will never not be a little peeved that adira's first two episodes feature endless misgendering. i get that they hadnt specified pronouns yet, and kind of maybe didnt know themself yet?, but considering the level of promo given to discovery's new non-binary character, to have to spend that much time meeting a new character and hearing 'she/her' that much was and is pretty frustrating. like we as the audience knew before any of the characters did

that said, i do find the layered metaphor that their joining with the tal symbiont is called 'an aberration' because adira is human, added with the beginning of the arc with gray, to be pretty damn compelling still. that mix of being othered but also hope is pretty well done imo! discovery is constantly trying so hard wrt telling queer stories, usually failing a tad, but also then bringing it back in, and i do respect that pretty solidly. TWO instances of unbury your gays is pretty unhinged to pull off and yet!!

So when they wrote the character of Adira, they wanted them to be non-binary and they cast Blu Del Barrio. Blu was using she/her at the time and hadn't come out.

While they were writing, Blu asked them to make Adira female for the moment because Blu wasn't ready to transition yet. Blue tried out pronouns on the Disco set, and Sonequa used to ask them what they wanted to use that day and make sure everyone used it.

When Blu was ready, Adira's transition was written in and they started using they, so it was an outside universe reason, and all done to support Blu with their journey.

They talk about it on the S3 DVD special features.

okay i am full on teared up at sonequa doing that every day. captain of my HEART.

The way Sonequa runs the ship is incredible. So many interviews are just all about how caring she is and how pleasant it is to be on the show. All the love.

The show also wrote Adira out for several eps in s4 so Blu could get top surgery, which is kind. I like how supported they were in their journey.

ALSO, Gray was originally written as a cis girl. Ian Alexander auditioned for Adira, and TPTB liked their work so much that Gray was rewritten to be a trans boy. And then, when they realised this invoked the Dead Trans Person trope, they brought him back to life with a fresh new body and dialogue about his transition.

Discovery is a long way from perfect, but so much of it operates from a position of respect and good faith that I will give it a thousand chances.

I think the turbolift is stuck…

Boring people the second they see something a little creative,silly,experimental,or even just a little confussing: UHMM...⁉️ WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST WATCH 😂 WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂🤣😂😭🤣😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂🤣😂😭😭🤣😂😭😂

I feel like if humans swallowed rocks like birds do to help grind up food we'd have so much fun with it.

Can just imagine all the girlies on tiktok going "I know this is a bit controversial but I honestly love using limestone as a gastrolith. Not only can you readily forage it but they are just so pretty when smoothed out after regurgitating them"

and then all the comments would be like " girl 😭 😭 calcite dissolves in stomach acid!! Just use quartz if you want a pretty gastrolith like 💀"

I like this site. Y’all just shotgunning counterfactual timelines

There’s be a whole cultural thing about people with hard water areas eating the Tea Bones from the kettle

what is tea bones :(

Tea bones are deposited calcium and magnesium (limescale) that are usually smooth and hard on one side, and worryingly osseous otherwise. In a hard water area where you make a lot of tea, the boiling action of the kettle generates bones 👍

Tea bones are highly sensory so I made my own post to show you rather than telling. I recently removed a collection of large and exquisite tea bones, so I only had a small tea tooth available, which I film myself grinding with a piece of slate to show you its hardness. I then proffer it to some birds, one of whom rejected it and one of whom accepted it.

Nobody else calls them tea bones except me. You can decide who’s right.

In 1960, SAG and WGA struck to force management to adapt to the new technology of television. Without that strike and the agreement it birthed, residual use payments would not exist.

My parents stole nearly all of my salary from my entire childhood. My Star Trek residuals were all I had, and they kept me afloat for two decades while I rebuilt my life. I have healthcare and a pension because of my union. The AMPTP billionaires want to take all that security away so they can give CEOs even more grotesque wealth at the expense of the people who make our industry run.

To give some sense of what is at stake: There are actors who star in massively successful, profitable, critically acclaimed shows that are all on streaming services. You see them all the time. They are famous, A-list celebrities. Nearly all of those actors don't earn enough to qualify for health insurance, because the studios forced them to accept a buyout for all their residuals (decade of reuse, at the least) that is less than I earned for one week on TNG. And I was the lowest paid cast member in 1988. They want to do this while studio profits and CEO compensation are at historic highs.

I mean, if not now, when? And I haven't even touched on AI and working conditions.

We must fight for the future of our industry in the face of changing technology, the same way our elders did in 1960. So today, my Spacemom and I went to the place where it started for us, way back when, to do just that.

I see all your support. It means so much. Thank you.

those first couple weeks after escaping a time loop have gotta be disorienting as all fuck. all those little cues that used to tell you what's about to happen are now triggers that cause you to brace for something that isn't coming. you have to relearn the permanence of death -- hell, you have reacquaint yourself with the entire concept of finality altogether. everything keeps changing but it never changes back and you keep having to remind yourself that this is normal. "it won't reset anymore," you echo to yourself, over and over and over, like a broken record, like you're still trapped in a loop, like someone who escaped the time loop but was doomed to bring it into the future with them

This is, dare I say, my magnum opus.

Oil on canvas

Based on this post by the legendary @squimp​

(ID - the first image is of a traditional painting showing a gridded tile floor done in greys and blues and browns. A small toy or stuffed animal of Quark, from star trek: deep space nine, sits on one of the tiles in the distance. The second image is a closeup of the quark toy, showing individual brushstrokes of blue, orange, and navy. End ID)

when god closes a door you reach your little paws under it and go mrrwwaaaooow mmreeaaow

in your 20s you must rediscover the joys of arts and crafts to stave off spiritual decay

CHEERS TO GUY WALTON FOR “OUTING” THE FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES

From the article:  

Walton has devised his own criteria for named heatwaves in the US, based on duration and extremity, on a one to five scale similar to hurricanes. Heatwave Chevron is classed as a four and is “historic”, Walton said. The meteorologist said he has a list of 20 oil and gas companies – including Exxon and Shell – for upcoming heatwaves and will turn to coal companies if he runs out of names.

OUTSTANDING MOVE

Y'all know what to do. Use Walton's naming system. Make it catch on.

And I hope that all of the fake memories I’ve created with you in my head, will someday become real for both of us.

I’m no expert on symbolism but I’m guessing this means “Welcome to a new day!”

somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

harry/the emh is so funny to me like for one they’re both characters where you’d think having gay sex would fix them but in this specific case it would absolutely make them both so much worse and it would be everyone else’s problem. the mess hall would become completely uninhabitable when they start arguing over which 17th century venetian composer is the best over breakfast. the doc always be asking harry to make all sorts of stupid and extraneous modifications to his program and harry would complain about it constantly. janeway (and possibly the rest of the crew too) would be desperately trying to break them up to no avail. it would be absolutely miserable for everyone within four lightyears of them

and oh my god can you imagine if b7 happened at the same time… then both of voyager’s senior engineering officers would be dating an artificial/semi-artificial lifeform who they love arguing with. absolutely insufferable

the thing is that harry deserves to let loose by getting a boyfriend who sucks and everyone hates and yes tom is the obvious contender here but there are other options out there. open your hearts and minds

the real reason they didn’t release the forbidden quodo tape is that it was supposed to be funny but odo refusing to say goodbye to quark and then pulling him in and kissing the living daylights out of him felt a little TOO organic and narratively satisfying for everybody’s comfort

they realized they accidentally upstaged kira and odo’s entire romance arc with a single blooper and decided they’d best not release it

also I always really wanted to know how and why the Quodo kiss tape exists in the first place because it was EDITED, they even cut in Nana Visitor's befuddlement during that take (and to her credit, also rather quick pivot into making the scene work lol)... the documentary team had access to boxes full of film for the few scenes that they remastered in HD so they probably found that take in there but they definitely had to make that tape, editing and all. Just to show it once at a panel in promotion for the DS9 Doc.

The notes on a recent post got me thinking

By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.

You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.

You have to.

Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.

It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.

You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.

I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.

Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.

Jennifer Diehl, Everything and the Kitchen Sink, 2019, Oil