#and based on the subject matter

[cellarspider]

8/30 Seek and Destroy

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We return to the movie that I wish to spin in a centrifuge until it separates into layers of its constituent parts, Prometheus.

Content warning for desecration of a dead body, continuing bumblefuck destruction of alien artifacts, and David being the adversarial two year old that he literally is.

Before we begin: Have you turned off Tumblr’s latest “feature”, which opens your account up to AI data harvesting? If not: do it! Log in from a web browser (the app doesn’t have this checkbox yet), go to “Blog Settings”, scroll down to “Visibility”, and turn on “Prevent third-party sharing for [BLOG NAME]”. Do this for each blog you have. Do it. Do it now. Tell your friends, it’s the hot new thing. Run free into the wilderness. This message will repeat whenever I feel like it.

Anyway, on with the show.

David is the most prepared crew member. While nobody else seems to have a single clue between their ears and most of the crew wasn’t even briefed prior to setting out, David has been studying for the past two years, treating language as a puzzle. He’s going to take what he learned and apply it to anything he finds in the alien complex.

And he will apply it whenever the mood takes him, because he is, again, two years old. That was the sense I got in the theater–he finds things he can mess with, and does so without hesitation or consultation with the humans. And while my instincts were still screaming that they shouldn’t even have landed yet, his behavior was the only one that made sense. He has been taught that he is only wanted when he’s useful. He has not been taught to keep his hands to himself. He figures the place out faster than the humans, and he seems pleased with himself for doing so. Therefore, he’s going to do so as much as possible.

As a result, we watch the cast act like screeching gibbons over a hologram. David had begun prodding at marks on the wall that look suspiciously like cuneiform (I’ll rant about it later), and he turned on a hologram projector. Simian crew noises ensue.

Those in the audience who are in the know are also expected to begin screeching excitedly at this point. The hallways they’re in are already taking on H. R. Giger’s signature biomechanical style. These holograms are showing us eight foot tall beings similar to his Space Jockey design.

The Space Jockey, named as such by the Alien production team, was one of those mysterious things about the original movie. Fused to what might have been the helm of the ship, seemingly alone with a hold full of carefully-arranged xenomorph eggs, and long-dead from a chestburster that had infected it. It set a warning signal before its death, misinterpreted by the crew of the Nostromo.

The movie never explained what the Space Jockey had been doing. Was this a cargo ship? A weapon? Was xenomorph reproduction somehow linked to the Space Jockey lifestyle? Their religion? Absolutely no information was given, and thus depictions of the Space Jockeys in subsequent media were split on whether they were benevolent, malevolent, entirely indifferent toward others, or simply too alien to be understood.

Physically, it was a complicated design for Alien’s crew to pull off, even as a corpse. The studio didn’t want to budget for it, and Giger ended up putting in a lot of extra work to help finish the statue. To make it seem even bigger than it was, the children of Ridley Scott and cinematographer Derek Vanlint were put into miniature space suits to give a sense of titanic scale to the creature, three times their height.

Scott made the logistical decision in Prometheus to scale these beings down significantly, purely for the difficulty in setting up shots and creating more sets scaled to this thing. It’s understandable, but I know some people are disappointed by it. As are others by the obvious implication you first get in this scene: the Space Jockey’s truly bizarre appearance is simply some sort of suit, worn by the far more humanoid aliens already seen in Prometheus’ opening.

Normally, I might be among those disappointed by that. I love monsters dearly, if my blog doesn’t give that away already. But there is a minimum threshold for inhuman features that the Engineers still meet for me. Something about the eyes and the uncanny look of their skin, both of which were deliberate choices by Ridley Scott and Neal Scanlan, the film’s creature designer who started with the Henson Company on movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, and has worked on the new Star Warses, including the absolutely fantastic Andor. Even in behind-the-scenes shots, they manage to look just odd enough to be pleasing to me.

(https://www.deviantart.com/pretty--kittie/art/Prometheus-Engineer-407324586)

I respect the design work that went into it and I like the final result, though I am very sympathetic to those who felt that this was an unnecessary explanation for a creature that was a more powerful symbol when it had no explanation.

Talking about such things is my happy place, and unfortunately we have to go back to The Bad Place now. The characters.

They find an alien corpse decapitated by a door (the great goddess O’Sha is most displeased), and within two minutes they’re sticking a meat thermometer in it.

Fifield the geologist has a panic attack, which is pretty relatable.

“Look, I'm just a geologist. I like rocks. I love! rocks! Now it's clear you two don't give a shit about rocks.”

He’s right and he should say it. They should still be orbiting the planet looking for artificial structures, and Fifield should be having fun doing an aeromagnetic survey or something.

But no. Meat thermometer. Sorry, “carbon reader”. Says the body’s been dead about two thousand years. They have just punched a hole in the first alien body they’ve ever found, to get precisely one data point. This is what is called a “destructive analysis.”

Destructive analysis is a technical term, so let me define it: You know how a team just read the text inside of a charcoalized lump that used to be a Roman scroll? How they didn’t destroy anything in the scroll to do that? How we might be on a path to getting so many ancient texts it could radically reshape our understanding of the period, and all it will take is some fancy x-ray scans and computers? The opposite of that. Think the opposite of that.

I’m going to go on a tangent out of pure spite and desire to educate. Carbon dating is complicated. There’s two isotopes (types) of carbon: Carbon 14 and carbon 12. C-14 is very, veeeery slightly radioactive, which means it will eventually burp out a little subatomic particle and turn into the non-radioactive Nitrogen 14. C-14 is mostly created in our atmosphere, so once something’s dead and in the ground, it’s not gaining any more C-14, it’s slowly turning into N-14.

We know how long C-14 takes to turn into N-14, it’s about 50,000 years to lose all but 0.2% of the original C-14. If you know how much C-14 something should start with, then you can take a look at how much C-14 your sample actually has, and you can calculate how long it’s been dead. Here’s a quick explainer from Scientific American to visually summarize this.

Now, the more complicated part. You have to know the starting conditions if you want to be accurate. You have to calibrate everything, because the amount of C-14 available in an environment can change over time. We have ways of doing this, but it usually means carefully studying the environment and other clues.

So if you were to actually find carbon-based alien corpses on an alien planet, you’d need to identify the atmospheric carbon isotope ratio, and then you’d be able to make a sketchy, poorly-calibrated estimation, that could be wildly off by a large margin. A critter that did a lot of traveling in its life would be especially hard to date, as you couldn’t be sure if it’d lived where you found it for long enough to take up the local C-14 levels.

In this case, their fancy meat thermometer might be plugged directly into the script, because the number they give is only about 60 years off the actual death date. How do I know this? Because of a thing I’m not saying yet.

That’s enough for this post right now. But I’m not done with this moment. I don’t like this moment, and I need to properly explain why. Next time.

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemiluminescence 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoluminescence 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence 4. https://dedalvs.com/ 5. https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/

[softceleste]

Autumn Best in Woman of the Hour (2023, dir. Anna Kendrick)

Please do not save, repost, or edit these gifs for any reason, use the reblog button instead. Also please do not interact if you’re a celeb rp blog, a true crime blog, or if you write taboo content on your blog, thank you!

[angelmush]

i am soooo nervous i start another writing class on tuesday and it’s super super small and everyone else in it is like . a published professional

[beneathsilverstars]

Would the saapfrin arts count for Siffrin's sexiness or do they still go to the other fella who has developed the superior swag in that timeline (Loop)?

hm this is tricky. on one hand, we’re judging sexiness, which is generally considered a physical attribute, particularly if the only data you’re using is pictures. and isatfrin and sapfrin are obviously physically identical.

but on the other hand! esp in such a cartoony art style, expression (and other shifting visual elements like pose) can play a huge part! and not only are there some differing expressions between the art sets, it makes sense for their personalities to have diverged enough that they’d be genuinely carrying themselves differently from each other.

but isatfrin does have the potential to make the expressions/poses of the sapfrin art under the right circumstances, particularly as proved by their demeaner getting more loopy towards act 5… so sapfrin could perhaps serve as proof for the sexy potential that lies within any siffrin?

[glossdebut]

[novembermorgon]

you know what the thing is, you draw beautifully and it’s clear you put details and meaning in your art, but you somehow miss a lot when it comes to understanding the books which ultimately is very sad.

i hope you know that adding a compliment in front of this does not make it any less rude and condescending and frankly i think assuming that you're some kind of authority in understanding the books in the correct way is kind of funny

[fromtheseventhhell]

Another round of asoiaf "prettycourse", another round of people ignoring Arya's self-esteem issues and how it relates to her arc because their enjoyment of the series hinges on an 11-year-old being considered ugly.

[molsno]

essentially, any urge that I have ever had to have sex with someone as an ace person, even before I knew I was ace, has been an urge to fulfill a sexual role.

we live in an allonormative society. our society is built on the premise that two people will form exclusive sexual pairs. sex is incentivized under an allonormative society because it produces material benefits for those who abide by its rules. a man benefits from allonormativity in that sexuality is an act of conquest, and further, a means to produce children which serve as stores of wealth. a woman benefits less from allonormativity, but her value as a sex object for men grants her conditional, limited access to a man's resources by occupying the role of mother to his children.

a tranny, on the other hand does not have access to this role. a tranny's worth is derived solely from her ability to act as a sex object. she can be discarded at a moment's notice when she ceases to be useful.

because we live in an allonormative society, this holds true in queer culture as well, even in the absence of cisheteropatriarchal dynamics.

so what is a tranny that doesn't want to have sex, then?

worthless. why would you even waste your time thinking about it? it doesn't deserve the time of day. love? you think a tranny that you can't fuck deserves love? are you an idiot?

I fantasize about having sex with people from time to time because at least then I can imagine that I'm worth something in this allonormative society. any attempt I have ever made to seek out sex has been met with immediate disinterest because I make no attempt to hide the fact that I'm ace. I don't mean rejection; I mean my very existence is outright ignored.

worst of all, it feels impossible to discuss this. the idea of asexual people suffering from compulsory sexuality upsets allosexuals' sensibilities. clearly, they insist, my urge to have sex just proves that I'm faking it, that I'm not asexual, that I just want to feel special, that I'm just pretending to be oppressed.

what they don't understand is that my urge to have sex is essentially a form of self-harm. I could not even begin to explain the toll it has taken on my psyche and the damage it has done to my self-esteem. I would compare it to the urge to detransition; I know that if I detransitioned, I would gain access to privileges that are unavailable to me as a tranny. however, forcing myself to be something I'm not, something which is a massive contradiction to my very existence, is a march toward suicide. the urge to force myself to be allosexual is much the same.

there is no freedom to be found for me in indulging this urge. the greatest freedom I have found is in embracing my asexuality, in seeking out relationships with other asexuals, where there is no pressure to have sex, and where I can truly be myself.

[gibbearish]

btw similar to the whole "if you try adderall at a party and it calms you down, get an adhd test" thing, if at some point in your life you try microdosing shrooms with a friend and end up feeling like a functional person for the first time in your life, get tested for depression. like yeah hallucinogens come with elation so youre probably gonna have some "this is the best ive ever felt in my life" vibes regardless, but like. if that in and of itself feels like finally breathing in for the first time in years, thats for sure a sign that something is up with your ability to process serotonin most of the time. feeling better than ever before should be a nice bonus, not a crushing weight off your chest

[tentacleplains]

more scenes that basically everyone sees but pointing out a specific detail i find interesting: "though i hope you don't cause a scene this time" does avery regularly cause scenes at parties?? lmao

[philzokman]

GUYSSS I GOT MY EXAM RESULTS BACK :D

[slabmaxxing]

watching stormz vods i am no longer mentally ill

[kickedin17]

I actually have Thoughts but it's been a terrible fucking evening and it's now 12am so for now I will simply say the fact halsey is leaning into alice in wonderland visuals for this tour/era overall at precisely the same time I'm having my own aiw resurgence is proof we still share a singular brain cell after all this time & I understand things I see the visions. Mx halsey I have recieved your transmissions

[lesbianralzarek]

someday people will learn to spot the difference between someone who likes to feel "better" than everyone else by mentioning what "highbrow tastes" they have in media, vs someone who just has some uncommon tastes and is trying to introduce you to blorbo from their shows. casablanca and shakespear are still around because some people like them, actually

its unfortunate, then, that some styles arent as lucrative as marvels style. the age of everyone being able to see anyone bitching about things best discussed amongst a select few in their in-group (i cant really post about how much i hated such-and-such media, because people who love it might see it and feel bad) has made it more or less impossible to discuss a hatred of the most popular style without hurting anyones feelings. and i do hate it. and its success has changed how people make movies now. and i am mad. but most of all, i wish i could bitch about it without making the people who genuinely like it sad

theyre still making marvel-likes because people like marvel, and they dont make akira-likes because not enough people like akira. please watch akira. its good. you might like it. if you like akira and other cyberpunk shit please talk to me about blorbo from my "old" non-english movie

[acrossfromladystardust]

i thought this was generally agreed on by now but apparently not:

sirius was more naturally smart, remus was more passionate about learning

[inkovert]

It really grinds my gears when people don’t appreciate story mechanics or have no sense of reading comprehension and say objectively wrong things like “this book was boring bc it had no plot and the characters didn’t develop at all.” Or “why did the author include all these extra unnecessary scenes that had no relevancy to the plot that I said was nonexistent, therefore stupidly contradicting myself”.

Mhm. Yeah. Hi hello. Those “extra unnecessary scenes???” not only did they LITERALLY MOVE THE PLOT FORWARD LIKE. NOTHING YOU READ AFTER COULD’VE HAPPENED OR WOULD’VE MADE SENSE IF YOU REMOVED THEM. But even if that WEREN’T true. Those “unnecessary scenes” literally served to provide the fucking character and relationship development that you said apparently didn’t take place

Like. Idk whether I just appreciate this stuff more and can see it plainly bc I’m a writer but like ??? How can you sit there and say something that you would know is objectively wrong if you actually sat down and thought about what you were reading??? if you wanted to read something simple and mindless that wouldn’t require you to think then I’m not sure why you picked up this book in the first place.

Like you’re entitled to your opinion or whatever but it’s still dumb. I’m screaming on behalf of writers and authors everywhere.