Smartacus

Piping hot take: I don't give a shit if straight actors play queer characters as long as they do so with empathy and authenticity. When you say shit like "only queer actors should play queer characters" what you're actually saying is only OUT queer actors should play queer characters. If you're assuming an actor (or anyone else, for that matter) who hasn't declared their sexuality is straight, you are participating in heteronormativity.

It used to be cold. There used to be all these bugs.

Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child has known this better than he.

The grass used to be green in the summer not brown

In autumn, puddles would freeze overnight, and give the sharpest, sweetest snap when you stepped on them. All gone by late morning, but reappearing the next day with sharp crinkles and chimes.

mayflies used to coat the road so thoroughly in spring that their corpses made the road more slippery than black ice.

Why did every gas station have the windshield cleaners? Because driving down the highway resulted in your windshield getting caked with dead bugs.

I miss Christmas beetles. They used to be so abundant we would collect them and put them on our heads until we had living crowns of gold. I haven't seen a single one in years.

I used to be able to chase fire flies in my back yard as a child. I’d catch them in my hands and then release… I don’t see them anymore here

So the big pool thing. Did they not chlorinate it or what? Did they not know you have to chlorinate it? I'm really baffled about what the fuck even happened there. SURELY they chlorinated it.

Oh HEY so like, the Obama administration renovated the reflecting pool to draw from the Potomac rather than municipal water, and installed an extensive filtration system, and APPARENTLY at some point in the last 10 years Trump ripped it out or stopped maintaining it, and look, algae.

Everything stupid that they do is such a great metaphor for everything else stupid that they've done

It's very likely that the paint was not appropriate for the usage to start with, and that that was on purpose. It's a standard shady really-the-mob contractor thing to guarantee more work, I'm told. It's quite possible that himself agreed to it, even, because he gives no fucks about national monuments, but does like handing out favors to friends, like this no-bid indefinite contract.

McDonalds ice cream machine arse groundskeeping

Some ducklings have now been spotted dead in the water from the hydrogen peroxide

"We're gonna achieve immortality by turning ourselves into machines" buddy I want you to find yourself a 15 year old laptop and try to run a 10 year old piece of software on it please. Connect to the internet, if you can, and attempt to log into any of your online accounts

I think it’s time to start work on my high fire clay tablet, a miniature Rosetta Stone, preserving the lyrics of Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life in English, Hebrew, and Akkadian. This will be my primary grave goods.

I'M LOOKING AT YOU TATTOO ARTISTS!

YES OMG BRÜNNHILDE

forget everything anyone has ever told you on the matter the truest marker of adulthood is starting to hear the siren call of high quality kitchenware

to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day

everybody leaving tags on my letterboxd roundup like "they didn't do the nobody scene??" we're so fucking past that i need you to catch up. i went into the movie knowing they wouldn't do the nobody scene and frankly i had made peace with it like okay if you don't want odysseus calling himself outis because you don't feel like the joke translates well enough WHATEVER you dont need to film every line of the poem. what i was NOT prepared for is that THEY DON'T SPEAK TO POLYPHEMUS AT ALL. they don't steal a giant wheel of cheese, they don't get him drunk, odysseus doesn't taunt him after their escape, AND he doesn't cry out to poseidon or the other cyclopes on the shore. it's "revealed" that he can speak in the cave before their escape as he prays to poseidon. someone asks odysseus "should we try to reason with him?" and ODYSSEUS says "we're past that." resulting in an adaptation where odysseus does not use wit or trickery to escape polyphemus at all-- which is the case with every single obstacle he meets. this guy does not lie and he does not play tricks. his intelligence is restricted to battlefield tactics, the administration and direction of his men as units. You have to poke polyphemus so he opens his eye before you can stab it! I am very smart. the only point at which he could be described as "tricking" polyphemus is when-- because the movie is allergic to making odysseus look stupid or silly in any way-- they tie straw to their backs to be mistaken for sheep instead of riding the undersides of the sheep, and we are presented with an action sequence of trousered and armored soldiers somersaulting and army crawling under polyphemus' gently dangling hand. which i hate because it is a less clever solution that only works if polyphemus is extremely stupid (shepherd who doesn't know how many sheep he has) -- and more importantly because it removes IMO the most emotionally efficient moment in the odyssey, which is polyphemus talking to the one sheep that's walking slow because it has odysseus on its belly like "oh no are you feeling okay today? you're moving so slow, maybe you're upset because i'm in pain? you're the best sheep in the world and i love all of you my sheeps" like that scene is supposed to instantly retroactively humanize polyphemus and make you realize odysseus has been torturing a person with feelings who basically just wants to be left alone with his pet sheep and it's extremely good at that in every translation i've ever read. but not one of odysseus' enemies are allowed an inch of humanity in this entire adaptation which seems to be a veiled metaphor for the vietnam war so what can you expect. and yes because odysseus never does anything wrong or stupid or silly, OF COURSE he would never reveal his name and allow polyphemus to curse him, and his crew only "believes" that he's been cursed by poseidon thereafter, which removes the ENTIRE MAIN ANTAGONIST of the story and changes the central conflict from man vs. god to man vs. ????

It's always fun when an author claims their work contains no politics, because either they're blatantly lying, or they genuinely think they're telling the truth and you get a lot of insight into what assertions about human nature they regard as so obviously and self-evidently true as to lie outside the political sphere.

Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

Hubris to think you COULD abuse bees

I think that if you see a balrog in an unlocked kitty kennel then you can assume that it wants to be there

It is so fucking bold of you to link the exact same paywalled book thirteen times in your reblog to throw people off the fact that you're using one source from 1859.

I don't think there's ever been a funnier vegan response in the history of this hell site. This is actual gold. If you cited an argument like this in a first year undergrad intro to bio module, then your lecturer would be legally entitled to fire you out of a cannon. I think I'm dying

signal boost!!!

I’ve reblogged her before, but really, you can’t have too many dark-skinned Black queens on your dash.