Female, bisexual. Lover of Tamora Pierce's Tortall and Emelan, Disney, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere, Animorphs, NaruHina, Sailor Moon (Crystal), reading, drawing, and So Much More.
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Gather around, my young friends and fellow dinosaurs, let me tell you about some BULLSHIT no one ever tells you about. I'm talking about menopause and perimenopause. Now, menopause has a very stringent medical definition. You have to not have had a period for exactly 12 months and a day to be considered in menopause. All the bullshit before that day once you start going through The Change is considered perimenopause. Here's some bullshit you might experience that people actually talk about when you're in perimenopause:
- shorter time between periods
- irregular periods
- hot flashes and/or cold flashes
- fucked up sleep
- OMG NIGHT SWEATS
- Vagina as dry as the Sahara desert
- lighter periods and/or endless bleeding like it's The Flood but it's in your pants
- lack of interest in Adult Fun Times
This time of joy can last anywhere from a couple of years to a god damn decade and there's no medical way right now to predict it.
Here's some of the REAL bullshit they don't tell you about but your dinosaur aunt is here to let you know:
- You can start perimenopause in your 30s, don't listen to idiot doctors who tell you you're "too young" because they don't know your body like you do.
- Perimenopause will make you HELLA DUMB. Seriously, I'm talking Bigly broken brain. Brain fog? Check. Short term memory? Wave goodbye to it. Ability to make words form out of thoughts? Yeah, good luck to you.
- Perimenopause can cause horrible fatigue because in addition to losing estrogen, you're also losing testosterone. Oh and that also leads to muscle wasting, cool cool.
- Things might suddenly hurt more because estrogen is known to be neuroprotective.
- If you're super lucky like I am, and like to collect rare illnesses, you might even get Burning Mouth Syndrome 💀
- And meanwhile, while you're going through this bullshit, you'll be getting gaslit by doctors who are operating based on 30 year old debunked data about how HRT causes breast cancer (not really) and that they shouldn't put you on it until you're in actual menopause. (Data shows starting HRT early can potentially prevent Alzheimer's in later years.)
- There are entire online clinics right now (I use Midi Health) focused on providing care for peri and menopausal patients and they will happily prescribe you HRT even if your regular PCP or OBGYN do not (if you meet the criteria). I've been pretty impressed with how holistically they view the patient. For full disclosure, I learned about them from my integrative health doctor and they do not accept Medicare (yet).
I'm 46 years old right now and I've been symptomatic for perimenopause for the last 8 years, although it's gotten the most dramatic in the past 2 years or so, which I hope means I'm almost done, holy hell. Yeah I was on the early side, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, so it's never too early to think about these things. And I hope to at least spare some of you the mind-fuckery I've been through because no one told me about most of this stuff, including my own mother who just DOESN'T REMEMBER what happened to her and now I completely understand why. And because I also have a connective tissue disease, I used to just dismiss my pain and fatigue as being caused by that illness rather than the loss of hormones.
Anyways, this is why we need Elders in our lives, so they can do Grandma Story Hour like I just did and validate you when the entire medical field tries to gaslight you. I hope you've found some or all of this educational/useful. Please share with your friends because we really do NOT talk about this stuff enough. (Ewwww Moon Blood!)
Stay well, and don't let the bastards grind you down!
So this was one of the original songs that would have been in the earlier version of Tangled, called Rapunzel, and it would have been Mother Gothel’s villain song. This was back when Rapunzel was a LOT darker and more in line with Hunchback… so why am I posting this?
Because I honestly think that THIS is the best cut villian song that Disney ever made. Like, ever. Give it a listen.
(Credit goes to Christopher Curtis. As for the images, its a bit difficult, but its mostly comprised of concept art of Rapunzel.)
Hurry, hurry, here's your chance... to submit a question to be discussed at The Official Unofficial 30th Anniversary Fan Celebration of Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame!
This online event will be hosted live and it will be facilitated in the format of a panel discussion with our special guests. The timing of the event is still TBC, but it will be confirmed shortly!
In addition to this online panel discussion with our special guests, we're also exploring the possibility of doing a casual group chat for fans to chat together afterwards (online via. Discord), and an in-person meet up in Paris on Sunday, June 21st.
Please review these guidelines when submitting your question(s):
You can submit multiple questions. There is no set limit on the number of questions that you can submit, but it's better to focus on "quality over quantity". We want questions that will evoke lively and engaging discussions.
Questions about our guests’ personal experiences working on the movie are allowed, but no questions about their private life. We want everyone to feel comfortable.
Keep all questions related to Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although there are themes in the movie that are relevant to the present day, this is not meant to be a political discussion. This event is meant to celebrate how much we all love Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, reminisce about our favourite related memories over the past 30 years, and for our special guests to share their insights and experiences working on the movie.
Keep all questions PG-13 (at most).
Due to time constraints, some questions may not be selected.
The deadline for submissions is Friday, May 29th at Midnight PST.
If you don't make the deadline or if you think of another question later on, don't worry! There will be time allocated at the end to take additional questions in real-time.
For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."
Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.
Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.
Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.
The best part is the local city council's reaction.
And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.
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I saw the answer on series comparable to Animorphs. So in the spirit of that question, from one Eleutherophobia fan to another, is there a series comparable to Eleutherophobia that you could recommend?
I have an entire Goodreads shelf called "After the Adventure" for books set after the end of a different story! Here are some of them:
Die by Keiron Gillen. One of my all-time favorite series, which is why it gets top billing despite being a comic not a novel. The 42-year-old survivors of a fantasy adventure that stole their adolescence (and one character's arm, and one character's life, and the protagonist's gender) realize they left a friend behind when they escaped last time, and now they need to go back in.
Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The world's greatest band of monster-killers has been retired for decades, but their former leader's daughter got her army in over their heads. So now the 60-something curmudgeons will just have to dust off their armor, ignore their aching knees, and go try to rescue her.
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory. Tells the story of a support group for sole survivors of adventures that no one else believes, because they all feature magic or monstrousness. One of the few high-quality depictions of therapy I've ever seen in a horror novel.
Mister Magic by Kiersten White. A group of former Mouseketeers child stars come to realize the show they were on was less Mickey Mouse Club, more Candle Cove, and now they're being forced onto a reunion tour that's even more sinister than it seems.
Wendy, Darling by A.C. Wise. Picks up at the end of Peter Pan, when an adult Wendy sees her daughter leave with Peter — and decides to hunt Peter down and steal her kid back, because her perspective on Neverland has shifted a lot in the last 30 years.
The Secret Country by Pamela Dean. Five cousins co-wrote an adventure story by playing pretend in their backyard — and then they switch universes with their fictional protagonist selves, and find themselves in their imagined country. Now they have to decide whether this is a game they want to play out, or an all-too-real political intrigue they need to escape before it turns deadly.
Fuck Fairyland by Skottie Young. When she was six, Gert fell into a magical world of candy and rainbows and talking animals. That was forty years ago. Now a bitter middle-aged alcoholic still trapped in her six-year-old body, Gert is determined to escape Fairyland no matter who she has to dismember to do it.
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. The most famous after-the-adventure novel ever written, featuring a boarding school for the survivors of portal fantasies. That said, McGuire is not my jam — I've tried several of her books and this is the only one I've ever finished. IMHO it's both cozy to the point of cloying and half-heartedly shocking. Plus, when I hold it up against We Are All Completely Fine, its casual "therapy sucks, amirite?" attitude is super annoying, especially in combination with the protagonists' therapy-speak.
From one Animorphs fan to another, is there a series comparable to Animorphs that you could recommend?
TBH, I don't know of any that are super similar. Animorphs is such a product of its time and its author(s) that even series that directly competed (Goosebumps, Dinotopia) look nothing like it. However.
Series that do cool things with first-person narration like Animorphs:
Queen's Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Set in a fictional version of ancient Greece/Turkey, the series follows one protagonist (primarily a thief, but hobnobs with queens) through a handful of different narrators who see him as a hero, a villain, a loser, a genius, a traitor, a savior... And they're all kind of right.
Pendragon by D.J. MacHale. The world's most relatable teenager narrates adventures across the multiverse. It's notable for its overt grappling with questions of ethics during war — at one point the narrator has to decide whether to kill 30 innocent people to keep nuclear weapons out of Nazi hands.
Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis. Truly a book about "we live in a society," only the twist is that the two different protagonists live in two different universes with two different definitions of "disability"... and then they develop a psychic connection.
Children's books that will ruin your life (/pos) like Animorphs:
The Nest by Kenneth Oppel. A heartbreaking and horrifying story about loss, fear, being disbelieved by adults, being overshadowed by a new baby, and the dawning realization that grown-ups can't fix any of the things that are most fundamentally wrong with the world.
Lewis Barnavelt by John Bellairs. The series that shows that children's horror does not have to be cozy, when it could instead be paranoid and atmospheric and disturbing.
Feed by M.T. Anderson. This book came out in 2002 but could have been written last year, all about how advertising is eating the lives of contemporary teens.
Books with many of the plots/structures that make Animorphs good:
Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden. Thank you @zarohk for recommending this series — it really is the closest to Animorphs I've ever found. A group of teens is camping in the Outback when the alien invasion takes their town, leaving them to decide how much violence they're willing to do in order to try and free their parents.
Endling by Katherine Applegate. Do I cheat by including this? Very well, then I cheat. An unapologetically disturbing premise (an "endling" is the last animal in an otherwise extinct species) gets softened over time by the power of friendship and screwball comedy, without losing sight of the horror.
Die by Kieron Gillen, or The Power Fantasy (Gillen), or The Nice House by the Lake by James Tynon IV. All are comics, not novels, so I'm grouping them at the end. But all have the common thread of "queer found family gradually turns toxic while dealing with dark magical adventures," and all remind me of Animorphs' uplifting yet disturbing codependency between the protagonists.
Gone by Micheal Grant (husband of Katherine Applegate) Every adult in a town off the coast of CA disappears all at once (like they got thanks snapped). Every single horrifying consequence of this you can think of is explored, and (some of) the surviving kids get superpowers. Brilliant political commentary, really funny sections, and some of the most graphic violence I read in middleschool. (Warning: while animorphs is aimed at elementary schoolers, Gone is aimed for middle/highschoolers)
He’s Superman! An illegal alien and reporter granted powers and abilities beyond mortal men by earth’s yellow sun.
Dak Hamee
i love the hork-bajir and their blades that cut tree bark and their peaceful nature <3 also dak and aldrea (purple girl on the left)'s love story is cute.
Only one person has bought my Anti-Fascist BL sticker, meanwhile the Anti-Fascist Yuri sticker was a hot seller. 🤔
Unless a lot of fujoshis prove me wrong (by buying some stickers), I'll be forced to assume that BL lovers are more fascist than yuri fans. 😢 Don't let me down, fujos...
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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Over approximately 10 days, our Artemis II crew successfully completed a voyage around the Moon. They gave us stunning photos of the far side of the Moon, Earth, and a solar eclipse, along with inspirational messages, laughs, and even a few tears. Let's recap the Artemis II mission.
First step: fit check.
Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen got suited up and had their spacesuits checked to make sure they were ready to go to space.
Once their custom-fit suits were checked and the astronauts were ready, they walked out to greet the crowd at our Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After saying hi to everyone, including their families, the quartet made their way onto the Orion spacecraft that would carry them to the Moon.
The astronauts entered Orion and completed more checks. Next, the closeout crew closed the final hatch on Orion.
Then, it was time for the big moment – well, the first big moment of the mission: Liftoff!
Orion was on its way to the Moon, and the astronauts aboard had plenty to do.
They exercised…
and conducted interviews…
all while showing the camaraderie and collaboration that make missions possible.
And that means Rise, too! The little plush zero gravity indicator was a constant companion throughout the mission.
Finally, it was time for them to go around the Moon and observe its far side. As the astronauts began to describe features of the Moon that they saw, they had a heartfelt moment when suggesting that a crater be named after Reid's late wife, Carroll.
During the lunar flyby, the foursome experienced a solar eclipse that only they could see!
All throughout the mission, there were many moments of "Moon Joy."
After the crew completed their observation duties, it was time to start the journey back home.
On April 10, the Artemis II astronauts safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the mission to a triumphant end.
These GIFs are just a taste of the amazing imagery and memorable moments from Artemis II. Relive it all on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/NASA
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
I really want you to get started on Jurassic Park now after reading your tags.
All right, you asked for it! This post is going to be long because I've been rereading Jurassic Park since I was about 10 years old. But. My thoughts:
Jurassic Park is the oldest story in the world: one about hubris, and the price men pay for their pride. From the first moment the protagonists step foot on the island, they can see it. There are poisonous plants next to the pool because they "look pretty." The harbor has no retaining wall because tropical storms aren't considered important. It's a story where you respect nature, or you die. Wu doesn't bother to learn the dinosaurs' names before breeding them, Nedry ignores them as unprogrammable, Malcolm mansplains them to their own creators, Regis laughs at the idea of them escaping, Hammond relentlessly monetizes them, Arnold insists he can control them... And they all get eaten by dinosaurs. It's the characters with the good sense to be overawed and scared (Muldoon, Gennaro, the paleontologists, the kids) who make it out alive. Almost paradigm.
More specifically, it's a book about the most fundamental principle of engineering: be scared, be confused, and then do something anyway. Then do something else, then something else, until something works. Timmy isn't a master hacker in the book; he's just (unlike Grant) willing to push buttons on the computer until he finds the power grid. Gennaro's still a scaredy cat in the book, but he clenches his teeth and goes into the velociraptor nest anyway. The heroic characters are the ones who conclude someone has to do something, despite not knowing what that something is. The villainous ones are the ones who refuse responsibility.
Speaking of which, can we talk about Ian Malcolm? I'm a sucker for a good Cassandra character, especially one that manages to get even the genre-savvy reader rolling their eyes and going "will you shut up?" And Malcolm is one of the best, every off-putting academic habit rolled into one: He thinks he's better than other people for not liking sports. He brags about not caring about appearances and then comments on Sattler's legs. He assumes Hammond has read his monograph and — when Hammond reveals he hasn't — pulls out a copy that he keeps on his person at all times to have Hammond read on the plane. He smugly explains that other characters should've foreseen they'd be killed by dinosaurs, only to be killed by dinosaurs. He calls his theory the Malcolm Effect. I do love Jeff Goldblum's gentler, more charming take on the character ("See, here, now I'm sitting by myself, talking to myself, that's chaos theory" I say literally every time I ask a question of someone who just left the room). But I prefer the way original Malcolm gets away with being right about everything because we so so badly want him to be wrong.
Speaking of that comment about the legs: by the low low bar of 80s/90s thriller writers, Crichton is surprisingly progressive. Jurassic Park invites us to laugh with (and roll our eyes with) Sattler, every time someone expresses shock the world's top paleobotanist is a woman. The Lost World perfectly captures the "women in STEM have to be twice as competent to get half the respect" dynamic, and it's a story about the male characters over-estimating their own competence as the female ones go about saving the day. Race isn't handled perfectly, but it is discussed in both books. Malcolm's chauvinism is designed to make everything else he says a bitter pill, to poison us against him. Crichton's no feminist. But Sattler's hardiness — later Harding's and Kelly's as well — are shown as hard-won in a world that batters nerdy girls so hard that only the toughest survive.
And Malcolm is just one of the many ways Jurassic Park masterfully lampoons scientific bullshit. After little Tina is bitten by a "strange lizard" and nearly dies from the swelling, Dr. Cruz assures her parents that lizards bite zookeepers all the time, that some people are allergic to lizard venom, and that the lizard Tina drew resembles a basilisk — and then we cut to him talking to his fellow MD. Where we find out that lizards don't attack humans in the wild, no human they know of has ever been hospitalized for a lizard bite, basilisks aren't venomous, and Tina's condition doesn't resemble an allergic reaction. They have no idea what this "lizard" (a Procompsognathus) could be or how it poisoned this kid, but they've been taught to obfuscate rather than admit that. Scientists are arrogant, and ignorant of their ignorance.
But the book is every bit as positive about empiricism as it is negative about individual scientists. The seamless way Crichton blends science fiction with science fact gets me every time. His preface connects Watson & Crick to Swanson & Boyer to Malcolm & Levine, explaining each step of the research process as he goes. He goes on to explain how Genetech developed its ideas from IBM, and that IBM and Genetech both contributed to InGen, which in turn influenced Biosyn, funded by Hamaguri... and only two of those names are fictional, but don't worry about which. Crichton does his homework, and then he presents his homework in the most compelling way of any writer I've ever encountered.
You need no further proof than the technologies — satellite phones, electric cars, touchscreens, gene editing — that were sci fi in 1990, commonplace today. Crichton did the reading. And he rolls that science out ever-so-slowly: dribbling first the mystery of the worker with a 3-foot gash in his torso who claims a bird of prey did it, then the mystery of the resort that needs the world's most powerful data storage, then the mystery of the billionaire who calls in the middle of the night with "urgent" questions about what baby dinosaurs eat... Until even 10-year-old me could look at that picture of a fractal and go "ohhh, I see how the unstable phase shifts of chaos theory explain the fact that a thunderstorm caused that guy to get eaten by a T. rex." Almost paradigm.
And all Jurassic Park's banging on about chaos theory belies a deep understanding of how interconnected ecosystems are. Animals, like plants, like subatomic particles, must be understood holistically. Pretending that the best way to learn the truth of any system is through breaking it down "is like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It's nothing of the sort. It's uniquely Western training." Crichton clearly loves biology: "a single fertilized egg has a 100,000 genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell... A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build the stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn't show up when he's supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman's lunch is perfect." And he clearly hates what capitalism has done to biotechnology.
Hammond the venture capitalist is a perfectly despicable villain: No dinosaurs have escaped, because I said so. If there are problems, no there aren't. Put on a good show for investors, no matter how many contractors die in the process. Talk about all the "good" the park will do by making tons of money. The kids are stranded and the tech expert's dead? No they're not, because I said so, now pass the ice cream. It's truly a delight watching him get eaten by dinosaurs.
For that matter, Jurassic Park is bursting with details of style over substance. There are cutesy Apatosaurus cutouts in the hotel rooms and bars on the widows, a half-finished restaurant covered in Pterosaur poop, and a celebrity-narrated tour track that can't synchronize with the dinosaurs. It's trying to be Disney World, and it's actually a roadside zoo. The signage — "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," the hand-lettered "Welcome to Jurassic Park", the room (and department) called "Control" — isn't subtle in its irony. But it is fun.
Which is yet another great sci fi trick. "Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks" perfectly sets up the blend of the accurate with the plot-fueling (likely why Crichton reuses it several times). Why are there Pterosaurs in a dinosaur park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. Why are so many Cretaceous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. You didn't know Dilophosaurus is venomous? Our funding is infinite... It's perfect, because it's the opposite of how the scientific process usually works. Again: Crichton knows his shit, and he knows how to communicate it.
Like, even when I'm reading Sphere or Terminal Man — books where I'm perfectly aware I know more than Crichton on the subject, not in the least because their science inevitably became outdated — I still find myself believing, at least for the length of the story. You don't have to suspend disbelief when reading Crichton's work; he hoists it into the stratosphere for you. Half the time he won't give it back even after you're done. Almost paradigm.
But despite all that nerdery, Jurassic Park is still a rocking adventure story that builds momentum until it smashes to its conclusion at 70 miles an hour, ending the millisecond it can do so with not a word of denouement. You can practically hear that last deep piano note on the final words. It's cinematic as hell. This is Crichton post-Westworld, pre-Twister, the ultimate adventure writer. He reads, clearly, avoiding the errors of sci fi amateurs who watch too many movies (the T. rex has a distinctive smell, the island is relentlessly humid, so on) but he knows how to make a tight fast-moving story that you can consume in under three hours. His imagery is powerful, his pacing is on point, and his plot sucks you in and shoots you out like a water slide.
Jurassic Park is fun. It's informative. It makes you laugh, and gasp, and sigh, and think. It has its flaws (Harding Sr. fades out in the 3rd act, Grant's Maiasaura expertise never pays off) but those are minor in a book that stands up so well to rerereading. Almost paradigm.
Further thoughts that didn't fit in the initial review:
Lost World is the better adventure story, getting the characters to the island and facing major problems almost right away. I'm torn whether that or Jurassic Park is the better novel overall, because Lost World has better writing and thematic coherence but IMHO Jurassic Park has a stronger plot and cast.
It fascinates me that the prologue hinges on Carter (and her PAs) not knowing that "raptor" can refer to dinosaurs as well as birds of prey. Because nowadays — thanks to Jurassic Park — "raptor" is so synonymous with dinosaurs that that's most people's first association, even when you're talking about modern birds.
Maybe I read too much fantasy, but I do feel like Harding Sr. has tons of wasted potential. His expertise is potentially more valuable even than Muldoon's, and even if he doesn't know a ton about human medicine he still knows more than anyone else on the island. He almost literally gets put on a bus — Muldoon has a line about him having been evacuated hours ago, offscreen, when getting Grant et al to the helipad — and it feels like the story loses sight of him. Then again, maybe it's just that Harding Jr. is one of my all-time favorite characters in fiction (reading Lost World, I am Kelly) and I want more of her dad.
Most of the changes in the movie align well with the book thematically — again, Crichton knows Hollywood and knew how to sign that deal — but one that I want to commend is tweaking Lex's character. She's kind of a plot moppet in the book, so having her be the one to fix the computers in the movie felt like better pay-off.
It's delightful watching Hammond lose his park and his life because a) he refused to pay Nedry fairly, and b) he refused to hire enough employees to run the place properly. Maybe in the real world shitty corner-cutting managers don't get eaten by compies, but it's awesome fantasizing about that being the natural consequence of corner-cutting.
You know what else is delightful? Ice cream made with fresh ginger. I tried it after reading this book, and would recommend.
I love how the movie gets around the limitations of the technology to imply things that can't be shown onscreen. We still haven't figured out a good way to film animals that move as fast as the T. rex is described as moving (slow-mo is the only workaround). So the movie has the characters in a Jeep driving at 60 MPH, and shows the T. rex in the rearview mirror, gaining on them. It gets the point about "slow dinos are a failure of human imagination" across, without having to speed up the film of their T. rex puppet.
Crichton isn't super funny, but he has his moments. Malcolm's "You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. Don't you have that feeling now?" as he's watching the T. rex advance on their car — gets me every time. Fuck off, Cassandra.
Someone assumed I was joking when I said the book's plot hinges on trans lesbian velociraptors. I am not, in fact, joking.
I really want you to get started on Jurassic Park now after reading your tags.
All right, you asked for it! This post is going to be long because I've been rereading Jurassic Park since I was about 10 years old. But. My thoughts:
Jurassic Park is the oldest story in the world: one about hubris, and the price men pay for their pride. From the first moment the protagonists step foot on the island, they can see it. There are poisonous plants next to the pool because they "look pretty." The harbor has no retaining wall because tropical storms aren't considered important. It's a story where you respect nature, or you die. Wu doesn't bother to learn the dinosaurs' names before breeding them, Nedry ignores them as unprogrammable, Malcolm mansplains them to their own creators, Regis laughs at the idea of them escaping, Hammond relentlessly monetizes them, Arnold insists he can control them... And they all get eaten by dinosaurs. It's the characters with the good sense to be overawed and scared (Muldoon, Gennaro, the paleontologists, the kids) who make it out alive. Almost paradigm.
More specifically, it's a book about the most fundamental principle of engineering: be scared, be confused, and then do something anyway. Then do something else, then something else, until something works. Timmy isn't a master hacker in the book; he's just (unlike Grant) willing to push buttons on the computer until he finds the power grid. Gennaro's still a scaredy cat in the book, but he clenches his teeth and goes into the velociraptor nest anyway. The heroic characters are the ones who conclude someone has to do something, despite not knowing what that something is. The villainous ones are the ones who refuse responsibility.
Speaking of which, can we talk about Ian Malcolm? I'm a sucker for a good Cassandra character, especially one that manages to get even the genre-savvy reader rolling their eyes and going "will you shut up?" And Malcolm is one of the best, every off-putting academic habit rolled into one: He thinks he's better than other people for not liking sports. He brags about not caring about appearances and then comments on Sattler's legs. He assumes Hammond has read his monograph and — when Hammond reveals he hasn't — pulls out a copy that he keeps on his person at all times to have Hammond read on the plane. He smugly explains that other characters should've foreseen they'd be killed by dinosaurs, only to be killed by dinosaurs. He calls his theory the Malcolm Effect. I do love Jeff Goldblum's gentler, more charming take on the character ("See, here, now I'm sitting by myself, talking to myself, that's chaos theory" I say literally every time I ask a question of someone who just left the room). But I prefer the way original Malcolm gets away with being right about everything because we so so badly want him to be wrong.
Speaking of that comment about the legs: by the low low bar of 80s/90s thriller writers, Crichton is surprisingly progressive. Jurassic Park invites us to laugh with (and roll our eyes with) Sattler, every time someone expresses shock the world's top paleobotanist is a woman. The Lost World perfectly captures the "women in STEM have to be twice as competent to get half the respect" dynamic, and it's a story about the male characters over-estimating their own competence as the female ones go about saving the day. Race isn't handled perfectly, but it is discussed in both books. Malcolm's chauvinism is designed to make everything else he says a bitter pill, to poison us against him. Crichton's no feminist. But Sattler's hardiness — later Harding's and Kelly's as well — are shown as hard-won in a world that batters nerdy girls so hard that only the toughest survive.
And Malcolm is just one of the many ways Jurassic Park masterfully lampoons scientific bullshit. After little Tina is bitten by a "strange lizard" and nearly dies from the swelling, Dr. Cruz assures her parents that lizards bite zookeepers all the time, that some people are allergic to lizard venom, and that the lizard Tina drew resembles a basilisk — and then we cut to him talking to his fellow MD. Where we find out that lizards don't attack humans in the wild, no human they know of has ever been hospitalized for a lizard bite, basilisks aren't venomous, and Tina's condition doesn't resemble an allergic reaction. They have no idea what this "lizard" (a Procompsognathus) could be or how it poisoned this kid, but they've been taught to obfuscate rather than admit that. Scientists are arrogant, and ignorant of their ignorance.
But the book is every bit as positive about empiricism as it is negative about individual scientists. The seamless way Crichton blends science fiction with science fact gets me every time. His preface connects Watson & Crick to Swanson & Boyer to Malcolm & Levine, explaining each step of the research process as he goes. He goes on to explain how Genetech developed its ideas from IBM, and that IBM and Genetech both contributed to InGen, which in turn influenced Biosyn, funded by Hamaguri... and only two of those names are fictional, but don't worry about which. Crichton does his homework, and then he presents his homework in the most compelling way of any writer I've ever encountered.
You need no further proof than the technologies — satellite phones, electric cars, touchscreens, gene editing — that were sci fi in 1990, commonplace today. Crichton did the reading. And he rolls that science out ever-so-slowly: dribbling first the mystery of the worker with a 3-foot gash in his torso who claims a bird of prey did it, then the mystery of the resort that needs the world's most powerful data storage, then the mystery of the billionaire who calls in the middle of the night with "urgent" questions about what baby dinosaurs eat... Until even 10-year-old me could look at that picture of a fractal and go "ohhh, I see how the unstable phase shifts of chaos theory explain the fact that a thunderstorm caused that guy to get eaten by a T. rex." Almost paradigm.
And all Jurassic Park's banging on about chaos theory belies a deep understanding of how interconnected ecosystems are. Animals, like plants, like subatomic particles, must be understood holistically. Pretending that the best way to learn the truth of any system is through breaking it down "is like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It's nothing of the sort. It's uniquely Western training." Crichton clearly loves biology: "a single fertilized egg has a 100,000 genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell... A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build the stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn't show up when he's supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman's lunch is perfect." And he clearly hates what capitalism has done to biotechnology.
Hammond the venture capitalist is a perfectly despicable villain: No dinosaurs have escaped, because I said so. If there are problems, no there aren't. Put on a good show for investors, no matter how many contractors die in the process. Talk about all the "good" the park will do by making tons of money. The kids are stranded and the tech expert's dead? No they're not, because I said so, now pass the ice cream. It's truly a delight watching him get eaten by dinosaurs.
For that matter, Jurassic Park is bursting with details of style over substance. There are cutesy Apatosaurus cutouts in the hotel rooms and bars on the widows, a half-finished restaurant covered in Pterosaur poop, and a celebrity-narrated tour track that can't synchronize with the dinosaurs. It's trying to be Disney World, and it's actually a roadside zoo. The signage — "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," the hand-lettered "Welcome to Jurassic Park", the room (and department) called "Control" — isn't subtle in its irony. But it is fun.
Which is yet another great sci fi trick. "Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks" perfectly sets up the blend of the accurate with the plot-fueling (likely why Crichton reuses it several times). Why are there Pterosaurs in a dinosaur park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. Why are so many Cretaceous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. You didn't know Dilophosaurus is venomous? Our funding is infinite... It's perfect, because it's the opposite of how the scientific process usually works. Again: Crichton knows his shit, and he knows how to communicate it.
Like, even when I'm reading Sphere or Terminal Man — books where I'm perfectly aware I know more than Crichton on the subject, not in the least because their science inevitably became outdated — I still find myself believing, at least for the length of the story. You don't have to suspend disbelief when reading Crichton's work; he hoists it into the stratosphere for you. Half the time he won't give it back even after you're done. Almost paradigm.
But despite all that nerdery, Jurassic Park is still a rocking adventure story that builds momentum until it smashes to its conclusion at 70 miles an hour, ending the millisecond it can do so with not a word of denouement. You can practically hear that last deep piano note on the final words. It's cinematic as hell. This is Crichton post-Westworld, pre-Twister, the ultimate adventure writer. He reads, clearly, avoiding the errors of sci fi amateurs who watch too many movies (the T. rex has a distinctive smell, the island is relentlessly humid, so on) but he knows how to make a tight fast-moving story that you can consume in under three hours. His imagery is powerful, his pacing is on point, and his plot sucks you in and shoots you out like a water slide.
Jurassic Park is fun. It's informative. It makes you laugh, and gasp, and sigh, and think. It has its flaws (Harding Sr. fades out in the 3rd act, Grant's Maiasaura expertise never pays off) but those are minor in a book that stands up so well to rerereading. Almost paradigm.
Further thoughts that didn't fit in the initial review:
Lost World is the better adventure story, getting the characters to the island and facing major problems almost right away. I'm torn whether that or Jurassic Park is the better novel overall, because Lost World has better writing and thematic coherence but IMHO Jurassic Park has a stronger plot and cast.
It fascinates me that the prologue hinges on Carter (and her PAs) not knowing that "raptor" can refer to dinosaurs as well as birds of prey. Because nowadays — thanks to Jurassic Park — "raptor" is so synonymous with dinosaurs that that's most people's first association, even when you're talking about modern birds.
Maybe I read too much fantasy, but I do feel like Harding Sr. has tons of wasted potential. His expertise is potentially more valuable even than Muldoon's, and even if he doesn't know a ton about human medicine he still knows more than anyone else on the island. He almost literally gets put on a bus — Muldoon has a line about him having been evacuated hours ago, offscreen, when getting Grant et al to the helipad — and it feels like the story loses sight of him. Then again, maybe it's just that Harding Jr. is one of my all-time favorite characters in fiction (reading Lost World, I am Kelly) and I want more of her dad.
Most of the changes in the movie align well with the book thematically — again, Crichton knows Hollywood and knew how to sign that deal — but one that I want to commend is tweaking Lex's character. She's kind of a plot moppet in the book, so having her be the one to fix the computers in the movie felt like better pay-off.
It's delightful watching Hammond lose his park and his life because a) he refused to pay Nedry fairly, and b) he refused to hire enough employees to run the place properly. Maybe in the real world shitty corner-cutting managers don't get eaten by compies, but it's awesome fantasizing about that being the natural consequence of corner-cutting.
You know what else is delightful? Ice cream made with fresh ginger. I tried it after reading this book, and would recommend.
I love how the movie gets around the limitations of the technology to imply things that can't be shown onscreen. We still haven't figured out a good way to film animals that move as fast as the T. rex is described as moving (slow-mo is the only workaround). So the movie has the characters in a Jeep driving at 60 MPH, and shows the T. rex in the rearview mirror, gaining on them. It gets the point about "slow dinos are a failure of human imagination" across, without having to speed up the film of their T. rex puppet.
Crichton isn't super funny, but he has his moments. Malcolm's "You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. Don't you have that feeling now?" as he's watching the T. rex advance on their car — gets me every time. Fuck off, Cassandra.
Someone assumed I was joking when I said the book's plot hinges on trans lesbian velociraptors. I am not, in fact, joking.
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something i noticed upon my most recent rewatch of tangled and tts is the overlying theme of "complacency vs ambition." this is present in many aspects of the story, but is perhaps most relevant when discussing zhan tiri and her disciples.
gothel kept rapunzel locked up in a tower for eighteen years, and lied to her about the world in order to keep her from leaving.
sugracha used the trauma rapunzel went through in "queen for a day" to manipulate her into forfeiting her autonomy.
tromus trapped rapunzel in her own mind and created a world free of conflict, inspired by her fear of the future.
what's most interesting to me is how zhan tiri is outlier in this trend. for one thing, rapunzel is not the one being directly manipulated. instead it's cassandra. she also does not attempt to keep cass compliant-- at least, not in the same way.
the disciples are focused on keeping rapunzel content. they discourage her questioning things or making decisions for herself. they want her to stay exactly the same as she already is.
zhan tiri, meanwhile, wants cass to change. she feeds into the feelings of inferiority that she's always had, encourages her ambition, and manipulates her into turning against her friends. but cass still isn't truly in control. she plays into zhan tiri's hands at every opportunity. every choice she thinks is her own is just another part of zhan tiri's plan.
this is not to say cass can't be held accountable. because while yes, she is being manipulated, those decisions were still hers to make. the show makes this very clear. but it was also her decision to do the right thing in the finale, and help rapunzel save corona.
cass and rapunzel's dynamic actually mirrors a couple others in the show-- that being catalina and kiera, and zhan tiri and demanitus. the theme of "complacency vs ambition" is present there, too.
in season three, we see that catalina feels stifled by her sister. kiera made all the decisions, and assumed catalina was fine with it when she wasn't.
then for zhan tiri, her ambition clouded her mind and endangered the people around her. demanitus recognized she has lost her way and had to put a stop to her. interestingly, in their final conversation, we see demanitus reach out to her one last time. just like how rapunzel never stopped reaching out to cassandra, even while trying to stop her.
(on a semi-related note: in "painter's block" we see that sugracha always taps her cane against the ground twice before using her magic to influence rapunzel. this reminded me of the pavlov's dog experiment, where they conditioned a dog to only salivate after ringing a bell, instead of when it heard someone in the kitchen. i don't know if this is what the writers of tts were going for, but i thought it was worth mentioning.)
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