Viola-ology @viola-ology - Tumblr Blog

The thing is "Padawan. Steal a car." is actually one of the oldest and noblest Jedi traditions. Part of the standard duties of being a Padawan involves securing the getaway vehicle when your assignment has gone sideways six times over and developed into a full Situation. They have all done this. I know in my heart that even Luminara at some point looked at a situation and sighed and asked Barriss to please steal a car before the shooting starts.

fangirlsovertoomanythings

The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.

gardnerhill

There’s a whole subset of Sherlock Holmes stories that could be labeled Asshole Guys Try to Control Women’s Money.

three--rings

Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil. Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again. (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)

waterhobbit

I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.

The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.

three--rings

This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life. The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.) There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors. Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime. And yes, so much of it is of the personal type.

volkswagonblues

dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.

fahbee

One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases. In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them. Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.

tiger-in-the-flightdeck

There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:

Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)

Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.

faejilly

#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )

muffinworry

Let’s not forget the time Holmes helps a young woman who’s being catfished by her own stepfather to steal her inheritance, and when the villain sneers that the law can’t touch him, Holmes grabs a horsewhip out of sheerest chivalry.

smokingtigerhiddengun

So, the most canon-accurate iteration of Sherlock Holmes in the last few decades is actually Benoit Blanc….

marzipanandminutiae

I think it’s also important to note, and complicates our ideas about what the highly patriarchal/misogynistic society of 19th century England looked like, that these stories SOLD

they were POPULAR

the Victorians LIKED reading about women who won out over shitty men in their lives, even when that plotline reaffirmed a woman’s power and agency or put an active sexist in his place (ie Irene Adler besting Holmes)

which is fascinating in light of. you know. [gestures broadly at all of Victorian gender dynamics, laws, etc.]

sailor-hobbiton

So yes, Benoit Blanc is the best modern Sherlock.

somewhereovertherainbowtables

The result of a post I saw on bsky earlier and joking with my friends

darth-moth

ffxivheritageposts

Certified FFXIV Heritage Post

cherryjams

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

bladespark

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

batrachised

thinking about the rancor handler at the beginning of ROTJ mourning his monster's death is foreshadowing for Luke and Vader

batrachised

@dandelionsandderivatives yes of course!

We're all familiar with the scene at the beginning of ROTJ where Luke beats the mighty beast that looks like something out of space Jurassic park. It has a face that one might say only a mother could love.

Everything about this creature emphasizes how monstrous it is. There's obviously the design, but there's also the fact that it is Jabba's method of destroying those who displease him. The horror is mild, but there are undertones of monster movie-esque themes in the scene. Luke waiting for the rancor to emerge from the shadows, etc etc. For all that, it's typical action movie stuff, and it ends in a moment that the audience might find a little humorous. After Luke defeats the rancor in a Jedi hero moment, the movie turns to the rancor keeper - who cries over the monster's death.

It's a ludicrous contrast, and although perhaps a bit touching, more funny than anything else. Monsters are meant to be beaten - what else would you do with one? Even this monster had someone who loved him is the underlying message, but there is a little bit of "pet owner of savage dog" type thing going on. I would say it's primarily meant to be humorous in the moment. After all, who would mourn the death of a brutal monster?

Fast forward to the last part of the movie, though, and all of a sudden...

Much like the rancor keeper, Luke is alone in his grief. A major theme of ROTJ is how solitary his journey is. He's set apart from the others. Although I would argue the potentially scorching hot take that Leia would also feel grief over Vader (just an entirely different grief), Luke stands alone.

If we turn back to the rancor keeper and his grief for an attack monster now (notably, a monster kept at the beck and call of a corrupt ruler), it suddenly has a new light, and the question implicit in the moment - monsters are meant to be beaten; after all, what else would you do with one? - suddenly has a new answer.

sgt-cookie-2

Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?

Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?

Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.

a-wild-torterra

The twelfth doctor posted this

rustenico

PAINTED DISCO ELYSIUM

segamascott

wolf-head

How does a country collapse, all while the citizens looked on— some in horror, others in resignation?

In his book "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation", Alexei Yurchak defined the term hypernormalization: "everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society"

Meaning: people in the USSR kept pedaling even though they could see their bike falling apart until one day the wheels fell off.

Because no one took decisive action to course correct, not enough people stood up and said "hey, we need to start fixing things now", no movement coalesced to organize and prepare, collapse became inevitable.

Now think about how we are watching the federal government implode. Agencies that help ensure we have clean water to drink and safe food to eat have been decimated. Organizations that help monitor and stop outbreaks across the world have been hobbled.

The president and his allies are enriching themselves by robbing the rest of us. Taking advantage of a sinking ship to loot everyone on board before getting away with their multiple passports and bunkers.

All while Americans think "if it was truly bad, someone would do something." "America is special, stuff like that could never happen here."

We need to do. something. Now.

Otherwise we are going to fall just like they did.

(Think really hard about how likely it is you'll have access to healthcare during and after a collapse. Can you afford to get sick? It's time to start regularly wearing a respirator to protect your health. Cause fuck knows the government is not going to protect you.)

estro-boi

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

estro-boi

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

macleod

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

aqwult

argumate

I don't see what the-- oh gosh

queer-as-city-folk

Happy Pride everyone, today is the tenth anniversary of the nationwide right to gay Marriage in the United States and the 22nd anniversary of nationwide legalization of Gay Sex. In 2 days is the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

queer-as-city-folk

We have won nothing without fighting and we have everything to lose, there is no gay liberation without trans liberation, none of us are free till all of us are free, we have won so much and come so far but the road ahead is still long, we must continue to fight for both our liberation and the liberation of all people

queer-as-city-folk

The gay liberation movement is young, everything we have fought for and won happened over the course of less than a human lifetime, and there are forces at play that wish to claw back at these hard fought for rights, we must be prepared to defend what we have fought for and we must continue to fight for improvement

queer-as-city-folk

We have to celebrate how far things have come, because we never would have made it this far without joy and hope, and while we can and must fight, we also must remain hopeful

queer-as-city-folk

This year is:

11 years since nationwide gay marriage in the US

23 years since sodomy was legalized

57 years since Stonewall