When I am at an age where I am supposed to mellow and sit back and relax, why do I allow people to irritate me when I don’t even care about them.

I have certain things in my life that are of interest to me, they don’t include what others are doing with their washing, or what this one said or didn’t say.

Do I need to give myself a good talking to.

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fvfarm:

Because the village news sheet printed a piece about my interest in having a Tumblr Blog, several people have made comments about it to me today.

That encouraged me to read back some of the items I had written about during the last few years. Not much has changed since I started. Just looking…

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Thank you!

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cumaeansibyl:

Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite characters in sci-fi ever because he is Luc Besson’s vision of the hetero sex symbol of the future: a flamboyant, emotionally labile man who wears skin-tight leopard print or decks himself in roses, a man who accessorizes with big jewelry and dabbles in cosmetics. And the ladies love him. Everything about him screams “gay” according to our stereotypes, but he’s portrayed as a 100% straight sexual dynamo.

Besson is one of the few directors I’ve seen who actually recognizes that our ideas of sexuality and gender performance might have changed drastically in the future.

Ruby Rhod is awesome.

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Ooh, interesting. I don’t know that we ever got in-character interaction like this during LBD (outside the Q&A videos, which were a little different). That could be fun.

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velasardegna:

regatta

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soupsoup:

comes from employee #2, practically the co-founder: Marco Arment

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lexigeek:

jaybushman:

This is an accurate depiction of my experience watching Star Trek Into Stupidity.

I liked it. :)

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dendroica:

Wayfarin’ Stranger by flipkeat on Flickr.

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fishesnstuff:

lies:

I used to keep tropical fish as a kid, and then had a phase in college when I got fairly into it. Lately I set up a 10-gallon freshwater tank just to dabble a little; this is how it’s looking now.

I’m a sucker for the natural look. I don’t have the energy to commit to full-on aquascaping at the moment, but that’s the kind of thing I was going for.

It just makes me happy to look at a tank like this.

Looks really nice! Trust me, you’ll become addicted to live plants. I absolutely love them. Just be sure to not bury the rhizomes of the java fern or the anubias completely! Otherwise the plants will soon rot and die. 

Ooh, thanks! I think I did try to bury those, without really understanding the potential consequences. I’ll tease them back out.

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Oh there were people shipping them since his 2 second cameo in episode 1. Which…yeah…… But then for some it doesn’t take much, just two attractive faces.  I dunno, after this episode I really don’t think he’d be quite Gigi’s type.

Let the breakneck de-shipping commence! :-)

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fuckyeabirds:

Blue grosbeak

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shickalenia:

Over the years, various Star Trek movies have attempted to redress the gender imbalance in the original crew of the Enterprise. With one woman and six men in the core cast, it’s already kind of a sausage-fest. This movie adds Carol Marcus, played by Alice Eve, but although her role is that of a scientist and a Starfleet officer, she isn’t exactly treated with respect. Not only does she have a completely gratuitous semi-nude scene halfway through the movie, but McCoy hits on her while she’s trying to defuse a bomb. Oh, and her most important role in the movie is governed by her relationship with a male character—her father.

Other than Carol Marcus and Uhura, there pretty much aren’t any women at all in Into Darkness. Seriously. At the beginning of the movie we see Noel Clarke’s comatose daughter and grieving wife, and later on Kirk has a threesome with two hot alien chicks—part of Abrams’ image of Kirk as “a player,” which somehow sounds a lot douchier than Kirk’s admittedly flirtatious characterization in the original series. Onboard the Enterprise we do see a new female helmsman (helmswoman?), but unlike the male background officers, she doesn’t get any lines.

I actually understand a lack of interest in adding women to the core crew of the Enterprise. Those roles are already filled: by Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest. But when it comes to side characters and antagonists, almost every single one is male, for no discernable reason. At one point, we see one of the main villains in the captain’s chair of a ship that seems to be crewed entirely by men. Earlier, Kirk, Spock and Uhura are confronted by a platoon of Klingons—all apparently male as well. Are we expected to believe that a mysterious plague has wiped out 75% of the women in the galaxy? Throw me a bone, here. [READ MORE]

I will add that the helmswoman who replaces Chekov does have a line. Annoyingly, though, the reason I remember this is that I specifically remember being thrilled and surprised to hear her talk. You know, without having to strip down to her underwear to do so.

It’s all about context. In the context of big Hollywood movies being made these days, STID is unremarkable in its treatment of race and gender. In the context of Trek movies, though, it makes me sad.

I don’t think Abrams was consciously trying to be racist by casting Cumberbatch in a role that Trek fans (at least) would know was canonically a POC. I assume that decision was made like this: They needed a very charismatic name actor, someone who’s hot right now and could pull off a super-intelligent supervillain. I’m sure Cumberbatch was on a short list of people they most wanted, and that they were ecstatic that he was available. That they tried hard to conceal the actual identity of the character he was playing can be explained, I think, as garden-variety desire to deliver a bigger surprise at that moment in the movie, rather than a guilty attempt to avoid charges of whitewashing. It could also have been both, I guess.

Especially if you’re a white guy (like me), you could make a case that by disregarding race in casting Cumberbatch, Abrams was being commendably race-blind. That is, that all he cared about was that he have the actor with the biggest possible combination of name-recognition and personal charisma, without regard to race. I don’t doubt that that interpretation was offered as an excuse when the casting was being considered. I bet when push came to shove it was a pretty easy decision: dollar signs and the chance to make a more-compelling movie for the large mass of people on one side. A commitment to advancing social justice as part of the franchise’s traditions on the other. With Abrams, someone who unapologetically acknowledges not getting Star Trek while he was growing up, thinking it was too philosophical, in the central decision-making role, I’m not surprised how it went.

It’s the same thing with having Alice Eve pose in her underwear. I’m sure there was someone, even if it wasn’t Abrams, saying they needed more sexy images of women’s bodies for the young dudes they hoped to draw to the theater. I’m sure there were people making the same argument back in 1966; otherwise we wouldn’t have had the green belly dancer or Mud’s women or any number of other sexist elements of TOS. But what I’m pretty sure we also had back then was someone in a key position pushing back against the worst of it. Saying okay, you can have the green belly dancer, but in return you’re going to give me this script three episodes down the road that turns on examining the evils of sexism in a way that’s really progressive for the mid-1960s.

The people who believe the Trek franchise has an obligation to be progressive in its treatment of race and gender, that those attitudes are baked into the future Trek imagines, may have been in the room while STID was being developed. But they didn’t have the final say, and the people who did have the final say didn’t care. It just wasn’t a battle they were interested in fighting.

It’s a good movie, as far as it goes. It’s entertaining and emotionally engaging. There are really interesting things happening with Spock, in particular. In all those ways it’s arguably better than the majority of past Trek franchise output.

But it’s not Trek. It’s something more conventional. I like a lot of what’s there, but I miss what’s not, and the more I think about it, and read these critiques by others who are similarly disappointed, the more I miss it.

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nataliakoptseva:

1807 Caspar David Friedrich

The Fog,

Detail Oil on canvas 34,2 x50, 2 cm

Vienna, Galerie im Belvedere österreichische

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umbfa2011:

Featured Artist: Emily Graslie

“This is my first large-scale painting – it’s an 8’ x 13.5’ landscape of my home state of South Dakota. My work strives to emulate the harshness of the land, the improbability of making a living off of it, and the perseverance of those who decided to stay and do just that.” 

Whoa. I had no idea.

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theashleyclements:

thisfeliciaday:

You are officially spoiled if you read below, NO COMPLAINTS!

Up front I will say I enjoyed this latest Star Trek movie a lot. It was super noisy, but enjoyable, beautifully executed, and I particularly like some of the secondary characters, Spock was excellent, etc etc. I just want to share an…

THIS. This so hard. Also, when one of only 2 significant female characters appears in a film in her underwear FOR ABSOLUTELY NO GODDAMN REASON it continues to send the message to both men and women that a woman’s value starts and ends with her sexuality and attractiveness. There are some outdated gender views in classic Star Trek, but that’s because it’s from the 60s. It’s 2013, and it’s time to do better.

Yeah, more things to be disappointed by. I think the biggest single problem I have with Star Trek: Into Darkness is that in many ways (and Felicia and Ashley point out a glaring example of it) it is an assertively conventional big-budget action movie, vintage 2013.

Previous incarnations of the franchise have sometimes been awesome, sometimes awful, frequently just kind of goofy fun. But they were always Trek, which means (again) a certain earnest desire to paint a future in which certain of our present-day problems have been solved (albeit with plenty of others that are still hanging around). In that sense, Trek has always been consciously unconventional.

This movie chucks that out the airlock. What’s left is compelling, and since it’s making money at warp factor 12 I don’t doubt this is what we’ll be left with going forward. But I’m really not sure that it’s Trek.

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boatporn:

Acorn dinghy at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding

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bohemea:

So much has been written about those few words at the end that Bob whispers into Charlottes’ ear. We can’t hear them. They seem meaningful for both of them. Coppola said she didn’t know. It wasn’t scripted. Advanced sound engineering has been used to produce a fuzzy enhancement. Harry Caul of The Conversation would be proud of it, but it’s entirely irrelevant. Those words weren’t for our ears. Coppola (1) didn’t write the dialog, (2) didn’t intentionally record the dialogue, and (3) was happy to release the movie that way, so we cannot hear. Why must we know? Do we need closure? This isn’t a closure kind of movie. We get all we need in simply knowing they share a moment private to them, and seeing that it contains something true before they part forever.

- Roger Ebert on Lost In Translation

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