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Oct. 24th, 2016 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* I have been wondering for some time what he'd do next. This really needs doing and it's not glamorous. This is technocratic and requires high intelligence and patience, so it's sort of perfect for him. "Obama to fight back on redistricting for Democrats:"
* "Sen Elizabeth Warren breathes fire beside Hillary Clinton in NH:"
* "Why Trump's call for poll watching terrifies the RNC:"
* "White Dudes, Trump, and America:" http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/10/20/white-dudes-trump-and-america/
* I think the purest expression of the Trump Agenda is the Latino Veteran who served eight tours of duty and his wife and children being driven from their home by racist who broke in, ransacked their house, poured gasoline on their daughter's crib and left racist death threats and a promise to burn their house down next time if they didn't get out. It really is exactly what he's calling for down to the violence, racial animus, and the deliberate persecution of a war veteran. And really what can be more modern Republican than terrorizing children?
* "I Went to a Wells Fargo Branch, this is What Happened Next:" http://wolfstreet.com/2016/10/23/i-went-to-wells-fargo-branch-this-happened/
* "Texas May Be Denying Tens Of Thousands Of Children Special Education:" http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/21/496943376/texas-may-be-denying-tens-of-thousands-of-children-special-education
* The supposed "Pro-life" movement did this by closing clinics and slashing funding. "STD Infections Rise To New Highs After States Close Health Clinics:" http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/20/498719092/std-infections-rise-to-new-highs-after-states-close-health-clinics
* The gift polish turned out to be a metallic pink instead of gold as I’d thought, so I added polka dots.: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/152278966547/the-gift-polish-turned-out-to-be-a-metallic-pink
* Today I also had the dinner il_volpe kindly gifted to me. Indian food: veggie sampler and eggplant.
* "New safeguards agreed for world's most trafficked mammal:" http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37494823
* "Two disabled friends build a forest around their village:" http://siz.io/two-disabled-friends-build-a-forest-around-their-village/?src=tum
* Yesterday I glued together the skeleton men Tavy broke, voted in the general election, voted in the building election (no rent increase. Yay!), did the rest of the paper bureaucracy, changed a tank, took books back. I did not change my sheets, alas.
I wrote this long beautiful thing on why you should vote, and vote early if you are in an early voting state, but it got erased. Instead I will simply say: Please, please, please vote your whole ballot. We need progressive Congress critters who will do what’s right. You need a Governor and state legislature who believe in health care, clean tap water, and bodily autonomy. You need a city government who believe in education and infrastructure spending. You need a School Board that believes in science. You need judges who think rape is a crime and mental illness isn’t. You need a compassionate Sheriff’s Department that wants to protect and serve, not murder innocent people. Initiatives are important. In my State we are voting on minimum wage and campaign financing. In my City we are voting on EMT and school bus funding. I know some of the initiatives are a little confusing, but it’s worth a couple of minutes reading them and looking them up if you still aren’t sure.
To get these things you need to VOTE!
* That's not who we are: https://thenib.com/that-s-not-who-we-are
* "11 More of the Scariest Stories We've Ever Heard:" http://jezebel.com/11-more-of-the-scariest-stories-weve-ever-heard-1653038439
* Walking Dead the Ennui continues:
Me watching the opener: Yep, they are going to drag it out even longer because it was already boring and manipulative, so why not go whole hog.
Me watching Neegan futz with his belt: At some point he's going to tie that around the arm of a Grimes and cut or threaten to cut it off.
Me during the first flash back: Ah. Fake out flashbacks to try to further build suspence that went flat during the last endless scene of the finale and is impossible to revive now.
Me generally: Will he EVER stop talking? When I was teaching I kept reprimands to one or two sentences at most because if you talk at them at length they tune out and it loses impact. It's too late to have any impact, but still.
Me at the start of the pan: They are going to pan down just far enough to show the gore, but not far enough to show who is dead. Yep. They did. Because it is the most boring and obvious thing they could do at this juncture.
Me: Oh look! They killed the two characters I and 90% of the Internet would have put money on them killing if there were a betting pool last Spring. They made us wait all summer to see them do what we assumed they'd do. It would have made more sense given Abraham's arc to kill him openly at the end of the finale, and if they wanted to shock us with Glen save it for the premiere when we actually wouldn't have been suspecting it. They could have easily cut down the endless Neegan monologue at season's end and tightened the whole thing up and made it more impactful to make room.
(To be clear, I'm against killing Glenn, but it was inevitable after the endless Schrodinger's Glenn dumpster situation. I'm extra against fridging him to serve as motivation for white character angst and action, but the choice to fridge him in the way that made the least arc sense or impact made me debating whether to just stop watching there and never come back. I'm still deciding.)
Me: Bonus cheese points for shooting them killing everyone but Rick so as to spoil leaks and then justifying it budget wise by jamming them in anyway.
Me: This keeps going on and on, there is nothing of interest going on still. Between the kill your lesbians thing, the bullshit suspenseless cliffhanger, and Glen, why am I bothering watching. Are Michonne, Carol, and maybe Morgan enough to draw me back to this shit show. Will this episode never end?
Me: ...And there's Chekov's arm belt. Sigh.
* Snerk: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/152244276817/curlicuecal-curlicuecal-curlicuecal
* ToS Rewatch:
- Space Seed. Ah the eugenics wars of the 1990's. I remember them well. We are a year and a half away from warp technology! I know, I know it's mean to tease, but given Richardo Montelban is born in 1920, his character would have been in his teens when the episode was made in order to be forty something when he was put in suspended animation in the 1990's.... So all star trek is guessing that some secret government eugenics lab already was raising a dangerous multi ethnic cohort of future attempted world conquerors. Using 1950's genetic tech. O.o. And I have to ask which country would do this in the '50's. It would have to be a rich country with advanced science, "selective breeding would have taken a lot of generations, which would push inception back to the 19th Century or earlier and that makes the whole thing less probable the further back you go. So I'm thinking it has to be some sort of early gene splicing Manhatten Project sort of thing, which means money and a large base of scientists to draw from. We're ruled out along with most of Europe on the grounds of racism. India had only gotten it's independence, so despite his mode of dress and supposed ethnicity, that seems awefully fast for India to have secretly built a future tech genetics program. Japan was rebuilding, dealing with shortages particularly early in the decade and not yet the powerhouse they became late in the century. So Russia or China, probably? Look, I am fond of Richardo Montelban, but there are definitely flaws, like him being made up with dark skin to be a Sikh, and the gender dynamics just generally. Amoung the racial types is listed "oriental." *wince* Problems, definitely problems. it says a lot of dark things about the historian, McGyver, that she finds Khan's creepy, controlling behavior on their first meeting awake sexy rather than gross, and that she finds his eugenics ideology attractive. I do enjoy Spock and kirk bating Khan into giving himself away, though it does say something about Khan that he falls for it. The scene where Khan gets McGyver to help him take over the ship is really scary, like domestic violence scary, with some negging tossed in. She is going with her abuser into an isolated situation where her abuser is the sole authority after she betrayed him into exile, and this is somehow meant to be a happy ending. *shudder* Seriously, there is nothing at all romantic in the McGyver/Khan interactions. They were chilling. I know she chose this but I am legitimately scared for her. Did no one think this through? I now have a lot of questions about whether Khan is lying about what happened to her in the Wrath of Khan movie.
Watching the bickering between Spock and McCoy early in this episode, I am reminded that as a child I thought they were competing for Kirk's interest when they did this. *ahem* That Khan vs. McCoy vignette when Khan
Wait a minute, If we get warp drive in 2018, does that mean the governmental and partial societal collapse in the First Contact movie is caused by Trump and the 2016 Presidential election? *shudder*
- A Taste of Armageddon. I actually agreed with Kirk on his objection in the beginning on being ordered to violate the standing order. Will wonders never cease. This whole situation just seems really sketchy right from the start. The mat painting really doesn't blend, but it's a nice change from the usual Styrofoam rocks. Once they started talking to the first local, I remembered which one this was, the computer war one, where they commit suicide when "hit." A lot of people have argued one way or another if this is clever or heavy handed, so I'm not going to rehash that. What I kept thinking of is Rachel Maddow's excellent book Drift, and how prescient this episode was regarding the post-Vietnam evolution of out military and attendant political structures. No, we don't walk into disintegration, but we have arranged for only 1% of our population to serve in a forever war that demands no sacrifices from the rest of us, and the relative bloodlessness back home makes it easy to pretend there isn't an endless war that has gone on for most of a generation, unless someone we love is actually in it or has been wounded or died. Her argument is that by shifting the burden to such a small minority and isolating the effects, it makes it so much easier for the wars to go on and on without any thought to the human costs. I think that the Star Trek version of that is less exaggerated than we like to think. Just saying. Do I think people on two planets would disintegrate themselves for 500 years without serious rebellion? No, but it sure looks like isolating the population at large from the real costs of war sure does wonders at prolonging it.
The thing that really surprises me about Tos is how few actual aliens there are. Nearly all the "aliens" are white humans. You get the Gorn that one time, and the ears on the Romulans and Vulcans, the green dancer, two episodes with big headed aliens, and the salt eater back in episode One, but mostly, they land on planets populated entirely by white humans with no attempt to explain why all the aliens look and act exactly like white people.
*****
* Hurricane Matthew has been catastrophic for the people of Haiti. 800 or more are dead and 60,000 or more displaced. Want to help?
Haitian local charities: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154561836757433&set=a.84340697432.97916.713622432&type=3&theater
Doctors Without Borders: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/country-region/haiti
Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org/donate/disaster-relief?donationProdId=prod12750029&scode=RSG00000E017&gclid=COnZ5tmJys8CFRBEfgodzWoPXQ
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* "Sen Elizabeth Warren breathes fire beside Hillary Clinton in NH:"
* "Why Trump's call for poll watching terrifies the RNC:"
* "White Dudes, Trump, and America:" http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/10/20/white-dudes-trump-and-america/
* I think the purest expression of the Trump Agenda is the Latino Veteran who served eight tours of duty and his wife and children being driven from their home by racist who broke in, ransacked their house, poured gasoline on their daughter's crib and left racist death threats and a promise to burn their house down next time if they didn't get out. It really is exactly what he's calling for down to the violence, racial animus, and the deliberate persecution of a war veteran. And really what can be more modern Republican than terrorizing children?
* "I Went to a Wells Fargo Branch, this is What Happened Next:" http://wolfstreet.com/2016/10/23/i-went-to-wells-fargo-branch-this-happened/
* "Texas May Be Denying Tens Of Thousands Of Children Special Education:" http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/21/496943376/texas-may-be-denying-tens-of-thousands-of-children-special-education
* The supposed "Pro-life" movement did this by closing clinics and slashing funding. "STD Infections Rise To New Highs After States Close Health Clinics:" http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/20/498719092/std-infections-rise-to-new-highs-after-states-close-health-clinics
* The gift polish turned out to be a metallic pink instead of gold as I’d thought, so I added polka dots.: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/152278966547/the-gift-polish-turned-out-to-be-a-metallic-pink
* Today I also had the dinner il_volpe kindly gifted to me. Indian food: veggie sampler and eggplant.
* "New safeguards agreed for world's most trafficked mammal:" http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37494823
* "Two disabled friends build a forest around their village:" http://siz.io/two-disabled-friends-build-a-forest-around-their-village/?src=tum
* Yesterday I glued together the skeleton men Tavy broke, voted in the general election, voted in the building election (no rent increase. Yay!), did the rest of the paper bureaucracy, changed a tank, took books back. I did not change my sheets, alas.
I wrote this long beautiful thing on why you should vote, and vote early if you are in an early voting state, but it got erased. Instead I will simply say: Please, please, please vote your whole ballot. We need progressive Congress critters who will do what’s right. You need a Governor and state legislature who believe in health care, clean tap water, and bodily autonomy. You need a city government who believe in education and infrastructure spending. You need a School Board that believes in science. You need judges who think rape is a crime and mental illness isn’t. You need a compassionate Sheriff’s Department that wants to protect and serve, not murder innocent people. Initiatives are important. In my State we are voting on minimum wage and campaign financing. In my City we are voting on EMT and school bus funding. I know some of the initiatives are a little confusing, but it’s worth a couple of minutes reading them and looking them up if you still aren’t sure.
To get these things you need to VOTE!
* That's not who we are: https://thenib.com/that-s-not-who-we-are
* "11 More of the Scariest Stories We've Ever Heard:" http://jezebel.com/11-more-of-the-scariest-stories-weve-ever-heard-1653038439
* Walking Dead the Ennui continues:
Me watching the opener: Yep, they are going to drag it out even longer because it was already boring and manipulative, so why not go whole hog.
Me watching Neegan futz with his belt: At some point he's going to tie that around the arm of a Grimes and cut or threaten to cut it off.
Me during the first flash back: Ah. Fake out flashbacks to try to further build suspence that went flat during the last endless scene of the finale and is impossible to revive now.
Me generally: Will he EVER stop talking? When I was teaching I kept reprimands to one or two sentences at most because if you talk at them at length they tune out and it loses impact. It's too late to have any impact, but still.
Me at the start of the pan: They are going to pan down just far enough to show the gore, but not far enough to show who is dead. Yep. They did. Because it is the most boring and obvious thing they could do at this juncture.
Me: Oh look! They killed the two characters I and 90% of the Internet would have put money on them killing if there were a betting pool last Spring. They made us wait all summer to see them do what we assumed they'd do. It would have made more sense given Abraham's arc to kill him openly at the end of the finale, and if they wanted to shock us with Glen save it for the premiere when we actually wouldn't have been suspecting it. They could have easily cut down the endless Neegan monologue at season's end and tightened the whole thing up and made it more impactful to make room.
(To be clear, I'm against killing Glenn, but it was inevitable after the endless Schrodinger's Glenn dumpster situation. I'm extra against fridging him to serve as motivation for white character angst and action, but the choice to fridge him in the way that made the least arc sense or impact made me debating whether to just stop watching there and never come back. I'm still deciding.)
Me: Bonus cheese points for shooting them killing everyone but Rick so as to spoil leaks and then justifying it budget wise by jamming them in anyway.
Me: This keeps going on and on, there is nothing of interest going on still. Between the kill your lesbians thing, the bullshit suspenseless cliffhanger, and Glen, why am I bothering watching. Are Michonne, Carol, and maybe Morgan enough to draw me back to this shit show. Will this episode never end?
Me: ...And there's Chekov's arm belt. Sigh.
* Snerk: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/152244276817/curlicuecal-curlicuecal-curlicuecal
* ToS Rewatch:
- Space Seed. Ah the eugenics wars of the 1990's. I remember them well. We are a year and a half away from warp technology! I know, I know it's mean to tease, but given Richardo Montelban is born in 1920, his character would have been in his teens when the episode was made in order to be forty something when he was put in suspended animation in the 1990's.... So all star trek is guessing that some secret government eugenics lab already was raising a dangerous multi ethnic cohort of future attempted world conquerors. Using 1950's genetic tech. O.o. And I have to ask which country would do this in the '50's. It would have to be a rich country with advanced science, "selective breeding would have taken a lot of generations, which would push inception back to the 19th Century or earlier and that makes the whole thing less probable the further back you go. So I'm thinking it has to be some sort of early gene splicing Manhatten Project sort of thing, which means money and a large base of scientists to draw from. We're ruled out along with most of Europe on the grounds of racism. India had only gotten it's independence, so despite his mode of dress and supposed ethnicity, that seems awefully fast for India to have secretly built a future tech genetics program. Japan was rebuilding, dealing with shortages particularly early in the decade and not yet the powerhouse they became late in the century. So Russia or China, probably? Look, I am fond of Richardo Montelban, but there are definitely flaws, like him being made up with dark skin to be a Sikh, and the gender dynamics just generally. Amoung the racial types is listed "oriental." *wince* Problems, definitely problems. it says a lot of dark things about the historian, McGyver, that she finds Khan's creepy, controlling behavior on their first meeting awake sexy rather than gross, and that she finds his eugenics ideology attractive. I do enjoy Spock and kirk bating Khan into giving himself away, though it does say something about Khan that he falls for it. The scene where Khan gets McGyver to help him take over the ship is really scary, like domestic violence scary, with some negging tossed in. She is going with her abuser into an isolated situation where her abuser is the sole authority after she betrayed him into exile, and this is somehow meant to be a happy ending. *shudder* Seriously, there is nothing at all romantic in the McGyver/Khan interactions. They were chilling. I know she chose this but I am legitimately scared for her. Did no one think this through? I now have a lot of questions about whether Khan is lying about what happened to her in the Wrath of Khan movie.
Watching the bickering between Spock and McCoy early in this episode, I am reminded that as a child I thought they were competing for Kirk's interest when they did this. *ahem* That Khan vs. McCoy vignette when Khan
Wait a minute, If we get warp drive in 2018, does that mean the governmental and partial societal collapse in the First Contact movie is caused by Trump and the 2016 Presidential election? *shudder*
- A Taste of Armageddon. I actually agreed with Kirk on his objection in the beginning on being ordered to violate the standing order. Will wonders never cease. This whole situation just seems really sketchy right from the start. The mat painting really doesn't blend, but it's a nice change from the usual Styrofoam rocks. Once they started talking to the first local, I remembered which one this was, the computer war one, where they commit suicide when "hit." A lot of people have argued one way or another if this is clever or heavy handed, so I'm not going to rehash that. What I kept thinking of is Rachel Maddow's excellent book Drift, and how prescient this episode was regarding the post-Vietnam evolution of out military and attendant political structures. No, we don't walk into disintegration, but we have arranged for only 1% of our population to serve in a forever war that demands no sacrifices from the rest of us, and the relative bloodlessness back home makes it easy to pretend there isn't an endless war that has gone on for most of a generation, unless someone we love is actually in it or has been wounded or died. Her argument is that by shifting the burden to such a small minority and isolating the effects, it makes it so much easier for the wars to go on and on without any thought to the human costs. I think that the Star Trek version of that is less exaggerated than we like to think. Just saying. Do I think people on two planets would disintegrate themselves for 500 years without serious rebellion? No, but it sure looks like isolating the population at large from the real costs of war sure does wonders at prolonging it.
The thing that really surprises me about Tos is how few actual aliens there are. Nearly all the "aliens" are white humans. You get the Gorn that one time, and the ears on the Romulans and Vulcans, the green dancer, two episodes with big headed aliens, and the salt eater back in episode One, but mostly, they land on planets populated entirely by white humans with no attempt to explain why all the aliens look and act exactly like white people.
*****
* Hurricane Matthew has been catastrophic for the people of Haiti. 800 or more are dead and 60,000 or more displaced. Want to help?
Haitian local charities: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154561836757433&set=a.84340697432.97916.713622432&type=3&theater
Doctors Without Borders: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/country-region/haiti
Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org/donate/disaster-relief?donationProdId=prod12750029&scode=RSG00000E017&gclid=COnZ5tmJys8CFRBEfgodzWoPXQ
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com