Hey do you dream of running away to sea to become a sailor? BOY HOWDY DO I HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU:
Grays Harbor Historical Seaport has just launched their new training program, Sea School NW. Lemme tell you why this is a huge deal:
The professional maritime world is massively male-dominated, with only 2% of the global industry identifying as female. This program, run by some of the most inclusive, enthusiastic folks in the business, aims to change change that by providing subsidized professional training for underrepresented groups wanting to break into the field.
They’re only accepting scholarship folks right now, which means the only requirements are being age 18-35 and making less than double the federal poverty level for 2017 ($24,280 annually for a single person).
You’ll spend eight weeks sailing aboard the Hawaiian Chieftain, preparing to earn your USCG Ordinary Seaman Credential and advance your trade skills through hands-on-instruction, online coursework, marine system classes, industry mentorship and job skill development.
Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That’s how people change.
lol ok but seriously: what is it like to look at this year’s election and not have to see every time your own flawed, smart, accomplished, empathetic mother was ever underestimated, condescended to, denied credit or deliberately wronged
But war is a really hard target. Most people—most of you, probably–dismiss world peace as a pipe dream. Perhaps you believe the deep-roots theory. If war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable, right?
You might also think that religious fanaticism—and especially Muslim fanaticism–is the greatest threat to peace. That’s the claim of religion-bashers like Dawkins, Krauss, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and the late, great warmonger Christopher Hitchens.
The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. Since 9/11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have killed 370,000 people. That includes more than 210,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates.
Far from solving the problem of Muslim militancy, U.S. actions have made it worse. ISIS is a reaction to the anti-Muslim violence of the U.S. and its allies.
The U.S. spends almost as much on what we disingenuously call defense as all other nations combined, and we are the leading innovator in and peddler of weapons. Barack Obama, who pledged to rid the world of nuclear weapons, has approved a $1 trillion plan to modernize our arsenal.
The antiwar movement is terribly weak. Not a single genuine antiwar candidate ran in this Presidential race, and that includes Bernie Sanders. Many Americans have embraced their nation’s militarism. They flocked to see American Sniper, a film that celebrates a killer of women and children.
In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he’s almost 90. He needs help!
@staff I am literally begging you to bring back replies sending someone a message to say I understand their text post is like calling my mom on the phone to say I like her Facebook status
“For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.”
so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage?
“If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.”
– Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Please, for the love of GOD, stop reblogging this post thinking that it’s photographs of Pluto! I have debunked this post until I’m blue in the face and I keep continuing to see it on my dash with exclamations of “omg! so amazing! what a time to be alive!” I refuse to reblog it again to explain how wrong it is, because inevitably people don’t read my comments but just reblog it YET AGAIN to swoon over how cool it is.
Those are digital drawings of an artist’s interpretation of what Pluto MIGHT look like, that were commissioned by NASA – LAST YEAR. They’re lovely drawings, but the post presents them as photographs of Pluto and people just keep getting fooled by them. I hate misinformation and I’m sick of seeing people get fooled by this dumb post. The actual photographs of Pluto are here now and they’re fucking amazing – let’s reblog them instead!
The show has creators. They make the choices.They chose to use rape as a plot device. Again. – Jill Pantozzi, The Mary Sue
It is possible to write fantasy without falling back on the harmful cliché that an old-timey setting offers a free pass to show women getting raped all the time. –Everdeen Mason, Refinery29
The issue with the show returning to rape as a trope is not simply because there have been thinkpieces speaking out against it, and is not solely driven by the rational concerns lying at the heart of those thinkpieces. It’s also that the show has lost my faith as a viewer that the writers know how to articulate the aftermath of this rape effectively… –Myles McNutt, AV Club
We already knew that Ramsay Bolton was a sadist and an abuser of women, we already knew that Theon Greyjoy was his tormented puppet. Showing Sansa’s dress ripped, showing her face shoved down into the bed, hearing her screams did nothing to reveal character, or advance the plot, or critique anything about Westerosi society or about our own conceptions of medieval society that hasn’t already been critiqued. – Steven Attewell, Salon
In general, I’m not a big fan of people getting raped in entertainment as a manipulative way of heightening the stakes, but I’m even less of a fan of people getting raped in entertainment when it accomplishes absolutely nothing. – Laura Hudson, Wired
What character development could be wrung from this tragedy that could not have been created without a violent rape? Why does Game of Thrones — and so much popular entertainment — revert to this horrific crime when they want their female characters to “grow”? – Michal Schick, Hypable
Was it really important to make that scene about Theon’s pain? If Game of Thrones was going to go there, shouldn’t they at least have had the courage to keep the camera on Turner’s face?…But the last thing we needed was to have a powerful young woman brought low in order for a male character to find redemption. No thank you. – Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair
To show Sansa being raped as the kicker to an episode — and then to cut to Theon, as if it’s his view, his reaction, his internalizing of the moment that matters — just felt like more of the same old same old we’ve been getting since Ros died, since Tansy was hunted, since Cersei was raped. – Nina Shen Rastogi, Vulture
There are thousands of ways to make a character and a series compelling without having to humiliate and dehumanize her with sexual force. Come on, Game of Thrones, you should know better than that. – Rachel Semigran, Bustle
Now with Sansa and Ramsay, Game of Thrones is seemingly confirming that it has no idea how to use rape as a storytelling device — crass as it may sound, fictional sexual violence can be extremely powerful if managed carefully (see: The Americans) — and rape is just about the worst storytelling device to deploy clumsily. – Jen Trolio, Vox
Welcome to cable drama, where a woman’s rape is an opportunity for a man’s character development….what really makes the wedding night rape of Sansa Stark notable is the fact that as brutal and honestly unnecessary as the moment is, the show doesn’t even have the courtesy of letting Sansa’s emotions about the event serve as the center of the moment….
This was a choice and the choice was to marry off a teenage girl, rape her, and not even have the dignity to care primarily about her feelings about her fate.
The show pretty much added a new, and in my opinion, entirely unnecessary victimization to her story. More concerningly, after Jaime’s rape of Cersei last season, it’s yet another rape Benioff and Weiss decided to add to the show that was not in the text and at this point, we don’t need anymore. – Lauren Morgan, New York Daily News
There have been numerous plot points and characters from Martin’s novels that have been omitted from the series; I’d love to hear what the showrunners’ arguments are for not only keeping the brutal assault of a young woman, but changing the storyline so that it happened to a beloved character. I’ll be waiting for an explanation, but like Jaime Lannister’s guilt [over raping Cersei], I’m not expecting it to actually arrive. – Casey Cipriani, Indiewire
There were so many ways around this very horrible and very predictable outcome and D&D decided to use what would shock viewers the most. Maybe I’m naive and hope too much for the good things, but I’m also a fan of good writing and creative characters who grow. Sansa’s “wedding” involved neither.- Jen Stayrock, Workprint
Bad enough that the assault upon the Stark princess by ghastly Ramsay Bolton was explicitly presented as an exercise in voyeurism, with Theon Greyjoy forced to watch as Sansa was violently assailed. What made the scene worse, and perhaps unforgivable, was that the rape was in the context of Sansa displaying increased maturity and independence. – Ed Powers, Independent.ie
Personally, I’d really like Game of Thrones to be a good 30-40 per cent less weird about women (and having Warrior Princess fighting girls in Dorne isn’t quite what I’m after, chaps). – Chris Bennion, Independent.co.uk
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“Fans have a direct experience with the crime than with murder or other really serious violent acts.
Often you can tell exactly what the story line was because it’s prompting calls about a certain issue or from a certain group of survivors.” – Scott Berkowitz,
president and founder of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) The hotline which receives a noticeable increase in calls every time there’s a portrayal of rape on a popular show. Support is available 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE
I was sitting in the back of a cab the other day (not a usual occurrence, but it was necessary and I wasn’t paying) while the driver was navigating his way through an obnoxious amount of construction, and he was basically just ramming himself in without giving a fuck, because he had somewhere to be and gave no shits who was in his way, or who was honking at him. This behavior used leave me very impressed and a little bit scared but this time I was just relieved, because otherwise we’d never get through it.
And it made me think about New Yorkers, and our attitude towards the annoying and stressful obstacles in life, which is basically “oh god I don’t want to do this, it’s so difficult and everyone and everything is in my goddamn way, this is the worst” … “UGH, FUCK IT, I’M DOING IT.” This is followed immediately by charging into traffic and/or a scary situation and continuing to move forward until the task is done.
