#todays article is...

[piratesexmachine420]

...panthers?

[polite--cat]

heart-wrenching & beautiful excerpts from the article on esteban ocon

[aferalworm]

A man threatened to show up at Capital One with a machete and gasoline

Let 👏 him 👏 do 👏 it 👏

I wanna see what happens

[carnage-cathedral]

>"cluster b demonization isn't real! you're just making that up because you're attention seeking and wanna be a victim!!!"

>open internet browser

>"how to defeat narcissists" article is on the front page in the health tab

[motherwench]

jeanette lee, a brooklyn-born pool player nicknamed the “black widow” for her tendency to wear all black outfits and “lure [her] opponents to the table and eat them alive.” some of my favorite photos of her :)

her vogue article here. sports illustrated article here.

photo creds: 1 - drew endicott via vogue. 2. 3. 4.

[javelinbk]

Paul McCartney reading news coverage of The Beatles, February 1964 and January 1969

[eddiegettingshot]

oliver stark talking about slow burn and longing and will they/won’t they like a man in the buddie trenches. he literally wasn’t lying when he said he doesn’t think buddie shippers are wrong

[sniperct]

Biden previewed the shift in a Zoom call Saturday with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Washington Post

Four days after that debate, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump was immune from prosecution for official acts during his first term in office. Less than an hour later, Biden called Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, to discuss the ruling and the arguments for and against reforming the court.

Biden continually works with really smart people in the background, quietly, until he's ready to do or announce something. He uses these tactics in negotiations with other countries as well. He's not bombastic nor does he make the media happy because he's boring, but he's effective.

Whether you like him or hate him, he's actually good at this job and he gets shit done and often times it's actually good shit.

[notbecauseofvictories]

also, just as a coda to that last post---if you think "spend a week making a needlessly complicated dessert" has fixed me, I was searching for ways to use up the extra heavy cream and milk....and discovered recipes for making cheese. So this inexplicable, needlessly elaborate train can just go on rolling!

[spiritsonic]

In issue #70, Tails says that he's learned to search trash cans, but he learned this in "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog" which takes place after Sonic Frontiers. Does this mean that issue 70 happens after "Murder" and "Frontiers"?

I've gotten a few questions along these lines-- right now (jul. '24), IDW Sonic is still taking place in the space between Forces and Frontiers. If/when we're allowed to move beyond Frontiers, we will make it VERY clear that that's the case.

Also, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is not considered canon so it doesn't have a concrete place on the timeline. My personal headcanon is that a very similar event has happened sometime during the comic's run, thus why Tails can make his reference and why we keep seeing Barry/the Conductor/his wife cameos.

I got another comment asking about Eggman mentioning the Eggperial City in Sonic Dream Team, too... I can't speak to that one, as I haven't played the game yet (don't have any Apple devices) and didn't work on the game. That would be a good Bumblecast question.

The comics exist in a stranger space, temporally speaking, than the games. These inconsistencies are unfortunately inevitable. Almost all long-running comics with un-aging characters end up getting weird time compression problems that you just can't think about too much.

[iamenits]

Screenshots of McCoy smiling (and a few where he isn't) from every Star Trek episode in production order.

[soapbubbles511]

I was looking for something else and came across this old Taika interview from Eagle vs Shark. I would like to point everyone who bitchily whines that he's changed and is full of himself now in this direction. It's not his fault you started taking everything he says seriously, but he was always like this.

[felassan]

Article: 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard took "so long" as BioWare "wanted to make sure we got this one right" - that, and "it takes a long time to record 700 characters" and 140,000 lines'

The Veilguard is "the best version" of itself that it could be

Excerpt:

"BioWare reveals why Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been in the works for a long, long time - and it sounds like the upcoming RPG is downright massive, from dialogue to voice acting. The 10-year wait for a new Dragon Age is coming to a close as the fall season approaches, meaning that excitement for the game is at an all-time high. Why did The Veilguard take "so long" to come to fruition, though? Speaking in an interview with GamesRadar+, creative director John Epler and creative performance director Ashley Barlow explain why work on the beloved RPG series' soon-to-come entry was seemingly slower. "We had other projects going on at��BioWare as well," Epler says. "We wanted to make sure we got this one right." The developer continues, calling The Veilguard "the best version" that the new Dragon Age "could possibly be." Barlow then chimes in, describing how she's been working on the game for five years now alongside its cast of actors: "We started casting five years ago. The team, the talent has been on for five years." And, according to Barlow, five years isn't that long considering the amount of work the cast had to do: "It takes a long time to record 700 characters, you know - 80,000 lines or 140,000 lines with all the Rooks. It just takes time to make good."

[source]

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[thursdayinspace]

They never talk about it. In the morning, it’s like it never happened. A secret kept in a box of thin frosted glass; one word could shatter it into a million pieces. It won’t hold forever, no matter how carefully they handle the fragile object, but for now, it holds.

She takes his hand before they separate for the night, he looks deeply into her eyes, she leaves the door between their adjoining motel rooms open just a crack, and they understand each other, most of the time. After hard days, during nights when the shadows creep in too close.

The lights are off because darkness hides the cracks in the illusion, conceals the truth in their eyes. He finds his way to her bed and she reaches for him, his warmth thawing the ice in her veins. His kiss steals her breath, fills her with life instead. She knows his hands so well, his touch more familiar than any love she ever saw in the bright light of day.

Touch is their only language in the dark, they won’t speak this into existence. Names hold power. So not yet, not yet. Undressing each other is a practiced act, it takes no time at all. There is no slow exploration of each other; for now, they know everything they can bear to know.

Her legs fall open for him and he pushes into her slowly, making her whole. In the dark, she’s not afraid of needing him. The skin of his back is so smooth under her hands, his breath hot against her lips. She brings her legs up around his waist to make their union complete, his body covering hers as she wraps herself around him, his cock deep inside her, responding to every tensing of her muscles, every gasp, every spike of pleasure.

There’s desperate need in every movement, his thrusts hard and slow, and even this is an illusion: the pretense of chasing release, when really, it’s just shy of enough. He’s fucking her, fucking a rough day out of her, giving in to desire so they can both forget. But it’s all a lie. He kisses her neck and she runs her hands through his hair and it doesn’t matter that they both know it, as long as the glass box is firmly shut by sunrise.

By now, he knows how to make her come, and he does. Her body goes tight and she bites her lip so she won’t cry out, squeezes her eyes shut against the blinding light of orgasm that rips through her body, heat exploding through her as she clings to him as hard as she can.

She loves when he fucks her through the aftershocks, when he needs a little longer, and somehow she taught him this without words. She loves the times her mind clears enough to witness when he falls over the edge, she loves seeing hearing feeling him come inside her. Under the cover of darkness, they fall apart in and put each other back together.

They both wake up in their own beds in the morning. She doesn’t mention it. Neither does he. But she can feel the phantom ache of where he was hours ago, and eyes the glass box in her mind, trying to ignore the new crack in it that hadn’t been there yesterday. The lid is firmly closed and she doesn’t touch it. Not yet. Not yet.

[mcromwell]

Going to the thrift that gives away books for free and grabbing the predatory, racist, and otherwise despicable material to turn into pulp to recycle into handmade paper.