speaking of america’s favorite fruit (not optional) i love applerankings.com so fucking much. absolute necessity for any real Appleheads out there
This is extremely descriptive. Amazing.
• any target
• churches in texas
• abandoned 7/11’s
• your bedroom at 5 am
• hospitals at midnight
• warehouses that smell like dust
• lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore
• empty parking lots
• ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods
• rooftops in the early morning
• inside a dark cabinet
what the fuck
•hospital waiting rooms •airports from midnight to 7am • bathrooms in small concert venues
I just got the weirdest feeling I swear
OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!
A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.
The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.
Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.
Because so am I. <3
Liminal spaces are amazing, because they - and the associated discomfort - exist in lives as well as in the material world!
An anthropologist named Victor Turner developed the idea originally to describe the space in the middle of rituals where a person is neither what they began as, nor what they will end as – an initiate going through an induction ceremony, a person in the middle of their wedding ceremony, etc. It’s a space of total ambiguity existing between two named states, and it freaks us the hell out.
It’s one of the things that led to wedding parties, to pick a solid example – because a couple transitioning from single to married are vulnerable in the middle space and need protection.
That’s why something like this will hit different emotional notes than if he got eaten on the street, or in a combat zone:
Adulthood ceremonies are so prevalent in most cultures because of this idea as well - someone vulnerable, in the transition, no longer a child, not yet an adult, needs to be guided through the shift. We’ve lost a lot of these sacred moments in modern western culture (I had a bat mitzvah, but sweet sixteens have vanished from a lot of places, I think, as have debuts… the line between childhood and adulthood in the secular west has gotten reallllly blurry.) and I have a hunch that’s one of the reasons why things like wedding showers and baby showers now take on a whole new level of meaning / annoyance. Because we’re missing the other markers of transition.
This is brining back major nerd feels from my BA days of obsessing over psychogeographies and then into my MA with the sublime as liminal/transcendental experience. And oh my god now I want to talk about Lovecraft (because pretty much all of the environments above are relevant there… Plus Old Ones. They’re always relevant).
Ooh, look at that. I derailed the conversation.
Also… I’m adding multi-storey car parks. I’m obsessed with them. They are so weird.
You ever invite your coworker to watch you give birth just to spite a racist
Okay howmst the fuck has a ship doctor in the far future never handled a birth without the father present? Are sperm donors and gay couples and trans women no longer a thing in the bajillionth century CE?? :/
I while understand the frustration with erasure sometimes it helps to look at things through the cultural context of when something was made. Star Trek the Next Generation was made in 1987, this particular episode I believe aired in 1988 a time when a future where the husband was always present for the birth would have been amazing to many of the people watching the show as men had only been allowed to be present for the birth of their children for 10/15ish years at that point in the US.
Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.
A future where the husbands were always present for the birth was still a little crazy to consider in the late 1980s. A good kind of crazy for the people living in that time, it showed a future where the wishes of the couple were finally consistently listened to by medical professionals as a result of the actions of people during their or their parent’s lifetimes. And it does that by also subverting it in allowing Data to step into the role of the father when the father was unknown and/or unwilling/unable to fill that role (I’ll be honest my knowledge of Next Gen is a bit spotty and I have not seen this whole episode, just a piece of it at family Thanksgiving). The woman’s desires as to how she would give birth are listened to and respected, something that still doesn’t happen in many hospitals now and would have been seen as even more revolutionary then. So while it isn’t perfect I think this scene was actually fairly impressive for its time and cultural context and shows a future that many people of that time would have seen as ideal.
I think this kind of contextual understanding and analysis is really important because things that look antiquated now were revolutionary then. I remember reading that the mini skirts in Star Trek TOS were legot just in fashion (about 64’ ish), one of the actresses (the one that played Rand) requested they be in the show and both her and Nichelle Nichols said they didn’t see them as demeaning but liberating in that time and context. Where as NOW it looks like ‘sexy male gaze’ but then it wasn’t.
Miniskirts are comfortable and easy to move in - unlike longer bulkier skirts, which had previously been required for “modesty.” And unlike the approach of “we’ll just put them in pants,” miniskirts made a statement that women crew-members weren’t being treated like men. Miniskirts were a way to say “I can be an attractive woman, wear comfortable clothes, and still look professional and do a serious job.”
The clothing for that message today would be different.
This is also why the bridge crew of TOS may seem “tokenistic” today. When it came out, the Cold War was in full swing and “Soviets” were maligned and hated, Black people could not count on their right to vote being honored, and mixed-race people (like Spock) were called horrible things like “half-breed” and “zebra.” A white man was in charge of the ship, but Gene Roddenberry was fully aware that a chunk of the viewership read him as queer, and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DISCOURAGE THAT READING, at a time when “homosexual activity” was illegal in the United States!
By today’s standards, “one of everything? How tokenistic.” In 1966? “A Black woman, a Russian, a man from multiple cultures, and a man who loves differently, all top of their fields, all working together and finding common ground to learn, grow, and help where they can? What a wonderful future!”
Also I’m sorry but like. A show also featuring a Japanese man who isn’t a stereotype but part of the crew, having a Scottish character be a part of the central cast (idk if I need to get into why this is important, but considering how England has continuously tried to erase Scottish culture and identity, and the stereotype of Scots as bumbling bumpkins, etc, its kind of nice to see a Scotsman who’s the best of the best at his job).
Moreover, a lot of kids watched this show. MLK himself contacted Nichelle Nichols and asked her to stay on the show when she was considering leaving, because “you don’t have a Black role, you have an equal role,” and there wasnt many Black role models on tv. I can only imagine how Black kids, Asian kids, and mixed race or mixed culture kids felt seeing people like them on tv. Hell, seeing Uhura on screen is what inspired Whoopi Goldberg as a little girl.
Also, yeah, its easy to look back and say ‘damn, fathers weren’t there in the delivery room? What assholes’ but no like they legitimately were not allowed in there.
Tiny correction: while George Takei is Japanese, and while Sulu thus looks like what we in the 20th-21st century consider to be an ethnically Japanese man, Hikaru Sulu was Pan-Asian by design. His last name is not Japanese. And Roddenberry designed him like that intentionally, because while there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment in the US at the time (I mean, hell… George Takei himself spent years in Japanese internment camps during WW2), there was also a lot of other anti-Asian sentiments, and Roddenberry intentionally put ALL of it on the character of Sulu.
Like, all the years of anti-Chinese racism in the US? Sulu. Anti-Japanese sentiments left over after WW2? Sulu. Korean War in 1950-52? Sulu. The Vietnam War, with Johnson in 1965 (a year before TOS started airing) choosing to start sending American troops into the conflict? Sulu.
Sulu was Roddenberry’s desperate attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human, and yeah, he probably put kind of too much on Sulu’s shoulders, but it was the 1960s and Roddenberry fucking cared about representation, so he did what he could.
Just, you know… a little bit more historical Star Trek context
Also to hammer this home?
Scotty was third in line for the captain’s chair. The only non-Kirk who had the con more then him was Spock.
He was smart, he was a *ranked* crewmen, he was a gentleman, he wasn’t a skirt chaser, and he was capitol L loyal. The only time he got into a fight was when someone both went after his Captain, AND his Ship.
And he was Scottish.
That’s so above and beyond the typical Scottish stereotype even TO THIS DAY.
Dr Polaski was coded as something of an arse just so they could make their valid points about equality and bigotry using her as a foil. Yes it was kind of clumsy from a modern perspective, but it was also kind of groundbreaking (not least because you didn’t usually get arses being played by women)
I am hard-coded to put this on any post that mentions MLK and Nichelle Nichols.
Also, it’s very worth noting that the “token minority character” label doesn’t apply in any way to these characters.
Tokens are there to present the appearance of diversity. Whereas Roddenberry created a diverse cast in an era where there wasn’t even a need for the appearance of diversity. Roddenberry didn’t put these characters in because he wanted to look diverse– he put them in to BE DIVERSE.
Context.
Seven years after, I see you again 😚
Guys this completely changed my writing, heed it. I often do an entire draft just looking at sentence variation and oftentimes the results are absolutely transformative in the difference.
This is very very good advice, and absolutely worth following. Read this. Read it again. Follow it. Your writing will get much, much better.
whenever i see this post i am like goddamn this is so true
Reblogged this a couple of years ago. Reblogging again because it’s still true.
This is part of my ongoing Discworld jacket embroidery project. Of course Great A'Tuin has to be on there. And of course it has to be the biggest one of them all.
I'm going to put the finished product in my masterpost, but I'm so proud of the thing that I have to put it in an extra post beforehand. Enjoy!
Update!!!
Behold: the elephants! 😁
The turtle moves! Now it's just the "cargo" left. And the universe. Well.
Update 3: Why did I have to try single thread for the disc. Why. How did I ever think that was a good idea. This is taking aaaages.
I'd say never again, but I know myself too well...
Still trying to decide whether to outline the landmass with darker thread or not. It would make the lands more distinct - but it might also make it look more like a comic. If you have any thoughts on it, let me know. I'll only decide once I've finished the rest of the disc and that'll be at least a week, if I had to guess.
I finally had some time to continue and the disc is done! Now just some stars, planets, etc...
My estimate is that this took about 150 hours. About half of that went into the disc because I discovered single thread embroidery.
And because I always think it's really interesting to see the back of the embroidery - bonus:
On to the next one! Maybe I'll do the luggage now.
Wow..!
I love the front but always appreciate pics of the back.
Flyer and assistant
cc: @petermorwood
The pilot’s wearing G-pants (aka Speed Jeans aka anti-blackout leggings) and the ground-crew guy is checking that they work.
*****
TL;DR - A lot of commenters on this and similar photos are unaware of the US military “Blue Discharge” mentioned below.
It meant more or less “dismissed as undesirable” and since - per Wikipedia - it gave no more specific reason but included denial of veteran benefits, it left civilian employers free to draw their own conclusions about what
“undesirable” meant, and discriminate accordingly.
*****
Further to other details from other comments, and with amateur-historian-hat on, men in wartime often made very close friendships that might or might not have a deeper element. As the song says:
If you can’t be with the one you love,
Love the one you’re with.
As a bestie, brother or more? They know, we can only guess. This snapshot was taken in a more innocent time and - up to about 45-50 years ago - male-male contact both in and out of military service was more physical without automatically implying a romantic or sexual subtext.
The subtext may well be there for viewers aware of what they were looking at, as in J. C. Leyendecker’s art. However,
a lack of any outrage during his entire career suggests that viewers unaware of what they saw remained blissfully ignorant, undisturbed by something they didn’t even know existed.
Private photos could be (and plenty of examples are) much more intimate than this public one shot on the flight-line, but all were risky. IMO those in them aren’t just showing affection but also a great deal of courage, because such photos might end up used as evidence of what various armed forced called “immorality”, “conduct unbecoming”, “not conducive to good order” etcetera, etcetera.
in the US military, this could and apparently usually would lead to the Blue Discharge mentioned above, creating even more problems for service personnel already needing to explain their sudden, unexpected and premature return to civvy street.
*****
Back to G-suits and the need to get hands-on…
Speed-jeans fitted very tightly, helped by laces (shades of the corset cliché in period dramas), as seen here…
…and as being laced here.
That hose held by the pilot in the OP pic and hanging loose in the second photo connected to a valve in the cockpit, which inflated compression bladders in the trouser legs.
You can see the extent of inflation in this close-up.
The pressure they created during
violent high-Gee combat manoeuvres (assisted by a lot of thigh and abs muscle-clenching by the pilot - radio comms during this can sound like severe constipation or badly dubbed porn) reduced the amount of blood being forced by gravity down from the brain and prevented a blackout, or at least reduced the risk of it happening.
If they didn’t fit or inflate properly, they wouldn’t work.
Checking them before a flight was a worthwhile precaution, because maintaining consciousness during a dogfight could mean staying in control as you pulled up, down or sideways away from an enemy fighter on your tail, while losing consciousness, especially at low altitude, could mean not recovering before you and your plane made a big hole in the ground.
It could also mean wallowing out of an evasive turn so the bad guy got a clear shot, and THAT could mean sharing cockpit space with stuff which would completely spoil your day…
My mother is 65 and right bang in the middle of the Baby Boomer generation, but she’s very cool and does her best to be and stay woke, keep up with shifts in vernacular, and takes care to do things like make sure she’s strict with getting pronouns correct, etc. Her meme game is a little lagging, and she only just discovered the cinnamon challenge. I was surprised to see her… not surprised. If anything, she seemed a bit pleased and said, “Yep, kids are still kids.”
I stared at her for a while. “What do you mean?” I asked her. She’s seen other ancient memes like planking and never had that reaction before. Seeing the cinnamon challenge was downright satisfying to her.
She looked me dead in the face and said, “Sweetheart, I grew up in a time when you could get crystal meth over the counter at the pharmacy. They were called diet pills then.”
“Whaaaaaaat.” I knew that Nazi Germany passed meth around like candy, but that was in the 30′s and 40′s. I had just figured it had been prohibited already in America by the time my mom was growing up. “Did you have a cinnamon challenge or something in school?” I finally asked.
She half-nodded and half-shrugged and said, “Similar. You couldn’t have candy or gum in school when I was growing up. It was about 1969 in San Francisco and parents were starting to limit cigarette smoking to kids under 18, too, so a lot of my school friends were squirming all day long with nothing to at least chew on.”
“What did they do instead, mom?” I asked suspiciously, because she would not bring this subject up after I had explained to her that the cinnamon challenge was dangerous because of how horrible it is to accidentally inhale it into your airways.
“Well… Back when I was in school, you could get cinnamon extract from the pharmacy. It was just cinnamon suspended in canola oil, and you could use it for cooking or treating a skin fungus. Stuff like that,” she explained. “So the boys at my school would take toothpicks and dip them in the cinnamon extract. That’s why chewing on a toothpick was so common back then. If you were trying to quit smoking or couldn’t have chewing gum, you could carry a little bottle of flavor extract about the size of a bottle of nail polish in your pocket and dip a toothpick in it. Then you’d have something to chew on that the teachers hadn’t banned, and you could hide them in your cheek easily.”
“So what did the boys at your school get into, mother?” I asked again. We were still on the topic of ridiculous memes. This had to go somewhere.
She smirked. “Well, after a while, the boys started noticing that the cinnamon extract from the pharmacy was spicy. It burned. So it started to get to be a challenge to see how many cinnamon toothpicks you could hold in your mouth at once. It got so bad that kids would get blisters and burns on their mouths from it, and you could tell if someone had a few of them tucked in their cheek in class because their face would turn red from the neck up like a cartoon.”
“Why have I never heard about this?”
She wasn’t done. “Finally, the teachers figured out what everyone was doing and it became a pretty big deal. Cinnamon extract started getting banned or restricted to adults. Then they banned toothpicks for sale to anyone under 18, too. That’s why it was a sign of being cool, particularly among guys, to walk around with a toothpick in your mouth. It either meant you had a fake ID or that you were 18.”
I stared at her for a long time. “Mom, why didn’t they just use hot sauce? It was California. Didn’t you have peppers?”
Without missing a beat, my 65-year-old mother replied, “Honey, we were white as fuck.”
Huh.
i have never contemplated someone doing this on the harp. i am amazed she got all the parts in and so fast
Wow!
HOLY FUCK
I laughed way too hard
this is the funniest fucking thing I have ever seen
I suddenly woke up stupid early on my day off with multiple weird random aches and pains and a revelation about the Leverage chess metaphors.
They’re all wrong.
Look, I obviously adore the white knight/black king motif, and it works really well for that very specific discussion of Nate’s shift in morality and position at the opening of the series. But the show as well as I and other fans have then tried to take that equation and apply it to other jobs and to the crew as a whole. This is fun and awesome, but I believe you’re going to get it wrong every time if you start from the white knight/black king line.
Because in all other situations, Nate is not the king.
Couple important things about kings in chess:
1. They don’t move much. They can only move one space at a time, and for most of the game they stay in their own little box, well guarded by other pieces. This is because
2. When the king is checkmated (threatened with capture and no possible escape), it’s game over. There is no more hope. This is the sole requirement for losing the game. No matter who else is in play, if the king is down, you lose.
This is NOT how Nate operates. Yeah, he makes the plans, but he doesn’t just hide in the office while everybody else carries them out. He’s almost always right up in there playing the most obnoxious guy you’ve ever met or smashing windows or something. And if Nate gets captured, it’s not game over, in fact, it often isn’t even a PROBLEM. Let’s look at a few times that happens, just for fun:
- In The King George Job, Nate’s getting beat up and Eliot slightly panics and is about to run to help, when Sophie says “NOPE, don’t do that, I can fix this without blowing our cover” and saunters in at her leisure. The jig isn’t up and she’s not even particularly concerned about him getting punched. I love it.
- In the Maltese Falcon Job, Nate sacrifices himself to save the team. This is a classic thing to do in chess and chess metaphors, but, I cannot stress this enough, you cannot sacrifice your king. That’s just called LOSING.
-In The Long Goodbye Job of course the whole con is structured around Nate getting caught. I guess this one kind of makes sense because the whole point is to look like they HAVE completely lost, but then at the end it appears that Nate’s going to secret prison and everyone else is escaping WITH the black book, so they STILL would be losing Nate but winning the job.
So if Nate isn’t the king, who is?
Hardison.
Let’s look at our points about kings again:
1. Doesn’t move as far or as quickly: Yes, Hardison ALSO gets out there and participates in the cons, everybody does. But Hardison does stay in the background more often, because that’s where his power is. He does the behind the scenes tech stuff and the remote stuff, he can wreck your shop without showing up through the power of the internet. He also does the forgeries of identities and objects, which are also done in his own space. At the same time, he has less physical power and less range – you don’t want him in a fistfight, or a gunfight, and his grifts are notorious for being a little… uh… interesting. So he has limited physical range and power but at the same time… .
2. The game is over if you lose him. That far-reaching behind the scenes power is absolutely vital for 90% of the jobs. He does the massive amounts of research and hacking legwork needed just to START a job, even before you get to actually completing the job. You are pretty much dead in the water without Hardison. But that’s just from a practical standpoint. Losing Hardison is also a crisis from an emotional standpoint. He’s our moral compass and our sweet baby brother and when Hardison gets in trouble there is no “well he’ll be fine for a few minutes” and no “well he kinda had it coming.” No, when Hardison is in trouble everything else grinds to a halt and everyone comes running. (See: The Experimental Job, The Grave Danger Job, The Long Goodbye Job.)
So like, yes Nate is in charge. But the king isn’t in charge on a chessboard, the king is just a piece with a very unique role, which Hardison fills much better than Nate does. So, now that we have our real king, who are our other pieces?
Queen: Parker. This has nothing to do with her dating Hardison. The thing about the queen is she can do a little bit of everything – she can move in any direction, making her the most dangerous piece on the board. Parker’s whole character arc is about learning all the different roles and how to access the whole playing field. She’s the only one who plans and executes an entire episode-length job by herself (okay, with a little help from her girlfriend). Plus, the other cool thing about a queen is she has a built-in transformation story – a pawn that crosses the board can become a queen, which Parker mimics by initially being dismissed as “the crazy one” and ultimately becoming the mastermind.
Knight: Sophie. I know, I wanted Eliot to be the horsie too, but this makes more sense. The knight’s deal is that it’s sneaky – it’s the only piece that can turn corners – and it can jump over obstacles. Sophie’s whole philosophy of grifting is that she shouldn’t need to know about safes or security systems, she should be able to bypass (jump over) all that by insinuating herself with the mark (being sneaky by playing a character to get behind enemy lines)
Rook: Eliot. This is the straightforward one – it goes in a straight line. It also literally represents the castle walls. It’s also so, so fucking helpful to have around, I fucking hate losing my rooks. It’s your solid right hand man, basically. Is this a little reductive of Eliot? Absolutely, but I’m jamming five complex characters into five predetermined boxes, it’s not all gonna be nuanced. And I think Mr. Punchy would like being seen as the fortress that everybody depends on, and to let all the nuance go under the radar. That’s where he likes it.
Bishop: Finally, here’s where Nate is hiding. While the rook can only go straight (lol), the bishop can only go diagonally. Nothing can be straightforward for the bishop, he always has to come at things from an angle. Like, you know, constantly looking at all the different angles of a situation and finding the right angle to come at a mark from. Also, the bishops sit right in the middle right next to the king and queen. I don’t know that this is historically accurate, but when my dad taught me to play he told me that was because the bishops were important councilors to the rulers, they were the ones who had important wisdom that would tell them the best plan of attack. So the king here isn’t necessarily the one making the plans – that’s the bishop. And finally, apparently the bishop is called lots of different things in other languages, but we’re operating in English, which means it makes Nate a priest, and that makes me happy.
