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1898 Georges Gaudy - Poster "Cycles et Automobiles Legia"

(Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya)

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And now we back to the square one

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ab. 1795 Marie-Élisabeth Gabiou, née Lemoine - Self-Portrait with Straw Hat and Palette

(Allen Memorial Art Museum)

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I hate Axios so I'm not providing a direct link lol, but you can see the article title if you want to look it up for yourself.

5 million people protested yesterday! I know what people are going to say, because I've seen it already: "This is all performative nonsense because these people should have voted for Harris instead."

I understand that, but consider:

The people protesting Trump are obviously angry at him and most of them are likely to be liberals/left-leaning people who voted against him in the first place! There may be a handful of people who voted for him joining the protests because they've since been disillusioned since November, or people who joined the protests after sitting out the election, but they're likely in the minority. There's significant overlap between Harris voters and anti-Trump protesters

What happened in November can't be undone. The only way to go now is forward, and of course, it's better to have large protests against the fascist administration than not!

The protests came at a time when the Trump administration is trying to intimidate protesters in LA with the National Guard and the Marines, and it's great that Americans around the country took to the streets and told the fascists that they weren't afraid of them, and wouldn't be deterred from voicing their dissent. The administration must not be emboldened by public apathy or fear

Relatedly, the narrative from the media and this administration after November was that Trump had a "mandate" and total cultural victory over America. These protests prove that is not true

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My friends(don’t have tumblr): have u seen this meme lol, it was on the ‘best of tumblr’ facebook page, tumblr is so funny

Me, a tumblr gremlin: haha yeah lol, think i’ve seen that one before lol

Me (what I really mean): you fools. I am plugged into the mainframe, wired to the primary source. Of course have seen that meme, and all 5000 of it’s variants, 3 and a half months ago. I have seen the rise and fall of that meme, the boom and bust, the drama, the pain, the shitposting, oh god, the shitposting. I have seen this meme in it’s rawest, freshest, unpasturised, most primal state. Do not insult me with these rank, stale puddles, that sit at the very base of the meme trickle down economy.

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Carmen Dell’ Orefice (l) and Dovima in gowns and jewelry by Scaasi, Helene Curtis hairspray ad, Harper’s Bazaar, July 1960

(via)

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Siena Trebol Embroidered Linen Maxi Dress by Agua by Agua Bendita.

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April 1968. ‘When rajahs take to print, the results are swirling streams of color!’

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Jane Seymour

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The legendary Marsha Hunt

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April 1968. ‘Kashmir: Landscapes of love’

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Subanbrn [ S u b a n ]

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Voyager rewatch s7 ep19: Author, Author

Another Doctor episode, which once again doesn't do anything to make me like him any better, since he spends nearly the entire episode insulting and disregarding the feelings of people who are supposed to be his friends.

The Doctor writes a holonovel inspired by his life, which he sends to a publisher, but he uses the likenesses of his crewmates to create evil versions of them, who do despicable things like killing their own crewman, insulting the Doctor every time they talk to him, and threatening to decompile his program every two seconds. When confronted by them over how hurtful they find his portrayal of them, he says it's not meant to be them, and that it's okay because he's just trying to make a point about hologram oppression.

While the case could certainly be made that other sentient holograms are oppressed if they don't want to be where they are and are held against their will, the Doctor's ire at not getting extra privileges beyond what any other Starfleet officers get isn't the same thing, and doesn't fill me with pity. Not to mention, he's the one who's constantly belittling and insulting to everyone around him. The fact that he used real people's likenesses without their permission is bad enough, but refusing to change it when they asked him to is not only unethical, but shows a massive disregard for his friend's feelings.

Considering we're already dealing with the legal questions over the use of computer generated likenesses and voices of actors in the 21st century, I would have to believe that there would be laws protecting people from unauthorized use of their likenesses in holograms in the 24th century, particularly in works intended for publication. But even for programs intended for personal use, there should be some sort of laws or Starfleet protocols which would settle debates like this before they begin. But in the early 2000s no one really thought of that, so we get stories like this, where using people's likenesses without their consent is somehow totally legal and okay. It's one of those times where Star Trek didn't manage to accurately predict future technology, and it really hurts this episode, since looking at it now, there's no question that the crew should have the right to control the use of their own faces and voices in any holonovel. The core problem here isn't even that the Doctor portrayed them negatively, but that he used their likenesses without consent in the first place.

But the negative portayals are definitely also bad, and the crew are understandably all hurt to find out the Doctor thinks so little of them. He refuses to apologize, or change the characters when he finds out how hurt they are, and it just reinforces that he doesn't actually like or respect any of them. And it sucks, quite honestly. Even though hologram rights are obviously meant to be a metaphor here, the optics of having a white guy demean and insult everyone around him, then complain about being oppressed when he doesn't get special treatment, really doesn't help me feel sympathetic. Along with the fact that I don't think humans should be creating sentient computer programs in the first place, I just get really tired of all these 'boo hoo poor Doctor' storylines, particularly when the first half is him being mean to people who are supposed to be his friends, and the second half is an inferior retread of territory already explored in Next Generation with Data. 'The Measure of a Man' already established that artificial life forms have rights, so that should apply to the Doctor too, case closed. But they sidestep that so they can have a whole episode of trying to make us feel sorry for the Doctor.

He finally feels bad after several people turn the tables on him and show him how it feels to be put in the position he put them in, and eventually agrees to amend his work, but his unscupulous publisher releases the unaltered work without his permission because holograms don't have rights. It then turns into a courtroom drama as they try to prove that the Doctor is a person who should control his work. It ends with the court declining to rule on whether he's a person, but declaring that as the creator of an original work, he has the same rights as any artist to control it, and the holonovels are withdrawn. While it's a positive outcome, I still have a hard time feeling joy on behalf of a mean-spirited, self-centered character like the Doctor.

The subplot of the crew getting to have video chats with their families back home for the first time is much more interesting to me. We learn Chakotay has a sister! Why has she never been mentioned once in seven years?! I wish they'd talk more about the character's lives and families more often!

The Doctor being unwilling to let Harry go first so he could be there for his mom's birthday, just so he could try to publish his mean little holonovel, felt pretty obnoxious- there's no way he doesn't know how much it would mean to Harry, but he obviously doesn't care. At least Tom stepped up to help his bestie out!

Harry eventually does get a cute little videochat with his parents, and B'Elanna gets a videochat with her dad, which I feel was way too casual and friendly for the amount of trauma he caused her. I just can't imagine her so easily letting him back into her life as an adult after he abandoned her as a child, especially now that she's going to have a kid of her own. He's the reason she wanted to genetically alter her baby for goodness sake! Anyone who's that afraid of her daughter being treated the way her father treated her would be more skeptical of him, and would definitely need some kind of proof that he'd changed before even considering forgiving him or having a relationship with him. The idea that abusive parents automatically deserve forgiveness, and to waltz back into the lives of their grown children, is really toxic. The reality is that it takes a lot of work to rebuild trust in a situation like that, and I wish they'd have shown it being more thorny than what we saw here. It just seemed like an attempt to neatly wrap up her storyline without putting in any of the work to earn it.

Seven being convinced to reach out to her father's sister was a nice little moment. Seven getting to have some connection to her past self, and to Earth, by talking to someone who knew her then, was unexpectedly poignant.

The last scene of the Mark I EMH holograms reading the Doctor's revised holonovel on the mining planet was meant to be poignant, but it mostly just felt gross that Starfleet would give all these holograms sentience, only to treat them like programs again- they should have either deactivated them before their programs became advanced enough to be self aware, or they should let them choose something else when they objected to the job they were given. Creating sentient holograms and treating them like they're not sentient is very much against Starfleet ideals. I wish they wouldn't raise issues like that when they know they aren't going to address it on the show again, since it's nearing the end of the last season. The whole point of Star Trek is to show that humanity can do better, that even if we mess up, we can fix it- don't just show the status quo as being awful without anything being done to address it- that feels too much like reality, which is just depressing.

Tl;dr: Another attempt to create sympathy for the Doctor that just ends up showing him to be even more mean, selfish, and unlikeable than before.

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xo_aprilj_xo

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Melinda_melrose [ M e l i n d a B e r r y ]