Me
rowantheexplorer
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
apurplefriend
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
Nobody else has any excuse.
GLORIOUS NERDERY Lego edition
“you’re quiet” yes I’m trying to gauge how weird I can be in this new social situation
Source: a-cloak
My favorite mermaid art is the one of a family photo with a mermaid mother and old sailor father and their sons are both reverse merfolk (human legs with fish heads).
This is the one!
It's by Jessica Warrick.
like 99% of "men and women are soooo different!!!" comedy is literally just describing the experience of not understanding other people. like it's not that women never say what they mean talking to other people is just like that. it can be hard to understand what other people are thinking. bioessentialism really rots the brain
"women will say I'm fine and then not mean it" yeah that's something literally everybody does. is this your first time interacting with another human being my guy
this is one of the only funny responses on this hell of a post
I could have lived in peace (stayed warm in my bed) but my enemies (job that pays my bills) brought me war (e-mails i have to respond to)
often ask myself why I am the way I am, but this bitch was a part of my formative years and I don’t think I have to look much further
Like you can’t just give a kid a sensual song number with an undulating fruity Tim Curry skeleton and not expect some kind of switch to flip idk man
The really funny part is that Hexxus’ big musical number was originally even more explicit than what’s seen in the film, and only had the naughtier parts axed by the studio at very nearly the last minute (that’s why it feels a little short, and why there’s a really awkward jump-cut right in the middle of it) – but either they forgot to make the same cuts to the soundtrack CD, or it had already been pressed and distributed by the time the decision was made, so anybody who bought it and listened to the soundtrack version of this number got to hear Tim Curry very openly singing about how despoiling the environment makes him “a special kind of horny”.
Alright i need the full version right this instant
Found it!
You can tell it’s the soundtrack version if it starts with unhinged howling, followed by a never-animated extended intro where Hexxus orgasmically sucks on the logging machine’s exhaust pipes.
HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD /OF THIS BEFORE?!
The lines
“i’m gonna grind up all creatures great and small and put up parking lots and shiny shopping malls”
Made me realize this song is one insult about cops and about 80BPM away from being a Dead Kennedy’s song and I can’t decide whether I want to hear a DK cover of this or a Tim Curry cover of “Too Drunk to Fuck” more.
god i love coming home and being at home and sitting inside my home and staying home
No no you don't understand! I want to watch this show/movie, read this book, listen to this podcast, etc.! But I must be in the right mindset and the exact head space to begin, or I just can't!
I'm not ALLOWED to enjoy it yet, I'm not ALLOWED!!!
there is something sick and twisted wbout me (i love to make spreadsheets)
emperor kuzco was clearly gay
hes 19, with unlimited power, and he ain’t got a gf. the only time we see him interact with any women his own age is when he’s rejecting like 7 of them rapid fire. he pretends to date pacha in a gag that lasts like 10 solid minutes. listen to me god damnit
Okay, but just in case anyone is coming to tumblr dot com for my hot takes on 20+ year old kids' movies: Kuzco super WAS gay (or at least coded as such) and of course, I didn't get it until I watched it as a gay grownup.
He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.
Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.
In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.
So yes. There you have it. I will not be taking criticism at this time.
In response to the question “How did a movie like this get made at all much less by fucking Disney?” there was a recent Vulture article that outlines the whole shit show of a history behind this film according to everyone (writers, directors, VAs, Stings) involved. The gist of the story is that they fucked up making a whole, true-to-form Disney musical that never came to see the light of day SO BADLY that Disney switched directors, locked the writer’s room, and didn’t review a single script until weeks after the film was in theaters.
Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:
holy shit read the article. it’s worth it and completely batshit
This is fucking insane
I've never adequately appreciated the batshit brilliance of this joke, I've taken it for granted
nothing like rereading a book you loved when you were younger only to realize the author can't write
Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.
YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.
This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were
1) so vital, and
2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.
“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”
Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)
If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?
They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:
If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)
And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.
The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”
Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.
And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.
I hate the cosmetic surgery industry for so many reasons I really do. But the line between cosmetic and medically necessary plastic surgeries is as a cloud, and we cannot sacrifice bodily autonomy for bans so. We need to dismantle white supremacy and the patriarchy in order to effectively tackle the issue. I should be able to get elective top surgery without medicalising my transness you get?
I had a breast reduction when I was 16. I was so top heavy that my back had started spasming badly by the time I was 12, if I hadn’t been able to get my reduction, I would’ve been in more extreme pain for much longer. The relief was almost instant. Just one example of medically necessary plastic surgery, in case people aren’t sure what that looks like.
Medically necessary plastic surgery also includes removing excess skin when someone loses a lot of weight: skin folds can become infected. Burn victims’ skin grafts, those are plastic surgery too. The field covers a lot more than people think.
Harold Gillies, now considered to be the father of modern plastic surgery, developed most of his techniques (many of which are still in use today) specifically to reconstruct the faces of men who'd been injured in WW1.
Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.
Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.
He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.
Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.
In both cases, the techniques he developed were still being used in similar operations decades later. Gillies himself stated that he wanted no publicity for performing these operations, saying that "If it gives real happiness, that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can give.”
