Am I the only one that’s a just a tiny bit pissed off that this is still an issue?
The Original Series wasn’t even in the general VICINITY of fucking around yo
How many shows these days would do this, and do it this way? These days, it would be all, “Ohh, we have to be sensitive and show the nuances of each side” and try not to make either side seem wrong. It wouldn’t be clearly spelled out, “pro-choice is right, if you’re against it you’re the bad guys.”
Jim Kirk is not here for your anti-birth-control, anti-choice, pro-death-penalty BS
James Tiberius Kirk was written and portrayed as a feminist and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Yep. That episode is exactly what you think it is: pro-birth control, pro-population control, pro-choice, and pro-women’s right to choose. And yes, Kirk, the supposed playboy of the spaceways, is in favor of all of the above.
It was written and aired in 1969.
It probably couldn’t air today.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
Also LMAO at all the sad whiny geek boys who are like “I miss the GOOD OLD DAYS of SCI-FI when it wasn’t all about SOCIAL ISSUES and instead it was just about MEN HAVING FUN IN SPACE. Like Star Trek! Star Trek wouldn’t put up with all this SOCIAL JUSTICE FEMINISM IN SCI FI bullshit!” And meanwhile I’m just over here like “…did you actually watch the show?”
It’s also important to bear in mind that the Original Series had a predominantly female fanbase, and during its initial run, was widely mocked and dismissed by mainstream (i.e., male) science fiction fans as being fake sci-fi for girls. It’s difficult to overstate the influence women had on the franchise in its early days; most of the early Star Trek conventions were organised by and for women, and indeed, those same organisers were primarily responsible for the massive letter-writing campaign that prevented the show from being cancelled after the 1968 season. Without that campaign, the episode pictured in this post would never have been made.
The popular image of James Kirk as a sleazy womaniser is part of a conscious effort to erase that history and render the franchise’s roots palatable to the misogynistic geekboys of the modern SF/F fandom.
And a gentle reminder that TOS was a Desilu production, which its board of directors voted to cancel after the second pilot due to cost concerns, a vote that Chairman Lucille Ball overruled. There is no Star Trek without Lucille Ball.
So yesterday I read this very good pant rant and I just had do draw Diana in something closer to the way the ancient Greeks depicted amazons. Not 100% historically accurate because I have no problem with the boots. I can see the Amazons adding stirrups to their saddles over time, so boots with a little bit of a heel make sense.
Vanessa Hudgens DC Comics superhero comedy gets series order
DC Comics is offiically launching a comedy series on NBC.
The network has given a series order to Powerless, which stars Vanessa Hudgens (Grease Live)
as a “spunky young insurance adjuster specializing in regular-people
coverage against damage caused by the crime-fighting superheroes.”
(Think The Office meets Agents of SHIELD minus Marvel).
More details about the pilot storyline: “It’s
when [Hudgens’ character] stands up to one of these larger-than-life
figures (after an epic battle messes with her commute) that she
accidentally becomes a cult ‘hero’ in her own right … even if it’s just
to her group of lovably quirky co-workers. Now, while she navigates her
normal, everyday life against an explosive backdrop, Emily might just
discover that being a hero doesn’t always require superpowers.”
Alan Tudyk, Danny Pudi and Christina Kirk are also in the cast, with Ben Queen as writer and executive producer.
MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY
That aside.
I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome.
1) Canned chicken and beef
looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins.
2) Fancy nut butters
Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)
3) Canned or packaged tuna
You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend.
4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like)
Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry.
5) Shelf-stable juice
This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives.
SPEAKING OF FOOD INSECURITY.
FOR MY FELLOW EAGLE FUCKERS, THIS SATURDAY, MAY 14th, IS THE STAMP OUT HUNGER FOOD DRIVE
The postal service will come pick up food left by mailboxes and in post offices and deliver it to your local banks. This is a list of stuff we REALLY want and need, please take the time to read it and consider donating YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO GO ANYWHERE
IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW
GOOD THINGS TO DO
Also: Food banks! It’s summer & kids are out of school soon, which means that for a lot of food insecure families, 2 meals a day are not necessarily offered. There are meal programs in some places, but not everywhere. People get hungry year round, not just over “the holidays.”
Money. Tampons. Diapers. The stuff listed above. Consider sending a small $ donation every month to your local food bank. It’s not a huge gesture, but the family down the street with both parents out of work will feel it.
see if your local grocery store has a partnership with a food bank; sometimes they put together package deals based on what the food bank needs. you buy a bag of groceries they picked out, and they deliver it.
as a general rule if you see some “cool trick” on the internet that involves combining chlorine of any form (including bleach or tablets) with anything else, you shouldn’t do it because they are almost definitely trying to seriously hurt or kill people who don’t know any better. things like mixing bleach with other “household cleaning supplies” are especially huge red flags–it sounds harmless, but the chemicals in these things react to create extremely toxic gas, or worse
stuff like that almost universally comes from places like 4chan where it’s fun and cool to misinform people in the most dangerous possible ways, and it’s nothing short of evil that people use something as incredible as the internet to literally kill strangers for no reason
I know, I’ve been pretty quiet on here. Work’s been…well, I’ve had night shifts, and they kill me. And we’ve been doing a feasibility study on some land that the owners accepted our offer on. It’s scary. And tight. And we’ll need a loan, almost certainly, to be able to build.
There’s a slim, slim, slim possibility that if every single thing came in at the cheapest end of the quote and the fees from the county were at the lowest end, then we might – just might – manage to do without a loan. But in reality, a loan is in our future.
Also, it turns out, you can’t build an “accessory structure” until you’ve got a structure for it to accessorise to. Which is frustrating, because we were contemplating popping up our to-be-studio building first, which would have given us somewhere to kip overnight, because the place is a good half-hour from where we’re staying.
However, it seems like an RV/Caravan (aka Travel-Trailer)/Tiny Home might be acceptable, as it’s portable. And even if they did grump about it, then we could just move the trailer. Which is much easier to deal with.
Anyhow, so we’re doing a bunch of things – got quotes for wells, some limited ground clearance, getting a power supply connected, a place for poo, those kind of small insignificant things. I had a good tramp around doing our version of beating the bounds – trying to find the flags that mark the corners of the lot. Given that it’s basically raw woodland, this was quite the challenge.
But it was beautiful, and we’re hoping to be fairly minimally invasive – enough land for us to have a little garden, enough clearance for solar, and a medium-small house. US small, UK medium.
In other news, our quest for an EV has been fulfilled. We have a 2002 Rav4 EV – which is – well, it’s clean inside, but startlingly dirty outside given how it looked in the photos. It’s white, so its permanent state is probably going to be ‘dirty’.
I’m waiting for Kathryn to get home, because then I can get her pawprint on the title document and go licence the wee beastie. But I took it on a little pootle earlier today and I can safely say ‘it both goes and stops’. It’s actually a nice car to drive. It definitely feels like a tenthirteen year old car inside. It’s grey plastic and simple trim. And the charge timer / pre-aircon-control is – well – what you’d expect. Chunky buttons and an LCD display. But, all in all, it seems pretty nice. And it’s got four seats, and will do nicely for ferrying things around. Including a me shaped thing.
ETA – I forgot to say. Dear god do I miss the UK’s plugs / sockets. I have spent the last few days attempting to navigate the seemingly innumerable different plug/socket options here. You might, if you weren’t here, say, if you were coming from Europe, make the foolish assumption that there were only a few kinds of common plug.
Say your normal house plug, then maybe a high current variant, and perhaps even a very high current variant. And perhaps a legacy low-power variant.
But no. I’ve been taken down an entertaining path where I bought what I thought would be the right socket – given I’d been told it was a 3-pin dryer plug. Only what turned up was a four-pin dryer plug. Which is fine, only that’s not what I’d bought. So I had to trek out and buy a four-pin socket. But I still needed a three pin drier plug for the drier end. And it turns out you can’t (easily*) buy three pin dryer plugs – you can buy plugs with a moulded lead attached, but not just the plugs themselves. Which means that I have hideousness of the first degree – a dryer plug (which has neutral and two ‘hots’) which goes to a junction with household style wiring (because I couldn’t really afford or justify 35 foot of 10/3 flexible cable) running to an exterior style box, into which is inserted a four-pin dryer socket – with the *shudder* ground and neutral linked together… which is apparently the way you get around these things…. (ugh).
Still, it all worked and nothing got terribly hot, and the car charged up just fine.
Now I just need to build some kind of portable rolly thing for the charger to live on, because it weighs approximately 87 tons.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
“America is now wholly given over to a d[amne]d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Another essay on fanfiction I’ve been meaning to tackle for awhile is the similarities I see between fanfiction, and the 19th c. sentimental novel.
A quick recap: women have been writing novels just as long if not longer then men. When the novel was first created, it was considered a lower former and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses in this article, it was only after considerable effort put in to the novel form by women, elevating its medium, that it suddenly became respectable and those women’s names were, by and large forgotten by time as “lower” once male authors took to it.
The quote above by Hawthorne is a well-known one, where he lamented that his own high-brow works simply couldn’t compete against the trashy novels being published by the women of his era, as in fact, these women were outselling him by 100,000s of copies. It may actually be that, well, no one really enjoyed his work. One of the novels of this era, part of the sentimental movement that Hawthorne was criticizing was a little book you may have heard of called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe which, its problematic aspects aside, is credited by Abraham Lincoln for helping to start the Civil War. This was because it was one of the first accessible books to actually describe the horrors of slavery, and slaves as people, in such a way that people felt an emotional of sentimentality and horror towards slavery enough to stand up en masse and call for it to end. So these “sentimental” trashy novels Hawthorne hated actually had historic ramifications because they were emotional and made people feel things. In fact, the sentimental movement is also credited with helping to bring sympathy to other social causes, like ending the death penalty, child labor, and other social ills, (which I can’t help but notice is somewhat similar to fanfiction and the push for LGBTQ* rights that making beloved characters gay actually helped to push as a cause among young women).
