always a little starstruck

Antony Green, Australian electoral analyst legend, called his final election on 3 May before his upcoming retirement.

The ABC put together a package in tribute to him that included interviews with 6 of the 7 living former Australian PMs (and read out a statement from Paul Keating, the seventh).

They then got Annabel Crabb, the person on the panel who has been on election night panels with Antony for the longest stretch of time, back to the Tally Room days, to present him with a bunch of flowers.

Antony’s response? “I don’t own a flower vase”.

But not to worry. Two days later, the man himself updates us on the fact he DID manage to find a vase for his flowers:

Yes, that’s a beer jug. And one that’s clearly been knocked off a pub-brewery that’s close to his home.

Imagine the Republican party was expected to win the next election in four months' time. The leader is a bit of a narcissist, but he's polling ahead of the other guy very steadily, and everyone expects him to win.

Then election day comes. The election instead goes to the Democrats in a historic landslide victory. The election is so handily won by the Dems that the results are called just under half an hour after the last polls close on the West Coast. The leader of the Republican party is voted out of politics entirely. The Republican party then splits in two, breaking up an alliance that's lasted like a century, meaning that their chances of winning a federal election ever again are basically nil if they can't resolve their differences and coalesce again.

The Corpus of Electronic Texts, or CELT, a collection of Irish cultural materials. This includes English translations of Irish myths.

Mary Jones - similar to CELT, and a resource we used for translations in the Irish mythology class I took in undergrad.

An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Mary Briggs, a British folklorist.

The Folklore of Cornwall by Ronald M. James. Unfortunately this book is harder to access and is often only in university libraries, but if you're interested in piskies it's a potentially very helpful read.

I love ravelry.

Not getting into ending spoilers but Steven Spielberg plays a character who is pivotal to the climax of the film.

Ray Charles fires a warning shot from a pistol at a shoplifter.

They did location filming in a mall that had closed the previous year in 1978. The production fucked that mall up so bad that it remained abandoned until it was finally demolished in 2012.

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

We all saw Elon Musk do the nazi salute at the Trump inauguration. We know that he is influencing and fanning the flames of right wing political parties.

And that very well may include ours.

Because Elon Musk has pledged to donate $100 million to the Reform party. He has since mentioned that it might be hard to give such a large sum now.

But I don’t think we should take our chances. And I think we can agree that letting billionaires influence our countries politics is a terrible idea.

If you also agree here’s a link to a Parliament petition.

It calls for the government to remove loopholes that allow wealthy foreign individuals to make donations into UK political parties (e.g. by funnelling through UK registered companies).

As it is a parliament petition the government are required to debate it in parliament. But for that to happen it needs to reach 100,000 signatures.

Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)

Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)

Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.

A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.

Arguably Game of Thrones.

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”