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People in New York City watching the Seinfeld finale together

#this is what succession sundays felt like on discord/twitter #meanwhile i would notttt have wanted to watch that finale in a crowd lol #it was enough of an. Experience watching it in my living room with my parents lmao #seinblogging

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Tom Paris on a Sphere (?) - 4.25.24

Photo from sketchbook

I had to digitally edit his sleeve in the full picture because the graphite kept reflecting too much light 😑 but other than that I had fun with drawing Tom!!!! Idk when I drew him last but anyways👍

#!!! #this is so good! #tom paris #fan art #traditional art #st:voy

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* * * News Interruption * * *

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Scully's report: And so, my time in captivity forced me to grapple with the essential truth that in order to stop monsters, we must understand them. Yet who is to say that as we learn to empathize with monsters, we shall not become them?

Skinner: ...so, do you want some mental health leave, or...

Mulder's report: Though it remains unproven whether the past life regression I underwent is valid, are we not all a collection of past lives? Who is to say that the people we once were are not dead? Who is to say we are not haunted by the ghosts of all who we could have been? Or is the self merely an illusion, a thousand pieces of different shredded photographs that we have pasted together and convinced ourselves is whole?

Skinner, removing his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose: What...what is...I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this

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they are about to drop the craziest shoegaze album you’ve ever heard

#huh. I've never seen this one #i feel like this is a promo image from a slightly different x files than the one in our reality lol #amazing #and those haircuts! it must be early early #txf #when promo photos attack

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One thing I love about the X-Files is that people just keep coming to Mulder for help. Like, it's well known that this man believes in extraterrestrials etc, but people will bring a difficult case to him like they're hoping that just this once, he will be normal enough to help them solve the case. And he never is!

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Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) | Wow! Those are beautiful.

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we did the best we could to extract the perfect columbo reaction gif, and here it is - been wanting to make this for bloody weeks

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thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.

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"It's just a TV show" maybe to you. I absorbed it into my soul though.

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you would not believe your eyes... if ten million fireflies...

#txf #fan art #they did /not/ have a good time in that forest 😂

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anyone know how to make ao3 stop warning you at the top of every page that you have muted some users?

#it's almost like they're trying to disincentivize people using Mute #but i'm not going to unmute certain people. esp big block o tags posters and folks who have me blocked on tumblr #ao3

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Everyone reblog this with your favorite Janeway quotes, please. 🖖

"I don't like bullies, and I don't like threats - and I don't like you, Culluh."

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mulder 🤝 scully

fleischman 🤝 o’connell

referring to one another with last names as a means of flirting >

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Morse and drinking in the 70s...

Long....because I can't write short. And obviously, a lot of you will already know this stuff...

Just want to take a moment to talk about alcohol and alcoholism in the context of the early 1970s and remind folks of how totally and completely different it is from how we see it today.

Drunk driving had not been outlawed in most countries. Not only that, it was widely regarding as funny—funny enough to be used as a regular “gag” in movies. Problem drinking was also seen as funny. There were regular cartoon strips about it. The “drunk” was a funny stock character in all sorts of plays and movies.

Alcohol was ubiquitous. We’re not just talking liquid lunches. We’re talking drinking at work, while you work—just as you see in Endeavour. Think about that for a second.

And politely saying no wasn’t something you did without social consequences. It wasn’t just seen as a personal preference. Unless you had a specific, acceptable reason, turning down a drink was often seen as stand-offish and judgmental or as a social snub. Teetotalism was regarded as rather naive and ridiculous—not something any man or woman of the world would embrace.

In the early 1970s, there was no widespread understanding of alcoholism as a disease. It was still seen very much as the consequence of personal weakness—still a matter of “If you cared enough or tried hard enough, you wouldn’t do this so it must be a character flaw.”

Plus, most people, “normal” people don’t have problems with alcohol, so if you do then there’s something abnormal and defective about you—most likely something you brought upon yourself.

And as a “personal weakness” and a “defect,” the shame around it was profound and the secrecy matched. If someone went away for treatment, it was very much akin to an unwed mother going off to have her baby and then returning without the child. You never spoke of it. You pretended that it had never happened.

If you were a kind person, you also didn’t go out of your way to parade babies in front of her or talk constantly about children when she was with you. But refer to it directly? Never. Ask for help? Never. It was always something to be hidden. Everyone did their best to forget that it had ever happened and saw this as the "kindest" thing to do.

When Morse returns from his “cure,” it would simply be assumed that everyone would pretend that nothing unusual has happened. Why he’s  just been off on a tour of the West Country and nothing else! Hope you had a lovely time! That sort of polite fiction was exactly what he would have expected upon his return. Anything more direct—at least in a public setting—would have been shocking to him and everyone else.

Where things break down, however, is in the more personal interactions. His relationship with Thursday is such that they can at least broach the topic of drinking. When they do, my impression is that Thursday is well-aware that Morse not “cured.” However, in the context of the time, saying this would be akin to saying, "You failed," because there was no disease model of alcholism in widespread use. You went to be cured and it worked or it didn't.

However, I'd also add that Thursday is almost to the breaking point with the cumulative strain he is under. He can’t cope with the “burden” of Morse being in a precarious state and he knows it. He feels desperately guilty about that—as well as about other things like Strange and Joan or about life having moved on so much while Morse was gone—and so he just shuts down. 

Shutting down is Thursday’s go-to strategy when he’s overwhelmed. We’ve seen him do it many times before. And part of that for him, is that he pretends that the people around him are ok—even if they are anything but ok. Not surprisingly, he does it the most with the people he has the closest emotional ties with—Win, Joan, Sam, and Morse.

So the only way that Thursday can cope is by having Morse be perfectly fine. Conveniently, his preferred coping strategy fits exactly with his society's expectations about how alcoholism works. If Morse is "cured," you don’t need to worry about sparing him the constant offers of alcohol in the same way that the young unwed mother might hope to be spared babies. You certainly wouldn’t embarrass him (especially after he’s been through the humiliation of rehab) by drawing attention in any way to a possible to the idea that he still has a problem. 

And finally, a last note on time context. The scene in the pub where Morse has that first drink after finding out that Joan is marrying Jim is utterly heartbreaking for so many reasons. One of those reasons, however, is that we know it’s the first drink—and that the first drink leads to the second, and so on and so forth. Then Morse says to Thursday, “They said the, the odd beer, the odd shot, does no harm…"Everything in moderation," they said,”  and we automatically assume he’s lying.

I’m fairly sure that those scenes were meant to be interpreted through our modern viewpoint. However, it’s worth noting that again, the model of alcoholism in the 1970s was nothing like what we have today. The idea that someone with a drinking problems/addictions needs to abstain entirely was not even close to universal at that point. It’s perfectly possible that the advice Morse is quoting is the advice he received!

#very important points #itv endeavour #fred thursday #e. morse #to be honest s8 and s9 really frustrated me because it seemed like heavily revisionist history re: the attitude towards drink in the 70s/80 #and towards the framing of morse's drinking in the original show #it's a serious issue but endeavour uses a completely modern lens #meanwhile classic morse treats it as a tragicomic foible that ultimately dooms him #not a He's So Irretreivably Broken From A Young Age thing #it just seemed like such an off mismatch with how much nuance there was in the early seasons #but yes this is well articulated #and yes to fred thinking not talking about it is the kinder thing

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Endeavour and Thursday

S2 vs S9. Some things don’t really change.

Random photos for fans. Please let me know sources if you can identify so I can attribute them properly.