A fantastic movie, one of the craziest i’ve ever seen, even though the premise is about a woman who is dissatisfied with her life, including her husband and daughter. It reminds me, in different ways, of the movies The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Holy Motors, the last episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even a martial arts movie or John Wick.
On February 13th, 2019, after 15 years, Opportunity Rover is declared dead. The last transmission:
my battery is low, and it is getting dark.
i have been here, searching, and exploring, and documenting, because humans in all their fragile wonderful humanity looked up,and saw the stars, and named them after heroes that died horrible lonely deaths, and after the large animals that shared their velvety nights, and after lovers
and they wrote themselves into the skies. thousands of years later, they sent me to join them, to travel the stars, to this place that is home-but-not-a-home. hello, how are you? i said to the barren rocks and the orange dust and the sunsets that are beautiful in the same way that the dark blue of ocean trenches is beautiful. i am opportunity, and i’m here to tell you stories about these strange beings that build machines to reach the stars. and i am here to tell them stories about you.
fifteen times around the sun, and i spun through nights and days, and i sent pictures back across the gulf, and on earth – tiny and blue and temporary – people looked at the images and gasped, and showed them to their friends, and cried over them in the feeltoomuch hours of the nights, and looked up at the bits of forever they could see from the ground – the galaxies and planets and moons and stars- and i hope they thought of me, patiently beaming pictures of otherness back to them.
i am (was?) only a metal frame with some electronics. i am not human, and i was not born, but the scientists with stars in their hearts named me and put some of their own precious humanity into me. so among the rocks and the dust, i roam, and i explore, and i am so far from home
hello, my name is opportunity. what is this? what is this? what is this?
a storm roared out of the ether eight months ago and savaged part of my metal frame, that nothingness-but-somethingness. i am tired, and i am damaged. and it has been so long, and this red dust is making it hard to sing. my humans, they tried to save me. for eight long months, they tried to reach me, but part of being human is the heartbreak, and after all, i was never supposed to last this long.
i just read a washington post article on romcoms aging poorly due to the pushiness (and oft-stalkery conduct) of the male characters therein, and it got me thinking about pride and prejudice, and specifically darcy saying, “one word from you will silence me on this subject forever.”
because, like, that’s the seldom-portrayed romantic dream in the patriarchal hellscape that is our world, isn’t it?
a dude being willing to say, “i understand if you don’t feel the same way about me, and i’ll leave you alone forever about this if my attention is unwanted.”
so simple, yet so wonderful in its basic human decency
and dudes to this day wonder why women still swoon over darcy
Note also: Elizabeth turns down Darcy’s first proposal, and in the process, accuses him of doing some stuff he did not do (and also some stuff he totally did).
The next day, he surprises her on her walk. He hands her a letter, asks that she read it, and then takes off.
When this happened to me after I had turned someone down IN REAL LIFE, the letter contained a passionate argument to the tune of “actually you’re wrong and you do like me and you should go out with me” and it was creepy af.
Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth starts with: “Be not alarmed, Madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers, which were last night so disgusting to you”. He goes on to set the record straight about the stuff he didn’t do (as well as the stuff he did) which is *actually relevant* to Elizabeth. And he, as promised, doesn’t romance her further.
It’s totally bizarre that even now, this can be considered unusually great dude behaviour.
Darcy’s first proposal: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
Darcy’s second proposal: “One word from you will silence me on this subject forever.”
His whole arc in the book is about learning to consider other people’s feelings and not just his own, but the fact that it’s expressed via who gets to talk and who is told to shut up is so, so telling. The first time around, he imposes his voice on her whether she wants it or not. The second time, he asks how she feels, and in exchange, offers her the gift of his silence.
And yeah, the fact that dudes still! have! not! learned! this! lesson! is exhausting.
I have never seen the Keira Knightley version of P&P because they cut a crucial line out of Elizabeth’s initial rejection. In the book, she smacks him down because of ‘your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others’. The movie cut the selfish disdain, which is absolutely the most important part of the line. Arrogance and conceit? He already knew about those! He’d already had a conversation with her about pride, specifically his pride, and he was ready to go down with that ship.
But the selfish disdain? That was new information. That was the ‘oh shit’ moment that prompted the long letter, most of which boiled down to ‘look, I genuinely didn’t think it would hurt your sister’s feelings much and I am legit sorry about that but I love my friend and he doesn’t deserve your mother, okay, nobody deserves your mother especially not you and Jane who seem very nice and also here is the long and embarrassing story about why George Wickham’s feelings are not worth my concern or yours ever ever ever’. He may be a socially awkward idiot but he does care about people’s feelings and he wants her to know immediately that he is not the asshole she thinks he is in that regard.
And then they meet again and he practically turns himself inside out to prove that he listened and paid attention and he is being super considerate of the feelings of others at all times bc she was right and he was wrong and he is trying hard to be better about this. So he rescues Lydia not only for Elizabeth, but because he feels bad that he didn’t consider the further damage this asshole could do to other girls, he rescues Bingley and Jane’s romance because he wants to repair the hurt he caused both of them, and then he very humbly proposes again to Elizabeth, with appropriate concern about her feelings.
The entire second half of the book is ‘Darcy Is More Considerate Of Others Because He Got Called On His Behaviour And Actually Listened’ and that’s the core of his appeal. Not because he’s a jerk in part one (and I’ve seen so many guys use Darcy as an example of Women Love Jerks Not Nice Guys), but because when someone actually explains to the socially inept egg ‘you are being a jerk and hurting people’s feelings’ his response is ‘oh, shit, I didn’t mean to do that, I will work super hard at never doing that again’. And then he follows through and does work super hard at it and makes the change.
Political scientist and sf fan Henry Farrell (previously)
argues persuasively that the dystopian elements of our everyday life
are best viewed through the lens of Philip K Dick (whose books
repeatedly depicted a world of constructed realities, whose true nature
was obscured by totalitarians, conspiracies, and broken computers) and
not Orwell or Huxley, whose computers and systems worked altogether too
well to be good parallels for today’s janky dystopia.
In the PKDverse, it’s increasingly hard to tell bots from humans (and
even the bots might struggle to tell whether they are or are not
artificial), and “centaurs” (human-machine collaborations) poison our
mediasphere with software agents
that periodically get puppeted by real-life trolls. These centaurs use
captured bits of human intelligence – Wikipedia scrapes, messages
harvested from social media – to impersonate humans when no human is
available to puppet them, but then summon human assistance when they
reach a crux that’s above their paygrade – a moment of truth when it is
possible to effect an epic troll, or complete the next phase of a giant
con.
And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.
not what i expected from a post that began with “speaking of pronouns,” but an a++ show of the versatility and surprise daily available on tumblr dot com
“What the fuck is going on? Donald Trump! Donald fucking Trump! He’s a jackass reality TV star. He’s goddamn clueless. For fuck’s sake, this can’t be happening. Can it? Fucking fuck. Why isn’t anyone calling it out? It’s like Alice in fucking Wonderland. How can we be doing this? Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
“When I see a bird, I see at the same time that bird on a tree near the house. I see everything as an ensemble, and I realize that’s how I see everything in life… With my lenses, I can take in that place, then the tree, the bush, the house. I try to capture all those places at the same moment, just like our eye travels from one spot to another in taking in the scene, and I try to reconstitute it.”
— Jean-Luc Mylayne, 2006
Click on each image for details.
This is the artist whose stuff I saw in Chicago with thebrideofcaliban and absolutely loved!!!!!
The Mary Sue has decided we will no longer be actively promoting the HBO series Game of Thrones. Allow us to explain.
As I write this, I sit within five feet of no less than ten Game of Thrones promotional products — some of which I’d been sent as a member of the press, but most of which I spent my hard-earned money on. It’s no secret that I’m an enormous fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series and, in turn, HBO’s adaptation, Game of Thrones. But I honestly didn’t think we’d find ourselves here again, and the fact that we have fills me with utter disappointment.
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.
