DOCTOR WHO (2023-)
2.05 “The Story & the Engine”
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@starleska
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DOCTOR WHO (2023-)
2.05 “The Story & the Engine”
Preserving these tags because they are Important ❤️
@starleska

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DOCTOR WHO | 2.05: THE STORY AND THE ENGINE + TEXT POSTS
[ID: a series of gifs combining the Doctor Who episode The Story & the Engine with popular social media posts about it. /end ID]
The pride flag with lavender stripe, but it's colorblind friendly and not eyestraining
Inspired from here (link)
[ID: A nine horizontal stripe flag with the colors pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue, purple, and lavender from top to bottom]
i am totally going to come across as a boomer in this post but as an engineer it's common sense to not build systems with a single point of failure. and i'm starting to realize that our usage of the smart phone is exactly that. a single point of failure. the calling/texting is the implied function of the smartphone, which is fine. that's what it's built for. but nowadays we don't think to keep a physical map or atlas or gps unit in our car because our phone has google maps. we don't keep address books anymore because it's all stored in our contacts. i serve customers who no longer carry a wallet/physical card because it's all on their phone. this is literally a single point of failure. if you lose or break your phone when you are in a foreign place you are fucking screwed. maybe you're still screwed even in your home town because so many people have become accustomed to using a smart phone to take them anywhere.
i've recently become a disciple of the road spirit. do you have any wisdom to offer me as embark on this new chapter of my spiritual journey
oh kat, what a gift youve given me!
okay so. here's some precepts, off the top of my head
move with speed, but not *haste*. its not about getting to your destination faster, its about the joy of speed itself. as a corollary: speed up for no reason! who cares if it wont get you there faster?
also, while speed is important, grace is just as important! always thinking about fish, birds, dolphins, etc. things that movie in fluids, fluidly. gradual stops, smooths shifts in and out of lanes, softening turns, etc. obv sometimes practicality gets in the way here, but that's fine
obviously you shouldnt speed like, *in front* of a cop or anything. but cops are basically violating your freedom of religion. you cant bend to that! speed freely
music is not necessary, but it's good if it helps you get in the zone. something that rocks, or something very smooth. a bassline. its a bassline type activity. experiment! i like to leave it on shuffle and skip songs a lot: i think its consonant with the proper amor fati (i think of it as like an aztec thing. throwing yourself to the gods control) to driving: you can never really control what other drivers do. theyre like...fellow dancer, who are also obstacles. play with them but also around them. give them a lot of space, so your paintbrush isnt squished up against a wall
relatedly: road rage, even in its mild form, is not conducive to the right meshing with the road spirit. it centers ego! you merge with the road. you ride the road, the road rides you ("tell my car"?)
while obviously the road spirit is most *easily* accessible on the highway, it's present everywhere! especially backroads! speeding on a windy backroad is so fun.
this isnt necessary but i think its better to drive a real shitbox. the boundary between you and the road is thinner. also, they have spongier brakes (smoother stops!) and more haptic feedback
even if youre not moving, you can be close to the road spirit! notice the sky (or if youre in a tunnel, the curving wall above you!), the smooth curves of the road, your fellow drivers
when it's warm enough, i recommend having the windows down. windows up driving can feel like a distant video game; windows down driving is all-there, you can feel the speed on your body

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Behold, a dragon.
Just wanted to share some shockingly good news in these difficult times. The full article is really worth reading. [Find it here]
important reminder (esp to those in liberal states) to never doubt the power of queer folks in red states to get 👏 shit 👏 done 👏
There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.
I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.
As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.
The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.
The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.
As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.
I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.
My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.
If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Sources:
• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text
• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)
The Good Place (2016-2020)
brah
The Good Place’s take on morality is so important to me. It never suggests that being good is easy or straightforward - quite the opposite - but it says, over and over again, that we need to try because we’re all people and we all matter.
My favorite rejected New Yorker submission

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Pictured: Luis Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat. He's photographed at his house, which has a green roof.
Article
"Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat without overloading electrical grids or spending money on fans and air conditioners. He came across the concept over a decade ago while researching how to make his own home bearable during a particularly scorching summer in Rio.
A method that's been around for thousands of years and that was perfected in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, green roofs weren't uncommon in more affluent neighborhoods when Cassiano first heard about them. But in Rio's more than 1,000 low-income favelas, their high cost and heavy weight meant they weren't even considered a possibility.
That is, until Cassiano decided to team up with a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis to figure out a way to make them both safe and affordable for favela residents. Over the next 10 years, his nonprofit was born and green roofs started popping up around the Parque Arará community, on everything from homes and day care centers, to bus stops and food trucks.
When Gomes da Silva heard the story of Teto Verde Favela, he decided then and there that he wanted his home to be the group's next project, not just to cool his own home, but to spread the word to his neighbors about how green roofs could benefit their community and others like it.
Pictured: Jessica Tapre repairs a green roof in a bus stop in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Relief for a heat island
Like many low-income urban communities, Parque Arará is considered a heat island, an area without greenery that is more likely to suffer from extreme heat. A 2015 study from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro showed a 36-degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city's warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas. It also found that land surface temperatures in Rio's heat islands had increased by 3 degrees over the previous decade.
That kind of extreme heat can weigh heavily on human health, causing increased rates of dehydration and heat stroke; exacerbating chronic health conditions, like respiratory disorders; impacting brain function; and, ultimately, leading to death.
But with green roofs, less heat is absorbed than with other low-cost roofing materials common in favelas, such as asbestos tiles and corrugated steel sheets, which conduct extreme heat. The sustainable infrastructure also allows for evapotranspiration, a process in which plant roots absorb water and release it as vapor through their leaves, cooling the air in a similar way as sweating does for humans.
The plant-covered roofs can also dampen noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, prevent flooding by reducing storm water runoff and ease anxiety.
"Just being able to see the greenery is good for mental health," says Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. "Green roofs have so many positive effects on overall well-being and can be built to so many different specifications. There really are endless possibilities.""
Pictured: Summer heat has been known to melt water tanks during the summer in Rio, which runs from December to March. Pictured is the water tank at Luis Cassiano's house. He covered the tank with bidim, a lightweight material conducive for plantings that will keep things cool.
A lightweight solution
But the several layers required for traditional green roofs — each with its own purpose, like insulation or drainage — can make them quite heavy.
For favelas like Parque Arará, that can be a problem.
"When the elite build, they plan," says Cassiano. "They already consider putting green roofs on new buildings, and old buildings are built to code. But not in the favela. Everything here is low-cost and goes up any way it can."
Without the oversight of engineers or architects, and made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks and cinder blocks, construction in favelas can't necessarily bear the weight of all the layers of a conventional green roof.
That's where the bidim comes in. Lightweight and conducive to plant growth — the roofs are hydroponic, so no soil is needed — it was the perfect material to make green roofs possible in Parque Arará. (Cassiano reiterates that safety comes first with any green roof he helps build. An engineer or architect is always consulted before Teto Verde Favela starts a project.)
And it was cheap. Because of the bidim and the vinyl sheets used as waterproof screening (as opposed to the traditional asphalt blanket), Cassiano's green roofs cost just 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot. A conventional green roof can cost as much as 53 Brazilian reais, or $11, for the same amount of space.
"It's about making something that has such important health and social benefits possible for everyone," says Ananda Stroke, an environmental engineering student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who volunteers with Teto Verde Favela. "Everyone deserves to have access to green roofs, especially people who live in heat islands. They're the ones who need them the most." ...
It hasn't been long since Cassiano and the volunteers helped put the green roof on his house, but he can already feel the difference. It's similar, says Gomes da Silva, to the green roof-covered moto-taxi stand where he sometimes waits for a ride.
"It used to be unbearable when it was really hot out," he says. "But now it's cool enough that I can relax. Now I can breathe again."
-via NPR, January 25, 2025
this week in I Am Very Smart: having enough money to go to the opera, museums and concerts correlates with having enough money for food, shelter and basic health needs
They controlled for socioeconomic factors though! The people who conducted this study knew that people with lots of money to attend the opera were also more likely to be able to afford basic necessities, so they controlled for it in their analysis. The fun thing about statistics is that you can control for different confounding factors so you can look at the effects of one independent variable (opera or whatever) on the dependent variable (mortality). Part of being critical of potential biases is actually reading the article and knowing what to look for.
In addition to that very good point about controlling for socioeconomic factors, the article says a single museum or concert per year makes a difference. Most cities have free community concerts (some even have free opera performances!) and museums that are either free, pay-what-you-want, or at least have specific days/times during which they are free or at a significantly reduced cost. Many libraries (which are free) provide free museum passes to card holders. In fact, the article quotes a museum worker who works at a free art museum in Baltimore.
If you actually read the article you would also read that educators are excited about this study because it provides evidence that the arts should be made more accessible financially - by restoring arts programs in the public schools, for example.
Also, “Advocates said the study was also a reminder of how critical it is for the arts to be more accessible to Americans of all incomes.” Linking to the article so it’s easier for people to get to cos it’s a good read.
I’ll admit my reaction started out really sarcastic and cynical, but this is really neat! Delightful!
you ever see someone so coked-up on adulthood that they've replaced every shred of interiority with a regurgitation of normative power structures
every dream, every shred of empathy, every unique desire, all rotted away and replaced by what is needed for power and control. Someone who will, no matter how well you get to know them, never show anything beyond goldfish level thoughts behind those eyes, because there is nothing left. there is a history, there. you can learn what used to be, but for the rest of their life they will never seek anything beyond the most bog-standard socially-normative popularly-affirmed idle pleasures between working, eating, and rest. the death of childhood is the death of a human being.
you can't fix someone when they get like this, either. you try and break them out of their shell and they just give you this sad, hollow, patronizing look. a look that says "you haven't grown up yet, haven't you? you haven't finished becoming a real human being, like me." I think it's a fate worse than death, to be like that.
it's not about "NPCs"!!!! it's about adults who, in seeking to distance themselves from children and the youth, whom they wish to wield violent superiority over (as encouraged by the society which regards children as non-sentient legal property of the family), crush their own non-normative aspirations that might be seen as immature!!!!! it's about people who are so attached to the power and stability of Being Mature that there isn't room for anything else!!!!! Stop misinterpreting my post!!!!! Hits everyone in the notes who's interpreting me wrong!!!!!
"And I'm trying my best to stand up for you in every way I can." 🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️

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“I Observe Witchy Holidays. Observe them as they pass by me because I forgot. Again.”
— Stormwaterwitch (via stormwaterwitch)
This is going to make me sound like a cantankerous old bitch, but meh, I'm gonna say it anyway.
Witchcraft is too commercialised nowadays.
It's great to see so many witchcraft books and supplies available. I can walk into kmart or big w and find witchcraft books, tarot cards, and crystals now.
The problem, though, is that everything that's readily available to the masses (i.e. the first thing witchlings may interact with) is all so watered down to be socially acceptable that it gives a warped view to new practitioners while being simultaneously useless to experienced practitioners.
As much as I love how personalised the craft is, I genuinely wish more experienced witches published their personal grimoires and gnosis. I would love to see what others are working on/what works for them.
So here's my plea: if you're an experienced witch (I.e. practising for over 5 years and working your own path), please share a little titbit of what you're currently working/researching/crafting.
☆Marci☆
I have genuinely loved reading all of the responses to this post. Thank you so much to those of you who have shared your craft!