awesomenell65

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hoban "wash" washburne - firefly 1x01 → filed under one of the greatest character introductions in television history

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I loved the movie and the series. Though I have an abrupt ending for it. Ritchie is not dead. Full stop. As alive and immortal as the day he first crashed his motorcycle. 🤣 for me, the series ended the episode before.

Eyyy OTNF is a fellow highlander fan :D I'm personally just into the first movie/comicverse though.

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Oh yeah. I read tons of fic on all those hand-coded websites in the 90s. I wasn't on the mailing lists though. Nobody would have invited openly underage me.

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I endlessly reread the books as a teen and of course had a huge crush on Chee. For this latest adaptation - especially embodied by Zahn McClarnon who is my age (!) - I have a whole new appreciation for Joe Leaphorn. I really enjoyed the first season - and want to watch the second but I had to pay extra for it and haven’t - yet.

I was digging around in the Chee and Leaphorn tags on AO3 and found out that there's a new(ish) TV show! I also saw that there were some old vids dedicated to you from the PBS Mystery! adaptations. So, I'm here 2 years late to let you know if you didn't already that there's a new Chee and Leaphorn show, it's called Dark Winds, and the actress playing Bernie is gorgeous 😍

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Haha. I clearly failed to post enough. I watched an episode or two and was really excited but didn't have time to finish and then got distracted.

My general thoughts are that I love the dark tone, love the lack of Chee's annoying relationship, and love Bernie being there from the beginning, but mourn the lack of slashy vibes. Hillerman would never have had that "They'll forcibly sterilize you" scene. This show looks to be adding back in the things he wouldn't have touched and it's great.

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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

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Nichelle Nichols, 1966. 

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memori - dnr

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Expanse Text Posts 1/?

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It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

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I was going to say these people are stupid, but that’s not what’s going on here

So what sense does it make to vote “uncommitted” in the DNC when Biden has not only said the magic word ("ceasefire") for a while now, but just outlined a specific ceasefire and armistice plan, urged people to take to the streets to pressure their leaders to support it, and urged Israel and Hamas to accept it? What could voting uncommitted actually make Biden do in reality, make him yell “ceasefire” louder? Assassinate Netanyahu?

But no, it’s not about that. It’s just about ratfucking Democrats. That’s why reality hasn’t penetrated their narrative. The ratfuckers are opportunists who see this war as their chance to fuck over the Democratic Party, a way to relive their glory days of 2016 when they helped condemn the country to far-right fascism the first time around, and no amount of reality will stand in their way now

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"When in Rome" 3.16 XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS

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love how in tos bones so often frames himself as this crotchety old man meanwhile canonically he’s like 42

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