And we're gonna sing it again...

grace & rocky hug in zero-g <3

(no-xenonite version under the cut!)

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

Arthurian canon is based upon popularity throughout history, so the more widely consumed and known the media is, the more it becomes a canon representation of Arthur and his knights.

Monty Python's version was, in fact, incredibly well researched and portrays one of the most faithful interpretations of Lancelot, as well as discussing the vague historical image of Arthur himself. It's widely known, to the point that people who know nothing about King Arthur will get references to Monty Python's version.

Back before this site banned porn, it was all tagged with whatever clear label matched it. If you wanted to search for, say, bdsm, you could type that in and find exactly that. And, crucially, it meant you could filter it out, too. Meaning that people who wanted to find that content could do so with ease, and people who wanted to not find that content on their dash by surprise could also ensure that with ease.

But then tumblr banned porn thanks to pressure from the Apple App store, and ----- did porn go away? Nope. It just stopped being labelled as porn. There's still all the same raunchy content on here as there was before -- its just not tagged, or its tagged with euphemisms, or tagged with creative tags that circumvent the bans, or tagged with completely unrelated should-be-innocuous tags like "oceans" or "photography" or "flowers" or etc.

Which not only makes it harder to find, but also, more importantly, makes it harder to avoid.

Nowadays I can be scrolling my dash and get slapped suddenly in the face by a post that is decidedly not G-rated, and its because neither the OP or the person who reblogged it has tagged with anything, meaning my blocklist (which I have in place so that I'm not surprised by a raunchy gifset while I'm scrolling my dash in the work lunchroom, surrounded by colleagues) hasn't caught it and filtered it out.

And the same thing is going to happen on other platforms. If you ban porn, the outcome is never "there is no more porn" -- the outcome is just "porn is harder to find now and simultaneously harder to avoid."

This post was prompted by a random post i saw earlier today which ive since lost, but which was an advert for some """fishing gear""" that looked pretty much like a dildo. And who knows, maybe that item WAS some kind of obscure fishing gear. But it made me think of how, with the censorship and purity culture infecting every corner of the internet, it means we ARE going to wind up with sites that are selling sex toys that are labelled as innocuous everyday items.

So imagine youre a kid and you get suddenly super into fishing, and you're looking into building a christmas wish list, so you research a bunch of fishing tackle. And there, nestled amongst the lures and weights and lines and tackle boxes, is a bunch of sex toys. None of them are labelled as sex toys. Theyre labelled as miscellaneous fishing tackle. Because, unbeknownst to you, the sex toys companies -- no longer able to advertise their wares honestly -- have started labelling their dildos as fishing lures and their whips as fishing poles and their butt plugs as fishing weights. And those In The Know are aware that to purchase sex toys, you need to look up these Regular Non-sexy Products, and you'll find the raunchy products youre after.

But meanwhile, anyone who wants to find ACTUAL fishing lures and poles and weights suddenly has to contend with mislabelled sex toys showing up in their search results.

two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl 🎏

it's really interesting looking back at both iterations of the story and how stratt and grace's rapport hinges on unrequitedness. there's obviously the karaoke scene in the movie acting as grace's bid for human connection vs stratt's necessary refusal in order to do her job. the book rarely if ever interrogates stratt's interpersonal relationships in the project and how her sense of duty and utilitarianism extends to them (well, aside from grace. more on that in a sec). She's a History major and an administrator and She Loves Humanity, but it's a characteristic that when analyzed deeper rings pretty hollow (possibly because the author thinks social analysis/critique in science fiction is stupid and thus doesn't exactly have much to say about People like someone in the humanities would. SAD!) so that's an addition to her character from the movie that i'm deeply pleased about. what i don't like as much is that the bid for connection starts from grace.

because book stratt and grace? the one sidedness of their rapport is the driving emotional conflict of the entire pre-launch plotline—and of grace's character development throughout the whole book.

like most scientists on the team, grace was brought onto the project by force, but he's the only one who fulfilled his purpose, was allowed to return to his own life, and then came back of his own volition, out of a sense of personal duty and responsibility. which is the reason stratt takes him back on! and why she begins to rely on him more and more, as an administrator, as a mediator, as a scientist, as an advisor. she has all the more reason to do that when she discovers he's coma resistant, but she was already doing all that baby!

grace spends the rest of their relationship half-assing that sense of responsibility. one thing i adore about book phm is how merciless it is with grace's "modesty" "insecurity" and "social anxiety". children are easy to dote on. they're not stupid, obviously, but on an interpersonal level they're not your equal, they have no way to actually demand accountability from you and call your ass out. he doesn't actually think he's a failure, he's not blind he should know damn well he's not like the other scientists. "science lapdog", "ooo i'm just a little guy cmonnnn i'm just a middle school teacher", he downplays his own importance because if he genuinely grappled with the level of responsibility she holds him to towards the people in the project he'd run like a fucking dog.

who even cares about this movie

“WHAT THE FUDGING FUDGER?!” I loved this scene so much I had to draw it! lol! That scream is iconic and I love Grace and his “Teacher Swears!” 🤣👎 It was actually the first thing I loved about him in the book, the first time I related to him!