Each New Thing I See I Get Closer And Closer To Making A Sweded Version Of Goncharov

An important perspective in light of recent events.

Watch this. 

Heck, there's a very good chance Littlefinger has an appointment made with Illyn Payne's sword. After all, it probably won't take long for Ned and Tyrion to put the pieces together in a conversation (one could say interrogation, but this is Tyrion we're talking about).

Hypothetically speaking, what would have happened if Tyrion managed to escape the Inn at the Crossroads before Catelyn captured him? Or better yet, if they hadn't crossed paths at all?

Catelyn makes it back to the North and starts preparing for war (which definitely makes her the protagonist of any Northern subplot), Tyrion ambles on down to King's Landing. When he gets there, it might be Ned laying charges (though his investigations may go differently, who knows when he's listening to Littlefinger). That means the entire matter is brought before Robert straight away and the Starks don't look great because the evidence against Tyrion isn't very strong and the people who were actually present for the bet about the knife know that.

So what we've got instead of rapid escalation to war is instead more of a slower-burning armed feud. Maybe Tywin retaliates with some border raids on the Riverlands (oops! were those your peasants?), but it's less likely he'd just walk in and start trying to burn the whole Riverlands down.

From there, we're back to a race as to whether Ned figures out the incest first or Robert dies...but Ned's got the time to gear up for war in this scenario, and he's probably not listening to Littlefinger anymore either.

I honestly expected another all-Moffat-women-are-the-same post when I clicked the link   and was positively suprised   not only does it include a deconstruction of the femme fatale archetype and how it apploes to Moffat's characters   but also some really good comparison between Amy and Clara   meta   non-celebratory business   sherlock   doctor who   clara oswald   amy pond   irene adler   mary watson   mary morstan   I DON'T like the use of the word 'real' in the manner   it just reminds me unpleasantly   and I don't usually make that distinction   but a man talking about writing stories representation what 'real women' face   seems misguided   but overall this is good   and deserves a read  

Thanks!

I suppose "real" may not be the best word under the circumstances. Based on my experiences with women, and having talked to a number of them about this before writing it, those scripts do seem to reflect the reality of women's lives within fantasy. But in the future I'll strive to be more careful to specify when I need to that I am myself a man and basing what I'm saying on my observations rather than my own experiences, as such.

A new update to my blog.

Could you maybe reblog this post if you think respecting trans peoples' names and identities is a basic right and not a political opinion?

No pressure. Just seeking some validation of my sentiment. Due to some. people

While $7.25 is low, at least part of the issue is that in a lot of small towns or rural areas, it actually can be a livable wage. It’s easy, living in big cities, to forget how small towns work.

That’s, at least theoretically, why the national minimum wage tends to be pretty conservative; it’s trying to come up with a number that wouldn’t screw over small businesses in small towns. That’s not to say the number can’t be higher, but the necessary minimum wage to survive is substantially different in a metropolitan city than it is elsewhere. (and differs from city-to-city) So individual states and cities, in theory, should set their own minimums where they need to be for the area.

Theoretically.

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

If that doesn't have potential for some fairytale nonsense, I don't know what does.

HOLY SHIT WHAT???

... because Doctor Who just hasn't been depressing enough lately.

Independence Day Marathon Part 1: Maleficent

To honor my country's existence, I decided to spend the entire day in the theater.  I mapped out to spend a solid ten hours staring at just about everything Hollywood could throw at me, and came out mostly unscathed. I feel like it was a good way to celebrate Independence Day.

I started with Maleficent, a fairly shallow but enjoyable-enough Disney fantasy galvanized by Angelina Jolie's amazing performance. She's always had an otherworldly look about her, but nothing has taken advantage of it like this, and few roles have let her dig so far into such a fascinating character. Writer Linda Woolverton does a great job expanding on the character, giving Jolie a rich character arc to traverse, and building a lovely twist around the nature of True Love's Kiss. And with that to work with, Jolie ignites the screen every moment she's on it, and it's absolutely worth seeing just for her.

If she wasn't in it, though... it would be about like Snow White and the Huntsman - watchable and pretty, but there's not much else to it. No one can chew the scenery like Sharlto Copley, but his villain is pretty flat. His backstory has him go from a guy who gives up the only thing he has to be with his love, then show up years later totally evil. The narration suggests he was corrupted by the greed of mankind, which sounds fine, but burying it in the narration makes it abstract, and we never see any evidence of Man's Greed elsewhere in the film. Elle Fanning is perfectly likable as Aurora, but all she's asked to do is smile pleasantly.

And the three fairies are simply obnoxious. That's one of my favorite elements of the original Sleeping Beauty - the heroes are three bickering old ladies instead of the straight-arrow prince. But here, all they do is bicker endlessly, without ever accomplishing anything. I never thought I'd see Imelda Staunton or Juno Temple give performances I didn't enjoy, but I couldn't stand them here. (I'm not as familiar with Lesley Manville, but she was perfectly wonderful in An Adventure in Time And Space, so I'm disappointed there as well.) I really do blame the script here - making them incompetent and not giving them any non-bickering scenes really doesn't give the actors any room. And the hideous visual effects for the fairies are no help - they look like rubber masks of the actors pasted over awful CGI. (The effects are otherwise fine if overabundant - they're pretty to look at, but it feels like we're watching pretty special effects rather than a real, living world.)

I'm not really convinced the Mega-Happy Ending was earned, either. Maleficent's story is so laced with tragedy and Aurora is so underdeveloped that neither of their endings really worked for me.

But Jolie makes it all worthwhile, and Woolverton's take on the story is interesting enough to carry it through its weak spots.