you all in time. The action of singing is valuable. But if you’ve never sung while you worked collectively on a project, you might not know that, and if you think in terms of zero-sum losses, the song becomes a waste of good breath you’re paying for at best and a threat of insurrection at worst.
And it’s very interesting thinking about the labor conditions on a spaceship that might bring such songs back again as useful aids to coordinating the labor of monitoring and running the ship. Or even, for that matter, coordinating the labor of other tasks in a spacefaring economy. Warframe’s “We All Lift Together” is one of these, of course. Surely there have to be others?
a) didn’t reblog this for it’s own merits because music recs and very very good commentary
b) I definitely really wonder if the work song could be perceived as a threat also because they promote the sense of comraderie and closeness that union busting corps actively discourage (along with the genetics they share with working condition protest songs described above). (Though I also wonder if some of the die-out here is related to how comparatively devoid of public, casual singing/music north american culture is, outside of specific subcultures of course… like singing/music is treated a lot as something that professionals or studied amateurs do, and otherwise it’s relegated to the privacy of your own home or very specific venues such as karaoke)
and
b) also add the Longest John’s cover of We All Lift Together (thank you @dungeonmastersconsortium for introducing me to it) because it’s VERY VERY GOOD (and I may have listened to it on repeat more than a few times over the last while):
The Wiggles - Elephant | Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras 2022
Kids group perform at Mardi gras 2022
Given the arguments that people have about children being present at Mardi Gras, here’s an aussie take on that.
Some people overseas may know who The Wiggles are, but if not, they are an Australian children’s educational entertainment group that have been around for over 30 years now (couldn’t be bothered to find the exact time period).
They are very integrated into aussie culture, so far as even having adult performances where they still perform a majority of the kids music, with fully enthusiastic not sober adults dancing along.
They performed 2 songs for the 2022 Mardi Gras in Sydney. Now I don’t live in Sydney (couldn’t get me to move there for a million bucks) so I don’t know if there were many kids at this event, but I could imagine at least some.
Yet I haven’t seen anybody decry “This will just normalise homosexuality in children. You’re making this cool and ideal.”
Just a reminder of the good that humanity can do, and the kindness even complete strangers can have.
Kyan died from a farm accident, and whilst going through his things his mother came across an unfinished composition he had been working on.
She put a call out on social media for someone to finish and record the piece to be played at his funeral. Multiple people answered, some even creating full ensemble pieces.
This one is probably my favourite.
An article explaining more.
Kyan's 'secret song' given wings by orchestras, famous musicians during 'deeply moving' funeral
The searingly beautiful music Kyan Pennell heard in his head as he wrote his first composition has filled the air after musicians answered h
It occurred to be that during the assault on the cannery, Powder goes through some massive emotional swings that I think help to explain why she turns to becoming Jinx.
In the discussion between Vi and Powder, Powder goes from being ecstatic that her tinkering had finally paid off ("it worked, it finally worked") to grief and guilt realising that she caused the death of Vander and Claggor. To which then Vi states "Mylo was right, you are a jinx", which I feel like Powder internalised as that even at her best, when she finally got things to work, she is still a jinx.
