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can we like…get rid of the so-called leather and rubber “pride flags” ? it’s honestly ridiculous and offensive to the lgbtq community. those aren’t pride flags. 

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The way that Elizabeth Bennet is tricked by Wickham is so important because it's confirmation bias and we are all so susceptible to it. Of course Elizabeth ate up everything negative Wickham said about Darcy with a spoon, it's what she already thought! Wickham checked first. Once he knew Elizabeth hated Darcy, he fed her ego by letting her know that not only was she right, but she was special and smart for seeing through Darcy's wealth and status.

"The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen." - Wickham, Ch 16

The world is blind, but not Elizabeth! Not with her supreme powers of perception and character reading. She sees the "real" Darcy...

And then of course, the best warning Elizabeth gets about Wickham (and I'll admit it's not a great one) is from Caroline Bingley, a woman she detests (I cut out the snobbery around it):

"Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give implicit confidence to all his assertions; for, as to Mr. Darcy’s using him ill, it is perfectly false: for, on the contrary, he has been always remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated Mr. Darcy in a most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but I know very well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to blame; that he cannot bear to hear George Wickham mentioned..." Caroline Bingley, Ch 18

Elizabeth's judgment isn't perfect, it's highly subject to bias. Jane Austen's understanding of the human condition was amazing. She set Elizabeth's deception up in such an accurate way it could be in a modern social psychology textbook. Of course she believed Wickham; of course she discounted Caroline, it's human nature.

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There is also the option of gunstreet -- I am thinking particularly of Fly Over My Grave Again.

[Note: this post is grumpy and eventually also about Star Trek, it just takes longer than usual to get there and is generally rambling.]

There's something tickling my brain about how my main fandom—to a large degree, sole fandom—for years was Pride and Prejudice, and one of my most intense and long-lasting, yet niche grievances with Austen fandom fanon was over Lady Anne Darcy. It was specifically around the fandom image of her as this absolutely idealized mother, a sort of Madonna figurine brought to life.

I've talked about this many times, but: we know little about Darcy's mother in the book, and that little doesn't really suggest this ideal modest, easy-going, selfless, soft maternal figure. Multiple people in the novel allude to her teaming up with her sister, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in arranging the betrothal of Lady Catherine's daughter to Lady Anne's son to consolidate the status and property of the sisters' husbands, as well as their own aristocratic ancestry. Lady Catherine is really the only one who goes out of her way to mention Lady Anne. Late in the novel, Darcy very carefully talks his way around filial respect towards his dead parents while also trying to explain how they affected him, insisting they were good people while adding that they not only allowed, but encouraged ("almost taught" him) his arrogance and narrow preoccupation with his family circle. He also specifically says that his widely beloved father was the more generous and pleasant of the two.

It's a small thing in some ways: Lady Anne is an incredibly minor character who is dead before the novel starts and whom we only hear a little about that's easy to overlook. At first (long ago), I didn't care about individual fics or headcanons or whatnot working to distance her from Lady Catherine (and even Darcy himself), and instead envisioning her as a sort of generic maternal ideal. But it was impossible to avoid noticing what seemed an oddly pervasive fannish investment in this quasi-Madonna image of her, even though a) we hear so little about her and b) it doesn't fit very well with what we do hear.

And honestly, Lady Anne being the more abrasive and haughty parent, whom Darcy resembles more closely, makes perfect sense with her background and with the structural mirroring of Elizabeth-Mr Bennet and Darcy-Lady Catherine (each parental figure embodying extreme versions of each lead character's flaws and in some ways, warped versions of their virtues).

But it's not just that there's no reason to assume she was so utterly dissimilar from and superior to Lady Catherine, and that both Lady Catherine and Wickham are independently manufacturing the Pemberley family's cooperation with the planned marriage between Darcy and Anne, or to think that Darcy's implication that Lady Anne was the more difficult personality is mistaken. The thing that always puzzled me is why so many P&P fans want to idealize her this way in the first place, when she's barely referenced in the novel. Why would so many fans care so much about this dead offstage aristocrat being defined entirely in terms of Being a Good Mother (maybe even a perfect mother) despite the obvious unnecessary complications this creates around the characterizations of her sister and son?

It was never a universal fanon, to be clear, but common enough that I couldn't help noticing it and finding it strange. Like, did this whole weird fanon arise solely because Lady Anne is Darcy's mother, and marginal and ambiguous enough to allow fans to default to the most comfortably gendered image of female parenthood? Is it related to the hyper-gendered interpretations of Elizabeth and Darcy themselves, even though both are most strongly associated with cross-gender parental figures in Mr Bennet and Lady Catherine?

(A tangent, but for the record: I'd also argue, and have before, that Elizabeth is most temperamentally similar to Darcy's male friends, while Darcy himself is far more like Jane and Charlotte than like Bingley or Fitzwilliam. And just about every time that either Elizabeth or Darcy makes an assumption about the other based on generalizations about men/women rather than particulars of each other's personalities, they get proven very wrong. So understanding either of them wholly in terms of masculinity/femininity seems dubious in the first place.)

There are probably other possibilities for why there's this investment in idealizing Lady Anne, but in any case, the reason I'm rambling about this is because a lot of the sense of Amanda Grayson's character post-"Journey to Babel" that I've seen reminds me a lot of Austen fandom's representation of Lady Anne.

It's not as baseless with Amanda, for sure. She is initially somewhat set up that way only for that image to get painfully undercut later, when she tells Spock she'll hate him forever if he doesn't step down from his responsibilities to risk his life for Sarek's (she also hits Spock in this scene, though "I'll hate you forever" feels worse to me! ymmv!). And later official ST productions have moved more and more aggressively towards this "Madonna" image of Amanda (while Spock himself has also been increasingly stripped of the messy, complicated ways that TOS Spock himself interacts with gender, in-story and out of it).

But even versions of Amanda that appear almost exclusively based on TOS Amanda seem to lean heavily into an image of her that reminds me much more strongly of fanon Lady Anne Darcy than the Amanda of "Journey to Babel." And I guess it's one of those things that I not only disagree with but don't really get the appeal of. I like both Lady Anne and Amanda quite a lot, despite all of the above—or rather, because of it. They seem to be difficult, imperfect figures within messy family dynamics—great! Messy family dynamics are a lot of fun, and being good mothers is not the only metric by which to engage with female characters who have children.

I don't think either Lady Anne or Amanda are good parents, but they're no worse at it than their husbands, and I find both of them more interesting to think about than their husbands. One of my first fanfics ever was a trollish little fic about Mr Darcy cheating on his wife, who has returned to her father's house with a premature baby nobody expects to live, only to increasingly hint and then reveal that the betrayed wife is Lady Anne and the supposedly doomed premie baby is Darcy himself. There's a TOS-only concept that regularly plays in my head about the cut "City on the Edge of Forever" scene where Spock invites Kirk to Vulcan to rest and heal for some indefinite length of time, only it happens at the end of the five-year mission when Kirk is even more ground-down than he transparently is becoming in S3, but this becomes interwoven with Amanda as this personable but ambiguous figure, and with the complications around how she relates to Spock, Sarek, and even Kirk.

Anyway. I don't know if there are other fandoms where people have noticed that drive to idealize rather than villainize flawed mothers, but I was very struck by how much the cleaned-up Amanda reminded me of cleaned-up Lady Anne.

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I will just point out that if I'm skipping the sex scene, it's because the author hasn't done 5 and/or 6. Not all readers care about that, but a lot do, and as an author you should decide what audience you're writing for and write for it.

Hey, real talk. How does one write smut??

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I've heard a lot of shit during my crafting life but is it just me or does "you must be really patient" make your eye spasm? Like, sure I'm doing the same thing over and over again for a larger goal but consider this: a patient person wouldn't need something occupy their hands with in lieu of throwing them at everyone who says something idiotic, would they?

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i'm nonbinary and my spouse calls me his wife and as it turns out. this is fine with me. i'm also ok with my kids calling me their mother. gender is made up anyway

At the store I was covering today a dad walked in with his kid. They were on the teen side of childhood but age was indeterminate to me. He said, “So they need a new bed.” Later he added, “Their current bed is pretty squishy.”

I glanced at the child and said, “Would I be correct in intuiting your pronouns are they/them?”

Both dad and child lit up and he thanked me for noticing.

“It’s no big deal. My wife uses they/them. It confuses people because they hear wife and assume she/her but they’re a they/them. It just sounds so much better than spouse or partner to say my wife.”

The kid was ecstatic and exclaimed, “Yeah cause that’s your wife!”

It was fully heart meltingly adorable.

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Really lovely article from LA Times!

“It’s very clear when you read the novellas and the scripts that it is a character who is not always comfortable in settings with other people and can find interactions with humans tricky to navigate,” Skarsgård says. “To me, it was a character we hoped would be relatable to people in the neurodivergent community, but also in a lot of fans in the LGBTQ community. Murderbot not having a gender or being subscribed to binary sexuality could be relatable, but it’s natural to Murderbot. That was important — this is how Murderbot was created, and none of this [identity] is a big deal to Murderbot.”

[elljayvee]

on amok time again: they really did "spock experiences primal alien mating drive and murder fuck ritual," and didn't even play with "and this is an excuse to see our prim and proper mr spock get sensual with a lady!". like he expends ALL of his hot dominating fantasy uncontrollable lust rage energy ON KIRK. they wrote that and had ONE chance to make spock have any scandalous, carnal housewife jerk off material romance they wanted with any sexy space woman in the universe, and they chose kirk. when he does interact with a woman he throws a soup at her

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I said earlier today that I think the success or failure of a Murderbot adaptation hinges on whether or not the audience and the characters have the "fuck's sake, Ratthi" reaction an appropriate amount, and by that standard, this one is bomb.

I love TV-show Ratthi so much. I love him being all awkward in his over the top friendliness, but still not giving up. He is a bit cringe, but it's just so relatable.

Also I really hope there is going to be more seasons, just so I can see him starting to explain to other people: "By the way, do not try to hug SecUnit! It doesn't like hugs!"

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[elljayvee]

No uniforms. No badges. Wearing masks to hide their faces.

ICE are not police. They have no training. They have no oversight. No disciplinary recourse.

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Labyrinth (1986) dir. Jim Henson

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These are trying to kill me and i think they’re going to succeed

excerpts from “there is always another,” one of the short stories in Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View: the Empire Strikes Back

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Just another day in life of padawan Mace Windu.

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Jar Jar has a life debt to Qui-Gon for three days before Qui-Gon dies. You had one job Jar Jar.

I'm kidding of course, but can you imagine Obi-Wan staring hopelessly through the force field and-- what's that? It Jar Jar with the metal chair sneaking up on Maul! He's tripped on his own feet and has now smacked into Qui-Gon, knocking him out. Now Maul is slicing the chair until comically Jar Jar is holding two small sticks! What's that!? He's tripped over Qui-Gon's unconscious body, knocking hard into Maul. Maul has stumbled into the pit! Maul has let go of his handhold out of embarrassment for the entire affair.

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I think some of this comes from Spock’s happiness in the episode. Yes, it’s artificial! No, he would not consent to it! But I think for a lot of people the fact that he (a) acknowledges that happiness while not under the spores and (b) by implication calls staying with the Enterprise a self-made purgatory makes it very easy to skim over a lot of the issues and focus on whether or not he liked it.

(Yes that’s fucked up. I’m not saying it’s a good interpretation, just that I think people are weighting those remarks he makes in a particular way that you (and I) aren’t)

It's genuinely kind of baffling to me that Leila Kalomi so regularly is the Spock "love interest" invoked as proof that Spock can't possibly be gay he had an ex-girlfriend didn't you see the episode with his girlfriend he could be straight or maybe bi but definitely definitely couldn't be gay.

Anyway, this is Leila's description of their previous relationship in "This Side of Paradise":

ELIAS: Did you love him? LEILA: If I did, it was important only to myself. ELIAS: How did he feel? LEILA: Mr. Spock's feelings were never expressed to me.

-

LEILA: Come back to the planet [with the docility sex pollen spores] with me. You can belong again. Come back with me, please. SPOCK: I can't. LEILA: I love you. I said that six years ago, and I can't seem to stop repeating myself. On Earth, you couldn't give anything of yourself. You couldn't even put your arms around me. We couldn't have anything together there. We couldn't have anything together any place else.

Like. Leila herself acknowledges that Spock would never willingly enter any kind of relationship with her unless drugged into it, even as little as taking her in his arms. And Spock, uniquely among the many people exposed to the spores, experiences physical pain in the transition to artificial happiness/belonging/"love":

SPOCK: No. LEILA: It shouldn't hurt. SPOCK: No, I can't. Please, don't! LEILA: Not like this. It didn't hurt us. SPOCK: I am not like you!

Early in the episode, she is very clear about how much she cares about what Spock would choose while fully functional:

ELIAS: Would you like him to stay with us now, to be as one of us? LEILA: There is no choice, Elias. He will stay.

Spock specifically asks her questions that would reveal the spore effect and allow him to make an autonomous choice. Leila refuses to answer until the spores painfully take him over. And even once she herself is freed of the spores' effects, her approach to Spock and his autonomy doesn't significantly change; it isn't really something she values about him.

Compare this to someone like Eve McMahon even in as terrible an episode as "Mudd's Women," in which Kirk is the one affected by the aphrodisiac and Spock is immune. Eve is strongly implied to be interested in Kirk, and she knows he's being affected by the drug that nobody has explained to the Enterprise crew; he asks her not to come into his bedroom, and she ignores that for a moment to carry out the seduction, but she knows it's wrong and is so horrified that she breaks it off and leaves. The even more ethically ambiguous Helen Noel in "Dagger of the Mind" also has an arc that leads to her insisting "This isn't right" when Kirk's autonomy is compromised, and reminding him of what's real. Chapel ultimately accepts in "Plato's Stepchildren" that Spock's no always meant no and could never be otherwise without some violation of consent that she finds horrifying. Leila is not uniquely terrible (Deela in "Wink of an Eye" is a lot more unambiguously chilling), but this isn't just how all women in TOS behave, either.

There's also an intriguing thread of very distinct mutual hostility and incomprehension between Leila and Kirk throughout the episode, in which neither comes off looking great, but Leila plainly cares quite a lot less about Spock's autonomy. A lot of this is mostly conveyed by performance (Shatner very convincingly bleeds jealousy as Kirk here), but Leila definitely doesn't get the nature of Spock's and Kirk's relationship even as it exists in S1:

SPOCK: Emotions are alien to me. I'm a scientist. LEILA: Someone else might believe that. Your shipmates, your captain, but not me.

Kirk very much does not believe that, just to be clear. I feel it's worth mentioning that this episode was aired directly after the one that concluded with this—

—and right before the one in which Spock insists he's acting based on logic and probability and of course wouldn't leap into danger. Kirk's response is just this:

That is also the one in which Spock torpedoes all his scientific principles in pure panic over Kirk:

SPOCK: Captain, are you all right? Jim? Jim!

SPOCK: Kill it, captain, quickly! KIRK: It's not making any threatening moves, Spock. SPOCK: You don't dare take the chance, captain. Kill it. KIRK: I thought you were the one who wanted it kept alive, captured if possible. SPOCK: Jim, your life is in danger. You can't take the risk. KIRK: It seems to be waiting. SPOCK: I remind you it's a proven killer. I'm on my way.

Anyway, Kirk is immediately jealous and resentful of Leila and regards her as the problem. He doesn't know much of anything about Spock and Leila's previous relationship and certainly doesn't seem to know how ephemeral it was (Leila's descriptions of how limited it was both occur in scenes where Kirk is not present and she pretty obviously tries to suggest it was a real romance when he is there). So Leila doesn't know what the relationship between Spock and Kirk actually is like and how bizarre Spock's spore-influenced behavior is going to seem, and Kirk doesn't know what Spock's relationship with Leila really was like, so we just end up with this wild uncomprehending mutual resentment between them.

Even before Kirk knows what's going on with Spock, he seems to think removing Leila from the picture would fix things. While it's not quite true, when he does figure out how to break the spore haze, his first priority is getting Spock away from Leila and back at his side. Spock makes it extremely clear what drives his refusal to return to Leila and the artificial happiness of the spores, as powerful as it was for him:

LEILA: I can't lose you now, Mister Spock. I can't. SPOCK: I have a responsibility to this ship, to that man on the bridge. I am what I am, Leila, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them.

Like, this whole situation is so fucked-up and puts such an emphasis on Kirk's oblivious jealousy of Leila, her lol what consent possessiveness around Spock (combined with the repeated revelations about how extremely minimal their relationship was and remains without literally drugging him), and the spores affecting everyone in basically the same pleasant but unhealthy way (rather than the highly idiosyncratic and physically painless effects of losing inhibitions in "The Naked Time") apart from it being specifically painful for Spock as he begs for it to stop. The whole interest of the episode turns on the essential melancholy of Spock's position: his only options are a) artificially- and painfully-induced contentment that is his sole experience of happiness but foreign to him or b) the fundamental self-inflicted purgatory of life at Kirk's side that is nevertheless truer to what he really is (I am what I am). It is not remotely difficult to read all this in repressed gay terms rather than proof!!! of Spock's attraction to women.

The thing is, of all the obligatory Spock "love" interests in TOS, there are multiple other ones that you could make an argument for. The most obvious is the Romulan commander; he's in his right mind, she's not the source of the dubcon, they have fantastic chemistry even if Spock's manner is deliberately ambiguous, she's super cool and hot and his age, and he definitely respects her. I guess there's Droxine, too; their interactions aren't even dubcon, just strange and bad and don't go anywhere. Even Zarabeth is only mildly sketchy compared to Leila and has a much better motive. But for some reason, the "well akshually" responses to gay Spock posts always seem obsessed with But His Canon Girlfriend Leila in particular.

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I assume it is a kind of fossil called a “cast”. Lots of footprint fossils are casts!

What happens is that first the impression fills in, like filling a mold. Lots of fossils are mold fossils, but sometimes due to things like water seepage, whatever is in the mold mineralizes differently than the exterior of the mold, and then it’s a cast fossil.

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

Oldest human footprint on the Moon, made July 20, 1969 on the Sea of Tranquility, Earth's moon.