cabbage

This is a painful reminder of the buffalo slaughter of the 1800s, when white colonizers tried to kill off all of the buffalo just to keep native American people from having resources.

Colonizers commit mass killing/full exterminations of native wildlife to further the genocide of native peoples and make way for the exploitation and abuse of imported farmed animals, which is further damaging to the environment and human health in general. It happens in every colonized area, from the bison in the US to the eels in Aotearoa.

People can fight these bills all they want, but they're going to keep coming if we continue to shill for and pay the companies that fund them. Stop giving them money if you can avoid it.

The mass killing of bison matters because it's used to harm native people.

It matters because bison are living creatures that feel emotions and pain and don't deserve to be killed.

It matters because the cattle that will be grazed on that land don't deserve to be exploited and killed for money, for a burger.

It’s difficult to fully articulate the hold that Patrick Stewart had on audiences when TNG was airing. Between the hundreds of magazine covers, the talk show circuits, and the paparazzi nonsense, the amount of baldness puns editors were compelled to create was astounding.

It was like the media fixated on this man because he had catastrophic levels of charisma and audiences were losing their minds over him (TNG was regularly beating network shows in ratings), yet he was so far removed from the narrow Hollywood standards of beauty that it vexed and haunted these people for years.

Baldness was a joke in Hollywood. 75% of George Costanza's identity revolved around bald jokes. If you were a bald actor, you were cast as a villain or a buffoon, never the hero. And if you were losing your hair, you had to slap a wig on or risk losing your career. Yul Brynner was somewhat of an exception but he was from a much different generation of Hollywood and even Bruce Willis didn't fully shave his head until 1994 (post TNG success incidentally).

In Patrick Stewart's case, there was often an undercurrent of snide putdowns with many interviewers, drawing focus to his baldness over and over and over again with low hanging jokes. It was like you could see their vanity-based paradigms cracking in real time and it was strange to witness. Imagine how bizarre it would be if talk show hosts today could only ask The Rock, Vin Diesel, or Jason Statham about their bald heads.

But karma swooped in to the rescue. In 1992 Stewart was voted TV Guide's "Sexiest Man on Television" with a whopping 54% of votes. He beat out the likes of Luke Perry, John Corbett, A. Martinez, and even Burt Reynolds (with a total of 20 contenders).

The middle-aged bald guy in the syndicated sci-fi show beat out the hottest of the Hot Guys™️ and it wasn't even remotely close.

^ Bald joke

Various K/S pins, 1970s-80s

Someone’s probably done this before, but First Contact! AU where Jim is an astronaut who got stranded and Spock is the vulcan scientist who saved him.

Sketches and rambles under cut: