daltongraham - Tumblr blog

[daltongraham]

One of my favorite movies of all time.

I am once again watching the last quarter of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the part with the actual encounters and all the amazing ships and so on, and as usual I'm having Big Feelings about it all

imagine, if you will, being an autistic and secretly queer trans teenager in the 70s (in an abusive household with an abusive and very distant father, amongst other abusive adults), having seen all the "aliens are evil and want to enslave/destroy us!" film rhetoric from the past (that was basically just xenophobia and racism dressed up) and then you're 14 and you go to the cinema and see this in surround sound (and none of the effects are digital, it's 1977)

and several things really stand out for me

all the ground crew being so damn calm and professional (and let's face it, autistic) about it

okay a few show fear - I especially love that one technician who dashes for the portable shithouse - but mostly they're just on it

the deliberate haze around the ships and their lights, making it look so magical

oh my gods the ships and all their shapes and colours and tumbling

All the aviator shades

that moment when they're trying to communicate musically with the trio of small ships and finally the ships sing back - which is like having your distant parent finally talk to you kindly (if you were me)

the musical conversation (as a musician myself I was so in love with this) between the keyboard dude and the big ship, and him clearly just grokking it and getting into the groove well before the computers took over the chat

them casually slipping "when you wish upon a star" into the soundtrack when Roy is being briefed as one of the astronauts

little Barry saying bye-bye to the aliens

and just the sheer force of "hey look they're from somewhere else and they're different from us and we're just amazed and full of curiosity and love for them" and how damn healing that was and still is - I'm so tired of the "aliens as creeping horror threat" trope

seriously this is like the polar/solar opposite of the x files vibe - all the struggle in the film is with humans - this was literally the first time a blockbuster film said "yeah but what if they were benign and it was just beautiful"

oh yeah and two years later I was on a kibbutz in Israel for the summer with my friend, and one night we were smoking under the stars when one of the stars started moving, went really fast and then did a slingshot turn and disappeared up into the night sky at crazy speed and we looked at each other and just dashed indoors giggling (hey, we were 16)

anyway what I'm saying is you should really watch it, it's pretty damn awesome (have good sound on if you can, and persist through the middle bit which drags sometimes)

[daltongraham]

i doodled this a little while back to see if I can still draw Them

[daltongraham]

There are so many plants. I study plants every day of my life and I'm still finding out about plants native to my area that i've never heard of in my life.

Stylosanthes biflora. Side-beak pencil-flower. Whadda hell

[daltongraham]

rain photo study

[daltongraham]

Saw this on a door at work.

[daltongraham]

I wonder if I could help create a tumblr fandom for Flatland

[daltongraham]

why don't people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?

I'm gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail

[daltongraham]

public libraries are so sick. there are five books I want to read and they're all relatively new so they're only available in hardback which is so expensive but it just cost me $0 to place holds on them. five books for zero dollars. it requires nothing but clicking a button and then going to the library to pick them up when they're ready. zero dollars. that's crazy

[daltongraham]

[daltongraham]

OKAY series of polls about sock preferences because i'm a curious autistic fuck:

(if you don't wear socks don't answer any of the other questions)

[daltongraham]

by Jaeyoun Ryu

[daltongraham]

my mom, dead in the middle of a conversation, slams on the breaks in the middle of a country road so she can pull over and take a picture of all these cows running for cover from the rain and adsfkjlfkdjg and thi dskfjfgj

[daltongraham]

Driving through Norway’s Fjords

[daltongraham]

Lilac-breasted Roller (Coracias caudatus), family Coraciidae, order Coraciiformes, Chobe National Park, Botswana

photograph by Diego Delso 

[daltongraham]

They’re going to the movies

[daltongraham]

Wizard worm just emerged from a wizarding hole! Lucky you!!!✨🪱🪄🍀