#birling day

[elektricangel]

I see you, John Finnemore 🥃 🚖 ✈️

[politelymenacing]

I don't want to say I'm the best sibling in my family, but no-one else got dad a gift for today, so....

[placetnemagistra]

Just need to shout derangedly about the Cabin Pressure / JSFP allusions in Good Omens 2, please add your own!!

Yellow Bentley — yellow car

Aziraphale as the incompetent detective / newspaperman with a Clue — the Birling Day episode where Arthur & Martin incompetently investigate Douglas’s theft of the Tallisker

Crowley ordering a large Tallisker — also Birling Day

A number of JSFP sketches where people who are total opposites are thrown together for long periods of time (eg the wildlife cameraman who doesn’t like snow leopards and the gay leopard Professor who absolutely adores them) or are bickering/unlikely but devoted spouses (the train driver and the train manager; the “Don’t Know Much About History” song sketch) - it’s a whole dynamic!! It has prepared him for this assignment!! (As has the practice of people being irrelevantly but cheeringly gay)

[crumbly-apple-pie]

I need Samantha Shannon to know that these five words in this order are spectacular

[ID: text from a day of fallen night, reading, “Wulf hirpled towards a birling,” /end ID]

thank you so much to @maileesque for the ID :)

[virgoscringe]

a portrait of the lovely Finch from a story @birlwrites is working on!! thank u for comming + trusting me with ur girl Birl i love her so deeply i hope she wins forever 💗💗💗

a closeup added bc Finch has the cutest face and i loveee how the lil heart brooch turned out heheh

(comms are still open! mwah!!)

[weaponizedducks]

happy proving mr birling wrong day! (anniversary of the titanic sinking) and also kate winslet and leo di caprio

[jeaninesfavouriteserum]

i am currently kinsidering sheila birling. tumblr please help me how do i know and why am i like this

[birlwrites]

i'm having to do a lot of stopping and revising and rewriting as i work on this part, which is good because it means i am rlly improving some of my technical skills and making the story much more impactful, but also bad because slow 😡

[ship-of-skitties]

kieran pokemon is so eric birling core

[can-of-w0rmz]

My English teacher’s been off for a long while so we’ve had a good load of substitute teachers, and one of them is teaching us An Inspector Calls and can I just say, is so much less dry than my actual English teacher. I’ll be real, classic lit nerd though I may be, I don’t like that play. Honestly can’t really stand it. But we’re leading a hate campaign against Gerald Croft now? Hell yeah I’ll write an essay for you on him let’s get this bitch! You give me those quotes and references on why he’s a dick I barely paid attention to his character but it’s drama now and I have personal beef with him let’s go

[lemongrablothbrok]

Random ass headcanon that From Eroica With Love and Cabin Pressure take place in the same universe. Don't ask me why; it makes sense in my brain somehow.

[wide-mindeddreamer]

gadies and lentlemen, goys and birls, it’s time for round five of Unhinged Shirts I Would Give Greta Van Fleet!

Josh:

Jake:

Sam:

Danny:

as always I do this for The Giggles ™ have a wonderful day

[bimboficationblues]

the tumblr leninist "clique" (which is looser and less consciously organized than people on her make out) does have its fair share of developmentalism and i understand if that makes you wary, but a lot of them are from the global south where developmentalism as problematic as it is for the class struggle as you alluded to, is a consideration that weighs more heavily on the psyche for reasons i wish you white global north leftists would empathize with more and a lot of them are some of the loudest advocates for more nuanced understandings of the global south on this site. it sucks because you're all genuinely smart people but the shading and vaguing is a very "tumblr" thing to do and not a very comradely thing to do. which i guess is fine. it's just tumblr after all but i can't help but feel like people can do better even if the material stakes are low

was it comradely for (a certain Leninist in this cluster) to organize protracted smear campaigns calling communists she disagreed with pedophiles

I hear what you’re saying re the developmentalism piece, likewise for the value of offering more thoughtful perspectives on the global south (indeed, I’m friends or mutuals with some of the people you are referring to). but like, my issue with the clique is not even necessarily that they hold positions I don’t agree with or think are detrimental to class struggle - that’s part of it, but at the end of the day it’s all just posting, and I’m a big-tent birl. rather, I think a group of very specific people (like, 5-10 names) are smug incurious assholes who got their political education through memes/aesthetics/rhetoric, and make it a bunch of other people’s problem by being self-assured, loud, and wrong. it’s personality more than politics, though the former will manifest in the latter (hence my original complaints).

And well, I feel that being vague is generally more constructive than getting into an online squabble every time I see those specific people say something annoying. though you are probably right that it’s not more constructive than simply remaining silent and rolling my eyes. such is the tempting curse of the blogger. sorry.

[spaceradio]

Cabin Pressure episode tournament - more polls at #cabin poll

Limerick - S2E6

An interminable flight with a very baffling cargo gives the crew the opportunity to pass the time by alternately opening their hearts up to each other and persuading Arthur not to play charades.

Edinburgh

It's the highlight of Douglas and Arthur's year - taking nice old boy Mr Birling on his annual day-trip to see the final Six Nations match, and get heroically sloshed. Martin, however, has difficulty working out what they see in him.

[o-uncle-newt]

Cabin Pressure Advent Day 21: Uskerty

I absolutely adore this episode as the origin of my single favorite Cabin Pressure line: "You know, between the dames and the horses, sometimes I don't know why I even put my hat on." Nothing will ever beat it for me.

So yeah, this episode is super funny, but I do want to talk a bit about something that's come up as my go to "look, a THEME!" here- vulnerability. Because as I was listening, trying to figure out what I was taking away from this episode besides "this is all really funny and well plotted" because at a certain point that gets old, it struck me that there are ways that both of our (absolutely brilliant) pairings this episode really strike a chord when considering the role of vulnerability- and lack of it- in relationships.

This is a bit less so in the Douglas-Arthur pairing in this episode, which is inspired (and yay, there's finally a nice airport manager!)- there are brilliant set pieces, and the premise of the bar conversation allows two very different people to kind of sort of attempt to understand each other. There's also a really nice father/son element- we already can perceive, even if it's not said outright, that Arthur doesn't have much of a father figure- his life is very dominated by Carolyn's influence, even in the majority-male flight deck, in a way that I think even tints his interactions with Mr Birling about sports (there's a tinge of eagerness for acceptance), which he's clueless about. Would Arthur know more about sports if he'd had a dad who gave a shit about him? Who knows. But this episode giving him an older man who's willing to open an as-yet-shut door into a men's world that excites him.

The men's world is, of course, the world of the pub. We've already seen a glimpse of Douglas in that milieu in Kuala Lumpur, and usually I'd say the less said about that the better, but I think there's something interesting about how mean spirited and surfacey it could be there, alongside Arthur's misunderstanding what Douglas means about "talking about their lives." He asks a question that is so unexpectedly and deeply personal that Douglas isn't even upset that he asks, he understands that this is another rule of masculine bar/pub conversation that he has to teach Arthur. On a certain level, this is fine on its own- there's a time and place for everything- but if you look at it a certain way, it can reinforce tropes about men and expressing emotions and feelings. And yet... even by following the rules of pub chat that Douglas lays out for him, and trying to fall into its ritualistic norms (like creative insults), Arthur, in part through his own open-book vulnerability, is able to bring things to a place where Douglas is pretty unselfconsciously vulnerable himself, about the place in the world where he finds himself. And by the end, he's fallen more into Arthur's more atmospheric image of two men in a bar. He's loosened up, and isn't playing by the rules anymore. It's just really nice (in addition to being hilariously funny).

The Martin and Carolyn pairing is maybe a bit less novel than the Douglas and Arthur one, but it still works really well in this discussion of vulnerability. Both of them have had pretenses/barriers they try to keep up- and both, incidentally, are related to their own interest in expressing that they are in control- but by now Martin has learned enough to have started to relax his. This actually really helps, as his actions aren't hampered by pretense or pride- he's basically able to function ALMOST competently with the cabbie as a result. But Carolyn is almost on overtime trying to keep her barriers up against vulnerability and it is clearly driving her a bit bananas, hence her complete dysfunction this episode- she has to be ironic and invulnerable about her gift to Herc, to prove that she may be seeing him but she doesn't have feelings (which will of course come to haunt her in Vaduz), and as a result loses all her judgment. And her overtime craziness is, unusually enough, what causes Martin’s misfortune, not his own incompetence! He's the functional one here, not her, because unlike her he's not filtering all his behavior through this one very constricting lens.

Once Martin is able to open her up a bit in the discussion of his salary- where she starts off in control as the boss and is forced to face the fact that Martin is loyal to her even when he shouldn't be*, which could very easily pierce the defenses of her invulnerability as she has to accept this reality- she starts to mellow out. Whereas she starts off saying that she's “not a little old lady” so she can’t do the totally reasonable thing until Martin begs, afterward she manages to chill enough that she can do the, you know, sane thing even though it dings her a bit in the self-confidence. She's not quite as in thrall to her inner barriers anymore.

I'll just end off by saying- this episode may also, in addition to my favorite line, have my favorite closing lines of any episode, with the possible exception of Zurich 2. Though that one's mostly about the nostalgia and emotions. So maybe this is it.

*On this note- when did Martin stop looking for jobs? He was looking in Rotterdam… given my St Petersburg post I wonder if it was before or after that.

[this-is-krikkit]

when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (positivity is cool) <333

thank you for this ask and for all the wonderful victuuri content you regularly flood my dash with hehe! you're one of my tumblr faves as well ♥️

here goes:

please please please, let me get what i want - the smiths

big bad wolf - in this moment

yggdrasill - corvus corax

is there anybody out there - machine head

spring nicht - tokio hotel i will NOT ACCEPT CRITICISM OKAY this birl is having severe middleschool nostalgia these days😭😭