BrainSpace

The voyager cast incudes some of my favorite characters in all of trek. Captain Janeway? Tuvok? Chakotay? B’elanna? The Doctor? Seven of Nine? Harry Kim? They are all such compelling characters!!! The actors all put their heart and souls into the performances! It is so easy to make up good stories about these characters!

And then a lot of the plots are actually good and compelling they just tend to lose the thread halfway through the episodes! The premise of the show is FASCINATING and they underutilize it immensely! A lot of the things that Do get written end up serving as incredible commentary on the time and NONE of it is self aware at all!!! It drives me nuts!

Like. It is so easy to keep watching voyager to feed the good version of voyager that lives in your brain. It is an excellent exercise in critical thinking and seeing what works about storytelling. The sets, the make up, the sound design, is all Incredible and it’s so visually fun to immerse yourself in.

And like. It’s fun! It’s a fun show! They boldly go! They get into situations! They have really compelling character arcs! They pose interesting questions! Do they think any of this through or resolve anything? Hell no! But part of Star Trek is making you think anyway! And it is SO fun to think about voyager. It is so fun to be like ok this is what I would have done to make this episode work, or, what do you think they were actually going for here, or, this was accidentally a really good commentary on what it’s like to be biracial or traumatized entirely by accident how wild, right?

And like that’s why every voyager fan is so deranged yes (I include myself in this god bless) because it takes a certain kind of person to see this show and care about it and think about it. And it also just hits that perfect spot in the curve where there is so much potential and also so much content that was not delivered on to make it absolutely Perfect for fan interpretation and fan content.

Andy: And then the next thing that happened was when I walked on set to do the very first scene with Sid, I saw Sid, and he was one of the most beautiful young men--

Connor: Yeah.

Andy: --I have ever seen in my life and I thought, wait a second. Wait a second, I want to f*ck this guy. This is what this is about, you know. Forget about the spy sh*t, I have no idea what that means.

Connor and Dominic: Right, right.

Andy: That's no action.

Connor: You can't play that.

Andy: And you can't play that, but I can play it if I want to get-- if I want to f*ck somebody, and I know how to play that.

Connor: Right, right.

Dominic: And they had no idea that this was--

Andy: No idea.

Dominic: --some back thought.

Andy: And god, Sid, god bless him because the moment I put my hand on his shoulder and I said--

Dominic: He felt it.

Andy: --he felt it and he picked it right up.

Connor: Oh, brilliant.

Dominic: Isn't that great?

Hello! I hand make these 3D Wire Galaxy fidgets. They were once popular back in the 1900’s, and were mostly enjoyed as a fun trinket, or hair piece. Enjoy this fun video of me making one from scratch! :)

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A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic. 

Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day. 

Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 egg 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour 1 tsp vanilla ½ tsp salt Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.

Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy.  Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour. 

Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick.  Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.

And it is GREAT.

It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

"hey, bobby, ginger's kid came out to her as non-binerary! can you believe it?"

"non-binary."

"huh? wha? what'd i say?"

"you said 'non-binerary.' the word is non-binary."

"right. non-byrony."

"ginger's gonna march with her kid in the parade next year! she's so excited!"

"she'll get to make signs... chant slogans..."

"you sound kind of jealous, lin."

"well, maybe i *am* jealous. maybe *i* wanna be a PFLAG mom."

"pee flag!!"

"...kids, are any of you non-binary?"

"i respond to both 'attaboy' and 'you go, girl!'"

In 1934-1936, trans brothers Mark and David Ferrow of Yarmouth, UK, both transitioned at age 13 with full parental support. Mark medically transitioned first in 1939 at 17 and his brother soon followed. “Though we have been girls, we have both felt men at heart,” Mark told a reporter. Their stories show that trans youth can grow up to be happy, celebrated adults.

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.