So, someone who is really special bought me this shirt for a present. And I wear it, but only rarely out of the house, because someone else who is really special and helpfully monitors my clothing has told me that it’s scary, and I might not want to wear a scary shirt (depending on the situation), because people will notice it, and I typically opt for a low-key public demeanor.

But today I  was behind on laundry, and needed a shirt to go to the gym, and this one actually was just about the last clean one in the dresser, so I threw it on.

As a result I learned three things:

1. My fashion advisor is correct. People noticed the shirt. Two people, one of whom I’ve never spoken to before, approached me to ask about it.

2. It is harder than I would have expected to explain what this shirt means. I managed to explain that a) it was the Darcy character from a modern-day adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, b) he appeared in a show on YouTube, and c) the show was called the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I didn’t get to explain anything about costume theater, or do my impression of Ashley doing Lizzie doing Daniel doing Darcy being a robot, or provide any explanation of how the word “malfunction” figures into this. Nor did I get to say anything about the John Green “pizza” shirt, and how this shirt is referencing that shirt. Really, I haven’t felt like such a failure in a long time. My advice: If you’re going to wear this shirt in public, spend some time beforehand thinking through how to explain it.

3. Selfies are harder to take than I would have thought. I tried to take a selfie in the mirrored wall at the gym to document my actual wearing of the shirt, but the photo came out blurry and lame. Still, I know echojardini, at least, has commented on the rarity of me-selfies, so despite the crappiness of the actual photo, here you go:

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“Bird-watching is an exercise in balance. It has a built-in acknowledgment that nature is finite: you don’t shoot the bird, you look at it. You bring along a guidebook, emblem of the library world, even as you wander out into nature in pursuit of something wild. You get the thrill of seeing an untamed creature, but immediately you cage it in its common or scientific name and link the bird, and yourself, to a Linnaean system of nomenclature that harks back to an Enlightenment notion that nature can be ordered. And behind Linnaeus lurks the biblical belief that, like Adam, we name the animals. It is simply our job.”

– Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies (via birdscout)

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nattonelli:

Johan Christian Dahl – Moon Night Over Dresden (1827)

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giddinesswithabandon replied to your post “I interrupt this Tumblr session to report…”

yes. It’s still a good line though. Just like when we quote LBD lines that weren’t written by Jane Austen…because they mean something to us. But I hear ya.

This is a good point (despite my regular, repeated whining). Rewatching with the director’s/writers’ commentary reminded me of some things. At one point in the commentary Peter Jackson pointed out that due to the logistics of creating the three films, The Two Towers ended up getting less time and attention than the others, and one of the results of that was that they ended up shooting a comparatively early version of the script. PJ said if they’d had the time, they would have much preferred to have revised the script two or three times more. Fran Walsh mentioned that explicitly in connection with the changes to Faramir, that they might have had time to explore other approaches to his character.

But as a result of having already shot so much footage, they were locked into a number of early choices, and could only try to fix the parts that weren’t working as well, adjusting things around the edges. That speech they gave Sam at the end was part of that process. And it is a good speech, and there are aspects of it (like the shot of Gollum’s reaction) that are very effective.

So yeah, it’s not something Tolkien said, and might not even be something he would have agreed with. But the movies were the movies and the books were the books, and I love them both the way one can love two children, or two episodes of KiTR, and have each of them be the favorite. Love is magic that way.

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i-love-art:

Claude Monet

Rosés de Noël

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…that I am old, cranky, and repetitious.

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janenx01:

lies:

janenx01:

dduane:

azurelunatic:

mamasam:

tonyabbot:

scary-monsters-and-davesprite:

lonelyinsomniac:

samsaranmusing:

Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

A visitor.

It’s…

It’s not an asteroid. It’s an old piece of a Saturn rocket or something like that. We weren’t in any danger from this one.

Still cool though.

I’m curious what makes you believe this is not about an asteroid. Looking at the dates in the lower lefthand corner of the gif, it seems likely that this is a reconstruction of the path of asteroid 2002 MN, which came within 75,000 miles of Earth on June 14, 2002. There’s some more information about it at Wikipedia and New Scientist.

In light of the information there, the OP’s comment about “nuclear winter and possible total destruction” does sound over-the-top. 2002 MN was calculated to be about 80 meters across, large enough to have caused an explosion comparable to the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908, but nothing like nuclear winter (unless a nuclear-weapons-equipped nation misidentified the asteroid’s impact as a nuclear attack and retaliated, unleashing a global nuclear war, which I guess is possible).

If you look at the plotted orbit, a Saturn rocket (or anything launched from Earth) seems really unlikely. The bulky parts of those never get very far from Earth, whereas this thing arrived from way out yonder, at least according to the gif.

Note that I didn’t investigate any of this until I saw your reblog questioning my initial reblog of the post, so thanks for giving me the incentive to do that. I could totally have been guilty of passing on a cool-but-bonkers Tumblr lie. On further investigation I think the asteroid part, if not the potential consequences, sounds pretty solid, but I was just lucky about that. In a sense that makes this post, like 2002 MN, a fortunate near-miss, not recognized by the party in jeopardy until after the fact. :-)

Found it!

http://ift.tt/1iASH7s

Oh wow! I apologize for doubting your information (and, as is too often the case, for spreading disinformation of my own).

I thought you were saying that it was something like an early stage of an Apollo rocket, but in fact, as your NASA link explains, there’s a big-enough piece to account for this object’s brightness that does get launched far enough out to leave Earth orbit — the S-IVB third stage that boosts the spacecraft away from Earth on the trip to the moon, then gets jettisoned before the return journey.

That’s not as big as the presumed “asteroid” that the (older) article I found was talking about, but as your more-recent NASA article explains, the white paint of an expended S-IVB would make it appear brighter, such that the 60-foot-long structure could be mistaken for a larger asteroid. And the fact that the object had a spectrographic signature consistent with Apollo rockets’ titanium dioxide paint, and that Apollo 12’s S-IVB stage did escape Earth into an orbit that could have brought it back at the time of object J002E3, is ridiculously cool. And yes, if we assume that this was an expended Apollo S-IVB, then you are absolutely right that it would have been no danger to humanity even if it did impact Earth, since it would most likely have burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere.

Thank you again for passing on all this really cool information, and sticking with it even after I dismissed your recollection. Your info really was like J002E3 — except that after a couple of loops around my brain it finally managed to get past my planetary defenses and achieve re-entry. :-)

I wish the OP had included a link to the article you remembered (which appears to be where the gif came from). It would have saved a lot of confusion, at least on my part. But I guess “oh noez; nuclear winter!” made for a more-compelling post.

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yulinkuang:

cracked:

Birds evolved from dinosaurs, and one crazy bird species never forgot.

Why the Cassowary Is the Most Terrifying Animal Ever

lies have I ever told you I have a favorite bird? This is my favorite bird.

Haha. I’m glad your favorite bird lives far away. :-)

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sophisticatedajumma:

Dear Smiling Eyes and husband,

Run.

Read More

Even if they weren’t interesting and entertaining (while sympathy-inducing) in their own right, I think I’d value sophisticatedajumma‘s posts just for the refreshing variety they introduce into my dash, which would otherwise be at risk of being overwhelmed by the (very real, and likewise sympathy-inducing) problems faced by teens and twentysomethings.

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A cloud passes in front of the moon.

The little blue dot is Mars.

echojardini:

Lunar Eclipse- Redlands, CA

That’s super cool-looking. I don’t quite understand what’s going on in all the images, but that adds to its artsy nature.

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aeternamente:

Okay, so I’ve been thinking about Bertha’s Attic Song, and how it relates to the AoJE and KitR universes. I was really confused about this for a while, but I think I’ve got it mostly sorted out. The video (including Bertha’s song and Jane’s reaction) is not really canon in either the AoJE or the KitR universe, but is sort of a crack AU like those AoJE indiegogo perk videos from a while back. But like the indiegogo videos, they’re related to things that have happened or could happen in the canon of both shows.

In the KitR-verse, James tweeted a photo of Audrey in the same costume/hairstyle/makeup an on the same set as Sinead in Bertha’s Attic Song, so that much, at least, is canon. The question is, is Audrey playing Bertha?

That’s actually a really complex question, and the answer depends in part on whether AoJE!Jane and her world are real or fictional in the world of KitR. That is, if any of the KitR characters watched AoJE, would it be a fictional adaptation of Jane Eyre (as it is to us), or a real person’s video blog? If the latter, that would mean that either the book, Jane Eyre doesn’t exist in the KitR-verse, or that this Jane person has a life that’s creepily similar to the life of a character in a 19th c. novel. If Jane Eyre doesn’t exist in the KitR-verse, Audrey can’t be playing Bertha. And if that’s the case, maybe us KitR fan-canon creator people should get on task and decide who Audrey is playing in her first feature.

Or you know, maybe AoJE!Jane is fictional and Audrey can play Bertha after all. Up to us, I guess?

My favorite meta in a while. And that’s a very competitive category these days, thanks to the droll subversives I follow.

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becausebirds:

The Wood Duck! This was the first fancy duck we saw while birding. These ducks are special because they have feet that allow them to perch on branches and nest in trees unlike other waterfowl. Woodies have ornate patterns on almost every feather!

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janenx01:

dduane:

azurelunatic:

mamasam:

tonyabbot:

scary-monsters-and-davesprite:

lonelyinsomniac:

samsaranmusing:

Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

A visitor.

It’s…

It’s not an asteroid. It’s an old piece of a Saturn rocket or something like that. We weren’t in any danger from this one.

Still cool though.

I’m curious what makes you believe this is not about an asteroid. Looking at the dates in the lower lefthand corner of the gif, it seems likely that this is a reconstruction of the path of asteroid 2002 MN, which came within 75,000 miles of Earth on June 14, 2002. There’s some more information about it at Wikipedia and New Scientist.

In light of the information there, the OP’s comment about “nuclear winter and possible total destruction” does sound over-the-top. 2002 MN was calculated to be about 80 meters across, large enough to have caused an explosion comparable to the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908, but nothing like nuclear winter (unless a nuclear-weapons-equipped nation misidentified the asteroid’s impact as a nuclear attack and retaliated, unleashing a global nuclear war, which I guess is possible).

If you look at the plotted orbit, a Saturn rocket (or anything launched from Earth) seems really unlikely. The bulky parts of those never get very far from Earth, whereas this thing arrived from way out yonder, at least according to the gif.

Note that I didn’t investigate any of this until I saw your reblog questioning my initial reblog of the post, so thanks for giving me the incentive to do that. I could totally have been guilty of passing on a cool-but-bonkers Tumblr lie. On further investigation I think the asteroid part, if not the potential consequences, sounds pretty solid, but I was just lucky about that. In a sense that makes this post, like 2002 MN, a fortunate near-miss, not recognized by the party in jeopardy until after the fact. :-)

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buzzfeed:

This is the extremely upsetting truth about baby carrots.

I choose to believe yulinkuang reblogged this specifically so I would see it and add it to my own bag of lies. Which is now a collection of LIES LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO BAG CARROTS.

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dduane:

azurelunatic:

mamasam:

tonyabbot:

scary-monsters-and-davesprite:

lonelyinsomniac:

samsaranmusing:

Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

A visitor.

It’s like it’s trying so hard to hit us and it just can’t do it

All I can imagine is every astronomer drinking heavily from 2002-2003 like “There it goes—OH FUCK IT’S COMING BACK”

“Dynamics of a fucking asteroid” indeed

At least it drew us a flower before it left…

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sp1rit:

awwww-cute:

The cutest Hobbit in the Shire

I WANT TO CRY THIS IS THE CUTEST THING EVER

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despairoftranslators:

Every day when I get to work, I drop my purse at my desk, grab my mug and a tea bag, and hike all the way across the building for hot water, just so I can walk through the theatre. I have a romance going with the ghost light, the sawdust-smell of the stage, the way the space feels alive, practically vibrating around me. I’ve taken an absurd number of photos on those morning walk-throughs. Here are a few.

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eyrequotes:

This post is full of nope. Not the image; that’s Tolkien. Quoting Tolkiengateway.net:

Not used in the original impression of The Hobbit, 1937, which included no coloured illustrations, this painting appeared in the second English impression of the same year, and in the first American edition, 1938. In the American edition the title ‘Rivendell’ within the decorative border was removed (on which J.R.R. Tolkien commented: ‘I cannot imagine why they have spilt the Rivendell picture by slicing the top and cutting out the ornament at the bottom’), but both reproductions carried the printed caption ‘The Fair Valley of Rivendell’ (‘Hidden somewhere ahead of us is the fair valley of Rivendell where Elrond lives in the Last Homely House’, Chapter 3, A Short Rest). The painting was reproduced in The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendars 1973 and 1974 and in The Hobbit Calendar 1976.

But the quote that’s been added above it… nope. I’m gonna channel my inner ibmiller for a second.

That’s not Tolkien. He never said it or wrote it. Or if he did, there’s no record I can find of him doing so, and certainly not within the text of the Hobbit, LOTR, or The Silmarillion.

That’s a line (with apologies to people who love it, and whose views on the subject are certainly just as valid as mine) that was written by some subset of Boyens/Jackson/Walsh as part of the screenwriting for the movie version of The Two Towers. And in fact (as discussed in the commentary track for the movie), it was written under intense time pressure, as they were struggling to come up with a satisfying ending for the movie, and in desperation finally crafted that speech for Sam, a speech that (again, with apologies to those for whom it works) always felt anti-climatic and vaguely lame to me.

Partly, I suspect, that’s because as a huge book nerd who spent his first few viewings of each of the movies helplessly cataloging every actual Tolkien quote, as part of obsessively noting every inclusion and departure from canon no matter how small, this line immediately jumped out at me and made me say, “That? You’re going to hang the big conclusion of your movie on that? It’s not even Tolkien!?”

So it just bothers the crap out of me to see the line attributed to Tolkien here. And I realize that’s just me, and it’s my problem, not your problem.

But just…

Nope.

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