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mysticonsheadcanons · 9 months ago

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Mysticons Fan Episode: Deal with Feels

The Mysticons are in Magi-Mall when Clawdette comes, saying that she was looking everywhere for the Mysticons. After Sharise is introduced to Clawdette, Zarya asks what happened. Clawdette says that the people in her clan are acting strange, and asks the Mysticons to come.

They go to the village where her clan lives, and sees a group of them bringing in a captured unicorn, which Em sadly points out is an endangered species in Gemina. Clawdette explains that her clan used to only hunt for creatures clients specifically request, but now would hunt anything in order to make a profit. Piper asks if all they do is hunt, and Clawdette reveals that they go to a strange monument that suddenly appeared near their village at least once a say. Clawdette says that the monument might be causing this, but is too scared to investigate, as she doesn't want to become heartless. The Mysticons decide to go, and Piper suggests Clawdette goes with them, promising that they will look out for her.

As they head to the monument, Em notices that Clawdette seems nervous and distracts her by asking her about her family. Clawdette looks away, and admits that her parents said that she's a disgrace to the clan, and that they're ashamed of having such an emotional daughter. Arkayna overhears this, and suggests that Sharise talks to Clawdette, as Sharise knows what it's like to have difficulty with family members. Sharise admits that she doesn't know what to say, as her own issues with her uncle aren't resolved.

They find the monument, and are about to destroy it with the Lances of Justice, but soon begin having visions of them gaining power by showing their strength and serving the spectral hand. The Mysticons are about to turn on each other, but Clawdette, who kept her distance from the monument, snaps them out of it by saying how good of friends they were when they protected Stormy from her. This snaps them out of the monument's influence, and realize that it is connected to the Spectral Hand. However, the distraction lasted long enough for the clan to come, and the Mysticons are forced to retreat.

Deep in the jungle, they talk about what to do, as they suspect using their magic triggered the monument to activate. Piper brings up how fab-tacular unicorns are, and Em agrees, saying that their horns have the power to break anything. This gives them the idea to free the unicorn, and get the unicorn to help destroy the monument. Clawdette leads them through the jungle, and warns the Mysticons to be careful, as it's easy to get lost in the jungle. Clawdette reminises about how she used to go here all the time to enjoy the beauty, and admits that those walks should have been her first hint that she didn't fit in with the clan. After a look from Arkayna, Sharise is about to say something, but Clawdette motions for the Mysticons to be quiet, as they are approaching the village.

While the Mysticons are distracting the villagers, Clawdette is freeing the unicorn. Zarya notices that Clawdette is having troubles with the locks, and goes to help. The clan memebers see what Zarya and Clawdette are doing just as the girls finish freeing the unicorn, and ignore the Mysticons to stop them. Zarya, Clawdette, and the unicorn gets seperated from the others, but between Clawdette's experience in the jungle and Zarya's tracking skills, they manage to find the others.

They get to the monument, but hear footsteps approaching. Em tells the uncorn to attack the monument. The unicorn tries to do so, and notice that while it's cracked, the monument is still standing. Arkayna guesses that the clan weakened the unicorn somewhow, but guesses that their Lances of Justice would help finish the job. While they are worried about the monument influencing them again, they decide to block it out by thinking of all the good times they had together. Sharise thinks of Em talking to her on the first night, Em thinks of Piper comforting her after Kasey was hurt, Piper thinks of Zarya apoligizing for not believing her about the monster, Zarya thinks of Arkayna telling Zarya she loves her, and Arkayna thinks of Sharise spending all night helping Arkayna learn basic halfling words for a royal halfling family that was visiting. The clan comes just as the monument is destroyed, freeing the clan from its grasp.

When they get back to the village, Clawdette suggests that the clan tries helping people. Her parents tell her that she's weak, and that she'll never be one of them if she doesn't learn to be ruthless. Meanwhile, the Mysticons are talking about the Spectral Hand returning, and realize that they have to tell Proxima. Just as they are ready to go, Sharise sees Clawdette sitting alone and goes to talk to her. She tells Clawdette that while you can't pick the family you're born into, you can find others who care about you. The other Mysticons join, and Piper hugs her, saying that they're friends now. Clawdette hugs back, and Piper comments how tight her hug is.

#Mysticons #Fan episode #Episode Description #Deal Wiyh Feels

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 1 year ago

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I had two things from the latest Bugle episode that I wanted to quote on Tumblr, and on the podcast they occurred within seconds of each other, going from the fun opening pre-episode bit to the top story. But it still felt wrong to put both of them in one post, as there will now be some hard mood whiplash as I transition from one to the next. I thought the most reasonable way to write about both things from one episode would be to split them into two posts, but the latter be a reblog of the former. Together, but clearly different things.

I feel like I can't write about the cute parts of this Bugle episode without acknowledging the ridiculously difficult line Andy Zaltzman managed to walk immediately after that. In 16 years worth of Bugle episodes, plus listening to lots of his other stuff, I think this might be the most personal/human I've ever heard Andy Zaltzman get (even including those days when he was really into 24 like a shockingly normal person). After sixteen years of hearing Andy only ever refer to his own Jewishness to make a joke about how bad he is at following the religion, it hits extra hard to hear him decide something has made him want to mention how it affects his identity without it being a joke.

Top story this week: And the world is fucked, still. I will admit, as I hinted at last week, and also on my radio show, I don’t think I’ve ever found it harder to write comedy than in the last couple of weeks. We’re now ten days on from the terrorist atrocities in Israel. Ten days in which the world’s shrinking supplies of optimism have officially reached critically endangered level. I think there’s a secret vial of optimism somewhere in a secret laboratory, it’s either in Siberia or Texas, I’m not sure, just in case optimism needs to be artificially released back into human circulation, so all is not lost. But it’s even now, harder to feel hopeful about the future of optimism as a mental state, and that shows where the world, and our species is right now. It remains a horrendous time of terrible suffering, loss, and tragedy, where the idea of comedy seems at once futile and inappropriate. So I don’t know quite how to address this story. It’s the second week we’ve tried to look at it. All I can say, and I’ll just get this out of the way. Due to my background, I do have an opinion on it: I’m Jewish, I’m human, I’m related to people, and I’m from Planet Earth. I’m a veteran of both the 20th and 21st Centuries, and therefore of both the second and third millenniums. As a result of these facts that have shaped my identity, I’ve developed over the course of my life a distinct aversion to all of the following in no particular order of dispreference: terrorism, anti-Semitism, discrimination in general, murder, war, oppression, intolerance, cycles of violence and revenge, people being driven from their homes, human rights atrocities, humanitarian catastrophes – especially the more avoidable ones, and intractable political disputes left in the hands of leaderships that appear to have no desire to act in the true interests of the people the purport to represent. Oh, and genocide. Oh, and another one: the looming threat of a major global conflict breaking out. Just not my bags. And I also have an aversion to people celebrating, glorifying, and justifying any of those things for any reason. Also not my bag. I prefer peace, and I prefer sport. I prefer everything, to be honest.

What a fucking episode, to have to go straight from that first monologue to that second one. They dealt with it about as well as they could in the discussion that followed, I think, in a situation where nothing can deal with that well.

I've got nothing to add to that. I don't generally talk about massive topical issues as they happen on this blog, because I'm not qualified to do so, and no one should get their news (or opinion-based editorials about the news) from a fucking Tumblr blog, or from any social media, or for that matter from a comedy podcast. I'll post about it when there's news about who Stewart Lee might be sleeping with or what Richard Ayoade said about a terrible book or who Nish Kumar's talking shit about now, because that's the sort of news that my British comedy blog is qualified to have an opinion about. Not global horrors.

But my real-life sport that's popular in Muslim communities means a number of people I care about dearly have family in Palestine and my heart has broken every time I've heard from them lately, and I wouldn't need to know anyone personally affected to be horrified, and I hope everyone is finding reputable news sources to consume informed and accurate and important discussions about this.

That's all I've got, listening to that Bugle episode has left me pretty emotionally drained, and me being emotionally drained is the least of anyone's problems, and sorry for making this post all about myself but like I said I'm not qualified to talk about anything besides myself when it comes to this, I'm going to go listen to Nish Kumar talk some shit now to relax. It's a hell of a thing when Nish Kumar's what you listen to to relax.

The Bugle's been going for sixteen years, as of October 15, 2023. I like that date, because it's only two days after my birthday. I enjoy that around my birthday every year, The Bugle also has a little birthday celebration. And they do. On their very first birthday, in October 2008, they had cake in the studio in England where Andy Zaltzman was and in New York where John Oliver was and they celebrated their project surviving for a year and it was really sweet. And every since then, they do something like that. Last year, they marked the big fifteenth anniversary with a tour of live shows, and a special John and Andy reunion episode that made me laugh so hard I had tears in my eyes while listening to it on a bus, prompting me to pull my mask up and hat down to hide my reaction, but it wasn't quite enough to avoid getting a few strange looks.

No big tour this year, but Andy Zaltzman did write a special In The Bin section with some nice callbacks, that I transcribed for the Bugle fans on Tumblr who might not be following the current version of the podcast but enjoy references to the original:

Andy Zaltzman: As always, a section of this podcast is going straight in the bin. This week: a special Bugle sixteenth birthday commemorative section. At sixteen now, The Bugle can start voting in some parts of the world, including, crucially, Ecuador, and the Channel Island of Sark. So that’s very exciting, that we can now vote in those parts of the world. Anuvab Pal: It’s time to rig some elections in Ecuador, that’s what I’m thinking. Andy Zaltman: Look, Bugles, if you want an election near you rigged, just email us and we will do what we can. The Bugle can now buy cigarettes, although obviously it wouldn’t want to; if a podcast starts coughing and spluttering it’s not a great listen. It also means that The Bugle is, depending on where you listen to it, now legally allowed to consent to, um, uh, be played at the same time as another podcast, also over the age of sixteen, I think. Sadly, the minimum age for marriage in the UK was recently raised from sixteen to eighteen, so the planned wedding between The Bugle and the 2001-born TV drama series 24 will not be happening yet. Bit of an age gap, but it would have been fascinating to see Jack Bauer’s comedic take on the week’s global news, and to see what storylines they came up with for The Bugle. Could the Los Angeles counter-terrorist unit stop The Bugle’s Machiavellian scheme to establish a professional four-day cricket championship in California before it was too late? I, personally, would have watched that repeatedly. Also, The Bugle can, at the age of sixteen, and this is not a moment too soon, now go and get a proper job. It can also change its name, legally, and from what I’ve heard, from sources close to The Bugle, it is considering a change of name, at this point, at age sixteen. Amongst the possibilities: The Barak Obama Interview Show – apparently there are certain legal issues with that; Zaltor the Merciless Dispenses Wise Judgement to His Adoring Yet Fearful Subjects – I can see that working; Bible Studies with Mildred and Herbit – bit of a mix-up; Andy Zaltzman’s Fashion, Style, and Romance Tipscast – let me live my dream; Tonight Last Week – I’m not sure that’ll work; and Two Celebrities Phone it in and Take the Cash – I mean you have to adapt to the changing podcast market. Or, uh, Hot Rod and Dragster Ride Again. All those are possibilities, but that section is in the bin.

I think I said "Aww..." out loud about three times during that part. The little references! To Hot Rod and Dragster, that time in 2011 when Chris Skinner made a brief joke about those being fun nicknames for Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver and it was meant to be immediately forgotten, but the fans addressed emails to those names for years. The little reminder of how John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman spent the first few years of The Bugle really into the TV show 24, which sounded especially weird coming from Andy because he never likes anything that isn't sport or the music of Boney M, it's so rare to hear him be a normal person who gets excited about a mainstream thing in popular culture, to the point where he first started referencing 24 I thought he was being ironic, but eventually it became clear that he had actually binged every episode and just wanted to talk about it. And obviously he also threw in a reference to that show Week Last Tonight or whatever. Small references to Bugle history in the 2023 anniversary section.

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transxfiles · 2 years ago

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lost phineas and ferb episode where perry is called to investigate what dr doofenshmirtz is up to because carl the intern got ahold of some intel that doof has been seen speaking to lawyers and looking up the endangered species act at internet cafes and as major monogram says, "something fishy is going on"

meanwhile phineas and ferb's subplot of "i know what we're gonna do today!" is that isabella needs her environmentalist fireside girls badge so they start researching which species are in urgent need of help in the tri-state area so that they can use new cloning and gene therapy technologies to bring at-risk animals back from extinction

(yes there is a c-plot where buford and baljeet argue the ethics of this idea, i don't have time to explain it all for you rn)

we cut back to🎵doofenshmirtz evil incorporated🎵where we see perry carefully maneuvering around doofenshmirtz's lab scared he might fall into a trap but he hasn't set off a single booby trap and it's clear something is off

he runs into doofenshmirtz and goes to kick him in the gut action movie style but doof steps back one overly confident and says, "nuh uh uh, you see perry the platypus, you are TRAPPED! by the danville section of the endangered species act of 1973!"

doof goes on to explain his tragic backstory: "you see, perry the platypus, when i was a child my parents did not show up for my own birth! but you know that already, yadda yadda yadda they did not love me and then they loved roger more, ANYways i was raised by ocelots! i had a lovely foster mother who took me in and made me one of the pride, and so you see, perry the platypus, i am still legally considered an ocelot. did you know that there are only 50 recorded ocelots still alive in the continental united states? very sad for me as a member of a near-extinct species. it would be immoral for you to hurt someone critically endangered... in fact, you have made many attempts on my life this summer"

[montage of doof's security camera footage of their battles]

"which is why i have decided to bring you... TO COURT!" we cut back to phineas and ferb's back yard where they've decided to start cloning ocelots in their kiddie pool

candace storms outside enraged and says, "phineas and ferb are you cloning ocelots in my duckie momo kiddie pool!?"

ferb's one line of the episode is "well, i guess it's more of a kitty pool, now"

candace storms away saying, "i'm going to tell mom!" and isabella turns to phineas and says, "oh, does your mom have experience in wildlife conservation?"

we cut back to the doof and perry plotline where the two are now in the danville hall of justice and we learn that doof has spent his monthly alimony check on a defense lawyer and perry turns and sees the lawyer and then vanessa helping her organize her briefcase and perry chitters at her and vanessa shrugs and says, "i'm thinking about going into legal defense. sorry perry."

the rest of the doof and perry b-plot is spent in court and perry is about to ask for a public defense lawyer when carl runs into the room and explains that he's owca's official legal defense and perry looks at him like, "uhhh is that even allowed?"

it doesn't matter because apparently the judge is out sick today but because it's danville roger's the judge now because he's the mayor and everyone loves him.

the court case continues.

meanwhile phineas and ferb have successfully cloned multiple ocelots from the original ocelot dna they had on hand and isabella asks phineas if these clones will experience health problems like premature aging, phineas casually explains that ferb figured out the problem while they were experimenting with stem cell harvesting.

back in the courtroom, doof's ocelot foster mother has been brought to the stand along with an ocelot to english translator. doof gets emotional seeing her after so long. she says that he was one of her favorite child and he was as strong a hunter as anyone else in the family. it's incredibly sweet. the jury's in tears.

meanwhile, isabella has established connections with a group in texas who are going to release the ocelots back into their natural habitat and, using the cloned ocelots to prevent inbreeding, help establish an ocelot breeding program. the group explains that they are going to send a helicopter to retrieve the cloned ocelots from danville and bring them to texas soon.

isabella gets her fireside girls badge.

candace manages to get mom to see the backyard only after the ocelots have been helicoptered off to coastal texas, their primary habitat.

mom makes it into the backyard as phineas stares wistfully over the fence and says, "if you love something, you have to let it go." candace goes, "look mom look look look!" and points at the ducky momo kiddie pool, devoid of cloned ocelots, where baljeet and buford are now chilling out, having settled their philosophical debate about the ethics of animal cloning.

back in the courtroom drama, doof looks like he's about to win when an attendant walks into the courtroom and whispers something in roger's ear.

roger looks up, grinning, and says, "good news, everyone! my attendant here has just enlightened me that ocelots are no longer considered critically endangered!"

this settles the case, with perry being decreed not guilty and the entire affair being called off. the courtroom cheers, roger walks over to doof and personally congratulates him on his species' return from the brink of extinction.

doof shouts, "curse you endangered species classification system!" at the ceiling of the danville hall of justice.

perry arrives back home just in time for mom to say, "who wants pie?"

the end.

#cricket.chatterbox #phineas and ferb #pnf #dr doofenshmirtz #perry the platypus #phineas flynn #ferb fletcher #greatest hits

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ooops-i-arted · 4 years ago

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What did you think of episode 3?? From a child development perspective at least?

I’ll start with a couple things I would like to add about Episode 2:

WE FINALLY SAW THE BABY RUN! HIS GROSS MOTOR DEVELOPMENT IS IMPROVING! YAY!!!

I s2g if I see one more stupid-ass post about Baby Yoda being “canceled” or “committing genocide” HOW THE FUCK IS HE SUPPOSED TO KNOW OR UNDERSTAND THEY AREN’T FOOD IF NO ONE IS TEACHING HIM THAT? HAVE YOU MET A TODDLER, EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS NEW TO THEM AND THEY ARE EXPERIMENTING AND EXPLORING AND IF THEY DON’T HAVE ADULT GUIDANCE YOU CAN’T EXPECT THEM TO START LEARNING ADVANCED CONCEPTS INDEPENDENTLY AT THAT AGE. If it smells and/or looks like food to him (which is probably does) he’s gonna think it’s food and eat it until he is taught differently! Also the episode CLEARLY states the eggs are unfertilized, so not a baby at all yet, and that the species is not endangered, that frog lady just personally is having her last batch of eggs. Pay attention before you start having stupid opinions. /rant

Well to build on that - Baby is learning and we see it in this episode. Din tells him “I will get you food” when he sees Baby is hungry and Baby does successfully wait until he gets food! We also see him use a spoon, which is fantastic because he can then practice those fine motor manipulative skills, even if he couldn’t quite figure out how to use them to get that octopus off his face! And his self-preservation/problem solving skills come back with him sealing his pod to protect himself. Like I’ve stated before, to me that seems like a learned behavior, since we don’t see it in Season 1. There’s clearly a time skip between Season 1 and Season 2* so to me that implies Din has been teaching him to do that to protect himself. He also seemed to have some awareness of/reaction of fear to what the Quarren meant by “we’re gonna kill your pet” so he is definitely comprehending more, including things that no child should be having to experience, unfortunately.

It’s subtle and a little up-to-interpretation, but the way Baby was looking between Din and the dehelmed Bo-Katan made me think he’s trying to process this, because his Dad DEFINITELY does not do this, who the fuck is this and why the hell is she taking her helmet off??? IIRC I think he looked funny at Cobb too when the helmet came off but I haven’t rewatched Episode 1 yet so I’m not 100% sure. It’s another mark of his attachment to Din; what Din does is Normal and Right and these other Mandalorians are Doing It Wrong to his mind.

And ofc Baby does actually learn “these are not food” when he sees the eggs hatch. I think Frog Lady had figured out what was going on with the eggs and it seems she and Frog Husband maybe even actually took the time to show him the tadpole and teach him not to eat it? Since that is definitely a food-sized item to him by the end of the episode. He is so excited to have a playdate when Din picks him up! So many people want to hurt him and Din has to keep him close and out of sight so much, it’s wonderful he got a chance to have some healthy social interaction. He clearly enjoyed himself since he didn’t want to leave.

And ofc he continues to have his dad as a “safe harbor” to use while he experiences the world, and also seems to regard the ship as a safe place. In Episode 2 he was crying and scared a lot while the spiders were around, but he recognizes that on the ship with Dad, he is safe, seeming more curious than frightened of the sea creature at the end of the episode. He even laughs when Din kills it! No matter how dangerous things get, he still knows that he’s safe with his daddy, and that sense of security is SO important for a child’s mental well-being.

As for Din, Dad Points gained for actually talking to the kid about things (telling him he’ll get food, trying to tell him not to eat the eggs although he really should’ve been more explicit with a little kid) and for being so Soft it melted my heart when he was checking on the baby after his kraken encounter. Minor Dad Points lost for just yanking the poor kid away from his new frog friend (you have to transition little kids, no wonder poor Baby was fighting so hard to not leave!). MAJOR Dad Points lost for bringing the kid close to the big-ass hole in the ship when those Quarrens were acting sketchy as fuck about insisting he let the kid see. Seriously Din what were you thinking??

*I’m actually kind of sad we didn’t see The Shopping Trip, an episode where Din does nothing but bargain shop for a new pod. (That will probably be a Baby Yoda POV Interlude tbh, since I set up Baby Hating Pods Now and will have to realign his Feelings On Pods to align with the new season.) And more seriously, where did he get that thigh plate?? Did he have to forge it himself (since it’s kind of implied his Mandalorian search has been unsuccessful so far)? Did he just find a raided covert and retrieved it from a fallen brother? That’s depressing... or did he just make a pit stop to see the Armorer?

#baby yoda #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #asks #anon #baby yoda meta

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discotreque · 4 years ago

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Disco 3.07: Unification III

I got Jeri Taylor's "Unification" novelization for Christmas in 1991, because I was an obnoxious little nerd who was already well into "chapter books." I was also the kind of obnoxious little nerd who, by the end of January 1992, had won an argument with my Grade 3 teacher over whether I could list a TV screenwriter as my "favourite author" on an assignment. She'd written a book! It had chapters and everything!

(My grade-school character arc was basically Brad Boimler to Beckett Mariner in 10 years or less.)

I don't even know what to say about "Unification III." Not all the writing choices worked for me—despite the unquestionable improvements this season, some of Disco's most annoying series-spanning tendencies remain—and when I watched it yesterday morning, I paused about halfway through specifically to reflect on how I wasn't really feeling this one so far.

Not even 10 minutes later, I was crying my eyes out, and I didn't stop until probably 20 minutes after the episode was over. Did the writing get better? Hard to say. Did the back half of the episode redeem the first half? I literally couldn't tell you.

I've spent an enormous amount of time this year thinking about vulnerability and trust, persevering through doubt, and taking terrifying leaps of faith. Like everybody else, I've lost a lot of stability in 2020, but I also met someone who makes my heart feel like it's finally home. She makes me feel like there's still hope, even when I don't know what's worth hoping for.

Mechanically, I think this episode could have used another rewrite. Thematically, it hit me so hard that I kind of don't care. This season of Discovery has things to say—and it's saying them more or less coherently, for a change—and they're things I didn't even realize I needed to hear, right now, from Star Trek. All that and an airtight teleplay might be asking for too much.

Miscellaneous and spoilery observations below:

Starfleet has always been as military as the plot and/or aesthetics demand at the moment—no more, no less, no continuity—and while I have as much fun trying to spackle it together with headcanons as anyone, you can't pretend there's been deliberate intention there. Which is to say: Acting First Officer Ensign Tilly makes as much "sense" as anything else in this dumb franchise, and I've yet to see an argument against her being Saru's 2IC that doesn't boil down to a (willful?) misreading of actual facts in the text of the show, if not just transparent misogyny.

And I don't think she gives herself enough credit. It's not that she'll be "more compliant" than Michael—I believe she'd call Saru on his shit if he were actually fucking up—but she'll push back within Starfleet protocols, and not immediately go rogue with a mirror-universe murder MILF. I even think—and I wish Saru had said—that Tilly would have encouraged him to bring Michael's plan to the Admiral, instead of shooting it down like Saru got in trouble for.

Finally, this ship is already a batshit partybus full of misfit nerds—Tilly might actually be the perfect person to keep them all wrangled on the captain's behalf, at least while Michael finishes her current character arc.

(I can't remember if I've heard Doug Jones confirmed for Season 4 and I'm terrified we're going to end up with Captain Burnham and First Officer Tilly in the saddest possible way.)

Seeing Leonard Nimoy as Spock—and even moreso, hearing that voice—completely undid me. He was my honourary grandfather and I miss him so much.

The name "Ni'Var" sounded shockingly familiar—and sure enough, it's a Vulcan word from TOS fanon that dates back to the 1960s, and probably most famously appeared as the title of a short story in Star Trek: The New Voyages, which was itself essentially a volume of officially-published fanfic. That's got to be one of this show's all-time deepest cuts—my jaw literally dropped.

T'Rina reminded me so much of President Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica that it made me slightly dizzy to see the actor's name—Tara Rosling—in the credits. And not only is she Mary McDonnell–tier gorgeous, she's immediately a Tim Russ–tier Vulcan too. Everything she says, every expression on her face, speaks inscrutable volumes—you can tell something's going on in there, but it's impossible to tell what. (Also uhhhh is a Starfleet captain allowed to smooch the president of a whole planet? Asking for a Kelpian friend...)

The mother-daughter dynamic that Sonja Sohn and Sonequa Martin-Green have created is so excellent and so painful. They both see Gabrielle's absence from Michael's life as an abandonment, and they both want to move past that—to atone and forgive, respectively—but so far they've only really interacted in high-adrenaline, ludicrously high-stakes contexts, and there hasn't been space for that kind of reconciliation. I’m looking forward to next season, when Michael can just holo-Skype her mom to complain about Book leaving his socks on the floor.

Book and Michael's little relationship D-plot was also achingly gorgeous to me, and felt shockingly real for a Star Trek romance. He's Han Solo—he belongs out there saving endangered species in his asymmetrical spaceship with his furry sidekick, roguing handsomely around the galaxy making wisecracks—not squatting on the flight deck of a Federation starship. But he can't just walk away from Michael—she's his home now. And instead of an unrealistically tidy resolution (or contrived conflict), they just sort of admit "yeah, oof, this is complicated," and hold each other.

Finally, special shoutout to Patrick Kwok-Choon and his radiant smile. I need Rhys and Bryce to have stupid Tom Paris/Harry Kim hijinks in Season 4 like you would not BELIEVE.

Next week: there's a rendering glitch in Georgiou's character model, and Ryn the Andorian is back to (hopefully) cheat death again!

#star trek discovery #star trek discovery spoilers #disco spoilers #amy's episode notes

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arcticdementor · 5 years ago

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Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not simply using the environment as a convenient opportunity for class-conscious virtue signaling—may want to brace themselves for a shock.

The sign I have in mind is a recent flurry of articles in the leftward end of the mainstream media decrying the dangers of ecofascism. Ecofascism? That’s the term used for, and also generally by, that tiny subset of our society’s fascist fringe which likes to combine environmental concerns with the racial bigotries and authoritarian political daydreams more standard on that end of modern extremism. If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s good reason for that, but a significant section of the mainstream media seems to have taken quite an interest in making sure that you hear about it now.

…

The first thing I’d like to point out to my readers here is that, as already noted, ecofascism is a fringe of a fringe. In terms of numbers and cultural influence, it ranks well below the Flat Earth Society or the people who believe in all sincerity that Elvis Presley is a god. It’s one of those minute and self-marginalizing sub-sub-subcultures that a certain number of people find or make in order to act out their antinomian fantasies in comfortable obscurity, and enjoy the modest joys of being the biggest paramecium in a very, very small pond. It’s fair to say, in fact, that the chance that ecofascism will become a significant political or cultural force in your lifetime, dear reader, is right up there with the chance that the United Church of Bacon will become a major world religion.

So why is this submicroscopic fringe ideology suddenly on the receiving end of so many faux-worried essays in important liberal newspapers and magazines, and in the corresponding end of social media and the public blogosphere? The reason, I’d argue, has to do with something else that’s been finally receiving its own share of media attention.

…

That is to say, counting up all its direct and indirect energy costs, this one conference had a carbon footprint rivaling the annual output of some Third World countries—and you guessed it, the point of the conference was to talk about the menace of anthropogenic climate change.

…

At this point, in fact, one of the current heartthrobs of climate change activism, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, refuses to fly anywhere because of commercial air travel’s gargantuan carbon footprint. Sensibly enough, she travels through Europe by train, and her rich friends have lent her a sailboat to take her across the Atlantic for her upcoming North American tour. This would be bad enough if Thunberg was an ordinary citizen trying to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, but she’s not—she’s the darling of the Davos set, a child of privilege who’s managed to parlay the normal adolescent craving for attention into a sizable cultural presence. Every time she takes the train, she adds to the number of people who look at the attendees at the Sicily conference mentioned above and say, “So what about your carbon footprint?”

That, in turn, is fatal to climate change activism as currently constituted. For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

…

To some extent this is common or garden variety hypocrisy, heavily larded with the odd conviction—on loan from the less honest end of liberal Christianity—that if you feel really bad about your sins, God will ignore the fact that you keep on committing them. Still, there’s more to it than that. Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral: that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral. Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.

…

If you haven’t heard of these followup studies, dear reader, there’s good reason for that. They argued unconvincingly that everything would be just fine if only the nations of the world handed over control of the global economy to an unelected cadre of experts, under whom the institutions of democratic governance would be turned into powerless debating societies while the decisions that mattered would be made by corporate-bureaucratic committees conveniently sheltered from public oversight. (If this seems familiar to those of my readers who endure EU rule just now, there’s a reason for that: the state of affairs just described has been the wet dream of Europe’s privileged classes and their tame intellectuals for quite a few decades now.) That’s the usually unmentioned reason why The Limits to Growth fielded the savage resistance it did: a good many people in 1972 recognized it as a stalking horse for a political agenda.

…

In the same way, the mere fact that certain people are trying to use climate change as a stalking horse for unrelated political agendas doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to dump trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or that doing so won’t cause epic disruptions to an already unstable global climate. Mind you, anthropogenic climate change isn’t the end of the world, not by a long shot; the Earth has been through sudden temperature shifts many times before in its long history, some of them due to large-scale releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—that’s one of the things really massive volcanic episodes can do, for example.

Attempts to dress up climate change in the borrowed finery of the Book of Revelations—sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia!—have more to do with our culture’s apocalyptic obsessions, and with the desires of ambitious people to scare others into signing on to their agenda, than with the realities of anthropogenic climate change. That said, we can expect a good solid helping of coastal flooding, weather-related disasters, crop failures, and other entertainments, which will take an increasingly severe economic toll as the years go on, and help drive the declines in population and economic output mentioned a few paragraphs back. Yes, this is one of the things The Limits to Growth was talking about when it predicted the long slow arc of decline ahead of us.

The problem faced by the people who have been pushing climate change activism is that their political enemies have found a very effective way to counter them: they can point out that the people who babble by the hour about the apocalyptic future we face due to anthropogenic climate change don’t take their own claims seriously enough to walk their talk. Thus the attendees at the environmental conference on Sicily mentioned earlier can no longer count on having their planet and eating it too—or, more to the point, they can’t count on doing so while still convincing anyone that they ought to be taken seriously. This is hard on certain delicate egos, and it also makes it hard to keep pursuing the agenda mentioned above while continuing to lead absurdly extravagant lifestyles propped up by stunning levels of energy and resource waste.

There’s a simple solution to that difficulty, though: the celebrities, their pet intellectuals, and the interests behind them can drop environmentalism like a hot rock.

That’s what happened, after all, in the early 1980s. Environmentalism up until that point had a huge cultural presence, supported by government-funded advertising campaigns—some of my readers, certainly, are old enough to recall Woodsy Owl and his iconic slogan, “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”—and also supported by a galaxy of celebrities who mouthed pious sentiments about nature. Then, bam! Ronald Reagan was in, Woodsy Owl was out, John-Boy Walton and John Denver gave way to Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko and “material girl” Madonna, and the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth had corporate executives on their boards of directors, and did everything they could think of to deep-six the effective organizing tactics that got the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a galaxy of other environmental reforms enacted into law.

…

I think we’re about to see the same thing happen to climate change activism, and one of the symptoms of the approaching swerve is the sudden flurry of mass media publicity being given right now to the tiny fringe phenomenon of ecofascism. Over the months ahead, I expect to see many more stories along the same lines all over the leftward end of the media and its associated blogosphere, insisting in increasingly shrill terms that anyone who pays too much attention to the environment—and in particular, anyone who expects celebrity climate change activists to modify their lifestyles to match their loudly proclaimed ideals—is probably an ecofascist. In fact, I would be very surprised if we don’t see a series of earnest articles in the media claiming that believing in ecological limits is racist; such claims are already being made in the blogosphere, and their adoption by the mainstream left is, I suspect, merely a matter of time.

#john michael greer #ecosophia.net #environmentalism #greta thunberg #ecofascism #green nude eel #puritans gonna puritan #the limits to growth #climate change

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thekoshertribble · 5 years ago

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What’s up with “the Preservers?” Questions and Speculation

So I was thinking about “the Paradise Syndrome” - you know, the super awkward and problematic Native American stereotype episode - and I was thinking about the “Preservers.” This is the ancient race that apparently searched the galaxy looking for cultures threatened by extinction and moving these populations to other planets where they could thrive. They’re never brought up again and I have a few questions...

- How do they decide which culture is threatened? Spock says they look for “primitive cultures” whatever the heck that means...To a race as supposedly powerful as the Preservers are, who is considered “primitive?” And was this their only way of selecting a population? The Native Americans on Amerind were selected because of genocide - but what about other threats like natural disasters, or plagues?

- Personal question: if the Preservers rescued certain Native American tribes from genocide, did they do the same for other peoples of Earth. Is there a planet out there somewhere inhabited by Jews? If so where is it, I would very much like to go there.

- Spock says the Preservers were an ancient race. But the earliest acts of genocide against Native Americans only goes back to the beginning of the 16th century. That’s only 700 years ago, from the 23rd century. In celestial time, this isn’t very long at all. Were the Preservers time travelers? Did they “foresee” the genocide of certain populations and move them before it happened? (On Amerind, for example, they placed an asteroid deflector because they predicted an asteroid would threaten the planet?)

- Did the selected population know it was being moved, or “re-seeded?” Or were they basically abducted by the preservers against their will? This, obviously seems extremely unethical and unsafe.

- Or maybe a representative of the Preservers would live among the selected people in disguise to learn about them and who is the natural leader among them? The representative could then tell said individual(s), in that culture’s terms, that there is a way of escaping persecution, and offer to help?(Miramanee refers to the “wise ones,” suggesting that the Preservers made some positive connection with her ancestors - I’m guessing it was positive because she calls them the “wise ones”, not the “takers” or “abductors.”)

- Or perhaps the Preservers had a form of selective memory-wiping that they employed to make their transported populations forget the likely trauma caused by their re-seeding. (Kirk’s memory wiping in the control room of the obelisk might be evidence of this technology.)

- Why did the Preservers do this at all? What was their motivation? They seem to sympathize with cultures and people in peril - is this because the Preservers themselves had suffered in some way? Were they an endangered species through some tragedy? Suppose they “saw” their own future inevitable demise, and decided to use the rest of their time dedicated to saving similarly endangered cultures from an early death.

- Final big question: is the “re-seeding” of cultures by the Preservers ethical? Obviously it violates the Federation’s prime directive of non-interference, but on the other hand, if you had the means to save a culture from extinction, wouldn’t you try to do something to help?

Bonus: Apparently I am not the only person who has wondered about the Preservers. In Marvel Comics’ Star Trek: Untold Voyages #5 (by Greenberg, Collins and Williams) the Enterprise meets a species that look strikingly like the “visitors” of old Earth scifi tales and UFO encounters. This species explain to Spock that they are as old as the Preservers and knew of their “re-seeding.” However, these “visitors” found this work unethical, and has been working for centuries to re-do the damage of the Preservers. Here’s why: (Transcripts below each image from comics)

Kirk: Why were they abducting the Lycosians?

Spock: For the same reason that they have visited and studied various planets and peoples throughout the galaxy over millions of years--to confirm whether or not these worlds were “seeded” by their contemporaries--an ancient super-race known as the Preservers.

McCoy: The Preservers...You told me once about them Spock! A long-lost race believed to have traveled the galaxy, rescuing life forms in danger of extinction and placing them on worlds where they could thrive...

Spock: Quite correct doctor. But these abductors opposed the work of the Preservers, believing that seeding planets with life forms from other worlds robbed these planets of their individuality--and wreaked havoc upon their natural environmental cycles.

Spock: It is the belief of the abductors that countless life forms were suppressed and unable to come into being, on world that would have rightfully been theirs, because of the very presence of the Preservers’ “seeds.” Thus, these abductors have been slowly working their way to across the galaxy, trying to determine how much damage was done to worlds seeded by the Preservers -- and undo that damage.

McCoy: “Undo--how?”

Spock: By removing the “seeded” life forms from the planets. To give each of these “tainted” worlds a chance to develop naturally.

McCoy: And what do they do with the “seeded” life forms, Spock?

Spock: They store them in the bowels of this vessel, in suspended animation. To eventually be returned to their rightful homes.

Kirk: What?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So clearly, not everyone approved of the Preserver’s work. The “Visitors” in this instance, were mostly concerned about the planets that the Preservers were “seeding,” not so much the “seeded” populations themselves. Obviously they don’t have problems with abduction, considering their own practices.

#star trek #the paradise syndrome #star trek untold voyages #long post #the preservers #star trek comics #kirk #spock #mccoy #alien abduction

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amandaj718 · 7 years ago

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A Very Robert Christmas

I wasn’t going to do this. I swear. I planned to watch, freak out and reblog all the gifs while crying. I plan to still do that, but I have so much to say about a lot of things. This episode felt like a palette cleanser. Almost, like, we were spun into a new direction. I’m going to go person by person. Family too (Ok, I have a lot to say about the Dingles) and then of course…my hearts…Robert Sugden. Aaron Dingle. Robron. (Also, this episode just gave me a great idea for my fanfiction since…it kind of came true today). This is full of spelling mistakes. My hands were shaking with excitement so excuse the poor execution please.

Let’s begin with the easy stuff.

(This is long. Get a snack)

General Overview of the Episode

Ryan is amazing. No holds bared here. Ryan Hawley is an amazing actor. The show knows this too or else he wouldn’t have given him his own episode to carry. Before anyone argues, he carries this whole episode. Everyone else (even Danny) is his supporting cast. He is amazing. So was Danny (crying…he always gets me to cry. Without fail!).

This was well written, well paced and VAL. I loved that Val was the surprise guest. I was so sure it was Katie and so was most of the GA and Robron fans. SURPRISE. I love Val so it was nice to see her.

“You got a lot gayer after I died.” - *SNORT*

The Dingles

*DEEP BREATH* They were just…terrible this year. While I would love to sit here and bad mouth Charity and Paddy about wishing Robert dead (What the frack?!?!) but I would expect that from Charity and Paddy. They are just…mean these days. Not even funny. That might be something else the show is setting up. Same with Chas. She knew/knows how Aarons feels but she wants her son to move on so she pushes. I get that. Doesn’t mean I like it. Also, bad karma my friends. WISHING PEOPLE DEAD. Just saying.

I want to talk about the Christmas Day celebration. The Dingles and Christmas should feel warm and welcoming. Tight like last year. Everyone was close to each other. The colors felt warm and welcoming. It felt like a family. Everything was shot tighter and with a tinge of old school Christmas cheer around the edges. Touches of green and gold. Some red too. There was a lot of love in their house that night.

This year? It was shot in wide shots. People weren’t sitting as closely. The place felt impersonal and even a bit gaudy. When the wanted a close shot, it was still a still and front facing two shot. It felt cold. Dark even. The Dingles were all there, but their hearts were long gone or have gone dark. They were wishing people dead, some were inviting themselves to the party (We will get to Alex later) and Aaron was in his own personal hell. The Dingles weren’t the warmth this year. They were the cold. Hint of things to come?

The Sugdens

The Sugden Family is a dying breed. They were once the main family (legacy family) but now they feel like an endangered species. I really felt this way after they started writing Victoria this year that the family was seriously in trouble.

I don’t anymore. I’m glad that one of my favorites, Victoria, was back today. I felt her again. She was worried about her brother and her husband. She was a friend to Aaron. She had her worries, but she knew her family, who was in her reach, needed her. It was nice to see complexity come back and not just be a plot device. I loved it. Welcome back Victoria.

Diane felt the same to me. Doug surprised me. I figured he would be a bit cruel or say something stupid, but he showed up with food and he seemed to care. There was a feeling of family. It was small, but it was there. It was nice to see. I felt more warmth with them than the Dingles today.

Lawrence White

Praise John for acting his butt off today. I love how Lawrence still showed up to talk to Robert. He didn’t yell. He didn’t accuse. He was just there to listen. Give Robert his ‘in’ too.

As for dream Lawrence. I think, that Lawrence represented some of the audience as well as the other characters in the village. I noticed he said some stuff I’ve seen written by the general audience and even a few anti’s. Which, didn’t upset me but showed that the show is aware of what others are feeling outside the fandom. Did I agree with everything he said about Robert? No but I think even Robert feels that way about himself sometimes. Also, Jack’s influence is in there with Lawrence’s appearance.

Rebecca White

Emily Head. I’m not a fan but when she gets to play black widow, she shines. Victim? She looks lost. Not so much. I don’t buy it. Especially in her scenes with Robert as he laid there.

‘Is he dead?’ COULD THAT HAVE SOUNDED MORE FLAT AND UNCARING? I don’t know if it was scripted that way but my god. It was bad. Bad line read. Also, bringing Seb over to see his father on the ground? What the frack? It was odd. Detached. Like she was fine showing Seb something that sad. Which…woah.

In the dream, her attitude towards Robert, talking about how he approaches business (once again hearing some GA comments and even antis). She was good and seemed to care about what she was saying. She plays black widow so well. SERIOUSLY. That is her strength.

The Seb thing. I mean, Justine and I have wondered if a medical emergency could bring into play paternity. I don’t know. It might have been Robert’s own fears as a dad. It might have been his mind who was in a dark place. I still think something is up there. I just don’t know what yet.

Lachlan White

Lachlan is the more interesting White as per usual. Robert sees him as evil and up to something. He will always be doing something to him. Which, might have been foreshadowing. Killer Lachlan is rising? Maybe? Dream Lachlan and Real Lachlan didn’t have any changes. Also, he was attached to Alex shocking him back to existence. Which…well…. Lachlan might be the shot in the arm to get this story going? Maybe. Either way, he was the most direct and most obvious from dream to real life.

Chrissie White

WHERE THE FRACK WAS CHRISSIE?

Alex Mason

It’s not secret that I don’t like Alex. I find him plotty. I find him annoying. I find him needy. I find him pushy. I don’t like the guy. Today, I found him all those things at once. He shows up to the Dingles without being asked. He was a bit harsh with Robert and didn’t seem to believe him when he said to fight for Aaron. We know how this ends with Aaron tomorrow but yes. Even after all that, like my friend Kat said, he wasn’t a factor. Yes, he was in the episode and had an impact but not really. He was just…a non-factor. He was there to push along a tiny plot thread that I think will be tied up by the second week of January and not by Robert but by Aaron.

Aaron Dingle

There has been a lot of talk about Aaron and choice. His choice. Family choice. Robert’s choice. The show addressed that tonight and that made me realize that the Robron/Aaron fandom was right on point. Aaron and his choice. Aaron has a been a bit passive lately. He did things for himself but mostly let his family dictate things, let Robert make a few decisions and even let Liv move him along. I had a lot of problems with that.

Tonight, Aaron made his choices…kind of. Ok, this might feel jumbled because my mind is still very jumbled about my favorite bearded bunny. Ok…let me see if I can get out what I am feeling about Aaron and choice.

I think Alex is being pushed on to Aaron by his family.

Victoria kind of pushed Aaron towards Robert.

Chas pushed Aaron to leave the hospital faster.

Ok. Aaron has three choices. Go with his families choice. Go with Victoria’s. Go with his own. This is when it gets complicated. I think Aaron hit his limit this Christmas. I think listening to his family, Victoria and then Robert’s opinions set him over. I think he had decided and then Robert and what he said, changed that again. If that makes sense.

Aaron loves Robert. They are soulmates (more on that in their own section) and I think he went in there ready to pick Robert but at the same time…he still wasn’t there or sure. He fought Robert but still backed off quickly. So, Aaron makes his decision, but he makes the easy one?

I’m so confused by what they are trying to accomplish with Aaron. I feel like Aaron will get his taste of a normal relationship and grow bored or find what he doesn’t want. Then he will start making decisions (Robert is his best friend but he isn’t going to be pushing anything onto him) that will lead him to support Robert in a quiet way (healthier way?) that leads us to reunion.

I’m very confused about Aaron right now. Obviously. I love him but Aaron…baby….honey…you can design your life the way you want. I wish you would learn that you can be happy with your choices. Support is great and needed but you have to make the decisions in your life. Time for you to do that.

Robert Sugden

Robert has had quite the ride today. I think Robert’s dream was an over exaggerated version of how he feels about himself and a mix of what he thinks others think about him. There were quite a few truths and Val’s section was less about how he feels but what could be if he continues down this road he has been on all year. 2018 will be a different year for him. He won’t change completely (no soap character does) but I think a lot of his worse qualities that have been played up all year will calm down and Robert will learn more. LISTEN more. Val keep saying listen. Robert needs to listen. He has already started. He listened to Victoria. He listened to Alex. He listened to Diane and Doug. He listened to Lawrence between talking to him about Seb.

Speaking of Seb. I think Robert will focus on being a dad now. He made the choice to concentrate on being a better dad to his son which I know is a sticking point for a lot of fans. It needs to happen even if Seb doesn’t stay. Robert does love his child. Don’t take that away from him fandom. Yes, it is a representation of a very bad year for Robert but in time…those memories fade. Believe me, they will on a soap. Again, I’m still not sure this kid is sticking around. They still haven’t cast another baby and even weirder they didn’t cast twins outright. Something is going on there and we aren’t allowed to know just yet.

Robert isn’t a bad person. He isn’t the worst soap character on that show (Charity and Cain spring to mind) but now Robert has been given an episode. He was given a chance to better himself for himself and no one else. He is being given the chance by writers to make himself an even deeper legacy character. This is good. I like this. Did I mention how much I LOVE RYAN HAWLEY?!?! Ahem…yes. He was good. GREAT. He was great.

Robron

WOW. Do those two idiots love each other. Beyond just love. They are soulmates. My heart was beating a mile a minute and I was holding my breath. Bad combo by the way. HA. Those two. Man. They just gave us a nice highway to reunion and marriage. Yes, they did. Hear me out.

Robert knows that holding onto Aaron isn’t healthy. Not in the state he is in. He needs to get better for himself. Get himself together and then be a dad to Seb.

Aaron wants to hold on, but I think even he knows holding on isn’t healthy. He needs to go off and do something else. Date Alex for instance.

Both don’t want to let go but they must. They have to do what is best for themselves while being friends (lets kid ourselves…they will never be completely out of each other’s lives…maybe in death and even then they will haunt each other). They need to rebuild and to rebuild with a foundation of friendship…that’s good. That is strong. That will last longer than just build a new relationship with old hurt and memories still lingering in the background.

This was clean break. A clean slate. A reason for them to build again. I might even get my wish. A reverse of last time only healthier. Aaron gets to do what he needs to do. Finds his way and then stands in the background as Roberts support as he deals with final White drama.

Friends. Best friends.

It hurts like hell. It hurts so bad. That cheek kiss broke me. Aaron crying. Robert crying. It hurt. IT HURT LIKE A STICK ON A BUTTCHEEK. It was needed and we are on the way. WE ARE IN THE FINAL ACT PEOPLE. LETS DO THIS.

Incidentals

That scene with Gerry and Aaron walking down in that nice suit. I’m going to echo my dear friend Justine here. Maybe that was foreshadowing for a wedding. Aaron’s wedding suit? MAYBE?!?!

My fanfiction touches a lot on what was touched on in this episode today. Not as great as the real thing but I feel like I’m not wasting my time sticking around and being positive. I’m not too stupid. *wink*

Gerry is a great addition. I can’t wait to see him be fleshed out.

I loved Jimmy and his boxers (WHAT DID THAT ALL MEAN?!?!) I can’t get a handle on what they were trying to do with Jimmy other than the obvious. I wonder if that was a hint at things to come for Jimmy. He is getting a storyline. He kept mentioning having a good idea for the scrapyard. Which is…worrisome.

Small thing in the hospital. Robert’s name was always placed above Alex’s. Yes, its protocol but I think that was a wink that Robert will ALWAYS be above Alex. *LET ME HAVE THIS*

Whew. I know not everyone will agree. I may have overthought or not thought through enough. That episode gave me so many feels and I still have feels writing this. I loved it. It hurt like hell but I know…its for the best. I see people think this means Robron are over but not at all. This is a new beginning. Exactly what they need for 2018.

*glasses up*

Lets hang on and follow this out. WE ARE ALMOST THERE. WE ARE CLOSE TO REUNION (my guess? February. Maxine episodes) and seeing AARON AND ROBERT GET STRONGER AWAY FROM EACH OTHER AND TOGETHER. Bring it on.

*CLINK*

#Robron #Robert Sugden #Aaron Dingle #Emmerdale #The White Family #A Christmas Tale #My views #Live and Organized Production

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Review: That Hope is You, Part 1

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Star Trek: Discovery review contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 1

Star Trek: Discovery has taken a long time to find its footing. What started as a show about the Federation-Klingon war quickly became a show about the Mirror Universe quickly became a show about legacy TOS characters quickly became a show about an evil A.I. set on wiping out all living things in the universe. The Season 2 finale, which saw the Discovery jumping almost a millennia into the future, was more than just a cliffhanger—it was a much-needed narrative reset, a way to keep the characters we have grown to know and love while wiping the slate clean of the muddled worldbuilding of the first two seasons. Was it a smart choice? Judging by this first episode, it was a brilliant one.

In “That Hope is You, Part 1,” we are introduced to a strange future where anything is possible. No longer burdened by the weight of canon and continuity, Discovery finally feels like it can tell its own story—and, best of all, it doesn’t feel the pressure to rush through it. This season is taking its time. The series gives its premiere to its protagonist in a way it has rarely been willing to do before, allowing Sonequa Martin-Green the space to show her acting chops. So much of this episode relies on Martin-Green’s performance, as she is our audience surrogate to this strange new world, and she absolutely nails it. She is overjoyed (when she realizes she has saved life in the universe). She is terrified (when it first hits her she is truly alone). She is silly (when she is high on the Mercantile agents’ truth powder). She is devastated (when she cannot contact her ship). She is hopeful (when she meets Mr. Sahil). Somehow, she is able to portray these emotions all in the course of one episode (sometimes, in the course of one scene), and make it feel true.

Of course Michael isn’t the only character carrying this episode. Really, it is a two-man story, centered around the burgeoning relationship between Michael, a stranger in a strange future, and Cleveland Book (David Ajala), a courier with a special connection to animal species who is working to save as many endangered species as he can in an indifferent universe. In a way, they are very similar—both have dedicated their lives to helping those who in need. In other ways, they are very different, and that difference seems related to environment. Book has grown up in a universe without the Federation, which is to say in a world without a just institutional authority that has the power and resources to protect the innocent. This hasn’t made him cruel, but it has made him pragmatic. When he meets Michael, he really doesn’t want to help her—not because he thinks she doesn’t deserve it or he doesn’t think it’s important to help those in need, but because “everybody has a story,” and he has already chosen his specific path of positive change-making. If he chooses to help Michael, it could mean failing the trance worm he has hidden in his cargo bay.

Of course, Michael doesn’t give Book much of a choice. She demonstrates, in action, how they can help one another. When Book is at his wit’s end, he chooses the safe path: betrayal. When Michael is at her wit’s end, she chooses the brave path: hope. She hopes placing her faith in Book will pay off and, even when it doesn’t, she does it again (although not without a punch or two to his pretty face). She hopes that Discovery has made it or will make it through the temporal wormhole, even if there’s no precedent for that outcome. She hopes that the ember that is the Federation could be stirred into something bright and alive again, even if everyone in this time is telling her this hope is foolish.

Then, she meets Aditya Sahil (Adil Hussain), a man who has woken up every morning for 40 years to serve in an institution he isn’t even officially a part of, and she sees her hope mirrored in someone else’s hope. “Hope is a powerful thing,” Mr. Sahil tells Michael. “Sometimes, it is the only thing,” she replies, and there are perhaps some contexts where this exchange would be too much, but in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and weeks from the presidential election that has revealed the open wounds on our nation’s soul, they are words to grab onto and hold tight. Watching Star Trek has never solved any real-world problems, but it has reflected hope back at us and the value of that experience cannot be underestimated. Popular culture has power and far too few of our contemporary stories value hope in any honest way. Star Trek has always represented hope as the brave choice, as the strong one, and more than anything, this Season 3 premiere doubles down on that legacy. And, perhaps because this is a story set in a world in which there is no utopian institution that will uphold justice for all and because this is an episode that features no visibly white characters, it feels honest.

In a strange future where the Federation is no more, a red angel falls from the sky. The third season of Star Trek: Discovery has begun, and this show has never been better.

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Additional thoughts.

This is a real Mad Max: Fury Road moment…

You may have noticed that, while the title for this first episode is “That Hope is You, Part 1,” next week’s episode is not “Part 2.” Perhaps that will be the season finale?

Olatunde Osunsanmi continues to be one of the go-to directors for this show. Discovery should hold onto him for as long as they can. In this premiere, Osunsanmi makes ample use of the Icelandic countryside, playing up its desolate, alien-like tundras in some scenes and its lush natural landscapes in others. This show has never looks better and that’s saying a lot because it has always looked good.

I do wonder what Book thinks of the Michael/Aditya exchange. Has it made him believe in the Federation just a little bit more? Or does hope take a different form for him?

OK, what is up with Grudge? “She’s a queen” is not something you say about a cat—well, some people might say it, but it’s still weird. Is Grudge literally a queen? Captain Marvel has trained me to expect anything.

While I wouldn’t call this episode particularly Battlestar Galactica-esque, Michael’s crash landing on an alien planet reminded me of Starbuck’s dilemma in “You Can’t Go Home Again” and Aditya’s setup on the old Federation relay station reminded me of dude waiting for the Cylons at the beginning of the BSG miniseries. (It doesn’t go as well for him as it does for Aditya.)

Speaking of references, tell me you didn’t think of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Book told Michael to close her eyes.

I love that Michael has absolutely no chill about being a time traveler. She barely tries to hide it.

“Dilithium… one day it all just went boom.” This feels like the kind of description someone who had shitty science classes in school might use. I know this because I am in fact one of those people. But, really, what is The Burn?

When Aditya is searching for Discovery, he mentions that there are two Federation ships currently in flight within range of his sensors. Whether this means they are active Federation ships of some kind or they are simply Federation ships that have been commandeered by other people remains to be seen…

Who had Andorians and Orions on their Alien Bingo Card for Season 3?

I love how David Ajala says “tricorder.”

“It’s temperature sensitive and really valuable so it’s probably ice cream.” I have never related to Michael Burnham more.

Programmable matter and portable transporters, but few subspace channels and a scarcity of dilithium creates a future that, in some ways, is technologically leaps and bounds beyond what Michael has known, yet, in other ways, is burdened with massive limitations compared to her life in the 23rd century.

“Were you praying?” “Something like.” Michael and Burnham discuss Book’s ability to communicate with different kinds of living creatures, from a plant with medicinal properties on Hima, to the trance worm who, um, swallows Michael momentarily.

Book thanks Michael for saving the world. She deserves a thank you.

What did you think of the Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 premiere? Are you into the time jump? What is up with Grudge? And how long do you think it will be before Michael finds Discovery again? Let us know in the comments below…

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Review: That Hope is You, Part 1 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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avannak · 7 years ago

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Hey AvannaK! I'm genuinely curious what you would've liked to see in a canon-consistent bridge series between HTTYD/GOTNF and HTTYD2? Do you have specific "should haves" and "would have been nice if..."? Sorry if you've answered this before. 😕 I'm not around as much. Take care!

Heya!!!

This is a really fun ask and it led me on a journey through a lot (a lot) of old posts. Some I’ve quoted, some I’ve linked to, but hopefully I’m managed to peace together a readable summation of things/events I like to imagine happened in between HTTYD/GotNF –> HTTYD2. Thank you!

Hiccup’s awakened to a whole new world; in the span of a month or so his entire life has been flipped and he’s got no choice but to hit the ground and run with it because, as of now, he’s at the forefront of Peace. The village is not only paying him positive attention (for being him) but also looking to him for direction. He’s lost a leg. He seems to have gained everything else.

In the following months, years even, his father does a lot of directing within the village, as Hiccup learns to lay out a plan. It’s not long after Hiccup awakens that Stoick sits his son down and says “Tell me everything”. Stoick wants to know Hiccup’s history with Toothless, his desires, his personal thoughts on where Berk is and move on from here and, to Hiccup, its a moment he’s been waiting for his entire life. His father has always loved him, but its felt like years since he’s openly valued his opinion. Stoick wants to be a team with Hiccup, because Hiccup is Berk’s first and only step into this new territory, but Stoick has the pull.

Stoick is openly impressed with his son after hearing the full tale; he says as much. About how brave Hiccup was, to make himself vulnerable like that, purposefully, and to come out victorious. The sort of bravery few vikings show anymore. The sort of bravery his mother had.

Hiccup and Stoick’s relationship had started to take a dive as Hiccup grew out of childhood and into a disappointing vision for a viking. It’s being restored, heftily, as they walk an entirely new path together (though, not at all without disagreement; both will continue to claim the other “doesn’t listen” until the very day they part ways).

Right from the get-go, Hiccup struggles with his leg or lack there of. There’s heavy frustration with limb loss and the adjustments Hiccup has to make around it leads to flares of temper – moments where he snaps at his father in misplaced anger, or Toothless, before he’s struck by reality and apologizes. Sometimes he pushes himself too far, insistent on maintaining independence, and Astrid, or Toothless, need to help him back, and he’s left sweaty, and angry, and embarrassed. Hiccup would have periods where he felt so helpless and it killed him because losing his independence for a time makes him feel like he’s Hiccup the Useless all over again. Phantom pains and feverish nightmares plague him often at first; times when he grows testy and stressed as this burning sensation runs up his leg like its still on fire, and Gobber has to sit him down and help him work through it. These episodes manage to crop up again and again in the following years no matter how comfortable he’s become on his feet.

In fact, late winter of that year, not long before Hiccup’s 16th birthday, when he’s just begun to feel physically normal, a common sickness is taken to an extreme for him. He can’t shake it, he loses weight, his leg pains him constantly. It has his father besides himself and Toothless acting out and Astrid furious with the gods.

And then there’s the growth spurts. He’s just sixteen when he gets a new leg fitted by Gobber. And then sixteen and a half when he adjusts that same wooden leg. Twice more before his seventeenth birthday he makes even more adjustments and it’s when he’s 17 and four months, after a fortnight of an aching back and pinched calf that Hiccup fashions himself a full new prosthetic of his own design. He happily braces it to his stump, sighs in contentment, and stands to look directly over his girlfriend’s head… who had merely come to accompany him to the Mead Hall and not be ridiculed for height disparities.

Gobber’s relationship almost immediately starts to transition from Uncle-figure/Blacksmith-master to confidant and therapy guide. Every other viking on Berk seems to have lost a limb, but Hiccup feels safest around Gobber to be open and vulnerable and actively seek help. Gobber teaches him the tricks to fastening a prosthetic, the mental and physical exercises to better deal with limbloss, holding his hand through the hardest of times and listening to his rants patiently. Limbloss is a way of viking life, but that doesn’t make it any easier watching a familial child go through it. At the same time Hiccup’s being pulled out of the forge more and more, and Gobber, like a distant, proud father, will both needle him about it and be supportive all the same. Gobber takes on another apprentices from time to time — capable young’ns, a few old hands with good experience — but he’ll miss the back and forth banter, and the exasperating ingenuity, of his honorary nephew.

Toothless takes it upon himself to get Hiccup into shape on his leg. He pushes the boy to exercise, to be physically stronger, just as Hiccup pushes him to tolerate silly human manners (like to not nest on Stoick’s bed or help himself to any fish netting in sight). Hiccup and Toothless have, by far, the best human-dragon relationship yet to be seen on Berk, often and unwittingly acting as ambassadors to their respective species with the goal of making cohabitation as seamless as possible. They also are still learning about each other, and the differences in their behaviors as humans and dragons; where they’ll compromise and where they simply won’t. The subject of Toothless’s tail come up between them. Hiccup has it confirmed that Toothless knows… he knows it was him. Just as Toothless understands, as well as any dragon could, that Hiccup’s learned and accepted that he too took his foot. It’s not instant forgiveness. Not when Toothless still bears the scars of the bola canon, and not when Hiccup is still freshly relearning how to walk, dealing with a new upheaval of emotion and pain, but both find the results well, well worth their suffering, and finding each other even more so. They forgive each other. They communicate through touch and two different, one-way, verbal speech habits until they’re able to make “we got even” jokes about it five years later to some rando, feral dragon lady.

Hiccup’s relationship with his peers is another thing that takes an immediate 180. Much like the village in its entirety, Hiccup finds himself saddled with their positive attention and respect. It carries a past of longing, heartache, and anger. Hiccup can’t find it in him to hold onto his resentment; not when they’re so willing to learn, so sets aside his unease and pushes them. He pushes them to fly, and to bond, and to listen to their dragons. He’s barely aware of a protective element building between the teens and himself; a rapport born from fighting a battle unlike any other. He doesn’t stop to question if its out of guilt for their recent past, or if they’re that singularly minded. Whenever he stops to think about it he starts to get overwhelmed by the reality that this is all happening, he’s “one of them” (or they’re one of him?), so he tries not to. …Even though they sit with Hiccup in the Mead Hall, and hang out with him beyond dragon training, and pull him into battle spars when just months earlier they would have shoved him down a knoll first. The twins show up at the forge from time to time, seemingly just to mess with him. Fishlegs will spend hours with him pouring over text discussing dragons, gushing about possible revisions to the Book of Dragons. For once, Snotlout gets to laugh along with Hiccup’s biting, witty retorts as they’re finally directed towards others: stubborn, withered old vikings set in their ways and still battling dragon integration.

Ruffnut quickly figures that her attention to Hiccup is hitting a stone wall, and her interest that came so fast and hard is easy to shrug off almost as quickly (though losing to Astrid, even in a one-sided, unacknowledged battle, still smarts). Instead she keeps up with the uncomfortable attention a while longer simply for her own amusement. Snotlout too learns to let go of Astrid. She so easily rolled into this new life (not that he’s fighting it), and, perhaps, she was never the ideal woman for him in particular. Still admittedly hot, though.

And then there’s nights in the Mead Hall. They grow older, stay out later, test the limits of Mead and foreign ales. Engage in drinking games they’ve only seen older warriors participate in. There’s a streaking incident. Brawls. Hiccup finds himself pushing to ban drinking and flying (because if vikings want to be idiots, then fine, but don’t endanger the dragons). Stoick enforces it (someone needs to look out for his idiot vikings). A more sober variation comes of it over time: Dragon Racing.

Debates within the tribe about spreading peace break out almost immediately. For the first year of peace, well into late summer, the tribe was nearly unanimous about focusing on integrating dragons: learning to fly, acclimating to the benefits (and drawbacks) of sharing space with dragons, and loose plans on altering the village to fit their new needs. As they grew comfortable Hiccup, and a few others, started to push towards communicating with their distant neighbors about bringing on this way of life. Frienemy tribes (the Meatheads, the Bogs, etc) were opening communications once more, and all Hiccup sees is an opportunity. Hiccup’s on a high over many platforms; he wants to expand peace, knowledge, and understanding between dragons and humans. People are listening to him and he’s good, really good, at what’s passing for impressive these days. He’s ready for more. But this is one area where the older generations has more experience, more assurance. It is almost unanimously agreed to keep the pro-dragon lifestyle secret, and it’s not to punish Hiccup, or dragons around the world that still battle humans, but to protect their own, very new way of life. Especially as it develops, and they’re left vulnerable, off-footed, all the while very much aware of how tribes once were long before violent dragons had forced humans to keep a united front.

It’s confirmed in HTTYD2 that Berk keeps their dragon lifestyle a secret from other tribes. Berk manages to shirk hosting an annual Thing year after year, claiming repairs for being the most devastated by the dragon war, that they’ve had to travel for timber and food given the ruin dragons laid upon them before the war mysteriously ended. Instead they travel, by boat, to meet old allies, testing the waters of old friendships, waiting for a time when an opening will come forth to bring dragons into their lives as well…

Hiccup must go to these Things, and does so without his dragon, often wary at familiar faces, nervously making up stories about his leg, wishing he had Toothless with him. Snotlout goes as well, meeting up with old playmates, but shocking them with a more protective attitude towards Hiccup. Astrid starts to accompany him when he’s seventeen; both having decided their relationship is concrete enough to make known outside Hooligan territory.

Following the events of HTTYD, Astrid (and the others’) focus is on learning to fly dragons ahead of the curve so that they can continue to master and teach. Beyond number one priority, and beyond keeping up with traditional physical tasks (as she’s still Very Viking, thank you very much), and a bit beyond helping out her village adapt to dragons, is Astrid’s interest in Hiccup. Yes, a lot of it has to do with him being the best and first dragon rider. He’s actually impressive. He’s impressed her. He has a future as a chief, and not just any chief, but the chief. The one that changed everything. And, it turns out, he’s pretty funny (and frustrating) and incredibly ingenious (but impractical at times) and he genuinely cares about her (but he’s probably being as impressed and disillusioned by her as she is him). She’s learning a lot about Berk’s heir, and she intends to continue to do so.

Astrid starts out by planting a kiss on Hiccup’s cheek from time to time. Sometimes in front of others as she tries to subtly secure a claim she’d thrown down in a moment of rapture. Sometimes in private, where she actually feels embarrassed, and vulnerable, because its more intimate than some public decision.

They get into arguments. Their priorities don’t always align. Astrid challenges Hiccup on his dragon knowledge (but it’s not just knowledge like Fishlegs has, where it can be categorized from books, but a silent empathy that can’t be taught. It takes her years to truly figure that out). Hiccup gets irritated when Astrid chooses Vikings over Dragons (as he often views it, but it’s not so black and white). There’s miscommunication. And Guilt.

Astrid goes through her own self reflection, and acknowledges that the man Hiccup’s becoming is worth her respect, just as she reaffirms that the boy Hiccup was, or who she knew him as, was not. She can forgive herself. Same as Hiccup gets to really know Astrid, beyond the shallow crush he had on her (which had been all but driven from him in the throes of discovering a life’s purpose).

They’re juggling a relationship (that didn’t have the most wholesome start) in the background of readjusting their worlds and taking on tasks and roles most adults wouldn’t be asked to. But they’re giving it a try, and it’s harsh at times, and sweet at others, and they “take breaks”, sometimes unhappily, and they meet other people (not court, or ‘date’, but there are other heirs who look at Hiccup as potential alliance material, and other Vikings, many other vikings, who are impressed by Astrid).

But through it all, as they learn about each other as people (and not crushes, or heir figures) they discover that they are a team. They were a team the moment they were forced to work together, and they remain a team throughout the rest of their lives.

Hiccup’s at the cusp of 16 and Astrid well already when Hiccup initiates a kiss with her. Kissing becomes more casual, but still soft, and sweet, from there on out. He fumblingly asks her on a “date” of sorts shortly after (having to insist that, no, this doesn’t involve the rest of the gang. Just her. She has an ‘oh!’ moment).

Hiccup’s 16 and a half, it’s the anniversary of the Death’s demise, when he allows Astrid to see his stump for the first time. She’d helped him through leg pain in the past–supporting his limps, staying by his bedside through fever–but this time he willingly removes his prosthetic and bares a scarred and ugly part of himself to someone who’s opinion matters. Astrid reacts to the breathtaking moment of trust and exposure with tender hands and speechless assurances, and Hiccup relaxes in her presence. I imagine it wasn’t sexual or humorous, but a terrifyingly intimate and vulnerable experience that launched them into a deeper level of their relationship. He allows her to touch the hard tissue, and to ask questions he hadn’t felt comfortable answering before.

A couple months later Astrid learns of the scars on his back, the ones she’s never considered before, from when he fell backwards into the explosion.

Not long after that Hiccup’s allowed to see her hair down, and to touch it. They grow more interested in each other as budding adults, and make more time for each other. Kissing intensifies. Groping and exploring follows. Sometimes they take things a little too far and it ends in giggles or, on occasion, an older viking yelling at them.

Astrid takes to grooming Hiccup. She braids his hair. Comments on his scruff. Gets involved with his wardrobe.

The flight suit is in development and Astrid finds it ridiculous; both a point of hilarity and something that scares her (though she’d never admit it outright) and Hiccup learns to hide it in one of the few white lies they’ve picked up in regards to one another.

They’re 18 the first time they exchange “I love yous” and the intimacy of their relationship continues to rise from there.

At just shy of twenty, and after much needling from his father and not-so subtle hints from Astrid’s family, Hiccup proposes.

The entire village is on a high in the following weeks. Heartened, Stoicks makes a weighty decision.

#HTTYD #HTTYD2 #Hiccstrid #httyd speculation #e wills #Thank you for asking #no really this was fun!#haha and I think I have a similarly subject'd ask of yours in my queue #recs rants rambles #long post #sorry kids #i got writing and didn't stop for a bit

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tsglexingtonkentucky · 5 years ago

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Earth Day Turns 50!

EcoSense and Earth Day

Earth Day is celebrating 50 years this Wednesday, April 22nd during this global pandemic. Meeting the urgent COVID-19-related need of educators’ around the world for virtual learning science resources, EcoSense for Living is now available on PBS LearningMedia, through a partnership with KET (Kentucky Educational Television). This amazing opportunity adds to the platform’s online resources for educators and middle and high school students to explore science-based environmental challenges, solutions and conservation topics.

Hosted by Jennie Turner Garlington, an eco-champion and mom, the EcoSense for Living series explores eco-challenges, solutions and conservation topics for a more planet-friendly life.

“We are so proud of how Kentuckians have stepped up and banned together to keep friends and loved ones safe. Although our hearts break everyday for all of the loved ones being lost, we embrace our families and are thankful for our time together. Through all of the loss we have gained bonds with our family. We have so much gratitude for so many hero’s in the medical field, grocery stores and all of the essential business’s that have remained open. I’m so proud of our fellow Kentuckians,” said Garlington

PBS LearningMedia syncs with Google classroom, explores state curriculum standards, manages classroom assignments and much more. The EcoSense for Living team worked with Dr. Melinda Wilder, a former elementary and middle school teacher, experienced educator and education professor at Eastern Kentucky University, to design the teacher’s guide and learning materials to accompany the complete video content, that originally aired on PBS stations. Dr. Wilder created discussion questions, vocabulary guides, hands-on exercises and other materials for teachers to tell environmental stories in a way that’s fresh, entertaining, and puts needed tools at the fingertips of teachers.

“We developed the content to accompany EcoSense for Living on PBS LearningMedia so the guides met the widely accepted three-dimensional standards, chose performance expectations that most closely aligned with the video information, and then developed appropriate questions for middle and high school students,” Dr. Wilder said.

The academic science literacy standards and benchmarks were developed with “buckets” or grade level disciplinary core ideas from Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) or similar state-wide frameworks. Some buckets include science, life science, ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem relationships.

This first set of EcoSense topics available now on PBS LearningMedia includes:

Grizzly Bears and Wolves: understanding the challenges of living in areas where they live, how they’re managed, and the “Endangered Species” Act - what it is and how it’s used.

Future of Food: from little changes we can make in our diets to reduce carbon to eating bugs!

Clean Air Act – how we got it and why it’s still so important.

Talkin’ Trash – how cities find innovative ways to turn trash into compostable treasure.

“With the EcoSense magazine style format, we were able to break the content down into digestible segments that fit well into classroom lessons, leaving room for interactive exercises,” said Garlington. “We’re excited to share these educational, entertaining segments that offer environmental science, history, biology and other lessons for middle and high school students. Moreover, we’re happy to help at this important virtual learning moment so students can hear from national experts, spark discussion, and provoke thoughts about caring for the planet.”

As an environmental media champion, former CNN producer, mother and concerned citizen, Jennie fervently embraces the sustainability views of her father, Ted Turner. She developed a PSA series called EcoSense for Living in 2005 that received high acclaim and she quickly expanded it into a 30-minute episode of the same name. That first show, featuring Clark Howard, offered environmentally friendly ways to save money daily around the house and led to more than two dozen half-hour subsequent episodes over the last 15 years.

These episodes are available for streaming on PBS. Four new episodes will premiere in April for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and Earth Month:

Wild Crossings looks at how animals can find passage in an increasingly developed world.

Fashioned for the Planet explores one of the most polluting industries of the world and alternatives to fast and cheap fashion.

Wild Healing shows our deep-seated connections to nature and how we all can understand and appreciate our link to domestic and wild animals and plants.

Innovation & Biomimicry explores the amazing versatile applications of mushrooms and how organizations like the Georgia Aquarium and Zoo Atlanta band together to use data to ensure survival for diverse species.

To date, the EcoSense for Living series has aired thousands of times in top markets nationwide including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Austin, Nashville, Seattle and many more. Each episode is produced by Picture Window Productions and made available to PBS stations across the United States via NETA, an internal network/satellite service.

View full episodes live streamed at https://www.pbs.org/show/ecosense-living/episodes/.

View the educational segments on PBS LearningMedia at pbslearningmedia.org/collection/ecosense-for-living.

Visit www.EcoSenseForLiving.com or Facebook (EcosenseForLiving) for more information.

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lettherebemonsters · 5 years ago

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FFFF-I saw this on mobile and I just HAD to answer this on the comp because I just have soooo much to think regarding Lore.

Most likely Lore spent those two years in space in a lucid dream-like state. The fanfiction Wayward Son on AO3 explains this part better and in a way that’s just eerily somber and sad......Lore having delusions and dreams of living with Data, of being accepted....of having a family who loved and cared for him and him having an ACTUAL purpose.....

We see this hinted at in The Descent part 2 when Lore tells the crew that he finally had a reason for living.

“ What's important is what I've done here. How I found my calling. I know now why I was created. No one can ever take that away from me. Without me, they would have perished. When I stumbled on their ship, they were lost, disoriented, they had no idea how to function as individuals. They couldn't even navigate their own vessel. They had lost their sense of purpose. I gave them their purpose. And they gave me mine. “

Imagine your life being reduced to compared to a sibling who can do no wrong, and you can do no right, your parents telling you that you were a mistake, an abomination....a freak that should have died in the womb (metaphorically speaking.)

Hell, Lore was REPLACED by Data. He thought he was the Soong’s SON....and they threw him away and forgot him. He was left constantly haunted by WHY his father abandoned him, and spent years in deep space being consumed by the nightmares of his parents locking him away and abandoning him.

Most likely what happened on Omicron Theta was that Lore was built like Data, meaning he had no emotions. But unlike Data, who slowly observed humans and had constant reassurance from his surrogate family....Lore must have been a “baby” when he was given emotions. Now, he’s a baby android. He can’t control himself because he doesn’t have the experience and maturity. Soong basically burned Lore’s brain and damaged him in a sick obsessive need to make his android more human in his impatience.

It drove Lore insane, and instead of fixing his mistakes.....he threw him away for a new attempt. Probably what happened, and this fits given how Lore and Data are IDENTICAL in every single way save a program or two, was that Data, built from Lore’s schematics, was designed to test how emotions could be given to an android and reduced to avoid damaging Data like Lore was damaged.

Maybe Noonien planned on slowly observing Data mature, gain emotions, then use that to fix Lore? But instead decided to run off when the Crystal hit and focus ONLY on his magnum opus. He had no time to look back on his mistakes, even if he called those mistakes his children.

Lore desperately wants a family. He NEEDS a reason to live. He hates humanity for treating him like a monster when his brother, who is arguable LESS human than him, gets treated like the gem of everyone’s eye.

Data had a home, a family, friends, a reason to live and was never humiliated and hurt for exploring what he was curious about. Lore must have never had ANY of that......

And in the unproduced episode Endangered Species, this is made EXPLICITLY clear when Lore asks Data to kill him to stop his suffering.....and Data watches a holovid of Frankenstein.

Data is Pinocchio, the doll who wanted to be a real boy. But Lore was abandoned, maltreated.....an innocent soul twisted and warped into the very monster the humans saw him as.

He is the Frankenstein’s Monster. And in many ways, with how the monster killed his father and vowed to burn himself alive, and how Lore accepted Data firing a phaser at him........he had no chance.

It’s very easy to call Lore evil. Even the Crystalline Entity issue may not have been meant as an evil act.....if Lore learned his parents planned to kill him, he would have asked a friend he trusted to save him. Data was made years after Lore was deactivated and locked away.....

More than likely, Lore asked the Crystal to save him.....and if it couldn’t....to avenge him. And the Crystal took the life of the planet for the life of Lore....an eye for an eye.

And the Borg is an aspect of this too.....Lore is the only one who WANTED to be like the Borg. The Borg had EVERYTHING he ever wanted. They had a purpose, they were essentially a family. He felt like he BELONGED when he was with the Borg. Imagine being so damaged that you willingly throw yourself into a toxic and extremely abusive system (as we see with the Borg Queen and how she manipulates Data in a way that can be construed as sexually assaulting him.)

And a personal idea of mine is that Lore was attached to his mother like Data was attached to their father. Maybe what he wanted most of all was to have a mother who loved him.....since his own father couldn’t stomach being in the same room as him for more than a few minutes.

And unfortunately, we know that Juliana was the one who pushed Noonien the hardest to get rid of Lore. So his heart was broken.....and it never recovered. It might lean more towards why he was so nasty to Beverly in DataLore......Beverly being a loving mother AND a mother figure to Data would have enraged him. And so he took it out on her, on Wesley.....on everybody, really.

Okay, Soong Family peeps, I wanna talk about Lore. (Because when don’t I want to talk about Lore, lbr)

So! Come babble at me about your Lore thoughts. Let’s start a thread - what are your Lore headcanons? What tf does he think about those two years he’s in space before the Pakleds pick him up? What really happened on Omicron Theta? What’s he after, anyway? Does he just enjoy being a malicious dick or does he have larger motivations than that in the long run?

#impishtubist #Statistical Input (Headcannons)#SO MANY THINGS TO CONTEMPLATE WITH LORE #I'm sorry this was so long. ;A;

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swwewrestlers-blog · 7 years ago

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Movie Review - The Wrestler

Throughout the World Wrestling Federations heyday that they had many alternative product vehicles. You could purchase buying and selling playing cards, lunch boxes, video games, attire, tickets, VHS tapes; you name it and you could just about guarantee that the WWF had a product for it. Again within the eighty's you'll discover many overt promos for all of these products. Fifteen second spots would air selling the products, the announcers would have them, followers with the product can be shown on TV and even the wrestlers themselves would carry the product or "gimmicks" to the ring.

Whereas many of those merchandise nonetheless exist, the very best sellers for the company are T-shirts, video video games, & wrestling figures. And the promoting of these products is extra tongue and cheek than up to now, as usual mentions are brought about in a comical manner.

Taping Format

Lately on Monday nights the WWE tapes a one hour web and international market show named Warmth, followed by the 2 hour reside version of Monday Evening Uncooked. On tuesdays ECW is taped and is immediately followed by a taping of Friday Night Smackdown. As you can see, every taping consists of one week of TELEVISION for 2 completely different reveals.

The previous format was drastically different. Utilizing lengthy blocks, the WWF would run TV tapings for 4+ hours. Usually they'd tape 4 one hour episodes again to again, each episode representing every week's price of TV. Many wrestlers would appear three or four instances per show. Clearly this is able to develop into just a little tedious for the followers in attendance. As was the norm, the vast majority of the tapings included the aforementioned "jobber" matches. On prime of this they might additionally usually tape one or two matches that had been unique to the WWF's residence video tape library, Colosseum Video.

Objectives of TV

The construction for the business was different again then than it is at this time. For example, right now's WWE tv is geared in the direction of scores & PPV purchase charges. Prior to now, whereas essential, rankings weren't as huge of a priority. The principle income sources for the WWF got here by way of home present (off TV reveals held in native towns) and in PPV revenue.

The usual for as we speak options not less than two massive matches per TV. Within the mid eighty's there would normally be a set of jobber matches, matches by which big identify stars have been placed towards no-name expertise, with the celebs set to get "put over" or to destroy these no-identify wrestlers on a weekly foundation. This formulation would occasionally change, in most situations during the WWF's late saturday night NBC hit dubbed Saturday's Night time Essential Occasion.

In October 2006, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched its annual 'Living Planet Report' - detailing the global impression on pure sources and the declining numbers of animal species which can be dependent upon them. It also provided solutions on tips on how to reverse the downward traits in these areas. This year's report also explores the affect of human exercise on the planet and concludes that the world's natural ecosystems are being run down at a price never seen earlier than in human history.

The 'Residing Planet Report' makes the terrifying inference that the world's inhabitants of vertebrate species have declined by a third since 1970, thus confirming the worst of human wrestlers who need to retire fears: that humanity is utilizing up the planet's resources at a much quicker rate than which they can be produced. Carter S. Roberts, President and CEO of the WWF, commented:

"The bottom line of this report could not be extra clear - for twenty years we have lived our lives in a approach that far exceeds the carrying capability of the Earth. The choices we make at present will form the chances for the generations which comply with us. The truth that we stay past our means in our use of pure resources will surely restrict alternatives for future generations to follow.

In truth, the USA, because the world's foremost client society, is seen to be on the forefront of what the WWF report calls 'resource overshoot' - the use of extra resources than is sustainable by the planet. This makes it all the more necessary for institutions within the USA - including the federal government, mother and father and academics - to show our kids (the "future generations" that Roberts talks about) with such concern of precisely how dangerous human behaviour might be to the planet.

In an try to attempt to educate kids, there has, so far been a wide range of efforts made by totally different sources on how best to protect the setting for future life. For example, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) runs a children's educational useful resource referred to as TUNZA, which goals to work in partnership with children internationally so as to equip them with the tools wanted to maintain the surroundings for their very own children in flip.

With environmental and wildlife awareness having turn into a lot extra prevalent in in style culture over the past ten years - by means of sources as broad ranging as The Body Shop's 1990s product packaging, through to Al Gore's recent film 'An Inconvenient Truth' - many bigger organisations that are not traditionally related to schooling have jumped on board. As an illustration, Doubletree hotels runs a program called 'Teaching Children to CAREÂ®' - a special academic initiative that goals to carry wildlife and environmental awareness to the forefront of the classroom.

With the continued initiation of this and different, similar packages each in America and the world over, there may be the chance that such applications will allow a reversal of the downward development of environmental harm; maybe permitting for the WWF's Living Planet Report back to predict a way more promising future for the world in future years.

As lobby teams and environmental organisations proceed to push governments the world over into taking drastic measures to curb the acceleration of world warming, it is maybe fair to say that other environmental points may be in peril of being pushed apart. People need to do not forget that local weather change will not be the only scourge to the health of our planet; the protection of endangered species, as an example, remains a paramount concern to many individuals intent on the preservation of natural wildlife across the world.

What makes a species 'endangered'? Generally speaking, a species could be mentioned to be in peril of extinction whether it is few in number or threatened by changing environmental or predation parameters. The 20 th century noticed the significance of defending certain species from extinction - particularly with the pioneering efforts of organisations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has been protecting endangered species since its inception in 1961.

The UN estimates that nearly 100 species are lost every single day - a staggering statistic. The foremost species protected by teams like the WWF include: tigers, nice whales, marine turtles, elephants, gorillas, of which fewer than 650 are left, and giant pandas, of which solely 800 are estimated to exist within the wild immediately.

Nevertheless, these are only a collection of the hundreds of endangered species that exist internationally. Their survival is crucial for plenty of causes - including that they function umbrella species; because of this their survival additionally helps quite a few other species that reside in the identical habitats.

The early efforts of organisations like the WWF have been essential in passing essential laws for the safety of endangered species; this consists of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 in America, which was designed to guard plant and animal species from becoming extinct. Since this time, international awareness of the significance of defending endangered species has skyrocketed. In the late Nineteen Nineties, excessive road retailers started to see the importance of animal safety - retailers like The Body Shop, for example, designed a whole vary of products on the protection of endangered species, and saw their recognition improve dramatically.

Local weather change is a natural means of the earth, any mammoth or dinosaur would be able to inform you that, nevertheless the speed at which it's at the moment occurring is unnatural. Should you have been to think about a process your physique goes by way of when a mosquito bites you; you get an itchy-bite, for a couple of days have a small pink bump and then eventually it goes away. It is a natural course of if it was left alone. But we do not depart things alone; in fact humans have a repute of improvement, change, growth and become involved in things when maybe sometimes issues ought to simply be left alone. So we itch, we scratch, we infect. The itchy-chew turns an angry purple and develops into something a lot more extreme than it ought to have been.

The yr 2010 is the Worldwide 12 months of Biodiversity, the yr that new species proceed to be found, but there are extra tigers in captivity than there are within the wild. Here in Africa our trademark beast, king of the jungle, the lion is now an endangered species, with consultants predicting its extinction in 20 years. These are occasions occurring in our life-time.

In accordance with the Living Planet report in 2007 alone man-form used 2 planets price of assets. We already over-shoot the biocapacity of our planet by 50% in 2007 and the carbon footprint has increased by 11 fold since 1961. seventy one countries are experiencing stress on blue water sources and here in South Africa we're already predicting water-scarcity points and a few rural and small cities are already experiencing them.

As per the ripple impact, biodiversity loss has an impact on ecosystems, inflicting injury, degrading and eventually leading to a whole collapse. Threats of habitat loss, alteration and fragmentation, over-exploitation of untamed species populations, pollution, climate change and invasive species in turn destroy the companies that ecosystems give people free of charge; regulating services of natural processes, similar to water filtration, waste decomposition, local weather regulation and crop pollination. Providers resembling help for regulation of basic ecological capabilities and processes for example nutrient cycling, photosynthesis and soil formation.

"Crucially, the dependency of human society on ecosystem companies makes the loss of these providers a critical risk to the long run nicely-being and growth of all individuals, all around the globe" - Residing Planet Report; 2010.

Globally there has been a 30% decline in biodiversity. A couple of examples of particular person species embrace the blue-fin tuna, a fish made famous not just for tuna salad and pasta but by the latest risk of its breeding ground caused by the BP Gulf oil spill earlier this year, has decreased in inhabitants by 5.8%. One other instance is the leatherback turtle, another species affected by the BP Gulf oil spill, which has declined by 20.5%.

In the report's biogeographical realms, South Africa is part of "Afrotropical" which exhibits indicators of restoration since the 1990's the place the Living Planet Index was at minus fifty five%. The statistics differ for every nation as in America and Arab Emirates need four.5 planets to keep up with carbon emissions and consumption used. In India they need less then 50% of a planet.

In an try to seek out 'greener' gasoline by utilizing bio-gasoline, palm oil crops have increased by 8 fold over 20 years, changing 7.8 ha by 2010. This land conversion included forests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the home of the Orang-utan. Their population has decreased by 10-fold in two species populations on account of the deforestation and habitat degradation.

However the report does say that each one is not lost. The minimum criteria for sustainability based on accessible biocapacity of the planet and the human development index "indicates that it's actually possible for international locations to satisfy these criteria, though major challenges remain for all nations to satisfy them.

Minimalist structure moto "Much less is Extra" method is needed, not solely in structure and art but from the person, to nations, to the world. The steadiness wants to vary us getting all the things and nature nothing, to nature getting extra, more in protected areas, more in conservation, more in investment to recuperate the injury that has been created over the years and us to getting much less and rather using the sources we've already captured.

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biofunmy · 6 years ago

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Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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