I finally sat down and scanned the Star Trek stamps I won on eBay about a year or so ago. I figured my fellow Trekkies would appreciate them
Love this aesthetic.
When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".
It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.
It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".
Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.
When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.
It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.
That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.
That's how you process cattle.
It's fucking disgusting.
It's patriarchal fascism. If children don't have a frame of reference for "normal" beyond what the Authority chooses to give them, they won't object when the Authority does something abnormal (or fascist)
1972 cover art for ‘La Force Mystérieuse,’ by J.-H. Rosny aîné. Possibly by Henri Lievens.
Inagaki Tomoo
Shôwa period
Vincent van Gogh, Pine Trees and Dandelions in the Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital, 1890 Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 91.5 cm
Captain Kirk simply will not rest until he has recreated the Pieta with every member of his senior staff
spocks-a-thot
Solid art reference, 10/10
if may i add
An impressive addition, suggesting Kirk’s varying artistic interests.
"A Corpse For Christmas" Esquire, December 1949 Illustration by Ren Wicks
Arkady Rylov - Sunset (1917)
On this day, 29 May 1972 the Dalit Panthers were formed in Mumbai, India. Modelled on the US Black Panthers the Dalit Panthers was formed to combat caste discrimination. Dalit refers to members of lower castes in India (sometimes referred to as “untouchables”). The Dalit Panthers advocated for both the abolition of the caste system as well as of class society. The organisation also advocated for women’s rights, health women’s study circles, and intervened to support Dalit women experiencing abuse and assault. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10125/dalit-panthers-founded Pictured: cover of a Dalit Panther publication https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=634412302065322&set=a.602588028581083&type=3
Maids, cleaners, janitors, and sanitation workers are all the most important people of civilization by far. Even 12 hours without them is VERY noticable and they simply need to be highly compensated for it
'Six AM', 1930 - William Wolfson
Everybody says "you don't want to grow up to be a janitor" until the janitors go on strike and suddenly the building becomes a disaster area because nobody is used to picking up after themselves.
They say "you don't want to grow up to be a garbage man" until the sanitarion workers go on strike and the trash starts piling up on street corners.
People pretend that these jobs are unimportant so they can pay them shit, but they are absolutely vital to the socities we have built.
ANDOR speaks to our reality
‘Traditionally, genre is taken less seriously than “serious” prestige television—but thanks to those lowered expectations, it can deliver the type of searing commentary that wouldn’t fly anywhere else. “Science fiction, in particular, has been a tool for years to talk about the world you and I live in,” ANDOR star Diego Luna said. “(At) the beginning of STAR WARS, you say, ‘This happened in a galaxy far, far away.’ Therefore you shouldn’t get nervous. It’s not about you. But it’s all about you, and you get complete freedom to make every comment you want to make. The beauty of science fiction is when you forget you’re looking at science fiction.”
‘As the [STAR WARS] franchise has for decades, the ANDOR story resonates with audiences who might feel as though they are merely a cog in a machine that rewards the powerful with more power and the wealthy with more wealth. “I think that the beauty of ANDOR is that it talks about what the social temperature needs to be for a revolution to erupt,” Luna said. “It talks about the world we live in, and it’s important to remind ourselves how much we can be part of change. It’s the only option, in fact, or it’s never going to come.”
“[Cassian] wants to get paid. He wants to survive. And that’s so many of us. The show is about how difficult it is to leave selfishness on the side, how difficult it is to stop this cynical way of living where we pretend to believe if we isolate ourselves, everything will be fine.”
Alone in the Amusement Park by Jeff Stanford 2023 inspired by Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) an American realist painter and printmaker.
being a pepper plant has to be so weird.
Imagine evolving capsaicin specifically to stop mammals from eating your fruits, and then a mammal comes along that not only will eat your fruits, but likes them specifically because of the capsaicin, so much that it starts using its weird paws to distribute and care for your seeds, which turns into a strong selective force that literally starts evolving you into producing MORE capsaicin and makes you a WAY more successful and wider ranged species than you ever were before
simply because this mammal LOVES Pain Chemical. that evolved specifically to produce pain in mammals. It's not that the capsaicin isn't WORKING. It's just that these freaks like it.
This is the same mammal with social instincts so goddamn strong that they literally try to form social bonds with their predators, and end up evolving the predators into a new species that fits into their social communities as a form of mutualistic symbiosis, and exists in several different forms with unique morphology and behaviors based on the function they perform.
Instead of, I don't know, EVOLVING TO BE FASTER, this animal finds a faster animal and sits on it. Which shouldn't even work because the faster animal is a prey animal and this animal is a predator, but SOMEHOW they FORM A SOCIAL BOND WITH THE PREY. So they can sit on it while it runs fast. And somehow the prey animal?? is cool with this?? and benefits from this relationship???
Literally how can you hate humans. Humans are possibly the most hilarious thing evolution has ever done.
other things humans have done
- eat poison plants, decide they like getting poisoned, and evolve the plants to poison them more
- evolve to not have hair, but they find mammals with thick fluffy hair and put the hair on themselves, and evolve the mammals to produce extra hair so they can both have a warm coat of hair
- split up their parasitic lice species into two separate species because they start taking other animals' hair and putting it on themselves so much
- learn how to set things on fire on purpose. maintain body temperature by just standing beside some wood that's on fire instead of literally any normal option
- figure out that their prey tastes better and is easier to digest when they hold it over a fire after killing it. get smarter because they digest food so good after it's been held over a fire.
- find a poisonous plant and try washing it in boiling water until they don't die when they eat it anymore
- go across the ocean by making a floating nest despite not being able to breathe underwater, drink ocean water, or even swim naturally
- drink milk from other mammals even though they can't digest it and it makes them sick. Evolve those mammals to produce more milk than their babies can drink so they can drink the milk. Some members of the species evolve to be able to digest milk because they were so hellbent on drinking it.
- find flowers, bugs and minerals that are nice colors and crush them up to try to turn other things that color
- eat mushrooms that make their nervous systems malfunction because they like malfunctioning their nervous systems
humans worldwide looking up into the celestial vault of stars a million light years away, separated from Earth by the deadly cold and emptiness of space: I bet there are guys up there to form social bonds with
…overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Pablo Palazuelo
Pablo Palazuelo (Spanish, 1916 – 2007)
DLM137 - Composition II - 1963
