re-watching the original trilogy is great because you really get a sense for how weird luke skywalker is, just how quickly he becomes that weird AND how quickly he commits to it. Like he's honestly pretty chill in a new hope, but the absolute INSTANT he figures out he can move shit with his mind he goes full send on the cryptic off-putting bullshit. Walking around in full black robes, speaking in riddles, aura farming and backflipping whenever physically possible. He's clearly annoyed when he first meets yoda in empire, but he dismisses that pretty quickly in favour of ALSO becoming an over-dramatic space wizard. The combination of his two teachers being yoda and obi-wan kenobi and him being the son of anakin and padme creates the single most intense and fundamentally kind force sensitive perfectly embodying the heart of the jedi order whilst also serving egregious amounts of cunt and being bizarre to be around. He would have THRIVED as a jedi master during the high republic. he would have been every padawan's favourite and every other master's worst nightmare
please behold the 24 Hours of Lemons race, in which you can only spend $500 total on a car to cross country race for 24 hours
named after the legendary 24 hour Le Mans race, Lemons rallies barely legal cars in an endurance race across America. had the privilege of sharing the freeway with this race and seeing the absolute art od this event
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.
He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"
So Theodora's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.
Top 10 branches of science ranked by how bad it would suck to be killed by them (from best to worst)
Physics - probably the nicest just on the grounds of how fast that's gonna be. Like if you're a goner before any of the other sciences can get to you, you probably don't even have time to feel anything.
Biology - the most standard default way of dying. Most of the time it sucks but not badly enough to warrant you its own wikipedia page.
Geology - one of the oldest OG classics. Rock hits Og. Og is gone.
Psychology - slow tigers are chasing you.
Zoology - fast tigers are chasing you.
Sociology - idk me and the rest of the angry mob agree that you had it coming.
Chemistry - this is a hard one to place because there's a lot of variation. But anyhow you're getting undone on a cellular level.
i really im absolutely astounded at the phenomenal job that MIB did not to be racist against aliens, despite being a movie about secret agents chasing evil aliens. that scene where jay helps an alien mother to give birth is probably one of the most humanizing moments for an Other ive seen in a movie ever.
like it grabs the body snatcher trope from the cold war "aliens are all around you, hidden in diguzise, they could be any one of us!" and then it says "and theyre just people, theyre literally just people trying to live their lives and thats fine"
you literally have a whooe scene where a cop stands out because he says "i dont care how menacibg or threatning someone looks im not going to shoot them if there is a reasonable explination for what theyre doing, one is sneezing and one is just doing excercise", and that is the guy that gets aproved to join MIB.
The movie has a real love for NYC and immigrant culture as a part of that. The opening scene where K welcomes the undocumented immigrants to the United States. One alien greets another and says he's ordered him pierogi. A lot of them are refugees from their home worlds who just want to survive.
Knitting finished as of last night! Still need to weave in a few ends, wash, and block.
Was aiming for 48” x 60”, came out 39” x 60” so far, but I’m hoping to be able to block it to a little wider and I’m ok losing a few inches of length for that
Thank you so much for all the nice things everyone has said about this blanket! Unfortunately, I do not have a pattern, so much as I have several patterns and some back-of-the-napkin style math notes that won’t make sense to anyone but me - but I do have a picture of this planning piece (since frogged to reuse the yarn in the blanket itself.)
As a few people in the notes pointed out, the dragon pattern is Tahesha the Dragoness by Ina Wendrock
Skill level: Advanced cable knit / Zopfmuster für Fortgeschrittene
But it's on a plain reverse stockinette background, and I wanted this as part of a complex cable afghan. It's going to be a wedding gift for two friends in my DnD group, so I knew I wanted it big enough that two people could reasonably share it while watching TV together on a couch, and for a dragon to still be visible when folded and draped over the back of a couch or chair, in case that's how they store it. So I knew I was committing myself to knitting 5 dragons (one in the center and one in each of the four corners), and figuring out myself how to plop the dragon in to a larger cable blanket pattern.
Back in November, I bought the dragon pattern and knit a test version of it so I could see how it worked and measure the dimensions. (You can see from the curled up edges that I did this before I found the part in the pattern notes where Ina Wendrock helpfully informs us that the dragon is knit over 45 initial stitches, to help us add it to our own projects, but ah well.) Then I started trying to figure out the other cables.
I knew I wanted some traditional cables so that it had an heirloom look to it (but with dragons), but I thought that the dragons would look too out of place if everything else looked copy-pasted from a classic fisherman’s sweater. Fortunately, there are a number of knitting designers right now doing cool things with trying to make cables that resemble Celtic knot motifs, so I went to the public library and borrowed a bunch of cable knitting books and started bookmarking what I liked. My favorite patterns were all coming from this book:
Mention the phrase ?cable knitting,? and most people?knitters and non-knitters alike?envision textured ropes, twists, and braids winding up
Which looks like it's out of print now, but wasn't in December and I was able to ask for and receive it for Christmas. (Designer Melissa Leapman's ravelry store is here in case anyone wants to check it out):
I narrowed my bookmarked cables down to patterns that had 1) an odd number of stitches; 2) a central "crossover" cable in multiple parts of the pattern so that I could "open" it up to create the medallions that the dragons would sit in; and 3) a stitchcount of less than 45, by enough that I'd have room to drop a traditional cable on either side. My favorite two would then be the center cables for the central dragon panel and the left & right dragon panels (when I wasn't doing the dragons), and then I decided on a very simple c4b twist between the panels and a tight 5-rib cable braid on the edges. I loved the first two patterns from the book that I tested and didn't have to try any of my runner-up bookmarks - but if you zoom in on the picture, you can see that for the traditional cables around the Melissa Leapman cable for the center panel, I tried and discarded a honeycomb cable and an Xs and Os variant before deciding on the one that I'm not actually sure of the name of that made it into the final pattern. For the side panels, I had thought it might be nice to incorporate a hearts cable since it was for a wedding blanket. I'm not sure how traditional these heart cables are, but I've seen them unattributed in more than one published pattern from different sources, and they're published in a number of cable pattern guides online. They worked next to the Melissa Leapman cable I wanted for the side panels, so they went in the pattern without me trying anything else.
While practicing the dragon cable, I had noticed that many of the cables started with an increase, so on the back of one of my chart print-outs, I graphed a rough plan for what I had decided to put where in terms of the traditional and Leapman cables that would go around the dragons, and numbered out the stitches if I worked the first cables in each pattern as increases instead of cables to mimic the start of the dragons. Then I added up the total number of stitches and cast on, and it worked surprisingly well! After completing one repeat of the side-panel central cables, I started "opening" up the circles where the dragon would be through improvisation (the left and right panels that were parallel always matched each other because I was doing the same thing in each row - other than that, I wound up doing it slightly differently every time, and that was ok. They look the same enough.)
I had planned to either leave it un-bordered or add the full mitered border that Ina Wendrock (who designed the dragon pattern) has on her store depending on how it worked up, but after I'd knit enough to see what it looked like, I decided that the mitered border was overkill, but it did need something, so when I finally got to the end I did an I-chord bind-off and then went back and picked up stitches along the cast-on to do an I-chord bind-off there too. If I had it to do over again, I might have done a folded hem on each side instead, but we'll see how the I-chord blocks.
So, that's how you make the dragon blanket. Either get the patterns I mentioned and try to duplicate, or just buy the dragon and add your favorite cables for the rest!
[Sorry I'm not more help, but I cannot stress enough - I did not write any of this down as I went.]
[[For the patterns that were from the Continuous Cables book, I used panel 10 from page 136 for the center and panel 27 from page 146 for the sides]]
the draw of arranged marriage AUs to me is really the way the dubcon of it all binds them together. neither of them have a choice in being here, something else is foisting this upon them whether that’s their parents or the political situation around them or expectation or something else, but the point is that they don’t get that one choice. so they have to make a choice somewhere else, that now that they’re here, they’re going to make it work. they’re each other’s only allies, in this cage built around them. they may have been coerced into swearing to stand by each other through anything, but they did swear.
it’s not love at first, or second, or third sight. it’s not love in the wedding bed the first time, whether they grit their teeth through it or decide together to forgo that binding step and try to get around it as long as they can. it’s about sharing a bed with a stranger while you learn their nightmares and how they hog the covers. it’s about sharing a name before you even know each other’s hobbies. the appearances you have to keep up, and the connection you find in both being exhausted by them, laughing together because isn’t it ridiculous how you not only have to be married but you have to act like it’s perfect and lovely for everyone else watching. it’s love that creeps up quiet and slow, between shared secrets that make your wedding bands mean something for the first time, and trying to protect each other from the trap you’re both in. and it’s about having the mortifying thought of “oh my god, i have a crush on my wife.”
