#rift 2017

[shesarealphony]

favorite horror watched in October 2023

[monstraduplicia]

Rökkur (2017) dir. Erlingur Thoroddsen

[angelfishofthelord]

for day three of my favorite queer media we have rift (2017). this icelandic mystery/horror is so friggin gorgeous and chilling and the relationship feels utterly authentic and raw

also like. gays in soft t shirts and sweaters. in the bleakest most mesmerizing landscape. the dialogue and interactions between characters is incredible. there's one scene in particular where it's just the two of them in bed talking that made me so emotional

[shadowgale96]

‘Why won't somebody come and save me from this? I must confess that I feel like a monster.’

Nadja - Blood Red Sky (2021)

Greta - Love, Death, and Robots: Beyond the Aquila Rift (2019)

Lily - Siren (2016)

Sai - Inhuman Kiss (2019)

Moder - The Ritual (2017)

Thomasin - VVitch (2015)

Dren - Splice (2009)

Beldam - Coraline (2009)

Melanie - Girl With All The Gifts (2016)

Irena - Cat People (1982)

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: Two men in an isolated holiday cabin try to process their failed relationship while increasingly strange events occur outside.

[aurosoulart]

two ol mans by The7thSea

this week’s #Phinart Friday features some sick crossover art between my comic Sunder and 7thSea’s comic The Rift! if you like webcomics with animal characters (and also dolphins of course) I highly suggest you check both of these out 👀

in this picture we have common dolphin Thavul meeting up with rough-toothed dolphin Diurn - either exchanging pleasantries or (much more likely) engaged in some form of blunt questioning (”Hey rough-tooth, what happened to your FACE?”)

Phinart Friday is a weekly feature for Sunder fanart! if you wanna be featured, tag me or submit your art here!

[selfindulgentsillinessbracket]

SELF INDULGENT SILLY BRACKET

Group 5 - Round 4

Remember to tag this blog in any propaganda posts so that I can see it. Also you can send in propaganda through my asks.

[shadowzgather]

"I'll do anything for a woman with a knife." { Jim @ Morgana. From; 𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐘 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒 }

"It's actually more of a ritual dagger." Morgana corrected, batting her eyes at him with a light blush. Jim was always so charming and sweet. She just needed a little of his blood to bind the magical items to him so that they couldn't be stolen from him. Well, at least not stolen easily. He'd need it for his crimefighting as Negaduck. That sentence still felt weird to her, but if it could change things for the better, she was all for it.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Young women are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, a trend that puts them squarely at odds with young men.

44% of young women counted themselves liberal in 2021, compared to 25% of young men, according to Gallup Poll data analyzed by the Survey Center on American Life. The gender gap is the largest recorded in 24 years of polling. The finding culminates years of rising liberalism among women ages 18 to 29, without any increase among their male peers.

Several societal forces have conspired to push young women to the left in recent years, including the #MeToo movement, former President Trump, rising LGBTQ identification and, most recently, abortion policy. Slower-cooking trends in marital status and educational attainment have also nudged the needle.

“I think there is a big generational shift that happened with Generation Z women who were really coming of age in the last five years,” said Kelsy Kretschmer, a sociologist at Oregon State University who studies gender politics.

The rift between young men and women may widen further. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a precedent that had protected abortion as a constitutional right for nearly half a century. The ruling has energized young women. New survey data, released this week, shows that 61% of young women consider abortion a critical issue, compared with 36% of all Americans.

“I would always choose a candidate that’s pro-abortion,” said Rose Merjos, 21, a government major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who is an avowed liberal. “Almost everyone either knows someone who has had an abortion or has had one themselves. This is something everyone can relate to.”

The share of men who identify as liberal has held fairly steady for almost 25 years, according to annual Gallup surveys. Roughly one-quarter of men ages 18 to 29 term themselves liberal, year after year.

Meanwhile, among young women, liberalism has exploded. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fewer than 30% of women identified as liberal. The liberal camp grew through the second term of former President George W. Bush. It expanded further during the tenure of former President Obama. It reached 39% in 2017 with the inauguration of Trump. In the last two years, liberalism surged anew.

“Young women today are much more liberal than young men,” Daniel Cox wrote in a June newsletter of the Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute. His work documents “a growing political rift” between young women and men.

Merjos attends a university long associated with both liberalism and activism. These days, though, she senses more of both among the women.

“In all of my government classes, there are probably two men out of 18 people,” she said. “ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], that’s mostly women. I’m wondering if women are maybe just more inclined to be involved in the community, engaged in the community. And that liberalizes them.”

Ezra Meyer, 22, is a senior at the George Washington (GW) University who leads the College Republicans. He is a conservative on a campus that is overwhelmingly liberal and largely female. In conversations with classmates about politics, he treads lightly.

“My metric for deciding if I’m going to be friends with someone really does not come down to what their politics are,” he said. “It comes down to how tolerant they are.”

Meyer doesn’t know whether the men at GW skew more liberal or conservative than the women. But he has noticed a distinct trend among campus conservatives this fall.

“We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting of freshmen on campus,” he said. “And I would say, overwhelmingly, it has been male. The conservative females that do get involved, there’s fewer of them, but they tend to be way more passionate and way more involved.”

Several factors have liberalized the nation’s 20-something women. The most recent, and perhaps the most powerful, is #MeToo, an uprising against sexual assault, abuse and harassment that caught fire in 2017, empowering millions of women to come forward and seek justice.

The inauguration of Trump in the same year pushed more young women into the liberal column. The 45th president battled his own #MeToo allegations and proved uniquely unpopular among young, female voters. Polling in 2016 showed that only 25% of women ages 18 to 34 favored Trump, compared with 40% of same-aged men.

The rise of liberalism among young women has also marched apace with a dramatic increase in young people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. In a recent survey, 56% of young women reported exclusive attraction to men, while three-quarters of young men said they were solely attracted to women. Prior research suggests LGBTQ Americans of all ages trend toward liberalism.

Several longer-term trends have fed the liberalization of young women as well. One is marriage. The share of women ages 18-29 who are married has fallen by half in twenty years, from 31% in 2000 to 15% in 2021, according to the National Opinion Research Center.

The growing ranks of single, 20-something women feel a sense of “linked fate,” researchers say. They gravitate toward female friends in political views, whereas married women more often mirror the politics of their spouses.

“The correlation between women’s sense of linked fate and liberal political preferences suggests that the Democratic Party will benefit” from declining marriage rates among young women, Kretschmer and two co-authors wrote in a 2017 paper for the journal Political Research Quarterly. They noted that “women make up the majority of the population and vote at high rates.”

Women also outpace men in educational attainment, a trend that dates to the 1980s. The ratio of women to men in college enrollment now stands at roughly 60 to 40, and it continues to grow. Americans who complete college are more liberal than those who do not.

“Putting off marriage, going to college, entering the workforce, women are doing that at much higher rates than they used to,” said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And all of those things are going to make conservatism and the Republicans significantly less attractive to women.”

In 1998, the first year of data collected by Gallup in its Social Series surveys, 28% of young men and 29% of young women identified as liberal. The gender gap in liberalism grew steadily wider in the 2000s, wider still in the 2010s. The 2021 poll yielded a 19-point spread between young men and young women, the largest on record.

“I do have some male friends that are moderate,” said Luci Paczkowski, 20, a California liberal. “And it annoys the hell out of me.”

What bothers Paczkowski about her nonliberal friends is not their centrism but her suspicion that they “do not have any clue why they are moderate. They just do not want to pick a side and, therefore, they are apathetic.”

[zvaigzdelasas]

Ecuadorian police stormed the Mexican embassy in Ecuador’s capital Quito on Friday night to arrest the former vice president, who is seeking asylum there, an escalation of tensions that Mexico decried as “an outrage against international law.”[...]

A rift between the two Latin American countries had been growing since Mexico’s decision to grant political asylum to Glas, vice president under leftist ex-President Rafael Correa between 2013 and 2017.

Convicted twice on corruption charges, Glas says he is the subject of political persecution and had been sheltering inside the embassy.

But on Friday, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on his official X account, said he had been informed that “police from Ecuador forcibly entered” the Mexican embassy and took Glas – who “was a refugee and processing asylum because of the persecution and harassment he faces.”[...]

Mexico plans to lodge a complaint with the International Court of Justice to denounce the Ecuadorian police’s actions, the spokesperson for Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs added.[...]

Adding to current tensions was Lopez Obrador’s apparent criticism of Ecuador’s recent elections, saying the 2023 run-off vote took place in a “very strange” manner and suggesting that presidential candidates had used the media, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio’s assassination and overall violence in their favor while campaigning.

The rift resulted in a series of diplomatic provocations this week, that also included Ecuador rejecting Mexico’s ambassador to the country, who was declared “persona non grata.”

6 Apr 24

[averyqueerhalloween]

Queer Horror/Thriller Movies! 🎃🏳️‍🌈

The Rocky Horror Picture Show - (1975)

The Hunger - (1983)

Interview With The Vampire - (1994)

Bound - (1996)

Wishing Stars - (2002)

Hellbent - (2004)

Jennifer's Body - (2009)

Paranorman - (2012)

Stranger By The Lake - (2013)

Lyle - (2014)

Mania - (2015)

The Untamed - (2016)

Raw - (2016)

The Neon Demon - (2016)

The Wild Boys - (2017)

Thelma - (2017)

B&B - (2017)

Rift - (2017)

What Keeps You Alive - (2018)

Knife + Heart - (2018)

The Perfection - (2018)

Braid - (2018)

Spiral - (2019)

The Craft: Legacy - (2020)

The Retreat - (2021)

The Last Thing Mary Saw - (2021)

Fear Street: Part One 1994 - (2021)

Fear Street: Part Two 1978 - (2021)

Fear Street: Part Three 1666 - (2021)

Queer For Fear - (2022)

Bodies Bodies Bodies - (2022)

They/Them - (2022)

Hypochondriac - (2022)

Wendall & Wild - (2022)

Knock At The Cabin - (2023)

Summoning Sylvia - (2023)

Jagged Mind - (2023)

[mutant-distraction]

Ol Doinyo Lengai, "Mountain of God" in the Maasai language, is an active volcano located in the Gregory Rift, south of Lake Natron within the Arusha Region of Tanzania, Africa.

Ol Doinyo Lengai is a symmetric cone that rises more than 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) above the surrounding rift valley. It has two craters on either side of the mountain summit, which is formed by a 110 metres (360 ft) high ridge. The floor of the northern crater is covered with lava flows that resemble pahoehoe lavas. Small cones with sizes ranging from 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) to over 10 meters (33 ft) occur in the crater and produce lava flows from their summits and, when they collapse, form their flanks.

The volcano is known for its unique, low temperature, carbonatitic lava. Eruptions have been recorded since the late 19th century, consisting of smaller tephra ejections and numerous carbonatitic lava flows on the floor of the summit crater and occasionally down the upper flanks. Activity primarily occurs in the crater offset to the north about 100 m below the summit where hornitos (small cones) and pit craters produce lava flows and spattering. The current eruption period began in April 2017 and more recently has consisted of ongoing thermal activity in the summit crater. Similar activity took place during August 2022 through January 2023. Via: Beautiful Mother Nature.

source: Planetary Landscapes

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Here's the archived link.

It's an interesting article about the back-and-forth this week over Charles's birthday. Did the Sussexes really call? Did Charles really talk to them?

The backstory: Victoria Ward broke the story that the Sussexes called Charles for his birthday. She says that Harry called and they spoke, and Meghan hopped on the line for a bit to speak, and they separately sent Charles a video of Archie and Lili singing 'happy birthday.'

Some takeaways:

"The fact that the Palace does not deny there was a call means we can safely assume that there was indeed a conversation" -> Not exactly true:

The Palace never comments even if there was a call. Personal calls to the BRF falls under the palace's "we don't speak about their personal lives" mantra.

Charles denying that there was a call would be terrible PR. It's a better strategy to keep quiet and let him rack up some "good Pa" PR points.

Meghan's PR from 2016/2017 claimed she had all sorts of meetings and phone calls with the royals that the Palace never addressed. The Palace's silence complicitness was very much "let's not and say we did," which this whole mess reeks of.

Usually the more specific and detailed something is, the more likely it's a lie. If Harry's press release had been "I called Pa for his birthday" it would be much more believable. But "I called Pa for his birthday and we spoke and then Meghan talked to him and then we had our kids make a video for someone they've never met to sing 'happy birthday' and we sent it to him" is suspect.

"The King always finds it exasperating when the media focuses on what he would see as trivia rather than the important work that he does, and there is a multiplier effect when the distraction involves Harry - doubly so in a week when the King is bracing for the release of the final series of The Crown on Netflix this week, poring over the death of Princess Diana." -> Harry's gotta get that Netflix connection.

"The King and Queen worry that if stories about phone calls and private conversations make it into the public domain they will be accused of leaking to the press, even if it's obvious it didn't come from them." -> The palace isn't Victoria Ward's source, even though it looks like it.

"...[Meghan's] attempt to launch a lifestyle and wellness brand. Planned as a rival to Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop empire, the launch had been heavily trailed for this autumn, but has now been put back to the other side of Christmas, at the earliest. The reason for the delay is unclear, but she has been given a rough ride by the US media of late and may want to wait until her approval ratings recover - something that a healed relationship with the Royal family would surely help." -> Meghan is Victoria Ward's source and:

She has no money (or backers) for the lifestyle and wellness brand.

She's banking on boosting her SEO with The Crown, Scobie's book, and Christmas-at-Sandringham-Reunion PR to make her the money she needs to launch the new brand.

She is expecting the public to take her side when Scobie's book is published.

"Toning down criticism of the King and Queen in any briefings the Sussex camp have given to Scobie is in itself a kind of olive branch" -> Scobie's book is a hit job against William and Catherine.

Interesting how the Sussexes are now openly and publicly admitting to their collaboration with Scobie for Endgame...especially after going to such lengths to obscure their involvement in Finding Freedom.

[gracesledomas]

31 Days of Horror ⤷Day 8: Rift (2017) dir. Erlingur Thoroddsen

[lulu2992]

Exploration of the now-offline Far Cry 5 official websites

Part 16: Nick Rye

Recovered content

As the first Gun for Hire to be revealed, Nick already had a description on the American website on July 13th, 2017:

THE PILOT NICK RYE Nick Rye broke away from a long line of Holland Valley air force veterans, his father included. Nick’s father pressured his son to enlist, but Nick refused, choosing to stay and take care of his wife. After years of building his crop dusting business, Eden’s Gate is aggressively trying to buy him out. All his life, Nick’s resisted the idea of going to war, and now war has come to him. It’s time to become a true American hero.

The embedded video was this one:

Like Mary May and Jerome, he was also mentioned in the “Meet Far Cry 5's Characters” News article from May 26th, 2017:

NICK RYE (GUN FOR HIRE) Nick comes from a long line of military pilots, and his decision not to enlist created a deep rift between him and his father. Instead, Nick took up the family legacy in a different way, waging war against farm pests as a cropduster pilot and trying to start a family with his wife, Kim. Lately, though, Eden's Gate has been making his life difficult through its aggressive attempts to buy his cropdusting business, and as the situation in Hope County heats up, it seems war has finally come to Nick's doorstep. And this time, he's answering the call.

On or before February 9th, 2018, his description changed, and a link to “Learn More” about him appeared.

THE PILOT NICK RYE Nick Rye broke away from a long line of Holland Valley Air Force veterans. His grandfather flew in WWII and in ‘Nam, and told Nick that war is hell—no exceptions. All his life, Nick has resisted the idea of going to war. But now war has come to him. It’s time for him to step up and become the true American hero he was destined to be.

The link took you to another News article posted on February 8th, 2018, and titled “The Hope County Resistance”. This is what it said about him:

NICK RYE - The King of the Skies - PILOT Name: NICK RYE Role: Gun for Hire Bio: Nick Rye broke away from a long line of Holland Valley Air Force veterans. His grandfather flew in WWII and in ‘Nam, and told Nick that war is hell—no exceptions. Nick met his wife Kim online and was attracted by her stories of travelling the world. After 9/11, he was pressured by his father to enlist, but Nick refused, choosing to stay and take care of his wife, who had recently suffered a miscarriage. Nick never reconciled with his father. Recently, John Seed—Eden’s Gate’s lawyer—has aggressively tried to buy Nick’s crop-dusting business. But Nick has refused to no end. And to complicate matters worse, after years of trying, Nick and Kim are expecting their first child any day now. All his life, Nick has resisted the idea of going to war. But now war has come to him. It’s time for him to step up and become the true American hero he was destined to be.

The appearance of his information box then changed on March 27th, 2018 (or earlier), and a new video appeared:

It was this trailer:

As for the European website, this is what it said about him:

NICK RYE THE PILOT Nick Rye broke away from a long line of Holland Valley air force veterans, his father included. Nick’s father pressured his son to enlist, but Nick refused, choosing to stay and take care of his wife. After years of building his crop dusting business, Eden’s Gate is aggressively trying to buy him out. All his life, Nick resisted the idea of going to war, and now war has come to him. It’s time to become a true American hero.

The video is the Ubisoft UK version of the second one posted on the American page:

And “More Info” took you to the official and still available Cosplay Reference Guide posted in June 2017:

NICK RYE Nick comes from a long line of military pilots, and his decision not to enlist created a deep rift between him and his father. Instead, Nick took up the family legacy in a different way, waging war against farm pests as a crop-duster pilot and trying to start a family with his wife, Kim. Lately, though, Eden's Gate has been making his life difficult through its aggressive attempts to buy his crop-dusting business, and as the situation in Hope County heats up, it seems war has finally come to Nick's doorstep. And this time, he's answering the call.

Commentary

I don’t think anybody in Far Cry 5 says Nick and his father were on bad terms, but since no one clearly says they had a great relationship either, that could still be true. In any case, Nick says his parents both passed away at the Hope County Clinic. He has a line in the files about his father and grandfather fighting in wars, but I don’t know if it’s stil in the game.

In deleted dialog, Kim confirmed she met her husband online, that she used to travel the world a lot when she was young, and that Eden’s Gate pressured them to sell their property. However, nobody mentions a miscarriage or says that the couple had trouble conceiving. If the information provided in the News article is still accurate, when we meet them in Far Cry 5, Nick and Kim have been married and trying to have a baby for at least 17 years (since 2001)!

Under the cut are all the available source files, saved directly from the website, of the images you see in the screenshots:

[blueiskewl]

Rare 350 Million-Year-Old Tree Fossils Has Scientists ‘Gobsmacked’

Rare tree fossils preserved with their leaves have an architecture unlike any plant known today and represent the earliest evidence of smaller trees growing beneath the forest canopy.

Trees are believed to have originated hundreds of millions of years ago. Ever since, evidence of these ancient plant sentinels has been in short supply.

Now, a new discovery of uniquely 3D tree fossils has opened a window into what the world was like when the planet’s early forests were beginning to evolve, expanding our understanding of the architecture of trees throughout Earth’s history.

Five tree fossils buried alive by an earthquake 350 million years ago were found in a quarry in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, according to a study published Friday in the journal Current Biology. The authors said these new and unusual fossil trees not only bear a surprising shape reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss illustration, they reveal clues about a period of life on Earth of which we know little.

“They are time capsules,” said Robert Gastaldo, a paleontologist and sedimentologist who led the study, “literally little windows into deep-time landscapes and ecosystems.”

Coauthors Olivia King and Matthew Stimson unearthed the first of the ancient trees in 2017 while doing fieldwork in a rock quarry in New Brunswick. One of the specimens they discovered is among a handful of cases in the entire plant fossil record — spanning more than 400 million years — in which a tree’s branches and crown leaves are still attached to its trunk.

Few tree fossils that date back to Earth’s earliest forests have ever been found, according to Gastaldo. Their discovery helps fill in some missing pieces of an incomplete fossil record.

“There are only five or six trees that we can document, at least in the Paleozoic, that were preserved with its crown intact,” said Gastaldo, a professor of geology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Most ancient tree specimens are relatively small, he noted, and often discovered in the form of a fossilized trunk with a stump or root system attached. For his colleagues to find a preserved tree that could have been 15 feet tall in its maturity with an 18-foot diameter crown left the paleontologist “gobsmacked.”

Ancient earthquake burial

The researchers excavated the first fossil tree about seven years ago, but it took another few years before four more specimens of the same plant were found in close proximity to one another. Dubbed “Sanfordiacaulis,” the newly identified species was named in honor of Laurie Sanford, the owner of the quarry where the trees were unearthed.

The forms taken by these previously unknown 350 million-year-old plants look somewhat like a modern-day fern or palm, per the study, despite the fact that those tree species didn’t appear until 300 million years later. But while the tops of ferns or palms as we know them boast few leaves, the most complete specimen of the newly discovered fossils has more than 250 leaves preserved around its trunk, with each partially preserved leaf extending around 5.7 feet (1.7 meters).

That fossil is encased in a sandstone boulder and roughly the size of a small car, according to Stimson, an assistant curator of geology and paleontology at the New Brunswick Museum.

The unique fossilization of the cluster of trees is likely due to a “catastrophic” earthquake-induced landslide that took place in an ancient rift lake, he said.

“These trees were alive when the earthquake happened. They were buried very quickly, very rapidly after that, at the bottom of the lake, and then the lake (went) back to normal,” Stimson said.

Finding complete fossil trees is rare and much less common than finding a complete dinosaur, according to Peter Wilf, a professor of geosciences and paleobotanist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved with the study. Wilf noted via email that the “unusual” new fossil tree was a relic of a time period from which there are almost no tree fossils.

“The new fossils are a milestone in our understanding of how early forest structure evolved, eventually leading to the complex rainforest architectures that support most of Earth’s living biodiversity,” Wilf added.

‘Very Dr. Seuss’

To King, a research associate at the New Brunswick Museum who found the group of fossils, the Sanfordiacaulis would have looked like something plucked straight out of Dr. Seuss’ most popular works.

“You know in ‘The Lorax,’ the trees have these big pom-poms at the top and narrow trunks? These probably have a similar structure. You have this massive crown at the top, and then it does narrow and paper into this very small trunk,” King said. “It’s a very Dr. Seuss-looking tree. It’s a weird and wonderful idea of what this thing could look like.”

But the reign of the Sanfordiacaulis was short-lived, the researchers said. “We do not see this architecture of plant again,” Stimson said. He noted that it grew in the early Carboniferous, a time period at the end of the Paleozoic Era when plants and animals were diversifying as they started to make their way from water to land.

Much of evolution is experimental, with success often measured by a species’ versatility, or ability to adapt to many different places and conditions. The peculiar set of tree fossils presents proof of a “failed experiment of science and evolution,” Stimson added. “We’re really starting to paint that picture as to what life was like 350 million years ago.”

Looking forward

Fossils such as the Sanfordiacaulis are not just useful in helping humans understand how life changed in the past, they can help scientists figure out where life on our planet might be headed next.

The existence of this particular species suggests that trees of the period were starting to occupy different ecological niches beyond what was previously understood, according to the researchers behind its discovery.

Gastaldo sees this as an indication that plants — much like early invertebrates — were experimenting with how they adapted to the environment. The earthquake that likely led to the trees’ fossilization also offers new geological evidence of what may have been occurring in Earth’s systems at the same moment in time.

“This is really the first evidence we have of (a tree) that would be between what grows on the ground and what would tower way above the ground,” Gastaldo said. “What else was there?”

By Ayurella Horn-Muller.