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So, so good

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This was a delightful ride. Worth the read.

At the gate for my flight home from visiting friends and there's a woman here with a service Shiba Inu. No pics because he has a Do Not Disturb vest and taking pics of strangers is illegal but I need to stress how ON DUTY this animal is. Ears up. Eyes doing Lazer scans of everything. Examining everyone who passes within 10ft like a security guard. Ass planted on her feet. I have never seen a dog with such intense chivalric guardian energy before. He has tiny eyebrows and they are FURROWED with concentration.

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This. Local elections are imperative. And NO politician is perfect…just vote for the one less likely to endanger your friends. Not hyperbole.

drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-“ no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just

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I couldn’t sleep until I drew this

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“Vibes not rules”

I once said we “Frankensteined” the Holosabacc table to keep it running. No one noticed. But oh God. I did. I was so mad at myself.

Starcruiser improvising was not for the weak.

Pablo Hidalgo was having a semi-breakdown on his twt yesterday because of people using words based on things that only exist in our world (milestone, dumpster, etc) and tbh this was so real of him he might be one of my favorite Star Wars creators

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Reepicheep is absolute goals. He and Sir Didymus are the truest of knights.

Reepicheep could kill the Witch King of Angmar (and/or Macbeth).

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This is EVERYTHING.

Spitballing with the fellas on discord and we've come up with a Star Trek character we want to see: A 200-year-old top Vulcan diplomat attending a function and laughing boisterously and slapping backs with everyone and then just relaxing into resting bitch face the moment nobody is watching him. He takes his job deadly seriously and studied parties extensively in the diplomatic academy. Every year he's brushing up on new developments in party theory. He knows every party nuance you could possibly think of, for the sake of intergalactic relations. Peace in the galaxy depends on it. It's weird but you gotta meet people where they're at, he thinks.

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This is the truest thing. And it can’t be overstated how our wee gorgeous St Scully with the porcelain complexion looked NOTHING like the women leading shows at the time.

With the representation I felt seeing a short redhead, I honor every person who has waited far too long to see a face like theirs in multiple media.

I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.

In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.

Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.

When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.

Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.

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No joke, getting to play John Hancock was one of my all time fave roles onstage. I still hope the fates will give me a crack at John Adams…but I NEVER thought I’d get to be in 1776 at all.

I have never in my life wanted to play a role in a musical so bad.

John Hancock is such a delightful role. I mean you get to basically yell as a job. But seriously his lines are always awesome and he knows his shit. Kinda wish he has his own song but still, I would kill to play that role. This was even before I got obsessed with David Ford. I just really liked the part of Hancock.

I have never been trained in acting or took any sort of lessons in my life, but I’m willing to do anything to play the role of John Hancock. I did audition a few months ago but I already told that story.

You truly don’t realize how fun of a part John Hancock is unless you pay attention to him through the entire musical. He’s HILARIOUS.

Part of me also wants to play Rutledge solely for the purpose of singing my lungs out to Molasses to Rum. Literally the only reason.

But Hancock means a lot to me and I know his lines slightly better then anyone else’s. (Even though I’ve seen the movie well over 100 times).

I’m manifesting myself to play Hancock one day. It’s my dream.

Bonus points if my fiancée is in the show with me.

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This this thisity this this! Leto is foul, method acting is not an excuse to be a colossal A-hole, and Robbie is a treasure. But seriously…method acting is not a green light to douchebaggery.

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Re blogging so I can get back to this later!

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it’ll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I’d recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn’t read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can’t for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You’ll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It’s genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

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we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.

when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.

the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.

my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.

when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.

and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.

in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.

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I love my favorite war criminals equally, but only one passionately. 💙💙💙

Something I find really amusing about the reaction to the Ahsoka trailer is the amount of people saying “Omg my favorite war criminal is back!!!” And the war criminal in question is Chopper and not Thrawn

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Adventures in Librarian-ing

Me: Do you guys know what a book dedication is?

Grade 1s: Nooo!

Me: It's kind of like the author is saying "This is who I wrote this book for, who I was thinking about when I wrote this." The dedication for the book that we're about to read says "For kids everywhere playing in boxes".

Grade 1: *gasps* I play in a box every day during after-school daycare!

Me: Yeah, I think I've seen you doing that too!

Other Grade 1: Wait, so they really wrote the book for us?! For real?!

Me: For real.

Grade 1s: :O

[The book I was about to read was Not a Box by Antoinette Portis]

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Incredible. Important. Kind.

“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley

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I love dives like this.

So, as much as I love charming, swaggering Han Solo, the guy is kind of awkward.

At first I thought it was an issue with his characterization in ROTJ where they made him a little too buffoonish for lack of a better word, and in Solo where they leaned a little bit too hard into Han being inexperienced and naive.

Don’t get me wrong, when it matters, the man is suave and dangerous and charismatic, and I love it.

But I was rewatching ANH the other day and I realized that at least when it comes to his personal relationships (except for Chewie) Han is kind of insecure and inept at forming meaningful relationships. To be fair, it makes sense given his backstory (in both Legends and Canon) and seedy profession. But legendary scoundrel Han is not at all slick when it comes to genuine interaction.

His initial introduction in the cantina as a ruthless survivor and his cocky dealings with Jabba tend to be the bulk of what people remember about his character, and for good reason. But there’s also captivating glimpses into a Han Solo who is more human than he probably wants anyone to see.

When Ben trains Luke, Han won’t stop insulting them both, but underneath all of the posturing, he does genuinely try to offer up real advice (that a good blaster is more reliable than an antiquated weapon). Then later, before abandoning Yavin, he doesn’t want to part on bad terms with Luke so, he chokes out a parting phrase that means something to Luke, tamping down his discomfort which is visible to the point that it’s kind of funny.

The first movie largely neglects his lack of social skills in regards to Leia (they do snap at each other, but that’s more to do with their clashing personalities than anything). He winks at her at the end, but Han is good at surface level flirting.

But then we get to Empire…strap in folks.

So, their first interaction takes place in the command center on Hoth, and Han is threatened to leave. And boy oh boy does Han really want/need Leia (and Leia in particular) to say she wants/needs him.

She has her own (very understandable) issues with opening up, so the closest she can get to admitting her own feelings is saying that the Alliance needs him. Leia may see herself as an extension of the Alliance, but that’s a different conversation and not enough for Han who needs to be sure of her feelings before making his own known. (Leia seems to have the same problem. They kinda suck at communicating sometimes.)

He asks her, very subtly pleads with her to open up, to reciprocate the bit of vulnerability he’s showing. She understandably doesn’t (again she has an unfathomable amount of her own trauma), cueing a fight at and Han goes back to the Falcon to be Totally-Not-Sad. Despite the fight though, he risks his life to make sure Leia gets out during the evacuation. (Gotta love how well he knows her.)

Then we get the big kiss scene. This time, Han has decided to acknowledge Leia’s insecurities because he wants to be with her. He specifically asks her “What are you afraid of?” Yeah, he’s kind of teasing her, but he knows Leia freakin Organa is not afraid of getting her hands dirty. It’s such a lame excuse, so he calls her out on it.

Then, all of the sudden, they’re finally together and Leia is just all in (see my post about Leia’s physically affectionate nature). And…Han adjusts. By the time they arrive on Bespin, he’s the one initiating hand holding, giving forehead kisses.

It’s a way more intimate than he would afford a casual hook-up. His scrapped intro in ANH (which was incorporated into the novelization by Alexandra Bracken), literally had him forget the name of the girl on his lap.

He’s still insecure when Lando starts flirting, but above all he’s in a relationship that is so casually affectionate. It’s a part of him we’ve never seen, but it suits him well.

Then we get to the big “I love you/ I know”.

In the original script, Han was supposed to say “I love you too.” Everyone thought it was a very out of character thing for him to say. The now iconic response was created during the shooting of that scene. I agree…to a point.

Now, I love the line. It’s iconic and great and very Han Solo. Yes it’s a smooth response…but it’s also…a really weird response…

Yeah, there’s a lot of people and to be fair, he just told Chewie to take care of Leia (which is very sweet), and once again probably still has some issues expressing vulnerability.

But…he also might die, so it’s weird that he wouldn’t tell her while he still can.

The pattern continues in ROTJ. Han is a bit out of character in this one, however I do like the moment where he’s referred to as a general. It’s usually read as him proving his commitment, and I agree. But I still think it’s funny that he decided to make it a surprise. It’s so cute and weird and very Han Solo.

He’s protective when Leia goes missing after the bike chase, and when they’re reunited picks her up and spins her adorably.

He’s still not super sure how to provide comfort all of the time (there’s a few times where Leia seeks his embrace, and he seems visibly unsure of what he’s doing). During the battle he’s always reaching out to shield her, hide her when she’s injured. Then he just holds her after the battle. The way she asked him to earlier, with a small but very genuine smile.

Finally, we arrive at “The Princess and the Scoundrel” where Han Solo does the GFFA equivalent of proposing on the first date. (For real, this book is one my favorite things. It canonized so many of my head canons like a very casual proposal). It’s perfect for its balance of being both weird and romantic.

Anyway, I like Han’s soft side and I don’t see it discussed enough.